Notes
INTRODUCTION
. For the notion of “humor,” see Nilsen 1993a, 302–6; Nilsen and Nilsen 2000, 57, 59, 293, 324.
. For the relation of philosophy to the comic prior to the eighteenth century, see Amir 2013b.
. Kierkegaard and Shaftesbury are connected also through Johann G. von Herder, Shaftesbury’s admirer and Hamann’s follower (Sparling 2011), whose influence on Søren Kierkegaard is significant.
. For Gilles Deleuze’s view of humor in the good life, as well as George Bataille’s and Clément Rosset’s views of laughter in the good life, see Nietzsche’s French Laughing Followers (work in progress).
. For Frederick Nietzsche’s and George Santayana’s views of laughter in the good life, and Henri Bergson’s view of laughter tout court, see Laughter and the Good Life (work in progress).
. For a thorough criticism of the conventional account of philosophy’s attitude toward humor, see Amir 2014.
CHAPTER 1: SHAFTESBURY—RIDICULE AS THE TEST OF TRUTH
. The references to Shaftesbury’s works correspond to the abbreviations listed at the beginning of the book. The abbreviated names of works are followed by numbers: capital Roman numerals indicate books, lower case Roman numerals indicate parts or volumes, Arabic numbers indicate sections. An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit is divided into books, parts, and sections (i.e., Inquiry, I, i, 1); Miscellaneous Reflections on the Preceding Treatises, and other Critical Subjects is divided into books and chapters (Misc., I, i); the Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (Essay), Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (Soliloquy), and The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (Moralists) are divided into parts and sections (i.e., Essay, I, 1); finally, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord is divided into sections (i.e., Letter, 1). Often book references are followed by a reference to Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., indicated by CR (ed. John M. Robertson 1963 [1900], two vols.), followed by the volume number in capitalized Roman numerals and an Arabic number indicating the page. For example: CR II, 14, stands for Characteristics, vol. II, page 14. On the rare occasions that a reference is made to the three volume edition of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., (1837, 6th edition, 3 vols.), it is indicated by CR3, followed by the number of the volume. References to The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (ed. Benjamin Rand, 1900), appear as abbreviation and page (i.e. Life, 1), and to the remainder of the material in the Shaftesbury Papers in the Public Record Office at Kew, Surrey, as the abbreviation P.R.O followed by references to arrangements there. For example, “Pathologia sive Explicatio Affectum Humanorum” is located at P.R.O 30/24/26/7/I, “Design of a Socratick History” at P.R.O 30/24/27/14, and “Askêmata” at P.R.O 30/24/27/10. These references, as well as references to other material found in the Shaftesbury Papers in the Public Record Office, are followed by an Arabic number indicating pages (i.e., P.R.O 30/24/27/14, 6).
. The first earl encountered John Locke for the first time in the 1660s while in need of Locke’s medical expertise. However, in subsequent years, the relation took on other dimensions as well. Most famously, Locke advised Shaftesbury on political matters and developed sophisticated arguments in support of the Whig cause (Klein 1994, 15, n. 31). Locke also was close to the Shaftesbury household and was in charge of educating the first earl’s grandchildren. Although Locke’s social and intellectual ties with the Shaftesbury household were closest during the 1670s, the third earl of Shaftesbury maintained contacts with Locke after the death of the first earl in 1683 and indeed to the end of Locke’s life in 1704. Philosophical discussion was not a staple of that relationship. However, a number of letters between them dating to the early 1690s do broach philosophic subjects. Indeed, Locke encouraged his correspondent to convey his reflections, but Shaftesbury seemed to have felt a mixture of respect and intimidation, complicated by a sense of being misunderstood by Locke, who appeared to be an unsympathetic reader: after a few stabs at a philosophic exchange, the younger man developed an embarrassed and self-effacing discomfort mixed with rebellious impatience (Locke 1976, III, 709–10; IV, 248–95, 666–71; V, 650–66, 123–5). Substantive discussion disappeared from this correspondence after 1694 or so. Establishing a philosophic identity distinct from Locke and from the sort of philosophizing Locke represented became a theme in Shaftesbury’s career. Locke’s personal proximity to the young future third earl helps explain the emotional intensity that later informed Shaftesbury’s search for a philosophical identity—his attack on Lockean positions involved attacking someone with whom he had a personal connection.
. Shaftesbury knew Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a French Protestant scholar and philosopher, who after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes settled in Holland. Bayle was renowned for his Dictionary (1734), and a skepticism targeting Christian orthodoxies in particular. Shaftesbury met with Bayle during his stays in Rotterdam and praised him in a letter to John Darby, publisher of the Characteristics (dated 2 February 1708, P.R.O. 30/24/22/4 f., 63; in Life, 385–6). John Robertson maintains that through Bayle Shaftesbury was influenced by Spinoza’s philosophy. In his introduction to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, Robertson refers to Spinoza as Shaftesbury’s “chief forerunner” and notes that “his critics and commentators in general have rather oddly overlooked the fact that his philosophy, as regards its bases, is drawn more or less directly from Spinoza” (Robertson 1963, xxxi). Referring to the Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, Robertson doubts Shaftesbury’s capacity at the age of eighteen to have produced from his own meditations “a finished and formal philosophical treatise, of which the theses were capable of influencing European thought for a century,” and calls it “an extravagant assumption.” Furthermore, he claims that “it is morally certain that his main ideas were given him; and as a matter of fact they are nearly all explicit or implicit in Spinoza, whose teaching Shaftesbury was sure to hear of in his one-year sojourn in Holland in 1698, if he had not studied it before. …” (Robertson 1963, xxxi). Eric Weil, who sees Shaftesbury as an atheist mystic, notes the influence of Spinoza on Shaftesbury’s version of pantheism, if only through the chapter dedicated to it in Bayle’s Dictionary (Bayle 1734; Weil 1967, 172; see Larthomas 1986, 365). Stanley Grean notes the resemblance of the overall tendency between Spinoza’s and Shaftesbury’s philosophies, but does not infer a direct influence: “Shaftesbury’s philosophy is part of a broad movement—not always connected—which manifested itself in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe in such diverse quarters as Spinozism, Hasidism, and Cambridge Platonism, a movement to recover the joy in religion” (Grean 1967, 31).
. Shaftesbury introduced the term moral sense to philosophy, but did not make much of it. He also was the first to liken moral sense to a sense of harmony in music and proportion in architecture and art. Shaftesbury maintains that we are disposed to act virtuously by our affection for virtue. Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, his philosophical heirs, call this affection for virtue “moral sense.”
. Even as a moralist, Shaftesbury is not considered to be speculative enough (see Klein 1994, 48–51; Grean 1967, 8). The lack of recognition of Shaftesbury in the history of philosophy may be due to his view of philosophy that was different from the view accepted in English and American universities at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Kuklick 1977; Rajchman 1985, ix–xxx).
. Shaftesbury’s influence on Hutcheson’s early work is impossible to miss; see Gill 2006, chap. 10. For Hutcheson on laughter, see Telfer 1995. Commenting on criticism of Shaftesbury’s views, Stanley Grean remarks that “the power of Shaftesbury’s thought … is seen in the very strength and virulence of the attacks made on his philosophy in the eighteenth century, a notable example being Berkeley’s Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher (1732), wherein Shaftesbury is so unfairly represented” (Grean 1967, x). George Berkeley attacked Shaftesbury’s Deism in the name of polite Christianity. So did Joseph Butler, an Anglican minister who became bishop of Durham in 1750, in his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736). In the name of egoism, Bernard Mandeville attacked the Shaftesburean account of natural sociability in The Fable of the Bees (1705).
. After reading Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, Leibniz wrote: “I found in it almost all of my Theodicy before it saw the light of day. … If I had seen this work before my Theodicy was published, I should have profited as I ought and should have borrowed its great passages” (Leibniz 1956, II, 103). The Theodicy was published in 1710 and The Moralists in 1709.
. Herder, Letter 33 (1794), in Sämmtliche Werke, 1877–1913, VVII, 158 (my translation).
. See Tave 1960, vii–ix. For the Latitudinarian Divines Isaac Barrow and John Hacket, and for the journalists of the Tatler and the Spectator, see there 1960, 4–8, and 8–15, respectively.
. Willey 1986, 58; Robertson 1963, 8.
. Shaftesbury’s follower, Francis Hutcheson, has been credited with providing a clear definition of humor as incongruity and with rebutting Hobbes’ theory of humor as superiority (Hutcheson 1750). However, he only reformulated and systematized Shaftesbury’s views on humor.
. In 1699 John Toland published without Shaftesbury’s permission his precocious Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in some respects his best book. In The Moralists, he put forth his ethical doctrine afresh, with a lighter and more unsystematic touch. Later, he incorporated the Inquiry into the Characteristics (1711).
. Many Britons came to think of Shaftesbury’s grandfather, the first earl of Shaftesbury, not only as a failure but also as an object of scorn and an example of the worst kind of conniving, manipulative, opportunistic politician (see Voitle 1984, 8; Christie 1871). Shaftesbury must have been sharply affected by his grandfather’s sullied reputation.
. Locke 1824a, VIII, 272; quoted in Basu 1999b, 158.
. The counsel Shaftesbury repeatedly stresses in the Letter Concerning Enthusiasm regards the use of ridicule as the proper regimen against “enthusiasm.” Robertson notes, however, that “the very self-consciousness of the Letter might alone suggest the manner of its inception. It does not employ banter, but prescribes it: A man spontaneously given that way would have made the fun he recommended” (Robertson 1963, xxi). Moreover, Robertson notes that earlier that year, in the first of his Letters to a Student, dated February 24, 1706–1707, that Shaftesbury “is anything but good-humored about the ‘enthusiasts’ ” (xxi). Yet even in the year in which he published his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and his Essay on Wit and Humour we find him writing to his protégé with extraordinary heat against Lucian as “a wretch who was truly the most profane and impious” (Letter of January 28, 1708–1709), “a deliverance so surprising,” according to Robertson, “as to make us feel afresh that the critic’s leaning to humorous methods was a rather cultivated mood with him” (Robertson 1963, xxii).
. To Coste, July 25, 1712 (Life, 504). The denunciation of Swift as a false wit follows the passage quoted. Shaftesbury had strong private qualifications regarding the way in which he had stated his public case for “ridicule.” Peter Coste, his French translator, sent copies of Shaftesbury’s works to Leibniz for comments. Leibniz was surprised to find many thoughts that accorded with his own principles (Leibniz 1875–90, III, 381), but in the matter of ridicule he had reservations. He claimed that the best and most important things could be ridiculed falsely, and even when ridicule was on the side of truth, it was perhaps too dangerous to be allowed. The religious effect of using ridicule against superstition, he feared, could encourage impiety. The point at which Shaftesbury writes that the author seems to despise himself is at the beginning of the Miscellaneous Reflections, where, with light self-deprecation, he resumes a relaxed mode after the more severe and more rhapsodic Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit and The Moralists.
. See Wolf 1993, for an analysis of the style of The Adept Ladys, and Wolf 1988 for the wit of A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.
. As one of the first attackers observes derisively, it is “good humour” which is “this Gentleman’s fondling word”; his “most sovereign remedy” is “a certain mixture of ridicule and good-humour” (Fowler 1708, 2; see 1709, 21). According to Stuart Tave, John Brown, who wrote the most elaborate of the replies, came close to the truth when he said that Shaftesbury “sets out” with ridicule, and then “slides insensibly into mere encomiums on good-breeding, cheerfulness, urbanity, and free Enquiry; and then, from these premises, often draws Consequences in favour of ridicule, as if it were an equivalent term” (Brown 1751a, 71). But Charles Bulkeley, Shaftesbury’s best defender, came even closer. Shaftesbury’s method, Bulkeley said, is “no other than reasoning upon every subject in an easy, cheerful, good humoured way. … Nothing can be plainer than that his Lordship uses the word ridicule as synonymous to freedom, familiarity, good humour, and the like” (Bulkeley 1751, 19–20). In another reply to Brown he pointed out that the ridicule Shaftesbury recommended was always of “cheerfulness and good-humour,” designed as a remedy for the gloom of superstition and the extravagance of enthusiasm (Bulkeley 1752, VI, 10–12). Shaftesbury’s “innate disposition,” according to John Toland, was to “Socratic Irony and innocent Raillery” (Toland 1721, viii), and these, Tave adds, “we know from Barrow and Addison, are virtual synonyms” (Tave 1960, 36).
. For Leibniz’s criticism of Shaftesbury, see Leibniz 1875–90, III, 407–17, 419, 423–31. When Peter Coste, Shaftesbury’s French translator and the person who introduced him to Leibniz, relayed Leibniz’s comments to him, Shaftesbury did not rebuke Leibniz’s criticism in the letter he wrote to Coste (July 25, 1712; in Life, 504). This impressed Leibniz so much that after Shaftesbury’s death he spoke of him as a man who recanted his views, who went from being a Lucian to being a Plato, which to Leibniz was a very extraordinary metamorphosis (Leibniz 1875–90, III, 381). It is doubtful, however, that Shaftesbury underwent such a remarkable transformation, and it is quite certain at any rate that he never was a Lucian. Rather, in his warm reaction against the Puritan tradition, he gave the appearance of having fallen into the opposite error of the rake. I believe his true path was the middle way of good humor.
. Letter to Peter Coste, 25 Jul. 1712 (Life, 504).
. Willey 1986, 35; Basil Willey documents these changes in chap. 2.
. See Moralists, iii, 1; Inquiry, I, iii, 3.
. Inquiry, I, i, 2; iii, 3; Moralists, i, 2–3; ii, 4; iii, 2; Letter, 4, 5.
. Inquiry, I, ii, 2; Moralists, ii, 1; Essay, iii, 1.
. For Shaftesbury’s view of the affections, see Grean 1967, chap. 9.
. Inquiry, I, iii, 3; Moralists, ii, 3; Letter, 5.
. For Shaftesbury on miracles, see Willey 1986, 66–67. The Bible is not a book Shaftesbury would highly recommend, and we find him using disparaging irony in the Volterian style regarding certain Old Testament characters. The stories and characters of the Bible, he warns the potential author to whom he addresses his Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, are not fit subjects for a “mere poet,” because they are divinely inspired and thus beyond comprehension (Soliloquy, iii, 3; CR I, 229–31).
. For Shaftesbury’s view of immortality, see Grean 1967, 91–97.
. Inquiry, I, iii, 3; Moralists, ii, 3; Essay, ii, 3, 4.
. Essay, iii, 4; iv, 1; iv, 2; Soliloquy, iv, 3; Moralists, iii, 2.
. In one of his papers on “Cheerfulness,” Joseph Addison writes: “The Creation is a perpetual feast to the Mind of a good Man, every thing that he sees cheers and delights him; Providence has imprinted so many smiles on Nature, that it is impossible for a Mind which is not sunk in more gross and sensual Delights to take a survey of them without several secret Sensations of Pleasure. … Such an habitual Disposition of Mind consecrates every Field and Wood, turns an ordinary walk into a morning or evening Sacrifice, and will improve those transient Gleams of Joy, which naturally brighten up and refresh the Soul on such Occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness” (Addison 1712).
. For Shaftesbury’s ridicule of Hobbes, see Willey 1986, 68–70. Richard Brett notes that Shaftesbury was a disciple of the Cambridge Platonists and, like them, detested the doctrines propounded by Hobbes. Although the latter belonged to an earlier generation, his influence still persisted in Shaftesbury’s day (Brett 1951, 32).
. Moral corruption results either from the excess of the self-directed affections or the social affections, or from the presence of any of the unnatural affections. Unnatural affections lead to neither the good of the individual nor the species, such as delight in witnessing suffering or destruction of others, a delight in disorder or sheer destructiveness, then malice or ill-will, and envy at the prosperity or happiness of another person that in no way interferes with one’s own, then hatred of mankind and society, passions aroused by superstition and related customs, and finally, sexual perversions.
. These instances of the use of “enthusiasm” are drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary entry and from Tucker 1972, 15.
. John Dryden, for instance, used enthusiasm in a purely literary context in the preface to his translation of Juvenal’s Satires in 1693. However, the change was particularly evident in the writings of John Dennis, whose project of rooting literary excellence in religion involved a favorable estimation of the uses of passion and enthusiasm in particular (1939).
