Today I wandered through several books touching on irony.

It began with Geertz.

Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. The common forms of it are familiar enough. In dramatic irony, deflation results from the contrast between what the character perceives the situation to be and what the audience knows it to be; in historical irony, from the inconsistency between the intentions of sovereign personages and the natural outcomes of actions proceeding from those intentions. Literary irony rests on a momentary conspiracy of author and reader against the stupidities and self-deceptions of the everyday world; Socratic, or pedagogical, irony rests on intellectual dissembling in order to parody intellectual pretension.

But the sort of irony which appears in anthropological fieldwork, though no less effective in puncturing illusion, is not quite like any of these. It is not dramatic, because it is double-edged: the actor sees through the audience as clearly as the audience through the actor. It is not historical, because it is acausal: it is not that one’s actions produce, through the internal logic of events, results the reverse of what was intended by them (though this sometimes happens too), but that one’s predictions of what other people will do, one’s social expectations, are constantly surprised by what, independently of one’s own behavior, they actually do. It is not literary, because not only are the parties not in league, but they are in different moral universes. And it is not Socratic, because it is not intellectual pretension which is parodied, but the mere communication of thought — and not by intellectual dissembling, but by an all-too-earnest, almost grim, effort at understanding.

Geertz and Rorty live side-by-side in my mind because I learned of both of them from the same wonderful, life-transforming book, Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Irony is central to Rorty’s work, so I dipped into what some consider his magnum opus, to refresh my memory of how he spoke of irony.

The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. Such metaphysical or theological attempts to unite a striving for perfection with a sense of community require us to acknowledge a common human nature. They ask us to believe that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others — that the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same. Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and theology are transparent attempts to make altruism look more reasonable than it is. Yet such skeptics typically have their own theories of human nature. They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings – for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at the “deepest” level of the self there is no sense of human solidarity, that this sense is a “mere” artifact of human socialization. So such skeptics become antisocial. They turn their backs on the very idea of a community larger than a tiny circle of initiates.

Ever since Hegel, however, historicist thinkers have tried to get beyond this familiar standoff. They have denied that there is such a thing as “human nature” or the “deepest level of the self.” Their strategy has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down — that there is nothing “beneath” socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human. . . . This historicist turn has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics — from the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress. But even after this substitution takes place, the old tension between the private and the public remains. Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger and Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did — as antithetical to something deep within us. Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with “irrationalism” and “aestheticism.” . . . I urge that we not try to choose between them but, rather, give them equal weight and then use them for different purposes. Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection — a self-created, autonomous, human life — can be like. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort — the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel. We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.

. . .

If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools — as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.

This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the “liberal ironist.” I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.

For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” — no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. . . . Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question — algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort — is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.

The ironist intellectuals who do not believe that there is such an order are far outnumbered (even in the lucky, rich, literate democracies) by people who believe that there must be one. Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism. So ironism has often seemed intrinsically hostile not only to democracy but to human solidarity — to solidarity with the mass of mankind, all those people who are convinced that such an order must exist. But it is not. . . .

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. . . .

Then I began to dig into a book on the Socratic method by Ward Farnsworth. I did this not only because Geertz spoke of Socratic irony but because Nietzsche characterized Socrates as “the great ironist”, in multiple senses.

In Birth of Tragedy:

…that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man — how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks — merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans resolve against pessimism — a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science — indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against–truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your–irony? — —

In Beyond Good and Evil:

The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” — or, more clearly, of instinct and reason — that is to say, the question whether in regard to the evaluation of things instinct deserves to have more authority than rationality, which wants to evaluate and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?,” that is to say according to utility and fitness for a purpose — this is still that old moral problem which first appeared in the person of Socrates and was already dividing the minds of men long before Christianity.

There it is: “dividing minds”, not necessarily between persons but within a single soul. This dividing seems essential to irony. He continues:

Socrates himself, to be sure, had, with the taste appropriate to his talent — that of a superior dialectician — initially taken the side of reason; and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the reasons for their actions? Ultimately, however, in silence and secrecy, he laughed at himself too: he found in himself, before his more refined conscience and self-interrogation, the same difficulty and incapacity. But why, he exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts! One must help both them and reason to receive their due — one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments. This was the actual falsity of that great ironist, who had so many secrets; he induced his conscience to acquiesce in a sort of self-outwitting: fundamentally he had seen through the irrational aspect of moral judgment.

So now I want to understand better Nietzsche’s attitude toward irony.

I’m seeing some general patterns. He associates it with decadence and non-nobility. By these terms, I mean something specific that is not purely vicious, just as in Nietzsche’s thought nobility is not purely virtuous. Nobility is simply a matter of psychic unicity. A noble soul is undivided, uni-perspectival, inert and impervious. It does not question its instincts but trusts them and acts instinctively. It is rarely curious, open to change or reflective toward its own existence. A noble soul is unironic. Socrates was ironic because he lacked nobility.

But he also seems to see an interpersonal dimension to irony. Consider this:

The clearest sign that two people hold alienated views is that each says ironic things to the other, but neither of the two feels the other’s irony.

Of course, the division is not just between the alienated friends. Each friend is speaking ironically, and has the inward division irony requires. But the irony is not registering, which raises the question: what is each friend missing in what the other is saying? Is the second meaning in the ironic utterances what each friend mistakes for the other’s belief, so the irony does not land? Or has each friend lost all sense of the other’s complexity and hears psychic polytonality as monotony?

For a while I was associating irony with pluralism, and I don’t think I was wrong to do so. Irony might be a necessary (or at least extremely helpful) condition of pluralism. But I want to understand their similarities, differences and relationship more clearly. I think irony is multiplicity of view in a single moment of experience (like a chord), where pluralism is more experienced sequentially (like a scale).

In irony we experience multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. If we are pluralists, we can mute all but one of the truths in order to experience another as a purer and cohesive perspective.

I have become this way politically. I have become almost unable to straightforwardly speak about any single political position without simultaneously feeling the legitimate objections of two or more others — and more importantly the sheer magnitude of social complexity of the “hyperobject” each attempts to know and respond to.

But we can only do this if we have learned more than just the factual What content of other political positions. Even more we must know how to dance the How of its logic and feel the Why of its driving concerns.

More and more I find this kind of irony is what is most lacking in contemporary political and social discourse.