How to Be Foolish in Being Angry: Against Sarcasm

For Ruth Bendik, whom I've never heard be sarcastic

Sarcasm and the process of philosophy

Etymologies can fill out a word’s connotations, but they aren’t normative. People make all sorts of sense out of already existing words depending how people use them.  Nor is the genetic fallacy worth committing.  Something may have begun in injustice until people later turned the origin around and used that thing for justice.  With words, some of us call that queering them. But even so, “sarcasm” does not have comfortable origins.  It comes from a Greek word meaning to tear flesh, and it was later used in that language to convey speaking bitterly and gnashing one’s teeth.  Even my Oxford American Dictionary defines sarcasm as “the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.”  As Hitz pointed out to Katherine, dictionary definitions are occasions to convey judgment about meaning since they express only convention (and convention can be misleading in a given context or for a given purpose).  But even so, things don’t look so good in the present for sarcasm:  the use of irony to either speak to or view people as unworthy of consideration seems both immoral and a neurotic form of irony.  Given sarcasm’s conventional meaning in English and its not-too-distant roots in Greek, it’s hard for me to conceive how sarcasm has a place in the search for wisdom.  Seeking to tear into someone seems the opposite of talking with them, and erasing someone’s considerability is tantamount to erasing them as responsible people.  So, what is the point of discussing sarcasm and the process of philosophy?

I’m sorry to disappoint anyone who hoped for an ingenious, conceptual connection between sarcasm and the process of philosophy.  I’m interested in the topic because of personal reasons and because of meta-philosophical ones, all having a contingent relation to sarcasm. 

Sarcasm makes me mad. Yet it is so popular that I often feel like an alien in its midst.  Those are the two personal reasons. They are subjective, but they do not reflect matters of taste. As you will see, they have reasons beneath them, why sarcasm should make me mad, why it it is good to be an alien in its midst.

The meta-philosophical ones are: There’s a way of doing philosophy that makes available our personal relationships to things, e.g., my personal anger over sarcasm when it is used in argument.  I want to see where that takes me.

Second, a big challenge to having disputes with others is “narcissistic illusion,” especially when anger is in the mix.  Narcissistic illusion is the tendency of people to make those with whom they are at odds into objects rather than to see them consistently as people deserving of interpersonal relating.  Narcissistic illusion switches the relational register to practical calculation, throwing sociality out of joint.  It’s afforded especially easily in colonial cultures favoring objectification. I worry that my society is fraught with narcissistic illusion, and learning how to philosophize in its midst strikes me as important. The popularity of sarcasm is a case in point.

So, those are my four reasons.

Why does sarcasm make me mad?

Here’s an example of sarcasm, with thanks to Misty Morrison:

A cat jumps up on a kitchen counter at a party. 

Someone says, “Do they know they’re not supposed to be on the counter?” 

The cat owner says, “They know they’re not supposed to be on it when there’s food  on it.” 

And the first person replies, “Yeah, because they know the difference.”

What angers me about this is the way the sarcasm is used between people.  It’s used to imply that another person is stupid or in some way unreasonable, possibly even ethically off. Moreover, this is done in a backhanded way, even passive aggressively.  It’s turned around and not forthright.  True to the Greek origins of the “sarcasm,” the speech act tears into someone, tries to take a piece out of them in passing.

“Look, if you think that my cat training is so bad that you have to express your judgment instead of us just hanging out at this party, then tell me straight up.  Listen to what I have to say, too.  If what I do matters enough that you have to clear ground around it, then I'm down for the conversation."

*

Sarcasm makes me mad because although people tend to be sarcastic about things, their intended target is the people holding beliefs that keep those things in place – and what it wants to imply is that those people are stupid.  Sarcasm is passive aggressive, cognitive contempt.   Even in the overused expression “You’re a real winner,” the sarcasm is directed in the first instance at something, namely, your accomplishments.  The target of this focus is, however, you or anyone who believes in you.  The implication is that your belief – or the confidence of others – in what you’ve done or how you’ve lived is stupid, unreasonable or ethically off.

            Dig, dig.

Being the alien

But sarcasm is popular (for instance, as a much loved quality on dating apps).  A mom at the neighborhood park recently sported the shirt, “Me, sarcastic?  Never.”  Maybe talk about sarcasm is really talk about something else – edgy humor?  Yet if that is only part of the story, we are left with the thought that part of what is popular in sarcasm being popular is the power to tear into people verbally in a passive aggressive manner by implying that they and anyone who shares their judgments around something are stupid and, in some sense, not worthy of consideration.  What is with that?

