Kierkegaard’s Contribution
Every human life is religiously designed (CA, 105). With this simple statement, Vigilius and with him, Kierkegaard, closes the doors of his philosophy to all those who do not believe this is so. In the last analysis, Kierkegaard’s thought is unapologetically Christian and relies on Revelation to provide the final perspective toward which the meaning of experience points. Kierkegaard attacks modern Pelagian attitudes, and those familiar with his work readily see the parallels with Augustine. Like Augustine, Kierkegaard denies that the natural man left on his own can save himself. This is the basis of his polemic against Romanticism and the hubris of academic philosophy.
As Vincent McCarthy explains, the psychology that Kierkegaard describes begins with natural man and moves through a process of self-discovery (1978). But, for Kierkegaard only the supernatural can, and does, overcome the disharmony in the human being and reconcile him with himself after the natural process has been completed. Kierkegaard knows this as a Christian, on the basis of Revelation, which he accepts, and the grace of reconciliation, which he claims to have experienced personally. The super-natural, however, will not be introduced into the human drama as deus ex machina. Rather, for Kierkegaard, it will be portrayed as a continuation that fulfills a natural development and takes one across the threshold. Revelation will be the grace that moves one forward after having reached a natural terminus; it will be the understanding of that final step and a retrospective upon one’s development. Revelation, then, provides the final perspective in which Kierkegaard’s religious psychology and philosophical anthropology operate. From within this perspective, Kierkegaard raises a challenge to all those who seek to understand humankind—to the poets and Romantics, to the philosophers, to the theologians and also to the psychologists, but most of all to the individual.
I propose to assess the contribution made by Kierkegaard’s views on humor and the comic, first, by singling out the Christianization of these notions in his thought; second, inserting his views within the history of Christianity’s attitude toward laughter; and third, situating them within the history of philosophy by comparing them with the views of his predecessor—the other modern philosopher who entrusted humor with an important role within the good life—the Earl of Shaftesbury.
1. Kierkegaard proposes a nonphilosophical notion of the unified personality in which the unifying factor is faith in the inherent (although Godgiven) value of what we are and have. Alastair Hannay emphasizes that Kierkegaard’s concept of self belongs to a tradition that is unlikely to afford insights to students of selfhood used to a new and more secular climate of thought (Hannay 2003, 199). Kierkegaard is a dualist who believes that the realm of existence consists of the world of temporality (i.e., space-time as we experience it in our daily life) and the realm of eternity. Eternity is the realm of actual transcendence, the dwelling place of God, the goal of humans who can relate to God both in this world and after death. Because the individual is located in this bipolar situation with a foot in temporality and at least a potential foot in eternity, humans can experience anxiety and despair. Kierkegaard’s view of the self grounded in his view of reality is especially relevant to the comic, for the comic is based on a contradiction which is defined in terms of the finite and the infinite.
Kierkegaard’s construction of a Christian philosophy or, as he puts it, “a Christian epistemology,” involves two interesting features. First, he self-consciously develops Christian ideas out of the rudiments of secular concepts. His treatment of anxiety and despair in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death are good examples of this strategy: The sickness unto death is a sickness that already assumes the framework of the cure. It is a sickness whose cure is faith, a sickness whose symptoms are described as forms of sin, that is, in terms that already presuppose the religious framework. The Christianization of ordinary secular concepts includes humor, as its definition involves guilt, eternity, and God. In this, Kierkegaard departs from his contemporaries’ views of humor, on which he draws for other aspects of humor (Olesen 2003, 225–6, nn. 27–32; see note 86).
