Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy by Amir Lydia

Author:Amir, Lydia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

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).

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