Irony

Moving on to the second section of Rorty’s book, the part about irony, I want to start by pointing out my favorite story that I came across this week, a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the dark humor residents of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Tehran have adopted this summer in the face of imminent war threats. It’s nice to be reminded that whatever darkness may envelop the world, most people on this planet are mostly interested in enjoying their lives with the people they care about. Their outlooks on life and basic attitudes are aren’t all that different from those on the other side of war divides—and I imagine reporters could write similar stories about people living in Russia and Ukraine, or any other global conflict.

It’s a nice way to transition to this Rorty section about not taking language, rules or any overarching theory in life too seriously.

As someone who is currently trying to juggle and synthesize numerous different literary forms and approaches at once, this is valuable to keep in mind, because any attempt to remain logically and philosophically consistent in the things I write day to day is a nearly hopeless task.

I’ve pointed out on several occasions that I’m blessed to have an incredibly devoted, astute reader who sends me various breadcrumbs (or at least I imagine so—if my reader doesn’t exist, my unconscious felt it necessary to invent her) on a regular basis showing how some of the things I write interrelate and sometimes come into conflict. It’s one of the most valuable resources any writer could ask for, in many ways more useful to me than a million casual readers. If my reader were to somehow, someday lose interest, the loss I’d feel would be overwhelming. I’m grateful to her beyond expression.

That’s why I need to remind her that sometimes I choose to overlook her suggestions because I am, at my core, an ironist, as was my literary hero Michel de Montaigne. Here’s how Rorty describes an ironist:

I shall define an “ironist” as someone who fulfills three conditions: (i) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.

I loved the way Rorty phrased this, because it can so easily be punctuated by Montaigne’s stock phrase “what do I know?” It also helps explain why I’ve been able throughout my career to adapt so easily to the vocabularies and vocal styles of different people from varying backgrounds. I remain, at all times, open to reconsideration and influence. I never believe that my approach is necessarily the correct one—but at the same time, I never fear offering my suggestion of one way to say something or approach a problem. If others decide I’m wrong, so be it, as long as I moved the process closer to consensus, agreement and completion.

It also speaks to why I find certain intellectual concepts so appealing, such as Michel de Montaigne’s two-people-connected-as-one intellectual friendship with Etienne de la Boetie and Carl Jung’s theory of the Anima and Animus. As a dedicated ironist who believes most of all in the journey and the process, it’s thrilling to have access to an intellectual peer also on the path. (As my Montaigne project demonstrates, there is a risk to endless iterating—can the project ever end? It’s never been a problem in my professional life, but for some reason my personal projects just want to keep going.)

Rorty then goes on, over numerous pages, to note the differences between an ironist and a metaphysician. While I understand that Rorty is trying to demonstrate that the ironist is superior to the metaphysician, I’m such an ironist that I found myself more interested in splitting the differences between the two types that he is describing. In fact, the way Rorty describes a metaphysician here sounds an awful lot like the approach that my reader incites, touching off in me the kind of synthesis a metaphysician might propose (but mine won’t, because she remains silent:)

The typical strategy of the metaphysician is to spot an apparent contradiction between two platitudes, two intuitively plausible propositions, and then propose a distinction which will resolve the contradiction. Metaphysicians then go on to embed this distinction within a network of associated distinctions – a philosophical theory – which will take some of the strain off the initial distinction. This sort of theory construction is the same method used by judges to decide hard cases, and by theologians to interpret hard texts. That activity is the metaphysician’s paradigm of rationality. He sees philosophical theories as converging – a series of discoveries about the nature of such things as truth and personhood, which get closer and closer to the way they really are, and carry the culture as a whole closer to an accurate representation of reality.

Reading this, I begin to doubt my own status as an ironist—maybe I’m an ironic metaphysician instead? I always appreciate someone taking a jurist/theologian approach to my texts. This comes back to my dislike of Rorty’s preference for restating issues rather than debating them. But here, Rorty finally gives me a restatement of his idea that I can better understand and embrace:

The metaphysician thinks that there is an overriding intellectual duty to present arguments for one’s controversial views – arguments which will start from relatively uncontroversial premises. The ironist thinks that such arguments – logical arguments – are all very well in their way, and useful as expository devices, but in the end not much more than ways of getting people to change their practices without admitting they have done so. The ironist’s preferred form of argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference. Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and extend that jargon.

This actually makes sense to me. Instead of turning every clash of ideas into a contest where a proposition is set up and a winner declared, the same intellectual clash can take place, but a redescription occurs in the process. What Rorty described previously as an act of poetry is better described as something I enjoy a great deal—iteration. And, in my experience, it’s very logical people with the intellectual flexibility to make those kinds of iteration who become my most valuable partners.

Rorty then moves on to a discussion of literary criticism, which is actually pretty much what all of my personal writing amounts to. I’ll save the more detailed description of this for the next essay, but I will close with Rorty’s description of the ironist as literary critic, which sounds very much like the approach I take to examining books, movies, philosophy or anything else I feel like taking up:

If we are told that the actual lives such men lived had little to do with the books and the terminology which attracted our attention to them, we brush this aside. We treat the names of such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from saeva indignatio, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust from Marcel the narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination. We do not care whether these writers managed to live up to their own self-images. What we want to know is whether to adopt those images – to re-create ourselves, in whole or in part, in these people’s image. We go about answering this question by experimenting with the vocabularies which these people concocted. We redescribe ourselves, our situation, our past, in those terms and compare the results with alternative redescriptions which use the vocabularies of alternative figures. We ironists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the best selves for ourselves that we can.