The Metaphysical Knight of the Negative: Kierkegaardian Critique of Solger's Irony

Abstract

The present article examines Søren Kierkegaard’s reception and critique of Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger’s concept of irony in The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841). In the first part, we begin with Hegel’s prior analysis of his former colleague, Solger, acknowledging him as a scholar committed to the development of legitimate speculative thought through the use of irony, though ultimately failing to achieve a satisfactory result due to a lack of reconciliation with a positive dimension, remaining stagnant within the sphere of the negative. In the second part, we show how Kierkegaard appropriates much of Hegel’s interpretation, while emphasizing the existential consequences of such stagnation, recognizing in Solger a “contemplative irony” belonging to the metaphysical realm, which, although seeking a unity between the finite and the infinite, results in acosmism and pantheism, remaining incapable of addressing the actuality of existence.