Product Code Database
Irony is the juxtaposition of what, on the surface, appears to be the case with what is actually or expected to be the case. Originally a rhetorical device and literary technique, irony has also come to assume a metaphysical significance with implications for ones attitude towards life.
The concept originated in ancient Greece, where it described a dramatic character who pretended to be less intelligent than he actually was in order to outwit boastful opponents. Over time, irony evolved from denoting a form of deception to, more liberally, describing the deliberate use of language to mean the opposite of what it says for a rhetorical effect intended to be recognized by the audience.
Due to its double-sided nature, irony is a powerful tool for social bonding among those who share an understanding. For the same reason, it is also a source of division, sorting people into insiders and outsiders depending upon whether they are able to see the irony.
In the nineteenth-century, philosophers began to expand the rhetorical concept of irony into a broader philosophical conception of the human condition itself. For instance, Friedrich Schlegel saw irony as an expression of always striving toward truth and meaning without ever being able to fully grasp them. Søren Kierkegaard maintained that ironic awareness of our limitations and uncertainties is necessary to create a space for authentic human existence and ethical choice.
Although initially synonymous with lying, in Plato's depiction of Socrates, eironeia came to acquire a new sense of "an intended simulation which the audience or hearer was meant to recognise". More simply put, it came to acquire the general definition, "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect".
Until the Renaissance, the Latin ironia was considered a part of rhetoric, usually a species of allegory, along the lines established by Cicero and Quintilian near the beginning of the 1st century CE. Irony entered the English language as a figure of speech in the 16th century with a meaning similar to the French ironie, itself derived from the Latin.
Around the end of the 18th century, irony takes on another sense, primarily credited to Friedrich Schlegel and other participants in what came to be known as early German Romanticism. They advance a concept of irony that is not a mere "artistic playfulness", but a "conscious form of literary creation", typically involving the "consistent alternation of affirmation and negation". No longer just a rhetorical device, on their conception, it refers to an entire metaphysical stance on the world.
In the 1906 The King's English, Henry Watson Fowler writes, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same." A consequence of this, he observes, is that an analysis of irony requires the concept of a double audience "consisting of one party that hearing shall hear & shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders' incomprehension".
From this basic feature, literary theorist Douglas C. Muecke identifies three characteristics of verbal irony:
According to Wayne Booth, this uneven double-character of irony makes it a rhetorically complex phenomenon. Admired by some and feared by others, it has the power to tighten social bonds, but also to exacerbate divisions.
is "a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed". Moreover, it is produced intentionally by the speaker, rather than being a literary construct, for instance, or the result of forces outside of their control. Samuel Johnson gives as an example the sentence, "Bolingbroke was a holy man" (he was anything but). Verbal irony is sometimes also considered to encompass various other literary devices such as hyperbole and its opposite, litotes, conscious naïveté, and others.
' provides the audience with information of which characters are unaware, thereby placing the audience in a position of advantage to recognize their words and actions as counter-productive or opposed to what their situation actually requires. Three stages may be distinguished—installation, exploitation, and resolution (often also called preparation, suspension, and resolution)—producing dramatic conflict in what one character relies or appears to rely upon, the contrary of which is known by observers (especially the audience, sometimes to other characters within the drama) to be true. ' is a specific type of dramatic irony.
', sometimes also called the ', presents agents as always ultimately thwarted by forces beyond human control. It is strongly associated with the works of Thomas Hardy. This form of irony is also given metaphysical significance in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, among other philosophers.
is closely related to cosmic irony, and sometimes the two terms are treated interchangeably. Romantic irony is distinct, however, in that it is the author who assumes the role of the cosmic force. The narrator in Tristram Shandy is one early example. The term is closely associated with Friedrich Schlegel and the early German Romantics, and in their hands it assumed a metaphysical significance similar to cosmic irony in the hands of Kierkegaard. It was also of central importance to the literary theory advanced by New Criticism in mid-20th century.
