recent experiments

 

Some notes on irony

 

Irony

 

 

What is irony, and what does irony have to do with philosophy?

 

[preliminary note: I am not arguing that irony is an answer. It is more likely a question.  However, whatever the answer is, a sense of humor will help.]

 

 

Xenophanes

 

Werner Jaeger’s classic study, Paideia, argues that “Xenophanes first taught Greece that philosophy could be a cultural force.”  Xenophanes breaks from the old aristocratic order and its ritual storytelling, to sing out the “first assertion of the intellectual virtue, sophia, wisdom, as the new basis for morality” – “philosophy discovers its importance for mankind” – “the disinterested search for truth” underlies the “critical analysis and guidance for human life.”[1]

A strain of bitterness runs through Xenophanes’ fragments.  The story is that he buried his sons with his own hands – his native Colophon was overtaken and crushed by the Medes – Xenophanes was exiled and spent the rest of his life wandering through Greek cities, ultimately reaching Italy and Sicily.[2]

Jaeger portrays him as a novelty, whose teachings excited interest, welcomed at the tables of the rich and great, but always off by himself, an outsider and loner.  The raw pain of his life made him see through the veneer of popular belief.  He could see, as no one before seemed to be able to do, that the Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black, the Thracians make their gods gray-eyed and red-haired; that every nation conjures up its own hocus-pocus.[3]  His bold rejection of the entire Greek pantheon led him to the broader question of the limits of human knowledge[4] – now seeing bluster and crude ethnocentrism in every reach of our minds[5] – a leap of mind which gave him the power to imagine animals worshipping gods and gods having no material properties at all.[6] 

Xenophanes had a wry way of suggesting the farce of human understanding – this is a comic bitterness – yet Xenophanes does not teach despair but, according to the Stoic Panaetius, cheerfulness.[7]  The insight into the hollowness of human conception does not make him reject the whole business of trying to understand the world – in Greek, philosophein, the desire to find out – instead he concludes from his own experience that “by seeking men find out better in time.” The gods do not reveal to us how things stand in the world or what we should do.  We have to search these things out for ourselves.[8] 

So, in this first configuration, we see a self-deprecating, wry understanding, a mind tested by experience, resilience returning from disaster, a lonely, outsider stance, an inquisitiveness and fearless reasoning, and a fundamental attitude of mind which he called euthymia, cheerfulness.

 

Comedy

 

Komodia, comedy, is another term from this early epoch – the period Nietzsche studies in The Birth of Tragedy – a time in which religious festivals evolved into portrayals of human society, meant to evoke an emotional response.  Note the double audience of the Greek theater – one party is in on the secret, while the other is not – the facts of the plays are not a matter of invention, but are known in advance; all the spectators are in on the secret – however, the characters on the stage are in the dark; the pregnant meaning of what they say is entirely lost to them.   The spectators in the audience are in the position of the gods, whereas the players on the stage are mere mortals who understand little of what they do.  The surface meaning is one thing, the underlying meaning something completely different.  This is the background for ‘dramatic’ irony, or ‘tragic’ irony – the ancient Greek model for saying one thing but meaning another – setting the example of the double speech, the double meaning, the double response, the split between God and man, spectator and actor.

This rupture opens up a basic mystery in trying to communicate with someone.  It happens that a person’s words or actions may be clearer to someone else than they are to himself.  This is a first version of what Wittgenstein called ‘the problem of aspect seeing’ – i.e., seeing a thing as a thing – seeing marks on the ground as a trail through the brush, or hearing a word as a warning – in a word, reading a sign.[9]  One person may grasp the full significance of a sign while another sees nothing; one person gets it, another does not.  Thus the precedent for seeing but not seeing, because one is ignorant, or because one is not in a position to know, or, later, after having grasped the meaning because one has learned it, seeing that one was blind before.  In the original case, this ignorance is genuine – the person really doesn’t get it; he can’t see it; he is effectively blind.  But where is a genuine ignorance, there is a sham – a dissembling, or pretense of ignorance, captured in the Greek term eironeia, irony, playing dumb, or pretending not to know. 

The etymology for the term komodia, comedy, is eye-opening.  Komodia derives from komos, banquet, revel, religious procession, a spectacle in which there is singing, aeidein, and odos, an ode, a song.  Aeidein derives from the Indo-European root Ö WEID, the basis of fundamental terms like view, review, interview, purview – vision, revise, wit, unwitting, guide and wisdom – evident, improvise, advice, advise – guise, invidious, wiseacre – also envy and prudent -- the Latin videre, to see, to look, to behold – the German gewissen, known, and gewiss, certain – the French voir, clairvoyant, voyeur – notably the Greek term idea, thought, aim, purpose, and eidos, form, pattern, type.  Irony is a playfulness in the theatre of seeing, thinking and knowing.

The cultural form of ‘dissembling’ – knowing and not knowing, pretending to know and pretending not to know – has a primary root in the Oedipus story – the man who knows and does not know.

The world begins to open up when we can stage it, get some distance from it, when we can laugh at it – the release clears out a space for beholding – the comic sensibility opens up the toolbox for actually looking into a thing. This distancing, doubling portrayal is a ritual form in which much of the root vocabulary for philosophy emerges – in Greek historia, inquiry, knowledge by investigation, study – the act of seeking knowledge and also its results. 

 

Democritus

 

Democritus, the father of the atomic theory, a great spirit-guide for the imagination, who lived perhaps a century after Xenophanes, is known to history the “laughing philosopher.”  Democritus’ thinking, which connects imagination and cheerfulness, is another step in the history of irony.

