











































[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 1-8]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Interview: Jonathan Lear, The University of Chicago 

ALAN D. PICHANICK 
Villanova University 
 
 
Jonathan Lear’s latest book, A Case for Irony (Harvard University Press), explores the idea that 
irony, understood rightly, is essential to our lives as human beings. Drawing on his studies of 
Socrates, Kierkegaard, and psychoanalysis, Lear provides a compelling account for us to rethink 
irony today and commit ourselves to a different understanding of it. Lear is currently the John U. 
Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of 
Philosophy at The University of Chicago, where he teaches and writes about questions at the 
intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. I had the chance to talk with him about A Case 
for Irony in April 2012. What follows below is a transcript of that discussion.   

 
 
Pichanick: What led you to write a book about irony? How did your interests in the subject 
grow out of previous interests and questions about the themes at the intersections of 
psychoanalysis and philosophy? 

Lear: Well, you know as well as I do that at The University of Chicago we tend to teach single 
books as a course. Certainly I have done that and I spent a period of time teaching texts by 
Kierkegaard, really to learn him better than I thought I understood him. I wanted to come to grips 
with Kierkegaard’s thinking, and in particular that grows from a long-standing work I have been 
doing on Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. I knew that Kierkegaard was engaged significantly with 
Plato and Socrates. The figure of Socrates loomed very large for Kierkegaard and I wanted to get 
a deeper understanding of what that engagement was in particular because he was a modern 
figure, living in nineteenth-century Europe and reflecting, drawing upon the ancient world for a 
kind of moral sustenance. I wanted to have a better understanding of how he understood the 
legacy of the ancient world for his contemporary world. So that is how I started, as an open-
ended inquiry into his thought and engagement with the figure of Socrates. 

So I would teach a text in a term and the years went by. I mean I would work my way through a 
lot of material in the classroom and the more I got into the text the more I realized that what he 
was saying about irony didn’t really fit all the dictionary definitions. I had been sort of taught 
about what irony meant and it’s not they had nothing to do with it, but it seemed like a poor fit. 

And as I read some of the later work, especially pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, I 
realized that Climacus was very critical of his own work on irony, the original book, The 
Concept of Irony,1 so I also realized that if you read contemporary lit on Socrates and irony they 
would all refer to passages in [The Concept of] Irony and there were no references to the thought 



Interview: Jonathan Lear  2 

that Kierkegaard had gone on to reject in significant ways that early work of his. Then I read 
these late diary entries, things he wrote just before his death about irony, and I realized that there 
had been a development of his thought. There was a puzzling and hard-to-understand … and yet 
it was the hard-to-understand part of it that seemed to be the part that made it the most significant 
for Kierkegaard. So that was all in my mind. I mean it just sort of arose in the process that 
happens at The University of Chicago of reading books together in a seminar. Then I just 
happened to get an invitation from Harvard University to give the Tanner Lectures on Human 
Values and I just at that point thought, “Well, this would be an occasion to try to pull my 
thoughts together.” I mean I had a lot of notes and thought on it but I hadn’t really pulled them 
together and so the occasion came up and it was really sort of how it happened. It’s not like I 
knew where I was going from the beginning. 

But the more I got into it, the more intriguing I saw that it was. And also it came more and more 
… I mean, I began to feel that I more and more understood why Kierkegaard thought this was so 
important to living a human life and I also thought that the standard reception of irony either as a 
kind of deception or as a kind of witty detachment is really missing the central issues about why 
irony matters for us as humans. So I thought I had a great topic to work with. 

Pichanick: So, can I jump in? 

Lear: The more I thought about it the more I came to see irony as a kind of anxious, uncanny 
disruption. I began to wonder how much of this is possible because my Freudian interests kicked 
in and I began to wonder how much more of this is possible for us because we are creatures with 
a sort of percolating unconscious.  

Pichanick: So, could I ask about this misunderstanding of irony as deception, or as being 
detached? What is it about that that makes it a misunderstanding and how do you think we 
should correct that misunderstanding? 

Lear: Well, I think that that’s a really good question, because I mean in some sense it’s not a 
misunderstanding. I think it is very important to grasp the sense in which it is not a 
misunderstanding before you grasp the sense in which it is. I mean, it is certainly right that if you 
go back to the ancient Greek, to the idea of eirōneía when Thrasymachus and Callicles and 
Gorgias and Alcibiades accuse Socrates of deploying his typical eirōneía I think that there is no 
doubt that they are accusing him of a kind of masking or deceptiveness or deviousness, so you 
know that that’s not a mistake. 

