[MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to the second lecture of Soren Kierkegaard, Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity. In the first lecture we learned that there were a number of important aspects of the thought of Socrates that were a great inspiration for Kierkegaard. We talked about Socratic irony, the idea of aporia. Socrates' role as the gadfly of Athens, Socrates' daemon, and finally, Socrates' so called maieutic art. It was useful to see these concepts in their original context in Plato's dialogues since this will give us a greater appreciation for Kierkegaard's unique use of them. But, we still have one brief errand to attend to before we get to this. Kierkegaard's understanding of Socrates was of course based on his reading of the text of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, that is, the primary Greek sources. But, it was also largely shaped by the interpretation of the famous German philosopher Hegel with whom he was in a constant critical dialogue in the concept of irony. Hegel's philosophy was a highly popular trend at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1830s when Kierkegaard was a student and was writing this work. So, in this lecture, we'll explore first the presence of Hegel at the university during Kierkegaard's time, and then we'll go through Hegel's analysis of Socrates treating the same topics that we introduced last time. That is Socratic irony, aporia, the daemon, and so forth. We'll see how Kierkegaard is inspired and influenced by the important historical role that Hegel ascribes to the person of Socrates. What does it mean to say that we are autonomous? For most people today, autonomy is just a fancy word for freedom. Literally, autonomy just means that one is able to give a lot of oneself. In other words, one can decide for oneself what one wishes to do. So to say that someone is not autonomous means that that person is subject to external laws that often contradict what one wants to do. So in this sense, we all generally think that autonomy is a good thing just as we think that freedom is a good thing. I don't want someone telling me what to do or imposing arbitrary rules and regulations on me that limit my freedom. Today, autonomy is conceived as a universally positive thing, but this was not always the case. In some societies, the main value was not for people to go out and act on their own desires and wishes. Instead, the most important thing was for them to follow a set of rules that had been agreed upon by one's family, culture, or society. This includes dressing in a certain way or acting in accordance with accepted norms. According to this view, to act autonomously is a sign of arrogance and disregard for one's family or tradition. This is often associated with religion. For example, in religious ceremonies, everyone is expected to do the same thing, to perform the same ceremony in the same way. It's impossible to be an individualist or a nonconformist in a ceremonial context. Moreover, in Christianity, it's thought that human beings are finite and sinful. They are only able to gain salvation, not by their own acts alone but by the grace of God. It's therefore considered, not just arrogant, but even irreligious to act as if one could determine the truth for oneself. In this sense, autonomy is conceived as a negative thing. This issue, which is still very much alive today, was one that was important in Kierkegaard's time. It was thematized by a young Danish scholar named Hans Lassen Martensen. When Kierkegaard was a student here at the University of Copenhagen in the 1830s, the philosophy of the German philosopher Hegel became a major trend among students. A key figure for the popularity of Hegel was Martensen who was just five years older than Kierkegaard. In 1836, Martensen returned to Copenhagen from a two year trip that he took to Berlin, Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, and Paris. On his trip, Martensen met most of the leading figures in Prussia and the German states who were discussing Hegel's philosophy at this time. When he returned to Copenhagen, Martensen immediately began an illustrious academic career. On July 12th, 1837, he defended his dissertation, which was entitled On the Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness. In this work, he critically treated the systems of the German thinkers, Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. Martensen argued that these philosophies all represented systems of autonomy that he believed focused one-sidely on the power of the individual. According to Martensen, this fails to recognize the profound dependency of human beings on God. With this topic, Martensen can, in a sense, be said to anticipate Kierkegaard's topic of irony. In both cases, what's at issue is the role of the individual or the subject vis-a-vis the objective order of things. Both Martensen and Kierkegaard seem to be in agreement that modern subjectivity or even relativism has gone too far. Martensen's key term for this is modern autonomy where Kierkegaard's is irony, but in the end, they're talking about the same set of issues. Martensen began lecturing at the University of Copenhagen in the fall of 1837. It was here at Regensen College that he defended his dissertation in the same year. His courses soon became the talk of the entire university. Students from all disciplines flocked to hear what he had to say since he was in a sense giving an account of what he had learned on his trip about the most recent developments in philosophy and theology in the German speaking states. To the consternation and amazement of the older, more conservative faculty, Martensen immediately became a kind of academic celebrity. To the students, he was an exciting young scholar who could speak to them in a way that they had not experienced before. He presented to them the basic ideas of the philosophy of Hegel which all of Prussia and Germany was talking about. One of Martensen's students describes his encounter with these lectures as his intellectual awakening. He