The Good Life
HUMOR AND THE GOOD LIFE
Peace of mind follows the suspension of judgment like its shadow.
—Diogenes Laertius on Pyrrho (Lives of Eminent Philosophers)
Humor needs not function within the confines of religious philosophies, as suggested by the views of the only modern philosophers to assign humor an important role in the good life—Shaftesbury, Hamann, and Kierkegaard. The role of humor in the good life proposed in this chapter is independent from religious presuppositions and is compatible with recent humor research. To fill the gap between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, however, I examine the views on humor, and if necessary for its understanding, on the comic, of Schopenhauer, Hegel, and his followers, Carlyle, Jean Paul, Santayana, Bergson, and Freud.
Arthur Schopenhauer, according to Terry Eagleton, is “a thinker so unremittingly gloomy that his work, quite unintentionally, represents one of the great comic masterpieces of Western thought” (Eagleton 2007, 82). Eagleton adds, however, that if Schopenhauer is still well worth reading, “it is not only because he confronts the possibility more candidly and brutally than almost any other philosopher, that human existence may be pointless in the most squalid and farcical of ways. It is also because much of what he says is surely true” (96). In his study of Schopenhauer, the French contemporary philosopher, Clément Rosset, rightly considers Schopenhauer a philosopher of the absurd (Rosset 1967). Adopting the well-known Shakespearian characterization of life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, act V, scene 5), Schopenhauer maintains that “no one has the remotest idea why the whole tragic-comedy exists, for it has no spectators, and the actors endlessly worry with little and merely negative enjoyment” (Schopenhauer 1969, II, 357). Given that the world is an objectification of an irrational force called the Will, which uses its representations blindly without ever attaining satisfaction, there is something ridiculous for Schopenhauer about the pompous self-importance of creatures who, convinced of their supreme value, pursue some edifying end that will instantly turn to ashes in their mouths. There is no grandiose goal to this meaningless sound and fury, only “momentary gratification, feeling pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling, and this goes on saecula saecolurom or until once again the crust of the planet breaks” (354; see 360).
Seen as a whole and only when its most significant features are emphasized, every individual’s life is a tragedy; seen in detail, however, an individual’s life “has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of the hour, are all brought about by chance that is bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy” (I, 322). These little incongruities are sources of misery presented as “fleeting” moments in a comedy, but actually reflect the underlying conflict between the demands of the species and the desires of the individual (II, 553–4). Comedy “brings out the inexhaustible material for laughter, with which life and even its very adversities are filled” and “hastens to drop the curtain at the moment of delight.” Comedy serves as the continued affirmation of the will to live; but were we to “contemplate somewhat seriously that burlesque side of life,” we would reach the conclusion that “what exhibits itself thus is something that really had not be” (438).
Tragedy is more important than comedy because it is tragedy that reveals the truth about reality, its purpose being “the description of the terrible side of life”:
The unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the good and the innocent are all here presented to us; and here is to be found a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence. … The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself. (I, 252–3)
Only the denial of the will leads to the Schopenhauerian road to salvation from this “mock existence” (358). Yet humor and laughter have no place in it, nor do they provide the momentary solace from the will’s pressure that the aesthetic experience offers. Schopenhauer, however, takes his theory of laughter seriously, boasting that there is “no question that here, after so many fruitless attempts, the true theory of the ludicrous is given, and the problem propounded [the real significance of laughter] but given up by Cicero definitely solved” (II, 92). Laughter is a prerogative and characteristic of the human being; animals are incapable of laughter because they lack reason and as a result universal concepts, which are necessary for laughter. Indeed, Schopenhauer’s theory of laughter is initially presented as part of his theory of concepts in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation (1819):
In every case, laughter results from nothing but the suddenly perceived incongruity between a concept and the real object that had been thought through it in some relation; and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity. (I, 59)
Schopenhauer develops at greater length his theory of laughter in the second edition of his book (1969 [1844], vol. II, Supplementary Essay No. VIII):
… the origin of the ludicrous is always the paradoxical, and thus unexpected, submission of an object under a concept that is in all other respects heterogeneous to it. Accordingly, the phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between such a concept and the real object thought through it, and hence between what is abstract and what is perceptive. (II, 91)
We laugh at an incongruity between a perceived object and a concept, and concepts are the work of the faculty of reason (I, 39). Thus, the appearance of laughter is closely related to that of joy because “it must be delightful for us to see this strict, untiring, and most troublesome governess, our faculty of reason, for once convinced of inadequacy” (II, 98). In a late essay on philosophy and natural science, Schopenhauer comments on the physiology of laughter (Schopenhauer 1974, II, 103–76); in doing so, he mentions laughter as a result of tickling. This is laughter “excited entirely physically” and is thus different from most instances of laughter, which have a mental cause (168) and with which Schopenhauer’s theory of humorous laughter is concerned.
In the extended essay on laughter in the second edition of his main book, Schopenhauer provides examples to illustrate his theory and draws numerous distinctions within the genre of the ludicrous, such as that between wit and folly, parody, and irony. Among these forms, humor is highly valued by Schopenhauer. He bemoans the corrupt habit of calling every clown a humorist, as “the word humour is borrowed from the English, in order to single out and denote a quite peculiar species of the ludicrous which … is even akin to the sublime” (II, 101). Humor depends on “a special kind of mood or frame of mind” that is “subjective and thus exists primarily for one’s own self” (100). Notwithstanding this subjective side, humor entails a specific relation to the object, and here Schopenhauer gives us a profound insight:
… humor depends on a subjective yet serious and sublime mood, involuntarily coming into conflict with a common external world very different from it. It cannot avoid or abandon itself to this world; hence, for reconciliation, it attempts to think its own view and this external world through the same concepts, which in this way take on a double incongruity, now on one side, now on the other, with the real thing thought through them. In this way the impression of the intentionally ludicrous, and thus of the joke, arises, yet behind this the deepest seriousness is concealed and shines through. (II, 100)
Because humor is the result of a conflict between the self and an external object, the humorist speaks a truth about himself in his relation to the other or the object, and this truth can be expressive of a sublime and contemplative mood. Both the sublime and humor involve reflexivity or self-awareness, foreign to the consoling experience of beauty. Yet it is the humorous mood that is the source of the art of comedy and expressed in it, as “every poetical or artistic presentation of the comic, or even a farcical scene, through which a serious thought yet gleams as its concealed background, is a product of humour, and thus is humorous” (100f.). Humor always conceals seriousness in the joke and is thus the opposite of irony, whose seriousness conceals a joke: Humor is “the double counterpoint of irony” and is representative of the moderns in much the same way that irony is representative of the ancients (100–01).
Schopenhauer’s contemporary, Georg W. F. Hegel, prefers humor to irony as well; his comments on humor can be fully appreciated when preceded by his view of the comic, whose importance within the body of his thought is rarely noticed. According to the prevalent interpretation of Hegel, “the tragic does not cease to sustain Hegelian thought: it accompanies the genesis of the dialectic, it marks the seriousness of action and the essence of history, in places it even comes to be confused with the absolute itself” (Beistegui 2000, 33). Hegelian dialectic is another name for the tragic and overcoming the tragic; dialectic is structurally tragic, and tragedy correspondingly dialectic. Moreover, the thinkers who hold that the tragic occupies a central place in Hegel’s philosophy such as Jean Hippolyte and Peter Szondi also have been led to accord tragedy an apparently incontestable ascent over comedy (Hippolyte 1972, 19; Szondi 1978, I, 167–8; 172–3).
Most philosophers have favored tragedy, yet among classical philosophers, Hegel values comedy and the comic spirit the most highly, both in The Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Aesthetics (see Gashé 2000). In the former work, Hegel considers comedy to be the most accomplished spiritual work of art, the final stage of drama before it gives way to religion. Having destroyed serious drama, comedy finally turns its mockery on itself and vanishes. Whereas tragedy is universal truth victorious over the subjective individual, comedy is the victory of the individual over the system. Tragedy shows individuals bringing themselves to destruction, whereas comedy shows individuals dissolving everything into laughter and celebrating the victory. Hegel calls it the hale condition of the soul, but is clearly much more interested in tragedy, although tragedy gives way to comedy in Hegel’s classification of the various poetic genres. Despite the crudeness of its expression and the buffoonery of its situation, comedy reveals a consciousness more developed than tragic consciousness. In a way, comedy is the completion of tragedy and the comic form continues that of the tragic: The masks fall away, plasticity gives way to irony and the objective equilibrium of the ethical substances cedes to subjectivity, which, through its laughter, masters everything.
In the Aesthetics, Hegel offers a general perspective on the place of the comic between subjectivity and objectivity. The problem of reconciliation between objectivity and subjectivity is not absent, and it is noteworthy that for Hegel reconciliation is possible through both tragedy and comedy. There is a difference, however. In tragedy the subject is finally resigned and renounces its individuality. In comedy, on the other hand, the subjectivity of the self-assured individual persists: “The general ground for comedy is therefore a world in which man as subject or person has made himself completely master of everything that counts to him otherwise as the essence of what he wills and accomplishes, a world whose aims are therefore self-destructive because they are unsubstantial” (Hegel 1975, II, 1199).
At this point Hegel differentiates between that which is merely ridiculous, harmless, and without consequences and that which is comic in general (1199–200). Laughter, in the former case, is only an expression of a self-complacent wit, while the comic destroys that which has no intrinsic value and that which is false and contradictory. The comic destroys that which has been historically overcome, and is therefore linked to the subject, who is certain to possess truth and to be beyond contradiction. By negating a given value, the comic leaves open the possibility of alternatives.
A consequence of this theory is that we can laugh at the past, but not at the present. This consideration applies also to the individual subject who can laugh at former weaknesses or mistakes—in short, at himself: “The comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustration of his aims and achievements” (1200).
Hegel also differentiates between two sorts of humor—subjective and objective. The former, as exemplified by the humorist Jean Paul, is a form of humor to which he pays tribute yet criticizes, in a manner reminiscent of his criticism of Romantic irony, for being subjective and arbitrary (Hegel 1975, I, 295ff). However, Hegel claims that works of “true humor,” such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), succeed in making “what is substantial emerge out of contingency.” Their “triviality [thus] affords precisely the supreme idea of depth” (602). Objective humor occupies an important role in Hegel’s thought. Humor remains for Hegel “the necessary head of a development immanent to the principle of the Romantic art form” although he rejects it at first together with Schlegelian irony as “the absolutization of the one abstract moment of subjectivity.” Objective humor, thus, is not only instrumental in bringing about the passage from art to philosophical thinking, it is also, as Wolfgang Preisendanz demonstrates, the formal principle of art after art, of an art that, within its own medium, goes beyond itself as art (Preisendanz 1963, 121ff).
Preisendanz showed how complex and nuanced Hegel’s concept of humor is, but the post-Hegelians Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fisher, Karl Rosenkranz, Moriz Carriere, or Adolf Zeising are basically uniform in defining humor as a sense of reconciliation that is nonetheless aware of still unresolved tensions in reality; humor is tolerant of human foibles and inadequacies, for it views them sub specie aeternitatis. The post-Hegelian elevation of humour also can be seen among later German humanists, whose orientation is not in any literal way Hegelian, for example, Eduard von Hartmann, Theodor Lipps, Johannes Immanuel Volkelt, Hermann Cohen, and Arthur Kutscher. From the twenty-five or thirty definitions of humor of the nineteenth century, this much of common agreement can be extracted: There is “an absence of scorn in humor, a presence of emotion, and … humor is an excellent thing” (Eastman 1972, 169). Thomas Carlyle’s view, describing the humorist and aesthetician Jean Paul, is characteristic: “True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affection what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us.” The bloom and perfume of a deep, fine, and loving nature, which is in harmony with itself, humor has its essence in sensibility, in “warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all forms of existence” (Carlyle 1827, 169).
Jean Paul (pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), whom Carlyle eulogizes, distinguishes in his School for Aesthetics between harsh irony and a sympathetic humor characterized by four central features: Its totality, its use of the annihilating or infinite idea, its subjectivity, and its sensuousness. Humor is total, Richter argues, because its object is not a single specific folly, but universal folly. It is therefore mild and tolerant of individuals. Humor is annihilating or infinite because from its perspective of detachment and perfect vision, it sees all the contradictions of real and ideal, finite and infinite, and thereby annihilates all. Humor is subjective because it sides with the individual, not with the universal. And finally, humor is sensuous because it is grounded in material existence.
Referring to humor as “a kind of psychic vertigo” and comparing it to the feast of fools in the Middle Ages when “an inner spiritual masquerade innocent of any impure purpose reversed the worldly and the spiritual,” Jean Paul complains that the present age is far too corrupt to allow such humor to reappear. The humorist introduces his personal circumstances upon the comic stage, although he does so only to annihilate it poetically. The humorist is both his own court jester and quartet of masked Italian comedians and at the same time their prince and director.
Opposed to the infinitely great, which evokes admiration, there must be something as infinitely insignificant, which evokes the opposite feeling. The former is the sublime and the latter the ridiculous. Seen as a relation to the ridiculous and as a modus of the comical, humor is based on the division between the I and the world, which is connected to Christianity and thereby based on the suffering of the finite as an unsublatable feature of human existence. As an expression of this situation and the possibility of aesthetically mastering it, humor is defined through the whole of the relation to the world: “Humor as the reversed sublime destroys not the individual but the finite by contrasting it with the idea” (Preisendanz 1974, col. 1233).
Jean Paul influences the history of humor by understanding it as the “reversed sublime,” as an attempt to mediate the infinite and the finite under the historical conditions of Christianity. In this attempt, the humorist surveys the infinite by means of the finite, experiencing the deficiency of not only this or that finite thing, but of the finite in general, without forgetting his own finiteness. Jean Paul’s impressive image of the humorist, who points to a salvation hidden to himself, is the mythical bird Merops, which flies upside-down in the sky, always looking down to earth (Richter 1966 [1841], Part I, vol. 5, 129).
An equally elevated view of humor can be found in the German philosopher and psychologist, Moritz Lazarus, who makes humor a religion of the mind:
For the mind in humor is related to the Idea and to Reality exactly as the whole feeling of man in religion is related to God and the World. … The humorous mind sees itself and its actual life far from the Idea, powerless to attain its goal and its desire, and therefore tamed and broken in its pride, and oft even condemned to the despondent fierce laughter of self-contempt, and yet on the other hand elevated and purified through the consciousness that in spite of all, it possesses the Idea and the Infinite within itself, and in its even so imperfect works it reveals them and lives them forth, and is itself most inwardly at one with them, if only through the painful recognition they bring of its own imperfection. (quoted in Eastman 1972, 174)
Humor is raised on the wings of German philosophy almost to the height of devotion. The praise of humor is characteristic of the nineteenth century, but the sympathetic view of humor does not lose its popularity in the twentieth century, as evidenced by J. C. Gregory (1924), Stephen Leacock, who grants humor a philosophic depth by suggesting that it arises from the perception of the “incongruous contrast between the eager fret of our life and its final nothingness” (Leacock 1935, 219–20), and the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, whose views deserve a more thorough examination.
“The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool,” Santayana famously writes (Santayana 1950, F-57, 93). He is one of the rare philosophers who deem everything in nature comic in its existence, but also “lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate” (Santayana 1955, 305; 1922, 144). He entrusts laughter with an important role in his philosophy and on humor he has these few comments: Humor combines modesty with laughter; we identify our attitude as humorous when the situation is made contradictory by our being satirical and friendly at the same time; when humor is distant from satire, however, comedy does not seem amusing anymore, and humor passes out of the sphere of the comic altogether (Santayana 1922, 259; 1896, 158–9). Whether it is in the way of ingenuity, oddity, or drollery, the humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an absurd position. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince, seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to that of tragedy, which elicits a complex emotion, “an element of pain overbalanced by an element of pleasure” (Santayana 1896, 141). In Santayana’s later philosophy, humor is singled out as the means to maintaining convention while disclosing the masks that cover reality. The importance of humor lies in letting us cling to our illusions, for we cannot live without them (Santayana 1922, 66). Humor brings the reconciliation absent from other forms of the comic, which makes it an excellent tool for inevitable predicaments.
Henri Bergson is the sole philosopher to have written a book on laughter (1900). Renowned for his theory of laughter and his investigation of the techniques of the comic, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic offers comments on humor that have influenced an entire generation of French thinkers such as Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Clément Rosset. Humor and irony differ in the manner in which they relate to the opposition between the ideal and the real, what should be and what actually is. Humor describes with scrupulous minuteness that which is done, and pretends to believe that this is what should be done. Jean Paul and other humor theorists have noticed that humor delights in concrete terms, technical details, and definite facts: Far from being an accidental trait of humor, it is its very essence. For Bergson, a humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist (Bergson 1999, 143).
Bergson condemns as unscientific Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) in the appended critical bibliography of Laughter’s second edition. Freud considers humor “one of the highest psychic functions, enjoying the special favor of thinkers” (1960 [1905], 56). He emphasizes its benign nature in an article published much later (1928 [1927]) than Jokes, which was composed contemporaneously with Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality early in his career, but at a time when such important advances as the ego–id–superego triad and the connected dyad of the pleasure principle and the reality principle remained only latent in his thinking.
Jokes, the comic, and humor are linked through the pleasure principle (although Freud does not use the term in Jokes) and its recreation of the mood of childhood’s inhibited pleasure. Freud retains the same distinctions and connections between jokes, humor, and the comic when extending these theories in his paper Der Humor of 1927. Humor is based on an economy of emotion coupled with the kind of elevation above vicissitudes outlined in chapter 7 of Jokes, but it is rendered more sophisticated via Freud’s new category of the superego.
Humor demeans the ego’s self-absorption as an adult trivializes a child’s preoccupation. As the agency allowing this split attitude, the superego represents that internalization of parental authority and attitudes contained in all mature personalities: “The superego tries, by means of humour, to console the ego and protect it from suffering” (Freud 1928, 166). Thus, humor now mirrors the joke in that it represents the contribution of the superego to the comic while the joke represents the contribution of the id. It offers less pleasure than the comic and jokes, which explains why it never finds release in hearty laughter; “but (without rightly knowing why) we regard this less intense pleasure as having a character of very high value” (166).
Humor is healthy, comforting, liberating and elevating, even though serving an illusion, “the illusion that the travails of life are not travails at all” (Parkin 1997, 79). Its capability of deflecting suffering places it among the great methods that the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer (Freud 1928, 163). The humorist economizes on his own self-concern or self-pity and thus converts the energy saved into positive pleasure. It has the infectious quality of pre-empting the need for pity on our part when responding to it. So humor can spread to an audience although it is independent of it: Unlike jokes, it needs no audience, and unlike the comic, it needs no victim.
Not everyone is capable of engendering or responding to humorous pleasure: It is “a rare and precious gift” to be able to reduce the world to a children’s game, and thus by implication humor occurs much more rarely than other forms of the comic (Freud 1928, 166). Humor also functions differently from these in helping one rise above human vicissitudes, such as disease, death, and war. Vicissitudes of this kind inhibit the comic, but they can be a spur to humor, as the one enduring them can laugh at himself and with salutary effect, encouraging indifference to his circumstances. Such indifference reduces the plight of the victim to trivial proportions.
This short historical survey illustrates the importance of humor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its independence from religious presuppositions: Humor need not function within religious borders to be deemed significant, as evidenced by Schopenhauer, Hegel, and his followers, Carlyle, Jean Paul, Santayana, and Freud. Yet despite the elevation of humor found in these views, it forms no part of the good life for Schopenhauer and Hegel, nor evidently for thinkers like Carlyle, Jean Paul, and Freud, whose works do not provide a full account of the good life.
A few prominent philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries interested in the subject single out laughter rather than humor, however: Henri Bergson in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) defends a vision of laughter that fits his metaphysics, but falls short of fulfilling a role in the individual’s good life; Nietzsche and Santayana entrust laughter rather than humor with an important role in their respective views of the good life, but the choice of terms is not random for these accomplished aestheticians. To respect the terms used by these philosophers, the thought of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Santayana are examined apart, in a study on the role of laughter in the good life that goes beyond the scope of this book. The present study seeks to provide a missing component in scholarly research—a much-needed supplement to the religious philosophies of Shaftesbury, Hamann, and Kierkegaard, one that offers an account of humor and its contribution to the good life within a philosophical framework compatible with recent research and independent of religious presuppositions.