This philosopher makes the transition from supernaturalism to naturalistic explanations.  Among the few fragments remaining from his thought are lines like these:

 

“No-thing exists just as much as thing”

“Compounds emerge and pass away, formed and dissolved by the coming together and separating of atoms in the void”

 

The theory implies that the everyday world is quite unlike the constituent world lying beneath it and that “man is cut off from the real,” “it is impossible to know what each thing really is,” and “in truth we know nothing of anything.” There is a “bastard” form of knowledge, which is a kind of “flowing in of opinion” upon each of us, and a “legitimate” form of knowledge that we must work at on our own to peer behind appearances.  Learning about the world by legitimately knowing it changes a person; through his ability to discern the underlying principles, man reinvents himself.  The materialistic account of the universe suggests the same rejection of supernaturalism regarding mankind.  If the mind is sufficient for understanding the cosmos, it surely is fit to govern itself.  Ethics then is the art of caring for the soul, analogous to the medical arts’ care of the body.  Man is weighed down in his initial, ignorant condition, but can become nimble by his new, legitimate understanding.  The touchstone is that the good is held to be an internal state of mind rather than something external to it.

Democritus names this internal ‘good state of being’ with the word, euthymia, cheerfulness – this word could also be translated as gladness, good mood, serenity, tranquility, laughter.[10] 

Some of the things we associate with irony – an upbeat, but self-deprecating spirit – sensing that something is absolutely contrary to what one expected – seeing that our expectations were really over the top – a sense for the absurd – a dry humor, a bitter taste, an acerbic wit, a mordant comedy – show themselves in Democritus. 

Diogenes Laertius records that Democritus understood euthymia to be “a condition according to which the soul lives steadily, calmly, undisturbed by fear, superstition or overheated passion.” Seneca explains that euthymia means “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path,” and “not being in doubt by following the footsteps of people wandering in every direction.” Modern scholars noted the resemblance to Socrates’ later vocabulary, emphasizing the role of one’s own intellect in creating happiness, and Democritus’ anticipating the more developed ethical views of Epicurean and Stoic thinkers.[11]

So, in Democritus’ conception, the ‘cheerful’ response assumes a background of tradition, and skepticism about tradition, and the advance from mythology to naturalistic explanations.  Because we begin with such grandiose nonsense, because we have to overcome our own gargantuan ignorance, because even with all our might we know so little, we had better learn to laugh. 

There is a story from the so-called Letters of Hippocrates, a collection ascribed to the legendary founder of Greek medicine, which records that the residents of Abdera, Democritus’ home town, became worried about the philosopher because he laughed at everything, including good and ill fortune and even death.  The people worried that their famous philosopher was going mad and so they sent for the most famous doctor in the world to cure him.  Hippocrates arrived to take on the case but quickly concluded that Democritus, far from being insane, was actually the sanest person he knew, for Democritus alone among all men seemed to have discovered the great joke of life, and was therefore quite justified in laughing at it.  The change from grandiose mythological explanations, to simple natural explanations – a stupendous correction downward – dramatizes the spectacular mismatch that lies at the origin of human understanding.  Hippocrates seems to have taken this lesson to heart, as when he says regarding epilepsy, regarded as the “sacred disease,” that “when you understand it, it will not seem divine anymore.”[12]

Euthymia is an early sketch of the thing we are looking at – lightheartedness, brightness, cheerfulness. This is the advance from “bastard” to “legitimate” forms of knowledge – myth to science, illusion to reality, opinion to knowledge – arguably an epistemological, intellectualistic guide to ethics.  Evidently, the gain in the advance to science is also felt as an emotional let-down, cascading from the stratospheric world of the gods, to the humble world of ordinary life, so that the gain in wisdom always has some sense of a comeuppance and an unseating of a person’s pretensions.  The thing that one least expected is exactly what one has to face.

 

Socrates

 

Democritus’ sense of humor reflects on the downfall from outsize magnificence to the quotidian norm.  Socrates follows this pattern from the skies down to lowly things.^[13]  

In Socrates the double audience is internal: there is someone who is in the know, and someone who doesn’t get it at all.  Socrates is both of these people.  This creates what is known as Socratic irony, Sokratike eironeia, or the profession of ignorance. 

Socrates – in Hannah Arendt’s phrase – discovered the essence of thought as the “two-in-one.”  Thinking is the soundless dialogue of the soul with itself -- the dialogue eme emauto -- between me and myself.  The thinker wanders the world in endless perplexity (πλανῶμαι μὲν καὶ ἀπορῶ ἀεί). He lives with the company of an especially thickheaded partner, who is always examining him. “He is a close relative, and lives in the same house.” “Whenever I go home to my own house, he hears me talking, and he asks me if I am not ashamed that I have the face to talk about things, when it is so obvious that I have no clue about what I am talking about” (Greater Hippias 304c-e).[14]

Socrates cannot seem to get away from this person, except by talking things out and coming to an agreement (homologia) with him. That is, Socrates starts out talking and thinking with himself, and at first, he is in contradiction with himself -- enantia legein autos heauto -- literally becoming his own adversary. Then the inner speakers carry on the dispute. The point of the discussion is to try to lead the two sides to reach agreement.  The criterion for the way out is the simple idea of not contradicting oneself (Protagoras 339b-c). This simple program makes Socrates the clarion voice of reason in philosophy.

Socrates discovered that he seems to become different people in conversation with himself, whose concerns and approaches are clearly opposite, as he struggles to understand and know himself. One Socrates is a Socrates whose radical ignorance counts among the great discoveries in history. This Socrates knows that he knows virtually nothing. He says explicitly that he does not know anything important and is not even sure that he is a human being. This is the Socrates who is acknowledges the ridiculous position he is in and who thus conjures up much of the comedy in the dialogues.  Yet another Socrates appears who seems to know many things. This is the Socrates whose vocabulary of explanation continues to dominate world thinking. This Socrates knows that examples cannot pass for definitions. He knows that opinion is not enough for knowledge. This Socrates knows that if he actually knew something, he should be able to say what it is clearly and explain it.  This Socrates knows and knows that he knows and knows why he knows, because he understands the grounds for claiming to know.

