Irony, Disruption and Moral Imperfection
- PDF / 596,359 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 188 Views
Irony, Disruption and Moral Imperfection Dieter Declercq 1 Accepted: 10 July 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Irony has a suspicious moral reputation, especially in popular media and internet culture. Jonathan Lear (2011) introduces a proposal which challenges this suspicion and identifies irony as a means to achieve human excellence. For Lear, irony is a disruptive uncanniness which arises from a gap between aspiration and actualisation in our practical identity. According to Lear, such a disruptive experience of ironic uncanniness reorients us toward excellence, because it passionately propels us to really live up to that practical identity. However, Lear’s understanding of irony is idiosyncratic and his proposal overlooks that disruption often results from value incompatibility between different practical identities. The disruption which follows from value incompatibility does not inherently reorient us toward excellence. The point is exactly that achieving excellence in one practical identity is sometimes incompatible with excellence in the other. Pace Lear, I do not identify this disruptive experience as a central example of irony. Instead, I consider irony a virtuous coping strategy for such disruption, because it introduces the necessary distance from our moral imperfection to sustain practical deliberation and maintain good mental health. Such virtuous irony negotiates a golden mean between too little disruption (complete insensitivity toward one’s imperfection) and too much disruption (a complete breakdown of practical deliberation and mental health). I argue that ironic media in popular culture provide a rich source of such virtuous irony, which I demonstrate through analysis of satirical examples. Keywords Jonathan Lear . Value incompatibility . Moral perfectionism . Disruption . Irony . Echo vs. pretence
1 Introduction The moral status of irony is suspicious. Philosophers (e.g. Blackburn 1998; Kierkegaard 1989 [1841]) and cultural critics (e.g. Rosenblatt 2001; Wampole 2012, 2016) often decry irony as
* Dieter Declercq [email protected]
1
School of Arts, Jarman Building, University of Kent, Canterbury CT27UG, UK
D. Declercq
spineless whimsy. The usual suspicion is that irony equals detachment from moral responsibility and earnestness. In defiance of these suspicions, Jonathan Lear (2011) boldly proposes that we should cultivate irony to achieve human excellence. For Lear, irony is an uncanny disruption of our practical identity which does not disorient us, but rather directs us toward virtue. Lear’s proposal is a welcome reassessment of irony’s morally suspicious reputation, while ‘disruption’ is a particularly fruitful concept to frame irony’s potential for virtue. Hence, Lear’s account offers seminal avenues for a moral reinvestigation of irony, unavailable in other philosophical accounts (e.g. Nehamas 1998). However, I will argue that what Lear calls “anxious, uncanny longing” (2011, 117) is only irony in a peripheral sense, and, because his proposal differs radically from other accounts,
Data Loading...
