A Case for Irony

Jonathan Lear

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674255197
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into America's heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors, puts it, "is something only assistant professors assume." Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. Lear's exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stake—the psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.

I

The Lectures

1

To Become Human Does Not Come That Easily

“To become human does not come that easily.” So wrote Søren Kierkegaard in his journal on December 3, 1854, and by now the claim would seem to be either familiar or ridiculous.¹ Ridiculous in the sense that for those of us who are human, becoming human was not up to us and was thus unavoidable; for those creatures who are not human, becoming human is out of the question. There is, of course, a distinguished philosophical tradition that conceives of humanity as a task. This is the familiar sense in which being human involves not just being a member of the species but living up to an ideal. Being human is thus linked to a conception of human excellence; and thus becoming human requires getting good at being human. We see this thought reflected in such ordinary expressions as “that was a humane thing to do”: in doing the humane thing, a person might be performing an act that almost all members of the biological species would evade.² Kierkegaard’s entry could then be understood as meaning that becoming human requires that one become humane, and that is a difficult task. Of course, if one wants to treat this as more than an uplifting metaphor, one needs an argument. And philosophers from Plato to the present have taken up the challenge, arguing that self-constitution is indeed an achievement.³ Rather than contribute to that discussion directly, I would like to take an oblique turn. For I suspect that this claim has become too familiar. Kierkegaard is getting at something unfamiliar: it has less to do with the arduousness of a task than with the difficulty of getting the hang of it. It is not that easy to get the hang of being human—and becoming human requires that we do so. In this lecture, I would like to render this familiar claim—that becoming human does not come that easily—unfamiliar.

§1. Excavating Kierkegaardian Irony

Christine Korsgaard, the contemporary philosopher who argues most thoroughly for the task-oriented nature of self-constitution, claims that our difficulty arises out of two fundamental features of our condition: the structure of human self-consciousness and the fact that we constitute ourselves via a practical identity. Given any item that enters self-conscious awareness—a temptation, desire, thought, “incentive”—we have the capacity to step back from it in reflective consciousness and ask whether it gives us reason to act (or to believe).⁴ And for self-constitution to be a genuine possibility, Korsgaard argues, we must ask this question from the perspective of our practical identity: “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.”⁵ My practical identity commits me to norms that I must adhere to in the face of temptations and other incentives that might lead me astray.

Our ordinary ways of talking about obligation reflect this connection to identity. A century ago a European could admonish another to civilized behavior by telling him to act like a Christian. It is still true in many quarters that courage is urged on males by the injunction “be a man!” Duties more obviously connected with social roles are of course enforced in this way. “A psychiatrist doesn’t violate the confidence of her patients.” No “ought” is needed here because the normativity is built right into the role.⁶

If we accept that becoming human requires that we inhabit a practical identity well, and that doing so requires both that we reflectively endorse (or criticize) the various incentives presented to consciousness and actually live by our judgment, then we can see how becoming human might be an arduous task. It can be tough work fending off those temptations that would undo our claim to be the person we are; it is, on occasion, tough work to live up to the demands that, given our practical identity, are required; and it can be tough work to hold the apparently competing demands of life together. Fidelity to oneself is not for the fainthearted. Thus we do have here an interpretation of what it might mean for becoming human to be not that easy.

However, this does not seem to be the difficulty Kierkegaard is talking about. In that journal entry he writes:

In what did Socrates’ irony really lie? In expressions and turns of speech, etc.? No, such trivialities, even his virtuosity in talking ironically, such things do not make a Socrates. No, his whole existence is and was irony; whereas the entire contemporary population of farm hands and business men and so on, all those thousands, were perfectly sure of being human and knowing what it means to be a human being, Socrates was beneath them (ironically) and occupied himself with the problem—what does it mean to be a human being? He thereby expressed that actually the Trieben [drives] of those thousands was a hallucination, tomfoolery, a ruckus, a hubbub, busyness . . . Socrates doubted that one is a human being by birth; to become human or to learn what it means to be human does not come that easily.⁷