. CR3 I, 227; II 139–40, 293–4. The alignment of Locke with Hobbes comes in Shaftesbury’s letter to Michael Ainsworth, June 3, 1709 (Life, 403). Shaftesbury’s analogy of right and wrong in the spheres of music, architecture and painting appears in CR3 I, 214, 251–2; II, 129, 177; Life, 54.
. Clarke 1969, sections 225–6, 230–2; Wollaston 1969, sections 274–90. Charles Taylor explains that “Samuel Clarke and William Wollaston spoke of certain acts being ‘fitting’—e.g., the grateful return of favors for benefits conferred—as though this were something like a logical truth, whose contradictory would be senseless. Hugo Grotius seemed to be invoking principles of this kind in the introduction to The Rights of War and Peace (Grotius 1901, I, I, 10; I, I, 3). Some clung to this form of rationalism because it seemed the only way to defeat the extrinsic theory.” By extrinsic theory Taylor means the view that good is distinguishable from bad, which nevertheless “depend[s] ultimately on self-love or self-interest, once we take into account the full consequences of our actions, including divine rewards and punishments” (Taylor 1989, 254, 259).
. For a discussion of how Shaftesbury influenced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German aesthetic thought, see Cassirer 1953, 198–202.
. Original Letters of Locke, Algernon Sidney, and Anthony Lord Shaftesbury, ed. T. Forster, 1830, 271.
. Chiefly through Henry of Bolinbroke, Shaftesbury’s optimistic theory reached Alexander Pope, who described it in verse in his Essay on Man (1733–4).
. Hippocrates, the fifth-century bc Greek physician, is usually credited with applying Humoralism to medicine. Humoralism as a medical theory retained its popularity for centuries largely through the influence of the writings of Galen of Pergamum, the prominent second-century ad Roman physician and philosopher, whose theories dominated Western medical science for well over a millennium. Through the neo-classical revival in Europe, humor theory dominated medical practice, and the theory of humoral types made periodic appearances in drama. In the Renaissance, Ficino associated melancholy with men of culture, and the theory that genius is associated with melancholy soon became fashionable. In 1858, Rudolf Virchow’s Cellularpathologie decisively displaced humoralism.
. See Joubert 1560, 1579. See the ancient Greek myth of Demeter, cured from melancholy by laughter (Gilhus 1997, chap. 2).
. For a criticism of this argument, see Grean 1967, 79–80.
. For Epictetus’ influence on Shaftesbury, see Long 2001, 262.
. For the Xenophonic Socrates, see Gera 2007. In his categorization of Socrates’ followers, Shaftesbury works out of the doxographical tradition. According to Diogenes Laertius, Socrates’ successors were Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes (Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II, 47), and the latter’s successor, Diogenes the Cynic (I, 15; VI, 2, 15, 21). According to Donald Dudley, however, Antisthenes has no direct relation to the Cynics (Dudley 1937, 1–16). Moreover, the epithetical characterization “manners” that Shaftesbury uses implies a distinctive way of conceiving philosophy: for Shaftesbury, there were no schools of thought in ancient philosophy, only philosophical “manners,” where “manner” conflated two distinct ideas, a mode of inquiry and a manner of expression. This sort of categorization assigned weight not to particular ideas or doctrines, but to the form through which a particular philosophy could be recognized and situated.
. Shaftesbury, Design of a Socratick History, P.R.O. 30/24/27/14, 53.
. Shaftesbury, Design of a Socratick History, P.R.O. 30/24/27/14, 53. Irony appears to be synonymous with humor that designates educated laughter. Horace’s letters are also presented as a model, whose “concealment of order and method” is held to be “the chief beauty” (Misc., I, iii; CR II, 168). Horace has a satiric program, which he describes in Satires 1.4. G.L. Hendrickson (1900), followed by many others, sees in this satire a clever adaptation and working model of Aristotle’s theory of liberal jest as well as a guide to the free person’s appropriate manner of jesting. Kirk Freudenburg (1993) argues that Horace draws his theoretical tenets about the comic from two irreconcilable camps, namely, the Peripatetic tradition followed by Cicero and the Iambos tradition, which Horace knew primarily from Lucilius as well as from Iambic poetry, Old Comedy, and Cynic moralizing. The result is a hybrid theory that, against all precedent, seeks to maintain the integrity of both traditions: “Horace wants it all: as a theorist, he combines the best features of two otherwise hostile traditions to create his own unique perception of satiric humor; and as an artist, he writes in the best traditions of ancient comedy, both Old and New” (Freudenburg 1993, 54). Horace proposes in the first lines of this satire to take up the topic of libertas, “freedom,” a word the satirist applied to the Old Comic poets, and Lucilius to denote primarily freedom of speech in the context of humorous, censorial poetry. Another model for Horace’s theory is the Roman orator, Cicero, who combines rhetoric with wisdom. He was heir to the Aristotelian liberal jest and refers to Socrates as the one who brought philosophy from the sky to earth, and takes him as his model. He does this since he aims to combine action and philosophy. For Cicero, see Klein 1994, 44–46. For Shaftesbury’s view of Horace, see Wolf 1993.
. Shaftesbury to Peter Coste, 1 Oct. 1706, P.R.O. 30/24/45/iii/48v; Soliloquy, CR3 I, 258, 328.
. Shaftesbury, Letter dated Jan. 28, 1708/9, Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University 1716, 24–25.
. Life, 504. Because A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm was attributed to Swift, Shaftesbury seeks to disengage himself from him. The full quotation on Swift reads: “Witness the prevalence and first success of that detestable writing of that most detestable author of the Tale of a Tub, whose manners, life, and prostitute pen and tongue are indeed exactly answerable to the irregularity, obscenity, profaneness, and fulsomeness of his false wit and scurrilous style and humour. Yet you know how this extraordinary work please even our great philosophers themselves, and how few of those who disliked it dared declare against it” (To Coste, July 25, 1712; in Life, 504).
. For Epictetus’ facetiousness, see Epictetus, Discourses, 1926, II, 27, vii, 6.
. To Le Clerc, Nov. 6, 1709, and “Philosophical Regimen,” in Life, 412, 227, 197.
. Pathologia sive Explicatio Affectum Humanorum, written in the winter of 1706–1707, is conserved in the Public Office of London under code P.R.O. 302 (P.R.O. 30/24/26/7).
. Tave 1960, vii–ix. Stuart Tave describes the evolution of the idea of the amiable humorist in the eighteenth century and the role Shaftesbury played in it.
. Benjamin Whichcote always had as his overriding goal his listeners’ moral improvement. Indeed, it is the practical nature of Whichcote’s sermons that Shaftesbury stresses in his preface to the sermons: He justifies their publication because of the salutary effect they can be expected to have on the character of the audience.
. Shaftesbury’s philosophy was part of a broader movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe that endeavored to bring joy to religion. Others who shared this conviction were Spinoza, the Cambridge Platonists, and followers of Hasidism (Grean 1967, 31). These were joined by devoted humanists such as Francois de Sales in France, who promoted redemptive laughter, laughing Jesuits, and Pierre de Besse, who published in 1615 the Christian Democritus, a book referring to the legend of the laughing philosopher, Democritus. This movement was widespread throughout the Netherlands as well (Minois 2002, 342–52).
. On laughter as a threat to social order and established institutions of the eighteenth century, see Redwood 1976, 183. For a different view, one that sees eighteenth-century discussions of laughter emerging from social stability and consensus in direct opposition to the perceived threat of laughter dominating the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Anselment 1979, 3. On raillery and its relation to ridicule, and particularly its lack of an object, see Knox 1961, 187–221.
. Richard Brett argues that the idea that ridicule is a test of truth is more than an aphorism or a passing thought for Shaftesbury. It is a thought Shaftesbury consistently maintains and firmly believes. Moreover, it makes sense in relation to his view of truth as congruence and falsehood as incongruity (Brett 1951, 171). Alfred Aldridge suggests that “the chief value of ridicule for Shaftesbury was its use as a test of demeanor or attitude, as a weapon against imposture” (Aldridge 1945, 154), an interpretation shared by Jean-Paul Larthomas (1986), Ernst Cassirer (1953, 183) and echoed in Konrad Lorenz’s theory of humor (Lorenz 1966, 252–3). Stanley Grean suggests that the logical terminology “test” and “criterion,” although misleading, have at least a figurative application: Ridicule has a kind “of proving power in that what cannot stand up under free and humorous examination, in Shaftesbury’s opinion, is not well-grounded in reason and Nature” (Grean 1967, 124). Stuart Tave, however, dismisses ridicule altogether: Not only “Shaftesbury nowhere clearly says that it is a test,” but “his true path was the middle way of good humor” (Tave 1960, 35, 39).
. Benjamin Ibbott, A Course of Sermons (1727) delivered in 1713–1714, quoted in Aldridge 1951, 373.
. Quoted in Casati 1934, 623; see Leibniz 1956, II, 1023.
. Adam Smith, like Shaftesbury, emphasizes the malevolent nature of laughter (1759). A small vexation in another excites no sympathy, he says, because our sympathetic passions are not as strong as our original passions: “There is, besides, a malice in mankind, which not only prevents all sympathy with little uneasiness, but renders them in some measure diverting. Hence the delight which we all take in raillery” (quoted in Tave 1960, 204).
. Herder, Letter 33 (1794), in Sämmtliche Werke, 1877–1913, VVII, 158 (my translation).
. This passage also may account for Stuart Tave’s conviction that Shaftesbury means good humor, not ridicule (Tave 1960, 39), and for Leibniz’s observation that Shaftesbury has exchanged ridicule for humor and good humor, a remark that Shaftesbury did not reject (see note 19). Shaftesbury insists that everything becomes serious during the process of inspecting the imagination. Reduction and inversion turn fantastic representations into a grave subject. This is the opposite of buffoonery, which turns serious subjects into burlesque (P.R.O 30/24/27/10, f.57, 129).
. For Shaftesbury’s views on tolerance, see Grean 1967, chap. 7.
. Richard Brett justly remarks that before we dismiss Shaftesbury’s theory too summarily we should bear in mind that in certain respects it agrees with more recent accounts of the nature of comedy (Brett 1951, 171). Henri Bergson, for instance, defines comedy as an attempt to impose a mechanical explanation upon a reality that cannot be explained that way. It springs from an endeavor to produce a harmony that, although internally consistent, is untrue when we take account of the nature of reality. Comedy is internally congruous, but compared with reality is fundamentally incongruous (Bergson 1999).
. Laurent Jaffro remarks on the similitude between Shaftesbury’s views and Lorenz’s (Jaffro 1996). On militant enthusiasm, see Lorenz 1966, 223, 231–5, 242–8, 250–3; on laughter, see there, 152, 240, 253, 254.
. The pamphlets attacking the Letter were written by Edward Fowler (1708, 1709) and Mary Astell (1709). The latter published under the pseudonym, “Mr. Wooton.”
. Shaftesbury’s Whiggism is expressed in his support for tolerance and his attacks on Tory High Church loyalties. However, the material Shaftesbury uses against the ecclesiastical propensities of Toryism had already been used in the seventeenth century to combat rather different targets. The arguments against “priestcraft” had its origin in the Protestant attack on the powers of the Catholic Church while the argument against “enthusiasm” emerged in the Protestant attempt to subdue its own more extreme expressions. On “priestcraft” and “enthusiasm” in eighteenth-century religious discourse, see Manuel 1983, 34–51.
. The meaning of Enthusiasm, a technical religious term applied both negatively and positively in the seventeenth century, expanded broadly and rapidly at the turn of the eighteenth century. By 1750, the term described philosophy, writing, the various arts, and even love. See note 34 for references.
. See Katja Maria Vogt’s forthcoming essay “Plato on Madness and the Good Life,” in Mental Disorders in Antiquity, ed. W. Harris. Brill: Leiden.
. For the difficulty in drawing a distinction between wit and humor in eighteenth-century practice, see Knox 1961, 189. For a different, albeit simplifying, view of the matter, see Billig 2005, 61–62: “Writers conventionally treated wit and humour as distinctly different phenomena. Wit involved playing with ideas or words, whereas humour occurred when the object of the laughter was a person. … Wit referred to clever verbal sayings, whereas ‘humour’ denoted a laughable character.” For examples of the distinction between wit and humor and the confusing and contradictory uses of the terms, see Morris 1744, 13; Beattie 1776, 486; Campbell 1963, 19–20.
. The notebooks are journals of self-examination. Organized topically, they offer an irregular record of Shaftesbury’s inner life, mostly between 1698 and 1704. They are tools for self-investigation and also for self-command, amounting to a kind of moral workbook. Shaftesbury wrote much of the material in the notebooks while immersed in deep intellectual engagement with the Roman Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. In places, the notebooks are a commonplace book of Greek citations accompanied by Shaftesbury’s commentary. Many entries are dated. A major shortcoming of the Benjamin Rand edition of the notebooks (1900) is the deletion of the dates. Additionally, it contains only a selection. For the notebooks see Klein 1994, 70–90. For Shaftesbury as Stoic, see Tiffany 1923.
. Epictetus, Discourses, 1926, III xii, 3–4, II 81–83; see also II xviii, 4–5, and III xxii, 13. Shaftesbury, P.R.O. 30/24/27/10, 366, 386.
. Moralists, i, 1; CR II, 5–6. On the rise of conversation as an arena for instruction in eighteenth-century Britain, see Burke 1993, 108–12. Laurence Klein suggests that the ideal situation for speech also provides a standard against which the sterility of distorted communicative patterns can be measured. These patterns correspond to the alternatives of unsociability and hyper-sociability. It seems appropriate to borrow the language of Jürgen Habermas here, because the ethics and politics of discourse are a pivotal part of his project, as they are for Shaftesbury as well. Habermas’ early concern with defining the eighteenth-century public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere (1989) leads him, via a linguistic turn, to a theory of communicative action, in which an ideal speech situation—with parameters much like those of Shaftesbury—provides a model not only for the pursuit of truth but also for a just form of human life. See Klein 1994, 13–14, and Giddens 1985.
. This view of wit is in direct defiance of Locke’s view that came to be much cited by the British writers on laughter in the eighteenth century. In his attempt to differentiate between “wit” and “judgment” Locke defines the former as a facility in putting together ideas that have some similarity, and “thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy” (Locke 1964, Bk. II, chap. xi, sec. 2). Judgment, which consists in the ability to distinguish carefully between ideas despite appearing congruous, is the superior faculty because clear thought depends on it: “Wit proceeds by way of Metaphor and allusion, wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore so acceptable to all people; because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labour of thought to examine what truth or reason there is in it” (Locke 1964, Bk. II, chap. xi, sec. 2). Locke concludes with the warning that these “agreeable visions” of wit fail to measure up to the “severe rules of reason.” Locke’s brief comparison between wit and judgment strongly favors the latter. Because wit and judgment are based on differing mental processes, Locke suggested that men “who have a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason” (Locke 1964, Bk. II, chap. xi, sec. 2).
. Lawrence Klein maintains, “Shaftesbury was the ideologist for a culture that would be both philosophical and gentlemanly, moral and conversable—in a word, polite” (Klein 1994, 119). Michael Prince concurs: Shaftesbury accommodates his texts for the modern reader, literate but uneducated, easily seduced by powerful images, bored by perceptively administered knowledge (Prince 1996, 41).
. Shaftesbury finds a correlation between current styles and the political history of taste grounded in common sense. With their liberty, the Romans lost also their style (Soliloquy, iii, 3; CR I, 219–20); the excess of buffoonery of the Italian theater reflects their lack of national liberty (Essay, iii, 1; CR I, 72), and the status of virtue in nations parallels the practice of humor (Moralists, iii, 1; CR I, 96). Also in the Letter Concerning Design, Shaftesbury points to a correlation between the political forms that common sense takes and taste (CR3 III, 402)
. See Klein 2000, 89; on chatter, see Fenvers 1993, 1–27.
. On the letter as a genre in Shaftesbury’s writings, see Misc., I, i; CR II, 157–9; II, iii; CR II, 225–6; II, ii; CR II, 207.