Understanding the role humor can play in the good life begins with acknowledging the tragic sense of life. 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. By construing tragic intrapsychic conflicts as comical incongruities, a conflict is simultaneously sensed as tragic and perceived as comical, leading thus 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 predicament defined by the tension between one’s desires and one’s capacity for fulfilling them on the instinctual, emotional, and intellectual levels. It is important not to resolve this tension, 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. This resolution stands out because it does not require renouncing our desires, or reason, or both; thus, it allows the radical change we denied ourselves before acknowledging our riducule.
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 about oneself, others, and the world 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.
Apart from the Hellenistic and Roman skeptical Pyrrhonists who graphically compare the peace of mind that follows the suspension of judgment to a shadow following the body, the proposal below is the only skeptical worldview I know of that aims at such an ideal and the only one to use humor to reach it.
THE COMIC AND THE TRAGIC
The tragic sense of life originated in tragedy, but disengaged itself from the literary form in the nineteenth century, and now wanders freely without the much-needed cathexis that the aesthetic form gave it. The comic may provide a personal therapy for the tragic sense of life, inasmuch as the comic aestheticizes the tragic vision and enables us to find pleasure in it. The comic thus secures the knowledge of the human condition that the tragic sense of life reveals without the maddening pain and incessant brooding that accompanies it.
THE TRAGIC
Tragedy refers to a literary form, and in general lay usage, to an unfortunate event disrupting the existence of the individual or an entire people and crushing the possibility of disposing of one’s life or destiny freely. The tragic refers to both of the above meanings of tragedy, and also expresses a certain tonality of experience and thought, or manner of relating oneself to the experience of being, and a way of understanding this experience, of thinking about it and communicating it (Chirpaz 1998, 4). This use of “the tragic” or “the tragic vision” is far more restrictive than the general lay usage of “tragedy” or “the tragic,” which can be synonymous with catastrophe and the sorrowful. Murray Krieger explains how the tragic vision differs from tragedy as a literary form:
“Tragedy” refers to an object’s literary form, “the tragic vision” to a subject’s psychology, his view and version of reality. … The tragic vision was born inside tragedy, as a part of it: as a possession of the tragic, the vision was a reflection in the realm of thematics of the fully fashioned revelation of aesthetic totality which was tragedy. (Krieger 1963, 131)
In his essay on the tragic, Peter Szondi reminds us of a distinction worth repeating. He states that we have had a poetics of tragedy since Aristotle, but “only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic” (Szondi 2002, 1). Indeed, philosophic speculation on tragedy and the tragic did not develop until the period of German idealism. Since the nineteenth century “the tragic sense of life” has been with us as a modern, indeed a neo-Christian invention, with Nietzsche as its chief prophet and preacher (Galle 1993, 39, 34). Modern consciousness has separated the tragic sense of life from its aesthetic origins:
Fearful and even demoniac in its revelations, the [tragic] vision needed the ultimate soothing power of the aesthetic form which contained it—of tragedy itself—in order to preserve for the world a sanity which the vision itself denied. … But what if we should find the Dionysian without the Apollonian? Here we would have life unalleviated, endlessly and unendurably dangerous, finally destructive and self-destructive—in short, the demonical. In effect it would be like tragedy without that moment in which the play comes round and the cosmos is saved and returned to us intact. It would be, in other words, the tragic vision wandering free of its capacious home in tragedy. (Krieger 1963, 137)
The consequence of the liberation of “the tragic” from “tragedy” is that the former is disengaged from the therapy provided by the latter’s aesthetic form:
The therapy produced by catharsis, which allowed the subversive elements to be healthily exposed and aesthetically overcome, would no longer be available. And the alienated members, now unchallenged, would be free to turn inward upon themselves to nourish their indignation in the dark underground. (137)
The greatest challenge the tragic view of life presents, I believe, is to produce a cathexis or therapy that does not deny its contents.
The tragic designates a tonality of thought that does not concentrate on exploring the world, but on explicating the reality of the human condition. Nor is the tragic vision a systematic view of life: It admits a wide range of variation and degrees; it is a sum of insights, intuitions, and feelings, to which the words “vision” or “view” or “sense of life,” however inadequate, are more readily applicable. For Miguel de Unamuno, the tragic sense of life is a subphilosophy or a prephilosophy, more or less formulated and conscious, reaching deep down into temperament, not so much flowing from ideas as determining them (Unamuno 1972, 5).
Most writers on the tragic sense of life agree on its contents, however, it is the sense of ancient evil, of the mystery of human suffering, of the gulf between aspiration and achievement. Schopenhauer writes of “the unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of humanity, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent” (Schopenhauer 1969, I, 252–3). Nietzsche too emphasizes suffering as the outcome of the constant struggle between the irrational, absurd, and ecstatic, on the one hand (the Dionysian), and the rational, intelligible, and harmonious, on the other (the Apollonian) (1966a). Nietzsche’s follower, Clément Rosset, describes Being as tragic, and thus illogical, amoral, and contradictory; tragic in a tragic world, the human being is “solitary, that is, without love, base, thus without value, and mortal, therefore, without life.” He is not responsible for the tension that defines the tragic; it is a mystery he can notice, but to which he cannot reconcile himself (Rosset 1991, 90, 22, 19; my translation). Rosset repeats Nietzsche’s view of the human predicament as that of the human being who has ventured into the recognition of a truth that he is incapable of facing. This is the truth about his contradictory and tragic destiny—tragic, in the sense that Vladimir Jankélévitch understands it, as “the alliance of the necessary and the impossible” (Jankélévitch 1998, 313).
Similarly, for Richard Sewall the tragic vision is in its first phase primal, or primitive, in that it calls up out of the depths the first (and last) of all questions, the question of existence: What does it mean to exist? The tragic vision recalls the original terror, harking back to a world that antedates the conception of philosophy, the consolation of the later religions, and whatever constructions the human mind has devised to persuade itself that the universe is secure. It recalls the original un-reason, the terror of the irrational. It sees the human being as questioner, naked, unaccommodated, alone, facing mysterious, demonic forces in his own nature and outside, and the irreducible facts of suffering and death (Sewall 1965, 37).
Moreover, as Oscar Mandel maintains in “Tragic Reality,” the human situation that lies at the root of tragic art is not simply that human effort fails, but that “failure lies implicit in the effort” (Mandel 1963, 60). He considers death, with its inevitable victory over effort, as the first tragic fact. The second tragic fact is sociopsychological: The very act of living in the society of others brings with it—unavoidably and “naturally”—friction, hate, and misery. The desire or need to live among one’s kind is tragic because of the misalliance between human beings. “Thus the very act of birth is tragic not only because it is simultaneously the condemnation to death,” Mandel explains, “but also because it fastens on the child the inevitability of suffering among his own species” (61).
We meet with tragic fact at every level; Mandel notes the intricacy of folly in wisdom, doom in success, flaw in every social reform, a phenomenon that Henry Alonzon Myers deems the ambivalence of tragedy and that Larry Slade, a protagonist of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, calls “the two sides of everything” (Myers 1956, 98–109): Attraction and repulsion, love and hate, illusion and disillusion, reform and reaction, utopian hope and end-of-an-age despair; these are the well-known materials of modern tragedies, which must end, if the artist fails to see the justice in “the two sides of everything,” on a note of futility and hopelessness (101).
Finally, Conrad Hyers sums up “the tragic paradigm” as a view of life that sees existence individually or collectively as structured in terms of polarities, oppositions, contradictions, and their collisions. The tragic opposition may be seen within the individual, between persons or groups, in the very nature of things, or all three. At the individual level, we have a predilection for reading the psyche as an internal struggle between contending forces. The heart of the tragic is the divided personality, and the theme of the inner torment of the tragic psyche has had a long history, from Sophocles’ King Oedipus, through Plato, Paul, the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, the Romantics, Dostoevsky, till Freud.
Sophocles’ King Oedipus is a tortured soul confronted with the twin revelations of having killed his father and married his mother. For Paul it is the “wretched man that I am” of Romans 7 who laments: “I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin” (22–4). In the Middle Ages this interior struggle is represented in many morality plays as a contest between the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins, as an angel and a demon whispering their contrary bits of advice. Shakespeare’s tragic outlook can be repeatedly seen in “equivalence,” exemplified in the two-sided nature of human feelings, whereby the source of our pleasure and joy is also inevitably the source of anxiety and grief: The human being, in accordance with his capacity for feeling, which is always the same for joy as it is for sorrow, is fated to enjoy and suffer in equal measures (Myers 1956, 100). The romanticists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries envision the human being wrestling with irreconcilable passions that tear the psyche asunder, or hounded by the disparity between the ideal (imagined or professed) and the real. For Dostoevsky, the center of the conflict is between faith and doubt, a dilemma experienced by many of the characters from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov (Hyers 1996, 24–25).
It is in literature that the tragic has found the par excellence form of its expression, as evidenced by so many literary works since the epoch of the Greeks.
Examples of the exploration of the tragic paradigm in the literature and drama of the nineteenth and twentieth century abound. The tragic sense of life has been portrayed in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Camus’ The Stranger, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, Melville’s Moby Dick, to name a fraction. Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life has been very much a part of our modern sensibility.
Philosophy is almost averse to the tragic sense of life. Echoing Nietzsche’s claims, Bernard Williams asserts that “moral philosophy is typically attached to the project of giving us ‘good news’ about our condition—whether in the form of the grand Hegelian narratives of progress or of Leibnizian theodicy. Even the bare Kantian fact of the good will is itself a kind of good news” (Williams 1996). For William Desmond, while tragedy reveals one of the ultimate forms of being at loss, philosophy strives to overcome loss, to place reason where tragedy faces rupture, to construct meaning where tragedy undergoes suffering (Desmond 1993). Clément Rosset suggests that philosophers generally resist admitting that tragic thought can ever be developed into a philosophy. Philosophy willingly admits that there is some tragic element in existence, literature, and art; yet it refuses to admit that a philosophy can be tragic in itself. Rosset adds an unacknowledged reason to his argument: A “tragic philosophy” would be inadmissible because it would mean the previous negation of all other philosophies. Thus, philosophers choose to leave the tragic to art and literature. This explains the difference one often finds between the philosophical and literary productions in the same civilization and at the same epoch, the latter basking in tragic brilliance and the former ignoring the tragic altogether (Rosset 1993b, 12).
This attitude toward the tragic explains why few philosophers can be deemed tragic, and why the philosophical status of those considered tragic is openly disputed. Rosset mentions Montaigne, Pascal, and Kierkegaard; Schopenhauer too is dismissed as a mere miserable man (Rosset 1991, 13). Moreover, the prominent tragic philosophers, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Shestov, and even Unamuno, to whom we owe the expression “the tragic sense of life,” only partly deserve this characterization because they search for consolation in the “good news” religion offers, which can hardly deserve the epithet “tragic.” Indeed, in The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner sees the current demise of true tragedy as a byproduct of Christianity, whose promise of salvation for all sinners who repent has broken the back of the tragic assumption, the “unfaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.” For Steiner tragedy is founded on the assumption that there are in nature and in the psyche occult, uncontrollable forces able to madden and destroy the mind, and that beyond the tragic, there lies no “happy ending” in some other spatial and temporal dimension. The wounds are not healed and the broken spirit is not mended. In the norm of tragedy, there can be no compensation. Similarly, Karl Jaspers defends the position that the Christian promise of salvation stands in direct opposition to the unredeemed, unredeemable fatality of the Greek tragic vision: “The chance of being saved destroys the tragic sense of being trapped without chance of escape.” To the same effect I. A. Richards considers tragedy to be possible only to a mind that is for the moment agnostic or Manichean, as “the least touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal” (Kerr 1967, 45, 37).
To the short and otherwise problematic list of tragic philosophers, we may add Schopenhauer, who sees the eternal strife of will against will as the ultimate nature of things, his follower Nietzsche, who considers himself the first tragic philosopher (Nietzsche 1979, III, BT, sec. 3; 1968, sec. 1029), a few French philosophers, such as Georges Bataille, Cioran, and especially Rosset, who deems himself the sole follower of Nietzsche as a tragic philosopher (Rosset 1983, 34; 1993a, “Notes on Nietzsche”).
Each age suffers from different tensions and terrors, but they open on the same abyss: Direction and focus may change, but the tragic vision is constant (Sewall 1965, 39). A tragic thought is a thought that is attentive to the constitutive contradiction of the human condition, which recognizes “the inevitability of paradox, of unresolved tensions and ambiguities, of opposites in precarious balance” (Sewall 1963, 120). Different authors have described this constitutive contradiction in a variety of disciplines and also within philosophy.
Sigmund Freud sees the constitutive contradiction of the human condition as a split between id and superego, and between the individual and society. The tragedy of childhood fate that points to the difficulty of becoming adult, the tragedy of the lifelong “repetition” of childhood scenarios, the tragedy of libidinal contradictions reflecting the wandering nature of human desire and thus the difficulty of loving, and the tragedy of the superego, pointing to the difficulty of self-knowledge and honestly judging oneself, all make conflict inescapable in human interaction. In his discussion of the tragic Freud, Paul Ricoeur emphasizes both the irresolvable situation in which desires can be neither suppressed nor satisfied and the ensuing narcissistic humiliation that even the lucid awareness of the necessary character of conflicts cannot diminish (Ricoeur 1974, 155–9).
Emile Durkheim finds that the constitutive contradiction is expressed in the opposition between the human being as an organism and an individual created by society; similarly, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman see a dialectical process between the biological organism and the social self, and Claude Lévi-Strauss and more recently Agnes Heller point to the conflict between nature and culture.
In philosophy, the most widespread view of a constitutive contradiction is between body and soul or mind. For Plato, the soul is dragged down and clouded by the dense and imperfect world of matter, haunted by a dim recollection of the pure realm from which it has fallen and torn apart by desires that move in opposite directions (Phaedrus; Republic). Pascal’s well-known depiction of the human being as a “thinking reed” summarizes the contradictions that characterize humankind: “What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?” (Pascal, Pensées, VI, 347–8; VII, 434).
Can we infer a tragic mode of thought from dramatic tragedies? Various humor theorists, such as Arthur Berger (1993), Conrad Hyers (1996), and John Morreall (1998, 1999) think it is possible. They compare this tragic vision, moreover, to a comic mode of thought derived from comedies. For example, John Morreall can compare the comic and the tragic visions of life, which he understands to be contrasting features of tragedy and comedy, because “the patterns we have discussed in tragedy and comedy are not just dramatic conventions for writing successful plays; they embody beliefs and attitudes concerning human life” (Morreall 1999, 339). He lists the following traits as representative of the tragic outlook: Simple conceptual schemes, low tolerance for disorder and ambiguity, avoidance of the unfamiliar, convergent thinking, noncritical thinking, emotional engagement, stubbornness, idealism, finality, denigration of the body, and seriousness. In contrast, the comic outlook is characterized as complex conceptual schemes, high tolerance for disorder and ambiguity, the search for the unfamiliar, divergent thinking, critical thinking, emotional disengagement, willingness to change one’s mind, pragmatism, a second chance, celebration of the body, and playfulness. Socially, the comic and the tragic visions represent respectively anti-heroism versus heroism, pacifism versus militarism, forgiveness versus vengeance, social equality versus inequality, questioning versus acceptance of authority and tradition, situation ethics versus duty ethics, and social integration versus social isolation (Morreall 1998, 1999).
Although descriptions of the respective cognitive psychologies of the tragic and the comic are relevant to the tragic sense of life and the comic outlook superimposed on it, their respective social outlooks are not. But Morreall uses the differences between the tragic and comic visions to justify his preference for the comic over the tragic in order to “experience life as funny and fun” (Morreall 1999, 334). Here I differ from John Morreall. Because I consider the tragic sense of life epistemologically valuable, I am looking for a way to sustain its vision. The humorous state of mind I am first proposing incorporates both visions, the tragic and the comic, and derives its significance partly from the viability of the tragic it enables. The more radical vision I further advance, homo risibilis, not only refuses to reject the tragic sense of life, but fully accepts it; and the last step of embracing one’s ridicule disengages the individual from both the tragic and the comic.
There are, furthermore, various theories that attempt to assess tragedy’s nature, but these will not be examined here because the concern of this chapter is the tragic sense of life. The tragic sense of life is a vision of life that may be revealed in tragedies, but it is different from tragedy in that there is no aesthetic form to give it meaning. It is a vision that wanders wild without the cathexis provided by the aesthetic form in which it originated. It is this lack of meaning and therefore of therapy that makes the tragic sense of life so tragic, and at the same time receptive to the therapy that humor is able to provide. I invoke tragedy, nevertheless, in order to confirm that the formula to which I will be reducing the tragic corresponds to it as well.
In The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Martha Nussbaum differentiates between three different themes in tragedies. The first is evaluated as an ordinary fact of human life whose occurrence no one would deny: “The Greek tragedy shows good people being ruined because of things that just happen to them, things they do not control.” The second theme is “something more deeply disturbing,” but some cases “are mitigated by the presence of direct physical constraint or excusable ignorance”: Tragedy “shows good people doing bad things, things otherwise repugnant to their ethical character and commitments, because of circumstances whose origin do not lie with them.” Finally, the third theme is a more intractable sort of case—one which has come to be called, as a result, the situation of “tragic conflict.” It is a case in which “we see a wrong action committed without any direct physical compulsion and in full knowledge of its nature, by a person whose ethical character or commitments would otherwise dispose him to reject the act. The constraint comes from the presence of circumstances that prevent the adequate fulfillment of two valid ethical claims” (Nussbaum 2001b, 25).
Nussbaum’s indebtedness to Hegel’s view of the tragic as the ethical conflict of two rights is evident (Szondi 1978, 165–74):
We have been considering situations, then, in which a person must choose not to do (have) either one thing or another. Because of the way the world has arranged things, he or she cannot do (have) both. … He wants, however, to do (have) both … we have, then, a wide spectrum of cases in which there is something like a conflict of desires … : the agent wants (has reason to pursue) x and he or she wants (has reason to pursue) y; but he cannot, because of contingencies of circumstances to pursue both. (Nussbaum 2001b, 27)
She mentions a case in which the reason for pursuing X is not a desire, but issues from a moral claim that, as Bernard Williams has argued, cannot be avoided by eliminating the desire (Williams 1973).
Hegel’s view has been criticized as a moral reading of tragedy, whose intent is to rescue free will; whereas the tragic resists moral interpretation (Ricoeur 1969, 217). In her characterization of tragedy, Nussbaum also empties the religious content of tragedy, which is a “questioning and an enacted testing of theodicy” (Steiner 1996, 136). Both Nussbaum’s vision of the tragic as found in tragedies and critics who emphasize the a-morality and religiosity of tragedy can now be added to the descriptions of the tragic given above and taken into account in the formula of the human predicament I want to propose.
Transcribing the various descriptions of the tragic into a formula depicted in the most general terms and the minimum of metaphysical assumptions may make the tragic more palatable. I suggest that the experience common to most human beings is a tyranny of desires, needs, and wishes seeking satisfaction on the instinctual, emotional, and intellectual levels. This yearning is frustrated by reason because the knowledge of the possibility of satisfying desires is brought about by reason. To satisfy these desires, needs, and wishes is very difficult, sometimes impossible especially without paying a price that reason may refuse to pay. This formula is compatible with theories that consider rational thinking an emotional process. Because rational thinking is still in competition with other emotion-driven processes, this leaves us with a dichotomy between cognition and the passions (Hurley et al. 2011, 84). This formula is also compatible with theories that consider emotions rational, because the conflict between emotions and rationality still exist (Fridja 2004, 82).
The validity of this description of the human predicament can also be assessed through three well-known philosophic theories of the relations we entertain with the world, with others, and with ourselves. First, in his renowned The Myth of Sisyphus (1959 [1942]), Albert Camus maintains that the “absurd” arises because the world fails to meet our demands for meaning. I suggest that we consider the gap that exists between the individual and the world, which Camus calls the “absurd,” as a gap between our need for value and meaning, on the one hand, and the impossibility of fulfilling that need in the world, on the other.
The absurdity of our situation derives from a collision within us rather than a collision between our expectations and the world, and can be described as a case of desires frustrated by the awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling them. Camus’ claim that the world fails to meet our demands for meaning suggests that the world might satisfy these demands if it were different. But Thomas Nagel rightly remarks that what makes doubt inescapable with regard to the limited aims of individual life also makes it inescapable with regard to any larger purpose that encourages the sense that life is meaningful. Once the fundamental doubt has begun, it cannot be laid to rest. This is not the case that the world might satisfy these demands if it were different. There does not appear to be any conceivable world (containing us) in which irresolvable doubts could not arise. Consequently, the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves (Nagel 1987, 54).