writes, and I quote, the man, who through his lectures made such a strong impression on me and many others was a young instructor, who had been appointed to give lectures on the recent history of philosophy for us first-year students. It was Hans Lassen Martensen. He brought new life into the new university building. Martensen for many years filled the largest auditoriums with nothing but zealous auditors. What immediately won me over to him was the fresh enthusiasm which surrounded him in comparison to the other instructors. He spoke precisely about what I thirsted to hear, and did so at times with a warmth which I found doubly impressive in the cold temple of the sciences. Among the students in Martensen's lecture hall was the young Soren Kierkegaard. His notes to Martensen's course can be found in his Notebook 4. Here, Kierkegaard could witness firsthand the sensation that Hegel and German philosophy were making among his fellow students. He was vexed by Martensen's success and frustrated by the avid interest that his fellow students showed in these lectures. While Kierkegaard clearly felt alienated from the group of students that followed Martensen around, he knew that he had to take seriously the thought of Hegel if he was going to write a dissertation on irony since Hegel had treated this topic in a handful of different texts. So he read carefully Hegel's lectures with a special eye to the different treatments of Socrates and Socratic irony. So why was Hegel so interesting to the students of Kierkegaard's generation? Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, and he spent the last decade of his life at the royal Friedrich Wilhelms University which is today the Humboldt University in Berlin. His lectures there in the 1820s to students from all over Europe. After he died on November 14, 1831, his students formed a society dedicated to publishing a complete edition of his works. They believed that Hegel's lectures constituted an important aspect of his thought. And so, in their edition, they decided to publish four series of his lectures, along with the works that Hegel had published in his own lifetime. These were the lectures on the philosophy of religion, the lectures on aesthetics. The lectures on the philosophy of history, and finally, the lectures on the history of philosophy. Kierkegaard owned copied of all of these works, and in The Concept of Irony he refers to or quotes directly three of the four. Hegel's most extended account of Socrates appears in the first volume of the three volume Lectures on the History of Philosophy which appeared from 1833 to 1836 edited by Hegel's student Karl Ludwig Michelet. We want to look at Hegel's analysis and see how it's relevant for Kierkegaard's understanding of Socrates in The Concept of Irony. In his investigation, Hegel makes use of the three main sources of Socrates life and teachings. The philosopher Plato, the historian Xenophon, and the comic writer Aristophanes. These are the same three sources that Kierkegaard uses in his analysis of Socratic irony in The Concept of Irony. Why were people so interested in Hegel's philosophy? Was it simply the latest philosophical trend, or was there really something important about it that spoke to people at the time? In Hegel's lectures, he portrays Socrates as what he calls a mental turning point in the history of philosophy and culture. The Greek philosophers prior to Socrates, the so called Presocratic philosophers, were concerned with understanding the world of nature. They were, in a sense, the first natural scientists who tried to give natural explanations of the world without appealing to any divine agency. They were primarily interested in the objective world as they found it outside themselves. By contrast, Socrates was the first to turn the focus inward to the realm of thought. While the other philosophers were concerned with explaining the natural phenomena in the world, they didn't problematize this issue of the way people thought. This is what Socrates did. He believed that understanding how people thought was prior to and more important than understanding the natural world. For in order to understand the natural world we must first know what it is to understand something at all. According to Hegel, this marked a revolutionary idea, not just in Greek philosophy but in Greek culture generally. The Greeks were accustomed to living in accordance with time honored customs, habits, that they took to be divinely sanctioned. This is the broad sphere of what Hegel calls, in German, sittlichkeit, which is usually translated as ethics or ethical life. By this however, he means not just the customary ethics that a given people like the Greeks follow, but also the broad spheres of religion, laws, traditions, and established patterns of social interaction. For Hegel, the Greeks believed that this obective sphere of customary ethics was true, as it were, by nature. In other words, when they acted in accordance with tradition and custom, this was not just the arbitrary will of some specific individual, but rather it was true in itself. This is the beginning of what is known today as the tradition of natural law. That is, the idea that some things are right or wrong by nature. According to Hegel, the conception of traditional ethical life can be seen in Sophocles' tragedy Antigone. In this work, a conflict arises between a young woman, Antigone, and the king of Thebes, Creon. Antigone's brother Polyneices has been killed in a failed revolt against the state. Creon decrees that the bodies of the rebels should not be buried but rather should be left exposed to the wild animals and the elements. Anyone caught trying to bury one of the rebels was punishable by death. Antigone regards this is an arbitrary decree of a single man, the tyrant Creon. This was just his personal opinion. The fact that he's the king and thus has the sanction of the law behind him doesn't change this. For Antigone, there's a higher law, namely the law of the family. The law that dictates that family members bury the dead of their deceased. In his