As a reflective and serious outsider, Prince Hamlet, the heir to the throne of Denmark, yet estranged both from his own family, from his true love Ophelia, and from the values of his own society, is a victim of a situation fraught with irony in the form of a serious moral dilemma. Urged on by a supernatural agency to avenge his father’s murder at the hands of his brother, Hamlet’s hated uncle Claudius, Hamlet is by his temperament and university education a rationalist disinclined to trust the word of a ghost. He knows he must act, but he also knows his own limitations. He is a thinker given to intellectual paralysis, and he castigates himself relentlessly for his inaction. How is he to proceed?
The unsuspecting reader unacquainted with or immune to irony takes at face value Jonathan Swift’s revolutionary recommendation to ease the suffering of the hungry Irish poor. The cheerfully enterprising narrator of his famous essay, entitled A Modest Proposal, appears to advocate the butchering and marketing of the flesh of the family’s own infants by their own parents, thereby reducing the number of dependents each family must feed, while simultaneously generating additional family income and providing variety for the palates of the wealthy. Swift’s bitterly ironic joke was in fact angry social criticism designed to awaken the untroubled or indifferent consciences of uncaring readers unmindful of those in Ireland suffering from grinding poverty, failed harvests, and grasping absentee landlords, when he published this essay anonymously in 1729. Swift is in good company. George Orwell, William Shakespeare, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Joseph Roth, Evelyn Waugh, Soren Kierkegaard, and many others also had similar diets of ‘unpalatable’ truths to share. The great prophets were ironists. So was Socrates, who as Clair Carlisle has noted, “was the master of irony,” for whom it was “even a way of life.”
Regarded today as the first ‘existential’ writer, by which is meant one who grapples with the meaning and purpose of life, and predating Sartre and Camus by many decades, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), to whom reference has already been made, was a Danish theologian, philosopher, and committed Christian aware that “no genuinely human life is possible without irony,” yet he insisted in his doctoral dissertation The Concept of Irony that irony itself was only an intermediate stage in the development of human ‘authenticity.’ The final stage in someone’s moral evolution can only be attained by transcending irony and replacing it with his or her acquisition of a life-affirming religious belief system representing the triumph of wisdom, the end-point of all soul-searching, and the answer to the central question that bedeviled Kierkegaard’s own troubled life, “How can I be human in this world? What is it to live well?” There is no easy answer to such a question, but the search for it must begin with the self-knowledge derived from an honest, rigorous, and profound examination of oneself. “Not until he has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he must take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister travelling companion– that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge,” wrote Kierkegaard in a diary entry on August 1, 1835. We must understand ourselves first, and come to an understanding of our own shortcomings before we can alleviate the problems of others. Elsewhere he wrote that a person’s “work of soul-searching, exploring his own anxiety and suffering” will have “deepened his understanding of being human, giving his philosophy the power to affect others.”
But in the meantime, and until such transformations routinely take place in human society, we must live with the demands of our imperfect human condition, making use of the skepticism of irony to assess and dismiss simple-minded ‘remedies’ to difficult dilemmas. Readers intrigued by Kierkegaard’s contributions to our understanding of this crucial question of ‘how to live’ are encouraged to read Clair Carlisle’s highly readable and deeply sympathetic biography Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. I borrowed the copy I read from my local library.