A second well known theory that bears on the validity of the description of the human predicament proposed above is Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the clash between me and the other, between the individual and the group (Sartre 1957 [1943]). This clash can be construed as a tension between, on the one hand, my desires and, on the other hand, my awareness of the existence of other persons whom I ought to take into consideration and whose desires clash with mine.
Finally, Immanuel Kant views metaphysical questions as necessarily arising from the nature of reason, yet transcending reason’s power of answering them: “Human reason has this particular fate that it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer” (Kant 1929, xviii). In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant speaks of “Metaphysics, with which, as fate would have it, I have fallen in love but from which I can boast of only a few favors” (Kant 1992–, Ak. 367). In The Critique of Pure Reason, he maintains that no matter how unsuccessful our metaphysical efforts may be “we shall return to metaphysics as to an estranged beloved” (Kant 1929, A850/B878). Kant holds that reason has a proper aim and an internal drive to reach it; because this drive is necessarily frustrated, the internal tension Kant describes will always arise between the necessary quest for metaphysical answers and the awareness of the impossibility of providing for this need.
These three examples provided by Camus, Sartre, and Kant can be generalized to depict the core of human tension and dissatisfaction as a clash between expectations and the perception of reality. The yearning is frustrated by the awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling it. This fundamental clash arises sometimes from practical reasons, and sometimes from principled reasons, that is, from reasons that are inherent in the nature of desires, cognition, or the clash between them.
Some thinkers deem the tragic an essential element of the universe (Scheler 1963, 27), or a pervasive aspect of it (Santayana 1922, 144), making it thus available to all. Others see the tragic as accessible to only a few: Max Scheler believes that some people are blind or nearly blind to the tragic (Scheler 1963, 27), and Richard Sewall emphasizes that this is an attitude toward life with which some individuals seem to be endowed to a high degree, others less so, but which is latent in every person and may be evoked by experience (Sewall 1965, 37). Miguel de Unamuno finds the variability of the tragic sense of life characteristic of nations rather than individuals (Unamuno 1972). Americans are considered to be averse to the tragic sense of life, perhaps as a consequence of their vision of the “indefinite perfectibility of man” that Tocqueville noted as early as 1835. For example, Stanley Edgar Hyman describes the American psychoanalysts’ reconstruction of Freud’s views along the lines that are less “gloomy, stoic, and essentially tragic” than his “applied” psychoanalysis, whose effect “has been to re-repress whatever distasteful or tragic truths Freud dug out of his own unconscious or his patients’ and to convert the familiar device of resistance into revisionist theory” (Hyman 1965, 278, 292).
The controversy over the accessibility of the tragic is related to a further debate on whether the tragic sense of life can be taught. Lionel Abel believes that only by undergoing tragedy one arrives at the tragic sense of life: “One does not acquire or develop the tragic sense,” he maintains; therefore, “it is not realized, but imposed; one never possesses it, one has to be possessed by it” (Abel 1967, 178). For Schopenhauer, experiencing the sufferings of life is only one way, albeit the more common, to arrive at a tragic sense of life, but knowledge is another way to it (Schopenhauer 1969, II, 638).
Another controversy bears on whether the tragic sense of life should be developed. A few authors believe the tragic sense of life should be fostered (Krieger 1963; Muller 1956), especially since there is “a perhaps unconscious but forceful onslaught on our sense of the tragic that threaten[s] to destroy it utterly” (Krieger 1960, viii). Others, such as the humor theorists Arthur Berger, Conrad Hyers and John Morreall, contrast the paradigms they deem “the comic” and “the tragic” in order to defend the comic outlook (Berger 1993; Hyers 1996; Morreall 1998, 1999). I believe the knowledge of the human condition brought about by the tragic view of life is worth preserving, but without the tonality accompanying it, the maddening pain, and the constant brooding over it. The comic, I suggest, may prove helpful for disengaging the content of the tragic from its pain.
THE COMIC
The history of tragedy and comedy, various theories of humor, and the affinity of humor with sadness and suffering point to the possibility of construing contradictions as comical incongruities that were originally perceived as tragic. A considerable amount of information has been accumulated that bears on the important role that humor can play in the alleviation of conflicts, as well as on its other physiologic, psychological, and social benefits. I suggest that humor may alleviate intrapersonal conflicts as well. Various philosophers have praised self-referential humor but this form of humor has not been sufficiently investigated.
TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
The histories of the dramatic genres and scholarly views on the relation between tragedy and comedy indicate that there is a basic connection between the two. Walter Kerr maintains, “the doorway to comedy is truly a back door through tragedy” (Kerr 1967, 17). In a chapter entitled “the tragic source of comedy,” Kerr describes comedy as an epi-phenomenon of tragedy:
Comedy, it seems, is never the gaiety of things; it is the groan made gay. Laughter is not man’s first impulse; he cries first. Comedy always comes second, late after the fact and in spite of it or because of it. Comedy is really the underside of things, after the rock of our hearts has been lifted, with effort and only temporarily. It appears in the absence of something and as the absence of something. Man’s primary concern is with the rock, with his heart, with tragedy. (19)
Comedy at its most penetrating derives from what we normally regard as tragic, Kerr believes. Comedy adds the last necessary ounce of truth to tragedy; it is not a relief, but “the rest of the bitter truth, a holy impropriety. The relief we find in it comes from its having finished the sentence …” (17).
The forms of tragedy and comedy are inseparable, for Kerr, one incomplete without the other. Tragedy is the forward, upward thrust; comedy is the drag or reminder. In early Greek arrangement of plays, the two are balanced in just this way, with the satyr child being born directly of its tragic mother. In the medieval rediscovery of drama, the two-faced pattern is repeated. Thus, “the first highly developed comic notes are developed not apart from, but out of, what has been presented as, most terrifying” (26). We have very good evidence, then, to show that comedy, in its fullness, comes after seriousness, after tragedy or its equivalent. And on somewhat lesser but nonetheless extremely provocative evidence, it seems likely that comedy comes from tragedy. If this is so, the two faces the theater shows us are in actuality the same face “worn by the same man, reporting the same event” (31). Northop Frye voices similar ideas in The Argument of Comedy: “Tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy,” he writes, and “comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself” (Frye 1964, 455).
At the end of Plato’s Symposium, Socrates insists to his friends, Aristophanes and Agathon, that “the genius of comedy is the same as the genius of tragedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also” (223 c–d). Beyond the literal sense that every writer should be able to do both, what Socrates seems to have had in mind is the undeniable truth that the highest comedy gains its power from its sense of tragic possibility and that the profoundest tragedy presents a full if fleeting vision through its temporary disorder of an ordered universe, to which comedy is witness. Without a sense of the tragic, comedy loses heart,” Richard Sewall maintains, “it becomes brittle, it has animation, but not life. Without a recognition of the truths of comedy, tragedy becomes bleak and intolerable” (Sewall 1965, 34).
Moreover, both the tragic and the comic involve opposition and conflict. We have seen the kind of oppositions on which the tragic sense of life broods, but scholars who study comedy also emphasize that the comic always involves an encounter of two different, often directly opposed, levels or experiences, such as high–low, soul–body, mind–matter, artificial–natural, spirit–letter, human–animal, divine–human, ideals–reality, spontaneity–habit, culture–vulgarity, high aims–low needs. Bergson adds to the series above yet another oppositional pair, living–mechanical or life–automatism, which he attempts to establish as the core of all others (Bergson 1999). Thus, the history of the genres and the constitutive part that oppositions play in both comedy and tragedy point to the possibility of transposing tragic oppositions into comical oppositions.
THEORIES OF HUMOR
Theories of humor may shed light on the transformation of tragic oppositions into comical incongruities. The theory of the comical attaches two distinct meanings to the term humor: broad and narrow. Humor is understood broadly when it is used interchangeably with the term comical. Some theorists apply the term humor to all kinds of comical works (see Dziemidok 1993, 101, n. 39). In this case, humor often is taken to mean the subjective aspect of the comical (both the capacity to experience the comical and the experience itself), as exemplified, for example, by R. J. Corsini’s definition in The Dictionary of Psychology: Humor is “the capacity to perceive or express the amusing aspects of situations” (1999). Similarly, in the expression “sense of humor,” “humor” is often semantically equivalent to “the comical.” What is meant by “sense of humor” is the aesthetic sensitivity to the stimuli that evoke the experience of the comical: A sense of humor is the capacity to perceive the amusing aspects of a situation or to construe it as such. Humor, then, is the contemporary umbrella term we use to refer to the comic and its cognates.
Many authors make use of the narrow meaning of the term humor to specify a particular form of the comical (see Dziemidok 1993, 101, n. 41). Moreover, humor is associated with a specific axiological attitude and a view of the world together with the form of humorous writing expressing them, whose important component is the comical. In these last two related meanings, humor, because of its permissiveness, tolerance, and reflective character, is contrasted with militant and uncompromising satire, on the one hand, and the primitive forms of the comical connected with farce and vaudeville, on the other.
Unless otherwise indicated, humor is used here in its broad meaning, as interchangeable with the comical. The various theories that attempt to define, characterize or explain the comical or humor as an umbrella term for the comic and its cognates are usually divided into superiority theories, incongruity theories (which include ambivalence theories), and release and relief theories, although a richer taxonomy exists. For example, Patricia Keith-Speigel offers an analysis of eight primary categories, and Matthew Hurley et al. update the three categories of humor theories with an analysis of more recent work, adding biological theories, play theories, surprise theories, and Bergson’s mechanical humor theory (Keith-Speigel 1972; Hurley et al. 2011, 37–55).
The most widespread contemporary view of the comical (humor) is as incongruity alone, or together with its resolution. There are various theories of incongruity, but they all present cognitions involving disjointed ideas, ill-suited pairings of ideas or situations, and/or their presentations in ways that diverge from habitual or expected customs (Flugel 1954, 722). The conflict-resolution theory is a variant of incongruity theory. Rod Martin reports on a long debate among cognitively oriented humor theorists as to whether incongruity alone is a necessary and sufficient condition for humor or whether it needs resolution as well. Some information-processing analysts, who have added to incongruity theory a component of conflictresolution, as well as others, have a two-stage process in common: First, the perception of some complexity, incongruity, discrepancy, ambiguity, or novelty in the humor stimulus; second, the resolution (i.e., cognitive integration or understanding) of the stimulus (Martin 1998, 26).
Oscillation, conflict-mixture and simultaneously experienced incompatible emotions or feelings characterize the ambivalence theories of the comical (humor) (Monro 1951). The difference between the incongruity and the ambivalence theories of humor lies in their emphasis: The former emphasize cognition and the latter emphasize feelings. As the comical/ humor has both cognitive and affective components, I use both theories, as well as the release and relief theories. The common basis of the theories pertaining to the latter group is their view that humor provides relief or release from too much tension.
The notion of incongruity explains the relevance of humor to conflict or opposition. We can consider incongruity as a conflict or clash between ideas, emotions, desires, or among them. Conversely, we also can consider conflict an incongruity, and by using the incongruity and ambivalence theories, we can construe this conflict as comical. The humor thus created enables us to tolerate the tension generated by this opposition. This last point is clarified by the third group of theories, which views humor as a relief or release of too much tension. Within the framework of these theories, it is possible to assume that some situations construed as tragic also may be experienced as comical, thereby making the situation bearable.
ENJOYING INCONGRUITIES
Some comical situations are independent of any underlying tragic incongruity. More importantly, the person who is in the midst of experiencing a tragic incongruity may not perceive it as comical. Our reaction to incongruity may be negative emotions, puzzlement, or humorous amusement (Morreall 1989b). According to such disparate sources as Freud, Bergson, and Morreall, however, as soon as a humorous reaction to incongruity has been established, emotions cannot arise (Freud 1928; Bergson 1999; Morreall 1983a, 1983b). Freud adds that the emotion should be nascent or in its very beginning for humor to be able to replace it. However, based on Freud’s view of pleasure as a byproduct of humor, I suggest that even later, especially if a more detached view of the current situation is required to act, humor, more than philosophical theory, has a better chance of asserting itself. As Freud explains, “we can only say that if someone succeeds, for instance, in disregarding a painful affect by reflecting on the greatness of the interests of the world as compared with his own smallness, we do not regard this as an achievement of humour but of philosophical thought, and if we put ourselves into this train of thought, we obtain no yield of pleasure” (Freud 1960, 289). Humor in Freudian terminology or a comic apprehension in mine can be induced by the incongruity created by the thought of the possibility of a more objective-reasonable view than the subjective-emotional situation one is experiencing; being even slightly pleasurable, this comical incongruity helps to set up a more detached view of the situation at hand.
“In the laughter with which we observe and greet the foibles of others,” Reinhold Niebuhr notes “a nice mixture of mercy and judgment, of censure and forbearance” (Niebuhr 1969, 137); this is even more so in self-referential laughter, as Shaftesbury has shown through the device of soliloquy as a means for self-correction. If Michael Gelven and Agnes Heller are right in arguing respectively that “laughter is the most curious manifestation of reflexive reason” and “the instinct of reason” (Gelven 2000, 1; Heller 2005, 29), then it is reason through laughter that communicates with the emotions. Sooner or later, it is necessary to establish some distance from one’s emotions in order to continue living. Gentle laughter at the folly of believing that the heart will get its way, that desires will be fulfilled, that mortals will not die, and that “this will not happen to me” is the first step toward bridging the gap between that which one desires and that which reason knows.
It may well be that philosophers cannot say much to themselves or to others who have lost a loved one, or an arm, or the ability to see. But, as Robert Solomon reminds us, we all meet or read about the rare sages who have suffered the most profound misfortunes and have retained a sense of acceptance, graciousness, and even humor about their lives (Solomon 1999, 115). Moreover, sadness, suffering, and humor may be intimately connected. This can be inferred from theories of humor that emphasize its survival value (Koller 1988, 26), or that view the comic as the sense and vital rhythm of life, celebrating a fertility god that is a symbol of perpetual rebirth and eternal life (Langer 1964, 498, 502, 503, 510). This connection also has been noted by suffering philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, who maintains that “the melancholy have the best sense of the comic,” and Nietzsche, who asserts that “the deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have,” and “the most suffering animal on earth invented for itself—laughter” (Kierkegaard EO1, 20; also JP 1,700; Nietzsche 1968, sec. 1040; 990).
If a tragic incongruity cannot always be perceived as comical by the person who is in the midst of experiencing it, most intrapersonal tragic conflicts, I believe, have the potential to transform themselves into comical incongruities, as theories of humor imply, histories of the dramatic genres and relations between the tragic and the comic illustrate, the association between sadness, suffering and humor indicates, and sheer survival recommends.
A considerable amount of information has been accumulated that bears on the important role that humor can play in the alleviation of social conflicts. Indeed, it is often said that humor is social; at least laughter is shared and is notoriously contagious. Humor itself is a universal, an everpresent phenomenon of every known society, a recognizable feature of every cultural inventory. Sociologists have pointed to consensus as the social glue that keeps diverse and sometimes-conflicting elements in human societies, groups, and associations together. Humor is one of the major means to achieving consensus because it signals to individuals that they share common experiences, ideas, themes, or values. It also functions as a mode of indirect communication that relieves stress and strain and enables the discussion of serious matters in a non-threatening way. It is an effective expression of aggression and hostility, as well as an expression of its contrary, a form of self-devaluation or self-humiliation that replaces hostility and indignation directed at others. It is a constant participant in the celebration of the significant arrival of major events in the lives of individuals or in the lives of an entire society. Humor also functions to correct human errors, voice social criticism, and disclose human sham or the posturing involved in deceit, pretense, and trickery. Humor can both reinforce and undermine stereotypes. One of its major functions is to provoke thought, and it is good in countering pain.
Finally, sociologists have documented the presence of both conflict and control among human groups. Humor is operative in terms of these concerns: It can be a devastating weapon of attack, and also can be used to manage group members by shoring up group morale (see Koller 1988, chap. 2). Although humor plays a significant role in social conflicts, it is important to note that sociological theories of humor diverge in their emphasis on this role: The functionalist approach emphasizes humor’s ability to vent or expel hostility and thereby avoid or reduce social conflict; the conflict approach, in contradistinction, sees humor as a weapon, a form of attack, a means of defense, and an expression or correlate of social conflict (Speier 1998). Sociologist Giselinde Kuipers explains that conflict theories of humor have been used especially in the analysis of ethnic and political humor (Kuipers 2008, 368); they are exemplified in the case studies Marjolein ‘t Hart and Dennis Boss relate in Humor and Social Protest (2007).
Humor need not be social, however: Kierkegaard considers the humorist a socially alienated isolato who takes an unconciliatory stance toward the world, and who “like a beast of prey, always walks alone” (JP 2, 1719/ Pap. II A 694, January 13, 1838); Schopenhauer, as we have seen above, emphasizes the individualistic stance of the humorist; and Carlyle sees the humorist as solitary as well (Carlyle 1827, 14). Unlike a joke, Freud considers humor something that can be enjoyed by someone without the need to communicate it, and to which “another person’s participation adds nothing new.” Thus, “humour completes its course within a single person,” and this is why “humour is the most easily satisfied among the species of the comic” (Freud 1960, 284). More recently Dineh Davis has argued, “humor begins within and may remain entirely within the individual (such as in self-talk or self-discovery), and as such can be dealt with within the disciplines of philosophy or psychology” (Davis 2008, 549). However, Willibald Ruch notes that in psychology and other disciplines, the scope of most theories of humor is limited to an analysis of jokes and cartoons (Ruch 2008, 28). This means that the analysis of individual, intrapersonal and noncommunicated self-referential humor that follows has been developed independently for the simple reason that heretofore research in this area has seldom been conducted and little or no data is available.
Nevertheless, there is much information about the role humor can play to ease personal conflicts. Today, the physiological and psychological benefits of humor are numerous and well documented, although the findings are less clear-cut than most people think. A sense of humor and the ability to laugh have long been viewed as important sources of both physical and psychological health. Since medieval times, a number of physicians and philosophers have suggested that laughter has important health benefits such as improving blood circulation, restoring energy, counteracting depression, and enhancing the functioning of various organs of the body (see Goldstein 1982; Moody 1978). In recent years, several of the physical health claims that have been made for humor come from the research of William Fry and colleagues. In the past century, various psychologists and psychotherapists such as Sigmund Freud (1928), Abraham Maslow (1954), and Rollo May (1953) also have discussed the importance of a benign sense of humor for mental health.
Belief in the positive health benefits of humor and laughter has become increasingly popular in recent years. A burgeoning “humor and health movement” has developed as well as organizations such as the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. In recent years, the growth of the “laughter club movement,” whose adherents promote laughter as a form of yogic exercise, has further added to the chorus of claims for the beneficial effects of even nonhumorous laughter on physical, mental, and spiritual health, as well as its potential for resolving conflicts at both the personal and international levels.
Humor may influence psychological health through the positive emotion of mirth associated with it. Like other positive emotions, mirth may enhance feelings of well-being and counteract negative emotions such as depression and anxiety. Consequently, individuals who frequently engage in humor may be less prone to various forms of emotional disturbance. Like other emotions, mirth is associated with a variety of biochemical processes in the brain and other parts of the body (Ruch 1993). Such emotion-related biochemical changes may have beneficial effects on physical health, such as increasing pain tolerance, enhancing immunity, or undoing the cardiovascular consequences of negative emotions. According to this model, overt laughter may not be necessary for health benefits to occur because humor and amusement may induce the positive emotion of mirth without the need for laughter. A healthy sense of humor would involve a generally cheerful temperament characterized by mirth, happiness, joy, optimism, and a playful approach to life (Ruch and Kohler 1998).
Humor may benefit psychological health through cognitive mechanisms. By shifting perspective and avoiding overly serious responses to situations, individuals who maintain a humorous outlook on life are less likely to become stuck in the cognitive distortion that gives rise to anxiety and depression. The humorous perspective may also be an important way of coping with stress. There is a large body of research pointing to the adverse effects stressful life experiences can have on various aspects of physical and psychological well-being. Thus, a humorous outlook on life and the ability to see the funny side of one’s problems may enable individuals to cope more effectively with pressure and anxiety by allowing them to gain perspective and to distance themselves from stressful situations, enhancing their feelings of mastery and well-being in the face of adversity (Martin and Lefcourt 1983).
