Jest Up to a Point: Seeking a Constructive Irony

Socrates

Public Domain

It seems as though, with each passing era, a new layer of identity is stripped from the vestments of our personhood and burned in the fire of socialscientific scrutiny. Be it religion, cultural group, or gender, each is reduced to the ashes of phenomenological incommensurability and the individual is robbed of what once robed her in meaning. What results is not the empowerment of the individual over prescriptive categories of identity but rather her inability to relate concordantly to her fellow individuals and the world around her. When ontological categories dissolve into arbitrariness, particular experience alone becomes determinative. Just as experience becomes more particular, it becomes less communicable (language itself is the abstraction and universalization of a particular, so as to make the thought of one person comprehensible to another). When phenomenology, the raw experience of a person, is alone operative in shaping that individual, then person A cannot relate to person B any more than A and B share the same experience.

The individual can only achieve meaning in such circumstances by self-assertion in opposition to others, resulting in the incessant and irresolvable positing of difference. This is the violence at the foundation

of post-modernity. Contemporary irony becomes essential to our self-determination, rather than methodological. Whereas ironic distance could once resolve in a new understanding of one’s relationship to the world, it now serves only to renew itself in an “infinite jest.” 1

When ontological categories dissolve into arbitrariness, particular experience alone becomes determinative.

The ontological violence that pervades the contemporary West is the alienation of the individual from her world and fellow man. This alienation maintains itself through the rejection of meaning. David Foster Wallace effectively characterizes the popular manifestation of such an attitude in his essay on television and U.S. fiction. The ironically negative relationship towards the world rejects any attempt to pin objective meaning onto self-expression as banal or outmoded. 2 Within the framework of ontological violence, the world must exist

essentially in discord rather than peace, and so the individual’s relationship to any other subjective entity must be negative. As a result, the positing of truth that transcends a single subjectivity is fiercely rebutted, even derided. Appearance and being are one and the same, because to be otherwise would imply a truth deeper than experience. This is the absolute coincidence of phenomenon and being that underlies our world.

Irony in its ancient formulation serves well to contrast its present usage. Socrates developed this irony, employing it to reverse the orientation of truth from the exterior world to the interior person. His irony, I argue, found its consummation in the person of Christ, who rejects the ontology of violence and creates an absolutely positive relation of the individual to the world.

Socrates did not only introduce irony on a world historical scale, but devoted his entire existence thereto. The kernel of his character can be summarized in his realization “that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know.” 3 This fact, reasons Socrates, is what makes him the wisest of all men. The fact that his wisdom consists in a negative orientation towards all other wisdom describes his irony. A more detailed description of Socratic irony as it manifested itself throughout the Platonic dialogues

6 | Jest up to a Point: Seeking a Constructive Irony

Jest up to a Point:Seeking a Constructive Irony

by Tobias Philip

is a task far surpassing the scope of my own reference to the illustrious figure, so I will summarize the insightful remarks that Kierkegaard, the well noted Christian ironist, has to say on the subject.

Kierkegaard contrasts irony as a way of being with its rhetorical usage, where “there frequently appears a figure of speech with the name of irony and the characteristic of saying the opposite of what is meant.” 4 In this sense, one might call ironic what is simply sarcastic, but in the purely ironic “the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence. When I am speaking, the thought, the meaning, is the essence, and the word is the phenomenon.” 5 So irony, in the sense which consumed the life of Socrates, was the active resistance to transparency and denial of experience per se in favor of a secondary, often hidden truth.

Irony appears throughout the gospels in the form of apparently absurd analogies that, by virtue of their risible images, make stark the reversal of the seemingly natural order, which Christ brings about. Most famously, Christ preaches, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” 6 On the one hand, it seems as though Christ thus closes heaven to the

rich. However likely this may be in practice, it would be incompatible with Christ’s teaching elsewhere. Christ also preaches that one must make oneself as a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. 7 If a grown man can make himself like a child, then perhaps a camel too can pass through the eye of a needle. Nonetheless, suchan image offends the intellect. If it gave no offense, then neither would those who take no offense be blessed. 8

More meaningful, however, is the sort of irony in which Christ’s words strongly contradictobservable phenomena. When John the Baptist sends two of his disciples to inquire as to whether Christ is the one whose coming John preached, Christ answers them “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” 9 This response would seem a mere report of miracles attributed to Christ beforehand, except that each experience seems

Christ’s statement, therefore, seems to assume that the dead, who remain dead, are somehow still raised

such an absurd denial of the state of things that it elicits laughter rather than faith. It may be remembered, that there was not as of yet in the life of Christ any report of the dead having been raised, not Lazarus and certainly not Christ himself. Christ’s statement, therefore, seems to assume that the dead, who remain dead, are somehow still raised, just as the blind, insofar as they are blind,may still see, and the deaf, remaining deaf, may hear. The last phrase especially, “πτωχοὶεὐαγελίζονται,” which may be better translated, “beggars have good news brought to them,” seems to confirm this sense, since πτωχοὶ are not said to have remitted their poverty, yet, being beggars, they hear good news. Throughout the gospels, Christ often asks “Having eyes, see you not? and having ears, hear you not?”. 10 If someone has eyes, then it is well assumed that they see, and likewise with ears and hearing. It is certainly not the sensual sort of seeing and hearing

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In repudiating the world, Christ repudiates materiality, the apparently manifest, and, like the ironist, phenomenon itself.

to which Christ refers, but one which those in possession of the physical senses may still lack. It is a sort of seeing and hearing that stands in dissonance with the observable phenomenon that Christ tells John’s disciples to report.

