Introduction
The aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in the good life. Various disciplines, such as medicine, psychology, and the social sciences, have praised humor for its individual and social benefits. However, the question of the good life is fundamentally a philosophical question; it is important to inquire into whether philosophers have given humor any role in the good life.
Although philosophers have always been interested in laughter, the accepted view is that they have rarely approved of it as a practice or as a subject worth exploring. Still, I suggest that a thorough study of ancient philosophy reveals a variety of relations between philosophy and the comic that have been epitomized in legendary figures such as the ridiculous philosopher (Thales), the laughing philosopher (Democritus), and the comical philosopher (Socrates). This relationship is also seen in the conceptions and practices of philosophy as comedic (Plato, the Cynics) and in views that associate the comic with the ideal of the gentleman––wit as a virtue (Aristotle)––or with human nature in general––laughter as the mark of the human (Aristotle). These relations between philosophy and the comic developed into traditions in Antiquity that have survived throughout the Middle Ages and flourished in the Renaissance before being rediscovered in the Modern era. Before the eighteenth century, however, pace some laughing philosophers of the Renaissance, philosophers seldom gave humor or any other form of the comic a prominent role in the good life. This study seeks to redress the neglect of such an important topic by concentrating on the small number of modern philosophers who have explicitly entrusted humor with a role in the good life as they conceive it.
Only two answer this description: the eighteenth-century British philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Although Kierkegaard refers to Shaftesbury when introducing his interest in the legitimacy of comic, their thought on this subject is related mainly through the work of the eighteenth-century theologian and critic, Johann Georg Hamann. One more philosopher has given humor a prominent role within the good life, the French contemporary philosopher, Gilles Deleuze; as he is a postmodern philosopher, I address his thought elsewhere. Frederich Nietzsche and George Santayana have prioritized instead laughter’s role in the good life, and their thoughts on the subject are examined in a separate study. This study focuses, then, on the respective views of the good life of Shaftesbury, Hamann, and Kierkegaard, and the role they assign in it to humor and other related forms of the comic. The latter include, first, the comic in general as well as in its relation to the tragic; good humor, ridicule and wit for Shaftesbury; and finally, irony, for both Hamann and Kierkegaard. This investigation concludes with my contribution to the discussion of humor in the good life. Drawing on recent research on humor, the tragic, the comic, and ridicule, I propose a prominent role for humor in the good life, which is accessible and perhaps even useful to contemporary readers.
When I mentioned to a colleague that I was writing a book on humor and philosophy, he laughed and said it would be a very short book. He was mistaken, unfortunately, yet he voiced the accepted view according to which philosophy has little in common with humor. Humor, it is thought, is frivolous, whereas philosophy is grave; humor is irrational, whereas philosophy is the epitome of rationality; humor is ambiguous and equivocal, whereas philosophy aims for clarity; and humor is indirect, whereas philosophy is explicit. Moreover, humor is spontaneous and leads to a bodily reaction––laughter––whereas philosophy is systematic and addresses the mind. Thus, humor has no place in philosophy’s lofty enterprise. Many introductory works on humor in other disciplines succinctly sum up philosophy’s negative attitude toward humor, emphasizing the tradition of Pythagoras, the laughterless (agelastos) philosopher, and comparing it with religion’s, especially Christianity’s, hostility toward humor and laughter.