Finally, humor may benefit physical and psychological health through the social mechanism of increasing one’s level of support. Individuals who are able to use humor more effectively to reduce interpersonal conflicts and tensions and to enhance positive feelings in others may consequently enjoy more numerous and satisfying social relationships. In turn, the greater levels of social support resulting from these relationships may confer stressbuffering and health-enhancing benefits (Cohen and Wills 1985).
A word of caution is in order, however. Rod Martin argues that claims for the benefits of humor are often simplistic, exaggerated, and unsubstantiated (Martin 2008). With regard to physical health, he sums up the research by suggesting, “the strongest evidence supports the idea of humor-related increases in pain tolerance, although the mechanisms are still unclear, and there is evidence that similar effects can also be found with negative emotions.” With regard to psychological health, there is some evidence that a sense of humor can play a beneficial role in coping with stress, enhancing interpersonal relationships, and contributing to general well-being, “although this research is also somewhat inconsistent” (509). Relationships between humor and laughter, on the one hand, and psychosocial and physiological health, on the other, are more complex than many people believe. More research is needed to disentangle these complex relationships, Martin argues. Although there is little doubt that humor and laughter can enhance positive feelings of mirth, we have only an incomplete understanding of the ways in which different aspects of styles of humor many contribute to broader dimensions of mental health and satisfying social relationships (511).
To conclude the discussion of the benefits of humor, I suggest that Michael Gelven’s argument in his Truth and the Comedic Art about “the comedic” can be endorsed for “humor” as well:
The praise of the comedic may itself be trivialized by the overready: laughter makes us feel good. … These psychological consequences are true benefits, and it would be churlish to deny them. To focus on them as the central explanation is rather like drinking a vintage Chateau Margaux merely to experience the gentle high that follows, and not to taste its wondrous, magnificent flavor. … It is likewise not the mere psychological benefits that endorse comedic laughter. What would it be, then? The truth, perhaps? Even if it is truth it is only that peculiarly self-revealing truth about ourselves, which may be the most important kind, but it is also the most elusive. What enables us to praise comedic laughter apparently runs more deeply than obvious psychological benefits … (Gelven 2000, 6)
Humor’s import is not confined to its psychological and physiological benefits. Its significance lies elsewhere, I suggest: Humor is an invaluable aid in attaining to philosophic ideals such as self-knowledge, truth, rationality, and virtue as well as more ambitious ideals such as liberation, joy and tranquility, as we shall shortly see.
SELF-REFERENTIAL HUMOR
In what follows I address only intrapersonal, rather than interpersonal, conflict. Intrapersonal conflict calls for self-referential humor. The opinions of philosophers on this kind of humor diverge: Self-referential humor is recommended by the laughing philosopher, Democritus: “Why did you criticize my laughter, Hippocrates? You people do not laugh at your own stupidity but each laughs at another’s” (Hippocrates 1990, Letter 17, line 5), by Seneca, who asserts that “no one becomes a laughing-stock who laughs at himself” (On Firmness, 16.3–17.4), and by Montaigne, who writes that “our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh” (1965, Bk. I, chap. 50). Hobbes explicitly refers to laughter at one’s own past foibles. He does not interpret it as sympathetic, however. Rather, it is a form of superiority that “put[s] the rest into jealousy and examination of themselves” (1840, IV, chap. 8, sec. 13). Shaftesbury has endorsed self-referential humor, which becomes fashionable in the nineteenth century, as we have seen at the beginning of this chapter. Nietzsche makes it his hallmark: regretting that philosophers lack self-laughter to mock the prejudices they baptize as “truth” (Nietzsche 1966b, sec. 5), Nietzsche chooses self-laughter as The Gay Science’s new motto (1886), and makes it the pinnacle of the artist’s greatness and the highest virtue of the human ideal he proposes (Nietzsche 1967, III, sec. 3; 1954a, IV, 12, 18; 20). In the twentieth century, Roger Scruton asserts approvingly that “humor is not normally self-directed,” whereas Daniel Dennett sees self-referential humor as the paradigm of all humor, and Avital Ronell, among others, considers it the mark of the philosopher (Scruton 1987, 169; Hurley et al. 2011, 131–3; Ronell 2003, 298–9).
Philosophers recommend self-referential humor for its ability to correct mistakes, improve morality, and foster the drive for self-perfection and self-transcendence. In their Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett and Reginald Adams Jr. make “the twinge of ridiculousness that you feel when you’ve made a mental blunder … the core of basic humor.” The “first-person phenomenon” is the fundamental source of humor in their model: “The (first) person both makes the mistake and discovers it. Laughing at others is a more sophisticated development of the funny bone …” (Hurley et al. 2011, 132–3). Drawing on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, John Lippitt proposes an existential laughter (1996) and argues that self-referential humor can be a tool in self-perfection (Lippitt 1999a, 2005). Influenced by Kierkegaard, Robert Roberts suggests that humor can be a tool for moral growth in virtue ethics and a form of wisdom: “A sense of humor about one’s foibles,” he writes, “is a capacity of character-transcendence; but character-transcendence is basic to the very concept of a moral virtue” (Roberts 1988, 127). Others have argued that humor and self-referential humor are virtues (Basu 1999a; Amir 2002). John Morreall has dedicated most of his academic career to foster philosophic interest in humor; for Morreall, self-referential humor is the most basic and most important kind of humor (Morreall 2010, 20); it may foster both moral and intellectual virtues (Morreall 2009, 112–9). Finally, Simon Critchley views humor, which teaches us to laugh at ourselves rather than at others, as philosophy in action (Critchley 2002; see 2003; Morreall 1983a). Thus, the workings of self-referential humor in an intrapersonal conflict deserve closer scrutiny.
HUMOR
I consider an intrapersonal conflict as an incongruity between one’s desires and their fulfillment. Once an intrapersonal conflict is construed as an incongruity, there is much that humor can do to foster awareness of the conflict and knowledge of its constituents, facilitate deliberation, and later, help one live consciously with unresolved conflict, or resolve the conflict on a higher level of understanding. In order to see how humor can accomplish this, we need a better knowledge of its constitution.
THE SENSE OF HUMOR
Rod Martin affirms that there is yet no standard conception of the construct of sense of humor (see Herzog and Bush 1994; Herzog and Karafa 1998); nor is there a theoretical framework on which investigators generally agree. Martin proposes a three-dimensional model of humor based on Hans Eysenck’s tripartite framework (Eysenck 1942; Martin 1998, 58–59). Although Eysenck’s model is originally meant to categorize the themes of jokes and cartoons, it might also be useful in conceptualizing the major dimensions of sense of humor in terms of cognitive, emotional, and conative (motivational) components. My view concurs with both models in viewing humor as a complex inner process or multidimentional construct involving simultaneous cognitive, emotive, and conative components; it differs from them, however, in the way I describe the emotional and conative components of humor.
From a cognitive point of view, humor enables the perception of the comic, that is, of the simultaneous duality or multiplicity of points of view. It enables “rapid cognitive-perceptual shifts” (Yovetich et al. 1990) between various conflicting points of views. These points of view may contradict each other as well as clash with more serious aspects of the situation. Thus, the capacity to perceive a series of incongruities is party to the cognitive component of humor.
From a conative point of view, humor is indifferent to motivation, reducing desire and impeding action. As Wallace Chafe hypothesizes (1987, 2007, 23), humor’s basic evolutionary and adaptive function is “disabling” (Fry 1992). A sense of humor is the safety valve preventing impulsive behavior that leads to counterproductive actions (Fry 1987). Chafe suggests that it is instructive to look at the main physiological and psychological manifestations of humor in light of his “disabling hypothesis”: physiologically it incapacitates and psychologically, because it is pleasing, it diverts attention away from decisive action (Roeckelein 2002, 271).
From an emotional point of view, humor offers several major benefits. First, it desensitizes intolerance to ambivalence by converting the pain of ambivalence into pleasure. Second, humor moderates extreme feelings, such as fear, anger, or sorrow (Morreall 1983a, 1997). In contrast to the practical orientation of emotions, humor involves a more abstract and less purposeful activity. Unlike reason, emotion usually employs a limited and partial perspective—the personal perspective of an interested agent. In contrast, humor links different, apparently unrelated elements within a more general, broader perspective, thereby generating a disinterested experience (Morreall 1983b; Fridja 1986, sec. 2.5; Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 364–5). Humor’s survival value consists, at least in part, in its functioning as a counterweight to the strong influence exerted by emotions and moods on our behavior. It draws attention away from the self and its desires, thereby enabling us to look at reality from a safe and somewhat different point of view than the emotional perspective (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 63–64). This makes it possible for us to relax and cope better with reality. Rod Martin notes that there are several possible mechanisms by which humor may moderate or buffer stress (Martin 2000). The function of humor as a moderator of stress paves the way to a third benefit: Humor provides release from the pressure of frustration generated by the conflict.
Fourth, by reducing shame and disgust, humor facilitates a confrontation with difficult aspects of the self and enables us to contemplate them more calmly. Michael Lewis explains that coping with shame essentially involves removing ourselves from the shaming situation, by confessing, denying (attributing the failure to an external source), and forgetting (reducing the weight of our flaw), as well as by using humor (Lewis 1992, 127–37). Humor is helpful because it provides us with a new perspective that transcends the current uncomfortable perspective. Adopting another perspective is contrary to the partial nature of emotions and is thus incompatible with an intense emotional state. Consequently, laughing at ourselves serves to distance us from the shaming situation as we join others (imagined or real) in taking a fresh perspective on it. The new vantage point humor provides thus helps to reduce the significance of the shaming situation (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 515).
Humor also can reduce disgust. The move from shame to disgust tracks the move from public to private, from external to internal, from child to adult, from repulsive to repressive. In his Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller argues that the comic and the disgusting share significant points of contact, and that there is an intimate connection between some styles of contempt, disgust, and the comic (Miller 1997, ix, 116). Much of the comic depends on a transgressive irreverence, a kind of feast of misrule in which, if not the violation, at least the mockery of certain norms is privileged. No sooner is an aspect of the disgust acquired than the very substance of that disgust becomes material for joking. Disgust usually can be indulged playfully for rather low scales. Miller explains, “there are ways within the rules of the repressive regime that disgust maintains to let the repressed return to see the sunlight. One way is via low comedies and dirty jokes, which allow some release but are not acceptable to people of taste” (173–4).
The experience of disgust can be more entertaining to us as is commonly the case in comedy when it is elicited by another’s shamelessness or ineptitude. Through the distancing from ourselves that humor affords, our own inaptitude should also be a source of pleasure. I suggest that if the comic and the disgusting share significant points of contact, the comic may be actively used in self-referential humor to discharge disgust. Indeed, James Beattie has already argued for the association of laughter and distress (Beattie 1976). The role of fear or disgust in laughter is such that the fear or disgust stimulus retains this function even when promoted to laughterstimulus; only fear or disgust is bisociated with a positive emotion. Beattie’s view is corroborated by contemporary research on the Amerindian clowns that shows that in the clown the stimuli of fear and disgust are often indistinguishable from each other. In the light of the theory of bisociation, the very laughter itself is marked by ambivalence, the negative distressing affects of fear and disgust being neutralized by their exalted place in the ritual. Here, it suffices to note that this profound identity on the metaphysical and symbolic levels is reflected clearly on the psychological level in the stereotyped intermingling of hilarious laughter and fear/disgust that betrays the presence of the ritual clown. Rather than a mere intermingling, the fear/disgust may be seen as necessary components of the bisociative laughter. The problem then becomes one of determining the factors that contribute to the component of positive affect toward such comic figures, which by neutralizing the fear and disgust generates our laughter. Howard Pollio and John Edgerly explain this balance, especially in the clown-priest, as a result of the clown’s simultaneous roles as butt and aggressor, which already suggests that he is the focus of a bisociative perception, one operational field he calls up (one role) being exploded by a contrasting field (the aggressor role) (Pollio and Edgerly 1996, 222).
Fifth, by gradually replacing feelings of anger, fear, sorrow, shame, and disgust with sympathy (Freud 1905; 1928) and compassion (Eisenberg and Strayer 1987), humor encourages self-acceptance, tolerance “of self and others,” and “a sense of identification with humanity” (Martin 1998, 99). The sympathetic aspect of humor is noted in most dictionaries and encyclopedias where humor is contrasted with wit and irony. For example, in its entry on wit, Webster writes of humor: “Often suggesting a generalness or greater kindliness or sympathy with human failings than does wit” (1993); “humor implies an ability to perceive the ludicrous, the comical, and the absurd in human life and to express these usually with keen insight and sympathetic understanding and without bitterness” (Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms 1992, 439, “wit”). In the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, J. M. Baldwin defines humorous and humor as “a complex feeling composed of an element of the comic and an element of sympathy” (1901–1905, 488). In A Dictionary of Psychology, J. Drever defines humor as the “character of a complex situation exciting joyful, and in the main quiet, laughter, either directly, through sympathy, or (indirectly) through empathy” (1973). Studies of comedians concur with these theories: Comedians are sympathetic to “our failings, our perceptions, and our emotions” (Barnett 1987, 155). Both in their consciously enunciated values and in their projective fantasies, they seem to have a preoccupation with morality and a sense of obligation to do good: “When they encounter the tragic, comedians are highly motivated to negate it and transmute it into something pleasant and funny. Furthermore, the humor of comedians may be seen as a strategy for soothing people and for denying the threats found in life” (Fisher and Fisher 1983).
Studies on empathy may teach us something about humor, especially because both concepts seem to be elements of wisdom (Orwoll and Perlmutter 1990). Although one cannot explain empathy “any more than one can explain memory, or imagination, one can investigate its parameters” (Wispé 1987, 34). It seems that in the construct of empathy itself, the interaction of cognitive and affective components is essential (Barnett 1987, 154). Empathy is obstructed by projecting the parts of ourselves we reject unto others (Kramer 1990, 292). Freud is aware of empathy and uses it in his discussions of humor (1960) and social psychology (1921). In his early discussion of humor, Freud uses empathy to mean that “we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it and try to understand it by comparing it with our own” (1960, 186). In his later work on humor (1928), he develops a sympathetic view of humor: The super-ego protects the ego, which is an exception to the common relations they entertain.
Through our distancing from intense emotions like fear or anger, and difficult feelings like shame and disgust, we experience these feelings as if they are someone else’s, yet with sympathy. Instead of impeding compassion by projecting the rejected parts of the self unto others, this sympathetic distancing from self brings one closer to others. Along the same lines, Agnes Heller has argued that “comic works change my sense of distance and identification, or the relation between what is called rational thinking and emotional thinking, or egocentric thinking and other-oriented thinking” (Heller 2005, 212).
The cognitive, emotive, and motivational components of humor work in conjunction. Once intrapersonal tragic conflicts also are perceived as comical incongruities, humor’s work on these conflicts can be described, so that the importance of the transposition from the tragic to the comic may be fully appreciated.
Construing tragic oppositions as comical generally results in a humorous mood or state of mind that retains both the tragic and the comical aspects of a conflict. The benefits of this kind of self-referential humor are fourfold. Humor may
1. facilitate self-knowledge through awareness of conflict and familiarity with its components;
2. enable deliberation;
3. help to cope with irresolvable conflict; or
4. advance the resolution of the conflict.
The latter benefit is explained in the section on ridicule, the former are explained here.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE, CONFLICT AWARENESS, AND DELIBERATION
An important component of self-knowledge is awareness of internal conflict as well as familiarity with the conflict’s components. Many of the obstacles that prevent us from living a good life are defects in our character, and through self-knowledge we may become aware of them. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, and Hume were as interested in self-knowledge as we are. According to John Kekes, self-knowledge is a mode of reflection, involving judgment, whose aim is to make our character less fortuitous and more deliberate. This is the same process as that of increasing control, for what moves our character in the desired direction is that we control it so as to approximate more closely than before our conception of a good life. This desirable transformation proceeds through the evaluation of our desires, capacities, opportunities, values, and actions with a view of forming out of them such enduring patterns as we regard conducive to living a good life (Kekes 1995, 127–8). Similarly, self-knowledge, in the sense of knowing one’s heart, true desires and leading passions, is needed as a first step for attaining to the ideal of authenticity or “being yourself” (Guignon 2005, 14).
Self-knowledge is a prerequisite of effective deliberation, which, in turn, is imperative for deciding whether and how to solve a conflict. Humor facilitates self-knowledge by creating the distance necessary to observe one’s self with the calmness that characterizes aesthetic contemplation. Within this safe inward environment made so by suspending blinding emotions, silencing shame and disgust, and incapacitating rash action, hidden aspects of the self are encouraged to emerge under the impartiality of the humorous gaze.
Self-knowledge assumes the inner dialogue we are all familiar with and which has been explored by philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists. There are two main models of inner dialogue, the reflexive model and the social model, and humor fits within both models. The former interpretation takes speech to be the manifestation of reflection, that is, of the act by which I am able to think about some content within my consciousness. I may, for example, possess a moral intuition of the virtue of justice, and live according to its principles; but in reflecting on it, I examine this content from some higher or more abstract perspective. Where the original level is merely “lived” and relatively unexamined, the higher level is evaluative and critical. Because this evaluation requires conceptual analysis, I talk to myself when I reflect. I may compare the abstract perspective with the lived one, finding room for humor if we believe Schopenhauer on the discrepancy between concept and perception (Schopenhauer 1969, I, 59). This procedure is common in character building. If we follow Spinoza, who is exemplary here, we evaluate ourselves according to a correct principle of living that we apply constantly to the particular cases frequently encountered in life (Ethics, V, P10Schol). To fully accept the gap between the ideal and reality, humor is needed in order to help us cope effectively with shame and disgust, among other emotions.
Other accounts of inner speech invoke a more overtly dialogical structure. Among these is the idea that my inner conversation takes place among different personae; I might adopt a role such as “parent,” “child,” “teacher,” or “victim” in relation to another such role within my self. My self might in fact be taken largely as a set of such roles, determined to a significant extent by my social relationships. This model allows for humorous interactions between these inner parts that mirror the important role humor plays in social conflicts. A familiar model for Freudian (and later) psychotherapy has the rational, conscious, articulating ego confronting its powerlessness in the face of the emotional, unconscious, and nonverbal id. The role of humor here is to encourage hidden aspects of the personality to emerge as a consequence of the promise of impartiality and tolerance associated with humor.
An important component of self-knowledge is awareness of internal conflict as well as familiarity with the conflict’s components. One notable outcome of this process is the acknowledgment of ambivalence that is necessary for understanding oneself, others, and human relations in general. Its importance justifies a lengthy explanation of the workings and pervasiveness of ambivalence in our lives. The state of simultaneous conflicting feelings, ambivalence is experienced in thoughts and emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something. Its opposite is a rigid intolerance for ambiguity, nuance, and paradox. A common example of ambivalence is feelings of both love and hate for a person. The term also refers to situations in which “mixed feelings” of a more general sort are experienced, or when a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness concerning something. Because both positive and negative aspects of a subject are present in a person’s mind at the same time, ambivalence is a psychologically unpleasant state that often leads to avoidance and procrastination, or to deliberate attempts to resolve the ambivalence. Ever since the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduced the term early in the twentieth century (Bleuler 1911), the ambivalence of human attitudes has been continually investigated, especially by psychologists. Bleuler identifies three types of ambivalence: the emotional (or affective) type in which the same object arouses both positive and negative feelings, as in parent–child relations; the voluntary (or conative) type in which conflicting wishes make it difficult or impossible to decide how to act; and the intellectual (or cognitive) type, in which persons hold contradictory ideas.
Long before the term was coined, the experience of ambivalence—being pulled in psychologically opposed directions—had been noted. In seventeenth-century France, the writings of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Pascal are the source for many pensées and maxims dealing with a wide range of ambivalent experiences. In his treatment of the emotions in Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza makes much of ambivalence, which he terms fluctuation or vacillation; it is the result of a transfer of emotions that he calls imitation (imitatio) (PP17 and 27). Spinoza also focuses on various other sorts of cases of ambivalence. In general, no observer of the human condition can fail to note the existence of mixed feelings, mingled beliefs, and contradictory actions.
Psychoanalysis has made ambivalence famous, as most persons think of ambivalence in connection with some complex and debatable claims of psychoanalytic theory. A few years before Bleuler’s coinage, Freud notes the alternation of love and hate for the same person, with the early separation of the two sentiments usually leading to the repression of hate (Jones 1955, II, 47; see Winnicott 1949). In “The Rat Man” (1909) Freud indicates that the opposition between love and hate for the object could explain the particular features of obsessive thought (doubt, compulsion). In Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), he adopts the term ambivalence proposed by Bleuler in the text of his conference published in 1911 in the Zentralblatt. For Freud the term, in its most general sense, designates the presence in a subject of a pair of opposed impulses of the same intensity; most frequently this involves the opposition between love and hate, which is often expressed in obsessional neuroses and melancholy. In the metapsychological writings of 1915, he adds that it is the loss of the love object that through regression causes the conflict of ambivalence to appear.
