Serious Jokes: Friedrich Schlegel and the Philosophical Use of Irony

1 Introduction

Irony is one of the fundamental concepts that is associated with the Romantic movement and is central to their philosophical writings. Of the Romantics, it is Friedrich Schlegel who articulates the most sophisticated account of irony (Handwerk, 2008, p. 207). For Schlegel, irony becomes the means by which one may address philosophical contradiction and in doing so confront the absolute.^[1] Schlegel both uses and delineates irony in his work, figuring a unity of form and content and staging contradiction. There is not the space here to give an exhaustive account of irony and so its literary and poetic outworkings, its role in ideas of linguistic autonomy and its negativity cannot be taken up. Rather, the incongruous relation of Schlegel to idealism is the starting point to clarify the context in which Romantic irony emerges. Further, the contradictory content and form of this philosophical irony along with the humorous and playful ways Schlegel chooses to express himself are vital. Thus themes of idealism, contradiction and playfulness are the locus around which the philosophical development enacted by Schlegel and the importance of his innovative, unconventional use of irony might be centred.

Schlegel’s early writing was produced in an idealist paradigm, with Kant having recently finished his third critique. Further, at Jena, Schlegel overlapped with Fichte who then occupied the chair of Critical Philosophy at the university. This context is evident in Schlegel’s work, including in his writing on irony, but his relation to idealism is a complicated one. He is critical of idealist systematicity but regularly deploys an idealist framework and vocabulary – one might suggest his relation to idealism is itself infused with irony. As well as contextual clarification, examining this ironic relation also indicates the contradictory approach Schlegel has to the work of his idealist forebears.

Contradiction itself is inescapable in Schlegel’s writing, arguably forming one of his most significant contributions to philosophy. For Schlegel, contradiction is the hallmark of irony and is a vital component of epistemology in its own right. It will be shown that contradiction is one of the primary philosophical concerns of Schlegel as well as his mode of expression. Schlegel deploys contradiction in such a way that it becomes difficult for commentators on his work to address adequately without either resorting to simplifications or ironically falling into contradictions themselves. Yet this is Schlegel’s intention – he wants to play with his readership, to joke with them and in doing so, make serious philosophical claims. The unification of the playful and the serious in Schlegel is one of the most compelling aspects of his writing. There is a humour running through the work, particularly in the earlier period at Jena, which I will focus on here. Schlegel wants to play with serious philosophy and take the dynamics of play seriously in his irony, enacting the kind of contradiction that is so central in his work. Irony is the meeting place of seriousness and jokes; figuring paradox, mediating his engagement with idealist philosophy and underpinning much of the more familiar aspects of Romantic philosophy.

2 Idealism

By way of introduction, Schlegel understands his work on irony to be cast in the mould of Socrates (Schlegel, 1799, p. 155). That is to say, he not only recognises the rhetorical irony present in the Platonic dialogues, but embraces a certain ignorance in the face of irony, so that the reader is uncertain as to where earnestness ceases and irony begins. This ignorance engenders Schlegel’s approach of embracing uncertainty and ambiguity, flying in the face of idealist systematicity, much to Hegel’s chagrin. (Hegel, 1835, p. 64; Behler, 1963, p. 217).^[2]

The exact relation between the work of Schlegel and that of the idealists is difficult to pin down exactly. Fred Rush characterises it as a counter development to the trajectory that leads from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel. Yet even though Schlegel is quite clearly in opposition to what he regards as the reductionist tendencies of idealist systematicity, he is not straightforwardly their adversary (Rush, 2006, p. 173). In his Athenäum fragments, Schlegel addresses this directly, arguing against both the idea that anyone interested in German philosophy is a Kantian and that “a Kantian is only someone who believes that Kant is the truth” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 173). He goes on to add with an unmistakable irony that if “the mail coach from Königsberg were ever to have an accident, [these Kantians] might very well be without the truth for some weeks” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 173) Rather than such a dogmatic conception, Schlegel would like to appeal to “the outmoded Socratic concept that disciples are those who have independently made the spirit of the great master their own” not following them to the letter but realising the spirit of their forebears – thus, claims Schlegel, “here are probably only a few Kantians.” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 173) The designation of this relation as Socratic is no accident on the part of Schlegel and, as will be seen, intimates the significance of irony in this vein. Further, this spirit and letter distinction regarding Kant was common at the time of this fragment’s writing and is in fact a Fichtean distinction. So even this relation could be characterised as founded on an idealist differentiation, though ‘the romantic ironists were hardly Fichteans “by the letter” (Rush, 2014, p. 622).

