Chic Ironic Bitterness

6. The Descent of Inner Dependence

chapter six The Descent of Inner Dependence p Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward be at one. —Socrates Any moment you choose you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man ‹nd a quieter or more untroubled retreat. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (AD 167) Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth. —Augustine, De vera Religione (AD 390) The inner man and its liberty . . . needs neither laws nor good work; nay, they are even hurtful to it. —Martin Luther, “On Christian Freedom” (1520) Morality is character, character is that which is engraved . . . for character is really inwardness. —Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846) What’s gonna set you free? Look inside and you’ll see. —The Beastie Boys, “Gratitude” (1992) There is a larger picture prior to the modernist model of how irony functions within the subject; it’s also a model essential to the role of 173 the self in the social contract. Romanticism requires a certain view of the self to operate. Civility operates upon the same logic of social distancing . Both require certain self-imposed regulations and desires for the self’s public presentation. But for even this division to be possible, there ‹rst must be a valuation of private interiority; there must be an view of the self as something existentially special when contrasted with the world of objects and events. There is mind or spirit, internal to a being, and there is matter, external to the being and in the world. This view is incredibly commonsense for us, for it forms the very philosophical foundation of modern personhood. We no longer have to think about it. But we may have to in order to address the source of our current cultural jam. How did this picture come to be? What would the self have to look like in order to conceive of it as a place to turn to for guidance and standards by which to judge the world? What are the philosophical narratives that went into establishing this distance from the world such that one could actually judge it? What sorts of speci‹c religious directives encouraged this movement—and more importantly , why? Prior to psychoanalytic theory or discussions of how cool defends the ego from attack, how did this picture of the self as something that needs to (or could) be defended originate? These are hyperbolically enormous questions that I cannot fully cover responsibly here. Still, they remain interesting questions, and it is important to recount, however brie›y, the story of this valuation and turn toward “inwardness” in the Western religious and philosophical tradition, as such directional change plays a vital role in the creation of irony as a worldview. This story comprises a major narrative in Western philosophy, and thus, in the modern liberal conception of individual subjectivity. But in order that I do not myself overstate, generalize, and simplify, Chic Ironic Bitterness 174 Both Romantic irony and civility require certain self-imposed regulations for the self ’s public presentation . I will ‹rst say it in another’s words. This way you can blame him. The political philosopher Charles W. Anderson has keenly observed of this tradition and narrative of inwardness: [That] the individual has the power to transcend, and thus to assess, culture is a view that is fundamental to the liberalism of Kant and Hegel, Mill and Dewey, as well as to the individualism of Plato and Aristotle, the Roman Stoics, and all of Christianity. This idea of individuality runs deep through our philosophical heritage. It is, I believe, fundamental to our liberal public philosophy.1 That is to say, the notion of private interiority as carved out by philosophical ideas of personhood, and as being the fundamental “location” and “guarantee” of individuality, would eventually create the foundation for the entire notion of outwardly extending privacy—including property, space, and constructs of the legal rights of persons. It is the foundation of individual autonomy, of the person as a self-possessed entity, implying a certain detachment and disinterestedness, the basis of liberalism in the West—indeed a continuing set of values that guides the behaviors of nations and laws in the present age. Augustine Augustine had much to do with our modern notions and images of the self as a private place inside of us, something sacred to be protected. Augustine’s view of the...