THE SPIRIT OF IRONY
What Makes the West Strong

British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton argues that the values of forgiveness and irony are at the core of our Western vision of freedom; not merely the freedom to disagree with others, but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule superstition and nonsense. When we ironize our holy cows and forgive the other, we acknowledge the otherness of everything, including our own. When we forgive, we grant the other the freedom to be. This, in turn, promotes accord and diminishes the need for violence.

In this course we will probe these questions: What is irony? Is it a virtue? How does it relate, on a fundamental level, to the Western concept of forgiveness? How do irony and forgiveness depend and bolster each other as basic values? Where does hope come into this matrix? Or does it?

Our readings will cover a selection from philosophical and literary sources: Plato, Aristotle, Biblical scholarship, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Descent into the maelstrom”, Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Derrida, Tadeusz Borowski’s “Auschwitz, our home”, Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism, Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Wayne C. Booth ‘s A Rhetoric of Irony, Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God, Oscar Wilde, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and others.

COURSE LENGTH: 12 weeks
DISCUSSION TEAM: Noga Emanuel, Susanne Lawson and another
FIRST SESSION: Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 6:15 pm