Yet almost all philosophers have been interested in humor. Some have attempted to understand its nature (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Bergson, Kierkegaard, and Santayana). Concerned for its ethical and political implications, various philosophers have refined it and laid out rules for its use (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard). Others furthered our appreciation of its rhetorical power (Gorgias, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian). Philosophers have used humor mainly as a tool for moral criticism: of ignorance (Plato); of the tragic view of life (Plato, the Stoics); of morality and religion (the pre-Socratic Xenophanes, the Cynics, the Peripatetic Theophrastus, the Pyrrhonian 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 of “academic” philosophy (the Cynics, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard). Philosophers have rarely considered laughter essential to the good life. The few exceptions are Democritus, deemed the “laughing philosopher”; Aristotle, who saw in “wit” (eutrapelia) one of the social virtues constitutive of the good life; the Stoic Seneca, who proposed laughter as an alternative to anger and sadness, thus making laughter constitutive of the good, that is, peaceful life; Montaigne, who preferred the “laughing philosopher,” Democritus, to the “weeping philosopher,” Heraclitus, and deemed us the laughable as well as the laughing species; Erasmus, who saw wisdom in folly; and Spinoza, who considered laughter the “pure joy” that enables us to partake in God’s nature.
Since the eighteenth century, however, a new form of laughter—humor—has fulfilled a new and important role in philosophy. In the present study of Shaftesbury, Hamann, and Kierkegaard, I trace the emergence of humor’s importance to modern philosophy, as well as the debts these philosophers owe to the views of various ancient philosophers (such as Democritus, Heraclitus, Gorgias, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, Cicero, Epicurus, the Pyrrhonian Skeptic Timon, the Stoics Epictetus, Sotion, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius; and Plutarch). I also consider medieval, Renaissance, and other modern philosophers’ views of humor (such as Aquinas, Erasmus, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Mandeville, Beattie, Hutcheson, Collins, Ramsay, Kames, Reid, Adam Smith, Campbell, Tucker; Pascal, Voltaire; Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herder, Lessing, Shlegel, Jean Paul, Solger, Feuerbach, Carlyle, Emerson, Bergson, Santayana, Sartre, and Camus), as well as the views of lesser philosophers, psychologists, literary figures, divines, and theologians. The outcome of this study is the insight that humor, when used to further the philosophic ideals of self-knowledge, truth, rationality, freedom, virtue, happiness, and wisdom, can be one of the most useful tools available to a philosopher.
This is not a study in aesthetics. My interest lies in explicit arguments for the role humor should play in the good life, rather than style or definitions of humor. I have respected, accordingly, the philosophers’ use of terms and definitions if provided and Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms to utter different views on the comic, irony, and humor. I have added biographical information and historically contextualized the discussion when necessary, because I believe that a philosopher’s view of self-referential humor is rarely dissociated from his use of humor, and humor and related terms are better studied in context since their meaning and use change according to places and epochs.
Last but not least, the three thinkers addressed here propose alternatives to organized religion, yet remain deeply religious: Shaftesbury’s philosophy is ultimately a religious faith, Hamann converted early in life to the religion of his youth, Lutheran Protestantism, and Kierkegaard is profoundly Christian. To understand their views, the discussion necessarily refers to the relationship of humor to religion, especially Christianity.
In the first chapter, I introduce the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s view of the good life and the role of humor in it. Shaftesbury’s originality lies in his unprecedented and unparalleled defense of humor, wit, ridicule, and good humor as important epistemological tools that promote truth and rationality. Shaftesbury considers ridicule a test of truth, humor a tool for reason, properly educated laughter a form of critical reflection, and good humor or cheerfulness the disposition in which philosophical and religious truth are most effectively comprehended.
The theory that ridicule is a test of truth has been interpreted as meaning that whatever cannot withstand free and humorous examination cannot be well grounded in reason, and that ridicule’s chief value may lie in its use as a test of demeanor to unmask imposture. Both interpretations are true and compatible with a more literal interpretation of Shaftesbury’s view that relates the idea that ridicule is a test of truth to Shaftesbury’s theory of truth. According to the latter interpretation, truth and virtue are ultimately congruous and harmonious, whereas error and vice are incongruous and inharmonious. Because the essence of the comic for Shaftesbury is incongruity and inconsistency, he sees error and vice as inherently ridiculous. On the other hand, truth and virtue do not lend themselves properly to comic treatment, as their mark is congruence and consistency. This reading is truer to Shaftesbury’s intention, I believe, but it makes the relation between ridicule and truth dependent on a view of truth that most of us may find difficult to endorse.