. For the essay, see Misc., I, i; CR II, 157–9; II, iii; CR II, 225–6; II, ii; CR II, 207.
. Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, which he preferred to the formal Inquiry, is populated with a range of voices in a range of combinations at a range of moments. Though not in a strict sense a dialogue, it is highly dialogic, a necessary condition for moral education. For The Moralists, see Prince 1996, 47–73. It is interesting to note that, not withstanding Shaftesbury’s efforts to conceptualize and put in practice his views of writing, Shaftesbury’s manner of writing was perceived by his early readers as confusing. His chief critic, John Brown, accused Shaftesbury of “frequently affecting a mixture of solemn praise and low buffoonery; not only in the same tract, but in the same paragraph”:
We have seen the noble Writer assuming the Character of a professed Dogmatist, the Reasoner in Form … [but] concerning Revealed Religion and Christianity, we shall find him chiefly affecting the miscellaneous Capacity; the Way of Chat, Raillery, Innuendo, or Story-telling: In a word, that very Species of the present modish Composition, which he so contemptuously ridicules [he also treats] as the Man in the Fable did his Pears; unconscious he should be ever afterwards reduced to diet on them himself. (Brown 1751a, 244–5; 242; quoted in Prince 1996, 38)
For Shaftesbury’s view of philosophic writing, see Klein 1994, 102–19; Malherbe 2000.
. P.R.O. 30/24/27/14; On the Socratic history Shaftesbury intended to write, see Klein 1994, 107–11.
. On humor in Shaftesbury’s thought, see Cassirer 1953, 170–86; Grean 1967 120–34; Jaffro, 1998, 93–101; Brugère 1999, 97–132, 331–41; Larthomas 1985, 488–96.
. The title of Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Francis Hutcheson’s first book, reads: “In which the principles of the Late Earl of Shaftesbury are explained and defended” (Hutcheson 1725, ii). In the preface to the second edition of his inquiry, Hutcheson emphasized his admiration for Shaftesbury’s work: “To recommend the Lord Shaftesbury’s Writings to the World,” he wrote, “is a very needless Attempt. They will be esteemed while any reflection remains among men” (Hutcheson 1745, xxi).
. The Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, published in 1709, was translated into French before 1713; Diderot, then in his first Deistic stage, published his adaptation of the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit in 1745 (Essai sur le mérite de la vertu); Montesquieu panegyrized him; a complete French translation of his works and letters appeared in Geneva in 1769; and a complete German translation of the Characteristics in 1776–1779. By that time, Shaftesbury’s account of optimism had even carried the day in Germany surpassing that of Leibniz (Lange 1925, 146–7), who had admitted its measure of congruity with his own; and there are clear traces of his influence in Kant’s ethics as well as aesthetics.
. For Ludwig Holberg as Kierkegaard’s unacknowledged mentor, see Allen 2009.
. For the controversy, see Aldridge 1945, 129–56; Brett 1951, 165–85. The extent of the controversy is evident in the dozens of references given in these studies, and they can be supplemented by material in Tave 1960, chap. 2–3, and 252, n. 28.
. Hutcheson first contributed his Reflections upon Laughter (1750) as separate essays to Hibernicus’ Letters (a periodical appearing in Dublin between 1725 and 1727).
. See also two letters by Akenside, in the Appendix to Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1854, III, 387–8). John Barrow recognizes facetiousness as one of the most effective devices to use against the skeptic who disavows the clear principles of reason that have already been approved by general consent and common sense.
. Thomas Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir William Davenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” Paris, Jan. 10, 1650; reprinted in Works (1840, IV, 454f.).
. The Hobbesian superiority view of laughter, to which Shaftesbury proposed an alternative, was definitely discarded in the eighteenth century with the help of Francis Hutcheson (1750), Abraham Tucker (1768–1778), George Campbell (1776), and James Beattie (1776). In the nineteenth century, the task was accomplished by William Greenfield’s “On the Ludicrous” (1809), and Jean Paul Richter’s Vorschule der Aesthetik (1813 [1804], sections 29–30; Werke, 1861–62, Part I, XI). For Thomas Carlyle, laughter becomes enormous, an explosive and deeply revealing release (1827). The incongruity theory also is suggested by Kant (“Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (Kant 1911, sec. 54), a view that is repeated by Friedrich Schelling but intelligibly altered and developed by Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer 1969, II, chap. 8). Kierkegaard also endorsed it. Today, the incongruity theory is so much in vogue that most scholarship on humor ranks past theorists of humor according to their intimations of it. See Morreall 1983a, 1987.
. The references to Spinoza’s Ethics are as follows: Roman numerals refer to books, “P” to “proposition,” “Dem.” to the short form of Demonstration, “Schol.” to Scholium, and “Cor.” to Corollary.
. Spinoza’s view of laughter as pure joy seems to contradict Descartes’ view, which was influenced by Plato’s view that laughter is a mixed joy (Plato, Philebus, 48). Joy is a significant notion for Spinoza, as it is “an affect by which the body’s power of acting is increased or aided” (Ethics, IV, P41Dem.). However, the controversy is apparent when Descartes states that the philosopher prefers great joys, which are generally somber and serious whereas Spinoza says that “Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; Melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil” (Ethics, IV, P42; Descartes 1955, 124).
. See note 3. Robertson finds in Spinoza’s Ethics or in his correspondence the main Shaftesburean doctrines: There can be nothing essentially evil in the universe as a whole, sin and evil are not positive, men cannot properly be said to sin against God; blessedness is not the reward of virtue but the state of virtue; acts done from fear of punishment are not virtuous; benevolence involves happiness; that things which are evil relatively to us are to be borne with tranquility, since nothing in the universe can be otherwise than it is; that angry passions constitute a state of misery (Robertson 1963, xxxi). See The Ethics, I, P17, Cor. and Schol.; P32 and Scholia; P36 and Appendix; II, P49Schol.; V, P42. Letters to Blyenbergh, Jan. and Feb. 1665 (esp. 32, 34, 36). See note 92 for references to Spinoza’s Ethics.
. The controversy about ridicule as the test of truth, namely, that which does not withstand ridicule is not true, does not exhaust the possible relations of humor with truth. Modern scholars of humor differentiate between the following possibilities: Is humor a lie, a non-bona-fide statement, or an expression of a deeper truth? Victor Raskin has dealt extensively on the topic of humor’s relation to truth (Raskin 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1998).
. Philosophers used laughter mainly as a tool for moral criticism: Criticism of ignorance (Plato); the tragic view of life (Plato, the Stoics); morality and religion (e.g., the pre-Socratic Xenophanes, the Cynics, the Peripatetic Theophrastus, the Hellenistic skeptical philosopher Timon of Phlius, the Platonic philosopher Lucius Apuleius, the Renaissance philosophers Erasmus and Thomas More, and the modern philosophers Pascal and Voltaire); and “academic” philosophy (e.g., the Cynics, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard).
. Kant, Reflexion 6050, Nachlass, Kants gesammelte Schriften, 1902–, XIII, 436, 1. 18–20. Kierkegaard, a severe judge of professors of philosophy, credits Kant with what he considers two exceptional qualities, a sense of humor and a rigorous honesty (Green 1992, 12, 75). According to Richard K. Simon, Kant makes humor important for philosophy by positing a fundamental incongruity between noumena and phenomena, and then by defining the comic as the perception of incongruity. This is fruitfully exploited by nineteenth-century thinkers who will posit humor, and especially irony, as thoughtful reactions to the perception of the world (Simon 1985, 108). As with Kant’s theories of empirical knowledge and practical reason, his view of aesthetic judgment emerges from a long reflection on the work of his British and German predecessors. In particular, he assimilates many Shaftesburean ideas on aesthetics, notably Shaftesbury’s view of the comic as incongruity and cheerfulness as not only temperamental but also the outcome of philosophic principles (Kant 2006, 131). Although he does not subscribe to the Shaftesburean idea that humor plays an epistemic role, he adopts Shaftesbury’s view that humor chastens enthusiasm.
Kant views laughter as positive and affirms its therapeutic role. Significantly, he adds laughter to Voltaire’s assertion in the seventh canto of the poem Henriade (1723) that hope and sleep are Heavens’ gifts to counterbalance the multiples sorrows of life. Kant regrets, nonetheless, that it is so difficult to excite laughter in sensible people (Voltaire 1901c; Kant 1911, sec. 54). This eulogy of laughter is part of Kant’s intense interest in his health and is part of the views about melancholy, hypochondria, medicine and the philosophical temper he advances in accordance with his own temperament (Johnson 2006; Sharfstein 1980, 210–30). Kant’s cheerfulness is noted by R. B. Jachman, one of his friends and biographers, who writes, “Kant’s disposition was by nature meant for cheerfulness. He saw the world with a glad look, apprehended its enjoyable external side and transferred his cheerfulness to external things” (sixth letter, in L. E. Borowski et al. 1912, 149); but Kant himself qualifies this cheerfulness as a hypochondriac’s deceptive gaiety (Kant 2006, sec. 62; 1902, VII, 104).
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant labels his views on the comic a “remark,” stating that “laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing”; in other words, that which is originally perceived in one (often serious) sense is suddenly viewed from a totally different (usually implausible or ludicrous) perspective. Laughter follows from something absurd and “the jest must contain something that is capable of deceiving for a moment” (Kant 1911, sec. 54).
. “And is the ridicule all gentlemen associate today with enthusiasm to be discounted? This ridicule is a powerful barrier against the extravagances of all the sectarians” (Voltaire 1989, 56; my translation.) This does not exhaust Voltaire’s views on the comic, or Shaftesbury’s influence on Voltaire, which lies in the latter’s use of a pleasant form and tone in order to interest literate people and engage public opinion on difficult and abstract questions. In various writings, Voltaire mixes his most serious reflections with burlesque jokes and witticisms. This mixture of nobleness and triviality, of reason and fantasy, of the serious and the comical, is characteristic of his style.
Putting aside his early Jesuit education, François-Marie de Voltaire (1694–1778) wrote satirical anti-clerical essays that led to his exile in Holland in 1713 and imprisonment in the Bastille in 1717. He was the hero of the French satirists of his time, although he refused to accept this honor. In the two texts he wrote on satire, his attitude toward the genre was severe (Mémoire sur la satire, 1739, and Epitre sur la calomnie, 1756). From the age of 16, when he wrote somewhat satirical and therefore very condemnable verses, he imposed on himself a rule never to partake in that “detestable genre” (On the satirical Voltaire, see Quero 1995). Although he called himself a militant theist, Voltaire criticized what he saw as the anti-rationalistic obscurantism of Pascal. He found, however, Leibniz’s theodicy—its attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with divine benevolence—equally repellent. His attack on Leibnizian optimism was most pointedly expressed in Zadig (1748), Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756), and Candide (1759).
In the entry “laughter” of his Philosophical Dictionary, he writes that those who seek the metaphysical causes of laughter are not mirthful. Laughter is not based on pride or superiority; rather he who laughs is joyful at the moment and prompted by no other cause (Voltaire 1901a). In his preface to The Prodigal, he repeats, “laughter always arises from a gaiety of disposition, absolutely incompatible with contempt and indignation” (Voltaire 1901d, 273). Violent peals of universal laughter seldom rise but from some mistake (273). He defines himself as an adept practitioner and a writer of “philosophical gaiety.” In his poem, Jean qui rit, Jean qui pleure, any Heraclitus becomes Democritus when life circumstances are favorable (1772). His most memorable view on laughter is that laughter arises when theory is confronted with reality, as his novel Candide exemplifies (1901b).
. See Christoph Wieland’s letter to Zimmermann, 6 Oct. 1758, in Wieland 1963, I, 363; G. E. Lessing, X Letter on the New Literature, 25 Jan. 1759, in Lessings Werke, 1999, 50; see also Larthomas 1985.
. For Romantic irony, see Alford 1984; Garber 1988; Behler 1990; Nilsen 1993c.
. Karl Popper is known for his thesis that rationality equals critical dialogue and that critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. However, he adds that the purpose of critical discussion is the refutation of one’s argument. Popper writes about critical rationalism in his works, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2 (1962), and Conjectures and Refutations (1963). In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper maintains that science does not, and cannot, verify its theories. Science makes progress by proposing bold conjectures in response to problems, which are then subjected to sustained attempted empirical refutation. This falsificationist conception of scientific method is then generalized to form Popper’s conception of (critical) rationality, a general methodology for solving problems or making progress. As Popper puts it in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, “intersubjective testing is merely a very important aspect of the more general idea of inter-subjective criticism, or in other words, of the idea of mutual rational control by critical discussion” (Popper 1959, 44, n. 1: see also Popper 1963, 193–200; 1972, 119, 243). In the introduction to The Myth of the Framework, he writes, “critical rationalism is a way of thinking and even a way of living. It’s a faith in peace, in humanity, in tolerance, in modesty, in trying to learn from one’s mistakes, and in the possibilities of critical discussion … [it is] an appeal to reason” (Popper 1994, xiii). In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism (1961), Popper applies critical rationalism to problems of civilization.
INTERMEZZO: HAMANN—HUMOR AND IRONY AS CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING
. Tyll Eulenspiegel (c. 1290–1350) was a German peasant who performed clownish pranks and tricks. As a literary character, he was circulated in popular printed editions narrating the string of lightly connected episodes that outlined his picaresque career, primarily in Germany, the Low Countries, and France.
. Hamann, Biblical Reflections (Smith 1960b, 121); Socratic Memoirs (179); for more references, see Hamann 1949–57, VI, 353.
. Hamann’s Socrates’ Memoirs influenced Kierkegaard’s magisterial thesis, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. Hamann also inspired the young Goethe’s projected plan for a drama on Socrates’ life. See Goethe’s letter to Herder from Frankfurt toward the end of 1771 (Goethe 1887, II, 11–13).
. For Shaftesbury’s influence on Aesthetics in a Nutshell, see German 1981, 21, and note 126; see also Wessel 1969.
. See Goethe 1948, Bk. 12; quoted in Berlin 2000, 256n2.
. For examples of Stillbruch, see O’Flaherty 1967, 78–79.
. See Unger, 1911, I, 501ff. Hamann refers indirectly to his own sense of metaschematism following the model of the Apostle Paul (Hamann 1949–57, II, 150). See also the passage where he accuses the Enlighteners of engaging in metaschematism in their own way (III, 144).
. For a helpful treatment of the subject of metaschematism, see Seils 1957, 73–74.
. For more examples of Hamann’s use of “metaschematism,” see Alexander 1966, 154–5.
. For the importance of Hamann, see Berlin 1994, Berlin 1999, 40–45, 48–49, and Sparling 2011. For an introduction to his life and philosophy, as well as excerpts from his writings, see Smith 1960b; for an analysis of the role of humor in his thought, see Alexander 1966, chaps. 7–8; for Shaftesbury’s influence on Hamann, see Deupmann-Frohues 1999. Oswald Bayer’s recently translated biography is also helpful for an understanding of Hamann’s thought (Bayer 2011).
CHAPTER 2: KIERKEGAARD: HUMOR AS PHILOSOPHY AT ITS BEST
. Translators Walter Lowrie and Howard and Edna Hong explain that in “little studies,” Kierkegaard refers to vol. 14 of Johann G. von Herder’s Adrastea, “Shaftesbury, Geist und Frohsinn” (CUPL, 570, n. 23; CUP2, 264, n. 263). See the end of the chapter for Kierkegaard’s relationship with Herder and the next note for abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s writings.
. The references to the works of Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms are designated according to the abbreviations listed in the bibliography, with Arabic numbers referring to pages. For example, CUP1, 213 refers to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, page 213. Unless stated otherwise, all references are to the Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong edition. When the references are to the David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie translation of Postscript, CUP is followed by an L (CUPL). References to Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker are written SV followed by volume and page number. When necessary a short title is used in the text, e.g., “Postscript.” References to Kierkegaard’s journals (Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. 1909–1938. P.A. Heiberg and V. Kuhr eds. 11 vols. in 19 parts. Copenhagen) is abbreviated Pap., followed by Roman numerals that refer to volumes, sometimes followed by superscript numbers that refer to parts, then capital letters referring to entries, and finally Arabic numbers that refer to pages (e.g., Pap. X1 A 100). References to the Papirer in English are to volume and serial entry number in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. 1967–1978. Ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. 7 vols. (e.g., JP 2, 1500).