lectures, Hegel quotes this work and refers to Antigone. He says that these are the eternal laws of the gods. For Antigone, the funeral rites are absolute objective facts of nature that she must obey even if her actions are illegal by human laws. The laws of nature are absolute whereas human laws are arbitrary. Hegel takes this to be exemplary through the Greek view prior to Socrates. The revolution of thought that Socrates brought about was to shift this emphasis on the outward objective sphere that was given by the gods as true forever, to the inward sphere of the individual. As Hegel explained, quote, Socrates' principle is that man must attain to truth through himself. Though for Socrates, one should not accept blindly what custom and tradition teach. Instead, one must critically examine these things and come to a conclusion about them for one's self. But note that this doesn't mean that whatever the subject happens to think is true and has validity. Instead, Hegel believes that there's still an objective truth but that it must be reached and recognized by the individual subject through rational examination. The problem with the Greek view, prior to Socrates, was that the sphere of accepted custom and tradition was, in a sense, tyrannical. This was claimed to be true in itself, and one's own personal opinion about it didn't matter. For Antigone, it's an absolute truth that the surviving family members must give the funeral rights to deceased relatives. It doesn't matter what Creon or anyone else thinks about this. It's simply true in and of itself. But for Socrates and for the modern view, each individual has the right to give his or her assent to the truth. This recognizes the rationality of the individual to know and understand the truth. So the revolution that Socrates began in the Greek world and that led to our modern conception is that the subject is a constitutive element of the truth. This was a revolution among the Greeks since it was a new and shocking idea, indeed an idea that cost Socrates his life. [SOUND] The idea of a subjective truth was one that greatly appealed to the young Kierkegaard. In the summer of 1835, he came here to Northern Sealand, to the north of Copenhagen, where he visited the small towns and villages at his leisure. He records his impressions from the short journey in his first journal called simply, The Journal AA. This is an important period for the young student, Kierkegaard, who seemed not really to be making particularly rapid progress with his studies. One reason for this was perhaps that he was still somewhat unsure about what he wanted to do with his life. In the journal, AA, he recounts some of his self-doubts and uncertainties about which course of life to take. On August 1, 1835, here in the fishing village of Gilleleje, he writes, "What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know...It's a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die." Here, the young Kierkegaard states explicitly that he urgently needs to discover a subjective personal truth, as he says a truth for me. Like Socrates, he rejects the objective truths that are accepted by society. He continues, "...what use would it be in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers' systems...And what use would it be in that respect to be able to work out a theory of the state....which I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see?" Here, he rejects the objective knowledge that's recognized by the world. He acknowledges that this enjoys respect and recognition among people, but since it's objective, it lacks something fundamental. Thus, like Socrates, he wants to find a truth within himself. [SOUND] It's particularly interesting to note the way, in which, Kierkegaard also includes Christianity in his account of the objective truth. He writes, "What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life?" Here, he recognizes that Christianity can be regarded as something external and outward, as one objective truth among others. The academic fields of theology, such as dogmatics or church history, might be thought to fall into this category. For example, what some church council decided isn't objective fact, but this has nothing to do with the individual's relation to Christianity. Like Socrates, Kierkegaard believes that the deeper truth is not the objective one, but rather, the subjective one that lies within. He connects this directly with Socrates, a few pages later. For Kierkegaard, as for Socrates, knowledge of external things is irrelevant without knowledge of oneself as subject. He writes, "One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else...Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning." Kierkegaard claims that one must first begin with skepticism or irony, in order to work through it. He writes, true knowing begins within not knowing, Socrates. Kierkegaard refers to the way in which Socrates undermines traditional truths and begins from the start or from a position of what he calls not knowing. Many years later, in 1846, in the concluding unscientific post script, Kierkegaard develops this distinction in some detail. At the beginning of the work, he explains that the objective issue is about the truth of Christianity. This is the objective truth about Christianity, such as can be determined by for example, the historical record, the sources, and so forth. In contrast to the objective truth, there's also the subjective, which is about the individual's relation to Christianity. The question of ones personal inward subjective relation to Christianity is for Kierkegaard a much deeper and more important truth than all of the external objective truths that can be established. This fundamental distinction between subjective and objective, for which the post script is so well known, finds its origins in Kierkegaard's reflections, here in Gilleleje in 1835. And these reflections are closely related to Socrates' Revolution of Thought, that turned away from external custom and tradition, and gave validity to what was inward and subjective. [MUSIC]
