Making Philosophy Laugh: Humor, Irony, and Folly in Philosophical Thought

By Dustin Peone

Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world.

In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. He demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666756012

Dustin Peone

Dustin Peone is instructor of liberal studies at Mercer University and a fellow of the Institute for Vico Studies in Atlanta. He has taught philosophy and core studies at Emory University and Oglethorpe University. He is also the author of Memory as Philosophy, Plague Literature, and Shame, Fame, and the Technological Mentality.

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Introduction

The Philosophical Standpoint

We are told by reliable sources that the first person to use the word philosopher as a self-description was Pythagoras of Samos. The significance of this term was not immediately clear to all. What sort of man is the lover of wisdom, and what sort of activity is this wisdom-love? What distinguishes philosophy from the myriad other professions that claim wisdom as their province? The most dangerous rival established by this title to wisdom is the statesman. If the philosopher is the true lover of wisdom, then what is the statesman? More pertinently, what is the tyrant?

The use of this word, philosopher, soon led Pythagoras into a delicate political dilemma. The tyrant Leon of Phlius heard that this man was in his kingdom, and that he was proclaiming a new science of wisdom. The effective tyrant cannot allow rival sources of authority to exist within his domains, nor can the tyrant allow there to exist some good in the state that he himself does not possess. Pythagoras was summoned to give account of himself and his wares.

Pythagoras understood his precarious political position. He could not admit to Leon that he possessed anything desirable to a king. It was vital that he present himself as benign and disinterested in political power. Nevertheless, a lover of wisdom still has certain obligations to the truth, even under duress. Had Pythagoras’ native wit failed him in this instance, it would have meant his early death. Fortunately, the philosopher of Samos was a man with a golden thigh.¹

Cicero says that when Leon asked Pythagoras what philosophers are, and how they differ from the other inhabitants of the world, Pythagoras responded with a metaphor. The life of man, he said, resembles the festival which was celebrated with most magnificent games before a concourse collected from the whole of Greece; for at this festival some men whose bodies had been trained sought to win the glorious distinction of a crown, others were attracted by the prospect of making gain by buying or selling. Everyone has some business at the festival, some reason for being there, whether their aims are glory or profit or entertainment. Pythagoras continued, There was on the other hand a certain class, and that quite the best type of free-born men, who looked neither for applause nor gain, but came for the sake of the spectacle and closely watched what was done and how it was done. These men who do nothing more than observe the spectacle are the philosophers; the spectacle begets speculation. Because tyrants are never quick-witted and require guidance, Pythagoras further illuminates his meaning: in the life of the city, some individuals are slaves of ambition, some of money; there were a special few who, counting all else as nothing, closely scanned the nature of things; these men gave themselves the name of lovers of wisdom.²

Leon naturally saw no need to do away with such a simpleton, and Pythagoras was able to freely spread his strange ideas throughout southern Europe. Such a vision of the world is that of a childlike man, who can pose no threat to the grave business of statecraft. The tyrant smiles at such fooleries and, believing the philosopher to be quite useless, does not see him as a rival. The fool may say what he likes to the lord only because the lord is a lord and the fool a fool.

Pythagoras, however, was no fool. His description of the philosophical life makes it clear, to those with ears to hear, that the philosopher alone is able to recognize and diagnose real folly. The festival is a time for light-hearted amusement, but only the child truly understands this. For the adult, steeped as he or she is in worldliness, the festival is an affair of gravitas. The buying and selling of goods is a serious business. The athletic competitions that occur on the stages of the festival of life are a serious business. The networking that occurs in the public square is a serious business. All those who attend are driven by their own ends and inhabit particular spheres of activity, wherein they lose sight of the spectacle as a whole. Draw back, and what one witnesses takes on an air of comedy. So many individuals, running about thinking of nothing but themselves, each consumed by self-interest and oblivious to the whole. The drama of life is this spectacle of little self-absorbed wills flitting around, occasionally colliding, occasionally bonding for a time, seemingly moving about as randomly as subatomic particles. For all the seriousness a life takes on from within, there is always something silly about it when viewed from without, in relation to the whole of the world.

The philosopher attends the fair to view the spectacle. However, as Shakespeare observed, All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.³ It is not only during festival times that the lover of wisdom delights in the human spectacle. The philosopher observes human activity at all times on this stage of the world. Descartes found himself amused by the simple absurdity of people walking down the street and crossing the square outside his window. He asks, "Do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men."⁴ The thought that bobbing and hustling hats and cloaks might be naught but specters is a distinctly philosophical thought. The person of the world has no such fantasies, because each human body represents some distinct opportunity with regard to his or her personal ends; each person either attracts or repels, in accordance with an entire superstructure of apprehension. Taken case by case, Descartes would readily admit that each bobbing hat reveals a man or woman hard at some pursuit. However, viewed in toto as a spectacle, the panoply of bobbing hats presents a much more amusing picture. We shall see later that Descartes is a Pythagorean thinker at his core.