The process of Christianizing ordinary secular concepts, infusing them with a potency they do not appear to have at first glance, is interrelated with the second important feature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: The strategy of constructing a framework in which the move from the aesthetic to the religious is shown (albeit indirectly) to be eminently reasonable. This strategy dominates the stages. As the stages are defined also according to their relationship with the comic, this reading illuminates the comic, as well as its relation to the tragic. Sylvia Walsh has convincingly argued that the comic, the tragic, irony, and humor are essential existential categories in Kierkegaard’s thought (1994). One should add that Kierkegaard’s existential categories are permeated by his Christian philosophy. His is an ethical-religious view of the comic, based on a specific metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. In the same way that the phenomenon of despair has been defined as a feature of human misrelation to the eternal (in religious terms), the opposite of despair, the comic as defined by Kierkegaard, is understandable only when one adopts his philosophical anthropology.
This means that, regardless of the potency of some of Kierkegaard’s views (i.e., the necessary contradiction in life and therefore the necessary role the comic plays in it, the importance of the comic, irony, and humor for developing one’s personality, the different life views embodied in the stages and the ways in which they contradict each other, the tendency we all have for the aesthetic and for self-deception), those who do not share Kierkegaard’s metaphysics and philosophical anthropology cannot implement the comic category Kierkegaard painstakingly expounds. They may experience the comic in their lives, if it is true that suffering generates the comic, but without the religious meaning Kierkegaard attributes to suffering, the comic experienced is different from the ethical-religious category Kierkegaard advances.
2. Both Kierkegaardian views on religion—that Christianity is humorous and that Christianity is not humorous—have precursors as well as contemporary followers, as rekindled discussion about the humor in Christianity has recently shown. The young Kierkegaard’s view that humor is identical with Christianity is anticipated by Hamann, Shaftesbury, and ultimately, by the religious Renaissance humanist, Desiderius Erasmus. Young Kierkegaard’s main influence on the theme of religion and humor, and Shaftesbury’s translator and follower, Johann Georg Hamann, has made irony and humor essential categories for apprehending Christianity. Shaftesbury considered Christianity a witty and good-humored religion, best apprehended in a corresponding frame of mind.
Erasmus recovered Socrates’ traditional role as defender of foolishness against the world’s wisdom, pitting this image against one which many Enlightenment writers favor, that of Socrates as a supreme rationalist. Erasmus transforms the ugly Socrates into a forerunner of Christ. Although the image of Socrates as Silenus is a commonplace of Renaissance humanism, the image is made famous by Erasmus in adage 2201, Sileni Alcibiadis, where Socrates is deemed “the most extraordinary Silenus of all” (Erasmus 1991, 271). Moreover, Erasmus ends his Convivium Religiosum, in which he compares Socrates to St. Paul, by imagining that one could address him in these words: “Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis” (“Holy Socrates, pray for us”) (Erasmus 1703–6; reprint 1961, I, 683).
Erasmus’ treatment of the Silenus lays the groundwork for the development of Christian grotesquerie. There is beauty in a fallen, decrepit, sick, dying man. This paradoxical insight lies at the heart of Erasmian comedy, which so often blends the earthly and the heavenly in outlandish ways. In such an outlook, the serious can stand where the playful stood only an instant before. These opposites are a pair, or, as Plato suggests, “sisters” (Plato, Letter VI 323d). The Christian application of this inversion in Erasmus sees Christ as foolish and ridiculous in the eyes of his enemies and wise in the light of heaven. Folly herself is lifted up and subsumed within eternal mystery.
Erasmus may be said to have given Europe the paradox of the Wise Fool. For although that personified oxymoron is at least as old as Socrates and Christ, and although its medieval ancestors and apologists are legion, the first modern, and most influential, appearance is as the figure of Stultitia in the Moriae encomium or The Praise of Folly.
