Analyzing Irony and Humor from Kierkegaardian Perspective

It's literary and philosophical essay that analyzes irony and humor from the perspective of the Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

I was reading a biographical and textual sketch of the Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard and I came to understand the philosophy of irony and humor as mentioned by the contributor. Irony occurs between the confinia of the aesthetic and the the ethical. And humor occurs between the confinia of the ethical and the religious. I became perturbed by the meaning of confinia. I did some search and I found that it had three meanings. They are adjoining, allied and contiguous. Adjoining means next to, allied means related to and contiguous means connected to. The biography did not carry any further explanations on these concepts and Kierkegaard made my afflatus to work on these concepts.

First of all I would explicate irony and then analyse how it occurs in a confinia between the aesthetic and the ethical. Irony as a term has baffled many and there is a host of interpretations for the term. Irony as a trope, or as a figure of speech would mean a figurative device which uses language in which the the utterance or writing of words would connote exactly the opposite of what was said. Irony is used to evoke meaning that can be incongruous, caustic and derisory. The reader of an Irony has to become involved with the secondary meaning that is the implied meaning as contrasted with the actual meaning. Basically there are two types of Irony and they are one a verbal irony and the other romantic irony. An example of a verbal irony would be: he looked out of the window and watched the weather turning foul and remarked to his friend, what fine weather it is. An example of a dramatic irony can be taken from Julius Caesar’s Hamlet where the murder of his father is at first ignorant to Hamlet but directly known to the audience. Here again I would like to analyze how the concept of Irony works as a confinia between the aesthetic and the ethical in the Philosophic sense. To put aesthetics into the realm of Philosophy would be problematizing the meaning and content of Aesthetics. I would like to define aesthetics in the philosophical sense as any event, experience, judgement, taste, hearing, feeling or seeing, which deviates and departs from the ordinary perception of sensory data. Next, I would like to provide a terminological classification of the term ethical. Ethics would be set of behavior which is codified by society, culture and institutionalized for propagating its social mores and life. In this situation ethics would include codes of what is morally good, contrasted with what is morally bad. One problem concerning ethics in the Philosophical arena is the problem of ethicalizing behavior itself and that will be a problem
of meta-ethics. Now how can irony lie in the confinia between aesthetic and the ethical? How can Irony clad the sublime in aesthetics as the ornamental or despicable and embrace the ethical as conduct or standard of the social norm. Here Irony would play the role of a key, whose exterior surface is ethics and whose interior surface is aesthetics. When the key is opened the resulting meaning would be the secondary level of meaning as implied by Irony. For Irony to operate, one would have to analyze what state of aesthetics has the society adapted. Is its aesthetic merely mimetic and confining to be sold as products commercially. Is the ethics of the society permissive or conformist? Irony can set in as a trope of operationality, only if the society’s ethics is liberal and permissive with higher gradations of tolerance and its aesthetics is opening its form and content to shock, bewilder and arouse participation. In such a society of transgressions, the creator of Irony works at a tertiary level of operations, the primary being the production of the product, the secondary being the experiencing of the product and the tertiary being the creation of irony. Let’s examine how the concept of Irony works philosophically. Here is an example: even though Nudes are only depictions, pornography of a decadent culture industry, Nudism is also a Philosophy.

Secondly I would like to analyze how the comic occurs between the confinia of the ethical and the religious. I am digressing ethics because I have explained already Now, what is religion? I would like to explain the concept of religion broadly that is in Philosophical terms. Religion is the submission of an individual to a higher power, a transcendent experience. Here philosophies like phenomenology have also defined the transcendent as inner subjectivity of being. Let me quote an example of a comic merging the ethical and the religious. Example: one gets a religious feeling, a transcendent experience of inner subjectivity when one releases feces, urine and vomit and also when one farts.