Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [82]
Or perhaps we’re even worse than this. Alexander Nehamas distinguishes between Socratic and Platonic irony, and he suggests that Platonic irony is deeper, darker, and more disdainful. The target of Socratic irony is the person with whom he speaks. The target of Plato’s irony is his audience, his readers, the self-deceived ones who listen to Socrates and share his values but do not change their lives. They understand his condemnation of the shadow world, but they devote themselves to it no less vigorously.
Plato lures the readers of his early dialogues into a cunningly induced state of confident ignorance. He instills confidence by lulling us into believing that we know better than Socrates’ interlocutors. He makes us presume that, unlike them, we see Socrates’ point; he makes us imagine we agree, if not with every single one of Socrates’ views, at least with his general outlook on life. And he displays our ignorance by showing that we do nothing of the sort … Plato turns us into participants in his dialogues, almost into characters of his own fictions. The dialogues’ final audience, watching all watchers, is Plato himself, who stands behind the most distant observers of Socrates’ dialectic and follows ironically the dramatic action he has created.140
Are we the ultimate targets of Colbert’s irony, and is he the final audience, watching all watchers of his show? He seems to admit as much when he discusses the origins of The Colbert Report. Bill O’Reilly is one model for his character, he says, but not the only one. When he developed his character and planned his show, he “was thinking of passion and emotion and certainty over information,” he said. “Passion and emotion, what you feel in your gut,” what Colbert famously calls “truthiness,” “the thesis statement of the whole show—that [truthiness] is more important than [true] information to the public at large, not just the people who provide it” (Colbert on Charlie Rose). This is a stunning revelation. Colbert intends to mock all things truthy, the peddlers and the consumers of truthiness, ABC news and the people who watch it, our broken election system and the people who accept it, our sophistic political representatives and the people who vote for them.
Colbert is not just parodying Bill O’Reilly and the others who “provide” America with her truthiness. He’s going after us as well. There’s something deplorable about a society that embraces truthiness as a way of life, as we do. But there’s something even worse about us, Colbert’s audience, because we identify with Colbert’s critique of American culture but embrace that culture no less vigorously. We accept its profound flaws and injustices with a shrug of the shoulders and a few laughs. We want the revolution, but only if we don’t have to do anything or make any real sacrifices.
Colbert Is (the Tragedy and Comedy of) America, and So Are We
That’s one possible interpretation of Colbert’s irony. There is another, and it attributes less disdain and more loving concern to Colbert.
At the end of Plato’s Symposium, it’s dawn following a long winter night of drinking and debauchery. Socrates is seated between Agathon, Athens’s great tragedian, and Aristophanes, Athens’s great comic playwright. The three of them are passing a large bowl of wine from left to right, drinking and following the trail of the night’s argument. Everyone else has either left the party or fallen asleep. Socrates, who is unaffected by alcohol, eventually outlasts everyone. Aristophanes falls asleep, and he is followed by Agathon, but not before being told by Socrates that the greatest poet ought to be capable of writing a single work that can be read both as a tragedy and as a comedy. One classic question here is: How if at all does this formula apply to Plato’s philosophy? Does he think the human condition