Later, Freud integrates Karl Abraham’s contributions to ambivalence in the thirty-second of his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (Freud 1933). Within the oedipal conflict ambivalence is resolved as a neurotic symptom, either through a reaction formation or through displacement (Freud 1926). Reformulated in the second theory of instincts, ambivalence becomes part of the fundamental instinctual dualism between life instinct and death instinct. It has since become the mark of the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis: All paradigms found central to Freud (creation through catastrophe, family romance and transference) are marked with ambivalence, as they all mix love and hate, attraction and repulsion (Bloom 1983, 57–58).
In 1920, Karl Abraham emphasizes the intensity of the sadistic fantasy associated with urinary and digestive functions. In 1924, he extends and transforms the Freudian schema of the evolution of the libido into a complete picture of the development of the relation to the object along two lines: The partial or total nature of the investment in the object, and ambivalence. The precocious oral stage of sucking is preambivalent, neither love nor hate are felt toward the object. There follow four ambivalent phases: The late oral stage, which is cannibalistic and seeks the total incorporation of the object, the precocious anal-sadistic stage, which seeks the expulsion and destruction of the object, the late anal-sadistic stage, which seeks its conservation and domination, and finally the precocious-phallic genital stage. The final genital phase of love toward a complete object is post-ambivalent (Abraham 1927 [1924]).
Psychoanalysis has associated the awareness of ambivalence mainly with pathology. Also more recent psychoanalytical theories have associated ambivalence with psychological disorders, especially depression (Klein 1975; Racamier 1976), but contemporary therapists who have elaborated on Freud’s first intimations on ambivalence and the oedipal conflict have emphasized the importance of ambivalence in human relationships (Mann 2002, 169; Valerio 2002, 264; see Winnicott 1949).
Ambivalence has been recognized before and after psychoanalysis, however, as descriptive of our normal emotional make-up, indeed, as the mark of our emotions and attachments. In her Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum notes, “emotions seem to be characterized by ambivalence toward their objects. In the very nature of our early object relations … there lurks a morally subversive combination of love and resentment, which springs directly from the thought that we need others to survive and flourish, but do not control their movements” (Nussbaum 2001a, 13). In The Subtlety of Emotions, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev considers ambivalence to be typical of romantic love, as well as constitutive of the structure of various emotions, such as pity and envy (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 439, 441, 449). The latter emotion, for example, involves both a positive evaluation of the other’s achievements and a negative evaluation of the other’s good fortune, creating an ambivalent reaction that entails both admiration and dislike of social targets (Smith 2008, 133–4). In “Ambivalence and the Logic of Emotion,” Patricia Greenspan argues that ambivalence, understood as simultaneous “mixed feelings” or contrary emotions rather than the continuous changing of one’s mind, is much more common than generally assumed. Ambivalence is possible without an abnormal breakdown of reasoning, as the “logic” of emotion allows for ambivalence (Greenspan 1980, 225).
A key concept in normal psychology, ambivalence also is embedded in social functions and professions. Indeed, one major source of psychological ambivalence is sociological ambivalence, which refers to the social structure, not to the personality. In its most extended sense, it refers to incompatible normative expectations of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior assigned to a status (i.e., a social position) or to a set of statuses in a society. In its most restrictive sense, it refers to incompatible normative expectations incorporated in a single role of a single social status. In both the most extended and the most restricted sense, the ambivalence is located in the social definition of roles and statuses, not in the feeling-state of one or another type of personality. Robert Merton believes that individuals in a status or status-set that has a large measure of incompatibility in its social definition will tend to develop personal tendencies toward contradictory feelings, beliefs, and behavior (Merton 1976, 7).
Ambivalence has been identified as a characteristic of modern societies, which through internalization has become a personal problem threatening our sense of identity. In his study of ambivalence and modernity, Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the ambivalence of societal powers is transformed into the nagging fear of one’s own inadequacy. The modern world is a world of conflict that has been interiorized; in becoming an inner conflict, it has turned into a state of personal ambivalence and contingency (Bauman 1991, 176). The outcomes of such a situation are depicted in William Ian Miller’s Faking It (2005), which places problems of personal identity at the core of our modern existence.
Not surprisingly, anthropologists and sociologists interested in humor stress its role in situations plagued by ambivalence. A major theme recurring in anthropological humor theories, according to Mahadev L. Apte, is that expressions of humor are the result of attempts to resolve ambivalence in social situations, roles, statuses, cultural values, and ideologies. For example, ambivalence may occur because of a conflict between social obligations and self-interest; the use of humor may provide a relief from such ambivalence (Apte 1983, 194). Similarly, according to sociologist Christie Davies, ambiguous and contradictory situations and values play an important role in the creation of jokes (Davies 1990, 307–8).
This makes the recognition of ambivalence imperative. Although knowing one’s feelings may seem simple, many ignore or try to sedate strong emotions like anger, sadness, and fear, and eschew ambivalence as threatening. But our ability to handle conflict depends on being connected to these feelings and on tolerating ambivalence enough in order to let it emerge. Paola Valerio suggests that acknowledging hateful feelings in ourselves as well as in others is necessary for truly loving (Valerio 2002, 264). Tolerating, if not enjoying, ambivalence is important, moreover, in order to minimize the violence of the one-sided perspective, which may often be at the origin of a tragic conflict, at least according to Hegel’s view of tragedy (Hegel 1975, II, 1196).
If the ambivalence theory of humor, which states that oscillation, conflict-mixture and simultaneously experienced incompatible emotions or feelings create humor, is true, one of its possible consequences is that it desensitizes intolerance to ambivalence by converting pain into pleasure. Humor brings forth ambivalence, because in the humorous mode of thinking a thing can be both X and not-X at the same time (Mulkay 1988). Some variation of Arthur Koestler’s idea that humor involves the activation of two normally incompatible frames of reference continues to form the basis of most humor theories today (Koestler 1964; Martin 2007, 72). In Koestler’s original view, the “bisociation” or ongoing incongruity is that which creates the humorous effect, rather than its removal, as in the incongruity resolution model. Michael Apter uses the notion of synergy to describe this cognitive process, in which two contradictory images or conceptions of the same object are held in one’s mind at the same time. This produces the pleasurable sensation of having one’s thoughts oscillate back and forth between two incompatible interpretations of a concept. Thus, in humor, we playfully manipulate ideas and activities so that they are simultaneously perceived in opposite ways, such as real and not real, important and trivial, threatening and safe (Apter 1982).
The pleasure we derive from ambivalence through humor enables us to acquire the ability to feel simultaneous contradictory emotions about the same idea, event or person. It is the most fundamental skill required for handling both internal and interpersonal conflict. The alternative is often violence, one of the principle outcomes of our misguided belief in single-mindedness, which assumes that for one side of the argument to be absolutely true, the other side must be erased by all means possible.
Unfortunately, throughout history we have tended to interpret conflict, whether internal or interpersonal, as traumatic, as something that cannot be tolerated and must be avoided or stopped, rather than as a coping challenge. Likewise, we regard those who in any way contribute to conflict, even when they are nonviolent, as villains deserving censure, punishment or even retaliation. Yet ambiguity and ambivalence exists in everything human because we are capable of perceiving things in multiple and even contradictory dimensions. We can simultaneously hold in the mind’s eye several layers of possibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that we can simultaneously do things, watch ourselves do them, comment on what we are doing, even criticize it, and at the same time imagine doing it in other ways. That complexity of perception is the principle trait that makes us what and who we are; and ambivalence is the key skill necessary for the creative management of this remarkable gift of multilayered comprehension. Enjoying ambivalence is also a prerequisite of ethical behavior. By allowing the conflict between the awareness of my needs and the perception of others’ needs, while controlling the conflict’s behavioral effect, humor enables a strong commitment to someone else’s interests without losing sight of my own.
After acknowledging the existence of conflict and encouraging the emergence of the conflict’s components, humor also may help in deliberating a solution by siding with the intellect, and mediating between the various components of the conflict. By keeping desire in check, and reducing sadness, fear, anger, shame, and disgust, humor effects “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” (Bergson 1999, 11) that is conducive to calm deliberation. Humor induces pleasurable rapid cognitive-perceptual shifts between various conflicting points of views, and governed by an impartiality that is sympathetic to all points of view, encourages diverse points of view to engage in dialogue. This characteristic of humor is also helpful in the process of endorsement and rejection of some, among the variety of, thoughts and desires that occur to a person. By this process a person comes to identify with some desires and thoughts, while rejecting others; by these acts of ordering and rejection, of integration and separation, one “create[s] a self out of the raw materials of life,” as Harry Frankfurt and Heinz Kohut suggest, and forms one’s character, as Joel Kupperman maintains (Frankfurt 1987, 38; Kohut 1977, 177; Kupperman 1991, 51).
Humor would be detrimental to deliberation if it were antagonistic to interest and seriousness. Various authors comment on humor’s seriousness, not least, Schopenhauer: “Humor depends upon a subjective, yet serious and sublime mood,” he explains. “Behind [the intentionally ludicrous] … the deepest seriousness is concealed and shines through” (Schopenhauer 1969, II, 100). Robert C. Roberts echoes this view in arguing that for all its power to distance us from ourselves, humor is as parasitic on serious interest as it is upon normal congruity: “An ultimate orienting seriousness about life gives one’s sense of humor a depth and integrity and scope that it will not otherwise have” (Roberts 1987, 169–70). Thomas Veatch makes the violation of some affective expectation the core of humor. Humor cannot initially arise if we are not somewhat emotionally invested in the situations that give raise to it (Veatch 1998). Thus deliberation is served not only by the pleasure derived from humor, but also by humor’s ability to maintain interest and seriousness.
LIVING WITH IRRESOLVABLE CONFLICT
After deliberation, the reduction of tension involved in a humorous state of mind enables us to live with an unresolved and perhaps irresolvable conflict, a situation exemplified by Joseph Agassi and Ian Jarvie’s comment on the effect of a good joke: “though unable to resolve the conflict, it makes life a jot less unbearable” (Agassi and Jarvie 2008, 57). But the reduction of tension also may help to opt for deliberately leaving the conflict unresolved, an option that is less viable for those who do not use humor to relieve the tension created by the conflict. We may want to leave the conflict unresolved when the price of resolving it requires relinquishing either our rational or cognitive powers, or renouncing the desires we identify as characterizing us no less than our reason, or both.
Metaphysical and religious theories that propose redemption or peace of mind attempt to resolve the human predicament as it has been defined here. Redemption is a promise to the individual, the community or mankind as a whole. It can be realized in the course of human life; or, it may stand out as a hope to be fulfilled in a much wider perspective transcending the life of the individual, in an afterlife, in a messianic state or in a general cosmic context (Scholem 1968). No necessary connection exists between religion and redemption because the source of the need for redemption, such as death, evil, human suffering, and ignorance, can be answered in religious as well as nonreligious terms (Schär 1950). Whereas the notion of redemption, or salvation, is generally used within a religious framework, thinkers with no commitment to organized religion have borrowed the concept to propose new ways to be redeemed in this world and within the human lifespan. Some have addressed the individual, others, the community or humankind as a whole. Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Santayana, for example, have replaced the redemption offered by organized religions with their respective philosophic personal redemptions.
Both religious and nonreligious redemptions are radical responses to dissatisfaction with the human condition. According to the formula presented in this chapter, this dissatisfaction can be characterized as a clash between human desires and the impossibility of satisfying them on instinctual, emotional, and intellectual levels for either principled or practical reasons. This clash or the human predicament is the problem that a particular redemption attempts to resolve. Some philosophical theories prior to Christianity, such as Hellenistic Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skeptical Pyrrhonism, do not hold “redemption” as their ideal, but rather ataraxia, tranquility or peace of mind, though their goal is similar to naturalistic philosophic personal redemptions.
I suggest that most religious and philosophical solutions to the basic human predicament require renouncing one or more aspects of our humanity as we know it. These solutions come at a cost and should be evaluated accordingly. Theories of redemption, or peace of mind, either Eastern or Western, religious or nonreligious, can be divided into general types, the first type negating desire, the second making light of reason’s limitations, and the third denigrating both desire and reason. A more thorough examination of these theories will enable me to substantiate these claims.
1. The first type of theories urges us to renounce our desires. It includes, among others, the Buddhist and Hindu views of release, Schopenhauer’s theory of redemption, which is influenced by them, the Hellenistic schools of Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism, and even the outlook on emancipation of such a reasonable philosopher as Bertrand Russell.
In “A Free Man’s Worship,” Russell writes: “To renounce the struggle for personal happiness, to reject any wish for temporal lust, this is emancipation” (Russell 1917, 55). In The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Russell seems to endorse a less demanding way of living based on John Locke’s program in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Russell 1987, 440–1). However, Kenneth Blackwell has convincingly argued that Russell holds a Spinozistic ethics (Blackwell 1985): Although Blackwell emphasizes the positive outcomes of this ethics, such as nobility and impersonal love, I believe Russell’s ethics is still predicated on the renouncement enunciated in “A Free Man’s Worship.”
Some religions originating in India share the common belief that freedom or release cannot be reached without the removal of worldly desires and passions: Desire leads to delusion and suffering, to the cycle of births and deaths. Hinduism includes a variety of views, however, Indian tantrism uses worldly desire to reach release, and the Vedas do not criticize desires. According to the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Sankara (which is probably the most dominant philosophical school in modern-day Hinduism) release lies in detaching oneself from the false self and uniting with a nonmaterial self that is the true self and at the same time brahman—the “Absolute.” This “Absolute” may be accessible to contemplative vision, but not to conceptualization. Although “Hinduism” is tolerant of various lifestyles, the road to final liberation often requires the renunciation of desires.
In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering. By desire, Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality, all of which are wants that can never be satisfied; as a result, desiring them can only bring suffering. Ignorance relates to seeing the world other than as it is. Liberation, in comparison, is obtained through understanding that leads to renunciation of our desires. The liberated state is called “nirvana,” that is, extinction (of the desires).
Schopenhauer is heir to both Hinduism and Buddhism; he believes his philosophy captures not only the essence of Eastern mysticism, but also of Western mysticism as exemplified by early Christianity. He proposes accordingly an ethic of total renouncement, a denial of the will to live, as the sole road to redemption.
The Hellenistic and Roman school of Epicureanism urges us to renounce desires; it allows, however, for desires that are both “natural and necessary.” Unnecessary desires for rich food, sex, status, power and the like, whose satisfaction does not serve to liberate us from pain and terror, are not “a bad thing in themselves,” but they tend to “bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures” attributed to them and should therefore be avoided, or kept within severe limits. The “goal of living” is “health of the body and the freedom of the soul from disturbance (ataraxía)” (Inwood and Gerson 1988, 24, 26ff). Contrary to their reputation as unruly hedonists, Epicureans tend to live as secular monks.
The Hellenistic and Roman school of Pyrrhonism urges us to suspend all judgments because of the skeptical doubts that undermine all dogmatic claims to knowledge. We achieve tranquility as a result of suspending judgment, without intending to do so (Sextus 2000, 1.25–30): tranquility follows the suspension of judgment—in technical terms ataraxía follows epochē—like a “shadow following the body” (Laertius 1925, 9.107; see Sextus Empiricus 2000, 1.29). The Skeptics are frank about the radical alteration in lifestyle they ask of us. Pyrrho talks of “altogether divesting ourselves of the human being,” and Sextus describes the Skeptic as a eunuch with respect to rational desires (Nussbaum 1994, 312). This is so because suspension of judgment frees us from the burden of worrying about what is true and right; it liberates also from the belief in a view of what is good—a belief that adds to the torment when the thing deemed bad is present; and it releases as well from all the evils that come from the intense pursuits of any special practical goal “with eager conviction.” These evils prominently include emotion: Joy when the good is present, fear lest it vanishes; desire for the good before it is present; grief if it is absent and even fantasized guilt—being punished for something we have done. These emotions are based on ethical belief, and Sextus suggests that only the complete extirpation of belief gets rid of them.
2. To the second type of theories, which promises a partial or full satisfaction of desires while disparaging reason’s limits, belong all answers to metaphysical questions, religious theories, and various philosophies that encourage the satisfaction of our desires at the expense of others, whose similar right is brought to us by reason, for example, the Nietzschean philosophy of the liberated individual.
Nietzsche encourages self-affirmation with an ethic of power that emphasizes egoism and self-regard. Pity and altruism are criticized, and the strong individual is the one who enhances his instincts and is a law unto himself, unpredictable and unmanageable, as morality is the herd instinct in the individual. To be an individual is to be autonomous, to be supra-moral: “This is what I am; this is what I want—you can go to hell!” (Nietzsche 1968, sec. 349). However, this individualism is not egalitarian, as Nietzsche assumes a fundamental inequality among men. The heroic task, open only to the few, is to become a sovereign individual, and this higher morality necessitates immorality according to the herd standards. Nobility is inborn and uses its environment to grow. The aristocratic individual serves as the measure for all men, and his instincts sublimated in a philosophy or a morality may swamp a multitude of following moral “slaves” (see Thiele 1990, chaps. 2, 4). Egoism, however, is defeated by the existence of others, I suggest, whose similar right to the satisfaction of their desires is brought to us by reason.
To this type of theories, which promises a partial or full satisfaction of desires while disparaging reason’s limits, belong also religious and metaphysical theories because metaphysics and religions overstep reason’s capacity. Keith Ward characterizes religions as “belief-systems which articulate, with different degrees of systematization, competing theories about the meaning of human life” (Ward 2001, 11). That life is meaningful is religion’s basic posit, Huston Smith explains, and the claim can be elucidated both subjectively and objectively, the difference being whether we are thinking primarily of life’s meaning for us or, alternatively, trying to determine its meaning in the total scheme of things (Smith 2001, 255). Smith explains that objectively there is no way to decide that question:
There are things to be said in favor of life’s meaning, the chief being that it is the seasoned answer to the question, the one that has presided over every known human collectivity, but it is not enough to insure its truth. The hermeneutics of suspicion is always waiting in the wings, ready to challenge the existence of religion’s “other world” by claiming that it is only wishful thinking—a projection of the human mind to compensate for the world’s lack. “There is no other world,” Malinowski intoned, and neither reason nor experience can prove him wrong. (261–2)
Irredeemably ambiguous to public gaze, life and the world come to us untagged, and serious doubts rightly arise about the validity of the meaning we ascribe to them. At the beginning of The Wisdom to Doubt, John L. Schellenberg simply states: “Reason requires us to be religious skeptics” (Schellenberg 2007, 1). Secular doubts call into question all religious views about the human condition that assume the existence of a supernatural realm. The arguments for and against belief in such a realm are familiar and endlessly debated. Thus, there is no need to repeat them here.
Along with Plato, Shaftesbury, and Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kant claims that the three areas where enthusiasm is most commonly found are unrequited love, religion, and metaphysics because all three are characterized by a powerful longing for an object that can never in principle be possessed. The longing can be so intense, the frustration so painful, that the sufferer may delude himself into thinking his desire will be fulfilled. This is the essence of enthusiasm, a problem yet to be addressed today as testified to by the contemporary appeal of religion, various forms of mysticism, and uncritical theories of the New Age movement.
The skepticism Smith points to is also relevant for the endeavor of metaphysics to provide knowledge of the world’s constitution and our place in it. The long history of metaphysics is accompanied by a no less long history of its criticism. There may be a difference between metaphysics and science with regard to skepticism, but I do not wish to elaborate on this here. Whether or not skepticism is based on Kant’s criticism of metaphysics or on other grounds, a skeptical attitude toward metaphysics undermines the possibility of adhering à la lettre to the otherwise inspiring ethical prescriptions that follow from the particular metaphysical assumptions most philosophies adopt.
3. The third type of theories, which denigrates both desire and reason, is exemplified by Taoism and some forms of Western mysticism, but also by those philosophies that overstep reason’s power while denigrating desires such as Stoicism and Kant’s view of the good life as a life lived according to the categorical imperative.