There, for the first time, the implications of an ironic and paradoxical dramatization of Nicholas of Cusa’s docta ignorantia are fully realized and, because of the book’s popularity, given widespread currency. The mode of irony that informs the speech of Erasmus’ wise fool may be described, with the same phrase that Nicholas de Cusa coins to describe the nature of learned ignorance, as a coincidentia oppositorum. Whether these opposites are jest and earnestness, praise and censure, or wisdom and folly, it is the coincidentia—the synthesis, the equipoise, the concord—that produce the quality of the irony. Walter Kaiser explains that the ability to perceive such a coincidentia requires a certain type of mind and a certain type of historical epoch. Stultitia “seems to sum up—or rather to synthesize into the Janushead of paradox—all of the contradictory tendencies of her age” (Kaiser 1963, 24–25). By the end of the Praise of Folly, Erasmus sanctifies folly and unifies it with the spirit of Christianity. At first folly is the benighted agent of shortsighted worldliness, but he then transforms her into the “foolish” spirit from a worldly point of view of self-sacrifice and charity. Erasmus’ book imbues comic folly with moral authority and thus sets a precedent for placing comedy on a respectable footing. Erasmus shows that comic folly can be rehabilitated and used to put life in proper perspective. He uses folly, for example, to criticize and ridicule the sinful pride of the Church.
This paradoxical turn of mind derives from the Pauline descriptions of Christian existence. Paul employs the comic technique of reversal as a weapon for Christian faith: “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe”; “we live as chastened but not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet enriching many, as having nothing, yet possessing all things” (1 Cor. 1:22; 2 Cor. 6: 9–10). The way to truth lies in that which conventional wisdom calls folly, which, according to Robert Polhemus, “is often an unstated premise in mirth and an implicit claim of comic form” (Polhemus 1980, 10). The paradox in the final analysis must be accepted through belief because human intelligence cannot lay hold of its full significance. Erasmus can only explain the phenomenon of unpleasant things made pleasant by recourse to the operation of grace. For Walter Gordon, this leads to the more extensive understanding of the whole of life in terms of the ludic (Gordon 1990, 156–7).
Kierkegaard’s early view of humor as intrinsic to Christianity is also voiced in contemporary studies, and in the theological mainstream there has recently been a recurrent interest in levity. This work has focused variously on laughter, fantasy, festivity, play, carnival, and the free play of difference, and it has operated within several theological genres. Recent theology has conflated humor with play and even with joy, although comic laughter is not the same as laughter that simply expresses joyfulness. Kathleen Sands argues that the root similarity and limitation of this literature lies in its interest in using the comic to establish a theological foothold above the tragic (1996). Whether taken as a metaphysical resolution to tragedy or a substitute for metaphysical resolution, the comic affords theology what Nathan Scott terms “a narrow escape” from tragedy into faith (Scott 1966, 77–118; quoted in Sands 1966, 505). The result of this forced contest between the comic and the tragic is fixed in advance: The comic view is made to seem self-evidently superior and closer to, if not identical with, the perspective of faith. The comic, then, has been used to form a theodicy, the justification of God—in other words, the justification of power as ultimately coherent and good.
Humor can be put to different use in Christianity, however, as some feminist thinkers suggest, and as Robert Roberts, followed by John Lippitt, attempt to do: With arguments based on the significance Kierkegaard gives to humor, they defend the importance of humor in Christianity (Roberts 1987; Lippitt 2000b, 2005).
Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Roy Eckardt have endorsed the view that humor should be excluded from Christianity’s holy holies—Kierkegaard’s final view of the matter (Niebuhr 1969, 134–5; Eckardt 1995, 101). This has actually been the most widespread view of the relation of Christianity with humor or laughter, as evidenced by histories on the subject. Sociologist Peter Berger aptly remarks that some religions are more humorous than others, and among the Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the farthest from laughter. This view is echoed in philosopher John Morreall’s important Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion (Berger 1997, 197–8; Morreall 1999).
The Christians share with Egyptian priests, as well as with Greek and Jewish ascetics, the ideal of the perfect human who never laughs (Adkin 1985; Resnick 1987). Jerome, Basil, and John Chrysostom opposed laughter and jocularity, as did the Fathers in general. This was justified by the view that there is no account of Jesus laughing in the Gospels. Laughter is mentioned in Jesus’ reported sayings, but it is to berate those who laugh in godless sinfulness and to announce that they will weep in the fullness of time, whilst those who weep now, are blessed and will laugh later (Luke 6: 25, 21). At the same time Aristotle’s thesis that laughter is a distinctive human property—the idea of homo ridens, “man gifted with laughter”—appears in both the Latin and the medieval Christian Latin traditions. A heated debate on laughter with far-reaching consequences arises in the Middle Ages. If Jesus, the great model of imitation for humanity, never laughs during his human life, then laughter must be alien to man, at least to Christian man. Conversely, if one posits that laughter is a distinctive feature of humankind, then laughing man will certainly feel himself more able to express his own nature. Both views are found in ecclesiastical authors.