The suggestion here is not that if only we would reflect on what our practical identity already commits us to then we would be taking on the difficult task of becoming human. The contrast Kierkegaard is drawing is not between unreflective and reflective life. Rather, it is between “the entire contemporary population” and Socrates—and to understand the depth of Kierkegaard’s point, it is crucial not to caricature the population. There is plenty of reflection in the contemporary population’s goings-on. Ordinary life is constituted by people assuming practical identities and then, in reflection, asking what is required of them. And Plato dramatizes the reflectiveness of ordinary life when, at the beginning of the Republic, Socrates goes to the home of Cephalus, a wealthy businessman who enjoys conversation. Cephalus makes it clear that not only does he have a practical identity as a businessman, but that he has been careful in life to stick to its norms. His grandfather had been wealthy, through inheritance and business acumen, but his father had lost the fortune. Cephalus has spent his life rebuilding the family fortune. (I.330a–b). And when Socrates asks him, in reflective conversation, “What do you think is the greatest good you’ve received from being very wealthy?,” Cephalus has a remarkable answer, clearly an outcome of reflective self-questioning (I.330d–331b). Cephalus is a man with a practical identity, a person who has had to stick to its norms in the face of challenges, and someone who has thought about what it all means. And yet, as he leaves the conversation to make a religious sacrifice, it is clear that this is part of the “hubbub, busyness” that Socrates’ life exposes.

The contrast Kierkegaard is drawing is between Socrates, whose “whole existence is and was irony,” and everyone else. We caricature everyone else if we think of them all as unreflectively going through automatic routines. Obviously, we do not yet know what Socrates’ irony consists in. But Kierkegaard is explicit that it is not—as the contemporary world would have it—about witty turns of speech, or even about saying the opposite of what one means. Irony is a form of existence. The contrast Kierkegaard draws is with everyone else who is “perfectly sure of being human and knowing what it means to be a human being.” So irony would seem to be a form of not being perfectly sure—an insecurity about being human that is at once constitutive of becoming human and so remarkable that, in all of Athens, only Socrates embodied it. The important point for now is that the perfectly-sure/not-perfectly-sure divide does not coincide with the division between unreflective and reflective life. At least some of those who are perfectly sure are quite capable of reflecting on the demands of their practical identity. Indeed, that very reflection may manifest their confidence. So the mere fact of reflection on the basis of one’s practical identity is not sufficient to take one out of the “hubbub, busyness” that Kierkegaard describes.

It would seem then that the route out of this busyness is not a trivial matter. Kierkegaard names it irony, and he ascribes it to himself as well as to Socrates:

My entire existence is really the deepest irony.

To travel to South America, to descend into subterranean caves to excavate the remains of extinct animal types and antediluvian fossils—in this there is nothing ironic, for the animals extant there now do not pretend to be the same animals.

But to excavate in the middle of “Christendom” the types of being a Christian, which in relation to present Christians are somewhat like the bones of extinct animals to animals living now—this is the most intense irony—the irony of assuming Christianity exists at the same time that there are one thousand preachers robed in velvet and silk and millions of Christians who beget Christians, and so on.⁸

Irony does seem to arise here from some feature of practical identity—in this case, from being a Christian. One can easily read this passage as a complaint about historical transmission—that long ago there were Christians, something got lost, and now there are only impostors—but one thereby misses the irony. One can make that complaint in the flat-footed way I just did. Rather, the occasion for irony arises from trying to figure out the types of being a Christian by excavating “in the middle of Christendom.” Kierkegaard used “Christendom” to refer to socially established institutions of Christianity, the ways in which understandings of Christianity are embedded in social rituals, customs, and practices.⁹ The picture here is of me trying to reflect on the types of being a Christian by consulting available church histories, the received accounts of the division of the church into sects, available accounts in sermons, books, editorials, and articles about Christian life. Again, it is easy enough to caricature my activity—choosing which church to join as though I were inspecting different species in the Galápagos—but the power of irony emerges when one portrays me as a more serious figure. So, I am engaged in what I take to be the practical task of living up to the demands of a practical identity—being a Christian—but I am doing so by working my way through Christendom. Note that this activity is essentially reflective—I am stepping back from ordinary life and asking what a properly Christian life consists in—and it may be undertaken in a genuine mood of sincerity and with intellectual sophistication. The problem is that, however thoughtful and sincere the questioning is, the reflection itself is a manifestation of the assumption that Christianity exists. It is a form of being “perfectly sure.” This shows itself in my reliance on Christendom to give me the materials for my reflection. But what if Christianity does not exist? What if nothing in the world—including this activity of reflection—answers to the call of Christian life? Then my reflection on my practical identity via an excavation of Christendom would be mere hubbub, busyness.