. Various pseudonyms would admit to sharing the same ambition. Perceiving “with psychological interest how different the occasion of laughter is at every age,” A, the pseudonymous author of the first volume of Either/Or, makes “the laughter of others and his own the object of observation” (EO1, 140). While sitting in Berlin’s Konigstater Theatre, Constantine Constantius repeats and expands in Repetition Kierkegaard’s notion of constructing a history of the human soul by discussing the way objects of laughter change at different stages of life: “Anyone wanting to make a psychological study of laughter at various social and temperamental levels ought not to neglect the opportunity offered by the performance of a farce” (R, 159). Richard Simon suggests that in this repetition of Kierkegaard Constantius makes the project of the pseudonymous authorship much clearer: The pseudonymous authorship is, if not exactly farce, then at least very similar to farce, the absolutely general acted out by talented comedians; and the effect on us, the audience, is to release our individual unique responses (Simon 1985, 105). For farce, see Davis 2003. For a thorough consideration of Kierkegaard’s interest in acting, actors, and the theater, see Malantschuk 1971.
. EO1, 20; also JP 1,700/Pap. III A 112. Kierkegaard’s nickname is well deserved: He confesses in his journals that his depression is his “most faithful mistress (EO1, 20; see JP 4, 5496/Pap. III A 114).
. JP 5, 5260/Pap. II A 662. In a journal entry, Kierkegaard confesses: “From a child I was under the sway of a prodigious melancholy, the depth of which finds its only adequate measure in the equally prodigious dexterity I possessed in hiding it under an apparent gaiety and joie de vivre” (quoted in Lowrie 1968b, 24).
. Also in the journals, Kierkegaard refers to himself as a genius (Pap. XI A 266; PV, 94; 95), “a poetic-dialectical genius, personally and religiously a penitent …” (JP 4, 6317/ Pap. XI A 56).
. For details on Kierkegaard’s contemporaries such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Bishop J. P. Mynster, see Stewart 2003b. For Kierkegaard’s “insistent teasing” of prominent figures in Danish cultural life, see Kirmmse 1990, 240; Lippitt 2000b, 188.
. In a number of autobiographical confessions published in his lifetime, Kierkegaard claims that he provoked this ridicule deliberately, in order to confuse the public and make a reading of his serious works more difficult; to expose himself to that which is most feared by the public—ridicule—and thereby test himself; and to demonstrate to those who made the Corsair a publishing success that they really have no understanding of laughter, comedy, or irony. If these claims can be believed, then those who mocked him in 1846 did so in ignorance of the fact that he was both the object and the author of the mockery. His understanding is greater than their understanding, and future readers, who are privileged to read this confession, are let in on the secret. But, the opposite can also be true, and several of Kierkegaard’s biographers have argued that the elaborate justifications for the Corsair incident are fabrications made up, after the fact, to hide the depth of humiliation he suffered and the surprise he experienced that ridicule directed against him could have such powerful effects:
I have never been a Diogenes, have never bordered on cynicism; … I have been able to crack jokes with an individual over my thin legs—but when it is the rabble, the utterly brutish humanity, the rowdies, silly women, school children, and apprentices who abuse me: that is the meanness and lack of character of a people directed against one who truly merits something from his people. The most tiresome aspect is that I am the only one who has the right to joke, but on those terms I cannot and will not joke. And yet I need the refreshment of laughter so often. But then, alas, that the one who is clearly the wittiest in a little country is the only one who is not witty—but the riffraff and the fools are all witty and ironic. (JP 6, 10–11)
. On the holy fool, see Fedotov 1966, 316–43; Syrkin 1982. On the relationship of Kierkegaard to the holy fool tradition of the Orthodox Church, see Thulstrup 1978. Richard Simon suggests that “here, if anywhere, are the limits of Kierkegaard’s appropriation of the comic and the clown—the holy fool does not include the profane fool. While the Christian Church tolerated both in the feast of fools tradition during the Middle Ages, Kierkegaard will not, or cannot” (Simon 1985, 96). Indeed, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Vigilius, says that “in regard to earnestness he will know how not to tolerate any joking” (CA, 128). This is echoed in Postscript (CUP1, 483).
. AC, 11, 23, 24. AC, 48, 215–6; AC, 48, 102–3; AC, 27, 60, 84, 85, 216. Kierkegaard also denounces “the play-Christianity of the priests” (AC, 80), deems the whole order of the clergy comical (24), considers Bishop Martensen’s silence “Christianly … comical” (67), denigrates confirmation and the wedding Christian comedy (217–22), and so on. For the attack on Christendom, see Woronoff 2001.
. McFadden 1982; Simon 1985. For the comic drama Kierkegaard created in Copenhagen, see Alastair Hannay’s biography of Kierkegaard (2001).
. The Concept of Irony is considered ironic as well as a parody of Hegel (Capel 1968, 385 n. 2); Concluding Unscientific Postscript is deemed a satire of Hegel’s philosophy (Hannay 2001, 309), which “mimics” (one of the predicates in the work’s subtitle), and which is often taken as parody (Allison 1972, 290); The Concept of Anxiety is deemed “the most ironic and certainly the most parodic of all the aesthetic works” (Poole 1998, 60).
. A few scholars have described ways in which Kierkegaard is a trickster or humorist in his pseudonymous authorship (Malantschuk 1971, 90). Michael Weston pinpoints comedy as a key characteristic of Kierkegaard’s entire pseudonymous authorship (Weston 1994, viii and passim). Josiah Thompson characterizes Kierkegaard as a “maieutic trickster” (Thompson 1973, 184), and Richard Simon as “a clown” in both his life and his work, adding “that clown, comedian, fool, is the best way to understand the man who is also religious writer and philosophical poet” (Simon 1985, 124). When Kierkegaard’s biographers examine his life from the standpoint of reality, they are led into medical diagnoses of illness and abnormality, but if they approached his life from the standpoint of the history of the comic, they would see harlequin. For Simon, Kierkegaard aspires to the role of a holy fool (96).
. For an anthology of Kierkegaard’s humor, see Oden 2004; Poole and Stangerup 1989.
. For humor and irony in Kierkegaard, see Lippitt 1997, 2000a, and especially 2000b; Oden 2004, 1–42; Thulstrup and Thulstrup 1988; Perkins 1976; Evans 1983, chap. 10; another helpful treatment is found in Walsh 1994, chap. 7. For the comic, see Barrett 1990; Langston 1985; Otani 1980; Hong 1976. For humor, see Taylor 1980a; Cain 1980; Morris 1988; Hannay 2003, 9–23, 137–49; Olesen 2003. For irony, see McCarthy 1982; Schleifer 1984; Smyth 1986; Cross 1998; Strawser 1997; Rudd 1998; Golomb 2002; Garff 2002. For the reception of Postscript’s theory of the comic and for references to literature on the subject of humor and irony in Danish, see Olesen 2005.
. The following is a list of some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms: Victor Eremita (Either/Or, 1843), Johannes de Silencio (Fear and Trembling, 1943), Constantin Constantius (Repetition, 1943), Johannes Climacus (Philosophical Fragments, 1844; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846), Vigilius Haufniensis (The Concept of Anxiety, 1844), Nicolaus Notabene (Prefaces, 1844), Hilarius Bookbinder (Stages on Life’s Way, 1845), Anti-Climacus (Sickness unto Death, 1849; Practice in Christianity, 1850), Victor Eremita and Frater Taciturnus (three articles in The Fatherland), Frater Taciturnus writes to the Corsair.
. In “Armed Neutrality,” Kierkegaard explains why he has “to keep neutral” lest he himself be considered the ideal of Christianity (PV, 139).
. The way salvation as a search for truth becomes a search for wholeness and unity is explored in Connell 1985. For an excellent analysis of Kierkegaard’s diagnostic reflections on the self, in particular the diseases of “reflection,” see Gouwens 1996, chap. 1.
. On the development of a vocabulary of self-fulfillment in modernity and its conflicts with a “disengaged reason” of instrumentalism, see Taylor 1989.
. W. Anz lists an entire set of categories that Kierkegaard obtained from Hegel: Existence, paradox, qualitative and quantitative dialectics, the reflection of anxiety, the moment, transition, leap, decision, synthesis, contradiction, recollection, idea, finite/infinite, possibility/actuality, self, spirit, personality, and history (Anz 1971).
. The Danish man of letters J. L. Heiberg (1791–1860) introduced Hegelianism into Denmark, where it became the predominant school of thought during the 1830s and 1840s. Heiberg claimed that Hegel had freed him for the vocation of comic dramatist by refining his strong pantheistic bent to the extent that he could take seriously the finite and even farcical aspects of existence in their dialectical relation to the infinite. Other Danes adapted Hegelianism to different purposes. H. K. Martensen (1808–1884), for example, developed an influential Protestant dogmatics. Such Hegelian interpretations of Christianity were the target of Kierkegaard’s vigorous polemic against the Hegelianism of the 1840s and early 1850s, which was carefully developed in his Concept of Anxiety and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. See Bruce Kirmmse for a detailed discussion of Hegelianism and idealism in his contemporaries’ views of theology and philosophy (Kirmmse 1990).
. Immediacy and its cognates have several distinct usages in Kierkegaard’s writings; these usages have in common the notion of something being unmediated, or directly given. In the first usage, one’s immediate nature, or immediacy, can be defined as those features that are merely given to one’s self: One’s physical body and its characteristics, one’s temporal position, one’s socially determined identity, and so on. In the second usage, to be able to stand in immediate relation to something else depends on that relation being unmediated by critical reflection. (Examples of such immediate relations abound in the authorship: The pure sensuous immediacy of Don Giovanni, the child’s unreflective trust in his parents and in the world, the individual’s unreflective pursuit of desire-satisfaction, the ethical immediacy of the person who accepts and abides by the norms of his society without ever reflecting on them or calling their authority into question.) In the third usage, to live a life of immediacy is to take life as it comes, that is, to take life as a kind of happening in which one finds oneself, the nature of which is determined by various conditions that are also unreflectively accepted as just “the way things are.” Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Postscript, explains that “the life-view of immediacy”—that which the immediate person’s view of life centers around—“is good-fortune” (CUP1 433). The immediate person pursues that which he takes to be the good without reflecting on or calling into question its goodness; he lives a life whose content is determined by his given desires and ideals as well as by the norms of his society without considering in abstract reflection whether this conception of the good has any genuine merit, whether his desires and ideals should be transformed or modified, or whether his society’s norms have any genuine authority over him.
. For abstract thought’s ability to transfer ab esse ad posse, see Law 1993, chap. 3.
. Kierkegaard’s proposal is not entirely without precedent: Augustine had proposed something similar to Kierkegaard’s maieutics in Christianity. Climacus in Postscript explains that: “My main thought was that, because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our day have forgotten what it means to exist, and what inwardness is, and that the misunderstanding between speculative thought and Christianity could be explained by that. I now resolved to go back as far as possible in order not to arrive too soon at what it means to exist religiously, not to mention existing Christianly-religiously … If people had forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they had probably also forgotten what it means to exist humanly” (CUP1, 249). From the start Kierkegaard’s motive in developing his theory of the stages of existence was to understand what it meant to be “a Christian in Christendom,” a faithful disciple of Christ in the midst of self-satisfied religious-secularity under the auspices of the State Church. He takes as his point of departure certain psychological observations (dependency, despair, guilt, and a sense of purpose or telos) and with these he provides a Christian interpretation of the nature and destiny of man.
. Julia Watkin gives the following example: In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s non-Christian pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis speaks about the gate as the object of the ancient Greek’s anxiety, but allows that only the Christian God, and not Greek fate, has independent existence. She argues that in this passage the voice of Kierkegaard himself is clearly heard (Watkin 2001, 7).
. Johannes the Seducer is clearly indicated as an example of one living wrongly (i.e., one bound to come to a bad end) spiritually speaking. The aesthete A is an unhappy if talented man. Judge Williams is the picture of civic contentment. Even the struggling, suffering religious believer is on the right path; his or her sufferings in fact indicate that he or she is on the correct course.
. Julia Watkin and Sylvia Walsh, among others, maintain that the important aspects of human existence explained by all the pseudonyms form a clear presentation of Kierkegaard’s view of the nature and purpose of human life (Watkin 2001, 8–10; Walsh 1994). Roger Poole remarks, however, that this clear view is reached at the price of “reducing … the sheer incompatibility of the pseudonymous’ views” (Poole 1998, 64). For a detailed exposition of the latter view, see Poole 1993.
. For Kierkegaard’s self-proclaimed irony, see Cross 1998; Garff 2002.
. For competing schools of thought about Kierkegaard, see Gouwens 1996, 3–19; Poole 1998. Louis Mackey’s opinion of Kierkegaard’s writings is worth mentioning. Their “tone is just as ambivalent as their purpose is devious and their method duplicitous,” he writes. “By virtue of his authorial self-restraint, his texts exhibit an almost complete abstention from determinate meaning and an almost perfect recalcitrance to interpretation. Like poetry, they ‘resist the intelligence almost successfully’ ” (Mackey 1986, xxii–iii). This leads to a controversy regarding the correct tools of interpretation. Mackey maintains that “if Kierkegaard is to be understood as Kierkegaard, he must be studied not merely or principally with the instruments of philosophic or theological analysis, but also chiefly with the tools of literary criticism” (x). Walter Kaufmann could be understood as responding to this claim when he writes that “a writer who so persistently distinguished between what he called an aesthetic approach and what we might call an existential approach should not be approached and discussed on the aesthetic plane, as he usually is” (Kaufmann 1962, 18). Kaufmann astutely observes that Kierkegaard’s “central aspirations [Christianity] are almost invariably ignored, and even those who notice them often give reasons why the things that mattered to him may be dismissed as really of no account” (11). Various schools of interpretation have different interests in the comic: theologians usually ignore it whereas postmodern commentators concentrate on the “how” of the comic instead of the “what,” thereby overstating the irony and often using it to dismiss the very subjects most important to Kierkegaard.
. Exactly how many stages exist is not altogether resolved in Kierkegaard’s writings. On the number of stages, see Pojman 1984, 17, 157, n. 25. In continuity with earlier pseudonymous authors in the Kierkegaardian corpus, Johannes Climacus views personal existence as a development through three stages: first, the aesthetic, which has its telos in immediate enjoyment through the satisfaction and refinement of natural drives, passions, moods, talents, mental capacities, and inclinations; second, the ethical, which has as its goal victory in the struggle to fulfill universal ethical requirements in the personal life of the existing individual; and third, the religious, which has its telos in eternal happiness, a fulfillment that is only anticipated in existence through a relation to God characterized by persistent inner suffering as the result of a consciousness of guilt and sin. But although Climacus retains the three-stage schema of the earlier pseudonymous works, the structure in Postscript corresponds to a view of the stages diagrammed as follows: Aesthetic, ethical-religious, Christian. The ethical optimism that accompanies the existential task of self-transformation into conformity with the ethical ideal flows progressively into a recognition of impotence in the existential pathos of immanent religiousness, or Religiousness A. Thus, these two stages in fact belong together. Within this schema, dialectical opposition, or either/or, occurs with respect to two factors, immediacy and immanence. In relation to immediacy, the dialectic decisively favors aestheticism, and the dialectical opposition may be diagrammed as aestheticism, the ethical-religious, and the Christian. Here Christianity stands in pathetic continuity with the ethical-religious inwardness over against aesthetic immediacy. In relation to immanence, however, the dialectic occurs primarily between Christianity and the ethical-religious, and the dialectical opposition is inverted: aestheticism and the ethical-religious, the Christian. In CUP1, 531n, however, Climacus mentions seven spheres: immediacy; finite common sense; irony; ethics with irony as incognito; humor; religiousness with humor as incognito; and then finally the Christian religiousness, recognizable by the paradoxical accentuation of existence. There are, nevertheless, “neutral men,” who do not fit neatly in any sphere (EO2, 172).