In Taoism, the goal is to realize oneness with the cosmos seen as an unconceptualizable, ineffable realm, one that is “mysterious,” and that, according to Chuang Tzu, does not permit discrimination or description. The adept approaches his goal in a purified condition, cleansed of emotions, desires and evaluations, and freed of all thought after fasting and years of silent meditation (Kohn 2001, 27, 34, 38).
Attempts to define mystical experience have been as diversified and as conflicting as attempts to interpret and assess its significance. Ronald Hepburn offers a useful definition:
Mystical experience is religious experience, in a broad but meaningful sense of religious. It is sensed as revealing something about the totality of things, something of immense human importance at all times and places, and something upon which one’s ultimate well-being and or salvation wholly depends. … There must be a unifying vision, a sense that somehow all things are one and share a holy, divine, and single life, or that one’s individual being merges into a “Universal Self,” to be identified with god or the mystical One. Mystical experience then typically involves the intense and joyous realization of oneness with, or in, the divine, the sense that this divine One is comprehensive, all-embracing, in its being. (Hepburn 1967, 429)
The language used to express and describe mystical experience is richly paradoxical, figurative, and poetic. Whereas ineffability is descriptive of many mystical traditions, asceticism is descriptive of some mystical experiences that occur only at the end of a lengthy, arduous religious discipline, an austere and abstinent path. Neo-Platonism and Catholicism in the West have developed mystical paths of this kind. Mystics to whom these double characterizations correspond are denigrators of both desire and reason.
The Hellenistic and Roman school of Stoicism is the most extreme Western doctrine with regard to desires and passions. These should not only be renounced but also eradicated. The extermination of desires and passions is necessary in order to fit the determined order of a universe akin to a rational organism in which passions are illnesses. Eradication of desires and passions is the key to the sage’s apathy or tranquility: He is happy while on the rack. Yet the belief in the rationality of the universe and in the necessary causal relation that determines all things oversteps reason’s power.
A final example is Kant’s ethical theory, which requires us to renounce inclinations and desires in order to live the good life according to the categorical imperative. This is undoubtedly a worthy ideal, whose grounding metaphysics is unfortunately difficult to establish within reason’s limits.
We may hesitate to choose any of the solutions that make light of reason’s limits, or denigrate both desires and reason, but we should also be wary of those solutions that urge us to renounce our desires, lest we be dehumanized by a solution that purports to do away with that which makes us human. If there exists a problem and all the solutions to that problem prove to be unacceptable, then, there remains one possibility—to abstain from resolving the problem. Because our humanity depends on a balance between our desires and our reason, when a solution requires a negation of one or the other, or both, a non-solution is the better policy. A nonsolution has positive content as well: It presupposes a careful perception of human nature as an amalgam of rationality and irrationality, assumes a lucid awareness of human possibilities and limitations, and gives value to life in prioritizing the everlasting struggle with the predicament that lies at the core of human existence.
Humor enables us to live with the basic human predicament without solving it because it provides relief from its tension. It enables us to maintain an open consciousness receptive to life’s ambiguities and congenial to the doubts necessary for a tragic view of life. This is evocative of Kant, as Kant’s criticism of enthusiasm points to a desire to maintain what Eric Voegelin calls “the balance of consciousness” (Voegelin 1990). Thomas Prufer has described this balance as the task of maintaining “the polarity or tension between openness to the plenitude of being, on the one hand, and situatedness in the phenomenality of finite beings, on the other hand” (Prufer 1962, 591). The philosophical eros Kant shares with the enthusiasts is what Prufer refers to as “openness to the plenitude of being.” Kant’s concern with the labor of articulating metaphysical insights in conceptual terms, his concerns with making metaphysics speak the language of common human reason and remain in touch with the sensus communis, and his populist emphasis on the primacy of practical reason or moral knowledge—all of these reflect his desire to balance his erotic openness to the plenitude of being with situatedness in the phenomenality of finite beings: “The philosophical act breaks down when either pole, openness to plenitude or situatedness in phenomenality, become exclusive of the other” (591). When openness to the plenitude of being uproots itself from situatedness in finite beings, then one has what Kant calls Schwärmerei. We know from Shaftesbury and Kant that humor is an antidote to such enthusiasm: “One will have to let enthusiasm run its course and laugh about it with Shaftesbury,” Kant writes in a note. But he seems to recommend humor as a tolerant attitude toward the enthusiasm of others while counseling Kantian critique rather than humor to combat inner enthusiasm.
The tragic view of life is not suitable for those who cannot live with unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or reconcile it into some larger whole. Although no one is exempt from moments of tragic doubt or insight, “the vision of life peculiar to the mystic, the pious, the propagandist, the confirmed optimist or pessimist—or the confirmed anything—is not tragic” (Sewall 1965, 37). The ambivalence we experience and the ambiguity we encounter are best explored, encouraged, thought out, and communicated with humor. Inasmuch as ambiguous means “open to more than one interpretation,” thus, “doubtful or uncertain,” humorous communication is inherently ambiguous; this is why humor is the best tool to convey ambivalence and ambiguity, and to testify to the elusiveness of truth in human affairs.
Humor provides an effective alternative to the urge for radical change, which usually involves giving up important aspects of our personality and human experience. It can do so by providing relief from the basic human tension between our desires on the instinctual, emotional, and intellectual levels, and between our awareness of the impossibility of fulfilling them, for practical as well as principled reasons. The special capacity of humor is its ability to help us reduce the tension created by this clash between expectations and reality because it can construe the clash as an incongruity. Enjoyment of the incongruous in a situation that otherwise would be construed as tragic amounts to transmuting through humor suffering into joy.
RIDICULE
If we accept that humans are doomed to an everlasting clash between desires and their satisfaction, the human condition lends itself to a double and contradictory evaluation as both comic and tragic. The possibility of characterizing the human condition as both tragic and comic is insufficient for favoring the comic interpretation over the tragic. An additional argument is required: I suggest that something that is both tragic and comic, or that has the potential to be either tragic or comic, cannot in the last account, be solely tragic. The tragic lacks the capacity of uniting contradictions that the comic possesses. This is referred to as “comic inclusivism, in contrast to the exclusivism of the tragic view” (Hyers 1996, 40). Similarly, John Crossan maintains that “tragedy is swallowed up in comedy” because the fact that “the same world can be interpreted in these opposite ways is itself comical” (Crossan 1976, 21).
A comical vision of sorts is the sole vision, I suggest, that enables us to view the human condition simultaneously as comic and tragic. If Kerr is right in asserting that “there is no act in life that is not, when seen as a whole, both tragic and comic at once” (Kerr 1967, 28), the vision that obtains by incorporating the comic and the tragic aspects of life is desirable because it is richer as well as more faithful to life’s manifold aspects.
How can we characterize the new level of comic awareness that incorporates both the comic and the tragic in a steady vision? The humorous mood brought about by transposing tragic oppositions into comical incongruities is transitory. When it dissolves, the individual finds himself emotionally humiliated and conceptually amused by the awareness of repeatedly transmuting tragic oppositions into comical incongruities, with an ever new capacity for suffering the former and no steady results from the latter. Nevertheless, repetition is the bread of comedy. The awareness that takes place, I suggest, is a higher-level comic awareness, which I refer to as “ridiculousness,” the view of human beings as ridiculous or Homo risibilis. I use the term ridicule or ridiculousness, although ridicule is a harsher word in English than in French, and may even be considered offensive in the former language. Yet it is a common term in French philosophy also used by contemporary continental philosophers. As I am referring to French writers who use ridicule, I retain the term.
The view that the human being is inherently ridiculous (homo risibilis) originates with an eleventh-century monk’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. Aristotle enters the history of laughter with the assertion that humans are the only animals that laugh (On the Parts of Animals, III, 10, 673a, 8, 28). Following Aristotle, many, including Boethius, Alcuin, Rabelais, Voltaire, and Baudelaire, have characterized the human being as homo ridens or the laughing species. Few, however, have characterized him as homo risibilis or the laughable animal. Although this characteristic of the human does not escape Plato’s keen eye in his discussion of laughter in the Philebus (48–50), Plato does not apply it to all persons, but only to those who are lacking in both self-knowledge and power. It is the eleventh-century monk, Notker Labeo, who innovates with his claim that the human being is not only the sole creature capable of laughter, but also the sole laughable creature: We laugh only at that which is human or that which reminds us of the human (quia quidquid risibile est, homo est) (Labeo 1972–1996).
Montaigne revives this view by maintaining that we are both homo ridens and homo risibilis as “our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh” (1965, Bk. I, chap. 50). Bergson draws attention to this defining characteristic at the very beginning of his book on laughter: “Several have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at” (Bergson 1999, 9). Recently, Simon Critchley has reprised both characterizations:
Homo sapiens is therefore not so much homo ludens as Johan Huizinga famously argued, where humanity would be identified with the capacity to play. Rather, we are homo ridens, laughing beings, or indeed, homo risibilis, which suggests both “the risible or ridiculous being,” and “the being gifted with laughter.” (Critchley 2002, 41)
Bergson’s view of the human being as an animal to be laughed at has also been echoed in Maurice Charney’s observation that “to be human is to be inherently comic” (quoted in Gutwirth 1993, 116). Bergson rightly wonders why “so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers” (Bergson 1999, 9).
The view that we are laughable beings does not necessarily imply that we laugh at ourselves. Because Bergson considers laughter a social corrective, he emphasizes laughter aimed at others rather than at oneself. Prioritizing the self-mocking ridicule found at the core of Freud’s paper “Der Humor” (1928), Critchley takes the argument one step further by viewing humor as essentially self-mocking ridicule: “In humour I find myself ridiculous and I acknowledge this in laughter or simply in a smile” (Critchley 2002, 94). Helmut Plessner advances a view that is similar to homo risibilis by characterizing the human being as the eccentric animal and laughter as the confirmation of humankind’s eccentric position in the world of nature (Plessner 1982, 1970). Plessner’s thesis is that the life of animals is centered, that is, the animal simply lives and experiences. By contrast, the human being has a reflective attitude toward its experiences and toward itself. This is why humans are eccentric; they live beyond the limits set for them by nature by distancing themselves from their immediate experience. Because human beings live outside themselves, their reflective activity achieves a break with nature. Indeed, Plessner goes further and claims that the human is this break, this hiatus, this gap between the physical and the psychical. The working out of the consequences of the eccentric position of the human is the main task of a philosophical anthropology, which is why laughter has such an absolutely central role in Plessner’s work.
Apart from Labeo, Montaigne, Critchley, and Plessner, the view that humans are ridiculous has rarely been advanced, and even less so to promote self-mocking ridicule. However, other terminologies have been employed to the same effect. For example, Santayana uses “absurd” for “ridiculous” and “despise” for “self-mocking ridicule”: In a letter he suggests that “perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself,” although “everybody is a coward about his own humanity. We do not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no fundamental humility. … For that reason we don’t like Dickens, and don’t like comedy, and don’t like the truth” (Santayana 1920, 230; 1922, 68–69).
We also may associate the view of human ridicule with the more ancient view of human foolishness. Beginning with St. Paul’s doctrine of the foolishness of Christianity and Tertullian’s maxim credo quia absurdum est, the wisdom of the Fool takes on philosophical shape in the Learned Ignorance of Nicholas de Cusa and the Christian Pyrrhonism of Montaigne and receives its classic formulation in Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly (see Davis 2011). Hume gives this tradition a twist of his own. The Humean laughter of the true philosopher is directed at himself, for he is in the highly reflective but ridiculous position of believing and at the same time knowing that he cannot justify the belief to himself. The true philosopher has come to see that the heroic moment of philosophical reflection is a joke at his own expense. He refers to this “whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent inquiry to satisfy themselves concerning the foundations of these operations, or to remove the objections which may be raised against them” (Hume 1975, 160). In his Treatise on Human Nature Hume describes this post-theoretic posture of the true philosopher as that of the Fool: “If I must be a fool, as all those who reason or believe any thing certainly are, my follies shall at least be natural and agreeable” (Hume 1978, 270). The Humean philosopher identifies with the “rabble” through the mediation of true philosophy, and embraces thus the ancient wisdom of the Fool. Unlike ordinary folly, philosophical folly is an attitude arising from the philosophical act that has arrived at a true understanding of its own nature. It is a joyful affirmation of common life in the face of contingency and despair following the failure of the philosophical act in its heroic forms. Hume calls it “the gaiety of MONTAIGNE” (Hume 1986, 179n; see Livingston 1998, 39–40).
Inscribing myself in these traditions, I suggest that homo risibilis is a fitting description of humankind because of the necessary seriousness and ensuing suffering with which we take ourselves and our endeavors in conjunction with the view that in the large scale of things we and our endeavors seem to be futile. For lack of proof of the contrary, we may assume the latter view. This is tantamount to experiencing reality first as tragic (reality is serious and brings suffering) and construing it as comical (reality is futile). This acceptance of human ridicule is aided by the love of truth, unpleasant as truth may be, a love exemplified ideally by philosophers. The contemporary French philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, following a long tradition of philosophers that have made the love of truth the mark of the philosopher, reminds us that we may hope that truth will be happy, yet the philosopher will always choose truth over happiness (Comte-Sponville 1993, 199).
The view of human ridicule, however, is worthless without appropriating it as a vision of oneself. Understanding the ridiculous condition of humankind should lead to accepting one’s own ridicule and finding comfort in it: The more ridiculous I am, the more I exemplify the human condition, the better I am as a human being. In The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno voices a similar thought inspired by Don Quixote: “One must know how to make oneself appear ridiculous, and not only in the eyes of others but also in one’s own eyes” (Unamuno 1972, 322). Similarly, Kierkegaard suggests, “humor wants to be a fool in the world” (JP 2, 1690/ Pap. II A 102), and Georges Bataille maintains that it is necessary for the human being “to want to be comical, for he is so, to the extent that he is a man (it is no longer a question of characters who are emissaries of comedy)—without a way out” (Bataille 1988, 169). Moreover, Avital Ronell makes the capacity to see oneself as ridiculous the mark of the philosopher:
Knowing one is being ridiculous nails you as a philosopher or at least targets the philosophical component of your Dasein. Being ridiculous already involves a philosophical insert, because it implies the act of laughing at oneself. In “l’Essence du rire” Baudelaire defines this ability to laugh at oneself falling (on one’s ass, back into childhood, forward into old age) as the moment constitutive of philosophical consciousness. What de Man interprets as irony—the philosopher splits in two, accelerating time while collapsing on the self—is set up by the fall designating a split between the dumb buddy, on the one hand, and the one who ridiculizes the faltered ego, on the other hand. When the philosopher [Thales] falls, prompting the opening act in the ur-scene of philosophical consciousness, this produces the double effects of ironic consciousness. … The subject laughs at himself falling; indeed, the fall announces the moment the subject becomes a philosopher by means, precisely, of laughing at himself, making himself ridiculous, sich lacherlich machen, thus in falling making himself performatively. Affected by the laughter of the other, as this other, the philosophical consciousness makes itself happen by passing through the constituting moment of making itself ridiculous. The laugh-along distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher to the extent that a position is taken outside the self, beyond which the self, detached, can be observed. The moment savagely accelerates the history of the self and its fall: to laugh at oneself is to laugh at oneself dying from an improbable position beyond or on the other side of a life that has disjoined by dint of the sudden slip into consciousness. (Ronell 2003, 298–9)
Nonphilosophers laugh at others, whereas the person who understands that this other is himself and laughs accordingly becomes a philosopher. The necessary distance from oneself that philosophy requires divides the philosopher’s consciousness, making him both laugher and butt. I would add to Ronell’s argument that the immaturity of the non-philosophical aspects of the self are a source of perpetual amusement to the philosopher’s cool and sobering awareness, just as immaturity is the stuff from which comedy is made.
Modern thinkers who advance the view that we are ridiculous usually consider our ridicule tragic. For example, Simon Critchley suggests that “the pretended tragical sublimity of the human collapses into a comic ridiculousness which is perhaps even more tragic” (Critchley 2002, 43). Critchley’s assertion echoes the view of Schopenhauer, deemed the philosopher of the absurd (Rosset 1967), and the view of the playwrights of the theatre of the absurd such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. Schopenhauer writes: “Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy” (Schopenhauer 1969, I, 322). Commenting on the ambiguity found in Samuel Beckett’s plays, Alfred Simon tells us that “not only are human misery and comicality inseparable, they also are each other’s paroxysm” (Simon, Le Monde, 27 Dec. 1989; my translation). Referring to The Chairs as a “tragic farce,” Eugène Ionesco says that the “human drama is as absurd as it is painful. It all comes to the same thing, anyway; comic and tragic are merely two aspects of the same situation. … There are no alternatives; if man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, ‘comic’ in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy.”
In her Immortal Comedy, Agnes Heller argues that although terming existential comedies “tragicomedies” is a misnomer, it still points to the specificity of existential comedy: “Whereas paradoxes are dissolved in a joke, and this is why it is a joke, they remain unresolved in the existential comic novel or drama. Whatever is ridiculed is also mourned; the thing which has been lost is mocked, but the loss still hurts” (Heller 2005, 97). It is interesting to note, moreover, that philosophers of the absurd have no sense of humor: Sartre has been deemed “among contemporary philosophers the most obvious candidate for the title ‘Least Humorous’ ” (Davenport 1976, 170). He identifies both the serious man and the ironist as one of the figures of his analysis of bad faith (Sartre 1957, 580; 1965, 154). The Flies depicts the ironic temper as a flimsy, escapist disposition while exalting its natural antagonist’s passionate, existential commitment (1955). On laughter Sartre has this sole comment: “Laughter is properly human because the human being is the only animal that takes itself seriously: hilarity denounces false seriousness in the name of true-seriousness” (Sartre 1971, 821; my translation). Camus reaffirms the value of irony in State of Siege (Camus 1958, 171) and complains in a personal conversation related by Clément Rosset that his sense of humor is overlooked by readers and critics alike (Polac and Rosset 2003, 80). There is hardly any humor in other existential philosophers as well, including Heidegger and Jaspers; despite their counting themselves among Nietzsche’s followers, not only is their philosophical thought closer to tragedy than comedy (Heller 2005, 3), but it is also far from the Nietzschean association of tragedy with joy and laughter.
But if human ridicule is thought to reveal human tragedy, it does so because we take ourselves too seriously even when acknowledging our ridicule. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the visitor in Ivan’s nightmare insists: “Yet men, with all their indisputable intelligence, do take the farce of existence as something serious, and this is their tragedy” (quoted in Kallen 1968, 379–80). The contemporary American theologian, Reinhold Niebhur, concurs:
What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignificant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast organization of life. But we pretend that we are the very center of this organization. This pretension is ludicrous; and its absurdity increases with our lack of awareness of it. The less we are able to laugh at ourselves the more it becomes necessary and inevitable that others laugh at us. (Niebuhr 1969, 140–1)
Because we are so serious about ourselves we see life as tragic in the first place; we are ridiculous because we take ourselves seriously and even more ridiculous when considering our ridicule a tragedy.
If it is true that works of existential comedy have expanded the phenomenon of the comic to territories from which they have been formerly excluded because “they sharpened our perception for a broader sense of the comic” (Heller 2005, 95–96), they did not expand it enough. I differ from those whose view is tragic-comic, including the playwrights of the absurd, in suggesting that as soon as we acknowledge the ridiculousness of our situation, the comedy is over: We cease to be comical, and with this, we cease to be tragic. We are beyond the tragic and the comic. There are two ways to explain the process of resolution by ridicule acknowledgment that I propose. One explanation stresses the similarities between this resolution and the comic plot resolution, which is based on the revelation of the hero’s true identity. The second borrows the two-stage process of certain incongruity theories of humor, in which the incongruity is resolved on a higher level of understanding.
NEW IDENTITY RESOLUTION
Resolution through revelation of the hero’s true identity is the basic plot of comedy, according to Christopher Booker. This kind of resolution has developed through several stages of comedy, beginning with Aristophanes (Booker 2004, 107–52). At the heart of Aristophanes’ comedy lies an agon or conflict between two characters or groups of characters. One is dominated by a dark, rigid, life-denying obsession; the other represents life, liberation, and truth. The issue is ultimately decided in favor of the latter. The eventual happy outcome hinges on a crucial turning point: The moment when the dark characters, obsessed with their divisive desire to make war, judge, or kill, are suddenly forced to recognize something so important about themselves that it completely changes their attitude, paving the way to reconciliation and celebration. Aristotle calls this anagnorisis or “recognition,” the moment when something previously not recognized or known suddenly becomes clear. “Recognition,” Aristotle explains, “means the change from ignorance to knowledge.” Something is discovered that transforms the situation. Booker maintains that this transition from ignorance to knowledge remains at the heart of the comic plot, and provides the clue to the thematic intent of the story.
