This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Becoming human irony and the practice of philosophy in Lear, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard Manzon, Tommaso Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 ‘Becoming human: irony and the practice of philosophy in Lear, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’ Tommaso Manzon King’s College London 1 2 Abstract: As it has been convincingly demonstrated by the French scholar Pierre Hadot, philosophy originally consisted in a practice or ‘way of life,’ aimed at personal transformation through the enactment of spiritual exercises. Such a process of personal transformation took the shape of a progressive appropriation of wisdom on the philosopher’s part, and was often described as a transition from a life of foolishness and confusion into one of clarity and insight. The goal of this work is to discuss how “philosophy as a way of life” has been practiced after its falling out of the philosophical mainstream in the 18th century. My thesis is that Jonathan Lear, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard are all authors who can be described as practicing “philosophy as a way of life.” In order to address their figures, I shall take as a point of entry the spiritual exercise of Socratic irony. Starting with a historical discussion of the practice of irony, I explore how my authors incorporate the latter in the light of their own commitments and metaphysical views. At the same time, I aim to connect irony to their ideals of human excellence, or, to the way in which they articulate the philosopher’s achievement of wisdom. Finally, I shall draw all these elements together in order to present the three different configurations of “philosophy as a way of life” that have emerged from my discussion. 3 CONTENTS Introduction – p. 8 PART 1: THE WORK OF IRONY, THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY: LEAR’S A CASE FOR IRONY, WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF HIS THOUGHT AND THE BROADER PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION Chapter 1) On the Concept of Irony: an historical and conceptual account from Socrates to Lear 1.1) A Brief History of Irony – p. 16 1.2) Irony Across the Ages: from Socrates to German Romanticism – p. 19 1.3) Irony Across the Ages: Hegel and Kierkegaard’s Doctoral Thesis – p. 25 1.4) Pierre Hadot on Philosophy and Spiritual Exercise – 32 Chapter 2) On Irony, Therapy and Love: Jonathan Lear’s psycho-philosophical synthesis and the goal of the philosophical life 2.1) Kierkegaard’s and Plato’s Influence on Lear’s “Case” for Irony – p. 35 2.2) The Experience of Irony – p. 40 2.2) The Nature of Therapeutic Action – p. 52 2.3) Transference and the Environment of Therapeutic Action – p. 56 2.4) Irony, Therapeutic Action, Becoming Human – p. 65 2.5) Irony and Love – p. 67 4 PART 2: HEALTH, GENEALOGY, AND DECONSTRUCTION: NIETZSCHE’S ENACTMENT OF THE SOCRATIC TRADITION Chapter 1) On True and False Culture: Nietzsche’s practice of Socratic irony in David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer 1.1) Untimely and Ironic Meditations – p. 71 1.2) The Cultural Philistine – p. 73 1.3) Nietzsche’s Concept of Culture – p. 75 1.4) Elements of Irony: the Ironic Question – p. 80 1.5) Elements of Irony: Ad Hominem Arguments – p. 80 Chapter 2) On Integrating Genealogy and Health: The Genealogy of Morals as spiritual practice and its connection to irony 2.1) The Valuableness of our Values and the Project of a Genealogy of Morals – p. 83 2.2) Genealogy as an “Imaginative Framework” – p. 84 2.3) Genealogy as a Spiritual Practice – p. 89 2.4) On Aporia and Atopia – p. 92 2.5) On the Nature of Morality – p. 93 2.6) On the Origin of Morals: Freudian Love and the Will to Power – p. 95 2.7) On what the Origin of Morality is Not – p. 97 2.8) Genealogy as Interpretation of Interpretations – p. 99 2.9) Health and the Will to Power – p. 102 2.10) Deconstruction – p. 104 5 Chapter 3) On Teaching Greatness to Oneself and to Others: Zarathustra prophet of the overhuman and his connection to the existential ideal of the ironist 6.1) A Commitment to Greatness: on Becoming Oneself and the Goal of Irony in Nietzsche – p. 107 6.2) Zarathustra as a Teacher – p. 114 6.3) Becoming Oneself as Becoming the Universal – p. 118 PART 3: THE SINGLE, THE TEACHER, THE CROWD: KIERKEGAARD’S CHRIST-ORIENTED IRONY AND ATTACK ON CHRISTENDOM Chapter 1) On why Christendom is a Disease and how to Heal from it: Kierkegaard’s criticism of culture, in connection with his practice of irony and his theory of communication 1.1 The Present Age, Its Sickness – p. 124 1.2 Direct and Indirect Communication in Relationship to Irony – p. 130 1.3 On Kierkegaard’s Practice of Irony, with Respect to his Different Author-Positions – p. 146 Chapter 2) On Poetry, Irony and God: on the connection between the ironic and the poetical life from a Christian point of view 2.1 Kierkegaard and Religious Poetry: The Religious Poet – p. 178 2.2 Kierkegaard and Religious Poetry: God the Poet – p. 184 Chapter 3) On Imitating the Supreme Ironist: Kierkegaard on irony and what it means to become a true Christian 3.1 The Single Individual – p. 187 3.2 The Teacher, the Saviour – p. 195 3.3 Who is the Imitator? – p. 203 6 Conclusion – p. 210 Bibliography – p. 220 7 INTRODUCTION What is it to live a philosophical life? The goal of this dissertation is to elaborate a possible answer to this question while dealing with a set of correlated issues. These include matters such as what it is to practice philosophy, and what is the conception of the human condition underlying certain practices of philosophy. To give a thorough answer to all these questions would require many more words and pages that one can type within the limits set for a PhD dissertation. If one were to seriously tackle these matters, the resulting text would be long enough to flood the world – or perhaps the web, if such a thing were possible. Accordingly, this thesis is a modest but nonetheless rigorous proposal on how to approach the notion of a philosophical life – or that of “philosophy as a way of life.” As is fitting for a doctoral dissertation, the present text will take a particular angle, and it will be limited to a particular historical period and to whatever a few selected authors might have to say on the topic. Before we get to discuss in depth the period and authors which will be the object of my work, I would like to offer a few introductory remarks. First, because the object of our discussion is the nature of philosophical practice, it is necessary to discuss the nature of philosophy itself. This is a complicated question: different people, different ages, and different schools of thought have come up with competing definitions of philosophy. Preliminarily, we could stick to the Greek etymology, and agree that philosophy is the love of wisdom. This is arguably a definition that all the members of the philosophical community would be content with. Moreover, such a definition is already a step in the direction of discussing the nature of the philosophical life: after all, if philosophy is the love of wisdom, it follows that the philosopher must be the lover of wisdom, and the philosophical life must be a life inspired by such attitude. Of course, to define philosophy as the love of wisdom is to offer a very vague formulation. After all, love and wisdom are signifiers which tend to sound rather empty: they definitely point to something – even a layperson has a grasp of these nouns and they are commonly used in ordinary language – and yet they are undeniably complicated and thick concepts. Therefore, we have just added a new layer of difficulty to our problem: not only we have at our own disposal different 8 historical definitions and practices of philosophy – certainly in part due to different understandings of the nature of love and wisdom – but we have also discovered that trying to answer the question concerning the nature of philosophy is already in itself a philosophical matter. Another way of putting it, is that to wonder what could be the nature of wisdom already implies being in a loving relationship with it: to try to understand how we could seek after wisdom, in a way which we would identify as love, is to establish precisely such a relationship.