Schlegel clearly overlaps with both Kantian and Fichtean forms of idealism at certain points. Indeed, Handwerk contends that it is the work of Kant and Fichte that provide Schlegel with the philosophical framework that justifies his turn to irony (Handwerk, 2008, p. 217). Schlegel labels ironic poetry variously as ‘critical’ or ‘transcendental,’ which is to say, concerned with its own conditions of possibility – a distinctly transcendental idealist concern. Rush points to further examples of terminological and conceptual overlap, suggesting that Schlegel’s ‘Unverständlichkeit’ (incomprehensibility) takes the Kantian notion of ‘Verstand’ (understanding) as its point of reference. In Kant this is ‘the faculty of deploying concepts in order to determine manifolds of intuition’ and so Schlegel’s category of incomprehensibility lies precisely external to that which can be conceptually determined (Rush, 2006, p. 194). Incomprehensibility is deliberately oriented with and against Kant, taking the Kantian paradigm and using it to demonstrate an evasion of the system altogether. The Socratic ignorance earlier highlighted is evoked within idealist terminology in order to specify exactly where Schlegel diverges from his antecedents. This emphasis on that which cannot be understood, the primary domain of irony, is thus shown to derive in part from Kant in conjunction with the Socratic origins and this modified Kantianism is even levelled against Fichte. Schlegel’s critique of the systematic Fichte is borrowed from Kant’s reluctance to condone what he regards as illegitimate knowledge. Though Schlegel’s irony, despite its unknowability, of course would also be too far for Kant, there is clearly a shared appreciation for that which is inevitably external to human knowledge, even if Schlegel’s account is “not entirely Kantian in its final form” (Rush, 2014, p. 629).

Despite this overlap, Schlegel is highly critical of Kant on similar grounds, that is, the dismissal of ambiguity. In his self-commentary on his fragments, Schlegel plays with the relations of irony, immediately complicated by the doubling of his own text as quotation.^[3] At one point, he claims that “I wrote this fragment with the most honourable intentions and almost without any irony at all” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 263). This essay is embedded with ambiguity and the ‘almost’ here allows Schlegel to formally build upon his use of irony, never closing off the possibility that any part of his writing is ironic, even this statement itself. Eckhard Schumacher relates this use of the word ‘almost’ to one of Schlegel’s Critical Fragments, in which he confesses that he is “disappointed in not finding in Kant’s family tree of basic concepts the category ‘almost,’ a category that has surely accomplished, and spoiled, as much in the world and in literature as any other” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 152). The question of ‘almost’ is levelled as a critique of a rigorous systematic idealism. It denies any firm categorisation or decision within the writing while at the same time provoking such a decision in the reader – should that which is written be taken as sincere or not. This is the interpretive question that the discussion of irony imposes. The playful way in which Schlegel deploys this ambiguity makes the question of irony utterly unanswerable and the incomprehensible is presented to the reader as a direct experience, that obstinate remainder that refuses any category or system (Schumacher, 2000, p. 224). Kirill Chepurin argues with more specificity that irony allows Schlegel to “complicate any clear distinction between ideal and material, as well as analytic and synthetic” (Chepurin, 2020, p. 127). There is an unmistakable complication of Kantian fundamental categories that allows Schlegel to criticise the idealist insistence on internal congruity and consistency.

Schlegel argues that Kant was incorrect to exclude not only ambiguity, but also contradiction from his system. He writes: “the Antinomies should not have moved Kant to give up the infinite, but the principle of noncontradiction.” (Schlegel, 1958, p. 410. My translation). This fragment is indicative of Schlegel’s attitude more generally during this earlier period of his writing, made quite clear by his continual self-contradiction and his insistence that “every sentence, every book that does not contradict itself is incomplete” (Schlegel, 1958, p. 83. My translation). However, it is significant that this predilection for the contradictory not only is oriented toward an undermining of idealist systematicity, but that it manifests primarily through irony. Georgia Albert claims that “most often, the name Schlegel gives to the situation in which the principle of noncontradiction is defied is ‘irony’” (Albert, 1993, p. 825). With this centering of contradiction, one must again return to the question of the relation to idealism. Schlegel’s connection to Kant and Fichte is fundamentally contradictory, with Schlegel both following and diverging from them, expanding and criticising their work, adopting and repudiating the idealist paradigm. Schlegel’s refusal to have his position pinned down to any kind of systematic or successive argumentation immediately problematises philosophically genealogical connections with Kant and Fichte. There is an inherent undecidability in the connection, a neither/nor that disallows Schlegel from either being simply a follower or a critic. But what can be said is that his relation to idealism is one of irony. Thus irony, as well as the content of his philosophy, is also the condition for its development in the predominantly idealist backdrop of Germany at the turn of the 19th century.