In the New Comedy, two new elements appear. First, comedy becomes a love story with the happy ending a union between hero and heroine in a way that symbolizes completion, the end of division, and the renewal of life. Apart from the addition of the love element, the story is still about the resolution of a conflict: Some state of darkness and confusion giving way, through “recognition” and a change of heart, to reconciliation and light. The second crucially important element concerns the nature of the recognition on which the resolution of the story turns: the nature of what it is to be discovered or made clear before a change of heart can pave the way to a happy ending. One of the main sources of confusion in the story and a chief obstacle to unity between the characters is that they are in some way unaware of each other’s true identity, or indeed their own. This element of ignorance and the need to establish true identity is a prelude to resolution. Only when everyone’s real identity has been sorted out can the way be made clear to the final union. This kind of resolution, then, centers on a process of “recognition” that ultimately leads to the revelation that someone’s identity is different from what it seems.
In a fully developed comedy (Shakespeare’s, for instance), recognition may involve four interrelated components, all working together. The first component, which is the only one that interests us here, is that characters trapped in a hard, divisive, unloving state—anger, jealousy, shrewishness, disloyalty, self-righteousness—must be softened and liberated by some act of self-recognition and a change of heart. They must in effect become a “new” or different person (“come to themselves”), and if they do not change in his way, they are destined to be punished or become the objects of general derision, so they can no longer harm others.
In Molière’s plays the road to resolution lies through “inferior” figures in the story. This is by no means new as again and again since Aristophanes’ comedies, characters are separated by an unspoken, invisible dividing line. The characters above the line represent the established order, an upper social level, the authority of men over women, father over children; those below the line, where the shadows fall, include servants, people of inferior class, wives, and the rising generation. The chief source of darkness in the story, in opposition to the life-giving forces, is the upper level, whereas the road to liberation passes through the inferior level. Through these examples from the history of the genre, Booker explains how “the essence of Comedy is always that some redeeming truth has to be brought out of the shadows into the light” (123).
I suggest that Booker’s observation applies as well to the revelation of the human being’s new identity, that is, the innate ridiculousness that constitutes the pervasive characteristic of humankind. Acknowledging our ridiculousness as a new identity is a redeeming truth, I believe, provided we adhere to the view that we are ridiculous only to the extent that we ignore ourselves. This view of ridicule, maintained by Baudelaire and Bergson, is intimated by Plato when he identifies to “know not thyself” as the source of ridicule (Baudelaire 1968, 378; Bergson 1999, 9; Plato, Philebus, 48). According to this view, the comic presupposes the butt’s self-ignorance; inadvertently comical, the butt ceases to be so at the moment he realizes his ridiculousness.
Both Nietzsche and Carl Jung envision an ideal of the self in a union of opposites (Huskinson 2004, 165). In Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche, as well as Jung (Jung 1951, par. 53), describe the experience of becoming übermenschlich or individuated (capable of harnessing the opposites and enduring the dangerous affects that the experience of wholeness occasions) in terms of a sudden conversion or “redemption” of the personality. This idea is not new: The tension of opposites as the primal life force goes back to the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, in the West, and pairs of opposites are the basis of Chinese philosophy. The tension of opposites that characterizes Homo risibilis includes the union of rational and irrational tendencies, which translates into the union of objective futility and subjective seriousness. The self as a union of opposites brought about by a full acceptance of oneself as made up of incongruous oppositions changes the self’s attitude toward all oppositions, including seriousness and futility. In the Laws, Plato emphasizes the importance of opposites, and of foolishness for wisdom, claiming that human affairs are not very serious although they must be taken seriously (816 d–e). Thomas Nagel has recently endorsed a view of the absurd that leaves us necessarily serious in our endeavor yet ironic once we notice our futility sub species aeternitatis, but he allows that this kind of tension may generate something new (Nagel 1987, 58–59; 1986, 4).
In contradistinction to these views and to the humorous mood’s status quo about the tragic and the comic, or seriousness and levity, the attitude that obtains from accepting one’s ridicule differs from previous experience. The view proposed here suggests that fully accepting our ridiculousness amounts to a complete liberation from it. Acknowledging ourselves as ridiculous and accepting ourselves without shame or self-blame enables us to transcend our ridiculous humanity. We regain our dignity, and have no need of the hermeneutics of the tragic or of the kind of comic that is parasitic on the tragic because the pain of the initial contradiction between our desires and the possibility of fulfilling them is eased. By accepting our ridicule, we have accepted this contradiction and have no more need of interpretations that attempt to make sense of it or alleviate its sting.
To use the language of redemption, we redeem ourselves by loving ourselves in our ridiculousness, in accordance to Nietzsche’s insightful appeal: “Love yourself as an act of clemency—then you will no longer have any need of your god, and the whole drama of Fall and Redemption will be played out to the end in you yourselves!” (Nietzsche 1982, I, sec. 79). By fully accepting ourselves as ridiculous, we transcend ridicule: we cease being comical. Finita la comedia, however, does not leave us in the grip of the initial tragic sense of life, I suggest, because the tragic and the comic are so inextricably linked now, that by transcending ridicule we have also transcended the tragic. Once we have transcended ridicule, we are not taken back to the original tragic situation with which we began because the comic has already taken away the tragic’s agony, disarmed it, and sweetened its sting.
Moreover, after acknowledging ridicule, the tragic that remains is not only inseparable from the comic, but also determined by it. A protagonist becomes truly tragic-comic when his tragic destiny has been determined by the comicality of his personality or appearance, his situation, his existential perspectives, and his attempts to realize his dreams and ideals. This may be our situation after the comic modulates the tragic, and that which is achieved in the awareness of ridicule that perceives the situation in inclusive comical eyes. Now that our comicality as ridicule defines us, our comical features account for the tragic elements that remain in us. “If Don Quixote lost his comical features he would no longer be tragic,” says the Bulgarian aesthetician Isaac Passy (Passy 1963, 71; quoted in Dziemidok 1993, 132–3). Don Quixote can be taken as representative of humanity because, as David Miller has noted, “the don exhibits all the absurdities of the human situation. … He is a fool, to be sure, but in being a fool, he is Everyman, and by being himself he is everybody” (Miller 1969, 91–92).
Having transcended the comic (by acknowledging our comicality we gain lucidity and sober up), we transcend the tragic that inheres in ridiculousness (it is tragic to be ridiculous, but we have ceased to be ridiculous; hence we are tragic no more). This claim, despite its innovation, can be substantiated by philosophers who point to the possibility of comedy transcending tragedy such as Hegel and Friedrich Schiller. As we have seen previously, in Hegel’s classification of the genres, tragedy gives way to comedy and reveals a consciousness more developed than tragic consciousness. Comedy is the completion of tragedy and the comic form continues that of the tragic. Having destroyed serious drama, comedy finally turns its mockery on itself and vanishes (Hegel 1975, II, 1199). A libertarian writer of tragedies, Schiller contends that the end of comedy is higher than that of tragedy; that where the end is attained, tragedy becomes superfluous. Comedy frees the human spirit from passion and enables the human being to envision himself and his world clearly and serenely, to recognize that chance is more influential than destiny, and to laugh at life’s inconsequentialities rather than to rage or weep at its wickedness:
Comedy aims at a more important end [than tragedy]; and if this end could be actually attained it would make all tragedy not only unnecessary, but impossible. The aim that comedy has in view is the same as that of the highest destiny of man, and this consists in liberating himself from the influence of violent passions, and taking a calm and lucid survey of all that surrounds him, and also of his own being, and of seeing everywhere occurrence rather than fate or hazard, and ultimately rather smiling at the absurdities than shedding tears and feeling anger at the sight of the wickedness of man. (Schiller 1964, 311)
“Such seeing is man’s supreme goal,” explains Horace Kallen, “It is the authentic happy ending,” for to Schiller “tragedy was the human condition; comedy, man’s self-liberation from this condition” (Kallen 1968, 347, 361). In contrast, Kerr is skeptical about the capacity of comedy to transcend itself:
But the pain of comedy is possibly more protracted and more frustrating than that of tragedy, because it does not know how to expel itself. Tragedy’s pain is productive; it comes of the abrasiveness of moving forward toward transformation. Comedy, making capital of the absurdity of seeking transformation, must forever contain its pain. By denying freedom it denies release. Tragedy uses suffering; comedy can only live with it. Comedy can only live with it, that is to say, against the possible day when tragedy, in an ultimate successful transformation, frees them both. Comedy, hugging the fox to its breast, stays close to tragedy against that possible, eternally doubted, day. Only the tragic absurdity is capable of transcending itself.
What a good man the clown is, to endure so much, to survive so relentlessly, to keep us company in all weathers, to provide us with a way of looking at the worst that enables us to take a temporary joy in the worst! For that is what he does: he stands horror on its head to keep us tolerably happy against the day when tragedy will look horror straight in the eye and stare it down. (Kerr 1967, 340; emphasis added)
According to Kerr, only tragedy can transcend itself by staring the tragic down. Kerr may be correct within the limitations of the genres and of the tragic and the comic views outlined at the beginning of the chapter; but with regard to the view of human ridicule, I suggest that, if embraced, this higher-level comic can transcend both itself and the tragic. The proposal still may follow Kerr’s suggestion that “tragedy will look horror straight in the eye and stare it down.” This is so because of ridicule’s affinity with the tragic, on which authors who adhere to our tragic-comic situation have commented. They consider our situation more tragic because of our ridicule. Only a comic of sorts can embrace both tragedy and ridicule, however, because only a higher form of the comic can incorporate both comic and tragic elements, as previously argued. Ridicule and the tragic feeling that accompanies it must be a form of the comic if we are interested in maintaining them both. Kerr is right, however, in asserting that horror needs to be stared down: We must stare down our ridicule in order to embrace it.
A full acknowledgment of our comicality that lies in the tragic liberates us from the tragic, but also enables us to transcend the comic. Like the Buddhist’s raft used for passing the river, or the Wittgensteinian ladder, or again the Taoist’s fish trap dispensed with when unnecessary, the comic disappears as soon as the tragic disappears. This does not necessarily mean that humor disappears altogether: There are other forms of humor than the comic that evolves out of the tragic.
Insofar as one is defined by ridicule, a resolution of the basic human conflict is obtained by acknowledging oneself as ridiculous. This mirrors resolutions in the comic plot when the revelation of the hero’s hidden identity changes everything. Embracing our ridicule saves us from ridicule, for one can be ridiculous only if one is unaware of being ridiculous. By acknowledging our ridicule, we transcend the tragic as well, for it is our ridicule that now determines our tragedy. By accepting the human condition as ridiculous and embracing ridicule as the defining characteristic of humanity at its best, we transcend ourselves because full self-acceptance is alien to human beings, as Nietzsche and Freud have explained: Nietzsche resorted to the overman to overcome our human, all-too-human incapacity for amor fati, and Freud deemed us all neurotics because of our necessary flight from ourselves (Nietzsche 1954a; Freud 1926). Thus, humor, which is called on to renounce the urge to redemption, reveals itself as redemptive in bringing about a liberated state capable of rivaling the highest ideals of religion and philosophy.
COGNITIVE INTEGRATION RESOLUTION
There is another way of explaining the resolution I propose. Some of the tension generated by the basic human predicament may be relieved through a humorous state of mind, but the humorous mood is only transitory (MacHovec 1988, 8). When it dissolves, the problem at hand may be resolved on a higher level (Basu 1999a). According to the theory of conflict-resolution, which we mentioned earlier as part of the incongruity theory of humor, that which may seem incompatible now will seem compatible under a different form of thought (Roeckelein 2002, 172–4; Mulkay 1988, 22–23). Such cognitive humor has the following two-stage process: the perception of a complexity, incongruity, discrepancy, ambiguity, or novelty in the humor stimulus; and the resolution, that is, the cognitive integration or understanding, of the stimulus.
In order to explain the second stage of cognitive humor, it is important to understand the possible outcomes to a conflict, exemplified by an epistemic conflict, that is, a conflict between beliefs. In unresolved conflicts, we find ourselves confused and both pieces of information are stored with the conflict between them noted. In uncooperative resolution, one of the beliefs will survive while the other is destroyed. In cooperative resolution we may find a way to accept the truth of both beliefs through a creative insight and dissolve an apparent contradiction into compatibility. Whereas the humorous state of mind helps to sort unresolved conflicts and avoid the uncooperative resolution of the conflict that defines the human being, as we have seen, the second stage of cognitive humor helps to attain to a cooperative resolution in the following way.
An inward conflict is incongruous only when it is assumed that human beings are congruous, that is, that I am a congruous being. But were I to realize that both points of view that clash in the conflict are valid and that giving up one of them is simplifying and reducing the complex being I am, these opposing views would not be incongruous anymore. Both would be necessary for doing justice to the being I am. The repetition of the conflicting situation would encourage me to adjust my conception of self to accommodate this view. The higher level that obtains is a view that sees conflicts as normal because they are constitutive of the complex being I am and the complicated relations with and in a world I do not fully understand. The incongruity that gives rise to the tragic and the comic is not perceived as an incongruity anymore. Rather, this view echoes Heraclitus’ phrase: “They do not understand that in being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself: a backward stretching harmony, as of a bow or a lyre” (Diels and Kranz 1972, Heraclitus, B51, 80). It also amounts to a harmonious congruence with myself, others, and the world, a situation that all philosophies seek to establish, as David Cooper argues in his introduction to his impressive World Philosophies:
Hegel, and following him, Marx saw philosophy as the endeavor to overcome what they called the problem of “alienation” or “estrangement.” By these terms, they meant the sense which many human beings—all of them, perhaps, at times—have of being “strangers,” of not being “at home,” in the world. Reading philosophers from all times and climes, I am struck by the accuracy of this perception of the central inspiration behind philosophical speculation, by the constant recurrence—from the earliest Indian thinkers recorded to twentieth-century existentialists—of the theme of alienation. (Cooper 1995, 5)
Cooper cites Wordsworth’s poignant description of the tension latent in conflicting emotions which is the spur to philosophical thought: “The groundwork of all true philosophy is the difference between … that intuition … of ourselves, as one with the whole … and that [of] ourselves as separated beings, [which] places nature in antithesis to us” (5). At any rate, many of the world philosophies, Cooper argues, can fruitfully be regarded as attempts to resolve this difference or tension by offering accounts of human beings that do justice to the uniqueness of the species, yet without, so to speak, rendering its members freaks, outsiders, or strangers in the world. “What hardly any philosopher of the first rank has done is to ignore, or remain sanguine about the tension,” he adds:
Those, like Kant, who confessed to their failure to resolve it, did so with palpable disappointment, even despair. After all, if the German poet Hölderlin was right and it is both “divine and good” to be “at one” with the world, then the failure to resolve the tension is not simply an intellectual débâcle, but a human tragedy. (6)
If Cooper is right about the initial philosophical spur, the view proposed here inserts itself in the history of philosophical attempts to overcome alienation.
The cognitive aspect of the resolution—acknowledging our ridicule—would be impotent in real life situations, however, if I could not accept its contents emotionally, that is, if I could not embrace it. That which enables me to accept it emotionally is no foreign element, but the emotional component of humor itself: The sympathetic and benevolent way in which one treats oneself in humor (Freud 1928). Bohdan Dziemidok differentiates between comical protagonists whom we like even though we laugh at them and those whom we like because they are laughable. Many theorists of the comic defend the thesis that one and the same object may both evoke the experience of the comical and the feeling of friendship and sympathy (Dziemidok 1993, 99–101). We have to pertain to this latter sort of comical protagonists in order to accept our ridicule emotionally.
The full acceptance of oneself facilitated by humor is a complex mechanism that draws its support from a certain view of humankind as ridiculous. But both the view of humankind as ridiculous and the process of its acceptance are not alien to humor; rather they are suggested to the individual through the enticing pleasure humor generates from the ridiculous being one happens to be.
THE GOOD LIFE
Transmuting suffering into joy, the alchemy of humor reveals itself as redemptive in bringing about a harmonious state and a serene joy that rivals the highest philosophic and religious ideals. Before assessing the viability and desirability of the good life obtained through a liberation from the tragic by purposeful and systematic use of humor, it is helpful to differentiate the ideas presented so far from the philosophical views on humor investigated in previous chapters as well as other views sympathetic to humor.
The proposal at hand follows Shaftesbury’s use of soliloquy in that it uses humor inwardly as a tool for self-discipline, for curbing exalted enthusiasm, and for systematically educating our sense of proportion. Like Shaftesbury, I see in humor a method for challenging all forms of irrationality and a liberating tool that frees us from patterns of action and thought that are ultimately life-destroying. Like Shaftesbury, moreover, I suggest that humor has a habilitating function with regard to the truth. The difference lies in our respective views of the truth: For Shaftesbury humor denotes a fundamental capacity for the apprehension of the beautiful and the good, whereas I consider humor especially apt for perceiving the ambiguity of life and the ambivalence of human beings, that is, the muddiness of truth and goodness.
The basic human predicament described here differs from the Kierkegaardian human contradiction in that it does not assume any metaphysical presuppositions about the nature of the self. Moreover, contrary to Kierkegaard’s view of the self in need of God to make it whole, the present proposal suggests a way to complete the self through a systematic use of humor. In its incorporation of both comic and tragic elements, the view of humor I propose is consistent with Kierkegaard’s view of humor. It differs, however, from his view of the comic as subsumable under the tragic; I suggest, rather, that the mixture of pleasure and pain found in the “humorous mood” resolves into pleasure, and that what is both tragic and comic is comical on a higher level. The final stage that obtains is different from Kierkegaard in that it is not inferior to religion and, unlike the Kierkegaardian view of humor, it is free from notions of guilt and God.
I do not refer to the higher state that obtains in terms of irony, as a number of authors have done in their attempt to point to a higher stage of the comic—“irony” (Morreall 1997), “comical irony” (Goldsmith 1991), “Pyrrhonist irony” (Gurewitch 1994), or “humorous irony” (Jankélévitch 1964). I use humor even when addressing human ridicule because the higher comical stage is characterized by a leveling sympathy and compassion, which are necessarily involved in humor, but alien to irony. This is no semantic divergence: Without the sympathy and compassion necessary for embracing one’s and another’s ridicule, the resolution would not be possible.
That we may find the world acceptable, not through tragedy but through an essentially human laughter, however, has not eluded contemporary philosophers. In his recent Jokes, Ted Cohen describes the laughter of acceptance, which confirms, “we may dwell with the incomprehensible without dying from fear or going mad. That may be a religious thought, but I found it in thinking about the human response to jokes, in the laughter that is absolutely, characteristically, essentially human”:
… a human response to absurdity is laughter. It is not just jokes, but indeed it is also the world itself and its various inhabitants that are sometimes absurd to human contemplation. When we laugh at a true absurdity, we simultaneously confess that we cannot make sense of it and that we accept it. Thus this laughter is an expression of our humanity, our finite capacity, our ability to live with what we cannot understand or subdue. (Cohen 1999, 41)
Simon Critchley voices similar thoughts about our aptitude for accepting our finitude. He suggests that a certain kind of laughter opens up this ungraspable and ever-weakening relation to finitude, which is based on acknowledging weakness and limitation rather than tragically attempting to affirm them (Critchley 1999, 222; see 2002, 119, n. 12).
In his Laughing at Nothing: Humor As a Response to Nihilism, John Marmysz gives his own definition of nihilism as essentially thwarted idealism in a way that is reminiscent of the basic incongruity considered as the human predicament in this chapter: “The full impact of the problem of nihilism strikes only when an individual passionately desires ultimate meaning, value, and purpose, but believes those things to be out of reach” (Marmysz 2003, 84–85). There are thus two elements to a nihilistic worldview: An idealized desire for a better world coupled with a belief that this can never be realized—“the real world is denigrated in comparison to the ideal, and the ideal is believed to be hopelessly out of reach” (85). This, for Marmysz, is the basis of a “nihilistic incongruity” on which his solution is founded. Marmysz, too, finds it in humor; through an analysis of jokes and the application of different theories about humor, Marmysz demonstrates that the “solution” to nihilism is to learn to laugh at it: “Humor allows us to confront incongruities and, instead of being overwhelmed by them, to understand them in an unusual and original fashion” (152). For this reason, humor creates “the capacity to make incongruities unthreatening and to interpret them in a manner that produces amusement” (153).