. Sylvia Walsh explains that defined in purely ideal terms, the Christian life, as Kierkegaard sees it, is an entirely positive existence, consisting of faith, hope, love, joy, forgiveness, consolation, new life, and blessedness. But these positive determinants are joined with and made recognizable through negative factors, such as the consciousness of sin, the possibility of offense, self-renunciation, and suffering. One does not come to have faith except through the consciousness of sin and the possibility of offense. Similarly, Christian love is expressed through self-renunciation, and joy is found in and through the strife of suffering in life (Walsh 1994, 227).
. For Kierkegaard’s change of attitude toward humor, see Collins 1983, 44–45, and 285–6, n. 10. Collins invites us to compare Journals, entry 121 with Postscript, 242–3; 400–4, and explains, “it is the contention of Pierre Mesnard, that, to the end of his life, Kierkegaard governed his personal relationship to Christianity under the sign of humor. This opinion confuses the attitude of humor with that of religious humility, which never claims to have already realized Christian principles but only to be engaged in trying to put them into practice. The distance between religious principle and practice leaves room for constant ‘becoming’ or improvement, but this is not the same as the uncommitted distance between the humorous mind and Christian truths” (Mesnard 1948, 462–3; see also Mesnard 1961; Collins 1983, 44).
. On the forms of despair, see Nordentoft 1972, 240–322, Hannay 2003, 76–88; on the pathology of the self, see Hannay 1982, 157–204; on the relation of anxiety and despair, see Beabout 2002, 35–48; on the Anti-Climacus’ writings, see Dunning 1985, 214–41.
. Pojman 1984, 158, n. 10. The difference between Kierkegaard’s and Hegel’s use of negativity is that the former’s fundamental orientation is Aristotelian whereas the latter’s “negative” has a stronger dialectical role vis-à-vis “being.” For a helpful discussion, see Stack 1976, especially chap. 2; and Taylor 1980b, chap. 5.
. For the difference between adversity and religious suffering, see ED I 34–35; II 7–26, 67–87; III 7–35; see also Thulstrup 1980.
. On truth, see Taylor 2002; Perkins 2002; Popkin 2002; Barrett 2002; and Westphal 2002.
. Andrew Burgess finds that some aspects of the comic are recurrent within all of Kierkegaard’s writings. First, the comic involves a contradiction or incongruity. Second, there needs to be an appropriate kind of feeling to go with the incongruity because, from Stages onward, there needs to be suffering. Third, another constant in Kierkegaard’s writings is his ethical concern with the comic and its legitimate and illegitimate uses in conversation as well as in writing. See Burgess 1990, for a valuable chronological approach to the comic in all of Kierkegaard’s authorship.
. For examples of incongruities see CUP1, 516–7n; JP 2, 257; 2, 260; 2, 262; 2, 267. For Kierkegaard’s view of incongruity, see Lippitt 2000b, 8–11.
. See, for example, SV, IV 414; VI 259; VII 268, 291, 503, 613.
. Marc Taylor maintains that Kierkegaard “decisively rejects the superiority theory” of humor (Taylor 1980a, 221); and because the relief theory of humor emerges after Kierkegaard’s time, Taylor does not comment on this latter view of humor. Stephen Evans nevertheless attempts to envision Kierkegaard’s reaction to the relief theory and finds its origins in Kierkegaard (Evans 1987).
. James Beattie in Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition is the first to subsume superiority under incongruity (Beattie 1776). In labeling all excessive behavior as incongruous, Beattie broadens the incongruity theory to encompass the superiority theory. Every comic vice represents a deviation from the golden mean, and all laughter asserts superiority over excessive behavior. According to Francis Buckley, Beattie simply redefines incongruity as superiority (Buckley 2003, 30). This move may well be grounded in the ethical project in which Beattie enrolled the comic, a project that is reminiscent of Shaftesbury’s endeavor, as the following examples testify. In a letter explaining the purpose of his projected textbook, Elements of Moral Science, Beattie wrote: “I wish rather to form the taste, improve the manners, and establish the principles, of young men, than to make them profound metaphysicians; I wish, in a word, not to make Humes of them, or Leibnitzes, but rather, if that were possible, Addisons” (Beattie to William Creech, 28 March 1789; quoted in Sher 1990, 87). Beattie placed great weight on moral exhortation and instruction. In his lectures, he emphasized that philosophy was to be valued chiefly because “it regulate[d] human practice,” and he made it clear that in his view the pursuit of knowledge was subservient to the cultivation of virtue. Beattie’s preoccupation with the inculcation of sound moral and religious values thus led him to renounce the anatomy of the mind for the graphic portrayal of virtue and piety, which included the use of humor. According to Beattie, “nothing is more interesting to human creatures than that which immediately concerns human passions, feelings and sentiments. And therefore it is an author’s fault and not the fault of the subject, if every part of Moral Philosophy be not made extremely entertaining.” As for those parts of the subject related to “our improvement in Virtue, and the regulation of the passions,” Beattie claimed that they should be “not only entertaining but delivered with that simple and expressive eloquence which touches the heart, and disposes it to form good resolutions.” Finally, Beattie asserted that in moral philosophy “the greatest exactness of method, accuracy of arrangement, and perspicuity of style are indispensable,” and that “particular care should be taken to avoid ambiguity of language” (quoted in Wood 1990, 143–4). By implication, then, Beattie’s own pedagogical style can best be understood as “entertaining” and “expressive,” primarily designed to instill the principles of piety and virtue in the hearts of his pupils. Like Hume, Beattie believed that the roles of the metaphysician and the moralist were distinct, and he eagerly adopted the guise of the practical moralist. For Beattie as a moralist and for the role of humor in his teaching, see Sher 1990, Wood 1990.
. For Christianity as the most humorous form of all religions, see JP 2, 252–3; 2, 255. For examples of how the comic relates to the stages of existence, see Oden 2004, 317–22.
. T. F. Morris emphasizes Kierkegaard’s assertion that humor “knows no way out” (CUP1, 520; Morris 1988, 311n). Humor shares this characteristic with the tragic, in contradistinction to the comic.
. Many authors are sensitive to this tragic aspect of the human condition. Merold Westphal mentions Jean-Paul Sartre and Blaise Pascal (Westphal 1996, 69). For the tragic in Kierkegaard’s thought, see Karsten Johansen, who analyzes mainly the small treatise in Either/Or entitled “The Ancient Tragic as reflected in the Modern” (Johansen 1976), and Pierre Mesnard, who doubts that the category of the tragic exists in Kierkegaard’s life and thought (Mesnard 1961).
. That Climacus intends an identification of the pathetic with the tragic here is an interpretation on my part inasmuch as he does not explicitly equate the two. This follows Sylvia Walsh’s view of the matter (Walsh 1994, 199). In identifying the comic and the tragic in the subjective thinker, however, he implies an identification of the pathetic with the tragic, especially when he states that “the relative difference between the comic and the tragic within immediacy vanishes in double-reflection, where the difference becomes infinite and identity is thereby posited. Religiously, the comic expression of worship is therefore just as devout as its pathos-filled expression” (CUP1, 89). In other contexts, the term the pathetic, or pathos, is used more broadly to connote simply an intensified form of passion also characteristic of the subjective thinker.
. In Repetition, Stages on Life’s Way, and Either/Or certain stances are limited to the life-view of the pseudonymous authors. In many instances, Kierkegaard employs normal terms in special senses, always building on the usual sense but unmistakably departing in order to add essential new content. This is the case in the use of all the key terms Vincent McCarthy studies, viz. irony, anxiety, melancholy, despair, and life-view. Thus, for example, irony for Kierkegaard does not merely refer to the tool of discourse but to a stance characterized by an attitude of passionate rebellion and rejection of the phenomenal world, after its illusory nature has been discovered. Anxiety revolves around “nothing” because around oneself and one’s possibilities. Melancholy revolves around the religious nature of the personality, and despair has at least four senses: The choice of self, loss of hope, sinfulness, and the assumption of sin-consciousness (McCarthy 1978).
. This final point of convergence is not radically new. On the contrary, Kierkegaard finally leads to an ancient view and ancient wisdom. In the end, Kierkegaard is Christian, and there is no escaping the Christian perspective that suffuses his work and marshals the direction of his analysis. Kierkegaard rediscovers ancient Christian truth for himself, and, according to his wish, for his readers. Vincent McCarthy suggests that his analysis may be summarized in the ancient dictum of Augustine, another psychologist of the soul, who said: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, [Lord]” (Confessions, I, ii; quoted in McCarthy 1978, 161).
. The example given in The Concept of Anxiety is sin: “When sin is brought into esthetics, the mood becomes either light-minded or melancholy, for the category in which sin lies is that of contradiction, and this is either comic or tragic. The mood is therefore altered, because the mood that corresponds to sin is earnestness. The concept of sin is also altered, because, whether it becomes comic or tragic, it becomes in any case something that endures, or something nonessential that is annulled, whereas, according to its concept, sin is to be overcome” (CA, 14–5). The mood that corresponds to sin is earnestness “expressed in a courageous resistance” (CA, 15).
. Apart from comedy and tragedy there is also a third genre for Hegel “of less striking importance.” It is a harmonization of the tragic and the comic in which a serious individual exists in a comic environment, and thus there is a happy ending. But although Hegel is elsewhere enthusiastic about dialectical syntheses, in this discussion in The Philosophy of Fine Art he is not (Hegel 1975, II, 1202). Richard Simon suggests that the tragic-comic does not interest Hegel, in part because it ruins the neat symmetry of his argument about comedy (Simon 1985, 108).
. See SLW, section 2, and passim. On the unity of the comic and the tragic, see Walsh 1994, 217, n. 19. On the unity of the tragic and the comic in Either/Or I and in The Concept of Irony, where romanticism is portrayed, see Glenn 1970.
. Socrates is described by Climacus as “a solo dancer to the honor of the God” (CUP1, 89). Socrates may also be considered the model for the pseudonyms and their imaginary constructions who characterize themselves as dancers (see Walsh 1994, chap. 5; Howland 2006, 39–40). Like jesting, dancing may be understood as connoting earnestness in relation to the divine and not merely aesthetic frivolity.
. For style as indirect communication, see Pap. VIII 1 A 33; CUP1, 64–65; 245n; FSE, 35–38. For an analysis of the style of the pseudonymous writings, see Mackey 1971. For Kierkegaard’s reasons for using indirect communication, see Elrod 1981, 249–303; Pojman 1984, 148–54; Poole 1993; Olesen 2005. For an interesting study of Kierkegaard’s theory of communication see Manheimer 1977, and for an illuminating yet brief overview of indirect communication, see Nordentoft 1978, 345–7. My discussion of indirect communication is deeply indebted to Pojman’s discussion (1984).
. The review is by Andreas Frederik Beck, News Repertorium fur die theologosche Literatue und kirchlich Statistik (Berlin, III, 1, April 30, 1845), 44–48.
. The idea that only the earnest can understand the jest is emphasized in pseudonymous writings, by Climacus in Postscript (CUP1, 276–7, n. 422) and by Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity (both books edited by Kierkegaard), and by Kierkegaard himself in My Point of View. See also the journal entries under “Communication,” including the extensive notes for a series of lectures on the subject, which Kierkegaard prepared but never delivered (JP 1, 617–8).
. Louis Pojman’s translation; quoted in Pojman 1984, 68. Adi Shmuëli notes that Kierkegaard has his pseudonymous authors undertake the same action that he himself undertook several times in writing his works (Shmuëli 1971, 136–7). The pseudonyms are either publishers (Victor Eremita in Either/Or) or binders of the book (Hilarius in Stages on Life’s Way), who vanish, or characters, who retreat (Constantin Constantius in Repetition); some of the characters are editors, like Brother Taciturnus in Stages, who tells us that he has found the diary, “Guilty/ Not Guilty,” in a lake, and challenges the reader to discover the author’s identity. Similarly, Kierkegaard does not introduce a single person in his works who says directly: “I am a believer, a Christian.” To speak in this way would be utter nonsense. That is why his works always have two characters, one who describes the other as a believer. For example, in Fear and Trembling Johannes de Silencio tells us that Abraham is a believer, in Repetition Constantius declares that the young man has religious “sentiment,” and the young man in turn refers to Job as a believer who has experienced repetition in his faith. Finally, Kierkegaard doubts whether he himself is a Christian and uses Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous character in The Sickness unto Death and Training in Christianity as the model of the real Christian. However, Anti-Climacus speaks not of himself, but of Jesus. It is therefore always someone else who says that another is a believer. While pseudonymity, an essential element of the Kierkegaardian authorship, is a “doubly-reflected (indirect) communication,” Kierkegaard, as he writes in “a First and Last Declaration” at the end of Postscript, does not use pseudonyms when publishing his edifying discourses because he wants to show that he is a religious writer even though he has published aesthetic works.
. For a comparison of irony and Christian love, see Shmuëli 1971, 155. Any indirect communication supposes two disparate qualitative opposites, and Jesus is this as well. Furthermore, the teacher of indirect communication is always incognito, and this is so even with Jesus. Kierkegaard argues that Jesus as a man is the incognito who is God Himself, that is, in becoming a man, God is hidden in the human. The effect produced by Jesus as the embodiment of contradiction is similar to the sense of distance created by indirect communication. Initially His lowliness offends the learner. Nevertheless, there is a capital difference between Jesus and any other indirect communication. The qualitative opposites established by the ironist and the humorist belong to the world of phenomena. Whether the matter in question is the union of the tragic and the comic, or unhappiness and happiness, the communication is always parasitic on a range of common things. Moreover, the designer of such a communication always keeps a distance from this world and is never the objective or disinterested witness of it. However, Jesus is different. In addition to the first type of indirect communication, Kierkegaard recognizes another form of indirect communication, one in which the communicator is a factor. Jesus is his own communication: He does not speak these things; he is these things. For additional essential differences between Jesus and other kinds of indirect communication, see Shmuëli 1971, chap. 9, 145–75.
. For modern models of indirect communication, see Pattison 1992, 66–67.
. Plutarch, 1967–84, Cato the Elder, Sayings of Romans, Moralia, III, 180–1.
. Pap. II A 166; Hannay 2001, 94, 138.
. For Erasmus’ relationship to Menippean satire, see Benda 1979; Ball 1979.
. On how the “indirect” moves from being a purely literary construct to one that involves the signifying activity of the “lived body,” see Poole 1993, 74, n. 25.
. For the fool, see Simon 1985, 94–95, Welsford 1968 and Willford 1969. Both Enid Welsford and William Willeford go great lengths to detail the characteristics of the fool—it is an inventory of personality that closely matches Kierkegaard’s traits and behavior. There is the matter of the fool’s dress, designed to call attention to itself, and the stick he carries as a scepter. Kierkegaard walks the streets of Copenhagen in old-fashioned clothes, carries an umbrella whether it is raining or not, and is lampooned for the uneven length of his trousers. There is the matter of the fool’s orientation to the world, his failure to marry, and the confusion of his sexuality. The nature of Kierkegaard’s sexuality has been rigorously debated among his biographers: Whereas he courted Regine Olsen, his fearful retreat from marriage is the event in his life that he wrote about most obsessively. There is the matter of the fool’s introversion and his role on the boundaries of the normal. Kierkegaard protects his introversion and inwardness at all cost. Living on the boundaries of Copenhagen society, he watches as an eccentric outsider. There is the matter of the fool’s purpose, his special ability to speak the truth with jest, to transvalue and invert, and thereby to bring an audience to a new understanding of the truth. This is the role Kierkegaard self-consciously adopts for himself. There is the matter of the fool’s paradoxical speech, which alternates between jest and earnest, meaning and meaninglessness, the worthless and the valuable. This is the language of Kierkegaard’s texts. Moreover, the fool’s special interest in his own disguises, the ways in which he calls attention to his masks and asks us to see through the disguises is closely allied with the manner in which Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship to Copenhagen. Kierkegaard in the role of the fool lacks a partner, however. Most fools live in pairs, one as wit, one as butt, and without this other Kierkegaard is forced to improvise. He acts both parts himself, “master of irony and martyr of laughter” (JP 6, 119).