It’s certainly not a mistake to make the accusation [of deceptiveness] and I also think that if the 
English word “irony” is used by speakers to mean that then that is one of the things irony means. 

Pichanick: Right, right. 

Lear: You know, a billion English speakers can’t be wrong about what the English word means.  



3  Pichanick 

What I talk about is really something that I think is being poorly understood if that’s what you 
think it all amounts to. What I think Kierkegaard did and I think this is a really interesting issue: 
how ironic are you going to be about irony itself? Or, how are you going to use the occasion of 
the discussion of irony to actually be ironic? Or, are you just going to be didactic about irony? 
As Kierkegaard matured, he became more and more ironic about irony and what he, I think, did 
was he sort of used the term for what he took Socrates to be doing at the moment that he was 
being accused of deploying his typical eirōneía, so that’s what made it so important for him to 
explore the issue of Socrates. These very unreliable characters, I mean, each of these figures of 
Alcibiades, Thrasymachus, Gorgias, and Callicles, they’re very brilliant people, all of them with 
very flawed characters, and so I think that Kierkegaard’s thought was, well, at the moment it is 
true they are accusing him of being deceptive but what is Socrates actually doing? 

In that moment, what illustrated that kind of criticism? From these kinds of people? I mean, 
basically Kierkegaard is treating them as unreliable – very smart, very brilliant very insightful – 
but ultimately unreliable narrators and with distorted visions of things. And so he then becomes 
quite playful with the concept of irony and says, “What is Socrates actually doing in these 
moments?” And what Kierkegaard sees, I think correctly, is that these are moments of intense 
earnestness; they are not deceptive at all although they appear like deception to people who can’t 
really see what Socrates is doing. 

So that’s what you miss if you just stick with [the thought that] irony must be deception and 
that’s the mistake there. The mistake is to think that it must be deception because that’s what 
eirōneía means and that’s what Callicles meant. I mean, that’s all true, but to think that’s the 
whole story, that’s the place where the mistake comes. Because it’s not the whole story and 
what’s in addition to that part of it is Kierkegaard’s point of view, why he took irony to be so 
important to the human condition. 

Pichanick: Right. Could you say more about what we are being earnest about? In the book you 
analyze Kierkegaard’s question, “Among all Christians, is there a Christian?” That seems to be 
the important ironic question, the question that generates an ironic experience. So why is that 
question the question for us to understand? 

Lear: That’s another really good question. I think firstly you can get a lot out of it if you really 
spend some time thinking with it. I think that lots of things can be occasions for irony and it 
doesn’t have to look like that. And then you know the other point I make in the book is that a 
sentence like that is neither necessary nor, and this is the really important part, nor is it sufficient 
for irony. I think that the not sufficient part is really crucial to get because I think that a sentence 
like that can and for the most part is used totally un-ironically. This is a place where there is an 
occasion for irony; the structure of irony is especially clearly displayed. So the sentence “among 
all Christians, is there a Christian?” can be used in an extremely straightforward way where we 
immediately hear it as what I would say as sort of superego terms, raising the question, “Do 



Interview: Jonathan Lear  4 

people who put themselves forward as Christians, do they really live up to Christian ideals or do 
they fall short?” 

And just as such, I want to say there is no irony there at all, but what I want to say is that there 
are occasions where the issue has to be – it’s got to be – in the first person. It could be either in 
the first person singular or first person plural. In this case I think the first person singular is the 
appropriate category. So you have to imagine that you yourself are that Christian asking the 
question. So that’s Step One: you have to assume the first personal engagement with it, although 
the personal pronoun doesn’t occur there. I am asking that question, and I am asking that 
question qua Christian, and I start to experience it. At first one of the features of it has got to be 
just the content of the question, the what of the question. But the how of the question, as I 
experienced it first personally as addressed to me or confronting me, has got to be an occasion 
for shaking me up, via my own sense of Christian engagement. Now the nature of the being 
shaken up when it’s working, which I am happy to say is rare, but when it is working ironically, 
the nature of the shaking up takes the form of uncanny anxiousness. It’s anxious longing and 
what’s so great about the question is that it shows the uncanniness is in the formal structure of 
the sentence. The first occurrence of “Christian” is like picking me out in my self-understanding 
in general, an understanding of myself living a Christian life. But the second occurrence of 
“Christian,” when the sentence is working ironically, is you might say the return of the familiar 
as unfamiliar and is disruptive in its familiar unfamiliarity. So its uncanniness is right there in the 
structure of the sentence.  