Shaftesbury uses ridicule to criticize enthusiasm, a popular term at the time denoting religious fanaticism. He suggests that individuals must search inward to discover the principle of mastering enthusiasm for beneficial use. Humor can be potently associated with enthusiasm because at the root of enthusiasm lies melancholy. By curing melancholy, humor helps achieve good humor. This unique combination of enthusiasm and humor is both original and effective in that it diagnoses enthusiasm as essentially melancholic; and drawing on a centuries-old belief, offers humor as melancholy’s cure.
A necessary tool for self-education and moral advice, humor serves as a test of truth through the sociability of dialogue in the philosopher’s inner dialogue, conversation, and writing. Humor counters overwhelming enthusiasm, deflates emotional excess, discloses intellectual and moral obtuseness, and enables the development of a sense of proportion necessary for a philosophical character. In conversation, wit and humor—more efficacious than earnest criticism for the distance they create between passion and argument—promote the philosophic goal of rationality as free critical debate. The use of humor and wit in philosophic writing annuls the writer’s authority, thereby promoting the autonomy of the reader, a necessary condition for developing independent thought and moral self-education.
By challenging the melancholy of solitary reason, humor exchanges life-denying solitude for life-promoting good humor, a necessary condition for understanding the world’s harmony, human goodness, God’s good humor and Christianity’s cheerfulness, and for appropriately creating in oneself the virtuous and good-humored character that constitutes the good life. As a liberating, life-giving, and life-forming power of the soul, humor is constitutive of the Shaftesburean good life, for without humor, the good life cannot be attained nor maintained.
Shaftesbury has assigned humor an unparalleled role within philosophy, in stating that ridicule is a test of truth, that humor and good humor have a habilitating function with regard to truth, that to be effective, criticism must be humorous, and that humor is the mark of rationality. The view that criticism must be humorous in order to be effective has antecedents in moral exoteric philosophy. The rest of Shaftesbury’s views are extremely original. The view that ridicule is a test of truth gained followers in the eighteenth century after having been at the heart of a raging controversy about ridicule’s relation with truth and reason. The idea that humor has a habilitating function with regard to truth influenced Hamann, and through Hamann, the young Kierkegaard. Yet the view that humor is the mark of rationality is unprecedented and without followers.
The chapters on Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard are separated by an intermezzo that presents the role humor plays in the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann’s view of the good life. Hamann is an important link between Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard, I suggest, as Hamann develops Shaftesbury’s view of humor and passes it on to Kierkegaard, Hamann’s only disciple: Kierkegaard found in Hamann his view of humor and a model for using irony and humor as indirect communication in the service of Christianity.
Hamann adopted Shaftesbury’s view of the habilitating role of humor with regard to truth. He agrees with Shaftesbury on the correspondence of true humor to reality and therefore on the view that humor represents the state of mind in which truth is best apprehended. However, truth, for Hamann, is the reality of Christ that can only be apprehended by faith. Hamann follows Shaftesbury in holding that humor (and Hamann adds irony) is epistemologically necessary for grasping the truth, but differs from Shaftesbury about the contents of the truth. Contrary to the usual philosophical categories, humor and irony are the only appropriate modes of thought for grasping the truth, that is, the “Word that has become flesh.” Participation in humor, Hamann claims, is analogous to repentance, which in itself is closely connected with faith. The person who cannot understand the humor cannot see the truth, as it is defined by Hamann’s conception of faith.
Faith is the existence of the whole person in the mode of humility. It has the further correlates of offence at God’s condescension and the concealment of His revelation, faith as characterized by the sign of contradiction, and finally, metaschematism, which for Hamann refers to the assumption of another cause as if it were his own in order to expose its weaknesses and contradictions. Hamann uses irony to express the latter idea and humor to express the first three ideas—contrasts, or mixing the high and low for expressing God’s condescension; contradiction for expressing the concealment of God’s revelation, or the theological theory of Kneschtsgestalt Christi that emphasizes the contradiction of Christ himself appearing in the “form of a servant”; and paradox for expressing the incarnated coincidence of opposites that is our road to salvation. Hamann’s originality lies in his application of the Biblical doctrine of Knechtsgestalt Christi to Aesthetics, which makes humor the best expression of Christian theological doctrines and the key for understanding them.