. For example, Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, 1927, XIV, 534, 536, 559; XVIII, 87. For Hegel on comedy and tragedy, see the next chapter as well as Roche 1998 and Gashé 2000; for Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel, see Mackey 1986; Taylor 1980b; Thulstrup 1980; and Stewart 2003a. However, it is to Danish Hegelians’ view of the comic rather than to Hegel’s that Kierkegaard objected. For J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen’s view of the comic, see Heiberg 1828; Martensen 1941a, 1841b.
. This metaphor is applied explicitly to satire and the comic in the paragraph that ends Postscript’s footnote on the comic (CUP1, 459–62; cf. JP 2, 1746, sec. 13–15). Climacus suggests that a good training for would-be satirists, who want to be responsible for their comic powers, is to renounce laughing at what they despise and exercise their eye for the comical on items for which they have partiality and sympathy (CUP1, 462). Renouncing laughter at that which one despises and focusing on the comic in objects for which one is partial and sympathetic is Shaftesbury’s advice to himself, as we have seen in the previous chapter. For the manner in which the concept of satire, which Kierkegaard considered treating when a student, bears on the relationship of comedy to tragedy, see Malantschuk 2002, 147. Humor also bears on these relationships, but satire’s distinct nature in comparison to humor and irony, to the best of my knowledge, is not clarified in Kierkegaard’s writings. Satire is used when something is “sad and ludicrous” and “comical and appalling” (SUD 43; 56); and while satire, much like irony, seems to exclude the jester, humor appears to be much more sympathetic and inclusive of the jester. Yet, Climacus classifies satire and caricature under humor rather than as a species of irony. On satire, see JP 1,140 /Pap. 11 A 571; JP 1, 189/Pap. X3 A 540; JP 2, 1800/Pap. XI2 A 294; JP 4, 5262/Pap. II A 166; JP 4, 6282/Pap. IX A 432; JP 4, 6907/Pap. XI1 A 497.
. Kierkegaard chastises the playwrights Baron Holberg and Augustin Eugen Scribe, the former for presenting characters that are caught up in the grip of genuine suffering, and the latter as an example of a demoralizing writer who “wittily and entertainingly entertains the age—with the sins of the age” (JP 2, 1761). Frater Taciturnus (the character of Stages on Life’s Way and the pseudonymous writer to the Corsair) directs allegation at the journal similar to those Kierkegaard directs at the playwright Scribe. Although many of his remarks of the ethical legitimacy of the comic precede his quarrel with the Corsair, the indication that Kierkegaard really believed that the hierarchy between the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages reflects on the comic, can be found in his confrontation with the editor of this popular journal, Meir Goldschmidt. In an 1846 journal entry, Kierkegaard dismisses the Corsair as “contemptible,” and criticizes its “misuse of the comic.” The comic, he argues, “must have the resource of a consistent and well-grounded ethical view, a sacrificial unselfishness, a high-born nobility that renounces the moment; otherwise the medicine becomes infinitely and incomprehensibly worse than the sickness” (COR, xvii). The most difficult task, he writes, is “to maintain the conception of responsibility rooted in ethical and religious earnestness together with the delight of jest.” The problem with the Corsair is that it performs only one part of this task, and never develops “the maturity that balances the two [earnestness and jest],” and as a result it “counterfeits and taints the comic and thereby silences the authentic comic” (178–9).
. If philosophers are thought to be in dialogue with anyone at all, then it is with great names in the history of philosophy. These great thinkers are conceived to be involved in an ongoing dialogue in an ahistorical forum of ideas. Jon Stewart observes in Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered that “it is thought that to be involved in seemingly petty polemics with little known Danish contemporaries would be unworthy of Kierkegaard’s genius” (Stewart 2003a, 628).
. The materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach voices a similar criticism of Hegelianism. Absent-mindedness for Feuerbach designates the exotism of idealism conceived as a form of life. The “humoristico-philosophical” life characterized by the negligence of reality and the humor of an involuntary distance from life finds in the writer its professional incarnation (Feuerbach 1834, I, 341f). Shaftesbury, Marx, and Nietzsche launch the same criticism, preceded by the Renaissance Philosophers Erasmus and Montaigne, who ridicule the philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages: Forgetting themselves in abstractions, they betray life, which is the true philosophical and theological concern. Following Erasmus and Feuerbach, Kierkegaard denounces Hegel’s abstractions and the theologians’ forgetfulness of the simple life of faith.
. My discussion of the philosopher as fool is deeply indebted to Lippitt 2000b, chap. 2. See also Lippitt 1999b. Michael Weston argues that Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms and the pervasiveness of comedy, irony, and humor in his critique of philosophy have their grounds in the ethical nature of this critique. Weston establishes this point in the case of pseudonymity (Weston 1994, 43). John Lippitt echoes the latter claim, namely, that the use of comedy, irony, and humor has an ethical-religious aim, to make us aware of a particular kind of illusion (Lippitt 2000b, chap. 2).
. For Johannes’ irony, see McCarthy 1978, 108–11.
. Andrew Cross maintains that in one crucial respect Kierkegaard modifies his earlier conception of existential irony. The ironist not only dissociates himself from the others but also from himself—from the social, embodied person that he has been and now merely plays at being. This is the self’s break from immediacy (Cross 1998, 126).
. Niels Thulstrup explains that in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard had another and categorically different standard of irony than that of Hegel: “This is clearly stated in thesis 8, where he says that ‘Irony, as an infinite and absolute negativity, is the lightest and weakest meaning of subjectivity,’ which immediately suggests that subjectivity has other and higher possibilities than the ironic position” (Thulstrup 1980, 260). Robert Perkins suggests that Hegel and Kierkegaard both understand irony in terms of the development of subjectivity, but that Hegel expresses this in relation to objective history, whereas Kierkegaard thinks more of the concrete individual (Perkins 1970, 250–1).
. Gregory Vlastos is convinced that Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socratic irony is “hopelessly perplexed” by a “dazzling mystification,” that is, by the “infinite absolute negativity” that Kierkegaard “fished out of Hegel,” which seduces him into finding in the Platonic texts “the vagaries of a romantic novella” (Vlastos 1999, 43, n. 81).
. For Kierkegaard on irony see McCarthy 1982, chap. 1; Cross 1998; Elrod 1975, 126–31. See also Schleifer 1984; Smyth 1986; Strawser 1997; Rudd 1998; Golomb 1992; Garff 2002.
. How radical negation can culminate in the marvels of fulfillment provides interesting speculation in Louis Mackey’s essay on The Concept of Irony: “Irony mastered remains unreconciled, and the actuality recuperated by mastered irony remains elusive” (Mackey 1986, 180). See also John Smyth’s explanation, which is summarized in Morton Gurewitch (Smyth 1986, 201–2; Gurewitch 1994, 218, n. 38).
. For explanations of the new poems and Martensen’s view of the comic as it appears in the review, see the translator’s notes to The Concept of Irony (Carpel 1966, 426–9, nn. 13–15).
. For the relation of humor to irony in Kierkegaard’s dissertation, see CI, 329; 178, n. 28. For the superiority of humor to irony, see Hannay 2001, 72–74; Pattison 1992, 53–55; Lippitt 2000b, 92–102.
. See also essays in Conway and Gover 2002, especially by Garff, Golomb, and Emmanuel. Kierkegaard wrote about the The Point of View: “The book itself is true, and is, in my view, masterful, if a little bit is added in order to emphasize more strongly that I am a penitent, and a little more about my sin and my guilt, and a little more about my inner misery—then it is true” (Pap. X1 A 78). “`The Point of View of My Life as an Author’ must not be published. No! No!—And this is what is decisive … : I cannot present myself entirely truthfully. Even in the very first manuscript (which, however, I had written without any thought of publishing), I was not, however, able to emphasize what is the main thing for me: that I am a penitent, and that this fact is the deepest explanation of me. …” (62f.).
. Alastair Hannay explains that if Kierkegaard were a subjective thinker, irony and humor would be his incognitos. In the pseudonyms the incognitos become “persons,” or at least “figures” (Hannay 2001, 315).
. Marc Taylor notes that of the eighty-four times Kierkegaard uses the word “humor” in his published writings, seventy-seven are in Postscript, as well as the eighteen of twenty-one occurrences of the “humorist” (Taylor 1980a, 221).
. Kierkegaard owned Hamann’s works and from the time of The Concept of Irony drew heavily on these texts while forming his views of irony. Christianity, as an offense to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, was Hamann’s epitaph, which Kierkegaard adopted. Louis Pojman maintains that the decisive moment of turning toward Christianity as essentially anti-speculative, as that which does justice to the subjective aspect of human nature, appears to come through Kierkegaard’s reading of Hamann in the fall of 1836 (Pojman 1984, 7–9). Kierkegaard, a young theology student, was first attracted by Hamann’s comparison of speculative reason to the Mosaic law, which must be superseded by the Gospel. “Our reason is therefore exactly what Paul calls the Law—and the command of reason is holy, righteous, and good; but is it given to make us wise? Even so little as the Law of the Jews made them righteous, but it is given to lead us from the opposite, to show us how irrational our reason is, and that our errors through it should increase, as sin increased through the Law” (Pap. I A 237; quoted by Kierkegaard in German). Reason is as inadequate for solving the ultimate problems of human life as the law is for solving the problem of sin. Knowledge is abrogated by grace through the Gospel, whose truth cannot be understood through reason. It is, continues Hamann, “incredible sed verum” (incredible but true).
Through Hamann, Kierkegaard discovers the category of humor, which comes to replace the category of irony as the deepest attitude toward existence (Pojman 1984, 7–9). Irony is the grim fate that inevitably wins out over man’s finitude, causing all his projects to end in death. However humor is seen as divine freedom, which is disjunctive with irony’s bleak necessity. It is positive and affirms that there is hope, although there is no reason for hope. Humor is the insight that God is wholly other. God’s truth necessarily appears very different than our finite comprehension of what it should look like. That is, divine reason is fundamentally disjunctive with human reason. Consequently, it is bound to appear to man as absurd. Humor in the human being is the appropriate attitude toward Divine Folly. Only in the absurd does the possibility of seeing God arise.
The Hamannian theme continues to dominate Kierkegaard’s thought throughout fall 1836. Reasoning, when brought to its ultimate conclusion, always ends in an absurdity, a reductio ad absurdum. In an entry, which adumbrates a discussion in the third chapter of Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard says that reason’s goal is paradoxicality: “Just how much the Understanding can achieve in a speculative sense can be best seen in the fact that when it is carried out to its highest potential in explaining the Highest, it must be expressed as a contradictory statement” (Pap. I A 243, Sept. 19, 1836; see II A 239; III A 108). Pojman explains, “the significance of humor, then, is to show just how impoverished finite reason is, to laugh at all man’s attempts by his understanding to scale the heavens. Secondly, it has a positive function of opening a person to accept the reality of paradoxical truth, and ultimately to acceptance of the highest paradox of the Incarnation. This humor is the road to salvation” (Pojman 1984, 8). It is only when Christianity ceases to be for Kierkegaard the most humorous worldview and humor is relegated to the last terminus a quo with regard to Christianity that Kierkegaard departs from Hamann. For Kierkegaard’s relation to Hamann, see Smith 1964; Andersen 1982; Hay 2008. For the differences between the two thinkers, see Smith 1964, 193, n. 34.
. Even as late as 1849 Kierkegaard writes, “Christendom is waiting for a comic poet à la Cervantes, who will create a counterpart to Don Quixote out of the essentially Christian” (JP 2, 1762). In Judge for Yourself! (written 1852–1854) he uses the lilies and the birds jestingly to teach the God-fearing worker the earnestness of God as a co-worker (FSE, 179, 183, 186). Kierkegaard’s disengagement from Hamann’s thought begins with a paragraph on the absurd nature of the Christian message. Apparently, Kierkegaard believed the quote to be Hamann’s, but it came from the skeptical Hume. It is a prolepsis of what will appear in fully developed form in the Postscript:
The Christian religion not only was the first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity. And whoever is moved by faith to assent to it is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. (Pap. I A 100)
This quotation comes from sec. 10 of Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. What Hume stated tongue-in-cheek Kierkegaard took to be an instance of the humorous and profound insight of Hamann. Miracle or “wonder” stands in disjunctive relationship with human reason, and unexpectedly breaks with the affairs and lives of men. The proper response to the wonderful is wonder, not reason. Pojman explains, “wonder, in the sense of being awed by the supernatural, is the appropriate response to the miracles in life, even as humor is the appropriate preparation for it” (Pojman 1984, 9). At this point, Kierkegaard returns to the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the theologian of wonder (Pap. II A 199, December 7, 1837). In Schleiermacher, the two poles—abstract systematizing and the personal subjective tendency—meet for Kierkegaard. Whereas Hamann is too one sided and lacking in systematic comprehensiveness, Schleiermacher seems to have balanced both tendencies, creating a personal philosophical theology. On closer investigation, however, Schleiermacher turns out to be deficient regarding the paradoxical, although his response to wonder is correct (Pap. I A 273).
. On the last page of the Concept of Irony where the later project in Postscript is anticipated, Kierkegaard refers the reader to Hans Lassen Martensen’s theological theory of humor (CI, 329). For Martensen’s view of humor see Martensen 1841a, 1841b, sec. 56.
. CUP1, 501; see also 617. In this passage, Climacus denies being a religious individual, claiming to be solely a humorist, whereas in another passage he places himself on the boundary of the religious within immanence seeking the Christianreligious (CUP1, 451). In yet another passage, he identifies his position within the borders of Religiousness A (CUP1, 557). Hence, it is never entirely clear where Climacus fits within the various forms of religiousness.
. The translation has been amended by Pojman 1984, 68.
. In an appendix to Postscript, Climacus suggests that the whole work has only been an experiment or imagery construction that is “about myself, solely and simply about myself” (CUP1, 617). “Everything,” he writes, “is to be understood in such a way that it is revoked” (CUP1, 619). The revocation at the end of Postscript has raised the contention that humorous revocation is a way of distancing oneself existentially from the divine. Certainly it may be that, but Climacus’ own revocation at the end of the book suggests another possibility, namely, that the existential humorist may revoke his words in the interest of indirect communication. He does not claim to be an authority on the subject of Christianity and has but one opinion, namely, “that it must be the most difficult of all to become a Christian” (CUP1, 619). He is thus qualified on the basis of his own self-reflection in the book to be only an apprentice, or learner. For this purpose he seeks a “teacher of the ambiguous art of thinking about existence and existing” who will allow him to ask questions and will go over everything until he has understood it, not simply learned by rote a paragraph a day (CUP1, 622–3). Having found no such teacher, Climacus is reluctant to assume the role of teacher himself, as if a learner in the art of existing could teach anyone else. Climacus thus leaves his readers free to master the art of existing for themselves just as he must do. Another possible interpretation of the revocation is that Climacus seeks to protect his own secret inwardness by cloaking his earnestness in jest. If that is the case, then his claim to be solely a humorist must be taken ironically—and humorously (Walsh 1994, 217). On Climacus’ revocation, see also Lippitt 2000a.
. Tonny Olesen finds the sources of these views about humor in Kierkegaard’s contemporaries (Olesen 2003, 225–6, nn. 27–32). That humor entered the world with Christianity has been “likely introduced by Jean Paul,” who designates humor as the Romantic-comic with “Romantic” meaning “Christian” (Richter 1813 [1804]; Olesen 2003, 225, n. 27). Moreover, the claim that humor gains its strength by bringing with it a category of totality seems to originate with Jean Paul, but is also found in H. L. Martensen (Martensen 1841b). The notion that humor is not a designation of the first immediacy but includes reflection is influenced by Gotthold Lessing’s distinction between immediate and reflective humor in Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Lessing 1962, sec. 93). Jean Paul’s view that “irony is added as the third modality within comedy” is appropriated by J. L. Heiberg, who subsequently redefines “humor” as the unity of “playfulness” (the immediate) and “irony” (reflection) (Richter 1813 [1804], programs VII and VIII; Heiberg 1828, column 4). Kierkegaard has excerpted the latter in Journal BB 1837. The idea that humor designates the unity of tragedy and comedy Olesen finds not in Jean Paul, who “only understands humor within comedy,” but in Karl Solger, “who is most probably the first to do so” (1962 [1829], 215–20). The observation that humor designates a culminating standpoint is found in Hegel, who, in Lectures on Aesthetics, places humor just before the end of the Romantic form of art, and the notion that humor is melancholic [vermodig] likely derives from Solger as well (1962 [1829], 215–20). The literature contemporaneous with the writings of Kierkegaard is replete with discussions of humor as the counterpart to Greek irony. See, for example, Baur 1837 and Daub 1838, to whom Kierkegaard refers respectively in Pap. II A 186 and II A 79. Olesen does not mention eighteenth-century thinkers who influenced Kierkegaard on these matters, such as Hamann or Shaftesbury, or the sixteenth-century religious thinker, Erasmus.
