Irony

Richard Ostrofsky
(October, 1998)
The concept of irony, and the value of “playing it cool”, figure largely on
the post-modern intellectual scene. For most of us, it's all but instinctive
today. Feeling passionately about something and showing it is a quick way
to look foolish, and to make one’s self vulnerable to ridicule. The resulting
anaesthesia protects against pain, but is also crippling. There is no know-
ledge without the ability to value, and no value without the ability to feel.
The ironic stance must be understood in contrast to the stance of
unreserved commitment. Irony is precisely a cognitive stance of double
mindedness and mental reservation. To speak ironically means to do so, as
it were, with a shrug, a wink, a curl of the lip. Though it is, and always has
been, a device of the complex, many-sided person against the simple one,
irony does not entail deception or hypocrisy necessarily – merely the
knowledge that one is not telling or acting from, and could not possibly tell
or act from, the whole truth. Freud perfectly captures irony's essence in a
wry comment: “You do not tell the best of what you know to children.”
Used kindly and without sarcasm, irony can be an effective teaching
device, hinting at depths in a situation and allowing the pupil to glide past
them, but warning him of their presence and preparing him to meet them
when he is ready to do so. It is also an effective weapon against the fool and
the fanatic, allowing the ironist to hold his ground while avoiding an open
clash. Or it can be used to make an opponent ridiculous – by putting him in
a position where he must draw attention to an insult that the ironist can deny
having intended. All these uses are ancient.
By contrast, the more radical use of irony is a fairly recent development.
As a defence against alienation and the absence of intrinsic meaning, the
ironic stance is a characteristically post-modern gesture in the face of life
itself. Today we resort to irony as an epistemological position: to avoid full
responsibility, and hedge one's bets. The ironist takes his commitments
lightly – with a grain of salt, as it were. He does not demand whole-hearted
belief either from himself or from others. Indeed, he tends to despise the
simple-mindedness that true belief requires. Knowing he cannot have proof,
he prefers to live without myth. Rather than believe and be a dupe, he finds
it preferable to go through the motions of his various roles without
believing. Others, of course, make the opposite choice, finding the
groundlessness of such a life unbearable. Thus, Richard Rorty could write
that everyone today is either an ironist or a metaphysician – either “just
along for the ride,” or a true believer.
Just as the concept of belief has shifted toward the more existential
notion of commitment, so irony shifts toward a judicious consciousness that
sees all sides of the issue – at least, as many sides as possible. Thus, the
ironist today is not necessarily a scoffer, but a kind of anthropologist – a
student of alternative commitment systems. The ironist choses his cognitive
commitments on political and existential grounds, realizing that his
adversaries have just as good reasons for their commitments as he has for
his own.
But I would not call this irony, precisely, although the usage is correct.
The individual who grasps the consequences of post-modernism and the
polyphonic episteme is not thereby compelled to choose (as Rorty would
have it) between irony and metaphysics – the “leap of faith” into a state of
empirically groundless certainty. True irony is the stance of an individual
who still thinks some position must really be true (in the classical sense),
knows he has not yet found it, but knows that he must live and act
provisionally unless and until he does. By contrast, the individual who
understands that classical truth is a notion that applies only in
philosophically trivial cases is not an ironist in the classical sense, but more
like a dancer, or a lover of dance.
The mature dancer has a very practical commitment to her art and to her
particular style. She lives and understands and moves through the world
with a certain viewpoint and with acquired habits that match. The pupil in a
dance class, has no such commitment yet. She goes through the motions and
tries to learn something, tries on her teacher’s viewpoint and identity,
practices one or more styles of dance, and may eventually become a dancer
formed in some particular way, with existential commitments accordingly.
The spectator or dance critic comes to the show with an appreciative but
judicious stance, and is concerned with the whole structure of dance
possibility. It may be part of the critic’s business to draw comparisons
among the different styles of dance, but it is no part of her business to
decide finally for one style and reject all the others. Nor is it part of her
profession to treat the performers (who hold the strongest possible
commitments to their respective styles with contempt because she surveys
them all from a more detached stance. Like the aficionado of dance, the
post-modern individual finds himself with a three-way choice of stances on
any given matter: tentative apprenticeship, existential commitment or
balanced appreciation and judgment. None of these should give offense as
irony does, and none is cause for existential despair.