Kierkegaard's method
Kierkegaard developed his philosophical thinking from a method that aimed to move from thought to action. With a Socratic inspiration, Kierkegaard was dedicated to dialoguing with people, wherever they found themselves, teasing them and refuting their ideas. About Socrates, he says: “He was not the case with that philosopher who, when explaining his intuitions, his speech was the very presence of the idea. Quite the contrary: what Socrates said meant something different” (The Concept of Irony, p.25).
the socratic irony it was the stage of the dialogical method in which Socrates asked what people knew for what purpose, when they tried defend their opinions, perceived the limitation of their arguments, the contradiction between them and the imprecision of their concepts. derivative of the verb eirein (ask), the word “irony” had the meaning of interrogation feigning ignorance. The resource, learned from Socrates, was developed by Kierkegaard not only as a stylistic resource to writing his texts, he took the resource into his life so that his existence and his writing were tuned.
He himself referred to himself as a ironist (or an ironic one, in another translation possibility):
“When the friendly reader comes, he will have no difficulty in seeing that, when I passed for an ironist, the irony was by no means where it thought a venerable cultured public would be; for such a reader, it is evident that he would not fall into the misery of admitting that a public can understand irony, which is as impossible as the existence of the Individual en masse.” (Explanatory Point of View, pp.63-64).
In his work, the first irony was that the religious author was present, but hidden by the aesthetic author. Later, he himself was the target of public debauchery, by newspapers such as “O Corsário” which depicted him in caricatures that highlighted his extravagant clothes and a deformity of the spine. The newspaper's attacks began with Kierkegaard's public refusal to give a glowing review of his work. Or... Or. Soon, the entire city began to make fun of the philosopher, which contributed to his reclusion.
About this, he narrates:
“If ever Copenhagen formed an opinion about anyone, I dare say it was mine: he was a madman, an idler, a vagrant, a shallow man, a good brain, even brilliant, witty, etc., but completely lacking in 'seriousness'. I represented the irony of society, the pleasure of life and the finest pleasure, but without a dash of 'serious and positive' spirit; on the other hand, he was extremely interesting and biting” (Explanatory Point of View, p.55).
That is, we realized that he was aware of the role he played, how he would be seen and what the consequences were for his practical life. Just as Socrates pretended not to know about an issue in order to get the interlocutor to recognize something he initially refuted, Kierkegaard intends to maintain this distance between the interior and the exterior so that his interlocutor does not suspect or feel threatened. He did this, for example, when he denied that he was a Christian, as opposed to the expression of Christianity in Denmark in his time, when he had a philosophical concern with "becoming a Christian".
The three stadiums and irony
To better understand the concept of “irony”, we need to refer to the aesthetic stage of existence. For Kierkegaard, existence comprises three stages (Stadier):
1) the aesthetic stage, in which man abandons himself to the immediacy, there is no conscious acceptance of an ideal. The search for immediate pleasure makes the esthete attach greater importance to the possibility of achievement than to the achievement itself. There are three ways of being in the aesthetic stage: sensuality, represented by Don Juan; doubt, by Faust; despair, by the wandering Jew Ahasverus.
2) The ethical stage, in which man submits to the moral law and chooses for himself. When speaking of the ethical stage, Kierkegaard speaks of the faithful husband: the ethical way of life is the individual's way of life that is right with the family and worker. It is no longer the individual who seeks pleasure, it is the individual who orders his life in relation to the fulfillment of duty. Says Kierkegaard: "The ethical sphere is a transitional sphere, which, however, is not crossed once and for all...” (Kierkegaard, Stadi sul cammino della vita, p. 693). It offers a way to prepare for the religious stadium.
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3) the religious stadium: the last stage proposed by Kierkegaard is the one that goes beyond the ethical stage and is the highest point you can reach; it is, therefore, the stage where the individual's fulfillment takes place. If, in the ethical stage, man can transgress a law made by men, in the religious stage, the error is against laws established by God; therefore, it means sin. The religious stage suspends the ethical stage when the individual is faced with a choice that implies a greater purpose. The example Kierkegaard offers is that of Abraham who agrees to sacrifice his son in order to fulfill the promise of the deity in which he believes.
indirect communication
This brief explanation of stages of existence for Kierkegaard relates to irony in two ways. As a stylistic resource with which he wrote his literary and philosophical works, irony appears in the aesthetic works of Kierkegaard. Through irony and of indirect communication, Kierkegaard prepares the reader instead of making direct attacks: he was interested in communicating his ideas so that its readers could act existentially, that is, awaken them to their own stocks. For Kierkegaard, knowledge that is more related to life can only be communicated in a indirect so that the interlocutor is taken to action.
Through the indirect method, Kierkegaard intends to lead to reflection whose universe is the interior and which aims to lead the reader to find the existential truth. Existential truth should not be communicated as a doctrine, so it is necessary for the reader to perceive it as a possibility to be realized. Thus, Kierkegaard begins his work in the existential dimension in which his readers find themselves so that they wake up to reflect on their existence.
About Kierkegaard's method, says Ernani Reichmann:
“This is the secret of Kierkegaardian maieutics: the indirect method, which was to learn from Socrates. And this is how Kierkegaard introduces everyone to the religious problem, as he wanted, without the reader noticing where he is being conducted through a dialectic that reaches moments of rare perfection, as in this well-known work called 'Fear and Tremor'” (REICHMANN, Ernani. Lyrical-Philosophical Intermezzo. Curitiba: Author's Edition, 1963, p.25. ).
Irony as a boundary zone between the aesthetic stage and the ethical stage
We talk about stages of existence to advance our understanding of irony for Kierkegaard. At work Post script, Kierkegaard talks about irony as a boundary zone between the aesthetic and the ethical stage. What does that mean?
In the aesthetic stage, as we have seen, the individual experiences his freedom guided by the pursuit of pleasure and does not question his values and whether his behaviors need to be changed. In ironic existence, understood here as not just a discourse device, the individual stands between immediacy and ethics. In other words, the ironic no longer acts with a view to the sensual, it operates a movement towards interiority based on the sensitive.
The ironic perceives its immediate nature and also the possibility of basing its existence on an ideal that transcends the immediate and which it is also capable of understanding. However, due to the individual's detachment from the world, he distances himself from other individuals and highlights a contradiction between his external behavior and his interiority.
When perceiving its interiority, the ironic differs from the individual in the aesthetic stage, however it does not decide to choose and, therefore, it is not in the ethical stage.
Image credits: jorisvo/ Shutterstock.com
KIERKEGAARD, S. The concept of irony constantly referred to Socrates. 2nd edition. Translated by Álvaro Valls. Bragança Paulista: EDUSF, 2005
_____________. Explanatory Point of View of My Work as a Writer. Translation by João Gama. Lisbon: Editions 70, 1986.
____________. Post scriptum aux miettes philosophiques. Translated by Paul Petit. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.
REICHMANN, Ernani. Lyrical-Philosophical Intermezzo. Curitiba: Author's Edition, 1963.
By Wigvan Pereira
Graduated in Philosophy
