/lit/ - Literature

Retroactively refuted by Hegel

"Irony is only a trifling with everything, and it can transform all things into show: to this subjectivity nothing is any longer serious, for any seriousness which it has, immediately becomes dissipated again in jokes, and all noble or divine truth vanishes away or becomes mere triviality.
Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it, — and, with the assertion that it stands on the very summit of religion and philosophy, falls rather back into the vanity of wilfulness".
He's obviously talking about irony in a very specific Socratic context in relation to his own system but still.