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, confronted with a phenomenon it considers dangerous and does not know how to control, the Church totally rejects laughter. There is a long list of grim theologians, and there are repeated negative comments on laughter, which is understood as an expression of worldliness, sinful insouciance, and lack of faith. Monastic rules proscribe laughter. The codification of laughter and its condemnation in monastic circles result partly at least from the view that laughter is a phenomenon expressed in and through the body. Conversely, weeping over the wretchedness of this world is praised as a Christian virtue. Christian saints rarely laugh except in defiance of imminent martyrdom. Around the twelfth century, the Church brings laughter under control by distinguishing good laughter from bad laughter—admissible ways of laughing from inadmissible. The Church reaches a codification of the practice of laughter, of which scholasticism assumes ownership. The Church’s relation with laughter has not evolved much since Thomas Aquinas’ rehabilitation of the Aristotelian virtue of wit or eutrapelia; before the middle of the twentiethcentury, only the Gnostics recognized Christ’s laughter.
It follows that Kierkegaard’s original contribution to a study of the comic does not lie in his first view of the relationship of humor and Christianity, and certainly not with his final view—that Christianity is out of reach of the humorous.
3. Shaftesbury’s writings as well as those of other British philosophers were not readily accessible to Danish readers, including Kierkegaard, because of Danish and British hostilities during the Napoleonic Wars (Popkin 1951). Kierkegaard’s direct knowledge of Shaftesbury may have been obstructed by political circumstances, but Shaftesbury’s immense influence on German Romanticism, and particularly on Kierkegaard’s unacknowledged mentor, Ludwig Holberg (Allen 2009), may explain the presence of Shaftesburean ideas in Kierkegaard’s journals and writings. We have also seen the role played by Johann Georg Hamann, Shaftesbury’s translator and follower, as an important link between Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard. The role of Johann Gottfried von Herder, himself a Hamann follower as is Kierkegaard (Ringleben 2006), should be emphasized as an additional important source of Shaftesburean influence: Kierkegaard owned Herder’s writings and quoted from them, very much as the writings of Shaftesbury were Herder’s constant companions from an early age. Herder’s Conversations on God, the work in which he attempts to summarize his philosophical and speculative convictions, exhibits throughout the direct influence of Shaftesbury. Moreover, the later works of Herder, the Adrastea and the Brife zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity), return to the English philosopher again and again. They are meant as a vindication of Shaftesbury’s idea of religion against the theological attacks launched against his so-called deism. Herder also admires Shaftesbury as a master of philosophical style; the reason he calls him “the beloved Plato of Europe” is because Herder considers Shaftesbury almost the only modern writer who has tolerably learned the art of the dialogue and knows how to employ it in a manner worthy of the Platonic model. But on the matter of putting truth to the test of ridicule, Herder sees in Shaftesbury a “philosophical scoffer.”
