David Egan Philosophy

Sometime in early adolescence, my friends started to replace my family as the people I would spend New Year’s Eve with. Around the same time, my parents started going to bed on New Year’s Eve before midnight. My mother once explained to bemused friends that my father felt no need to make a big deal out of New Year’s festivities, proclaiming, “Kieran is an ironist.”

This remark prompts three questions. What is an ironist? What does being an ironist have to do with going to bed before midnight on New Year’s Eve? And why were my parents such weirdos? I’ll try to answer two of these three questions in what follows.

The word “irony” derives from a Greek root and was used to describe someone who dissembles, who doesn’t speak straight, who says one thing while meaning another. The Greeks didn’t mean it as a compliment. To call oneself an “ironist” in ancient Greece would not be a badge of pride.

Socrates may have been an exception. His many critics accused him of irony and he didn’t exactly deny the charge. However, getting the plain truth about Socratic irony is no straightforward matter. One reason many of his fellow citizens accused him of irony is precisely that it’s hard to pin down exactly what Socrates means.

First, a bit of background. Socrates lived in late 5^th century BCE Athens. It was a time of political turmoil, during which a 27-year war with Sparta brough the golden age of Athens to an end. Socrates gained notoriety by mingling in the public spaces of Athens and exposing the ignorance and hypocrisy of the great and the good. He earned enough enemies that he was ultimately found guilty of undermining traditional religion and corrupting the youth and was executed by the state. He had a lasting influence on many of the youths that he allegedly corrupted, though. One of them was Plato, who wrote the most enduring works of Western philosophy in the form of dialogues that feature Socrates as protagonist.

A central focus of the Socratic dialogues is how one is to teach virtue, and who is qualified to teach it. In a typical dialogue, Socrates converses with one or more self-proclaimed experts on a certain virtue—courage, temperance, piety, justice, and so forth. His interlocutors are often enough sophists, professional tutors who charged vast sums to give the aristocratic youth of Athens instruction in the skills of debate and argument that would serve them well in a political career.

The characteristic move of Socratic irony comes early in the conversation, when Socrates expresses relief that finally he’s found someone who can teach him about virtue. He, Socrates, confesses that he is no kind of expert, having never really been able to say what virtue is, and he looks forward to learning from someone who can. But as the dialogue progresses, the roles of teacher and novice are reversed. Under pressure from Socrates’ questions, it emerges that the alleged experts aren’t experts at all.

Socrates’ enemies—the ones who called him an ironist pejoratively and saw him as dishonest and insincere—perceived these exchanges as an intellectual hustle. Like the pool shark who pretends to be a novice before running the table against an over-confident opponent, Socrates tricks his interlocutors into thinking he’s an innocent student before trouncing them in debate. But this interpretation makes Socrates out to be one of the sophists he despised. For them, the purpose of debate is to win the argument, not to arrive at the truth. Socrates doesn’t simply beat the sophists at their own game. Instead, he tries to change the game that’s being played: from a display of persuasive speech to an inquiry into truth.

Socrates isn’t simply being insincere when he professes his ignorance. A Socratic dialogue doesn’t conclude with Socrates providing the “correct” account of the virtue in question. Instead, the dialogue ends in aporia, that is, in an impasse, where Socrates has undermined the confidence of his interlocutors without installing himself as the expert in their stead. He’s exposed his interlocutors’ ignorance without claiming to be free of ignorance himself.

But not all forms of ignorance are created equal. Unlike the blind ignorance of his interlocutors, Socrates’ ignorance is also a kind of wisdom—and here I think we see the deeper character of Socratic irony. In the Apology, Socrates recounts his surprise at learning that the Oracle at Delphi proclaimed him the wisest of all men. I am not wise at all, he reflected, so what can the Oracle mean by declaring him the wisest? As Socrates recounts it, his habit of questioning the supposedly wise men of Athens was an attempt to test the Oracle’s claim. If he could find someone wiser than he was, that would prove the Oracle was defective. But his investigations only exposed the ignorance of all the supposedly wise. And so, Socrates concludes, his superior wisdom lies in the fact that at least he recognizes his own ignorance.

So in a way, Socrates emerges from the dialogues as the true teacher and the true expert in virtue but only by reconfiguring what it means to be an expert, to possess virtue, and to be wise. In the wake of Socrates’ ironic reversal, expertise, virtue, and wisdom don’t consist in confident mastery of a certain body of established knowledge. They consist instead in the recognition that nothing is ever definitively established, that everything is subject to further interrogation, and that, consequently, our aim as lovers of wisdom (the etymological meaning of “philosopher”) is constant vigilance and ceaseless inquiry. In the Apology, Socrates styles himself as a gadfly constantly irritating his fellow citizens into wakefulness and proclaims that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” It’s not the content of the answers that make a philosopher but the persistence of the questioning.

Despite his foundational status in Western philosophy, Socrates’ irony remains a marginal position. One abiding aspiration in philosophy—an aspiration arguably established by Plato himself—is to find the first principles from which everything else follows. If we can identify those first principles—in logical axioms, in a complete map of human cognition or historical destiny, in an understanding of God’s nature or the Platonic Forms, depending on your philosophical outlook—then our reasoning can unfold unerringly. The great German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is considered by many to represent a pinnacle of this kind of systematic thinking. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, a more dedicated disciple of Socratic irony than most, remarked of Hegel’s complex philosophical system, that if, having completed it, he had remarked that it was merely a flawed experiment to see where his thinking might lead him, “then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived.” But as it is, Kierkegaard remarked, “he is merely comic.”

