I'm not sure what Kierkegaard meant by "Irony being infinite absolute negativity". I can understand that irony gives an insight through explicitly denying it, but it seems to me it shows something. On the other hand, really good irony may really rest on aporia, and this may pertain to the idea of absense or negativity.

I have only read this one amongst Søren Kierkegaard's works, and when I read about him, I seem to disagree. But here he really seems to point out sort of a Guru Yoga approach on philosophy, since Socrates personality (and to a lesser extent his life history) is taken as the philosophical fact par excellence.

Of course "The Clouds" is the best record about Socrates, it baffles me it is taken to be ironic Kierkegaard saying so.

Is there possibility of a subject-independent particular?¹ In order to answer this question, first we should determine that if we are dealing with what is separate from an observer, we already are trespassing some metaphysical matters. Since I don't believe metaphysics is possible in any sense, for me to talk about these matters is just a thought experiment.

So lets suppose reality (independent from the observer) not only is possible², but is the case. In this situation, we have an Aristotelian world, with objects and their features. Let's suppose one of those features is colour, and the colour of the particular object we are dealing with is yellow.

Philosophers are still fond of such positions, since they not only are in agreement with our common-sense "this shirt is red"³ but they are in agreement with the structure of our language. There is a big trend in philosophy these days — ironically excentrical in itself — that produces a metaphysics based entirely in common-sense and language structures! Of course, since all over history people have tried to be original, nothing more original than being common. So the color dispute is today much less inclined to those crazy scientists and much more inclined to my aristotelian grandmother. But I sense this is just aesthetics, because physics is so cheesy these days — nobody would want to talk about quantum interconectedness and metaphysics, it is almost the same as talking about piramids or the shroud of Turin.

Well, enough of Schoppenhaurean rantings, back to some argument.

So we have this independent yellow thing outside our possibilities of perception. We maybe have the light of the sun (or some standardized source) and that particular quality stands there, unexamined and unexaminable. So why do we call this "yellow"?

Does the frequency matches that of our observation? Even if we could not measure it, it could certainly be the case that it matches — but is this enough to call it "yellow"?. Maybe the language of God has left the word "yellow" for a configuration of things, but in this case he would be a kind of observer also (even creation would entail some private kind of yellowness). In Japan and China, blue and green are different shades of blue, and although for us brown/red and yellow/orange seem different colors, for Russians there are different words for light or dark blue. Shades or colours?

It seems that some animals such as tropical fishes, have 5 colour receptors in their eyes, humans have 3. We see a range a frequency that was stabilished by evolution, so basically we see colours that were important for survival. So if we don't have a hard circunstance-observer dependent colour, how could we decide names for our colours represent properties of things?

What sense is to talk about "yellow" with an extraterrestrial that had a different sun and atmosphere, and perhaps a completely different frequency-range of vision? We could say to this fellow that we believe some object has by itself some specific thing that ordinarily we can see, but he can't. Then we would say that we could never see this property of the thing itself ourselves, but we believe it is a possibility! "It may have some property you can't understand and I can't see, that's all I'm saying, believe me". Of course, possibilities abound: since I don't know what lies in the borders of space, it may as well be a giant turtle. I can't prove this is impossible, but "borders of space" are a little queer, and so all metaphysics.

If we come to private language and modern so-called "externality", put some qualia in the mix and loose all metaphysical assumptions, then it starts to make sense to talk beyond ideas such as realism and idealism, which are basically only some 18th century novelties (or much older in the case of realism). Of course, nobody knows for sure what those things imply to philosophers, since the idea of the impossibility of a private language seems to make impossible any of the common constructions of philosophers. How can we talk about underlying structures or transcendental concepts if there is no priviledged point-of-view that can tell others about how things really are? Rules of communication such as the required to estabilish what means "colour"⁴ and what a particular colour is are not defined by relation to discrete and separate entities such as "phenomena", "understanding" or "thing-in-itself". This rules form a game in which participants engage, and have nothing to do with explanations or telling how things truly are.

As Wittgenstein puts it:

“The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible - though unverifiable - that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.”Wittgenstein

Philosophical Investigations §272

To even talk about the possibility of "red" outside these games is to make a Monty Python sketch out of philosophy. Well, that's what most philosophy turns to be anyway.

The guy just wanted a good definition of number, and then that vicious Russell came and destroyed everything.

But anyway, when you check that he started the definition of number by the number zero you see he was insane. This is probably the most difficult one to define.

In it's definition you see the paradox already — at least if you don't give a clear definition of class.

"The class of all objects that aren't equal to themselves"⁵, this is zero. But then, if this class is equal to itself, it isn't, and if it isn't, it is. Poor Frege. Then Russell suggested that classes are not objects or something like that, and Plato got sad⁶.

Moral: Logicians are obsessive-compulsive.