Apart from these general considerations on the relations among Kierkegaard, Herder, and Shaftesbury, the reference to Shaftesbury that introduces Kierkegaard’s interest in the legitimacy of the comic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript alludes to “little research projects,” which translators Walter Lowrie and Howard and Edna Hong interpret as being Herder’s Adrastea, chapter 14 (CUPL 570, n. 23; CUP2, 264, n. 263): “In the previous century, a thesis propounded by Lord Shaftesbury that makes laughter the test of truth engendered several little research projects to find out whether it is so” (CUP1, 512). In “Shaftesbury, Spirit and Cheerfulness” (“Shaftesbury, Geist und Frohsinn”) found in Adrastea, Herder eulogizes Shaftesbury and commends both his view and use of humor:
The first work Shaftesbury published himself was a letter about enthusiasm … Shaftesbury also suggested [against enthusiasm] … cheerful reason and something of that merry mirth, which pleasantly solves the strained facial wrinkles as well as the old brain cramps, wit and humor … Shaftesbury wanted to contribute actively, not only in teaching, to chase away that clumsy, bad humor; his writings are full of wit and good humor … with the freedom of the mind and of the wit Shaftesbury presented his moralists, a composition almost worthy of Greek antiquity and almost superior to it in its content. It shall become a form of soul for every young man able to comprehend the beautiful and noble, because this might be the best metaphysics that has ever been thought. … in addition to that written in the method of cheerfulness, which was our author’s own, serious thought form, his muse and grace. … And yet, intelligent wit and cheerfulness, as Shaftesbury wants them, are not only the salt of how society commerces and of reading books, they rather are the spice and flower of life itself, indispensable for the formation of each noble adolescent. (Herder 1877–1913, Adrastea, vol. I, chap. 14; translation Patrick Neubauer)
But Herder rejects the literal interpretation of the Shaftesburean idea of ridicule as the test of truth:
Only rawness of reason or persistence of disease could have accused him of such irrational principles as “Ridicule is the test of truth, in a state of laughter, the serious can be examined best” etc. One should just read his own defense, the case about the freedom of wit and mirth with a clear eye to make sure of his opponents’ air strikes … Folly, and only the incorrigible, fine or coarse folly, deserves ridicule; what man of senses will apply scorn, which is always close to contempt, against the holy, the venerable, the truly great and beautiful? … Because laughter and jokes, wit and humor are transitions and do not want to be more than that, who would want to revoke or scorn such happy messengers between truth and folly or foolishness? But on the other hand, who would choose them to be the final, highest judgments? (Herder 1877–1913, Adrastea, vol. I, chap. 14; translation Patrick Neubauer)
Many Shaftesburean ideas are easily recognized in Kierkegaard’s journals and writings as Kierkegaard paraphrases Shaftesbury without naming him (a common practice of his, I am told by the journals’ translator, Brian K. Söderquist). For example, we read in the journals, “He who does not constantly dare to submit his earnestness to the test of jest is stupid and comical” (JP 2, 1743/Pap. VI A 3, n. d.), where “the test of jest” replaces Shaftesbury’s “test of ridicule.” Moreover, the following quotes from Shaftesbury’s Characteristics could appear to be written by Kierkegaard despite the difference in wording: “There is a great difference between seeking how to raise a laugh from everything, and seeking in everything what justly may be laughed at” (CR I, 85); “And if I have either laughed wrong, or been impertinently serious, I can be content to be laughed at in my turn … For he who laughs and is himself ridiculous, bears a double share of ridicule … we become more ridiculous than the people we ridicule” (CR I, 98, 57, 59); “A mirth not out of the reach of wit is gravest … a gravity not abhorrent from the use of that other mirth …” (Life, 362); a public discourse that is not grave but “light” is quite probably the most serious discourse of all (CR I, 54); there is a difference between “genteel wit” or “true raillery,” on the one hand, and mere “buffoonery” or “banter,” on the other; “buffoonery, satire and the common wit” are examples of contemptible human pursuits (Life, 53); and contemporary satire is “scurrilous, buffooning, and without morals or instruction” (CR I, 173).
The association between Shaftesbury’s and Kierkegaard’s thought is significant insofar as the former anticipates some of the problems that the latter is usually credited with formulating, such as the difficulty of giving advice, the relationships between the author and the public and the importance of the author’s disavowal of authority, the importance of the theater for philosophy and for inner dialogue, the dangers of religious enthusiasm and emotional excess, the necessity of fighting philosophical abstractions and barren academicism, and the urge for an edifying philosophy whose heart is moral education. Shaftesbury’s anti-systematism finds an interesting parallel in Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism: The former’s search for “a discursive practice distinct from that of the lecture or the sermon” is similar to the latter’s views on indirect communication. Shaftesbury’s concept of the “virtuoso” is echoed in the moral significance of music and art for Kierkegaard, in the same way that Shaftesbury’s view of the “genius” can be found in Kierkegaard’s differentiation between the “genius” and the “apostle,” especially in The Book on Adler.