Hamann also uses irony, albeit negatively, to point to human finitude. Irony is necessity’s iron law of negation, canceling all human striving and aspirations till they amount to nothing. Irony is the grim fate that inevitably triumphs over human finitude, ensuring that all human projects end in death. Humor to Hamann is divine freedom, disjunctive with irony’s grim necessity. Humor affirms that God is wholly other and that Divine reason is fundamentally disjunctive with human reason and consequently bound to appear absurd to humans. For Hamann, humor is the appropriate human attitude toward Divine folly because only in the absurd does the possibility of seeing God arise. The significance of humor, then, is not only to expose the impoverished state of finite reason, but also to laugh at all human attempts to scale the heavens with unassisted understanding. Humor’s positive function is higher than irony’s negative function: It opens a person to the acceptance of the reality of paradoxical truth and ultimately to the acceptance of the highest paradox of all—the incarnation. Thus, for Hamann, humor is the road to salvation.
In the second chapter, I introduce the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s views on the roles played by humor, irony, and the comic in the good life. Early in his career, Kierkegaard adheres to Hamann’s view of humor and accordingly considers Christianity the most humorous form of life. Eventually disengaging himself from Hamann, he rejects this view, arguing that Christianity is inaccessible to humor. Humor, however, is a way of life for Kierkegaard, a phase that can help the intellectual accede to faith, and a mask of the truly religious person. As a way of life, humor is a worldview in which the tragic and the comic are held in balance and the fundamental paradox of life and the contradictions of individual existence are given full expression. This is the worldview that represents philosophy as lived thought as epitomized by Socrates. Kierkegaard criticizes organized religion, proposing instead a tragic faith characterized by resignation, guilt, suffering and dread, which from the vantage point of humor can be chosen as a worldview, for the latter is the closest to a religious life. At the highest level of existence, which is Christian faith, humor is still possible, but only as an incognito, as a mask to hide the profound religiousness of the true Christian.
By equating humor with philosophy, Kierkegaard attributes to humor the highest possible role within philosophy as he conceives it. The main problem with his view of humor results from its dependence on his view of religion. This accounts for the subordinate role he gives humor with regard to religion and for his view of humor as tied up with God, guilt, and suffering.
The comic has an original role to play within Kierkegaard’s philosophy as well. The comic is not the highest category for Kierkegaard, as it is subsumable under the tragic not only in the hierarchy of life’s stages, but within each stage as well. Within these limitations, however, the comic fulfills a crucial role in the Kierkegaardian good life: It is an instrument of truth, the primary tool of philosophy once it steps into the new existential role Kierkegaard designs for it, which is to lead the individual toward worshiping the true God. The comic is the main criterion of advancement one has on the negative Kierkegaardian theological ladder and the major positive indicator of one’s relation to the truth. Kierkegaard maintains, I suggest, that by examining the content of our laughter we can know the sort of person we are. Kierkegaard thus views the comic as both sword and shield whose mastery is crucial for inner progress from lower to higher stages of existence. For lack of an external criterion for inward advancement, which is the sole progress Kierkegaard recognizes, the comic is the main tool of examination, correction, and evaluation an individual possesses for reflecting on himself, his life, and his personal experiences, and for communicating this to others.
