Irony, Socratic and otherwise

"Contrary to present-day prophets of self-discovery [...] there is no authentic core you discover when you probe yourself. Rather, knowing oneself requires a commitment to travel outside of oneself and join with others. Self-knowledge is a destination not an origin. At the beginning, before examination, we are strangers to ourselves.

existential self-examination

"In this sense Socrates foreshadows the way modern thinkers emphasize embodied knowledge. Words can be used to imagine or describe, to mount [hypotheses] or to theorize, but Socrates wants speech to have the effect of a performative promise. It essentially amounts to the claim: here I am, here is what I believe in, here is myself. Anything less will be mere gesturing in the air.

[...]

"Irony today might at bottom say that 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.' As a cultural norm it might even amount to the claim that it is impossible to mean what you say. How different this is from Socratic irony, which urges us to mean exactly what we say and admit that closing the gap between what we are and what we express is impossible."

--Roy Brand, LoveKnowledge : The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida (New York : Columbia University, 2013), pgs. 13-14. (Italics above are in the original.)