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Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

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first existentialist philosopher

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fondness for metaphor, irony and parables

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how one lives as a "single individual"

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priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking

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personal choice and commitment

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critic of idealist intellectuals of his time such as Hegel, Goethe and Hans Christian Andersen

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ask yourself how much time you spend using your cell phone and computer today, that will tell you how different you are from one or two generations back

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these constant changes make people feel insecure

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things that people have done all their lives suddenly become obsolete

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Kierkegaard saw many of these kinds of changes coming in the 19th century

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scholars argue whether Kierkegaard was a philosophy, theologian, inspirational author, literary writer, psychologist, or something else all-together

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his highly creative form of writing makes it hard to say which genre he was using or what academic field he belonged to

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he's had an appeal to people who disagree among each other

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he's been seen as an advocate of both progressive political views and reactionary ones

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both a critic of German idealism and a follower of it

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focused on relativism, lack of meaning, and the crisis of religious faith that are typical in modern life

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1841 "On the Concept of Irony"

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when we say that e.g. a law is merely relative, we intend to undermine it, i.e. it doesn't have absolute validity and therefore we can choose to follow it or not

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Kierkegaard refers to subjectivity and relativism as irony

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compares Socrates irony with modern irony

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post-structuralism

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instability in the human sciences, due to the complexity of humans themselves and the impossibility of fully escaping structures in order to study them

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post-structuralism is a response to structuralism, an intellectual movement of the mid-20th century which argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure modeled on language

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Kierkegaard and Socrates

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"my task is a Socratic task"

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we have to understand how he understood Socrates and what he took Socrates to stand for

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mostly found in the work "The Concept of Irony"

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aporia: in thought, a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises, the state of being perplexed, at a loss

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maieutics n. the art of giving birth to ideas

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Kierkegaard's life

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born 1813, the year the Danish state went bankrupt

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Kierkegaard's father was one of the few who was still relatively wealthy

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Danish Golden Age (painting)

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first half of 19th century in Denmark

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arts took on a new period of creativity catalyzed by Romanticism from Germany

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mostly had to do with painting from 1800-1850: Eckersberg, Bendz, Hansen

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Hans Christian Anderson

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Copenhagen was small and impoverished at the time, and dominant figures of the age new each other and influenced each other

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1838: published first book, criticized a novel by Hans Christian Anderson

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raised in tradition of Lutheran Christianity

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brother studied theology and became a bishop in the Danish Lutheran Church

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youngest of seven children

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all died except he and his older brother Peter (bishop)

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School of Civic Virtue

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founded 1789

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for sons of wealthy bourgeois families

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attended 1821-1830

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classic education in Latin, Greek and Hebrew

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developed a love for Greek culture and literature

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studied Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, some of Herodotus' Histories and some of the New Testament

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read dialogues of Plato, specifically the Euthyphro, the Apology, and the Crito

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read Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates

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he discovered here Socrates, who fascinated him for the rest of his life

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Kierkegaard didn't have many friends probably due to the fact that he had a tendency to tease and antagonize his fellow students with his superior intellect

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often beat up for this

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he came back to this school later in life to teach Latin

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The Concept of Irony

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three parts, two long, one short

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1. The Position of Socrates Viewed as Irony

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compares the picture of Socrates as presented by Plato, Xenophon (students of Socrates, and wrote dialogues with their teacher as the main speaker) and Aristophanes who parodied Socrates in a comedy called The Clouds

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presents Socrates as someone who doesn't have any positive doctrine or theory, but rather merely contradicts what others say without presenting anything positive himself

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Socrates is a negative, destructive force

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talks of Hegel's view of Socrates was very influential at the time

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2. The Concept of Irony

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talks of the modern form of irony of the German Romantics

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while Socrates' irony is given a positive treatment, the Romantics were criticized as using irony in the service of relativism or nihilism, whose goal he thought was to undermine bourgeois society without giving a truth of meaning to replace it

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3. Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony

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Kierkegaard's presentation of his own view of the proper and appropriate use of irony

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impossible to use irony as Socrates did

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but Romantics go to far by undermining society

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Kierkegaard suggests a limited form of irony as the most appropriate for his own day

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