Soren Kierkegaard

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 Socra-
tes’ 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 pan-
icked 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 Renais-
sance, culminated with man declaring God dead, seizing power for himself,
and thus gaining ample opportunity to experience his own abysmal impo-
tence. 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 sui-
cide.” 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 shad-
ings of the mother tongue could endow the exposition with the requisite
subtlety. In 1837 Kierkegaard had noted that “to write about romantic sub-
jects 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