On the Concept of Irony
On the Concept of Irony
“An arrow of pain has been lodged in my heart since my earliest childhood. As long as it remains there I am ironic. If it is drawn out, I will die.” In this retrospective reflection from 1847, Kierkegaard made irony into a condition that had been inescapably his own for as long as he could remember. But doesn’t irony presuppose a consciousness that a child does not possess, a mentality that is foreign to the child? Perhaps. A child may be satisfied with employing a bit of irony, with pretending, with crawling into the shelter of a lie, with using language in a manner different from what people think. In this case one says something other than what one means, or one means something other than what one has said. This is irony. And it is good to have it at the ready when other people abandon us, which of course they do. Sooner or later.
From his childhood home, Kierkegaard had learned the forms of pretense. His school had taught him the necessity of distance. The study of the German romantics, Schlegel in particular, had provided him with insights into the rather restless intellectual history of irony. He inhaled irony’s urbane ether from Heiberg’s articles. And during the calamitous course of his engagement he developed all this into a sort of desperate perfection. Thus, at one point in 1848 he was able to summarize some of his insights in a journal entry that has a clearly autobiographical character: “A wishing, hoping, searching individual can never be ironical. Irony (as constitutive of an entire existence) consists of the exact opposite, of situating one’s pain at the precise point where others situate their desire. The inability to possess one’s beloved is never irony. But the ability to possess her all too easily, so that she begs and pleads to become one’s own—and then to be unable to possess her: That is irony.”
Irony is thus something more and something different than a spirited turn of phrase for the delight of one’s dinner partner. Irony is (also) an intellectual distance from others, from the world, and from oneself, a prerequisite for being able to die away. And as such, irony is an extremely sophisticated but also a very risky maneuver that can place the ironist in a life-threatening condition: “Irony is an abnormal development which, like the abnormality in the livers of Strasbourg geese, ends by killing the individuals involved.” Socrates was history’s first ironist, or he was, at any rate, the first person historically connected with irony. It cost him his life, but in his case it was scarcely an abnormal development. Rather, the abnormality was in Socrates’ times, which could not accept irony in calculated, Socratic doses. People thought he seduced the young and was a threat to the state. So they panicked and turned to the hemlock. But irony cannot be killed so easily, all the less so because “the ironic nothingness … is the deathly stillness in which irony haunts (this word taken in an entirely equivocal sense) [Danish: spøge, meaning both ‘to haunt’ and ‘to joke’].” This haunting became an indisputable reality in romanticism, because romanticism was not just moonlight, sonnets, and enchanting portraits in gilded oval frames. It was the epoch when the development of modern man, begun in the Renaissance, culminated with man declaring God dead, seizing power for himself, and thus gaining ample opportunity to experience his own abysmal impotence. Romanticism was the beginning of modernity, and Kierkegaard knew it: “Total irony, in fact, may certainly be thought of as something characteristic of modernity.”
Even though his own personality practically stood there beckoning to him, offering him a topic for his magister dissertation, ironically enough, it took Kierkegaard some time to notice it. In the latter part of September 1837 he considered “The Concept of Satire” as a possibility, while in July 1839 he revealed a slightly morbid “desire to write a dissertation on suicide.” Prior to these digressions, however, there was a rather detailed sketch of the various forms of irony, dated July 6, 1837, in which Kierkegaard defined the manner in which Socratic irony is related to Christian humor, referring to an “extremely interesting” conversation he had had with Poul Martin Møller one evening the previous week. We are not told concretely what they talked about, but in any event Møller was the right person to turn to, because in 1835 he had written an article titled precisely “On the Concept of Irony.” It was only five pages long, however, and it was not published until 1842.
Although he vacillated among possible topics, Kierkegaard had firmly decided that the dissertation was not to be written in academic Latin, as the university rules normally prescribed, but in Danish, so that the tonal shadings of the mother tongue could endow the exposition with the requisite subtlety. In 1837 Kierkegaard had noted that “to write about romantic subjects in an appropriate tone in Latin is just as unreasonable as to require a person to use rectangles in describing a circle.” So he was compelled to request a dispensation, and on June 2, 1841, he “most humbly” addressed to King Christian VIII and his civil servants a letter in which he appealed to the precedents of Martin Hammerich and Adolph Peter Adler, both of whom had defended their dissertations in Danish in 1836 and 1840, respectively. Curiously, he did not take the opportunity to mention a third and even better-known example of such a dispensation, H. L. Martensen’s dissertation Meister Eckhart, which had been approved in its Danish form in March 1840. Perhaps Kierkegaard did not mention this instance because, in the event, Martensen had not had to defend his dissertation, since the University of Kiel had in the meanwhile awarded him an honorary doctorate. But we cannot exclude the possibility that Kierkegaard did not want to be linked to his former tutor, a man for whom, as time went by, he had conceived an increasing hatred: Before he submitted his dissertation, Kierkegaard had called upon Martensen privately in order to read him a portion of his manuscript, a polemic against Schlegel; Martensen did not approve of the long-winded and highly mannered style of the piece and had therefore only expressed his “appreciation rather coolly.”