Typically, the Socratic dialogue pits the dogmatist moved by pity or contempt to enlighten the ignorant, versus Socrates, who quickly flusters supposed experts with his powerful simplicity.  This way of looking at irony makes it seem like a kind of trap that the hunter sets for the prey – meant to capture, defeat, and expose to public humiliation – thus a kind of personal attack on the opponent.  But Socrates does not spare himself from this attack.  Typically he does just the opposite.  He makes himself his own main object of ridicule.  Thus Socratic irony emerges as a fresh kind of humor, aiming its unflattering light principally at oneself.  This is irony speaking from a place where the inner and outer man are out of sync – a Socrates who knows and another who is ignorant – hunter and hunted -- a tight spot where one can’t really even face oneself – this is the main obstacle, the chief thing one is confessing.[15]

Vlastos argues that Socrates’ irony is complex – there is a great deal going on here – there is a great deal to unpack.  Socrates denies that he knows, yet he knows; he denies that he teaches, yet he teaches; he denies that he is political, but he is political.[16]

The Socratic dialogues include the Protagoras, which tackles the question about whether virtue can be taught; in the Laches the discussion is about courage; the Euthyphro examines piety, the Charmides prudence, the Hippias Minor is about truth-telling, the Hippias Major examines beauty, the Ion art, the Gorgias happiness, the Lysis friendship and Republic (Book I) justice.  The same basic question at stake in all these discussions -- i.e., the nature of human society.  All of them reach a negative result.  There is no solution to the problem of virtue -- nor of courage, prudence, happiness, justice, truth-telling, piety, beauty – nor friendship.  Thus we look into the matter and get nowhere. 

We begin to catch hold of the depth of our ignorance – we are in the dark even about the simplest things – we are in the dark about our most important values. There is a special kind of problem about virtue – courage, prudence, happiness, justice, truth-telling friendship – an epistemological problem – the problem is that we do not know what any of these things are. 

            Socrates is making a jump here that people have struggled to understand.  Like his predecessors, he wants to exchange the old aristocratic order with a new foundation based on reasoning.  He is not proposing to do away with friendship, happiness, justice, truth-telling or courage – but he does want to change all these things – as it were, he wants to rechristen the basic virtues as new versions of themselves, now recast in the bright light of reason.  But he is unable to do this.  The effort fails, the conversation ends, the result is the aporia – the dead end. 

            Consider the scene in the Symposium (218e) where Alcibiades proposes to trade his famous beauty for Socrates’ inner beauty – Socrates who is famously ugly – Socrates rejects the offer as trading gold for brass.  He is certain about the higher value he thinks he has discovered, even if he can’t make the case for it.  So he goes on, sensing this higher order – nagging himself that he cannot make the argument for it – carrying on with the work of showing what courage, prudence, happiness, justice, truth-telling, and friendship really are.  This is a compound of cheerfulness, self-abnegation, and doggedness. 

            This is another approach to Wittgenstein’s investigations into ‘aspect seeing’ – i.e., seeing a thing as a thing – seeing a sign as a sign.  Socrates enters into conversation with a huge skepticism – he is uncertain that he can nail down what he means or that anyone will really get what he is saying.  As Vlastos says, “in almost everything we say, we put a burden of interpretation on our hearer.” When we’re talking to someone, we can’t also tell them how to understand everything we are saying.  At some point, we have to rely on them to ‘get’ the point we are making.  Thus we have to rely on the other person doing something that we ourselves may not be able to do.  Socrates tries to make this absurd situation absolutely plain, laid right before us to behold.  The upshot seems clear – there is an enormous space for misunderstanding in every conversation we have – we are all exactly in the same odd position.  Every single one of us must puzzle things out on our own.[17] 

 

Darkness

 

Philosophy – in Plato's image – reaches out of the cave, trying to see the light, but once the philosopher has seen the light, there is a powerful tie back to common humanity that draws the thinker to jump back into the world in order to try to do some good.  He returns to the darkness to help free the prisoners.  In the allegory, he is executed for his troubles.

Philosophy takes place in the dark – when one is still chained, when one gets free, and when one comes back – all these important transitions happen in the dark.  Our insights bring us back to the dark.  The dark is, roughly, each other, the darkness in people, in oneself.  In the words of the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every single human being.”

A dark kind of comedy bubbles up from dark places.  The gallows humor of soldiers, emergency room doctors, police, fire, paramedics, people who work in prisons, mental institutions, funeral homes – people who work in the dark places of the world – is hard to put in words. 

Hagakure – The Book of the Samurai – from Yamamoto Tsunetomo – a samurai of the Edo period – has a dark sense of humor, as when he says that “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly” and “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.” 

The hopelessness of a dark place is a setting for thought, and one reaction – one experiment in the face of the dilemma – is morbid humor.  Gallows humor, black comedy, dark comedy – a light touch on matters of enormous import.  This is in German Galgenhumor (last words before being hanged), in French humour noir – an idea we find pretty much around the world.  On the one side are profound deficits, horrific events, unbearable losses – on the other is a grim and ironic cheerfulness. 