3 Contradiction

As well as this contradictory relation to his philosophical forerunners, contradiction is also evident at a structural level in Schlegel’s writing, with a persistent awareness that everything he has to say about irony is subject to the same relations he discusses. Simply put, he must be ironic about irony. He must write with “the irony of irony” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 267). This is an important philosophical contribution in Romanticism, at once an intensification of the self-reflexivity in transcendental idealism and a challenge to univocal epistemic assumptions. It is quite clear that irony, even in its less convoluted rhetorical form, is concerned with contradiction: that one says one thing in order to raise the thought of its opposite. This, for Schlegel, is what makes irony so significant. Therefore, the account of irony outlined in his work does not form a complete whole, as is precisely Schlegel’s point, but rather is a framework for the reflexive performance of contradiction. Schlegel does not really articulate a position, philosophical or otherwise, but instead saturates his writing with a self-reflexivity that both performs and explains the philosophical uses of irony. Schlegel is perpetually drawn to the “seductive symmetry of contradictions” (Schlegel, 1958, 2, p. 318. My translation). Each of his positions “undermine each other, dislocate supposedly secure statements by permanently restarting, relativising or even contradicting” (Schumacher, 2000, p. 223. My translation). These direct and less direct self-contradictions mean that at every moment the reader must decide whether to take Schlegel seriously, though they are never given the means to arrive at such a position. It is purposeful that through irony the text itself cannot be reduced to intelligibility, no matter how sophisticated or thorough the reader – each line can be taken as its own fragment, quotation, or allusion; incomplete and ambiguous. Hence the contradiction at the very heart of Schlegel’s irony. As Paul de Man realises, in the work of Schlegel, what is at stake in irony is “the possibility of understanding, the possibility of reading, the readability of texts, the possibility of deciding on a meaning or on a multiple set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy of meanings” (De Man, 1996, 167).^[4]

This understanding of irony is concerned with the form of the text, yet Schlegel also related irony to the subject much more directly, at least in his later lectures. In these lectures, he describes “the irony of love,” suggesting that “it arises from the feeling of finiteness and one’s own limitations, and the apparent contradiction of this feeling with the idea of an infinite implied in all true love” (Schlegel, 1958, 10, p. 357. My translation). Here too, irony is concerned with being confronted by contradiction, in this case quite straightforwardly that between the finite and infinite. In this regard it is a continuation of Schlegel’s earlier positions. He continues, explaining that “it must have been drawn from one’s own feeling and this experience of feeling” (Schlegel, 1958, 10, p. 357. My translation). Thus, within Schlegel’s work, there is an uncertainty as to whether irony is primarily a condition of the text, or something that emerges within the subject who produces the text. This too could be understood as a necessary contradiction that is the corollary of any discussion of irony, with the ultimate location of its origin philosophically ambiguous, or ultimately unanswered by Schlegel. As Benjamin recognises in his essay on the Romantics, “it may in part be quite impossible to unite these diverse elements in one concept without contradictions” (Benjamin & Bullock, 1996, p. 81).

So the theme of irony delineates a problematic of the interaction of infinite and finite. Irony is the vehicle for the exploration and presentation of contradiction in philosophical work and thus operates as a performed challenge to discursive norms. It is that which is able to “relativise the views of poetry” against the infinite, or absolute (Suzuki, 2016, p. 294. My translation). As Schumacher expounds, “irony obscures the possibility of distinguishing between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility” (Schumacher, 2000, p. 225. My translation). With this use of irony, one can never be quite sure that one is really understanding the text and so it engenders an experience of incomprehensibility, of that which is beyond description. In this way, the boundaries between the philosophical and poetic are dissolved yet do not become simply identifiable. Schlegel writes in order to evoke an experience in the reader rather than an understanding and designates a certain kind of subjectivity in the work modelled on the Socratic archetype of philosophy presented through narrative and dialogue. This subjectivity reflexively points to an unspecifiable, uncertain whole – something unnamable that is the context for each fragment which allows philosophical irony to flourish in contradiction at every instance in the writings of the Romantics.