Whatever the particulars may have been, in his petition for a dispensation from the Latin requirement, Kierkegaard emphasized that his topic required a free and personal exposition; he referred to the excellent grades he had received on his examinations; he pointed to his stint as a Latin teacher; and he pledged that both the theses that would accompany the dissertation as well as the oral defense would be in Latin. Finally, he included a copy of a recommendation from Michael Nielsen, who gave his former pupil a detailed and impressive testimonial, stating among other things: “Mr. S. Aabye Kierkegaard, a theological graduate, excelled as a pupil in this school because of his hard work and intelligence and his brilliant understanding of the subjects taught in general and of the form and spirit of languages in particular. Even as a pupil he gave us cause to expect great things of his integrity, self-reliance, and ability; his clear, acute, and comprehensive vision; his profound, lively, and serious mind; and his generally excellent gift for exposition, which he has subsequently demonstrated…. As far as I can judge, he has an unusual command of the Latin language, both orally and in writing.”
While the king was formally considering Kierkegaard’s request, the six notebooks containing the dissertation were circulated among the appropriate members of the university faculty. They did not raise any doubts concerning the quality of the work, but they all grumbled about its untraditional style. Kierkegaard himself had worried a bit about this matter: “I have worked on this dissertation in fear and trembling in order to keep my dialectic from swallowing up too much of it. People will find fault with the uninhibited style. Some half-educated Hegelian robber or other will say that the subjective element is too prominent.” Although they were not half-educated, nor (apart from Martensen) particularly Hegelian, in their written evaluations every one of the readers complained precisely about Kierkegaard’s stylistic “uninhibitedness,” his lack of restraint. They had various difficulties in accepting the proposition that not only could scholarship be humorous, but that the humor could itself be a part of scholarliness. It was thus fortunate that Kierkegaard had deleted from the dissertation’s preface a passage in which he intimated to the reader that “at times, in order to lighten my burden, I sing at my work.” Seen from his own, retrospective viewpoint, on the other hand, it was a shame that he had been injudicious enough to have insisted at one point that it had been “a shortcoming in Socrates that he had had no eye for the totality and had only looked, numerically, to the individuals.” In a journal entry from the autumn of 1850 Kierkegaard commented on this issue with a bitter outburst: “Oh, what a Hegelian fool I was. It was precisely this that constituted the major proof of how great an ethicist Socrates was.”
The first portion of the dissertation is relatively well-behaved and has the form of a detailed analysis of the interpretations of Socrates’ character—and not least, the character of Socrates’ irony—advanced by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes. Kierkegaard developed a two-pronged analysis. On the one hand, he attempted to define Socrates’ world-historical significance, his significance for the story of history. On the other hand, he searched out Socrates’ significance for the history of subjectivity. Kierkegaard went to great lengths to fulfill the demands posed by an academic dissertation with respect to method, scholarly exactitude, familiarity with sources, and other formal requirements, but he did not take any pleasure in playing the bloodless scholar: “I have now finished presenting my conception of Socrates as he is exhibited in Xenophon’s peepshow, and in conclusion I will ask only that the readers, if they have been bored, not place the blame on me alone.”
The second part of the dissertation, which treats romantic irony, constitutes a remarkable about-face from an academic treatment of the material to the sort of exposition which at times borders on the reckless. Of course, the wish to write on irony—in particular, on the concept of irony—is in itself ironic. Irony never permits itself to be subsumed under its concept in orderly fashion. It does not want to be conceptualized; on the contrary, its character is to expand beyond all boundaries. Even in the introduction to his dissertation, Kierkegaard explains that it is as difficult to sketch irony, as expressed in Socrates, as it is to “depict an imp wearing the cap that makes him invisible.” The image is almost a violent assault on the power of imagination: We wish to see something that has the power to prevent us from seeing anything at all. Later in the dissertation, irony’s negative power to effect its own disappearance without leaving a trace is illustrated with reference to “that old witch” who decided “to devour everything and then to devour herself as well,” so that she ended by devouring “her own stomach.”
Kierkegaard was thus painfully aware of the tension between the subject matter and the exposition, but he ingeniously chose to transform the problem of irony into an ironic point: In his dissertation he not only explicates irony, he also replicates it. And he does this, he explains, to head off what was apparently a common error: “Thus in modern times there has been plenty of talk about irony and about the ironic conception of actuality; but this conception has rarely manifested itself ironically.” And irony was to do this—manifest itself ironically, that is—in Kierkegaard. But unfortunately, when it comes to irony, it is not so far from manifestation to sheer mania. At any rate, that was what the members of the sober-minded evaluating committee thought.