In order to fulfill its role in promoting truth, the comic becomes for Kierkegaard an ethical-religious category. Nothing is further from Kierkegaard than the freedom of wit and humor advocated by Shaftesbury. Kierkegaard’s ethics of the comic, devised on the basis of his hierarchy of existential spheres, prescribes a correct use of the comic, which will lead to the good life. The ethics of the comic justifies laughter when an individual’s existential position in life is higher than the position at which one is laughing. Through this device, I suggest, Kierkegaard makes certain that his edifying lessons on the comic bear on his lessons on the good life, because laughing well is living well for Kierkegaard. And, as Kierkegaard forbids himself from teaching the latter, yet indulges, albeit through pseudonyms, in teaching the former, the comic attains additional power as Kierkegaard’s main tool for teaching the good life.
Yet Kierkegaard’s notion of the comic is contingent on a certain philosophical anthropology that involves infinity as constitutive of the self and assumes the incapacity of the self to become whole without God. This makes the comic much more dependent on Kierkegaard’s controversial view of religion than common use allows. Kierkegaard’s tendentious view of the comic as well as his Christianized notion of humor may be at odds with nonreligious persons. For a view of the comic that is independent of metaphysical assumptions, and a view of humor free of God and guilt, we must turn to the last chapter.
To fill the gap between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, I begin the last chapter by reviewing the observations on humor, and if necessary for its understanding, on the comic, of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Hegel’s followers, Carlyle, Jean Paul, Santayana, Bergson, and Freud before introducing my view of the role of humor in the good life.
The tragic sense of life is a vision that wanders wild without the cathexis provided by the aesthetic form in which it originated. The tragic sense of life requires the therapy that humor is able to provide. Tragic intrapsychic conflicts can be construed as comical incongruities as evidenced by the history of the genres of tragedy and comedy, certain theories of humor, and the affinity of humor with sadness and suffering. A conflict that is sensed as tragic and perceived as comical leads to a humorous mood that reflects the ambiguity of life and the ambivalence of humankind. A humorous mood is helpful for becoming aware of conflicts, for deliberating over them, and for leaving unresolved the basic human conflict between one’s desires and one’s capacity for fulfilling them on the instinctual, emotional, and intellectual level. It is important not to resolve this conflict, I suggest in contradistinction to redemptive theories both religious and otherwise and to philosophical theories aiming at peace of mind, because such resolutions come at a price: They either renounce one’s desires, or one’s reason, or both. Although living with unresolved conflict is difficult, humor can play an important role in relieving the tension it creates.
Nevertheless, the humorous mood is transitory, and when it dissolves, there emerges the ridicule of repeatedly transmuting tragic oppositions into comical incongruities with an increasing capacity for suffering the former and no steady results from the latter. The resultant awareness is the view of human beings as ridiculous or Homo risibilis.
Ridicule dissolves, however, if we adhere to the view that we are ridiculous only to the extent that we ignore ourselves. The resolution that obtains mirrors both the resolution of the comedy plot, where the true identity of the hero changes everything, and the process of two-staged theories of humor, which require a higher level of resolution of the initial incongruity in order for a situation to be humorous.
Through a multistage process involving a systematic use of humor that disciplines our taste to find pleasure in incongruities that are not immediately funny to us, a ladder of perfection can be climbed that leads to a state rivaling the highest philosophic and religious ideals. This achievement is gradual and is based on changing visions according to one’s capacity to transmute suffering into joy through the alchemy of humor. The lucidity we gain frees us from the comic as well as the tragic, at least from that part of the tragic that has been transmuted into the comic and has thus become constitutive of the tragic-comic protagonist that describes each of us. The freedom that results from the newfound harmony with oneself, others, and the world is characterized by joy and serenity.
Philosophers have been much more interested in tragedy than in the comic. At best, they have studied irony. It may come as a surprise that philosophy entertains important relations with the comic that go back to the ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophers. Renaissance, modern, and postmodern philosophers have revived and innovated as the notions of humor, laughter, and the comic change over the centuries. Yet Philosophy’s relations with the comic have been understudied. This book fills a void, then, by investigating the relationship of humor with truth, reason, self-knowledge, and the good life. This is uncharted territory for philosophers, as well as humor theorists and academics of other disciplines.