In psychological terms, gallows humor is a coping strategy, a defense mechanism.  Freud discusses the problem in Humor (1927): “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”

 

Black comedy

 

Breton argues in his Anthology of Black Comedy (1940) that dark comedy branches off into an aggressive form, in which comedy is used to mock the victim; a second form emerges with de Sade, in which the victim’s suffering is treated lightly, which leads to the opposite strategy of sympathizing with the victimizer; and black comedy takes its classic form as irony, in which the comic is the victim himself.

Hegel argues that irony is not really aimed at persons, but is a kind of cultural criticism -- “irony which makes every objective reality into nothingness” -- “irony which pours scornful laughter on existence” -- thinking that Socrates was so far ahead of his time that he had no other choice but to negate the world he lived in and conjure up a new world that existed as yet only in thought.[18]

Schleiermacher follows a similar line – irony is Socrates’ great creation -- irony is the key to understanding Socrates’ perspective – there is no solution, but this is not a problem – something like the Viennese saying, the situation is hopeless, but not serious.

Kierkegaard follows Schleiermacher’s reasoning to the conclusion that we are left to confront the impossibility ultimately to put into words what value is.  It is left to us to go on upholding value even though we live in complete ignorance about it.  Faith sees best in the dark.^[19]

“There is an irony which is merely a goad for thought, quickening it when drowsy, disciplining it when dissipated.”  But this is not what Socrates is up to. Socratic irony is not merely an expedient or a strategy in argument: irony is itself is the substantive result to which the argument is intended to lead.  Kierkegaard thinks we have to interpret eironeia historically – for Kierkegaard the beginning point is Greek religion.  In effect the problem we are looking at, with Socrates’ knowing and not knowing, is the difficulty of founding society on mythology and religious storytelling.  The problem is seeking a point of departure for religio-ethical truths “in the higher authority deriving from poetry.”  Socrates emerges from the tradition of sages and lawgivers who speak to us in pithy sayings and laconic brevity, “writing what is on every man’s lips,” “the style of philosophy among the ancients,” such as Look to the end, Nothing too much and Know thyself (Protagoras 343b).  Great orators restate the values that bind a people together. When sage advice is challenged, its defenders respond at first by saying what everyone knows, and making explicit again the rules of the game -- which, for example, Sophists like Hippias and Gorgias claimed to do.  Yet at some point, platitudes no longer seem to work.  Something is amiss in society, some change is underway, new factions emerge.  This is where Socrates enters, asking his ‘what is x?’ kind of question, which cannot be answered by producing celebrated examples of x-hood.  It is not enough to know how to use words, but instead we have look deeper and try to understand the moral principle.  This is where we are headed – yet we never reach the goal – instead, we just leap. 

 

Irony undergoing change

 

Aristotle seems to have thought that Socrates’ admission of ignorance was sincere.  He makes the distinction between seeming to be wise but being ignorant, and being wise but not seeming to be, and says that Socrates was forced to ομολογώ (admit, concede, confess – in war, terms of surrender) that he did not know (On Sophistical Refutations, 165a 19-27, 183b 5-10). 

Burnet describes Socrates’ irony as slyness, a reluctance to commit himself, and a habit of self-deprecation.  Vlastos describes Socrates’ irony as fitting its different contexts – impish, insulting, somber; clumsy in some passages, in others under perfect control; Socrates is sarcastic when he is trying to dress someone down, self-deprecating when he wants to encourage someone to talk.[20] 

‘Advancing to ignorance’ can be sincere, then, or a ploy – a way of speaking the truth, or speaking the truth by saying the opposite of what one means – in Xenophanes, in Democritus, in the theatre, in Socrates.  There is a truth underneath here – what Vlastos calls “a substantive doctrine.”[21]    

This is what George Rudebusch calls the “implicit Socratic conclusion”[22] and Sarah Ahbel-Rappe calls “the seeds of Socrates’ ethical theory” – a “eudaimonist ethics” – roughly identifying happiness and virtue – a cheerfulness to meet the dead blank of incomprehension; a generosity enjoying its own groundlessness.[23]

Irony appears to keep changing through history – this is one of Baudelaire’s main contentions in The Essence of Laughter, from 1868 – for example, the ironist invents a form of himself that is ‘mad’ but that does not know its own madness; then he reflects on and sinks into his invented, diminished capacity.  This is the subject of Jean Starobinsky’s study, Irony and Melancholy.  There is something called ‘romantic irony’ – Schelegel’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as worked out in his classic Literary Notebooks, from 1797 – the story of an alienated man who has become the object of his own reflection and whose acute consciousness prevents him from acting.  Irony is at once “self-creation, self-limitation, and self-destruction” – a kind of trap that one sets for oneself – but again, like feigned madness, also a strategy for coping with distress. 

Baudelaire remarks that a person who trips and falls does not usually laugh at himself, unless he is a philosopher.  The philosopher is the man who has formed by habit a power of doubling himself, “thus assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomenon of his own life.”  It is because one is disinterested that the stumble seems funny.  An implication here is that philosophy is a kind of disassociation from one’s own condition.  Irony is a way of adapting to an alienated state. 

Wittgenstein remarked that one should be able practice philosophy entirely in the form of jokes. He added: it should be possible to do this without being facetious – that is, without losing one’s high purpose.  He was also curious about the fact that we tend to ruin a joke when we explain it.  He concluded that we have to tell the right joke, at the right time, and not explain it. 

Wittgenstein argues that humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.  One of his examples is the statement that “Humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany.”  He noted that this did not mean that people in Germany were not in good spirits.  This is about “something much deeper and more important.” Wittgenstein ventured the idea that understanding a joke, and understanding music, and understanding philosophy, are somehow alike.  In order for a person to understand, one has to get into the right point of view – from which to get the joke, or hear the music, or follow the argument.  Then he asks himself: How could we ever teach what we mean by this ‘right point of view’? – How could we ever explain what we mean by this? – What is this?  Following this line of thinking, he wonders, what if you don’t get the joke?  What if you can’t hear the music?  What if you don’t see the argument at all?  What is a person lacking who cannot make the jump? 

