Recent research has led me to look at the role of irony in aesthetics and philosophy. My interest was most immediately stimulated by section 408 of Vico’s New Science, which seems to me to point towards the role of irony and literary aesthetics in the Jena Romantics and Kierkegaard. Vico does so by referring to the simultaneous emergence of philosophical reflection and consciousness of irony in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
The idea of irony is not directly addressed much by Vico, but his approach needs to be grasped to understand his full argument about the significance of the ‘persona’ as object of Roman law (that is the creation of a personality in law distinct from ‘life’ personality). The reading great significance into brief passages of Vico in terms of his overall argument and the resonance of his work with later thought, is inevitable given the nature of his argumentation and the structural oddities of the New Science.
It is not clear he had much in the way of direct influence outside Italy, and a few observers of Italian political and intellectual debates, before Jules Michelet’s translation of the New Science in 1827, though possible lines of influence exist on Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Shaftesbury because they were in Italy at the right time, along with Herder, Hamann, Jacobi and Goethe, because they at least knew of the New Science and had seen it, and maybe through that German influence Adam Ferguson, and also possibly other German writers. Anyway similarities in thought in all these cases may be more significant coincidence and common influences, rather than individualised direct influence, even where the thinkers concerned had demonstrably read Vico, since they seem to have already formulated their basic thought. The extent to which Vico anticipates future ideas and the lack of evidence that he directly influenced their appearance is quite a strange combination.
Getting onto the broad topic of irony, it can appear that irony was more at the centre of Athenian consciousness than it was, at least in any recorded manifest form, since it had become so habitual to talk about Socratic irony and dramatic irony with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics. However, what we generally mean by Socratic irony, the claim to ignorance in which he lures one or more protagonists into a philosophical discussion, which leads to a thorough demolition of initial assumptions and a series of subsequent fall back positions, does not appear in Plato’s dialogues, except as an activity, not as a defined method. Elenchus is also used in relation to the Socratic method of argument, but the idea that the Socratic approach can be regarded as ‘irony’ in a way which overlaps with elenchus is widespread.
Alcibiades in the Symposium and Thrasymachus in Republic I, refer to Socrates’ irony in hiding himself, rather than as a part of argumentative trickery though there is some relation between the two. I could only find two references to irony in Plato though it is possible that a classical scholar might find more, I did at least take the precaution of checking that in all cases the English word ‘irony’ was being used to translate the Greek precursor.
Aristotle refers to irony in Nicomachean Ethics II, with regard to the person who is the opposite of a boaster, who understates his qualities, so ‘irony’ refers to self-deprecation. Irony appears again in Rhetoric II and III with regard to forms of insults and then elevated forms of humour, so presumably it is a relatively refined form of insult as well.
What became known as ‘dramatic irony’ and associated with Aristotle’s thoughts on literature in the early twentieth century, refers to an interest in revelation of the hidden in tragedy in the Poetics without use of the word ‘irony’. So in Plato and Aristotle, irony refers to what is hidden, understatement, or rhetorically recognised insult. It does not refer to a long line of possibilities interacting with each other, resting on the ambiguities of interpretation, which is largely what irony means in literary criticism and philosophical aesthetics. ‘Dramatic irony’ perhaps ties the irony down to a single revelation, but has to be taken in the context of ‘irony’ as ambiguity and the model richness of possible meanings in Shakespeare, which have conditioned literary criticism.
There was brief flowering of ‘irony’ as an aesthetic and philosophic concept in the late 1790s, in the Jean Romantic group of Friedrich Schlegel et al. I cannot get into a full discussion of this, but the writings of the group include an interest in the ways that ‘irony’, in the multiple possibilities of meaning is appropriate to discussing the novel, particularly Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, and the supposed unity of philosophy and poetry in the novel, referring back to Plato’s dialogues. Socratic irony in a ‘Romantic’ sense of dissolving relative points of view so maybe all points of view) from the point of view of the absolute are read back into ‘Socratic Irony’ as it appears in Plato’s dialogues.
This position was criticised by Hegel as tending towards a self-dissolving relativism and Kierkegaard picked up that criticism in The Concept of Irony, and very roughly speaking found a middle way between Hegel and the Jena Romantics in which irony can be part of reinforcing subjectivity of a kind that does not just negate the external world. The Jena Romantic period was a couple of years and Kierkegaard only discusses irony extensively in his first major book, which was his master’s thesis (apparently postgraduate student work of this extent was reclassified as doctoral soon afterwards in Denmark).
However, the Jena Romantics anticipated or influenced a great deal of future literary work and work in literary criticism, as does Kierkegaard who is building up a philosophical position in which literature, aesthetics, literary style, and irony are highly important. A body of work with its own great influence in philosophy, theology, and literature. The work of the Jena Romantics had its own philosophical influence, and are part of any genuinely broad understanding of German Idealist philosophy.
So brief though the moments of irony were, Vico does do something significant in suggesting link between the growth of reflective philosophy and irony, even if the forms this took in the Jena Romantics and Kierkegaard was presumably more radical in its focus on subjectivity, aesthetics, and literary forms of philosophy than Vico could have anticipated. If we add in the role Vico gives to Homer as a provider of imaginative universals to be abstracted by philosophers, and as communicating various kinds of knowledge, we get a bit more of that Romantic and post-Romantic attitude to subjectivity and literature, to forms of aesthetics and literary criticism that focus on ambiguity and indeterminacy.
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