One cannot, however, lay any claim to philosophical thinking if one lives forever on the level of the absurd. Just as the grim seriousness of the self-absorbed individual is the result of a one-sided perspective, so is the view of the spectacle as a whole one-sided. To float through the world seeing only meaningless automatons gesticulating wildly beneath their outerwear is a pernicious giddiness, which lacks both the philosophical sense and any meaningful sense of the comic. The one and the many—the individual and the world—is among the oldest tensions in the intellectual history of civilization. Any thinking that one wishes to call philosophical must recognize and confront this antinomy without blushing. The comic view of the spectacle is a temptation, but it must be reconciled with the tragic view of the individual, or else one’s portrait of the world fails to embrace reality. Life, writes George Meredith, is not a comedy, but something strangely mixed; nor is comedy a vile mask.⁵

This perennial tension between the tragic and comic gives human life the character of tragi-comedy. Human existence is a slow wending toward death. In death, all of the projects and plans of the individual are defeated and overthrown. We know this, and we are seemingly the only animals that understand the complete ramifications of this existential fact. However, far from inspiring a universal fatalism, this very knowledge undergirds our continued feverish endeavors and projects. We stand defeated from the start, and yet we struggle on. We fight to exist. Those who refuse to engage in this life-struggle are not typically seen as the reasonable ones who give up a losing cause, but as the succubi of human society.

The character of tragi-comedy is understood best during violent and perilous ages, when the value and meaning of life are subject to new modes of investigation. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett presented the paradox of existence in the most succinct form possible: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.⁶ These two irreconcilable statements are at the heart of tragi-comic thinking. Life is tragic because we ultimately fail. Life is comic because we make the effort anyway. We refuse our fate. This denial of one’s own destiny is the height of presumption, and is therefore inherently comical. We give ourselves airs of immortality, we pretend at stations above ourselves. We are the puffed-up valets of French comedy. These airs and this play-acting, however, are by far the finest qualities of the human species. I can’t go on. I know this for a certainty. I reject it. I go on. One might justly ask, How can this be? The whole of life, in fact, unfurls within the How can this be? and we are left none the closer to an answer.

The great spiritual power of the philosopher to consciously confront the tragic element of life springs from this view of the world as spectacle, as from a fountain. The only definition of philosophy as resonant through the ages as that of Pythagoras is the response issued by Socrates on his deathbed. Plato’s Phaedo chronicles the final hours of the life of Socrates, before he ultimately submits to oblivion in a cup of hemlock. These final hours are related after the fact by his student Phaedo while visiting Phlius, the scene of Pythagoras’ encounter with the tyrant Leon. It is to these people of Phlius that Phaedo announces Socrates’ new definition of philosophy: Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying [hoi orthos philosophountes apothneskin neskein meletosi].⁷

Training for dying requires the recognition of the tragic element of life, the ultimate terminus of the individual existence. However, this is not a fatalistic doctrine. Dying is not itself a skill that one can master. To learn to die means learning how to live. If I must die, how ought I to live in the meantime? What constitutes the sort of life that one may lead, at the end of which one may have no cause for fearing death? A good life, Socrates would have us know, makes dying easy. At the moment of condemnation, when Socrates stands before the people of Athens having been found guilty of high crimes, there is a joke on his lips. Death is the only reasonable penalty for a corruptor of youth and an enemy of the public gods. Socrates knows this, but when asked to propose his own penalty for himself, he responds, If I must make a just assessment of what I deserve, I assess it as this: free meals in the Prytaneum.⁸ If I have committed these crimes, as you say, then I deserve to be honored for them with free lunch as a benefactor of the polis. Only a man who has lived a good life and knows what is worth dying for could make such a remark, therein erasing any good will the crowd may have felt for him and ensuring his own execution. This is answering tragedy with comedy, which is the wisdom of dying.

There is no need today to emphasize the tragic element of life or the tragic sense of philosophy. Philosophical thinking has fully embraced this aspect of existence, to the great detriment of the comic sense of life. To overemphasize the tragic, though, is a perversion of the philosophical tradition. It is to lose sight of the spectacle and immerse oneself fully in the seriousness of the crowd. Tragedy only prevails on an individual level, and is therefore only admissible as one aspect of existence. Stobaeus writes, Among the wise, instead of anger, Heraclitus was overtaken by tears, Democritus by laughter.⁹ Heraclitus, who fixates on the parts of the world and the eternal flux in which these parts abide, is the weeping philosopher. Parmenides, who sees only the whole, is the laughing philosopher. Each is a partial truth, but neither vantage point is complete in itself. Without a dialectic between the two there is only the perpetual laughter or tears of the maniac. What philosophy requires today is a rejuvenation: a return to the sense of the comic, in order to attain a balanced standpoint.

