Socrates Irony Analysis

1.2 Irony across the Ages: from Socrates to German Romanticism

The first thing to register when considering irony in Socrates, is that in no passage of Plato 's work does Socrates or any of his associates refer to him as an ironist. Rather, it was his opponents who accused him to be an eiron, that is, someone who practices irony . This, has to do with the fact that up until Socrates ' times, the standard understanding of the Greek word eironeia was exclusively that of deception or dissembling . More precisely, as David Wolfsdorf shows discussing a passage from Oppian 's On Hunting, erioneia '[...] is the use of deception to profit at the expense of another by presenting oneself as benign in an effort to disarm the intended victim [...] ' .

As Wolfsdorf notices, this has caused a tendency over the course of history to consider Socrates ' praises of someone 's wisdom and admissions of his own ignorance as disingenuous . However, this disingenuousness becomes now one free of malice. As Vlastos puts it, Socrates came to be seen as '[...] the very incarnation of eironeia [...] ', while being himself '[...] innocent of intentional deceit [...] though [...] serious in his mockery [...] ', and '[...] dead earnest in his playfulness [...] ' . In other words, the man who came to be considered as a paragon of irony was also one thought to be exceptionally just and committed to truth. The irony of Socrates simply could not be anymore what eironeia meant up until that moment. Hence, as he became the paradigmatic ironist he transformed the ethical colouring of this word and caused eironeia to become (now Socratic) irony . Accordingly, Ancient interpreters of irony mantained the idea that feigning was a component of irony: they still mantained that to practice irony was to say one thing while meaning another. However, they discharged irony from any negative connotation. However, in contrast with Thrasymachus, they understood the goal of irony to be pedagogical and therefore beneficial , rather than a strategy aimed at overcoming one’s