Irony and Humanity: Lear and MacIntyre

This is an extended exchange between Jonathan Lear and Alasdair MacIntyre about the value of irony.  Both have extremely interesting things to say, and they are perhaps closer to one another on the subject than one might expect (Lear is the author of the recent A Case for Irony, which is excerpted at the beginning).  Here's a little bit from Lear's intervention:

[MacIntyre] says, “It is because and only insofar as irony serves the ends of truthfulness and humility that we need it.” Basically, I think he is right; but I want to sharpen the point a little. When an experience of irony is being deployed well, I want to say not merely that it serves truthfulness and humility, but that it itself is a manifestation of truthfulness and humility. This is the form truthfulness takes on this occasion; and thus a “world without irony” would be a world without this form of truthfulness as a human possibility. Thus I agree completely with MacIntyre when he says, “Without irony . . . some of us some of the time would not be shocked into truthfulness.”

But there are two other points I want to make about truthfulness. First, it seems to me that if we take truthfulness as the fundamental human value, we can see that humility, at least when properly deployed, is itself a manifestation of truthfulness and not some added on value. One cannot be truthful without some humility about one’s ability to understand the world one inhabits or to understand oneself as an enquirer into that world. So, in the deep sense of truthfulness, we do not need to say that “truthfulness by itself is insufficient”: the humility required is itself part of truth’s sufficiency. Second, there is an aspect of truthfulness that MacIntyre does not focus on in his comments: the fullness of truthfulness. When we think, for example, of the true cross or a true friend or a truly religious person, we are concerned not just with accuracy or faithfulness to norms, but with a fullness of being. When I think of my life-long friend Fred, for example, I realize not just that he has been a real friend to me over the decades, but that his friendship fills him up, as it were, expresses who he most genuinely is. Now if we take the fullness of truthfulness seriously, we can see another reason why the possibility of irony can be so important. When it is occurring in the right sort of way it fills one up with an anxious longing to figure out—in a practical sort of way—what the goodness of, say, teaching consists in. When deployed on the right occasion in the right sort of way, the truthfulness that is irony is a fullness of truth.