What, then, is Christ’s relation to phenomenon? Indeed he does not deny outward action, saying that it is by external actions that the quality of a person may be judged, since “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit.” 11 At the same time, however, Christ gives good reason through his own speech for distrusting the apparent meaning of external signs. He is described as speaking obscurely, “without parable he did not speak unto them; but apart, he explained all things to his disciples.” 12 κατ᾽ἰδίαν, meaning “apart,” may be literally translated “according to his own,” or personally, and is the same word used to describe “his own disciples,” ἰδίοις μαθηταίς. This personalness is opposed to the publicity of lucid expression. The necessity of parables follows thus: Christ’s meaning, like his Godhead, is veiled from the exterior senses. As the phenomenon of speech serves the ironist as antithesis to the essence of his intention, so do the parables provide a sacred distance between Christ’s words and his meaning.

Indeed, it was apparent to his disciplesthat Christ preached obscurely. They urged him, “there is no man that doth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, manifest thyself to the world.” 13 Christ responds that the world hates him since he gives testimonyof its evil after which his disciples departed to observe a festival, “But after his brethren were gone up, then he also went up to the feast, not openly, but, as it were, in secret.” 14 Following the very challenge to manifest himself (φανέρωσον σεαυτὸν)

and the reproach for working in secret (ἐν κρυπτῷ), Christ departs for the feast not manifestly (οὐ φανερῶς), but as in secret (ἐν κρυπτῷ). His active repudiation of publicity devalues externality, just as his teaching favors interiority. He preaches, “There is nothing from without a man that entering into him, can defile him. But the things which come from a man, those are they that defile a man.” 15 Very much in the spirit of the writer of Ecclesiastes 16 Christ also asks, “what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?” 17 This is the very world (κόσμος) to which Christ’s disciples ask him to manifest himself. In repudiating the world, Christ repudiates materiality, the apparently manifest, and, like the ironist, phenomenon itself.

Returning to the classical view of irony,

Kierkegaard claims: [Irony] has the returning-into-itself that characterizes personality...but in this movement, irony comes back empty-handed. It’s relation to the world is not one in which the relation is an element in the content of personality; its relation to the world is a continuous non-relation to the world, a relation in which, the moment the relation is to begin, it pulls back with a skeptical reserve...thus one sees that there is an absolute dissimilarity between Socrates and Christ, because the immediate fullness of deity resided in Christ, and his relation to the world was so absolutely real a relation that the Church is conscious of itself as members of his body. 18 I believe Kierkegaard’s understanding discounts the negative aspect of Christ’s relationship to the world. Insofar as Christ is truly man as well as God, his relation to the world must be as real as ours. Nonetheless, a real relation to the world is not a real relationship to apparent phenomenon. Socrates did not deny that there was reality, but he did devote his life to probing it with incessant inquiry, until all that remained real was rational thought. Christ followed the Socratic path by giving the highest

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truth to interiority, but followed further. Like Socrates, the Gospel of John gives precedence to the principle of rationality, the λόγος. 19 This principle, however, came to bridge the infinite gap between rational thought and experience, that manifests in Socratic aporia, when “ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο [the word became flesh].” 20 Whereas Socrates’ existence was defined by his “non-relation to the world,” that ever returned to his particular personality, Christ’s retreat into personal interiority is made universally real by his assumption of humanity in its fullness. For Socrates personality could not extend beyond his very self, but Christ identifies himself as existence itself (ἔγω εἰμί). 21 The world has its greatest reality from the fact that God dwelt therein, and so, in relation to the world renewed in the embodied λόγος, all else is untruth.

Finally, what good does it serve to compare Socrates with Christ? For this answer, I will quote Johann Georg Hamann, a seminal figure of the German enlightenment, brilliant ironist, and devout Christian: “Socrates seduced his fellow citizens from the labyrinths of their learned sophists to a truth that lies in hiding, to a secret wisdom and from the pleasure-altars of their prayerful and politically savvy priests to the service of an unknown God...whoever shall not suffer Socrates to be counted among the prophets must be asked: Who is the father of the prophets? And is our God not called and shown to be a God of the gentiles?” 22

Truly then, Socrates and Christ serve similar roles insofar as they lead their disciples to the hidden God. Nor is it incompatible with the Christian religion that it was the same God who inspired Socrates and spoke through prophetic revelation.

Socrates and Christ, then, offer stark counterexamples to the shallow satire that passes for irony today. While Socratic irony deconstructs phenomenon and leaves thought as the only truth, contemporary irony deconstructs reason and exalts phenomenon as the only truth. The existence of Socrates served to annul the Sophistry

of fifth century Athens. Christ, on the other hand, annulling the exteriority of first century Palestine, established the validity of the God within, such that everyone might through his universal personhood participate in the hidden Godhead. r

Endnotes: 1. To borrow the words of David Foster Wallace. 2. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, (1993), 184. 3. (Apology, 21.d)Thomas G. West, Plato’s Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation, with a New Translation. Copyright by Cornell University, published by Cornell University Press. 4. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, II, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 247. 5. Ibid. 6. Mat. 19:24. All translations are Douay Rheims, except when it is noted that an alternative translation is presented, which is my own. 7. Mat. 18:2-3. 8. Mat. 15:6 9. Mat. 11:5. 10. Mark 8:18, but compare also Mat 11:15, and Mat 13:15. 11. Mat. 7:18. 12. Mark 4:34. 13. John 7:4. 14. John 7:10. 15. Mark 7:15. 16. See Ecc. 1:2. 17. Mat. 16:26. 18. Kierkegaard, 220-221. 19. “ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος” ( John 1:1). 20. John 1:14. 21. John 9:8. 22. Johann Georg Hamann, Hamann Magus des Norden. Hauptschriften, edited by Otto Mann, (Leipzig: In der Dietrich’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937), 79-80. [Translation is mine].

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