In his pithy Critical Fragment 8, Schlegel writes that “irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 149). Schlegel revisits this fragment in On Incomprehensibility and praises himself for its “brevity” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 266). With this joke, even with a hint of vanity, he is getting at something more fundamental. Through the activity of self-commentary he is able to comment on communicability and reflexively address irony as it emerges in his own writing. For Schlegel, ironic paradox, or contradiction, is at the core of any linguistic expression and his apparently flippant, playful approach to the topic in On Incomprehensibility is, to his mind, the best way to approach it, given that anything he writes will become subject to this same paradox.

Humour is an important feature of Schlegel’s irony, but it is not all only an elaborate joke, and he is quite genuine about the jokes he is making. It is important to assess this playfulness and not simply dismiss it for a lack of seriousness. Irony is not opposed to seriousness, it is not simply a joke, but rather places both sides together: in it, “everything should be joking and everything serious” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 156). This relation of humour and earnestness is taken by Schumacher to be an indicative example of how Schlegel’s irony works in a structural sense as it “resists a mediating, identity-creating resolution of contradictions by mobilising that paradoxical movement” (Schumacher, 2000, p. 225. My translation). It seems that Schlegel is more interested in sustaining the contradiction than he is with finding anything like a synthesis. Irony thus keeps any clear distinction between the comprehensible and incomprehensible in motion, never clearly delineating them at any point, but finding a productive tension between the two. A tension that Schlegel persistently plays with.

4 Playfulness

In his On Incomprehensibility, Schlegel claims: “A great part of the incomprehensibility of the Athenaeum is unquestionably due to the irony that to a greater or lesser extent is to be found everywhere in it” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 265). He suggests that irony is ubiquitous in the Athenaeum, but if such a claim were to be taken seriously, it undermines not only itself, but everything else in the journal. Schlegel delights in the contradiction and the confusion it renders for his reader: “it is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 136). The play of unintelligibility in Schlegel’s irony leads to a crisis of interpretation and an utter confusion as to the place of playfulness in Schlegel’s writing; the irony runs circles around his readers and they are not in on the joke. The error of these harmonious bores lies in being unable to settle on anything definite because of the dynamics of irony and thus continuing to oscillate between understanding the text as a joke or serious, as Scherz or Ernst, to use Schlegel’s own words. It is not a misapprehension of which way round they should get their categories, it is a mistake “insisting on wanting to know whether they are getting it right or wrong” (Albert, 1993, p. 831).

Irony needs to be taken in its contradiction; Schlegel must be understood as playful and earnest at once. Not an alteration, not a synthesis, but a contradictory identity wherein “one should not distinguish between Ernst and Scherz” because they “coincide at any given moment” (Cherpurin, 2020, p. 120). There is a complete suspension of any definite standpoint in relation to the absolute and Schlegel’s writing removes its own basis for distinguishing between “figurative and literal meaning, between understanding and non-understanding, or even between serious speech and (word) play” (Schumacher, 2000, p. 217). For Schlegel, irony is at once “playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 265). Which is to say, the form that the fragment takes, and the commentary on the fragment which surrounds it, must be taken at once seriously and in jest. The Socratic irony that Schlegel attempts to channel does not allow a final resolution, a final completion, it maintains the tension as it is – incomprehensible, incomplete and inviting infinite interpretation.^[5]

Schlegel’s playfulness with irony is expressive of something quite serious about his philosophical thought and at one point he goes as far as to argue that “irony is not to be joked with [nicht zu scherzen]” (Schlegel, 1958, 2, p. 370. My translation). This, of course, directly contradicts his earlier assertion that it must be both playful and serious. Is one of these statements ironic? Is it possible that both are ironic? Or is it the case that the contradictory nature of irony is operative throughout Schlegel’s writing, even at the meta-level and thus making him very difficult to take seriously at all. According to de Man, Schlegel’s contemporaries failed to take him seriously, or recognise the serious philosophical work that was being carried out through the jokes and irony (De Man, 1996, p. 166). The serious elements were dismissed as the jokes that they also are. Hegel is perhaps the best example, despite recognising the Fichtean origin of the ironic form, he complains that Schlegel “treats nothing seriously and carries on the business of joking merely for the sake of joking” (Hegel, 1835, p. 296). The dynamics of irony and their embrace of contradiction lead Schlegel’s writing to appear illogical, disingenuous, and totally unsystematic, anathema to the quite serious formulations familiar in idealism. Yet Schlegel is arguably trying to be systematically unsystematic – in accordance with his Athenaeum fragment 53, his writing is to be system and non-system; a simultaneous instantiating of mutually exclusive binaries. Schlegel’s pair of Scherz and Ernst figure his understanding of irony and are a primary way in which irony manifests in his writing. They are not figurative mirrors in a restatement of Fichtean transcendental reflection, rather a unified whole in the absolute, folding all standpoints into itself. With this, Fichte’s system is wholly undermined in Schlegel’s adoption of its terminology.

