Irony as the Birth of Kierkegaard's “Single Individual” and the Beginning of Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper examines the idea presented in Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony (1841) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) that irony, far more than a rhetorical device, is an existential category that gives birth to the subjectively existing single individual. As such, irony is no diversion from or necessary undercutting of one's ethical growth but is a required step in fostering it. Although Kierkegaard preferred to focus on the individual, irony nevertheless plays an essential role in issues of social justice and politics, since the self must be distinguished from its social environment if there is to be any hope for one's being useful in changing it for the better, and irony is the means by which the distinguishing of the self occurs. For example, since Kierkegaard believes that politics is at best only provisional and approximate, irony has an important role in chastening overweening political forces, which are often accompanied by human rights abuses. Irony secures room for individuals who have an inner infinity that can never be utterly conformed to the strictures of finite politics. Thus, as Kierkegaard presents it, irony's birth of the single individual is shown to be politically significant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".