When we think about irony, what comes to mind is often something like Socratic or dramatic irony. The first describes instances in which a speaker feigns ignorance in order to draw out another person’s claims and expose their inconsistencies, while the second refers to situations in which events unfold in a way that sharply diverges from what agents intend or expect. Examples of both abound in cinema and pop culture, and they tend to be easily recognizable.
But what if irony doesn’t merely consist in manipulating words or situations? What if it implicates our very perspective on the world? This is at least what Hegel seems to be suggesting in his (admittedly brief) criticism of “irony” in the “Morality” section of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right. We’ll be elaborating on that criticism in this article, but not in abstracto, as Hegel would have it. Rather, to frame our discussion, we turn to no less than the cradle of philosophical inquiry itself: Reddit, circa 2023.
In one particular thread, a Reddit user laments the overuse of the word “unironically” on social media. The word, our user indicates, is now colloquially used to emphasize the sincerity of a particular claim—usually when the speaker wants to signal that they know their claim is counterintuitive or cuts across the grain of public opinion. For instance, by saying that “running is unironically fun,” I’m asserting a preference that, while true subjectively, nonetheless stands in conflict with prevailing views on the matter. In other cases, however, “unironically” presupposes a context in which the preference being asserted is, for the most part, held ironically. This makes sense if we consider that the “unironically” trend emerged as a response to so-called “hipster irony” in the early 2010s—a regrettable fad defined by liking or doing things “as a joke.” What this amounted to was basically avowing preferences or practices perceived to be “uncool” or “mainstream,” while insulating oneself from them by attaching an asterisk. (Case in point: *ironic tattoos.)
Against this self-effacing Y2K hipster, the proliferation of “unironically” in our media spaces seems like a good thing; through that word, we seem to be reclaiming the art of doing and saying things earnestly. But while this earnestness may be real, it isn’t altogether sufficient to redeem our new obsession with “unironically”. At least, not if we read the situation through Hegel’s understanding of irony. To see why, let’s turn to what I’ll call “The Nicolas Cage Controversy of 2010–22.” Basically, the controversy I want to point out involves two “moments”: The first corresponds to the “ironic hipster,” who, reacting against Nicolas Cage’s exaggerated acting style, sparked mass consumption of Cage’s movies under the banner judgment, “Cage is ironically good.” The second belongs to the contemporary anti-ironist who, taking up this evaluative claim, altered it to become: “Nicolas Cage is unironically good.”
On a Hegelian construal, this first moment—the ironic hipster—doesn’t imply a form of irony, but hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as Hegel defines it, occurs when evil is represented as good in order to deceive others. The possibility of such deception arises from what Hegel calls the “right of conscience”: the subject is entitled to test the good by her own conviction, to determine whether a given content holds rationally for her. Yet this entitlement does not amount to moral relativism. Because action takes place in an actual world, it remains answerable to what Hegel calls the “right of objectivity,” that is, to norms and institutions whose validity holds irrespective of my subjective views. While Hegel’s broader project aims to overcome the division between what I take to be good and what is good objectively, that reconciliation cannot simply be assumed. So long as they remain divided, bad forms of conscience remain possible, one of which is hypocrisy.
Let’s consider an example. If, having stolen someone’s wallet, I nonetheless represent my theft as “good”—for instance by saying that I was donating the cash inside to charity when, in reality, I used it to buy groceries—then I am acting against the objective good while still trying to persuade others that my theft was consistent with that good.
That said, I still haven’t totally dispensed with objective right in this case. The fact that I’m attempting to justify my theft in moral terms belies an awareness that theft is objectively bad. And it is in this sense that Hegel sees hypocrisy as necessarily entailing an acknowledgment of the action’s objective wrongness. For, if the hypocritical perpetrator of a theft felt that the moral valence of her action could be subjectively determined, then there would be no need for the lie, and no need to re-describe the deed so that it appears to fall under the good.
The first moment of our Nicolas Cage case functions in a structurally similar way as the theft example. Before we get into it, though, a quick disclaimer: By drawing an analogy between these cases, I don’t mean to suggest that Nicolas Cage is an evil person, nor that liking him is morally on par with thievery. But for argument’s sake, let’s say that Nicolas Cage is an objectively bad actor, that calling him “good” amounts to a bad evaluative claim, that consuming his content is, in itself, an instance of perniciously bad taste—and, finally, that Hegel’s theory of hypocrisy can be extended to encompass arguably non-moral situations of this sort. On these assumptions, then, the hipster’s claim that “Nicolas Cage is ironically good” performs the same hypocritical maneuver as the thief’s justificatory story. It re-describes what would otherwise count as bad—both the aesthetic claim (i.e., “he’s good”) and the practice (i.e., watching him)—as something good. Here, the adverb “ironically” supplies the re-descriptive hedge characteristic of hypocrisy. Through it, the hipster says, in effect: I’m not really committed to the idea that Nicolas Cage is good in the relevant, aesthetic sense; I’m watching National Treasure precisely because Nicolas Cage is bad. I’m laughing, and in laughing I’m registering—indeed, affirming!—the irremediable badness of his acting.
In this way, the hipster leverages his re-description to deceive others (or himself) into believing that the wrongs of his Cage-consumption are somehow “goods.” But while this deception doesn’t thereby vindicate the badness of his action, it is also through it that the hipster tacitly concedes that very badness, concedes, that is, that Cage does not meet the objective standard of what counts as good acting—and so shouldn’t be watched in a serious way.