Pichanick: So in the book you use the phrase – when this happens it’s like you’ve lost the 
ground beneath your feet.  

Lear: That’s right. I think this is the experience of irony and the experience of irony is a 
particular species of anxiety. And that’s what I am trying to capture, this particularity, the species 
nature of the genus anxiety is irony. 

Pichanick: Right. So, why would I ever want this to happen to me? Somebody might say, “It 
sounds like you’re falling into the abyss.” Is somebody missing something when they ask that? 

Lear: I think that’s a moment of it. But, I think, “Why would I want this?” There are two 
different reasons. I think the experience of irony in itself is neither good nor bad. 

It’s an occasion that could have a deleterious effect on life. I mean, it doesn’t have to be good. It 
might be neutral, but it does provide an answer to your question. I think it does provide an 
occasion you might say of calling oneself back to one’s own best self. Calling oneself, shaking 
oneself up in the name of oneself. 

Because in so far as the category Kierkegaard was working with – Christian, I mean – you don’t 
have to be working with that one but we have been talking about it so we can go on with it, but 
whatever the categories are, [they are] the important ones in life. I focused on practical identity 



5  Pichanick 

because that’s what Christine Korsgaard was talking about,2 and others who I was engaging with. 
But it doesn’t have to be your identity. It can be whatever central values there are to your life that 
you are already committed to as being what really matters to who you are and what you are 
going to be. And yet you are called back to them. Maybe you haven’t been living quite as well 
with respect to them as you could. So it’s a kind of – when it’s working well, it’s a kind of call of 
your own best self back to you, without it being a superego-voice just falling short of a well-
established ideal. It’s shaking up your sense of ideals as well as your sense of yourself. 

Pichanick: Interesting. You mentioned your colleague – well, not your colleague but your dialog 
partner – Chris Korsgaard. So I wanted to ask you why you chose to write the book the way you 
did, where the first half is a presentation of your Tanner Lectures and the second half is 
presented as several dialogues between you and colleagues. Is that connected to the content of 
the book? 

Lear: Yes. I thought there’s always a question in writing philosophy of form and content and 
how they fit together. When I went up to give the lectures I was very impressed with the 
discussions. On the one hand they didn’t agree with me and on the other hand I didn’t agree with 
them but I really thought that this was… I knew philosophy becomes alive in living conversation 
and then I felt, “This is a living conversation,” so it struck me that this might be a really good 
form for the book. Just as dialogues are really a good form in Plato for what he is doing, the 
places where Chris Korsgaard and I disagree are places where the reader can make up his or her 
own mind about where they stand and give me more of a chance to elaborate what I was thinking 
and also show how people can understand each other. So for me, it was the hope of presenting a 
living conversation to a reader as a way of engaging the reader and his or her own philosophical 
thinking about the subject. It is very much in my mind that this might be a very nice way to 
present an account of irony. 

Pichanick: So would learning to read a Platonic dialogue the way Plato wanted or a 
pseudonymous work by Kierkegaard the way Kierkegaard wanted help us to understand irony 
better? 

Lear: I think so but I think the issue – you used the word “understanding” and I want to make 
clear that the relevant understanding at issue is practical understanding, which is also taken by 
academic philosophers to be theoretical understanding. And I think that what Plato was trying to 
do and I think Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author was trying to do it in different ways was to 
shake us up as readers. It’s not just about coming to a theoretical understanding of what irony – 
the concept of irony – is. But [it’s also about] putting ourselves in a position where we can grasp 
in terms of living why there is something to be said for irony in the human experience. 

Pichanick: That makes me want to ask, is irony something you hope both your students 
experience in the classroom and your patients in psychoanalysis? Do those two experiences 
compare? 



Interview: Jonathan Lear  6 

Lear: I think it comes up in different ways, but yes. I think that in the philosophical case of 
students studying Plato or Socrates in class, I take it that coming to an understanding of, for 
instance, Socratic ignorance: what does Socratic ignorance amount to? I think there’s a huge 
difference between grasping intellectually that Socrates was the guy who said he knew he didn’t 
know and internally developing a sense of what that kind of ignorance consists in, why it’s 
important to human life and how to integrate it into a human life. I am not saying that students 
should succeed in that, but if there’s no practical understanding and no practical engagement – 
how does this kind of ignorance arise in my life? Then I think something has gone missing in the 
process, the engagement. 

Pichanick: As a professor myself, I feel we teach under external pressures to show that students 
must acquire quantitatively measurable skills as a result of their education and one could wonder 
about patients in psycho-therapy here as well. So I want to ask what you think the prospects are 
for something like the ironic experience you’re talking about as being a real goal of education. 
What do you think it would take for that kind of idea to sink in? 