Moreover, Shaftesbury anticipates some of the solutions Kierkegaard has found to the problems they both identify. Humor is helpful in philosophic writing for setting the reader free, annulling the author’s authority, and enabling an autonomous appropriation of the content, which is necessary for independent thought and moral self-education. Satire is effective in the criticism of the Church, academic thought, and all that is abstract and thus does not aim at edifying. The comic is a tool of reflection needed for curbing one’s enthusiasm and fighting emotional excesses, and is founded on an incongruity or contradiction whose existence is real. And last, but not least, the comic entertains an essential relationship with the truth.
However, there is an important difference between the uses of the comic by these two thinkers: Shaftesbury lightens the plight of ridiculousness in order to encourage the use of it in conversation, that is, to promote the use of reason and liberate wit and humor from ethical, political, and religious constraints. Kierkegaard uses similar views to those of Shaftesbury’s on ridicule in order to attack illegitimate uses of the comic and protect Christianity as the sole life-view that has overcome laughter.
In order to assess Kierkegaard’s contribution to the study of the comic and humor, however, a more detailed comparison of their roles within his and Shaftesbury’s views of the good life is in order. Such a comparison is not an easy task because these thinkers differ in their views of the world, God, human nature, the ideal individual, and the role of sociability and rationality in attaining to the ideal individual: Shaftesbury is a deist, Kierkegaard a Christian; the former lives in a harmonious, beautiful, and beneficent universe among good-natured human beings, the latter lives in fear and trembling in solitude among sinners; the former promotes joy and a moral character akin to a work of art that is attainable through philosophy as inner and outer rational dialogue and by one’s own powers; while the latter, plagued by an incomplete self, struggles as a sinner praying for God’s grace to enhance religious suffering in solitude through a movement that takes him past philosophy and ethics to the doorsteps of true worship where he rests transparently in the power that establishes him.
Yet, as different as their worldviews are, both Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard consider the comic an instrument of thought that is an invaluable aid in reaching their respective goals. To that end, they recommend its use in inner and in outward communication, both oral and written. Superficially, their goal seems the same: To build a moral character in oneself and another; for Kierkegaard, however, it is a moral-religious character that is the aim, a goal that makes additional claims on the individual who initiates the conversation or the writing.
In writing, humor serves the common goal of both Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard: To annul the writer’s authority and enable the reader to do the work for himself. For Shaftesbury, the justification of such an endeavor is both moral, to help one become a moral agent by one’s own power, and prudential, to overcome the resistance of receiving advice as to how to live. Kierkegaard justifies this kind of authorship both for the reader and the writer on religious grounds: The writer has no religious authority, he is a sinner himself, and it is Christ that does the work both for himself and the reader.
The use of humor in conversation serves the same goal as in writing for Kierkegaard and is justified in the same way; yet another justification for humor’s use in conversation is to protect the parties’ interiority. For Shaftesbury, humor is important in conversation because it fosters rationality as criticism—a goal that is as foreign to Kierkegaard as the Shaftesburean practice of putting ideas to the test of ridicule in order to foster together the sensus communis is alien to Kierkegaard’s individualistic philosophy. Truth is not the outcome of shared discussion for Kierkegaard, but has to be found in one’s inwardness.
In inner conversation (Shaftesburean “soliloquy” or Kierkegaardian “inwardness”) the role Kierkegaard gives to the comic follows the role his predecessor has prescribed, to serve truth by curbing enthusiasm and counterbalancing the emotions. The comic purifies the moods and counterbalances pathos, and thus stabilizes the inner equilibrium in order to help create the conditions for choosing the leap towards a higher level of tragic.