This tragic sense in philosophy is as old as civilization, but it has progressively come to dominate modernity and postmodernity. The intellectual circles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adopted the words enlightenment and progress, or their continental equivalents, as their standards. As the power of monarchs and the influence of the church both crumbled, science and technology blossomed. New modes of organization and new modes of living brought with them a new ethos of optimism. For the first time in human history, an ideal like the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness became really tenable, because for the first time in history, the melioration of all natural and social evils seemed possible. However, this general optimism was premature. New modes of life do not necessarily mean better modes of life, and the excitement of cultural upheaval masked something darker. This excitement brought with it a sense of life that was more giddy than comic, unmoored as it was to critical thinking. However, it also brought the rough beast, its hour come round at last, which slouches toward Bethlehem to be born in the Second Coming of Yeats.¹⁰ A vacuum is as abhorrent to the spiritual world as it is to the physical world, and the void left by the conquest over older forms of human suffering was quickly filled by new forms.

One can see, even amidst the giddy fervor of the French Enlightenment, Rousseau rising up to proclaim the tragic sense of life. For Rousseau, the entire project of modernity is bankrupt from the start. The modern ethos embraces a perverse view of the human being, and the product of this ethos can only be a hollow caricature of man. The drama of human existence was doomed to a tragic end from the moment culture began and naturalness ended. In the scathing and intuitively penetrating social criticism of Rousseau, the comic sense of life has no place whatsoever. Despite his own tendency for rather humorous and ironic writing, he reveals himself to be an enemy to comedic thinking in his letter to d’Alembert on the theater. He derides Molière, that most sensitive and excellent of comic writers, for making sport of serious matters. He calls Molière’s misanthrope Alceste a good man who detests the morals of his age and the viciousness of his contemporaries; who, precisely because he loves his fellow creatures, hates in them the evils they do to one another and the vices of which these evils are the product.¹¹ The depiction of Alceste as a fool is, for Rousseau, a moral travesty. Alceste is a tragic hero whose ill fortune is to live in corrupt days rather than among the noble, hearty Spartans. Rousseau fails to understand the function of humor as an instrument of investigation and sociomoral correction. His standpoint is that of the serious man.

If we wish to find critics deeply suspicious of modern optimism, a line can be drawn from Rousseau through Wordsworth and the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century to Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and so on. Criticism is not, however, the equivalent of tragic thinking. Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais, Dickens—all were perceptive critics of their societies who were nevertheless deeply in tune to the comic sense of life. In fact, comic thinking depends on a deep skepticism of contemporary norms and values. The uncritical acceptance of the status quo produces neither comedy nor tragedy. This is the unexamined life, which belongs to a third category: the banal.

The tragic sense of life that permeates philosophy today is something outside of this line of social criticism. It is the product of the human travesties of the twentieth century, the violence done by man to man: the carnage of two world wars, the sublime terror of nuclear weaponry, the rise of systematic and technical political oppression, the wild flailing of terrorism. The great and novel evils of the twentieth century were made possible by the Enlightenment ideals of science and method. Perversely, each is in some way traceable to the pursuit of happiness.

Because it has become so easy to witness tragedy all about oneself, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and observe the spectacle with a disinterested smile. The attempt to do so is usually castigated by well-meaning serious men and women. The tone of philosophy, as it always does, has taken on the tone of the polis. Miguel de Unamuno writes as the spokesperson of his time when he says, The effort that [a being] makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not recognize it?¹² The forthright recognition that life is finite, that death abides even while the organism flourishes, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not.¹³ Unamuno calls the philosophy that springs from this starting point of death el sentimiento trágico de la vida, the tragic sense of life, and for him and many others, this is the only path an honest philosophy can take. And yet, we recall Socrates beginning with the same starting point and ascending to the comic sense of life.

The high priest of the tragic sense of life in the philosophical history of the twentieth century is Martin Heidegger, whose influence is still deeply felt today. Heidegger’s central work, Sein und Zeit, resonated enough with his times that it is said that copies were often found in the possession of German soldiers killed during the Second World War. The central passage of Sein und Zeit reads, Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. This allows for the ontological possibility of an existentiell Being-towards-death which is authentic.¹⁴ In the German original, as well as in translation, freedom towards death is emphasized in bold font, the only such instance in the book. This emphasis shows the foundational importance of death for Heidegger. All spiritual authenticity is rooted in this freedom toward death and the whole of the human dance revolves about its one maypole, the fear of death. Embracing this freedom towards death frees the spirit from its crushing angst and allows it to see itself authentically, as a finite being.

There can be no authenticity for Heidegger outside of one’s being-towards-death. The moment one looks in any other direction, one falls back again into the inauthentic life of the marketplace. This manner of authentic being is necessarily solitary. Whatever work the individual undertakes is a monadic endeavor; what is lost are transpersonal meaning and the capacity for coordinated cultural projects.¹⁵ While this doctrine does capture a very real aspect of human existence, its one-sidedness ultimately valorizes the fear of death at the expense of life. For Socrates, learning to die means learning to live. Learning to live means living within a social organization and undertaking meaningful projects within that framework. It means learning what things are worth dying for. Heidegger cannot teach us this; at the heart of his work, there is only fear and trembling, and nothing can make death meaningful.

This emphasis on death is fully tragic, and is the product of a life passed in the hazardous contemporary world. Some of the consequences of this view reveal themselves in Heidegger. First, there is a marked quietism, a