In any of these four modes, irony may be used to emphasize a point, to satirically undermine a position, or to heuristically lead one's audience to a deeper understanding.
Because irony involves expressing something in a way contrary to literal meaning, it always involves a kind of "translation" on the part of the audience. Booth identifies three principal kinds of agreement upon which the successful translation of irony depends: common mastery of language, shared cultural values, and (for artistic ironies) a common experience of genre.
A consequence of this element of in-group membership is that there is more at stake in whether one grasps an ironic utterance than there is in whether one grasps an utterance presented straight. As he puts it, the use of irony is
An aggressively intellectual exercise that fuses fact and value, requiring us to construct alternative hierarchies and choose among them; it demands that we look down on other men's follies or sins; floods us with emotion-charged value judgments which claim to be backed by the mind; accuses other men not only of wrong beliefs but of being wrong at their very foundations and blind to what these foundations imply.
This is why, when we misunderstand an intended ironic utterance, we often feel more embarrassed about our failure to recognize the incongruity than we typically do when we simply misunderstand a statement of fact. When one's deepest beliefs are at issue, so too, often, is one's pride. Nevertheless, even as it excludes its victims, irony also has the power to build and strengthen the community of those who do understand and appreciate.
This narrower connotation of disparagement associated with sarcasm is further supported by its etymology: where eiron refers to a dissembler, the verb sarkazein means "to tear flesh like".
In spite of these differences, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg observes sarcasm replacing the "linguistic terrain" formerly held by verbal irony as early as 2000. In everyday usage, the term irony is sometimes more narrowly reserved for situational irony.
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.
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. According to Schlegel, instead of resting upon a single foundation, "the individual parts of a successful synthesis formation support and negate each other reciprocally".
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.
According to Schlegel, irony captures the human situation of always striving towards, but never completely possessing, what is infinite or true.
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 Rüdiger 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".
Yet, it is Hegel's interpretation that would be taken up and amplified by Kierkegaard, who further extends the critique to Socrates himself.
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.
In this way, contrary to traditional accounts, Kierkegaard portrays Socrates as ignorant. According to Kierkegaard, Socrates is the embodiment of an ironic negativity that dismantles others' illusory knowledge without offering any positive replacement.
Almost all of Kierkegaard's post-dissertation publications were written under a variety of pseudonyms. Scholar K. Brian Söderquist argues that these fictive authors should be viewed as explorations of the existential challenges posed by such an ironic, poetic self-consciousness. Their awareness of their own unlimited powers of self-interpretation prevents them from fully committing to any single self-narrative, and this leaves them trapped in an entirely negative mode of uncertainty.
Nevertheless, seemingly against this, Thesis XV of the dissertation states that "Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony". Bernstein writes that the emphasis here must be on . Irony is not itself an authentic mode of life, but it is a precondition for attaining such a life. Although pure irony is self-destructive, it generates a space in which it becomes possible to reengage with the world in a genuine mode of . For Kierkegaard himself, this took the form of religious inwardness. What is crucial, however, is just to in some way move beyond the purely (or merely) ironic. Irony is what creates the space in which we can learn and meaningfully choose how to live a life worthy ( vita digna) of being called human.
For instance, the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty advances a concept of irony centered on the "liberal ironist", whom he contrasts with "the metaphysician". The ironist, according to this theory, is someone who maintains radical doubts about their own "final vocabulary" (the fundamental concepts used to justify their beliefs and actions), recognizes that rational argument cannot resolve these doubts, and doesn't believe their vocabulary is closer to ultimate reality than others. This postmodern position is a consequence of acknowledging the historical contingency and plurality of vocabularies, where no neutral standards exist for choosing definitively between different ways of describing the world. On this theory, irony functions as both a philosophical method and way of life that disrupts entrenched vocabularies through redescription, metaphor, and narrative rather than traditional argument.
|
|
