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THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRONY 33 little figures I was telling you about? But believe me, friends and fellow drunks, you ve only got to open him up and you ll find him so full of temperance and sobriety that you ll hardly believe your eyes. Because, you know, he doesn t really care a row of pins about good looks on the contrary, you can t think how much he looks down on them or money, or any of the honors that most people care about. He doesn t care a curse for anything of that kind, or for any of us either yes, I m telling you and he spends his whole life playing his little game of irony, and laughing up his sleeve at the whole world. I don t know whether anyone else has ever opened him up when he s been being serious, and seen the little images inside, but I saw them once, and they looked so godlike, so golden, so beautiful, and so utterly amazing that there was nothing for it but to do exactly what he told me. (Plato 1963, 567 68 [215e 217b]) Socrates achieves this enigmatic persona through irony, in being playfully distant from what he says. But the Symposium also brings out more than Socrates use of irony. Socrates entire personality or existence can be, and has been, read as ironic. This is given, not in what Socrates says, but in Alcibiades description of him. Here, Socratic irony is not an art of speech or dialogue, a way of playing with language in order to lead the discourse beyond fixed definitions; it is a mode of self or way of life. Socrates is enigmatic. He lives and acts, not as a person or subject with an essence and identity revealed through speech, but as a character in constant creation and formation. To love Socrates is, then, not to love a fixed form but to be enamoured with a process of creativity. We might say, then, that Plato s dialogues open the problem and politics of irony. There is no doubt that they offer examples of rhetorical irony, where Socrates refers to ignorance, wisdom, cleverness or beauty, suggesting that the sophists are anything but wise, and that Socratic ignorance is of greater value. There are cases where irony is used as a device to deflate and defeat the sophists or those who believe that all life and value can be managed through rhetoric and forceful oratory. But these ironies are neither simple opposites nor contraries. By ironically presenting himself as committed to what the sophists say, Socrates exposes the lack of sense at the heart of 34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRONY sophistry. Through this defeat of mere rhetoric and contingent definitions Socratic irony has been identified with the birth of Western reason, or the commitment to a truth and logic that is valid and present for any possible speaker or subject. Irony opens the possibility of moral autonomy, where we do not just receive definitions of what moral concepts mean but must intend these for ourselves. In this sense, according to Vlastos, Socratic irony merely makes explicit the ethical norms of all discourse: Socratic irony is not unique in accepting the burden of freedom which is inherent in all significant communication (Vlastos 1991, 44). By exposing how empty and unstable rhetoric is, Socratic irony demands a more rational understanding freed from opinion, received ideas and ad hoc justifications. Plato s dialogues fulfilled a political and ideological imperative (Lycos 1987), which the concept of irony sustains today. Plato s dialogues present various voices, usually of Socrates and a gathering of sophists or friends, where the argument is ordered logically: not just by force or skilful persuasion but by right reason. Irony is crucial here for two reasons. In its limited sense, as a simple rhetorical device, irony must appeal to common sense or right reason. In order to say what is other than understood, or say one thing and mean another, we require a shared context in which hearers would be able to recognise what is really being meant. This includes Socrates interlocutors who are the first to describe him as being ironic when he leads them into absurdities, contradictions and reversals in their argument. Irony relies on a crucial feature of language as shared recognition. In ironic speech acts we become aware of a feature that marks all language: we do not just exchange signs; we recognise a meaning that is other than the sign, or what the sign intends. This dimension of meaning and sense requires shared conventions and presupposed values. Examples of stable or simple irony, where there is a clear meaning achieved because of a common recognised context, are already present in the Platonic dialogues. As we have already noted, the Platonic dialogues are the first instances where the word irony (or eironeia) is used to describe such feats of language, although later commentators have found instances of irony as early as Homer. The important point is that the dialogues are the first recorded occasion of this shared recognition of implied meaning being made explicit, labelled as irony, and given an important political function. For the Socratic method is not one of stating values in the form of commands or propositions, or even of alluring rhetoric, but appealing to THE PHILOSOPHY OF IRONY 35 assumptions we all obviously share. In the dialogues rhetorical irony, as a simple figure of speech, explicitly relies on, and develops, a shared context of understanding. The dialogues therefore institute a new mode of politics. Politics is not just the site of competing opinions; it is a reasoned discussion leading to a higher , universal and necessary value. Politics is achieved through philosophy: reflection on the idea of the good behind what we say, and not through rhetoric or literature, as mere style. Politics is not [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |