The Practical Irony of the Historical Socrates

PROBABLY FROM SOCRATES' OWN TIME, certainly from Aristotle's time, irony has been a central feature in the description of the philosopher from Alopeke. importance of Socrates' irony is reflected in the title of an influential book, stemming from influential teaching and articles, by Gregory Vlastos: Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher.' In Vlastos's discussion, and generally, irony is assumed to be an exclusively verbal phenomenon. Greeks, however, down through the fourth century B.C.E., knew of a practical irony. It was an irony of manner or more broadly of style. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses Spartan dress, i.e., the imitation of Spartan dress by Athenians, as an example of irony (1127b27-28). Socrates, it will be seen, was associated by contemporaries with this particular style and thus with practical irony as defined by Aristotle. Aristotle's discussion of irony appears in a chapter on truthfulness, the mean between the extremes of boastfulness and irony. He begins: let us discuss truthful persons and untruthful persons in and in practices (rpd~4cat) and in their claims about themselves (1127a19-20). An irony of practices, a practical irony, is presupposed. Consistently with this starting point, Aristotle's whole discussion of the mean and the extremes looks to public and social context. Theophrastus follows Aristotle.2 He begins his character sketch of the ironist: would seem to be ... a pretense of the worse in practices and in words (7npoatnoorlat; Ti XEypov 7tpdx(c0v K~a X6yov, Char. 5.1 Jebb-Sandys). For a narrower, exclusively verbal sense of irony, one can compare the definition in the roughly contemporary Rhetorica adAlexandrum: is to say something while pretending not to say it or to call things by the opposite names (1434a17-18). author of this rhetorical treatise has formulated a definition in which the notion of practice is absent. Irony now has the purely verbal status that it will have in Cicero and in Quintilian (except for a single intriguing statement to be discussed below, 202).3 Vlastos, thinking of verbal irony, resolutely denied irony in Aristophanes' Clouds. The anti-hero of the Clouds is many things to many men, but an ironist to none.4 But with this comedy one can begin to describe the practical irony of the historical Socrates.

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