But Kierkegaard extends the role of the comic, I suggest, by making it a criterion of advancement on the negative Kierkegaardian theological ladder and the main positive indicator of the individual’s relation to the truth. Kierkegaard maintains that by examining the content of our laughter can we know the sort of person we are. Jest is the attitude towards that which has been overcome, very much as for Hegel the comic destroys that which has been historically overcome and is therefore linked to the subject, who is certain to possess truth and be beyond contradiction (Hegel 1975, 1199–200). 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 and his personal experiences. The ethics of the comic enable the individual to situate himself in the spheres of living according to the content of the comic he is enjoying. Moreover, by encouraging the right laughter, one that corresponds to that which is really inferior, the individual advances through the stages along life’s path because through laughter new norms are established. The penalty for violating the ethics of the comic is ridicule, a sanction found in Shaftesbury but made threatening enough by Kierkegaard to spur the learning of his ethics. Kierkegaard thus views the comic as both sword and shield whose mastery is crucial for inner progress from lower to higher stages of existence; the comic is philosophy’s primary tool once it steps into the new existential role Kierkegaard designs for it, which is to lead the individual towards worshiping the true God.
The epistemological role attributed to good humor as a means for apprehending truth in Shaftesbury’s philosophy has no parallel in Kierkegaard’s thought; but humor fulfills an epistemological role in relation to the truth of Christianity for the young Kierkegaard through the intermediary of Hamann’s Shaftesburean views on the matter; humor helps apprehend the truth for Hamann and young Kierkegaard because truth—the Incarnation—is paradoxical. Moreover, the later Kierkegaardian view is similar to the Shaftesburean view that truth will not withstand ridicule. Shaftesbury grounds this view in a vision of the universe as harmoniously beautiful and of the comic as false because it portrays the beautiful as ugly, whereas Kierkegaard grounds his view in a vision of the human being as a synthesis of contradictions, and truth as the domination of the highest contradiction: truth is protected by the comic from the comic because if something is true, it has conquered the comical as lower than itself. Thus, ridicule as the test of truth, in the sense that truth is immune to ridicule and whoever does not see that is ridiculous himself, is the key to Kierkegaard’s ethics of the comic: the Kierkegaardian truth is approximated by using the “test of jest” Kierkegaard refers to in his journals in much the same way Shaftesbury proposes to use his “test of ridicule.”
For both thinkers, the comic is an objective incongruity, which enables it to be a test for truth; but as Kierkegaard also requires that the incongruity be resolved on a higher level, this divergence yields a different concept of the comic. Not only is the view of the comic different for these philosophers, but so is their use of other related concepts as well: in Shaftesbury we find laughter, ridicule, wit, humor, and good humor; in Kierkegaard, the comic, irony, humor, and occasionally ridicule. Much more elaborate and subtle in Kierkegaard’s thought, these terms bear the mark of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, as well as of an ethical-religious worldview that redefines the comic and Christianizes humor. Shaftesbury, in contrast, is a pioneer of the modern use of benign humor, who struggles to delineate the difference among humor, good humor, ridicule, wit, and laughter.
Finally, Kierkegaard and Shaftesbury are both Socratics who use the serio-comic as a tool for moral or moral-religious education much like the ancient followers of Socrates, such as the Cynics and the Stoics. Moreover, Shaftesbury’s ideal character is a “middle genius, partaking neither of hearty mirth nor seriousness” (Life, 194–5), a mixture of “jest” and “earnest” that Shaftesbury calls “soft irony” because “a mirth not out of the reach of wit is gravest” and “a gravity not abhorrent from the use of that other mirth” is ideal (Life, 362). This is retained both in Kierkegaard’s ideal of true earnestness as a mixture of jest and earnestness, and in his characterization of the humorist, with suffering and pathos substituting earnestness and counterbalancing the comic in the concept of humor. Both philosophers promote an ideal of a serio-comic individual, at least as far as the humorist goes in Kierkegaard’s teleology, heir to Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. Yet they are also differentiated by their vision of the highest individual, who is characterized by the presence of humor for Shaftesbury and by its absence unless as a mask for Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard’s originality does not lie in suggesting a relation between the truth and the comic. Nor does it lie in the two additional philosophic traditions in which it is inscribed, one, beginning with Plato, which criticizes common uses of the comic and offers an alternative view of it that reflects moral concerns, and the other, common to philosophy and literature, which uses the comic as a means to moral amendment. Rather, it lies in the kind of Christian justification he gives to both the serio-comic and the comic’s relation to the truth, and in the device of an ethics of the comic that guarantees this relationship.
