User:Patrick Welsh/sandbox 2

A great deal of irony is, and is intended to be, what Booth terms "stable irony", which he identifies by four marks: it is intended to be understood, it is covert (rather than overtly presented as an instance of irony), the intended meaning is fixed, and its meaning is limited to the context of utterance.

This usage has its origins in the 19th-century writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Søren Kierkegaard.

In the 20th century it is also an important concept for such diverse theorists as Paul de Man and Richard Rorty.

General irony, or "irony as a way of life"
Typically "irony" is used, as described above, with respect to some specific act or situation. In more philosophical contexts, however, the term is sometimes assigned a more general significance, in which it is used to describe an entire way of life or a universal truth about the human situation. Even Booth, whose interest is expressly rhetorical, notes that the word "irony" tends to attach to "a type of character — Aristophanes' foxy eirons, Plato's disconcerting Socrates — rather than to any one device". In these contexts, what is expressed rhetorically by cosmic irony is ascribed existential or metaphysical significance. As Muecke puts it, such irony is that of "life itself or any general aspect of life seen as fundamentally and inescapably an ironic state of affairs. No longer is it a case of isolated victims.... we are all victims of impossible situations".

This usage has its origins primarily in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other early 19th-century German Romantics and in Søren Kierkegaard's analysis of Socrates in The Concept of Irony.

Friedrich Schlegel


Friedrich Schlegel was at the forefront of the the intellectual movement that has come to be known as Frühromantik, or early German Romanticism, situated narrowly between 1797 and 1801. For Schlegel, the "romantic imperative" (a rejoinder to Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative") is to break down the distinction between art and life with the creation of a "new mythology" for the modern age. In particular, Schlegel was responding to what he took to be the failure of the foundationalist enterprise, exemplified for him by the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Irony is a response to the apparent epistemic uncertainties of anti-foundationalism. In the words of scholar Frederick C. Beiser, Schlegel presents irony as consisting in "the recognition that, even though we cannot attain truth, we still must forever strive toward it, because only then do we approach it." His model is Socrates, who "knew that he knew nothing", yet never ceased in his pursuit of truth and virtue.

Although Schlegel frequently does describe the Romantic project with a literary vocabulary, his use of the term "poetry" (Poesie) is non-standard. Instead, he goes back to the broader sense of the original Greek poiētikós, which refers to any kind of making. As Beiser puts it, "Schlegel intentionally explodes the narrow literary meaning of Poesie by explicitly identifying the poetic with the creative power in human beings, and indeed with the productive principle in nature itself." Poetry in the restricted literary sense is its highest form, but in no way its only form.

Irony is not the only literary term to which Schlegel assigns extra-literary significance. Indeed, irony itself is presented as the uneasy synthesis of allegory and wit. Summarized by scholar Manfred Frank: "As allegory, the individual exceeds itself in the direction of the infinite, while as wit the infinite allows the unity that breaks from the wholeness of the series to appear selectively." According to Schlegel, allegory points beyond itself toward that which cannot be expressed only poetically, not directly. He describes wit as a "selective flashing" (Aufblitzen); its content, he says, is "always paradoxical", its unifications of the finite and the infinite are always fragmentary.

These two figures cannot exist together at once. What allegory attains indirectly by conjoining, wit attains only momentarily by total individuation, the fragmentary finitude of which contradicts the intended infinite content. Schlegel presents irony as the "structural whole" sought by these two "abstract" figures. It accomplishes this as "surpassing of all self-imposed limits". Frank cites Schlegel's descriptions from a variety of sources:

"Irony consists in a 'constant alternation (Wechsel) between self-creation and self-destruction', in a 'wonderful, eternal alternation between enthusiasm and irony', between 'creation and destruction', an 'eternal oscillation between self-expansion and self-limitation of thought', a 'reciprocal play (Wechselspiel) between the infinite and the finite', it is 'the pulse and alternation between universality and individuality'—no matter how the contrasting pairs may be articulated."

In this way, according to Schlegel, irony captures the human situation of always striving towards, but never completely possessing, what is infinite or true.

Hegel's misreading
This presentation of Schlegel's account of irony is at odds with many recent interpretations, which, as Beiser discusses, have been predominately postmodern. These readings, he contend, overstate the irrational dimension of early Romantic thought at the expense of its rational commitments—precisely the dilemma irony is introduced to resolve.

Already in Schlegel's own day, G. W. F. Hegel was unfavorably contrasting Romantic irony with that of Socrates. On Hegel's reading, Socratic irony partially anticipates his own dialectical approach to philosophy. Romantic irony, by contrast, Hegel alleges to be fundamentally trivializing and opposed to all seriousness about what is of substantial interest. According to Rudiger Bubner, however, Hegel's "misunderstanding" of Schlegel's concept of irony is "total" in its denunciation of a figure actually intended to preserve "our openness to a systematic philosophy".

It is Hegel's interpretation, however, that would be taken up and amplified by Kierkegaard, who further extends the critique to Socrates himself.

Kierkegaard


The eighth thesis of Søren Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, states that "irony as infinite and absolute negativity is the lightest and the weakest form of subjectivity". Although this terminology is Hegelian in origin, Kierkegaard employs it with a somewhat different meaning. Richard J. Bernstein elaborates:

"It is infinite because it is directed not against this or that particular existing entity, but against the entire given actuality at a certain time. It is thoroughly negative because it is incapable of offering any positive alternative. Nothing positive emerges out of this negativity. And it is absolute because Socrates refuses to cheat."

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and others, saw irony, such as that used by Socrates, as a disruptive force with the power to undo texts and readers alike. The phrase itself is taken from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, and is applied by Kierkegaard to the irony of Socrates. This tradition includes 19th-century German critic and novelist Friedrich Schlegel ("On Incomprehensibility"), Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and the 20th century deconstructionist Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony"). In Kierkegaard's words, from On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates: "[Socratic] irony [is] the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it..."

Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others insist that irony—whether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotes—must, in Kierkegaard's words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Similarly, among other literary critics, writer David Foster Wallace viewed the pervasiveness of ironic and other postmodern tropes as the cause of "great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists [ironies] pose terrifically vexing problems".