As a result, the hypocritical hipster affirms the objective aesthetic standard from which his action departed by qualifying that action as ironic. By contrast, the second moment in our controversy—“Nicolas Cage is unironically good”—contains no such obeisance to objectivity. This is because that moment corresponds, structurally, to what Hegel condemns as “irony.” For Hegel, irony consists in treating subjective judgments about the good as conclusive in an objective sense. He puts it this way: In irony, “objective goodness is merely something constructed by my conviction, sustained by me alone.…I, as lord and master, can make it come and go [as I please].” In other words, the true Hegelian ironist treats the objective as binding only so long as she is willing to bind herself to it, she treats it and as void the moment she withdraws that willingness. Conviction thereby becomes the seat of validity, such that what is valid in and for itself is reduced to what is subjectively valid for the individual. Hence Hegel’s further formulation: “As soon as I relate myself to something objective, it ceases to exist for me, and so I am poised above an immense void, conjuring up shapes and destroying them.”
Applied to our second moment, then—and with the same assumptions in force—irony inheres in the fact that, by asserting Nicolas Cage to be “unironically good,” the Hegelian ironist both violates the objective aesthetic standard (which would continue to stipulate that Nicholas Cage is not a good actor) and repudiates the authority of that standard altogether. This is implied by her use of the word “unironically.” Through it, she indicates that she need not apologize for her Cage-consumption nor try to deceive others into thinking that her consumption was inauthentic.
So, to recap, moment one corresponds to a form of hypocrisy, while moment two corresponds to irony. What, though, is the upshot of all this? Although both hypocrisy and irony represent impoverished forms of moral subjectivity (or bad conscience) for Hegel, irony is the significantly more pernicious of the two. That may seem trivial when the object in question is merely an actor or a meme. But once the ironist takes herself to be sovereign over validity in matters of taste, it becomes easier for her to extend the same posture to norms, institutions, and shared standards more broadly. And it is precisely this extension that Hegel identifies as problematic. Because insofar as the true Hegelian ironist refuses to recognize the objective right of her institutions (e.g., the state, civil society, science, etc.) to dictate the terms of validity, she undermines her ability to identify with those institutions in the ways required, ultimately, for freedom and reconciliation—i.e., the practical sphere circumscribed by what Hegel calls “Ethical Life.”
Irony interferes with this process of reconciliatory identification because, if the subject reserves the right to void objectivity whenever it fails to coincide with her felt conviction, then she cannot genuinely inhabit institutions as the locus of her freedom; she can only stand above them as a kind of sovereign spectator. And it is this sort of spectatorship that, for Hegel, leads to emptiness, vanity, and ultimately a tendency toward nihilism.
In the context of our “unironic” age, this diagnosis seems to track. We are living in the time of the “silo” and the “echo chamber,” both of which serve to construct an illusory world out of our subjective opinions. In that sense, we are perpetually cast in the role of the Hegelian ironist! It’s no surprise, then, that our public life is also marked by a rising lack of trust in—or, more precisely, by a growing sense of alienation from—the institutions that organize our social world.
Nevertheless, one might object (and very reasonably) that the problem isn’t with us; it is our institutions that are at fault. Between a state that can’t seem to disentangle itself from a cycle of war-mongering (plus vaccine-denying, law-defying, immigrant-deporting, etc.) and a civic community of chronically online iconophiles, it seems safe to say that our institutions aren’t doing a very good job of getting us to identify with them. And not just because we find them unsavory but also because embracing those institutions would seem to make us complicit in the harms they perpetuate. Only by rejecting them and refusing to champion their claims of objective validity do we position ourselves as defenders of the “good.” In our world, we proclaim, ironists alone inhabit the moral high ground.
Socrates offers some precedent here. Confronted with an Athenian society in ethical shambles, Socrates was known to employ irony against his fellow citizens, tongue-twisting them into recognizing the moral contradictions in their thinking. Indeed, even Hegel seems to somewhat vindicate Socratic irony, citing his historical context as justification for the rhetorical praxis he employs. While a similar sort of justification may likewise apply to our current situation, the idea that context neutralizes the problems associated with irony seems to conflict with our understanding of democratic agency. Latent within that understanding is the idea that we are responsible for shaping our institutions. Whether we like it or not, the state mirrors the sum total of our collective, national decisions. We are already complicit in its horrors! By disowning that complicity through irony, we likewise seem to disown our right to democratic participation—and, in the process, to trick ourselves into believing that we can do nothing to alter the course of the state’s descent into moral depredation.
So while the memeification (and subsequent approbation) of Nicolas Cage isn’t single-handedly dismantling the utopian promise of Hegel’s Ethical Life, it does seem symptomatic of the irony that has come to saturate the world we’re navigating today. But that isn’t itself cause for despair. The Cage Controversy I discussed only had two moments, but irony, for Hegel, constitutes the third and final moment of “Morality.” As he indicates, it is precisely irony’s problems that propel us from “Morality” into “Ethical Life.” Perhaps, then, our unironic age is on the cusp of liberating itself from the tyranny of a sovereign subjectivity into the democratic togetherness of reconciliation. But if that’s too far a stretch, then we may at least console ourselves with the hope that our third Cage-moment, if it ever arrives, should have better taste in movies.
Virginia Moscetti
Virginia Moscetti is a first-year PhD student at Northwestern University. Her research focus lies primarily in political philosophy, which she tends to approach from the standpoint of Kant, Habermas, and, more recently, Hegel. Beyond research, she serves as the Series Editor of Current Events in Public Philosophy at the APA Blog.