. On the role of humor, see Lippitt 2000b, chaps. 4–5, 60–103; Evans 1983, 195–210. Stephen Evans thinks of the existence spheres not in terms of a fixed schema but rather as “existential possibilities that can be helpfully reflected on with the help of certain defining categories” (Evans 1983, 199). Although it is helpful to relax the rigidity of the schema of the stages, or existence spheres, by thinking of them in this way, another solution is suggested by Sylvia Walsh, who argues that it may be possible to think of humor in terms of a gradation, or range, of humorous standpoints and as operative on the boundary between immanent religiousness and Christianity as well as between the ethical and the religious (Walsh 1994, 212–17). Marc Taylor neglects the element of humor in Religiousness A. He views humor only as a boundary category within the ethical and Christian-religious stages, although he does place humor within immanent categories. Thus when Taylor discusses humor as the incognito of religious faith, he presumably means Christian faith, and not Religiousness A, as Evans and Walsh interpret it (Taylor 1980a).
. What makes Religiousness B distinctive is the concept of God becoming human to make human salvation possible, as in when “the learner owes the teacher everything” (PF 38). For the difference between Religiousness A and B, see Deuser 1998. The centrality of Postscript in the corpus makes it easy to think that the richly developed contrast between Religiousness A and Religiousness B (the project initiated in Philosophical Fragments of comparing the modes of religious subjectivity embodied in Socratic and Christian faith) is the culmination of the authorship’s presentation of the religious stage. However, this is not the case for Merold Westphal, who adds Religiousness C:
Like Religiousness B, it is distinctly Christian, but whereas in Religiousness B Christ is the paradox to be believed, in Religiousness C he is also the Pattern of Paradigm to be imitated, most particularly in his compassion for the poor and the powerless … Religiousness C represents an ethic of radical compassion that welcomes the neighbor even across the class of ethically sanctioned marginalization. (Westphal 1998, 120–1)
Practice in Christianity is the most important text for Religiousness C, but For Self-examination, Judge for Yourself, and Works of Love are also important. For Religiousness C, see Westphal 1992; for Kierkegaard’s Christian ethics, see Quinn 1998.
. The characterization of religiousness in terms of hidden inwardness is something Kierkegaard later explicitly rejects in Practice in Christianity because it too easily becomes an excuse for the relaxation of rigorous striving in Christendom, where everyone is presumed to be a Christian in hidden awareness (PC, 215–32). In place of hidden inwardness Kierkegaard introduces the “inverted recognizability” of the Christian through external suffering brought about by opposition from the world (PC, 212, 215). But Christianity is still essentially inwardness for Kierkegaard, and he continues to speak of a true “concealed inwardness” in the form of “the suffering of real self-denial” on the part of true Christians (PC, 138–9).
. Ideally, the religious individual would be so artful in disguising inwardness that not even the slightest hint of it would be apparent to others, but Climacus admits that “as long as the struggle and the suffering in inwardness continue he will not succeed in hiding his inwardness completely” (CUP1, 501). It is this element of imperfection that distinguishes the religious individual of whom Climacus speaks from the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling, for Climacus claims that the knight of faith is presented in an illusory state of completeness and thus in a false medium, rather than in the medium of existence, where nothing is ever finished or complete (CUP1, 500–1).
. Kierkegaard contrasts this view with the Hegelian view, which maintains, “in eternity a person will preserve a comic consciousness about the temporal” (CA, 207). For Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, one of four attitudes toward eternity is comical—when eternity is conceived abstractly, that is, in metaphysical, aesthetic, and aesthetic-metaphysical perspectives. It is viewed negatively as the boundary of the temporal, or as imaginatively and dreamily present in poetry and art, or as comically preserving the temporal within itself. Vigilius primarily has in mind a statement by Poul Møller. The other intended target is Hans Martensen’s Hegelian tendency to give superiority to the comic in an aesthetic-metaphysical viewpoint that swallows up the temporal in the eternal (CA, 154). Kierkegaard’s own view of eternity is the basis of the somewhat bizarre conjecture he advances in his journals: “Granted that eternity is too earnest a place for laughter (something I have always been convinced of), it seems that there must be an intermediary state where a person is permitted to laugh outright … Socrates would be found in this intermediary state” (JP 2, 272).
. In the last of the Diapsalmata of Either/Or, the young aesthete relates a tale in which he is granted one wish in front of all the gods in the assembly. He chooses “one thing, that [he] may always have the laugh on [his] side.” Because the gods begin to laugh, he concludes that his wish has been granted (EO1, 41–42). But the gods laugh at him, for to have laughter always on one’s side is to claim to transcend finitude, time, and history. The aesthete’s existence is comical, because, as he notes, it is always comical “when subjectivity as mere form would assert itself,” that is, when an individual “tries to be the absolute” (EO1, 140, 143).
. Sotion and later his renown student, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 bc–ad 65), presented laughter and crying as an alternative to anger (Stobaeus, Florilegium III, 20, 53; Seneca, De Ira, 2.10.5; 2.4.4–7; Tranquilitate Anima, 15.2–5).
. On the Corsair affair, see Simon 1985; see the collection of material brought together as COR; Lowrie 1938, 347–63; Lowrie 1968b, 176–87; Perkins 1990; and Poole 1993, especially 188–99.
. Buckley 2003, xiii, xii, 73, xi, 12. When relativism triumphs, the view that laughter signals inferiority becomes unpopular. Francis Buckley explains that the modern academy often is agnostic about norms and skeptical about truth. It prizes an irony in which perspective is all. Modernism is also strongly egalitarian and hostile to signals of inferiority. Buckley believes this may explain why superiority theories are out of fashion today. In addition to Buckley, who defends “a soft version of the Normative superiority thesis” (xii), Charles Gruner (1997) and Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith (1991) may be the only scholars who defend the superiority theory today; they do so by subsuming the incongruity theory to it. In an agnostic and skeptical environment laughter cannot flourish, however. A comic relativism that asserts that one life plan is as good as another is wholly destructive of laughter, according to Buckley (Buckley 2003, 81).
. According to Hobbes, we signal our superiority by laughter but the truly superior do not laugh. The most superior person scorns to tank himself against others. At the limit, he will seek to rise above all laughter. For Hobbes’ theory of laughter, see Chapter 1, Concluding Remarks.
. It follows that the example given by Merold Westphal is inadequate. Although the characterization of Climacus portraying “the existing thinker as having what we might call a metaphysical sense of humor” is accurate, the explanation of this sense of humor as “an appreciation of the inherent incongruities of being human” fails to provide an exact definition of human. Instead Westphal offers the following example: “Politicians who are able to laugh at themselves are somehow more human than those who take themselves with utter and unrelieved seriousness” (Westphal 1996, 72). This may be true, but it does not exemplify Kierkegaard’s view and in this sense the example is inadequate. The metaphysical incongruities revealed by the Kierkegaardian sense of humor depend on a specific metaphysics and a particular view of what it means to be human, which may not be shared by those who are not religious or who do not endorse Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity.
. Among the great figures in Church history, Luther is the one with the most notable sense of humor. Peter Berger suggests that “the same robust sense of humor can even be detected in one of Luther’s most famous statements, containing as it does the doctrine of justification by faith in a comic nutshell when he advises the over-scrupulous Melanchton ‘to sin forcefully, but to believe even more forcefully’ (pecca fortiter sed crede fortius)—a sentence that humorless Catholic critics have often used to discredit Lutherianism and equally humorless Lutherans have reinterpreted to make it inoffensive” (Berger 1999, 199). Luther’s sense of humor permeates his correspondence and table talk and is emphasized in all his biographies. For Luther’s humor, see Oberman 1989; Gritsch 1983; Zwart 1996.
. Both Jerome and Augustine grasp the latent analogy between the Christ of the Gospels and the Socrates of the aporetic dialogues. Erasmus is a connoisseur of both, and it is no surprise that he elaborates on this thought in his Praise of Folly. Erasmus’ attitude to Socrates’ irony is important to recall in the context of his comparison with Christ and St. Paul. If references to Socrates’ ironia in the Middle Ages are extremely rare, they become commonplace in the Renaissance; and from then on Socrates’ ironia, writes Erasmus, become his ironia familiaris (“habitual irony”) (Erasmus 1961, V, 844). For Socrates and the Early Church, see Edwards 2007; for Socrates and Kierkegaard, see Howland 2006.
. For Erasmus and Kierkegaard, see Simon 1985; Jensen 2009. In Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly (1971 [1509]), Folly (Stultitia) goes through three stages of existence: She is first comic, foolish, intoxicated, sexual, vain, in love with herself; she is then satiric, wise, critical of everything she has raised, angry at the world and its folly; finally she is the wise fool, religious, the simple Christian praised by Paul in 1 and 2 Corinthians. Richard Simon finds similarities between these stages and the three stages of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship: Aesthetic, ethical, and religious (Simon 1985, 109). Appended to the The Praise of Folly is Erasmus’ “Letter to Martin Dorp,” which explains that the mock encomium has been written “under a laughable persona” in order “to call the world back to true Christianity” (Erasmus 1971, 147, 156). Erasmus argues that it has the same serious purpose as his explicitly serious works but is nevertheless only a piece of foolishness that we do not have to take seriously. For the kinds of comedy found in Erasmus, see Gordon 1990, 6–7; for The Praise of Folly, see Kaiser 1963, 9–10; and for Erasmus as a laughing philosopher, see Kallen 1968, chap. 4.
. See Scott 1966; Cox 1969; Kuschel 1994; Miller 1969; Crossan 1976; Taylor 1984; Wood 1988.
. Some earlier works have been influenced by anthropologist Johann Huizinga’s work on play (1955), or the theories of the classicist Francis Cornford (1961) and the Cambridge Ritual school, which understand Greek comedy as the dramatic expression of an older ritual cycle of death and resurrection (e.g., Wood 1988, 24; Crossan 1976, 22). By the mid-1970s, deconstructionist literary theory, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “carnival” (1968), have also become significant for theological reflection on the comic. An enlightening analysis of the current interest of theology in humor can be found in Sands 1996.
. In Reinhold Niebuhr’s case, for example, the incongruities of humor, like those of faith, are theologically significant only because they point to a deeper level of congruity (Niebuhr 1969); John Crossan contends in a similar vein that parabolic paradoxes of the New Testament lead beyond language to the divine silence (Crossan 1976). Hugo Rahner and Karl-Joseph Kuschel construe Christian levity as an emulation of the detached laughter and unconditional freedom of God (Rahner 1972; Kuschel 1994). Conrad Hyers views comedy as “the playfulness which characterizes both Creator and creation alike” (Hyers 1987, 7; see Hyers 1981). Kathleen Sands justly remarks that when play, festivity, or carnival are affirmed as Christian, it is because they are made to represent an “endless” creativity, a radical, relativizing openness that cannot be contained in the purposive and conflicted aims of ordinary life (Sands 1996, 504).
. Theology’s interest has been confined to what Charles Baudelaire calls “the absolute comic,” so described to contrast it with “the significative comic,” which involves social criticism (Baudelaire 1956). For a recent thesis on the importance of the absolute comic, see Kern 1980. Kathleen Sands argues that the treatment of humor by some deconstructionists amounts to another variation on this theme, as when Candace Lang traces humor to the endlessly self-referential character of language (Lang 1988). In either case, Sands explains, the comic affords a certain victory over social constraint. She also mentions that for Edith Kern the victory can only be temporary and fantastic (Sands 1996, 504).
. For alternative views, see Bell 1992; Sands 1994. Among religious feminists Mary Daly is due special credit for using humor to exorcise the God of patriarchy and for restoring the virtue of “Laughing Out Loud” to women (Daly and Caputi 1987; see also Sands 1996, 502).
. See Sanders 1995; Minois 2000. For a good exposition of the relationship of Christianity and humor, see Lippitt 2000b, 169–74.
. For humor in the Bible, see Lang 1962; in Judaism, see Radday and Brenner 1990; Murray 1993; Reines 1972; Morreall 2001; in Islam, see Rosenthal 1962.
. Laughter plays a prominent role in Zen Buddhism and Taoism, and there is a positive attitude toward it in Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The different attitudes to laughter in Western in contrast to Eastern philosophies and religions may be due to the otherworldliness of Western religions and the Western view of the individual as an uneasy combination of body and mind, as well as of animal and godlike origins. For laughter in Hinduism, see Siegel 1987; in Buddhism, see Morreall 1999, 49–62; in Zen Buddhism, see Hyers 1974, 1989; Blyth 1959, 1969; Moore 1977; in ancient Chinese philosophy, see Harbsmeier 1989; in Taoism, see Hyers 1974, chap. 10; in Confucianism, see Chao-Chih 2001, chaps. 5–6. For humor and laughter in religions, see Morreall 1989a, 1999; Gilhus 1991, 1997; Sarazin 1991.
. This view originates in Aristotle’s remarks in a treatise on physiology: The human being is “the only one of the animals that laughs” (De partibus animalium III, 10, 673a, 8, and 28). For Aristotle’s arguments on laughter, see Labarrière 2000; for the history of laughter as a human property since Aristotle, see Ménager 1995, 13–20.
. For Jesus’ laughter, see Le Goff 1992. The question of Jesus’ laughter is encountered in sermons and homiletic literature. Moreover, it was not restricted to monastic or strictly ecclesiastical society, but was also very much alive in the University. In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris traditionally organized a yearly quod libet (a discussion on a chosen theme that is open to the general public) on precisely this subject. However, before the middle of the twentieth century, only the Gnostics had recognized Christ’s laughter.
. Although risus monasticus was illegitimate laughter, the monks managed to create written jokes, the joca monacorum, of which there are collections from the eighth century onward.
. Christian behavior is more varied than Christian theoretical considerations. Mikhail Bakhtin has argued for the existence of a comic culture in the Middle Ages (1968). Although often frowned on by ecclesiastical authorities, such a culture is emphatically Christian in content. One should mention the Easter laughter (risus paschalis) as an important medieval practice: In the course of the Easter mass the congregation was encouraged by frequent obscene jokes and funny stories to engage in loud and prolonged laughter in order to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection. St. Francis of Assisi is a notable exception to the common view of laughter in Christianity. For laughter in the Middle Ages, see Le Goff 1997; Verdon 2001; Sanders 1995, 127–164; Minois 2000, 95–243. For laughter in the Renaissance, see Ménager 1995, 79–83.
. Alexandre de Hales, the first great Franciscan doctor and lecturer at the University of Paris from 1220 to 1240, wrote one of the first scholastic texts on laughter. The important texts of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus also had an influence at the level of the practice of laughter. Thomas Aquinas revives eutrapelia, the Aristotelian social virtue of wit as appropriate laughter for the free person (Aquinas 1972, II-II, quest. 168, art. 2). This plea for restrained laughter is followed by Pascal (Pascal 1941, Provincial Letters, no. 11). Employing his usual tripartite division, Aristotle claims that excess is buffoonery and deficiency is boorishness, but that there exists a true wittiness characteristic of an honorable and free person. Aristotle’s views are further developed by Theophrastus and taken up by Cicero, who uses the Latin terms liberalis and illiberalis for the Greek “free person” and his opposite. The Stoic-peripatetic tradition, which can be found in Cicero’s De Officiis and De Oratore, has a great historic influence (see note 47, Chapter 1). Aristotle’s eutrapelia gains a negative connotation in Greek and Roman culture, however, which eventually reaches its peak with Christianity (Verdon 2001, 17). In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul counts eutrapelia among the vices to be avoided: “Neither filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor jesting, which are not convenient” (5: 4). Wit is condemned by Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and in literally dozens of passages, by Basil and John Chrysostom.