I wonder whether sarcasm is sought-after to provide a sense of security in a society of insecurity, selfish competition, and aggression.  In a society where social alienation is part of the formal cause of many of the relationships people form at work, in politics, and in so-called “private” life, sarcasm would be one of the ways people bring their gats to the killing party.  It would be a verbal and emotional equivalent to carrying a concealed weapon and knowing how to use it. But this would be a false sense of security, an “insidious loop.” Sarcasm’s passive aggressive, cognitive contempt would be a weapon in the midst of society recycling (or “socially reproducing”) various forms of abuse as purported conditions for being able to show up at work and function with others in social life.  Like power-workouts and shooting ranges, training in sarcasm would help people get ready for battle in a society that is embattled. Many violent qualities are seen as virtues although they are vices.

Would facility with sarcasm then be on the other end of the spectrum from “ordinary good relationships that continually chafe against domination and oppression”?  But what of those of us who use sarcasm precisely to chafe against domination and oppression in circumstances where passive aggression makes sense (since active resistance can be deadly or damaging)? Would we still be confirming the communicative and emotional groundwork for socially reproducing cycles of abuse? Things would depend on whether one knows how to contain sarcasm and point it to just ends only – and then only at the right time, in the right manner, and for the right reasons.  Pretty tricky stuff (and why would that be better than irony, that unlike sarcasm leaves people room to wonder?).

Perhaps it is not so bad to feel alien when faced with social alienation.  That alienation in the face of alienation may be the opening to a world where people have solid relationships that don’t internalize cycles of abuse.

Ordinary vices and ordinary reflection

The specter is dizzying here. It isn’t easy to exist out of this world while in it.  Wrestling with alienation demands self-reflection. This mini-series is on interpersonal relationships and philosophy, and sarcasm is an ordinary phenomenon. Is facility with sarcasm what Judith Shklar once called an “ordinary vice”?  Reflecting on sarcasm’s ubiquity is one way to reflect on social alienation – how, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, “another world is possible.” Yet I’ve used some big theory in the background of the piece so far – Lukács, social reproduction theory, Nussbaum and Winnicott, and the history of the phenomenology of the other, to name some obvious sources.  How does interpersonal reasoning figure in an ordinary – not particularly academic – way? I’m interested in how we can use ordinary, personal reflection to work out the conditions of good relationships.

I don’t think there’s some big mystery here, nor romanticism about ordinary people.  Insofar as people can read the intent of others, especially when it is aggressive, it is not hard to read sarcasm provided that one can get inversions where something that is supposed to be meant actually means that anyone who holds that view is stupid or in some other way off.  If we get in touch with our register of other people’s aggression, then we should be able to tune into sarcasm’s weaponization in banal contexts.  We should be able to feel the fighting underneath the surface of things.  Eventually, we might sense the way daily warfare of a non-bloody sort has led to a gradual hardening of social interactions such that “atomization” is a good metaphor for how people have become objects to each other against which there must be continual capacities for verbal and emotional defense.  In other words, while theory will definitely help us make sense of why we might reproduce some bad thing teetering all the time on the edge of slights and wrongs, it is relating – empathetic capacities and emotional intelligence in processes aimed at staying connected and authentic (rather than how torturers and manipulators abuse those capacities) – that does the heavy lifting, opens up the soulfulness.

There’re whole wisdom traditions in good relationships, and good relationships begin with good relating – or as I prefer to say (since “good” is of the logic of calculative, practical reason, even though in this instance it is Geach’s attributive adjective that is saying that a kind of thing, relating, is well achieved) – harmonious relating.  Each “wisdom tradition” is personal and idiosyncratic, of each one of us and our families, friendships, good relationships.  They aren’t some capital “T” Tradition of a capital “P” Philosophy or capital “R” Religion.  The ancient, big thing about them is that they’re differently and commonly human – as much as the common is achieved through good relating, over and over, incompletely and fragmentarily perhaps, yet thickened into lives that go well.

For myself, I listen to how my body feels when faced with sarcasm, I look and see what people do with it and try not to let the domination cycling through the communicative system, even if it used for justice, orient how I approach others or my own life.  Sure, those acts of sarcasm are only words.  Only very salty words, perhaps.  Or bitter, and bitterness can be a palette. But then words have potentials to connect and to untangle.  Other words are possible.

Narcissistic illusion and angry conditions

Kant held that our drive to make sense of things predisposed us to make believe, metaphysical assertions due to our seeking complete explanations.  He called this propensity “transcendental illusion.”  At the moment when there were no further explanation available, we might fudge things and fill in the gap in our understanding with something we claim to know when it is not empirically determinable.  He understood this tendency as a constitutive of theoretical reasoning, a dynamic tension inside it, yet the needs apparently met by the metaphysical assertions are practical – e.g., for an immortal soul or for a God.  Transcendental illusion manifests a practical difficulty affecting theoretical cognition, a response to something we can’t live with for very long.