Lear: I don’t think I can talk a lot about social movements but we have noticed that the 
humanities are under some kind of critique and attack and questioning why should there be 
humanities at all in a university setting. And I think people in the humanities ought to have some 
answers. From my point of view, you can’t really come up with an answer that is going to satisfy 
unless you bring in an essential aspect of the humanities, whether it’s literature or philosophy, 
that the humanities have value because when it’s working, they are experienced as… they are 
addressed to us in the first person. There is a first-personal confrontation with the words of 
another, whether it be Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Homer, or Plato. It’s not just that these writers were 
great writers; their greatness consists in an ability to strike you, the reader, and leave haunting 
words to which you are called upon somehow to react. And I see that kind of personal 
engagement is a constituent of the humanities when the humanities are working well. And from 
that point of view, irony is a specific example of this kind of first-personal address and 
confrontation. 

Pichanick: That’s interesting. Next week, you continue your dialogue with Alasdair MacIntyre. 
How do you compare his views to yours? 

Lear: I’ll know a lot better after… I guess we will have to find out. Alasdair MacIntyre is 
someone I very much admire and I have long admired him. I’ve been reading his work since I 
was a very young man and learning from him. I’m curious to hear what he has to say but I don’t 
yet know. From my point of view, I use the example of being a Christian as an example because 
Kierkegaard used it, and just as an attempt to explicate Kierkegaard. I stuck with his own 
example for a while. I also talk about other things but the issue of the religious commitment 
and/or Christianity in particular is not my central interest. My central interest is the phenomena 
of irony and I think irony can occur in perfectly secular or atheist contexts as well and I deal with 
that in the book. But Kierkegaard was a Protestant and MacIntyre is a committed Catholic so I 



7  Pichanick 

would expect there to be some difference there between Kierkegaard and MacIntyre on the 
engagement and that might come up in his discussion of my book. I can’t tell you what will 
happen but I’m looking forward to it. 

Pichanick: Some people might label both you and Alasdair MacIntyre “public intellectuals.” 
What do you think about that label? 

Lear: I’m not sure why. I don’t think I’ve done as much of that as I used to do. Not that I’m 
against it, just that I have been busy with my own academic writing and research. And though I 
very much like my own book, I don’t think of it as a best-seller. I knew in making the decision 
that the book should have the form it has – where I would receive responses by commentators 
and then my responses to their responses – I knew that it would sell many fewer books than if I 
had written a different kind of book, but I wanted it to have this form. I actually feel I have been 
so busy with my academic work I have not written as many [non-academic pieces]. I used to 
write more op-ed pieces and pieces for The New Republic and I haven’t been doing that just 
because I have been so busy. So, what I try to do is write on topics that I hope are broad and deep 
philosophical interests and I try to write in a way that is clear as can be. I try to make my writing 
as open as possible to a readership. The previous book on Radical Hope3 which was about the 
Crow Indians – there are a lot of non-philosophers who have read that book. It’s been read by 
anthropologists and Christians as well, Indians, Native Americans… It’s been pretty widely read 
and I’m pretty glad about that but I’m not sure that would make me a public intellectual. It’s just 
that I'm writing books of wider interest. About the specific question you asked about public 
intellectuals, I don’t know what I think about the term but I do think that, I wish I was writing 
more, taking more of a stance. I do think I’m in favor of philosophers taking a role of a citizen in 
the polis, taking a stand on the important issues of the day. I haven’t been doing it much but I am 
in favor of people doing it more than I am doing it.  

Pichanick: I feel like there is a final question that must be asked. Our whole conversation 
between you and me about irony – a professor talking to his former student about irony, 
education, the soul – I think in your sense might not have been an experience of irony for either 
of us. So what would it be for us to have spoken ironically? I guess you talked about this in the 
beginning – to speak ironically about irony in your sense. 

Lear: What do you think? 

Pichanick: You’re asking me? What do I think? Well, my response is now I feel like we have to 
start over and maybe that’s the ironic part. 

Lear: I’m going to leave that as an exercise for the listener. 

Pichanick: Very good.  

 



Interview: Jonathan Lear  8 

 
Notes 
 

1. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. 
Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  

2. Korsgaard, Christine. 2011. “Self-Constitution and Irony.” In Jonathan Lear, The Case 
for Irony (Tanner Lectures on Human Values). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 
Press. 75–83. 

3. Lear, Jonathan. 2008. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. 
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 


