Abstract
…[S]ome image of Socrates is indispensable to our philosophical thinking. Perhaps we may say that today no philosophical thought is possible unless Socrates is present, if only as a pale shadow. The way in which a man experiences Socrates is fundamental to his thinking. — Karl Jaspers1
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Notes
Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Christ: The Paradigmatic Individuals, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 20.
For an interesting discussion of Hamann, see Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993).
The relevant texts are Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alexander Nehamas, ‘Voices of Silence: On Gregory Vlastos’s Socrates’, in his Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 83–107; and Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).
David E. Cooper, ‘Irony’, in David E. Cooper (ed.), A Companion to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 239.
See D. C. Muecke, Irony (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 14.
Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom. 2nd edn (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 337a.
Plato, Symposium, 217a. I have followed Vlastos’s translation (Vlastos, 1991, p. 34).
Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 105.
This point is made by Andrew Cross, ‘Neither Either nor Or: The Perils of Reflexive Irony’, in Hannay and Marino, 1998, p. 129.
George Pattison has pointed out that Kierkegaard’s friend and teacher, Poul Martin Mraller, anticipates The Concept of Irony in tracing nihilism back to Fichte, and to Schlegel’s interpretation of him. Moller writes that irony ‘is a consequent development of the fruitless struggle to construct a self-enclosed ethical system from the standpoint of the individual. This method must necessarily end with the loss of all content, with moral nihilism’ (Meller, ‘Om Begrebet Ironi’, in Efterladte Skrifter, 3rd edn (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1856), 3, p. 152; cited in Pattison, 1992a, p. 28).
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© 2000 John Lippitt
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Lippitt, J. (2000). Irony and the Subjective Thinker. In: Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598652_8
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