Roman Rethorics's View Of Irony

This view distilled by Roman rethorics remained the “standard” understanding of irony until German Romanticism. Therefore, with very few exceptions, for twenty centuries irony was thought of as a literary or oratory technique . However, the collision of this version of irony with German philosophy pushed the history of this concept into its modern stage. Crucially, the Romantics did not limit themselves to provide a new definition of what irony is. Irony, as any other concept, can receive a definition only insofar as it is part of a wider conceptual and metaphysical system. Therefore a change in some element of the system forces always a re-definition of the remaining members of it. Accordingly, the new metaphysics of reality heralded by the

According to the Romantic Weltanschaung human nature melts away in the flow of reality. At the same time, it tries desperately to reach for the infinite . In this context, the ironist is in a sense she who turns to reality hoping to make something emerge out of it . She bears within her a longing for the absolute, and strives to reach for it in the midst of the ever-flowing reality. Therefore, the stance of the ironist is the most suitable for human beings, insofar as it acknowledges and expresses what human nature is. Irony is to embrace our longing for the absolute while realizing the impossibility of reaching it – thereby, the ironist finds a way to live out the existential contraddiction into which human nature is

Schlegel is very clear-headed in making a difference between his understanding of irony and the one passed down by the tradition. As we find reported in his notebooks, ‘no things are more unlike than satire, polemic, and irony. Irony in the new sense is self-criticism surmounted; it is never-ending satire’ . Crucially, while Schlegel acts the move of irony from rethoric to philosophy, he maintains Socrates as the paradigmatic ironist. In his Philosophical Fragments he writes that ‘Philosophy is the real homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty […] There is also a rethorical species of irony which […] has an excellent effect, especially in polemics […] But compared to the sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse, it is like the pomp of the most splendid oration set over against the noble style of an ancient tragedy’ . Here we can see how Schlegel set the stage for all following reflections on irony. These will now belong primarily to the field of philosophy, but will still keep Socrates as the initiator of