The Christendom of Kierkegaard’s Europe no longer exists; and I expect this audience to be largely secular, and those that do live a religious life will do so in different ways. Thus, we can step back from that Christendom and treat it as an object for reflective consideration of the standard type. But if we were inhabitants of that Christendom, reflection would be possible, reflection on our practical identity as Christians would be possible, reflection on Christianity would be possible—but all of this would be further acts within Christendom. Christendom aims to be (and when it is vibrant it for the most part is) closed under reflection: for its inhabitants, reflection is possible, even encouraged, but is not itself sufficient to get one outside it.¹⁰ Elsewhere Kierkegaard called Christendom a “dreadful illusion,” and I take it he is talking not only about its degree of falsity, but about its all-encompassing nature.¹¹ The illusion of Christendom is that it is the world of Christianity—that when it comes to Christianity, there is no outside—and its success as illusion thus depends on its ability to metabolize and contain reflection on Christian life. One can thus easily see that when a culture is in the grip of a vibrant illusion, philosophical discourse about our ability to step back in reflection can function as ideology, reinforcing our confinement in the name of liberating us from it.

And I see no reason for assuming that for any illusion there will always be discrepancies, disagreements, contradictions within it such that reflecting on them will be sufficient to get us out of them. When Christendom was vibrant there were plenty of discrepancies, disagreements, and contradictions—and reflecting on them was the stuff of Christendom. I suspect that the thought that reflective consciousness ought in principle to be able to recognize an illusion from the inside derives not only from the well-known narratives of Hegel and Marx, but from the plausible thought that if we are to give content to the idea of something’s being an illusion, we need to give content to the idea of our coming to recognize it as illusion. However, one can accept that thought and nevertheless be skeptical that reflection is the mode of recognition. On occasion we fall in love, then we fall out of love, and then we give ourselves reasons for why our love failed. On occasion we fall into illusion, and over time illusions may lose their grip, and then we can see contradictions, discrepancies, and disagreements as reasons for giving it up. What grounds our confidence that our reflective reasons are the cause of giving up the illusion, rather than it being the illusion’s fading that facilitated the reflection?

However that may be, it is precisely the moment when reflective consciousness unwittingly participates in the illusion that is the occasion for “the most intense irony”—at least, in Kierkegaard’s opinion. The instance that concerned him was the one he took to be of greatest practical importance to himself and his neighbors: trying to figure out how to be a Christian. Notice that the occasion for irony arises not merely for the vain and the hypocritical, the shallow and the silly; even if I am smart and sincerely want to think about how to be a Christian, if I do so by excavating Christendom—that is, engaging in reflection within Christendom—this activity, too, is an occasion for irony. And this at least suggests that when a person is misleading himself about the point of his own reflective engagement, irony may be of help. Thus it behooves us to understand what Kierkegaard took irony to be.¹²

§2. The Experience of Irony

To get clear on what irony is I want to distinguish the experience of irony from the development of a capacity for irony; and to distinguish those from what Kierkegaard calls ironic existence. In a nutshell, the experience of irony is a peculiar experience that is essentially first-personal: not simply in the sense that all experience is the experience of some I, but that in having an experience of irony I experience myself as confronted by that very experience. Developing the capacity for irony is developing the capacity to occasion an experience of irony (in oneself or in another). We tend to think casually of “the ironist” as someone who is able to make certain forms of witty remarks, perhaps saying the opposite of what he means, of remaining detached by undercutting any manifestation of seriousness. This, I shall argue, is a derivative form; and the deeper form of ironist is one who has the capacity to occasion an experience of irony. Ironic existe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: The Lectures
• Part Two: Commentary
• Notes
• Commentators
• Index