He thinks about his status as a foreigner in Great Britain and the loneliness of not being able to speak to someone in one’s native language.  Then the differences between senses of humor from one place to another interests him.  What is it like for people to have different senses of humor?  -- They don’t react properly to each other.  His example is throwing someone a ball and expecting them to throw it back, but instead the person pockets the ball and walks away.  “If it is true that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, this would mean, not just the people were not in good spirits, but that the Nazis had been successful in destroying a whole way of life, a way of looking at the world, and a whole set of reactions and customs that go with it.”  This background thing, the background for getting the joke, the kind of thing that the Nazis tried to destroy, is what Wittgenstein calls “tradition.”  Tradition is not something that a person chooses.  You are born into a tradition and whatever you learn runs through it.  But this does not mean that you’re stuck in tradition, or that you can never get away from it. 

Thus, people have different senses of humor, people take things in different ways, but in every tradition, there is the chance to break away – the same chance one has to look back and laugh at oneself.  Baudelaire argues that in every tradition there are people “who develop in themselves the comic sensibility and draw it forth for their fellows.”[24]  What does a person lack who can’t do this? – What does someone lack who has no sense of humor?  Wittgenstein answers: the power of imagination.[25] 

Thus, at first blush, the search into irony maps out a few markers – tradition, distance; witness to something, reflection about it; the problem of aspect-seeing, or seeing something as something – hearing what someone says, for example, not just as words, but as a joke – since people become ‘aspect-blind,’ and unable to see something as something – unable to see themselves, for example, as funny.  A person who cannot see himself as funny may be said to lack imagination. 

 

Irony as higher understanding

 

Richard Rorty studies the concept in his essays from the 1980s and converts it into a higher form of understanding.  The ironist has radical and continuing doubts about the vocabulary she is using to describe the world; the ironist realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can never dismiss these doubts; the ironist does not think that her vocabulary is any closer to reality than any other.  Irony is a way of managing the doubts we have about the limits of our own point of view.[26]

When people talk about irony today, some of the things they mean are: insincerity; a sneering undertone; a self-congratulatory sense of superiority, an annoying kind of self-importance; pretense;

a kind of masking at an opposite pole from direct speech -- the polar opposite of saying what you think.  To say what you think to an ironical person seems almost impossible, because they seem incapable of taking anything one says seriously.  Foucault notes regarding the history of this idea that political critique is a kind of precursor to self-criticism: before one can become ironical about oneself, one learns to be ironical about society -- the critical focus always starts out turned outwards.  Thus, irony is usually like sarcasm a negative form of comedy and critique meant to question social conceptions, and to encourage political change in society, especially in a context in which political change seems dangerous or impossible, as we see e.g., in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and in Voltaire.  Like the fable, irony is indirect speech, not yet able to say plainly what one thinks in society. 

 

Out of sync

 

The subject is the comic sensibility in relation to morals – the contribution to ethics from the sense of humor.  An early idea is that our life is out of sync with the hidden cosmos – this is the comedy of our situation and the thing we have to face.  Later there is the idea that our knowledge is out of sync with our values – the things we rely on most are the weakest of all.  Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, from 1511, which sets off the Protestant Reformation, aims mainly at superstition, and heretic-hunters, and the enormous hypocrisy between what is said and what is actually done.  The Church becomes the setting for the rift between illusion and reality – the folly of it, from the Greek moria, silliness, dullness, foolishness, sluggish understanding, the basis of moron and sophomore – in Greek, morosophos, a sapient fool, or foolishly wise. Rabelais’ Gargantua, 1534, takes aim at bigotry, officiousness, pretension, absurd prudery, and poseurs, attacking the idea that a superior humor attaches either to gender or class.  Montaigne’s Essays, 1580, defines a kind of comic sensibility intermixing the observation of absurdity with disgust, sarcasm, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt, humility and self-deprecation –  “I never have seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.”  Thus our life is out of sync with the universe, or our values – out of sync with truth, at odds with intelligence, in opposition to genuineness and naturalness – our pretensions are way out ahead of our knowledge. 

            Shakespearean comedy has some basic structures like mistaken identity, or a defining mis-understanding, and reason and emotion at odds with one another, and the nuttiness of events completely beyond human control.  Typically there is a separation and a reconciliation.  Things start out in disarray, disunion, and dissension, and things end up with a resolution, an apology, a renunciation – often a marriage.  The comic subject is a person who reflects on her feelings and criticizes her feelings and wants more from herself.  The scene is removed to some agreeable imaginary territory, far distant from home – often a movement from the city to the country and back to the city again.  The audience is in on the joke – often there is a fool reflecting on the scene – often a play within the play.  There are disguises, masks, masquerades.  All of this speaks to the big themes such as identity, ignorance, helplessness, awareness – distance, doubling, reflection – getting away to come back.  More than anything, Shakespeare seems to point to the idea that in comedy we see that man by nature is a victim of his own illusions. 

Humor in a sense is something like the spirit of a place and time, as Wittgenstein notes, but Socrates and in a sense everyone who is trying to think clearly is out of sync – out of sync with the spirit of the time – since if we are trying to take a critical stance and get at the truth, we have to suspend belief for a while and subject it to scrutiny.  Humor has an ambiguity here, indicating both the tradition in which people live, and something required to step outside the norm to find one’s own way of looking at a thing.