Thus F. C. Sibbern, the dean of the faculty, to whom Kierkegaard had personally presented his dissertation on June 3, remarked in the circular letter that he forwarded along with the dissertation when he sent it to J. N. Madvig, professor of classics, that there was something in the dissertation that in his opinion belonged to a “lower sort of genre,” and he compared Kierkegaard to the German writer and aesthetician Jean Paul, who, according to Sibbern, also had a “peculiar and characteristic manner of marching, walking, and slouching.” Sibbern further wished that the title of the dissertation be changed to the following: “Socrates as an Ironist, With Contributions to the Development of the Concept of Irony in General, Particularly with Reference to the Most Recent Times.” Sibbern entertained no doubts, however, that the dissertation ought to be accepted for defense; true, it was a quite long, but it could be read relatively quickly because “the language flows easily” and furthermore, “the handwriting is very legible.” The legibility of the handwriting can presumably be attributed to the fact that Kierkegaard had had a fair copy of the dissertation made by C. L. Simonsen, who shortly thereafter emigrated to Norway, where he bragged a bit about his part in the enterprise.
Madvig, who now received the dissertation for inspection, was also satisfied with its contents, in which he discovered “intellectual liveliness and fresh thought,” but he, too, believed that as a composition it was marked by a “certain free and easy carelessness,” and that “the development of concepts lacks scholarly order, form, and firm focus.” Worst of all, however, was that “the exposition suffers from a self-satisfied pursuit of the piquant and the witty, which not infrequently lapses into the outright vulgar and tasteless.” Madvig briefly considered whether the acceptance of the dissertation ought to be made conditional on “the removal of these excrescences,” but he wasn’t up to pushing the idea, since this sort of negotiation was of course difficult and awkward in any case, and in Kierkegaard’s case would probably have been unavailing. After this tirade Madvig returned the piece on irony to Sibbern, who immediately forwarded it to F. C. Petersen, professor of classics and the provost of Regensen College, who recommended that “various excesses of the sarcastic or mocking sort be removed as inappropriate in a piece of academic writing.” After approving the change of title proposed by Sibbern, Petersen sent the papers further to his colleague (and temperamental opposite), P. O. Brøndsted, who responded a mere twenty-four hours later with an elegantly written assessment in which he noted that Kierkegaard had apparently found it impossible to resist an “inner temptation to leap over the boundary that separates both genuine irony and reasonable satire from the unrefreshing territory of vulgar exaggeration.” Nonetheless, Brøndsted believed that if a “personal preference for tidbits of this sort prevents the author from following advice in this regard,” he would let the matter pass without further ado. But university rector Hans Christian Ørsted, who had to give formal approval to the petition for dispensation from the Latin requirement, would not simply drop the matter. Indeed, in a private letter to Sibbern, Ørsted drily remarked that the dissertation “makes a generally unpleasant impression on me, particularly because of two things, both of which I detest: verbosity and affectation.” Ørsted was further concerned about the haste with which the evaluation procedure was being conducted, and consequently he suggested that Martensen or the new professor of philosophy, Rasmus Nielsen, read the dissertation. Since Rasmus Nielsen had asked early on to have nothing to do with the matter, the dissertation went to Martensen, who wrote four lines concurring with the points of view already voiced, hence voting in favor of accepting the dissertation. After this, the matter—which by now had become rather difficult—went back to Sibbern, who on July 16 declared on behalf of the philosophy faculty that On the Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates was worthy of being defended for the magister degree.
This was in turn communicated to Christian VIII, who in a letter of July 29, proclaimed that “Søren Aabye Kjerkegaard is granted permission to acquire the magister degree with the philosophical dissertation submitted by him and written in the Danish language.” The king, however, imposed the condition that the oral defense was to take place in Latin, and that the work was therefore to be accompanied by Latin theses setting forth “the dissertation’s principal points” and approved by the examiners prior to the oral defense. Kierkegaard did as the king required, and after yet another trip through the university’s machinery, the dissertation and fifteen Latin theses—of which three (numbers I, XIII, and XV) were at one point close to being rejected—were returned to Kierkegaard. On September 16, P. G. Philipsens Press reported that the dissertation was finished at Bianco Luno’s print shop. In the haste to get everything done, an unfortunate error had arisen, and a Greek passage from Plato’s Republic, which was to have adorned the title page, had been dropped. In the half-darkness of the typesetting room the printer had also had trouble with the Roman numerals, so Sibbern’s Latin proclamation was followed by the date 1851, while the date of the oral defense was set for 1861.
The typographical errors seem almost to be a material manifestation of the unruliness with which the ironic spirit of the dissertation resisted academic packaging, but on September 29, 1841, Kierkegaard was finally permitted to defend On the Concept of Irony, which interested parties could purchase for one rixdollar and forty-eight shillings.