To conclude the assessment of Kierkegaard’s contribution, Kierkegaard does not innovate in his use of the serio-comic, or in a Christian justification of it, as Erasmus justifies his Sultitia or folly in Christian terms; rather, Kierkegaard is original in the kind of Christian justification he provides and in his argument for the serio-comic as an embodied philosophy, as a life style (the ironist and the humorist) and not only a literary form. As Kierkegaard explains in his doctrine of true earnestness (a mixture of jest and earnestness), the serio-comic is always necessary because it is first and foremost an existential requirement that is ultimately justified on religious grounds (UDVS, 96–97): Everything that is religiously important in the world is also, that is, at the same time, a jest, since no finite act can capture the infinite. The serio-comic is necessary to the Kierkegaardian task of “simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute telos (end, goal) and relatively to relative ends” (CUP1, 525), because the comic reflects and expresses the relative attitude toward relative ends. Thus, by teaching people how to laugh, Kierkegaard teaches them how to live, because the comic devices he uses necessitate the incorporation of new existential norms: the comic teaches a sense of proportion because it indicates what is important and what is not, what pertains to eternity and what to temporality, what is worthy of an absolute relation and what of a relative relation, and how to maintain both relations simultaneously.
Kierkegaard is not original in finding a relationship between the comic and the truth, as Shaftesbury and Hamann precede him, but he innovates in the justification he gives to this relationship and in embedding it in an ethics of the comic that guarantees that in teaching how to laugh he teaches how to live. Kierkegaard’s endeavor provides a criterion that distinguishes true ridicule from false ridicule, a criterion Shaftesbury assumes, but does not provide. Kierkegaard’s ethics of the comic, which mirror the hierarchy of the life stages, supply “the test of the jest” that replaces Shaftesbury’s “test of ridicule.” The ethics of the comic guarantees that the relationship of superiority existing de facto between the laugher and the butt of the laugh matches the hierarchy Kierkegaard establishes between individuals whose lives embody different worldviews. In order to accomplish this, Kierkegaard uses the comic as a tool of reflection and ultimately of truth. Thus, in teaching how to laugh, Kierkegaard teaches how to live.
The importance of the last statement for understanding Kierkegaard’s thought lies in Kierkegaard’s avoidance of teaching how to live. As we have seen above in the discussion of the ironic Kierkegaard, whether Kierkegaard teaches how to live and whether his religiousness directs the whole production of his writings is still controversial. Accepting the idea that in teaching how to laugh Kierkegaard teaches how to live indicates a possible resolution of these controversies: Taking Kierkegaard’s teachings on the comic seriously provides a key to understanding the rest of his writings.
However, Kierkegaard’s views of the comic, irony, and humor are imbued with a specific metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. The comic involves suffering and infinity, making it an ethical-religious category. Kierkegaard’s thoughts on humor and its relationship with suffering are profound and interesting, but the notions of guilt and eternity as well as the idea of God involved in Kierkegaardian humor may be at odds with the non-religious persons’ view of humor, with different views of religion held by religious persons, and with different views of the relation between religion and humor. Given that Kierkegaard’s edifying discourse of the comic is intended to lead us to a certain form of Christian living, the question of whether we should let Kierkegaard teach us how to laugh is disputable. In the next chapter, I propose a role for humor in the good life in which the views on humor and the good life are independent of religious presuppositions.