Schlegel’s notion of the absolute is only impinged upon when the ‘harmonious bores’ try to understand and thus impose relations of identity upon the infinite, that which contains all standpoints. It is the forcing of irony into the comprehensible that shatters the absolute into cognisable pieces. And so in Schlegel’s infinite unfolding approach to the absolute that he envisions as the process of Romantic poetry, “it is not irony but the desire to understand irony that brings such a chain to a stop” (De Man, 1996, p. 166). It is not, as Nobukuni Suzuki has it, a perpetual reflection between the two poles that sustains the process, but a realisation of the contradiction inherent in irony and the subsequent destabilisation of interpretation (Suzuki, 2016, p. 294). This instability leads to proliferation of interpretive prospects and thus an appreciation of the relation of each particular to the absolute via a hermeneutics cognisant of its own interminability. In this way, Schlegel’s serious jokes are only the starting point of Romantic irony.

Schlegel’s serious playfulness emerges clearly at the end of the On Incomprehensibility essay, where he merges his authorship with Goethe’s. Here he expands on a stanza of the poet’s to generate a full poem, but nowhere indicates to his reader that this is what he has done. Not only does this play with notions of authorship, but the text itself makes use of puns, most notably playing on the closeness of ‘versteht/wer steht’ [understand/who stands], joking about the issue of understanding and comprehensibility, the main theme of the essay (Schlegel, 1799, p. 270). Taking these jokes seriously, one might glean that Schlegel is attempting to write through and about irony so as to establish that which direct discursive argument cannot, to reach beyond the usual purview of philosophy. It is philosophy identified with Romantic poetry, “the real homeland of irony … informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery” and “always free, albeit serious, play [ernstes Spiel] (Schlegel, 1799, p. 148; Suzuki, 2016, p. 291. My translation).” Playfulness is at once the core of the philosophical significance of Schlegel’s irony, and probing the edges of discursive acceptability.

5 Conclusions

There is far too much to be said about Schlegel’s philosophical use of irony. With the purposeful lack of discursive structure or logically unfolding argumentation, it is not possible to circumscribe the exact role played by irony in his thought. Its relation to the fragment, to parabasis and to autonomy have had to be left wholly unexamined. Further, Schlegel’s self-conscious reflexivity regarding irony undermines any account he provides and multiplies the difficulty for his reader. The earnest and the ironic fit together in the text, slide over one another, producing new philosophical statements, new ironies, never to be entirely secured. As Albert recognises: “even the definition of irony as something whose meaning cannot be pinned down can itself not be pinned down” (Albert, 1993, p. 832). The equivocacy of irony is totalised – it is essentially non-cognisable, or at least not fully.

My own reading of Schlegel is bound up in this dynamic; the multiple readings by those interpreters of Schlegel presented here continue the proliferation of interpretation, each one multiplying its own set of reference points and commenting upon commentary. This enacts an accelerated multiplication in the text, with the initial authorial intent absent from this process. Any commentary upon Schlegel’s work on irony must either be contradictory or contradict Schlegel. It must recognise the “absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses,” ideas which are “perfected to the point of irony” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 176). Reading Schlegel is already modelled by Schlegel himself when he comments on his own fragment concerned with Socratic irony. The irony that emerges in this self-interpretation reflexively “arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication” (Schlegel, 1799, p. 265).

Schlegel’s irony gnaws at the philosophical foundations of communicability and thus raises the question of what can really be said about it. Further, this question of communicability cuts to the core of the philosophical problem for Schlegel, both in his own writing which must communicate through the incomprehensible and the writing of those who interpret him, who are thus left trying to communicate the incomprehensible. When de Man claims, “you will never understand,” he means it quite literally – Schlegel’s irony denotes that which is alien to the understanding (De Man, 1996, p. 164). This incomprehensibility, both accessed and performed through Romantic irony, is conditioned by idealism, described in the jargon of critical philosophy and conceptually configured as that which is external to the categories of cognition delineated by Kant. And yet, this incomprehensibility gestures towards the insufficiencies of the systems of Kant and Fichte, a point that even Hegel seems to have missed. Schlegel’s serious jokes are indicative of a significant moment in the history of German philosophy, standing in the midst of the development of idealism but not reducible to it and most importantly, demonstrating through irony the inescapability of contradiction, no matter how rigorously it is systematically excluded.