But it might be worthwhile to explore whether the difficulty can sometimes be framed as a relational one, that is, as a problem in having good relationships.  The need to know everything manifests insecurity just as easily as a “drive” to reason.  Trying to make sense of things when they no longer make sense doesn’t seem to predispose us to making an illicit leap in knowing unless we have a problem with being ignorant or limited.  And why should these make us insecure if we really are at our mind’s limits and our finite being is held soulfully in our relationships?  So, then, we are finite and out of answers.  So, here we are together, though!  There are times for knowing and times for giving up, but the latter need not be a threat.  Then it seems that “transcendental illusion” might be better called a form of narcissistic illusion, the one concerned with metaphysical questions.

A whole way of approaching the history of philosophy opens up when we ask how well the philosophers and their philosophies related in the ordinary way I have suggested here.  How soulful were they, really, how connected with others?  To what extent were their theories defenses against dying, being lonely, lacking love, having poor levels of social connection, existing in fractured societies, dealing with cycles of reactive relationships, and so on?  To what extent were their manners of thinking, writing, and philosophizing similarly affected by seeing themselves and others – or seeing the existential situation of their world – through degrees of objectification, antagonism, isolation, and various other forms and registers of social alienation including narcissism?  (What is it to write philosophy in a way that is soulfully connected?)

Narcissistic illusion, I want to say, emerges in many places.  One of them is in theory, but another is in interpersonal relationships where we might say the illusion has its origins.  Inside personal relationships, narcissistic illusion is the tendency to subvert relational reasoning – and the sometimes-arduous process of connecting authentically with others and with oneself – through switching to a practical calculus of ends.  In such a situation, others become objects to be moved around.  Hence the term “narcissistic,” for narcissism is the propensity to view others out of control of one’s will as threats to one’s will that must be mastered or controlled.  Narcissistic illusion, then, is the tendency to turn others into objects as a matter of course during relating.  It shuts down the gap between wills and souls.

Now there are times and conditions when that gap is well-nigh unbearable, or so it seems.  Especially when we exist in what I call “angry conditions,” we may fall into narcissistic illusions.  “Angry conditions” are social conditions where anger circulates freely inside social interactions, often under the surface as passive aggression or irritability and often still erupting readily into light over small slights.  Moreover, in angry conditions, there is reason to be angry, for moral dignity may be repeatedly slighted or erased in them, injustice may be part of the fabric of life, and there may be very low degrees of relational virtues, such as low degrees of trust, consent, non-weaponized empathy, and community-building reciprocity.  When living for long periods of time – perhaps for one’s whole life! – in angry conditions and when lacking good relationships to counteract these conditions through the protective potential of trust, consent, thoughtfulness, and mutual care and love, one’s very being may become as raw as an irritated, open wound.  One may even have had to forget that the wound is there.  But the gap between wills and souls has become so much of a painful reminder that it feels best to steel oneself against it.  This is where narcissistic illusion comes in.

Take sarcasm.  Someone says something that you think is stupid.  That makes you irritated because your general way of being is to defend yourself against stupidity or to use the stupidity of others to your own advantage, lifting yourself up comparatively.  You can’t trust the situation to be communicative, let alone reciprocally respectful and caring, because you exist in angry conditions.  So, you simultaneously move strategically in those conditions and reproduce them by taking them as action guiding, and you turn the one who spoke into an object, someone without a soul in the moment.  You are sarcastic about what they said.  This means:  that person is stupid and anyone who believes them is stupid.  They need not be listened to, and it is stupid to do so.  Their words are worthless.  Not a very soulful thing to do.

Why not side-step the difficult relating of sorting through disagreement with others, especially when trying to relate exposes you to being vulnerable?  It’s not even prudent to be vulnerable in contexts where injustice circulates and could come right back on you.  Or so it might seem.  But the problem is that the gap between wills and souls is a condition on sociality as such.  When narcissistic illusion tacitly switches the relational register to practical calculation, throwing sociality out of joint, it turns people into objects going against our wills rather than our seeing them consistently as people deserving of interpersonal relating.  Well, but even in conditions of injustice, this is simply not the best way to proceed.  It’s borderline immoral too.  Now the angry conditions have claimed you.

Foolishness

What is it to communicate in a way that is soulfully connected? Speaking for myself as someone who is legally a United States citizen, I think that people in my country exist in angry conditions.  Above, I cited one article as to why this seems to be the case, for U.S. society is characterized by cycles of violence of many forms, relentless competition often uninhibited by thoughtfulness for others, and many forms of social alienation.  In such conditions, it is easy to be angry since anger courses through the system in multiple forms of varying intensities.  But if we are not to be, say, sarcastic with others – are not to imply that they and their communities of judgment are deserving of contempt for being stupid or unethical – how should we approach disagreement, especially in conditions of injustice when it can be dangerous to disagree?