 

Some modern ideas

 

Freud claimed that humor has to do with vicariously gratifying a forbidden impulse, as a

means of reducing stress.  He devotes an entire work to this theme – Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) – yet (ironically) very few jokes in this book are actually funny. Freud the comedian does better in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in which he tells the story of the condemned man who, upon approaching the gallows, remarks “What a wonderful way to begin the week!” and also the story of a boy of ten who, reacting to the sudden death of his father, remarked that “I understand that father is dead, but I don’t see why he can’t come home for dinner” and also the story about Freud himself lecturing a group of American scientists – Freud was explaining his theory that in dreams the narrator is always an egotist, but someone in the audience stood up and remarked “well, that may be true of Austrians, but American dreams are strictly unselfish.”  Mainly his focus was on parapraxes, i.e., small errors in speech, memory or physical action, such as a forgetting someone’s name or misplacing one’s keys, which, in psychoanalytic theory, is a kind of unconscious reminder – a “Freudian slip.”

Kierkegaard argued that “the more thoroughly and substantially a human being exists, the more he will discover the comical” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846).  Existence itself is out of sync –

shot through with contradiction – since our imaginations always reach further than our deeds.  Since existence is a contradiction, each of us may apprehend our own existential situation either tragically or comically, depending on the perspective we adopt.  He wrote “[w]hen the subjective existing thinker turns his face toward the Infinite, his apprehension of the discrepancy is tragic; when he turns his back to the Infinite and lets this throw a light from behind him over the same discrepancy, the apprehension is comic.” 

He tries to illustrate this point by telling a joke Plato credits to Socrates.  The story goes that a friend once approached Socrates and told him that people said all sorts of horrible things about him when he wasn’t around. Socrates replied: “Well, that doesn’t seem like much to worry about.  For all I care, people might as well beat me in my absence.” Kierkegaard offers this as an example of adopting a comic perspective. 

Kierkegaard makes the startling claim that the comic sensibility is a person’s most important tool for existential progress.  The tool works, he says, because the sense of humor “gives us a release from the sorriest of all tyrannies: the tyranny of moroseness, stupidity, and inflexibility of spirit.”  Humor is important because it helps us resist what he calls “the natural inclination to think of ourselves as finished.”[27] 

The conceptions of humor as a stress reliever – again as a tool for existential progress – suggest a kind of ‘cool’ under pressure, and ‘rising above’ – not boxed in, flow – not certain, but skeptical -- an ability to step back and reassess where one is – and so, in effect, when we look at humor and examine it closely, what we see is something very like confidence. 

When we care about something there is the tendency to exalt it to the skies, idealize it, which easily becomes fanatical, so that we have a very hard time hearing it criticized or mocked or humiliated; we confuse the attack on it with an attack on ourselves and ‘lose our cool’ – we ‘take it personally’ and attack the attack on our ideal – but with a bit of humor and self-confidence, we can chill for an instant, and reassess.  We create a chance for reflection. 

Having a sense of humor about the thing we love shows that we are upholding our ideal as a realistic goal rather than a fanatical need.  It’s a dose of realism.  Being able to see the thing we care about criticized, taking some hits, does not imply any disloyalty – one can love and still mock the whole circus around loving – its obsessiveness, its extremity, its unyieldingness – its manic character, its biases, its intensity -- its narrowing of value down to one and one one object alone in the universe.

Perhaps we can see more into the nature of comedy by thinking about a few jokes from The New Yorker.  In one, the Addams family peers through their front window at a raging storm outside.  The caption reads “Just the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive.”  Another pictures two large dinosaurs against a background of violently erupting volcanoes.  One says to the other “Don’t worry about me, baby, I’m a survivor.”  Then there is the drawing of two prisoners whispering to each other chained side-by-side midway up a wall in an enormous dungeon.  The caption reads: “Now here is my plan.”  Two scruffy bums sit in a bar, and one of them is saying “When it comes to the mot juste, Harry, you’re in a class by yourself.”  Another pictures a mousetrap baited with a slice of cheese; by it stands a glass of wine.  Then there is the one with an amoeba, a fish, a lizard, an ape, a Neanderthal and a man sitting together drinking at a bar.  The man says “I still say it’s only a theory!”  In a similar vein, a simple line drawing portrays two slugs conversing.  The caption reads: “We’re slugs – we don’t have a creation myth.”  A recent cartoon imagines a customer sitting at a sushi bar, with two sushi chefs behind the counter.  One of them is an enormous halibut.  The second chef explains to the customer: “He feels he can do more good on the inside.”

Possibly these cartoons do have something in common.  It’s not easy to say what this is, and it would be easy to make them unfunny by undertaking too windy an analysis.  However, there are a few things we can say.  The doubling theme is there in all of them.  In every case, there’s a situation and a response to it.  There is some dire circumstance but also a reaction – even if it is only a ludicrous gesture.  The humor resides in the gesture.  This is (roughly) the response of a sane person to an insane world.  No doubt Camus and Sartre would say, “the confrontation of man with the absurd” – or the plight of a meaning-seeking being who must live in a world which has no meaning – or some similarly grim dilemma.  The New Yorker’s great writer and cartoonist James Thurber explained this view in his signature phrase “the death pangs of comedy.”  This (he explained) is the mild-mannered murmur (a wave of the white flag) but also the defiant shout of rebellion (intelligence and courage wrestling with the mystery of life). 

So, being witness and reacting, facing the absurd and coming back, you can find the humor in things, and stand up for yourself, and for your values, and you can do these things whether you have any chance or not – whether you are out of sync with the universe or the things you love most or even with yourself -- you can come back from the predicament with humor. 

