On negativity and subjectivity: Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s Irony was an operation by which commonly accepted customs and historical practices could be criticized, by promoting wisdom through delivering  no positive philosophical doctrine or theory to others who claimed to know something. This was his ‘Socratic task.’ Similar to Socrates, Kierkegaard focused his intellectual efforts on understanding what it meant to be a human and how to pursue a life worth of living. To his view, truly existing individuals, who obeyed the natural human desire to know, would embrace the negativity of uncertainty and take responsibility for their personal views. His Christian understanding of God, as related to subjectivity, was what he meant to defend by applying Irony. When confronting the Clergy of the Copenhagen of his time, Kierkegaard learnt the political consequences to the commitment to Socrates’ method in the way he  applied it to his modern setting.