. Jesus is laughing in the writings of ancient Coptic Gnostics. See the Apocalypse of Peter 81:11 and 83:1, translated in Robinson 1990, 377; and the Gospel of Judas 2.3–7, 3.6, 9.3, 14.12–14, translated in Pagels and King 2007, 109–10, 111, 115, 120.
. On Shaftesbury as “the beloved Plato of Europe,” see Herder’s Fragmente über die neurre deutsche Literatur, Sämmtliche Werke, 1877–1913, I, 182, and Eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Erster Abschnitt, Sämmtliche Werke, 1877–1913, V, 499. On Shaftesbury as a “philosophical scoffer,” see Herder’s letter to Kant from 1768, in Immanuel Kants Werke, 1922–23, vol. IX, 64. On Herder and Shaftesbury, see Cassirer 1953, 199. On Kierkegaard and Herder, see Adamsen 2007. On Herder and Kierkegaard as Hamann’s followers, see Ringleben 2006.
. For a more comprehensive discussion of Kierkegaard’s thought on the comic and its relation to the ancient comic traditions in philosophy mentioned in the introduction, see Amir’s “Kierkegaard and the Traditions of the Comic” (2013a). These traditions, which survived throughout the Middle Ages and flourished in the Renaissance before being rediscovered in the Modern era, include the Ridiculous Philosopher (Thales), the Laughing Philosopher (Democritus), the Comical Philosopher (Socrates), Philosophy is Comedic (Plato, the Cynics), Wit is a Virtue (Aristotle), Laughter is the Mark of Humanity (Aristotle), the Laughless Philosopher (Pythagoras), the Mocking Philosopher (Gorgias), and modern and postmodern traditions of the comic such as Laughter is Epistemologically Valuable and the Comic is Ontologically Rooted.
CHAPTER 3: HUMOR AND THE GOOD LIFE
. For criticism of Schopenhauer’s view of laughter, see Lewis 2005; for Schopenhauer’s various forms of the ludicrous, see Sprigge 1988. These articles also provide good explanations of the role of laughter in Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, on which little has been written.
. See, for example, von Hartmann 1887, II, 391–425; Lipps 1898, 261–4; Volkelt 1905–1914, II, 529; Cohen 1912, II, 114–17; and Kutscher 1951, I, 158–61. Lipps has influenced both Freud’s psychology and his view of humor.
. For Carlyle on humor, see Ziolkowski 2011, chap. 5, 213–56.
. For Jean Paul’s humor, see Kleinert 2008. The comic is also praised as a philosophic capacity by Ralph Emerson in his 1843 essay of the same name: “The best of all jokes,” he writes, “is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding from the philosopher’s point of view” (Emerson 1964 [1843], 379).
. For these philosophers, see Nietzsche’s French Laughing Followers (work in progress).
. For Freud’s view of humor and other forms of the comic, see Parkin 1997, chap. 2.
. See Laughter and the Good Life (work in progress).
. The argument presented in this chapter antedates the writing of the previous chapters of this book. Presentations in philosophy and humor conferences of earlier versions vary from 1984 to 2009 (Amir 1984, 1990, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2009a). I have benefited from my colleagues’ comments in these conferences.
. “Tragedy” refers to a literary form difficult to define. The motto of Paul Gordon’s monograph on tragedy is as follows: “… It seems that there cannot be a true theory of tragedy, for underlying every theory of tragedy is the assumption that tragedy has a set of necessary and sufficient properties” (Weitz 1967, 160; quoted in Gordon 2001). Comedy follows in tragedy’s footsteps; according to Robert Corrigan, it is “moving in the right direction in criticizing the ‘formalistic fallacy’ which assumes that a certain theme or structure can be identified which strings together all the varied beads of comedy” (Corrigan 1965a, 3; quoted in Hyers 1996, 9).
. The Russian-French philosopher Leo Shestov generates his tragic philosophy in response to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, and through his ongoing critique of Kant. In contrast to systematic philosophy, tragic philosophy is based on an acknowledgment of the actual horror and chaos of life. It is not meant to teach truth, but to probe and articulate the most personal, difficult, and paradoxical human experiences of the good and the true, and the first and final questions about the meaning and purpose of life. For Leo Shestov’s philosophy, see Shestov 1969, Martin 1969, Philonenko 1998. Leo Shestov was Georges Bataille’s teacher and influenced the latter’s tragic philosophy. He has also influenced the early twentieth-century Russian existentialist school of philosophy: Nikolai Berdiaev, Aleksei Losev, and Merab Mamardashvili. For Shestov’s followers, see Clowes 2007.
. For the Romanian-French philosopher, Cioran, see Cioran 1973, 1990; Parfait 2001. For Georges Bataille, see Bataille 1943; Land 1900; Botting and Wilson 1998. For Nietzsche, Bataille, and Rosset, see notes 5 and 7.
. See Durkheim 1964, 325–50; Berger and Luckman 1967, 180–3; Luckman 1971, 41–49; Lévi-Strauss 1963–1976, 1967, 1–47, 1969–1980; Heller 2005, 21.
. See for example, Nussbaum 2001b and the updated bibliography there. There are anthologies on the substance and meaning of tragedy such as Abel 1967; Corrigan 1965a; Michel and Sewall 1963; manuscripts written in the wake of Nietzschean tragedy such as Witt 2007; Sallis 1991; and Gordon 2001; anthologies that examine the relation of philosophy to tragedy such as Kaufmann 1969; Georgopoulos 1993; Beistegui and Sparks 2000; and monographs on the tragic such as Myers 1956; Szondi 2002.
. For Kant’s view of reason’s drives and aims, see Johnson 2006, 51–52; Yovel 1980, 15–19.
. For the histories of tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play that follow early tragedies, see Cornford 1961; Gilhus 1997. For various views of the relationship between comedy and tragedy, see Koestler 1949, 371–80; Langer 1953, 326–66; Kerr 1967; Davenport 1976; Morreall 1997.
. In her recent work on comedy, Alenka Zupančič suggests that Henri Bergson’s gesture is more ambitious than simply adding yet another pairing—the living-mechanical (or life-automatism)—to the series of oppositions used in comedy. She thinks that he proposes this oppositional pair as the real core of all the others, and that a large part of his book on laughter is dedicated to the attempt to demonstrate the reducibility of different descriptions of the comical to this conceptual matrix. See Zupančič 2008, 111–12.
. For incongruity as a necessary and sufficient condition for humor, see, for example, Nerhardt 1976; for incongruity together with its necessary resolution for humor, see Suls 1972. For information-processing analysts who add a component of conflict-resolution to incongruity theory, see Shultz 1972 and Suls 1983. For theorists who propose a two-stage process of humor, see, for example, Berlyne 1972 and Koestler 1964.
. For incongruity theories, see Schopenhauer 1969; Kant 1911; Gerard 1759; Leacock 1935; for ambivalence theories, see Eastman 1972; Lund 1930; Menon 1931; Monro 1951; finally, for release and relief theories, see Spencer 1860; Lipps 1898; Kline 1907; Freud 1905; Rapp 1947.
. For the relation of suffering and laughter in Nietzsche’s thought, see 1966b, sec. 270; 1954a, IV, sec. 13, 15; 1982, sec. 386; 1979, II, sec. 4.
. See Fry 1992b, 1994; Fry and Salameh 1987, 1993.
. For humor and psychological well-being, see Morreall 2008 and Martin 2008. For contemporary uses of humor in psychological therapy, see Ellis 1977; Grossman 1977; Grotjhan 1970, 1971; Ventis 1987; Robinson 1977, 1983. For a bibliography of therapy and humor, see Nilsen 1993b, 11–15.
. For the view that morality should solve both interpersonal conflicts and intrapersonal conflicts, see Wong 1984, 38. For differences between these conflicts, see McConnel 1988.
. See, inter alia, Morreall 1983a, 1983b, 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2009, 2010.
. O’Connell 1976, Norrick 1986, and Minsky 1983 emphasize that humor enables switching between various conflicting points of views.
. Vera Robinson explores the psychological and physiological functions of humor and the individual’s ability to cope with internal stress (Robinson 1983, 116–9; 1977); humor serves as a moderator of stress for depressive (but not anxiety) symptomatology (Nezu et al. 1988); Rod Martin presents a theoretical model of stress and coping, and discusses the way in which nonhostile, self-accepting, realistic humor, and laughter represent a healthy broad-spectrum coping strategy (Martin 1988). See Jon Roeckelein for numerous references on humor and stress (Roeckelein 2002, 268–9).
. For character, see Kupperman 1991, chap. 1. For the view that self-knowledge is necessary for moral wisdom, see Kekes 1995, chaps. 6–7. For limitations of our capacity to attain to self-knowledge by our own power without a dialogue with others, see Joplin 2000.
. Inner dialogue has been explored by philosophers such as Plato (Theaetetus 189e–190a; Sophist 263a; Philebus 38cd), Augustine (Confessions 1991, Bk. VIII), Shaftesbury (Soliloquy [1711]; Philosophical Regimen [1992]), Hannah Arendt 1978, Gilbert Ryle 1979, Hans-Georg Gadamer 1989, Mikhail Bakhtin 1984, and Daniel Dennett 1991; anthropologists such as George Herbert Mead 1934, psychologists such as Jean Piaget 1959, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky 1962, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Sokolov 1972 and others. For a good survey of the variety of views of inner dialogue, see Blachowicz 1998 and 1999. See also Amir 2001, and Rowan and Cooper’s The Plural Self 1999.
. See also Charles Rycroft’s Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis 1995 and Pinkus 2009 for a good survey of ambivalence. I am grateful to David Segal for his help in researching ambivalence in psychology.
. For Robert Merton’s typology of sociological ambivalence, see Merton 1976, 6–12.
. A good survey of Western civilization from this perspective is found in John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man 1970.
. Spinoza asserts that his philosophy offers a road to salvation (Ethics, V, P36; P42 Schol.); so do Schopenhauer (1969, II, 638), and Nietzsche, although this aspect of the latter’s thought is less often emphasized (1979, III, “Why I Write Such Excellent Books,” sec. 8; 1967, II, sec. 24; 1954, “On redemption”; 1968, sec. 852; 1974, Preface, sec. 3). Philosophy contributes to the good life as Santayana conceives it, but it is also a road for “inward” or “philosophic salvation” (Santayana 1944, 428; 1980, 21, 192, 213).
. For Hellenistic philosophies’ view of ataraxia, or peace of mind, as a radical personal solution akin to personal philosophic redemption, see Nussbaum 1994. The messianic zeal of Epicureans was legendary, and Stoicism has been compared to a religion.
. I am grateful to Itay Ehre for his help with Indian philosophies. For Hindu release, see Clooney and Nicholson 2001; for the Buddhist view of release, see Eckel and Thatamanil 2001; “The middle way,” which has become synonymous with Buddhism is misleading: It is a middle way between extreme Hindu asceticism and a dissolute life of pleasures, but its attitudes toward desire is not mild and conciliatory (see Marinoff 2007, chap. 3).
. For Schopenhauer’s view of renouncing the will and its sources in Eastern thought, see Berger 2004. For desire in Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism, see Nussbaum 1994; Long 1986.
. There are good reasons for rejecting the dream that the gods exist, and the number of books on this subject is great. I merely mention four recent works: Dennett 1993; Kekes 1995; Kitcher 2007; Wielenberg 2005.
. See Plato, Phaedrus, and Burton 1989, 867. Burton discusses enthusiasm in love, religion, and philosophy in “Love-Melancholy,” the Third Partition of his book. See also Shaftesbury (Letter, 2; CR I, 15–16); Kant, “Sickness of the Head,” 1992–(Ak. 2: 267), 268; Johnson 2002, 79–80.
. For the new age movement, see Amir 2009b.
. See Karl Popper’s work (e.g., 1959, 1963, 1994) and its critics.
. For mysticism’s attitude toward desire and reason, see Carmody 1996; Borchert 1994. For the Stoics’ eradication of desires and emotions, see Sorabji 2000, 181–210, and for a criticism of the Kantian metaphysics of the categorical imperative, see Allison 1990.
. Kant, Reflexion 6050, Nachlass, Kants gesammelte Schriften, 1902–, XIII, 436, 1. 18–20; translated by Patrick Neubaeur.
. “Ridicule,” says Webster New World Dictionary, “from the Latin ridere, to laugh. As a noun, it is 1. The act of making one the object of scornful laughter; or 2. Words or actions intended to produce such laughter. As a verb: to make fun of; deride; mock” (Webster New World Dictionary, 514). “Ridiculous: deserving ridicule; absurd” (515).
. That we should take into consideration the view from nowhere is Nagel’s contention (Nagel 1987, 1986). This is not embraced by other philosophers, such as Robert Solomon (1976, chap. 1) and John Kekes (1995, 175–8; 2010, 234–8). For both, the fact that this view makes our concerns futile is a good reason not to embrace it.
. The New York Times, June 1, 1958, sec. II, 3; quoted in Esslin 1961, 101.
. The literature on self-love’s benefits is enormous. I recommend Liebman 1946, chap. 2.
. Don Quixote opens the gallery of many figures such as the majority of Chaplin’s Charlies from his mature period, and the main protagonist (by Vittorio de Sica) of Roberto Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere. Concerning Charlie Chaplin, Conrad Hyers writes: “If ever there was a comic figure that approached universality it was Chaplin’s Tramp … he was the arch-typical comic hero, grappling with universal human problems … In Charlie the whole of the human condition was represented symbolically … He touched the heart of the human predicament in a way that was as profoundly wise as it was delightfully humorous” (Hyers 1996, 4–6). Peter Berger too identifies Charlie Chaplin as the paradigm of the tragic-comic in the history of the film, but it is in prose literature that tragicomedy in everyday life is best caught. In European literature, Berger identifies Cervantes’ Don Quixote as “the paradigmatic embodiment of the tragicomic hero” (Berger 1997, 119). There are more recent cases, however, such as Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991).
. The “raft parable” occurs in The Discourse on the Parable of the Water Snake (Alagaddūpama Sutta) in the Majjhima Nikāya of the Pāli Canon, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (1995). See also the parable in sec. 19 of Chuang Tzu called “Mastering Life” (Wieger 1984) and Wittgenstein’s parable of the ladder in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1963).
. Plato has made laughter itself an ambivalent emotion (Philebus 48–50). Since Plato onward, the conflict-mixture theories attempt to explain this mixture of pain and pleasure (Eastman 1972, chap. 5).
. For irony, see Mueke 1966; Booth 1974; Attardo 2000a, 2000b; Giora 1998.
. The tension between Nietzsche’s critical and positive philosophy is common knowledge in the secondary literature, and is sometimes solved by dividing Nietzsche’s thought into periods. See, for example, Magnus and Higgins 1996.
. For the difficulties inherent in Rosset’s view of joy, see Tellez 2009, 135–48.
. For Nietzsche’s view of generosity, see Nietzsche 1954a, I, “On the Gift-Giving Virtue.” According to Nietzsche, one can be moved to do things for other people out of a self-sufficient sense of having more than enough, a superabundance, of things. Nietzsche considers this kind of “noble” giving ethically superior to giving based on pity or a sense of obligation. See, among many other places, 1966b, sec. 260, and 1974, sec. 55, and Shapiro 1991.
. On serenity in the West, see Sorabji 2002; Ballesteros 2000; Liebman 1946. For Eastern views of serenity, see the bibliography mentioned in previous notes.
. There are many forms of skepticism; because the view presented here considers certainty unattainable, it is skeptical about the claims of metaphysics and religion insofar as they are considered certain. It claims, moreover, that relinquishing one’s desires or reason, or both, for unwarranted claims is not necessary. Pyrrhonism is a much more radical and pervasive form of skepticism. For Pyrrhonian skepticism, see Sinnott-Armstrong 2004; for its practice, see Nussbaum 1994, 280–315; for other forms of skepticism, see Popkin 1996; for philosophy from a skeptical perspective that considers certainty unattainable, see Agassi and Meidan 2008.