Kierkegaard is in the minority. Most philosophers do want to get to settled answers. The ironist, by contrast, speaks in the voice of Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”

My father was not just an ironist on December 31. He was an educational theorist for whom irony played an essential role in a robust curriculum. It’s not enough to teach students mastery of various systems of thought, he argued. A good education should also instill the flexibility and imagination to see the incompleteness of any single perspective and to shift perspectives. This flexibility doesn’t come as an alternative to deep knowledge—you can’t shift perspectives if you haven’t acquired a perspective to begin with—but as an antidote to dogmatism. An educated mind is an active mind, constantly inquiring rather than resting on its well-schooled laurels.

An ironist resists absolutes, so for an ironist, the start of a new year holds no absolute significance. After all, there’s nothing astronomically significant about the first day of January. It’s a quirk of calendrical history that most of the world marks a new year ten days after the winter solstice. Stay up and party if you feel like it, but there’s nothing wrong with going to bed early if you prefer.

Can an ironist make New Year’s resolutions? The ironist has a fairly non-committal attitude toward the new year itself and what’s more, the idea of resolutions would seem to run counter to the ironist’s resistance to absolutes. But isn’t resoluteness sometimes desirable? Don’t some of the deepest and richest aspects of our lives—friendship, marriage, family, not to mention politics, religion, and philosophy—call for unbending commitment? Irony has its place, surely, but so does earnest sincerity.

Yes, but. Just as I suggested it would be a mistake to read Socratic irony as glib insincerity, so too would it be a mistake to understand irony as a refusal of all commitments. What ironists refuse, as I’ve interpreted them, isn’t the commitment itself but the notion that this commitment relieves them of any further need to reflect or inquire. A resolution is a starting point, not an end point. If it involves adopting a new habit or abandoning an old one, it induces changes in the habitual patterns of life. A student of Socrates would want to examine those changes, to interrogate them, to ask what benefits or detriments they bring.

In that regard, the ironist’s response to our various resolutions and commitments isn’t one of supercilious refusal. It’s rather to append to all our resolutions and all our commitments what Socrates the gadfly urged on his fellow citizens: be ever vigilant. Pay attention to what you do, to what you say, to what you think. Interrogate yourself. As another great ironist, Friedrich Nietzsche, put it, what’s needed is not the courage of one’s convictions, but the courage for an attack on one’s convictions. 

1. There has never been a confirmed case of murder in Antarctica. The closest candidate was a 1959 attack by one Soviet scientist on another with an ice axe (it’s unclear whether the attack was fatal). The fight arose over a chess game and ever since, chess has been banned from Soviet and Russian Antarctic research stations. (source)
2. The last time a US airline crashed was in February 2009. Since that time, US airlines have travelled 13.3 trillion passenger-miles without a crash. That’s the equivalent of 2.3 light years. (source)
3. In 2009, South Africa enacted a ban on the domestic sale of rhino horns. The ban resulted in a huge rise in rhino poaching and a drop in the rhino population. South Africa lifted the ban in 2017 and rhino poaching dropped by half in two years. These surprising results came about because the ban caused a drop in supply and a corresponding rise in the price of rhino horns, incentivizing poachers to be much bolder in their pursuit of illegal rhino horns. (source)
4. More satellites have been launched into orbit in the last five years than in the previous six decades. (source)
5. Why does the second, as a unit of time, have the same name as the ordinal number after first? Because “minute” derives from the Latin “pars minuta prima,” i.e. the first small (minute) division of the hour, and so the second is the “pars minuta secunda,” i.e. the second small division of the hour. (source)
6. There are more refugees in Turkey than in any other country in the world. (source)
7. Three from Tom Whitwhell’s wonderful year-end list that inspired me to start my own monthly version (linked here). First, there are just 16 trademarked scents in the USA. They include the scent of Crayola crayons and of Play-doh, as well as the scent of a type of gun cleaner. (source)
8. Second, there’s a distinct species of mosquito that’s endemic to the London Underground. (source)
9. Third, areas around former Soviet prison camps have higher levels of prosperity and productivity than comparable areas in the former Soviet Union that had no prison camps. The likely reason is that many educated elites were sent to the Gulag and many of their descendants stayed in the area near where their elders had been imprisoned. (source)
10. The platypus doesn’t have a stomach. (source)
11. A number of Algonquian languages have Basque loan words because the first Europeans that people like the Innu and Mi’kmaq had significant exchanges with were Basque fisherman with whom they traded. (source)
12. It’s mathematically impossible to tune a piano with perfect harmonics. If (as is the case with standard piano tuning), you use a “well tempered” tuning that gives equal intervals between each note, your fourths will be slightly sharp and your fifths will be slightly flat. If you tried to get perfect fourths or fifths, the octaves would be a little off. (source)
13. The word “artery” derives from a Greek word for the windpipe. The arteries are empty in a dead body (since the heart is no longer pumping blood) and so the Greeks thought they were air ducts. (source)
14. The dollar sign ($) was originally an American symbol for the Spanish peso. The peso (worth eight reals, hence “pieces of eight”) flooded into the cash-strapped American colonies thanks to pirate raids on Spanish ships and became its dominant currency. The peso remained legal tender in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. (source)
15. From the same source: there were more silversmiths in Colonial America than lawyers, even though there were no silver mines to speak of. Silversmiths served as money launderers for pirates, turning illegally looted silver coins into more respectable goods.