TSAI

THE IRONIC FALL

Romantic irony, broadly defined, regards irony as something like a human condition or predicament. Romantic irony is also one of the earliest and most intense modes of anti-humanism. It is precisely because we are human and capable of speaking, creating and engaging with others that human life has no fixed nature; any definition it gives of itself will only be one more creation, which can never exhaust the infinite possibilities for future creation: ‘If every infinite individual is God, then there are as many gods as there are ideals’ (Schlegel 1991, 92). The German Romantics emphasised Bildung, as culture and creation, and insisted on the arbitrariness, artificiality and deviation of any process of Bildung or formation: ‘A human being should be like a work of art which, though openly exhibited and freely accessible, can nevertheless be enjoyed and understood only by those who bring feeling and study to it’ (Schlegel 1991, 67). Art, Friedrich Schlegel argued, is not the accurate presentation of the world, nor the natural expression of human life; art is essentially other than life: ‘The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity’s prime characteristic’ (ibid. 96).

Nature may be creative, but it creates according to its innate tendencies; human creation has the capacity to be ironic: to present itself as other than what it is. Indeed, what it is has no being other than a capacity to create. Human life, as capable of Bildung, is essentially capable of being other than any fixed essence. This is why human life is ironic. On the one hand, all life is creative and must ‘become’ as part of an infinite process of natural production: ‘No poetry, no reality’ (Solger in Schlegel 1991, 70). On the other hand, humans have a capacity to create in such a way that they reflect this creative process: ‘A beautiful spirit smiling at itself is a thing of beauty; and the moment when a great personality looks at itself calmly and earnestly is a sublime moment’ (Schlegel 1991, 69). And once humans recognise natural production or creation, they can create another nature, a non-natural or super-natural nature, a creation of will and art rather than unselfconscious or blind production: ‘Every good human being is always progressively becoming God. To become God, to be human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing’ (ibid. 55). In poetry, for example, we do not just copy nature. Like nature, we create, and the poem is evidence of this creation; the poem is mimetic but it does not copy a thing so much as a process. It creates just as nature creates, and in so creating itself we have the power to see the world in its becoming, not just its inert being: ‘In all its descriptions, this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry’ (ibid. 51).

There is a problem, however, with expressing or realising this process of creation. Once we create a poem we are left with a created object, just as once we form or define ourselves we are left with static forms and definitions. Romantic irony must tackle this process of the fall of creative life into inert objectivity; it does so by recognising that creativity or the human spirit must always be other than any of its creations, definitions or manifestations. Far from seeing this fall, in pseudo-Christian terms, as a or fortunate fall. It is only in not being at one with itself, in not being self-loss of a pure origin, the German Romantics embraced it as a felix culpa, identical, that life can become and create, or can recognise itself as life, even if that recognition will always be partial or ironic. For there will always be a potential for (future) life and becoming not exhausted by actual and existing creations. Creation is not the deviation from some proper and complete past, as it had been in Platonism with its notion of original forms. Creation is a release of the dynamic potential of life. Indeed, we only have a sense of the infinite, or what is not finite, from various created finite viewpoints. Romantic irony therefore reverses the relation between origin and effect, between origin and fall. It is not that there is an original paradise or plenitude from which we are separated. On the contrary, it is only in diverse life itself, in all its difference and fragmentation, that we get any sense or idea of some whole or origin. The origin or foundation is a created effect of life, not its preceding cause. Far from finite daily life being a fall from an original infinite plenitude, it is only the fragmentary, the finite and the incomplete that can give us a sense of the infinity that lies beyond any closed form. An ironic ‘fall’ realises, therefore, that there was no paradise before the sense of loss. The idea of an original plenitude is an image created from life: ‘All life is in its ultimate origins not natural, but divine and human’ (Schlegel 1991, 102). The idea of a fall is, however, essential to irony and life as irony. It is in creating images of a lost paradise that we create ourselves as fallen, and thereby create ourselves at all. For to be selves or personalities we must be limited or delimited from some grander whole.

This is why, for the Romantics, the poem is so important. The poem is a fall from the pure flow of creative life into some determined and limited object. Such an understanding of the poem was explicitly related to the Ancient Greek notion of poiesis as the distinct object or end of a creative act or praxis. But unlike other created things, which simply are and retain no evidence of their becoming, true poetry presents itself as fallen, that is, as other than or detached from the process that generates it. In contrast with the theological notion of a fall from some divine and eternal origin, the fall of irony embraces rather than mourns its finitude, difference and non-identity. It is in not being complete, in affirming one’s difference and distance from some pure and undivided ground, that one also attains character and consciousness. The self is necessarily fallen: not fallen from some origin, so much as producing a lost and other past in the very act of falling. It is the fall itself, the creation of oneself as a speaking and finite being, that creates the idea of the unfallen origin.

Further, for the Romantics, this fall is one of ‘buffoonery’. German Romantic irony was defined through a constellation of concepts, including, in addition to buffoonery, humour, wit and satire. The joke or Witz undoes the mastery of the subject, as laughter and nonsense disrupt logic and sense. Irony is related to buffoonery not just because subjective mastery is undermined; buffoonery falls, enjoys the humour of the fall, laughs from on high at the falling buffoon, and remains implicated in the fall. One can never master the ironic process, never recognise or stand above one’s finitude: ‘Irony is the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos’ (Schlegel 1991, 100). The minute we see ourselves as other than what has fallen, as beings who can overlook and describe the fall, we fall further into smug self-recognition: ‘One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one’ (Schlegel 1991, 24). Irony must recognise that we can never overcome singular viewpoints and achieve a God-like point of view; we are always subject to a cosmic joke. For any idea we have of our selves or our world will be part of a process of creation and destruction that we can neither delimit nor control. If humour often relies on a feeling of superiority or elevation above life’s misfortunes, irony recognises—but never fully realises—the implication of all life in this chaos. The ironic attitude must not just take a delight in seeing the clown slip on a banana skin; it must not just laugh at this fall from human coordination into an animal or thing-like buffoonery. It must recognise that we are all part of this falling; we are always dupes and effects of a life with a power well beyond our control and recognition.