But the proposal advanced in this chapter is more radical than the views of Cohen, Critchley, and Marmysz on laughter’s philosophic benefits. I suggest that the situation that obtains on this proposal is a celebration of humanity, an acceptance of one’s finitude, a gracing of our folly, a therapy for the hubris and self-centeredness of the tragic view of life. The freedom that results from the newfound harmony with oneself, others, and the world is characterized by a serene joy that enables the affirmation of life and brings along moral and epistemological benefits. In the remainder of the chapter, I assess the viability and the desirability of the Homo risibilis proposal.
1. The viability of Homo risibilis. I begin assessing the viability of the proposal by addressing arguments on the limitations of self-laughter. Granted that one can recognize oneself as ridiculous, I address the viability of the joyful outcome of such a bleak perspective.
In his remarkable Truth and the Comedic Art, Michael Gelven argues that comedy graces our folly:
The existential coherence of being comedic judges of our own comedic folly enables a truth that is so fundamental to what and who we are as foolish and hence rational persons, that, in its absence we cannot be complete, much less think about being complete. Fun enables us to be complete. This completeness has already been identified as the joyous recognition of our own self-reflective judging of our graced foolishness. (Gelven 2000, 149)
Although fun enables us to be complete, Gelven seems to restrict its salvific quality to comedy: “Unless we are able to participate in the comedic celebration we cannot, in any other way, reflect on our folly with fondness to the extent that it discloses fundamental truth,” he writes. The rare, existential coherence of being comedic judges of our own comedic folly—which is being fun at its highest level—exists nowhere outside of art” (Gelven 2000, 148). In contradistinction to Gelven, I suggest that those who can recognize themselves as ridiculous can grace their own folly as well as the folly of others. If I have ever laughed in a comedy, I should laugh at myself outside a comedy. To do so, I have only to recognize that all laughter is self-laughter: It is at myself that I laugh. Not recognizing this fact makes me ever so ridiculous, which is yet another good reason to laugh at myself. As we have noted in the discussion of homo risibilis, the laughing philosopher Democritus already finds ridiculous our capacity to laugh at others instead of at ourselves. Indeed, nothing is less critical than excepting oneself from the human condition: Every laughter, argues Critchley, is self-laughter because “the object of laughter is the subject who laughs (Critchley 2002, 14). Recognizing oneself as laughable may be the defining characteristic of the philosophic consciousness, as Ronell has argued. If this is so, this recognition occurs independently of the performance of the conventional theater; it occurs in the theater of the mind where the philosophic comedy takes place.
Moreover, if I have ever laughed at myself while revisiting past experiences, I should laugh now, in media res. The spirit of humor, Stephen Leacock explains, “views life, even life now, in as soft a light as we view the past” (Leacock 1938, 216). Humor means looking at the present with the (kind) eyes of the future as if it were the past. A repeated claim about humor, however, is that it is impossible to use it in the present as one would in the future; some incongruous situations are just too heavy with practical consequences for most people to find funny while they are in these situations, yet “in retrospect they may seem funny” (Morreall 1983, 105–6, 109–10). Karl Marx begins his essay Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852), thus: “Hegel notes somewhere, that all great world-historical facts and personages, so to say, repeat themselves, he forgot to add: First as tragedy, then as farce.” Marcella Goldsmith extends the meaning of his statement and generalizes it to include psychological phenomena; this is possible because “with time the subject detaches himself for whatever event may have caused his suffering and is able to view that event with serenity” (Goldsmith 1991, 118). Similarly, Hegel, as observed earlier, maintains that we can enjoy the comic only in retrospect, once we have sublated it; and this idea is preserved in Kierkegaard’s thought on the comic, which, he asserts, needs a way out of the contradiction in order to be legitimate. Along the same lines, Jean Paul stresses the impossibility of someone finding oneself ridiculous while engaged “in his actions” (Jean Paul 1964, 317–18).
Philosophers who explain why ridicule applies to others or the comic to the past may be right, I suggest, when spontaneous laughter is involved. Indeed, these provisos are mostly advanced as part of the explanation of what (spontaneous) laughter is about. However, finding oneself ridiculous in the present while looking at others may involve no spontaneous laughter; one does not have to find it funny nor particularly enjoyable. To recognize one’s ridiculousness and to acknowledge it is sufficient: If the other is ridiculous, so am I, and if I will recognize it in the future, I can recognize it now—otherwise, I am being ridiculous in my insistence that only the others are ridiculous and that only in the future can I consider this experience laughable. The enduring incongruity that lies at the basis of ridicule is indifferent to who is being ridiculous and to when it is easier to recognize it. It has nevertheless to be acknowledged independently from any pleasure it may bring. This supposes developing a taste for incongruity. With Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, I suggest that laughter can and should be learned. A discipline of laughter is important not just in order to enjoy oneself, but mainly because through laughter new norms can be adopted that eventually change one’s attitude toward oneself, others, and the world.
The change of attitude that follows the acceptance of one’s ridicule leads to a newly found harmony with oneself, others, and the world that results in freedom and is characterized by joy. Tragic philosophies that associate the tragic with joy may help us understand this apparent paradox. Even in a disharmonious world, a newfound harmony is joyful for Nietzsche and Rosset. Nietzsche conveys his relief thus: “The fatality of essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. … One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole … that alone is the great liberation” (Nietzsche 1954b, VI, sec. 8). Rosset attests to a similar liberation during the performance of a tragedy:
What can we do with the world … if it does not know the tragic? Alone with our tragic, in an anti-tragic world. … It is from this anxiety that the tragic drunkenness delivers us forever in affirming without hope of contestation: the world is tragic, the world is the tragic. … That is, destiny is at the measure of our destiny, the latter’s value is not exceptional, but to the contrary a “sign” of the tragic reality. We are tragic in a tragic world: doesn’t one see what marvelous accord fills us with joy? …
We discover, in reality, a world with which we can establish a contact: it knows us, we know it, we agree with it on a fundamental point: nothing exists, nothing—except the tragic. (Rosset 1991, 90; my translation)
To be tragic in a tragic world is still a marvelous accord that fills us with joy. Adam Potkay’s analysis of the emotion in his The Story of Joy, may help us understand how this can be so. Joy is “the mind’s delight,” because it is “the experience of reunion or fulfillment, of desire at least temporarily laid to rest. Joy is what we feel, and as self-reflective beings know we feel, in situation, real or imaginary, in which what was lost is found; what was missed restored; want constrained is lifted; what we desire arrives; or what arrives satisfies a desire we hadn’t know we’d had” (Potkay 2007, vii). Joy’s paradox involves the nexus of loss and restoration, self-dispersion, and perfect concentration. It is a passion for primacy, for recurrence; it arrives with restored life or with access to more life, and is the point and proof of one’s insertion into a unified order of nature (16, 235, 96). From Spinoza and Shaftesbury onwards, joy arises from recognizing the self as part of God, Nature, and the rational structure of the universe, Potkay maintains (171). Were we to conceive of Nature as irrational and we as part of it, joy would still be the outcome of this recognition of the self as part of Nature, I suggest, on condition we could accept their irrationality. The benefits of Homo risibilis are predicated on this acceptance, but it is also a worldview that can only be reached through a gradual acceptance of irrationality and a practice that teaches us to enjoy it.
2. The desirability of Homo risibilis. I characterize the joy that results from embracing one’s ridicule as a constant, serene, and affirmative joy, otherwise empty of content. I address the appeal of other philosophies that exempt us from acknowledging our ridicule, such as Nietzsche’s and Rosset’s, by criticizing the feasibility and desirability of the joy they associate with the tragic. Finally, I spell the moral and epistemologic benefits of Homo risibilis.
Heinz Kohut observes that “joy relates to experiences of the total self”; it is both “cause” and “effect” of a process of self-development, and is related, in particular, to the self’s journey toward an openness that would make it whole (Kohut 1977, 45). This is the joy that arises from the whole human being that Spinoza deems hilaritas, and which has been translated into English as “cheerfulness” or gaiety (Ethics, III, P11Schol.). It springs from oneself as a cause, from imagining one’s own power of acting, and is therefore a constant joy and not a transient one. Spinoza, here, follows the Stoics’ differentiation between kinds of joy: Joy as a passion or emotion that should be eradicated, on the one hand, and as a rational joy that is the outcome of a successful Stoic living, on the other (Nussbaum 1994, 399–400). Roman Stoics reserve gaudium for the latter to designate an equable state of mind, and laetitia to designate either irrational joy or, less negatively, the physical aspect of gaudium (Cicero 1945, 4.6.12–13; 340–1).
In contradistinction to the joy arising out of the humorous mood, which is transitory, the joy that follows from embracing one’s ridicule is constant. It is heir to the Stoic and Spinozistic joy, because it follows from a newfound harmony with the world, regardless of its nature.
An interesting characteristic of joy is its freedom from desire. Martha Nussbaum notes, “Joy may inspire no desire, or simply the desire to act in some way expressive of joy …” (Nussbaum 2001a, 135). For Robert Solomon as well, joy tends to seek out and form intimate bonds with itself; it has no desire, except to share the mood. Its object is everything, but nothing in particular. The power and strategy associated with emotions are in joy’s case “none necessary,” and the question of the status involved in emotions “doesn’t even arise” (Solomon 1976, 276):
Joy is that happy passion that renders our world not only satisfactory but “wonderful.” Like contentment, it formulates its values and expectations to conform with the world. As such, it has no ideology (except the laissez faire of the status quo or utter indifference to change), no concrete ideals or values. (275)
Because joy has no desire in particular, it is conducive to any action. Joy is so ethereal, however, that it is extremely difficult to describe “without slipping into the mush that such moods freely supply” (275).
Once joy is attained as a permanent state one’s relation to life changes, for joy enables the affirmation of everything—an attitude recommended by proponents of tragic philosophies such as Nietzsche and Rosset. Neither, however, can point to a warranted way of getting there. Nietzsche combines his own keen sense of the tragic life with an uncontained joy although, as Robert Solomon rightly points out, “he is not always convincing” (Solomon 1999, 144). Nietzsche opens the fourth book of The Gay Science with a resolution for the New Year: “Some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer,” and urges us in Twilight of the Idols as well as in other writings “to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction” (Nietzsche 1974, sec. 276; 1954b, X, sec. 5). The joyful Dionysian affirmation is reached through self-overcoming, Nietzsche maintains, yet there is a gap between the destructive-lionesque stage and the creative and affirming-childlike state described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part I, “On the Three Metamorphoses”) and exemplified in other Nietzschean writings.
True, Nietzsche explains that once you say yes to a single joy, you say yes to all woe, because joy and woe are connected (1954a, IV, “The Drunken Song”). Joy and woe may be connected, but one generally does not intend to embrace woe when affirming joy. After joy is present, woe may be joyful too. One does not, however, gain a clear indication of how to reach tragic joy, the joy that affirms everything. Moreover, one can doubt that tragic joy exists; tragic joy is found in Richard Wagner’s Art and Revolution (1896, 40) and Tristan and Isolde, in the writings of his one-time disciple Nietzsche, and in William Butler Yeats’ late Nietzschean poems; there is no trace of it in previous understandings of the tragic, especially not in Aristotle, whose theory of tragedy does not refer to joy (see Potkay 2007, chap. 8). Finally, even if such a joy is possible, one can doubt its desirability: Being also “a joy in destruction,” it is predicated on cruelty toward others and toward oneself, as expressed in such passages as “what constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty,” or “to see the failure of tragic natures and to laugh, that is divine” (Nietzsche 1966b, sec. 229; 1938, II, 380).
Rosset, the sole faithful disciple of Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy, openly acknowledges the mysterious origin and advent of joy: He deems the love of life a graced joy, a Pascalian gift, which cannot be attained by a determined path, yet is absolutely necessary for affirming life. Indeed, our highest and most difficult task is to accept the real, to find satisfaction in the sensual and perishable world (1993a, “The Cruelty Principle,” 83). Accepting the real, however, presupposes a consciousness that would be capable of both knowing the worst and not being affected by this knowledge of the worst. The faculty of knowing without suffering mortal damage, Rosset believes, is situated absolutely out of reach of human faculties:
This wisdom is not evident and supposes, in order to be efficacious, the extra-help of an extraordinary force, not to say supernatural, which I call the joy of living, the only resource that enables us to fulfill the wish expressed by Rimbaud in the last line of his Season in Hell: “to possess truth in body and soul.” In other terms: to reach finally an accord between the faculty of knowing and the faculty of living. (Rosset 2001, 85; my translation)
Joy is the necessary condition, if not of life in general, at least of life lived consciously and in full awareness. The simple fact of taking reality into consideration, the simple exercise of reflection suffices here to discourage all effort—unless joy somehow comes to one’s assistance, a joy that, like that of the Pascalian God, steps in when all forces are failing and brings about, in extremis and against all odds, the triumph of the weakest cause. In the final apology of the second of the Provincial Letters, Pascal defines this act of sustaining precisely as an “extraordinary intervention.” The intervention of joy is forever mysterious, impenetrable even for those who feel its beneficent effects:
In the final analysis, nothing has changed for them, and they understand no more than before. They have no new argument to invoke in favor of existence and they are still perfectly incapable of saying why or for what they are living. And yet from this moment forth they value life as indisputable and eternally desirable. This is the mystery inherent in the zest for life. (19)
This extraordinary and mysterious assistance, that which Pascal calls grace and Rosset calls joy, is necessary for life conceived as knowledge of reality, but it cannot be attained by a determined path akin to that of climbing a ladder of perfection.
If indeed a clear path to joyfulness is indicated through a systematic use of humor, it answers the paradox of tragic philosophies—that which is most needed, joy, does not lie within the scope of our will (Rosset); or, although the will is the only way to attain to what is most needed, there is no assured path leading to it (Nietzsche). I believe with Rosset and Nietzsche that because we are joyful, we can affirm life—an impossible task if we try to affirm it without joy in our arsenal.
A serene joyfulness may be good in itself, but may also have beneficial moral consequences if we believe Spinoza, Nietzsche, and contemporary research regarding the effect of well-being and induced positive moods on altruism (Argyle 1987, 216–7). Because we are in a state of constant joy or happiness, we can be virtuous Spinoza maintains in contrast to most moralists. Virtue and blessedness are equally valuable and fundamental for Spinoza, for they prove in the end to be identical. Thus Spinoza asserts in his Ethics: “Virtue itself [is] happiness itself, and the greatest freedom” (II, P49Schol.). And he adds in the last proposition of the same book: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in blessedness because we restrain our lusts, but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we restrain our lusts” (V, P42). Blessedness is not the prize of self-control, as most moralists and religious thinkers have led us to believe: We can be virtuous because we are happy, and happiness is virtue itself.
Similarly, Nietzsche affirms that because we are joyful we can be generous. Nietzsche maintains that the happiness of the individual with strong, healthy instincts has its benefits for his neighbors. His love of self translates into an affirmation of the world. His sense of freedom and power allows magnanimity toward others. On the other hand, the unordered soul is spiteful and dangerous. Its viciousness amounts to a discontentedness with itself and a condemnation of life. For virtue, generally beneficial to one’s neighbors, is that which follows happiness; it is a byproduct of a fulfilled life. Leslie Paul Thiele notes that Nietzsche attributes this thesis to Goethe, who writes, “joyfulness is the mother of all virtue” (Thiele 1990, 75n).
Virtue is easier for the happy and generosity comes naturally to the joyful. Other paths that lead to joyfulness may achieve as much. However, there is a special characteristic of the life lived in full acknowledgment of one’s ridicule: One’s personal dignity and self-esteem do not arise from comparison with others. If Robert Solomon is right in asserting that “every emotion is a subjective strategy for the maximization of personal dignity and self-esteem,” more concerned with our own security and esteem than they are with accuracy or fairness (Solomon 1976, 222, 209), and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev is correct in assuming that every emotion is based on comparison (Ben-Ze’ev 2000, 18), then ridiculous man finds no use for envy, jealousy, anger, and other comparative emotions. There is no one to serve as comparison, as ridicule equalizes, and the only self-esteem available to us stems from our sense of truthfulness, which, if made our supreme maxim, is, at least according to Kant, “the maximum of inner worth (of human dignity)” (Kant 2006, 195). It is an ethic of compassion, however, that follows most naturally from the egalitarianism of Homo risibilis. Similar to the Christian and Buddhist ethics, whose egalitarian vision lies at the heart of their shared concern for suffering (be it from sin or ignorance), but without need of their metaphysical presuppositions, such an ethics can be derived without unwarranted assumptions from the vision afforded by Homo risibilis.
The epistemologlical benefits of Homo risibilis are significant as well. First, its egalitarian view of our weaknesses can ground a much-needed view of human fallibility. An equivalent of humility without religious overtones, it is conducive to a greater openness to criticism, which, according to critical rationalists, is the sole content of rationality.
Second, the joy this worldview affords grants the capacity to withstand the truth about the human condition. John Kekes states in his Moral Wisdom and Good Lives that “the variety of inappropriate attitudes to the human condition is great. Discussing them would take a very long—and very depressing—book” (Kekes 1995, 176). He identifies and criticizes four frequent and most typical kinds of inappropriate attitudes he calls disengagement, denial, romanticism, and resignation. In disengagement, we deliberately turn away from the interests of humanity; alternatively, but equally wrongly, we deny or overreact to our understanding of permanent adversities; or we are lured by resignation (180–1). A right attitude to the human condition, one that involves no disengagement, denial, romanticism, and resignation offers greater realism. It leads to the acknowledgment of the pervasive forces of contingency, conflict, and evil, and it motivates us to mitigate their destructive consequences undaunted by the knowledge of possible failure. Realism is acquired after having chastened, reduced, purified, and strengthened hope by resisting the temptation to pursue facile solace: By distancing ourselves from our condition, by denying the facts, by romantic self-aggrandizement or world-weariness, or by succumbing to resignation. It is a life lived without expectation of cosmic justice, but also without bitterness in the knowledge that the world is not more hospitable to us.
Third, it is a serene life that is reached without renouncing one’s reason or desires. By enabling us to accept our necessary failure, it grants us serenity while liberating us for action. Serenity is a goal of Eastern philosophies and religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as Western philosophies and religions such as all Hellenistic philosophies, Neo-Platonism, and the philosophies of Spinoza and Santayana. Religions that aim at redemption also aim at serenity. I have criticized these philosophies and religions for the means that lead to that goal but I believe their goal is both worthy and within reach. The sort of humor described in this chapter can be developed and does not require special comedic skills (see Ruch 2008, 69–71). Its benefits are in proportion to its use, and the serenity it offers is gradual. The tragic sense of life that it assumes is common enough to make it serviceable to most, if not all, who wish to use it.
Finally, it is a skeptical and secular worldview that avoids unwarranted metaphysical and religious assumptions. It brings to mind the Skeptical Pyrrhonists who graphically declared that peace of mind follows the suspension of judgment like a shadow following the body: We suspend all judgments because of the skeptical doubts that undermine all dogmatic claims to knowledge, and tranquility follows the suspension of judgment—in technical terms ataraxía follows epochē—like a “shadow following the body” (Laertius 1925, 9.107; see Sextus Empiricus 2000, 1.29). This means that we achieve tranquility as a result of suspending judgment without intending to do so (Sextus 2000, 1.25–30). The proposal outlined here does not partake in the sort of skepticism endorsed by this school. It is nonetheless a skeptical worldview that shares the Pyrrhonists’ dislike of unwarranted assumptions as well as their ideal of tranquility. Apart from this Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, the proposal outlined here is the only skeptical worldview I know of that aims at such an ideal and the only one to use humor to reach it. The worldview proposed in this chapter naturally clashes with Shaftesbury’s religious faith as well as with Hamann’s and Kierkegaard’s Christianity. Its significance derives partly from its controversy with them: Nonreligious persons need not despair of finding a role for humor in the good life, as humor is not only congenial to a skeptical worldview but discloses perhaps more fully its potency within an intellectual environment of this sort.
I have described a multistage process involving a systematic use of humor for disciplining our taste so that we can find pleasure in incongruities not immediately funny to us: Beginning with the tragic, it traces the course leading from the comic to humor and on to ridicule, maps ridicule’s banishment and with it the comic and the tragic, and culminates in an account of a liberated state of being characterized by joy and serenity. Through this process a ladder of perfection can be climbed that leads to a state rivaling the highest philosophic and religious ideals. This achievement is gradual and based on changing visions of oneself, others, and the world that correspond to the human capacity to transmute suffering into joy through the alchemy of humor.