 

Irony as freedom

 

There is a kind of game at work in conversation. I play at you understanding me.  You play at you understanding another person.  Vlastos remarks that Socrates played this game “for bigger stakes” than anyone ever before or since.[28]

Socrates digs the deepest into this problem.  He exposes the very tenuous connection between the pronouncements of everyday speech and real understanding lying behind them.  He draws the most extreme consequences from the dilemma of something being utterly familiar but at the same time completely unknown.  In the Lysis, for example, Socrates is investigating this problem in one of its scariest contexts – for what could be more important to a person than love?  Despite the danger, Socrates keeps his composure – he is willing to go on with the game – even if this means going on with friendship without actually knowing what it is.  I think that when Vlastos says that “Socrates plays this game for bigger stakes” than we see anywhere else, he means roughly that Socrates has a towering standard for knowledge, and that Socrates is courageous enough to admit that very little, or perhaps nothing, of what we know in life, ever gets anywhere near this mark. 

Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and figures like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, focus on the circumstance of having to go forward, without having any foundation to do so.  For Schleiermacher, Socrates exposes the mystery at the center of the moral motive.[29]  We step forward, but there is no ground beneath our feet.  This is the main subject of Kierkegaard’s 1841 Master’s thesis, On the Concept of Irony, With Constant Reference to Socrates, rejecting the project of explaining morality in rational terms, but portraying morality as a decision to take on an onerous burden, without any attempt to explain it.[30]  For Heidegger, Socrates is “the purest thinker in the West” – Socrates simply “stands in the draft,” without seeking any refuge, facing the headwinds that come whenever we begin to look closely at everyday ideas.[31]  Wittgenstein discovers the “groundlessness of belief”[32] – or as Malcolm says “how much mere acceptance, on the basis of no evidence, shapes our lives.”[33]  Our lives are formed by groundless beliefs – absolutely fundamental beliefs – underlying which is an inexplicable trust.[34]  Wittgenstein drew the conclusion from these reasonings that morality was nonsense – it “does not add to our knowledge” in any way – at the same time expressing his deep respect for it.[35] 

Wittgenstein’s friend Frank Ramsey accused him of contradicting himself – Surely, if ethics is nonsense, please don’t confuse us by saying that this is important nonsense![36] – This is a puzzle that occupied these two men – among the great thinkers from recent times – for more than a decade.[37]

            Sara Ahbel-Rappe refers to Socrates’ “compromise wisdom” – a “human wisdom” – the wisdom of getting back to the ground state of ignorance, and the distance between where we are in understanding and where we aspire to be.  By acknowledging the weakness inherent in the moral position – its epistemological unmooring – Socrates is able to portray ordinary ethical commitments as chivalry in the face of danger, with more honor in suffering a wrong than in doing one (e.g., Gorgias 469b ff).[38]  

So Socrates constantly harps about his ignorance, but we are not meant to see him as ignorant – instead, as wise.  Socrates portrays the conversation as having gotten nowhere, but we are not meant to interpret it that way – instead, it makes progress.  Socrates has a wisdom that seeks to nudge aristocratic competition towards cooperation.  This is a substantive, new teaching, contrary to the mere literary conceit of speaking ironically.  Socrates’ arguments succeed in breaking up the warrior ethic of the agon – success at all costs – and inculcating the classical ethic of the logos – reasoned consensus.  The attempt to explain a thing, and the realization that we cannot explain it, are compatible as a life practice – a first formulation of philosophy not just as an academic study but a way of life.[39]  

Everything appears to hinge on looking at what we do in a certain way – being very clear about what we want our attitude to achieve – and from our study of comedy we understand that the main thing we want to change is ourselves.  In thinking about morality, we are in the situation of having to come back from grandiosity to realism.  There’s a comeuppance here and a bitter acknowledgement.  This is humbling and – if we can survive it – inspires a self-deprecating humor.  Thus by seeing things in a certain way, we come back with cheerfulness, irony, a light touch, and a sense of freedom. 

 

Challenging irony

 

David Foster Wallace offers a helpful critique of irony – “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage” – “Once the rules are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities that irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking has now been done and redone.”[40]

Once everybody knows that everything is bunk, there is the problem of what to do.  Irony stays where it is as ridicule – this is what Foster dubs “the new sincerity.”  Postmodern irony becomes an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. It is no longer has anything to do with redeeming what’s wrong, because to assert anything like this now this looks sentimental and naive – especially to the weary ironists of the world. Thus, irony moves from liberating to enslaving – irony is a self-fulfilling passivity for critics too clever for their own good – irony no longer self-deprecation or persistence in wanting to know, but an indifference that (ironically) is a prison.

Wallace’s value system shows itself in his Kenyon College speech – This is water! – from 1993.[41]  Normally we don’t get it.  Our default setting is total ignorance.  We just don’t see what is going on around us.  We have to go way out of our way to wake up at all, to begin to understand where we are – we are trapped in an egocentrism that requires enormous effort to crawl out of because there is no experience in our lives that does not revolve around us. Resetting the dials of our perception-machines so that we can pick up on other people and the entire world around us requires a herculean effort of will and focus.  This is somewhat like the fish who up to a certain point just did not get it – but who then suddenly realizes – ‘This is water!’ – I am immersed in water!  Wallace suggests a journey from normal stupidity to shocking awareness. 

Worship is a given – its default setting is unconscious – whatever we do in the default setting, it will not be enough – it hums along merrily in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and self-indulgence.  The only real choice we have is what to worship.  Freedom is not about choosing between distractions – “freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline” – freedom is the opposite of the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of going on by not seeing what we are doing. 

