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above and beyond language. We only have concepts, selves and
speakers through language. Poiesis, or the creation of forms through
which we think, is not a peculiarly literary event; it is essential to all
thought. Any sense of what is other than language can only be generated
from language. As we saw in the Symposium, Plato is only able to
express his idea of pure truth above and beyond dialogue through the
62 ROMANTIC IRONY
use of dialogue and irony. We could conclude, then, that there simply is
no truth or meaning outside human speech and communication.
The German Romantics who gathered in Jena from 1796 and who
influenced, and were influenced by, other Romantic movements, took
the insights of Kant and idealism to turn poetry rather than knowledge
into the absolute principle of subjectivity, and they did so through
irony. To begin with, they had a transcendental understanding of poetry
going back to the Greek word for poiesis: the creation of some external
form. Poems or literary objects were specific instances of a far more
general poetry , which included the creation and formation of
concepts, selves and fixed objects. All life is poetic insofar as it is
creative and productive. However, poems as such reflect upon and are
aware of their status as detached creations, as other than the force of life
that brings them into being. German Romanticism s criticism of the
closure of philosophy is still relevant today. Friedrich Schlegel used the
notion of irony to criticise the assumption that language, the effects of
language and the forces of texts could be reduced to conscious intent
and the self-conscious will of the subject. To this extent, the notion of
German Romantic irony provides a way to think beyond many of the
contemporary assumptions regarding language.
We can begin with the contemporary account of meaning from
contexts. Any self, world, object or value can only be given through
some shared system of conventions and differences; any reference to
what lies outside a context of language can only be given from that
context. It makes no sense to refer to meanings or ideas in themselves;
meanings are just what we posit from acts within a context. Insofar as we
speak we remain committed to rules and conventions; without the
lawfulness and regularity of contexts there would be no language. One
has to mean what one says; all language involves commitment and
sincerity. There could not be a universal practice of speaking without
meaning what one says:
the retreat from the committed use of words ultimately must
involve a retreat from language itself, for speaking a language&
consists of performing speech acts according to rules, and there is
no separating those speech acts from the commitments which form
essential parts of them.
(Searle 1969, 198)
ROMANTIC IRONY 63
To be committed to a meaning, to speak at all, is just to behave in ways
that could be expected or made sense of from one s context. Any
interpretation or explanation of a meaning would itself be another act in
a context. It makes no sense to ask what the world is really, outside our
concepts or context, for any world that we experience as other than our
concepts is only thinkable from concepts; we are always already in a
context. That is just what having a world is.
German Romantic irony, by contrast, reverses this order between
concept and world. It is not that we have a world, life or subjectivity
seen through language and concepts; texts, concepts and language are
effects, fragments or poems thrown out by an infinite life that goes well
beyond any context. This life may not be knowable, for knowledge and
theory are indeed conceptual, but it can be felt through irony. If, for
example, we are presented with a tragedy by Shakespeare, a
philosophical fragment or an ironic poem, then we are not presented
with the experience of the whole of life; but we are given a sense of this
wholeness through its very absence. An irony of this form would not
gesture back to some norm or idea to which it was inadequate; it would
be necessarily fragmented or incomplete. Consider the following poem
by William Blake, again from Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame they fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
(Blake [1794] 1957, 214 15)
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Now, on the one hand we might want to say that there is a clear irony
lying in the absurdity or limitation of the speaker s voice. The speaker
addresses God as a mechanical creator and then wonders how anything
so complex as the world might have been put together. We might say
that Blake is ironising eighteenth-century natural theology, or the idea
that from any ordered creation we should assume some rational and
ordering principle. For the dissecting intellect of natural theology, we do
not need startling revelations, angels or miracles to disclose God, for
God is just the principle of the world s natural harmony. Blake ironises
this argument by showing that if God were nothing more than a rational
creator or divine watchmaker we would have to be mystified or terrified
by something so arbitrary or irrational as the tiger. As long as we talk
and think within the bounds of reason , what cannot be explained will
appear as incomprehensible or terrifying. However, this irony does not
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