The thing to work against is narcissistic illusion – treating others and even oneself as an object rather than deal with the gap between wills and souls – and so it seems to me that a direction to think through is to leave being self-possessed and sarcastic to one side and to explore being foolish instead.  But I need to say a bit about what foolishness means to me.  I take the notion from Lynne Huffer’s work where she develops an ethics of foolishness from Foucault’s invocation of the “Ship of Fools” in The History of Madness.  The basic idea behind being foolish is that, from the standpoint of self-possessive narcissism, one becomes “empty headed” (the etymology of “fool”) in being soulful; from the standpoint of angry normalcy, one willingly becomes abnormal.  To be a fool in disagreement within angry conditions is to refuse to stop relating interpersonally with others including those with whom you disagree.  It is foolish from the standpoint of calculation, but it is relationally free.

Inside personal relationships, narcissistic illusion is the tendency to subvert relational reasoning – and the sometimes-arduous process of connecting authentically with others and with oneself – through switching to a practical calculus of ends. 

What does the fool do when they are irritated by their conditions enough that they feel like tearing into everything, or, worse, angry enough at another’s beliefs or practices that they might want to tear into them and that person?  They let the irritation reach their soul.  They let another’s beliefs or practices trouble them.  Like I said, they are foolish.

They let the irritation reach their soul.  Narcissistic illusion includes one’s relationship to oneself.  One simple way to close down the gap between wills and souls is to objectify oneself.  This begins with closing oneself off so that one need not relate as an authentic person but can work situations manipulatively by making an instrument of oneself to play a role or to obtain something.  It’s easy to forget that sarcastic people are not simply tearing into others to move them and the situation around; they are also closing off themselves.  But the foolish way to exist in angry conditions is to let the irritation reach you.  When it does, you are no longer invulnerable to them.  Rather, you open yourself to being agitated.  The question is how this can go well for you, how it can contribute to your relating with others well.  I will come back to this question in a moment when I discuss the positive anxiety of wonder.

They let another’s beliefs or practices trouble them.  In the meantime in this fraught society, someone says something that you want to tear into; or maybe it is just that you want to put them in their place and remind them of your powers; or maybe you just hate something whenever it comes up and you want to excoriate anyone who believes in it.  Without having to explicitly disagree with them – or at least with any depth – you could be sarcastic toward them.  But you could also be a fool.

The fool with others lets their beliefs or practices, when they strike you as objectionable, be troubling.  The cat owner who lets their cat up on the counter and the cat’s independent will both become troubling to you.  Being foolish, you stay with the trouble.  What is going on for this other – or these others – and in this situation such that we have such different ways of approaching it or a sharp disagreement at some point?  The fool is not sarcastic but credulous.  They believe that the other believes and look into what that other believes or does.  They take the difference as a problem to consider rather than something to warrant moving another around and attacking forthright communication.  What is really going on here is that the fool takes seriously that another has judgments of their own – and the fool is open to being bothered by them and their judgments.

They let another bother them.  At the heart of foolishness, another person – that they have judgments of their own that are so off, for instance – bothers you.  Rather than being sarcastic, you let them bother you.  But where does that leave us then?  Where does that leave you?

It leaves you in the trouble.  Now, why on earth is that good?   Because it leaves us connected by the trouble.

Wonder and anger

When we are connected by the trouble, we’re stuck with the other and our situation.  At least one of us is troubled by the other, and at the least to that one, you, the situation is accordingly troubling – at least insofar as the troubling person shapes it!  But being stuck with the other and being foolish enough to be troubled, it’s no longer an option to move the other around, not even by sarcasm.  You just have to face them and who they are, where they are, what they do, and what they believe.  You have to take them in.

This can be bonkers, but it is beautiful, a strange and harsh beauty especially when the troubling one is very wrong in your eyes.  And if you are angry at them for good reason, what then?  How can you both take them in and be angry at them?

But you can’t be truly angry at them without taking them in, for you cannot see them as capable of responsibility and so of blame without taking them in.  Where is their spark of agency? What is their history? In other words, taking them in and being troubled by them is the beginning of both real connection and the possibility of real accountability in the “moral nexus.”  Anger that does not see the other is narcissistic.

Taking them in and being troubled by them, you are subjected to the unsettling possibility of them and their unsettling possibilities of belief and practice. This unsettling, it is crazy-making for someone who is too self-possessed, someone who tries to master themselves and shut out the gap between wills and souls as this makes them vulnerable to the back and forth connections of society.  But for the fool it is wonderful, and I mean this precisely.

Thanks to Katherine Cassese and Sidra Shahid for valuable feedback.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).