Real freedom is actually seeing, attending to something, taking care of something, sacrificing for something – the difference between unconsciousness and not thinking versus being educated and understanding how to think.  “The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

So – you recover your amazement – you are now in charge – but Wallace downplays the use of comedy in this formula – it’s more like anger and gritting your teeth.  Everything has been done and redone and everything sinks into an enormous boredom and everything is pointless and frustrating and empty.  Pay attention – work like hell to stay awake – wake the hell up! – don’t try to soften this up or run away.  So, in a sense, Wallace reprises Socrates’ call to the examined life, but takes away Socrates’ humor.

At this point we can return to Xenophanes and the beginning of the argument, from the insight into human ignorance, taking form as philosophy, an objectivity returning from a default grandiosity, which ignites the new desire to seek out and learn, which he called euthymia, cheerfulness.

 

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[1] Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, translation by Gilbert Highet (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 173-4. 

[2] Diels-Kranz fragment 21 b 14.

[3] Diels-Kranz fragment 21 b 16.

[4] Diels-Kranz fragment 18, 34, 35.

[5] Diels-Kranz fragment 21b 15.

[6] Diels-Kranz fragment 21b 23.

[7] Laërtius 1925c, § 20.

[8] Diels-Kranz fragment 18.

[9] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 193-219. 

[10] Diels-Kranz fragment 68.

[11] Gregory Vlastos, ‘Ethics and Physics in Democritus,’ in D.J. Furley and R.E. Allen (eds.), Studies in Presocratic Philosophy (Volume 2: Eleatics and Pluralists), 1975, pp. 381–408.

[12] Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease. 

[13] Cicero, Tuscan Disputations V, 4, 10; see also Brutus 31. 

[14] See Hannah Arendt, The Life of The Mind, Part 1, Chapter III, section 18.

[15] See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, 1983; The Courage of Truth, 1984; and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989, esp. p. 92.  

[16] G. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 236-42.

[17] G. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 44.

[18] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830, sec 571.

[19] Hegel argues that irony is a kind of cultural criticism -- “irony which makes every objective reality into nothingness” -- “irony which pours scornful laughter on existence” -- thinking that Socrates was so far ahead of his time that he had no other choice but to negate the world he lived in and conjure up a new world that existed as yet only in thought (G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830, sec 571).  Kierkegaard undertakes perhaps the most extensive discussion of the question in Western philosophy in his 1841 work The Concept of Irony, With Constant Reference to Socrates.  He remarks that we should not be too quick to equate irony with mere pretense.  "There is an irony which is merely a goad for thought, quickening it when drowsy, disciplining it when dissipated." For Kierkegaard this is not at all what Socrates is up to. Socratic irony is not an expedient or a merely a strategy in argument, but is the substantive result to which the argument is intended to lead.  Kierkegaard thinks that Schleiermacher and Hegel are on the right track in interpreting eironeia historically, but for Kierkegaard we have to reach back further in the timeline.  For Kierkegaard the beginning point is Greek religion.  In effect the problem we are looking at, with Socrates’ knowing and not knowing, is the difficulty of founding society on religion.  The problem is seeking a point of departure for religio-ethical truths “in the higher authority deriving from poetry."  Socrates emerges from the tradition of sages and lawgivers who speak to us in pithy sayings and laconic brevity, “writing what is on every man’s lips,” “the style of philosophy among the ancients,” such as Look to the end, Nothing too much and Know thyself (Protagoras 343b).  Great orators restate the values that bind a people together. When sage advice is challenged, its defenders respond at first by saying what everyone knows, and making explicit again the rules of the game -- which, for example, Sophists like Hippias and Gorgias claimed to do.  Yet at some point, platitudes no longer seem to work.  Something is amiss in society, some change is underway, new factions emerge.  This is where Socrates enters, asking his ‘what is x?’ kind of question, which cannot be answered by producing celebrated examples of x-hood.  It is not enough to know how to use words but instead we have look deeper and try to understand the general principle.  This is where Socrates remains his whole life.  See S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, With Constant Reference to Socrates, translated by Lee M. Capel, 1965, p. 91 and ff.  See also Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits, 1847.

[20] Gregory Vlastos, Plato’s Protagoras, (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1956), p. xxiv. 

[21] Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 1-22.

[22] George Rudebusch, Socrates (Hong Kong: Wiley and Sons, 2009), p. 108.

[23] Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Socrates (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 54-57, 85-87. 

[24] Charles Baudelaire, On The Essence of Laughter, 1855.

[25] Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 1990, p. 531.

[26] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73.  See also Norman Knox, The Word ‘Irony’ and Its Context, 1961

[27] S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 394. 

[28] G. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, ibid.

[29] Fredrich Schleiermacher, Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, op.cit., pp. 128.

[30] S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, translated by Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), see especially pp. 340-42. 

[31]Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper, 1976), p. 17.

[32]Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), paragraph 166.

[33] Norman Malcom, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 199. 

[34] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, op. cit., paragraphs 459, 509. 

[35] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, delivered 1929 (London: Blackwell, 2014), last paragraph. 

[36] Frank Plumpton Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays (New York: The Humanities Press, 1950), p. 263.

[37] For a study of their conversation and its comparison to Socratic ideas, see Steven Brutus, Important Nonsense: Essays in Philosophy (Portland: Daimonion Press, 2012), pp. 187-218. 

[38] Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Socrates, op.cit., p. 57. 

[39] It occurred to me that this could be Socrates’ point – i.e., even if I cannot complete the examination of a question and reach homologia with myself, I can create a life pattern for myself grounded in this practice. I can also seek out and make friends with people who are trying to do the same thing. In this sense, the idea of friendship becomes inspired and enlivened by philosophical search, which may be the core idea Socrates is flirting with in the Lysis.

[40] David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", Review of Contemporary Fiction 13(2), Summer 1993, pp. 151-194.

[41] David Foster Wallace, This is Water! https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/