Posts Tagged ‘Henri Bergson’
“We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh”*…
Emily Herring on Henri Bergson and the importance of laughter…
… Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much thought. The pre-Socratic thinker Democritus was nicknamed the ‘laughing philosopher’ for espousing cheerfulness as a way of life. However, we know more about his thoughts on atomism than on laughter. Similarly, the section of Aristotle’s Poetics that dealt with comedy hasn’t come down to us. Other major thinkers who have offered passing, often humourless, reflections about humour include Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, who believed that we laugh because we feel superior; Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer who argued that comedy stems from a sense of incongruity; and Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud who suggested that comedians provide a form of much-needed relief (from, respectively, ‘nervous energy’ and repressed emotions). Bergson was unconvinced by these accounts. He believed that the problem of laughter deserved more than a few well-worded digressions. Although his theory retained elements of the incongruity and superiority theories of humour, it also opened entirely new perspectives on the problem…
… Why did a philosopher of such renown deviate from his more traditional and serious philosophical obsessions – the nature of time, memory, perception, free will and the mind-body problem – to focus on the apparently frivolous case-studies of slapstick, vaudeville and word play? And what was there to be gained from such analysis? The topic was a ticklish one. Laughter, wrote Bergson, had ‘a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation’. It was almost as though there was something unnatural about subjecting one of the most pleasurable and ubiquitous human experiences to dry philosophical speculation…
… He believed that laughter should be studied as ‘a living thing’ and treated ‘with the respect due to life’. His investigation was therefore more like that of a field zoologist observing frogs in the wild:
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition … We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.
Like all good metaphorical field zoologists, Bergson started his study by familiarising himself with his metaphorical frog’s natural habitat: in other words, the conditions under which laughter is most likely to appear and thrive. Following this method, Bergson arrived at three general observations.
The first one, according to Bergson, was so ‘important’ and ‘simple’ that he was surprised it hadn’t attracted more attention from philosophers: ‘The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.’ When Bergson wrote these words, he couldn’t have foreseen that, a century later, through the power of the internet, one of the most popular forms of comedy would be provided by our own pets in the form of viral videos, memes and gifs. But, in a way, he anticipated it in what he wrote about laughter directed at non-humans:
You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression…
… Bergson’s second observation might appear counterintuitive to anyone who has been reduced to tears by a fit of uncontrollable giggles: ‘Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.’ But his point was that certain emotional states – pity, melancholy, rage, fear, etc – make it difficult for us to find the humour in things we might otherwise have laughed at (even anthropomorphic vegetables). We instinctively know that there are situations in which it is best to refrain from laughing. Those who choose to ignore these unspoken rules are immediately sanctioned…
… This is not to say that it’s impossible to laugh in times of hardship. In many cases, humour appears to serve as a coping mechanism in the face of tragedy or misfortune. In 1999, as he was being carried out of his house on a stretcher after a crazed fan stabbed him, the former Beatle George Harrison asked a newly hired employee: ‘So what do you think of the job so far?’ On his death bed, Voltaire allegedly told a priest who was exhorting him to renounce Satan: ‘This is no time for making new enemies.’ Following Bergson’s logic, perhaps in some cases humour is cathartic precisely because it forces us to look at things from a detached perspective.
Finally, laughter ‘appears to stand in need of an echo’, according to Bergson. Evolutionary theorists have hypothesised about the adaptive value of laughter, in particular in the context of social bonding. Laughter might have emerged as a prelinguistic signal of safety or belonging within a group. Laughter and humour continue to play an important role in our various social groups. Most countries, regions and cities share a wide repertoire of jokes at the expense of their neighbours. For example, this Belgian dig at my compatriots, the French: ‘After God created France, he thought it was the most beautiful country in the world. People were going to get jealous, so to make things fair he decided to create the French.’
Jokes need not be nationalistic or even derogatory in nature to facilitate social bonding. Most friends share ‘in-jokes’ that are meant to be understood only within the context of their particular social group, as do certain communities brought together by a football team, political opinions or shared specialist knowledge (‘Why are obtuse angles so depressed? Because they’re never right’). Our laughter ‘is always the laughter of a group’, as Bergson put it. Even in those cases when we are effectively laughing alone, to, or perhaps at ourselves, laughter always presupposes an imagined audience or community.
Bergson’s observations tell us where to find laughter, under which conditions it is possible for laughter to emerge, but they don’t tell us why we laugh. They do nonetheless provide us with important clues. It is no accident that we laugh exclusively at other humans, and that laughter is a communal experience: its purpose, or ‘function’, wrote Bergson, is social. In addition, it isn’t by chance that laughter requires a temporary shutdown of our emotions: though pleasurable, laughter is above all punitive. But what, or whom, is laughter punishing, and how does it do that?
Read on to find out how Bergson reached his conclusion that laughter solves a serious human conundrum– how to keep our minds and social lives elastic: “Laughter Is Vital,” from @emilyherring.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
For those finding it difficult to laugh in these troubled times, see this piece on the pessimisitic Schopenhauer‘s conoisseurship of very distinctive kinds of happiness: “The semi-satisfied life.”
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As we chortle, we might send smiling birthday greetings to Ramón Valdés; he was born on this date in 1924. An actor and comedian, he is best known for the character he made iconic: “Don Ramón” in El Chavo del Ocho, a hugely-successful Mexican sitcom that aired for 8 seasons (31 episodes) across Latin America and in Spain.
“Not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half”*…
Further to an earlier post about the latest installment of an age old debate– the “dialogue” on free will vs. Determinism between Robert Sapolsky (determinist) and Kevin Mitchell (champion of free will)– the (remarkable) George Scialabba weighs in…
In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.
Why so momentous? Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?
For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?…
[Scialabba succinctly explicates Sapolsky’s and Mitchell’s (each, estimable) arguments…]
… But are beliefs about free will really the point here? Judges, whether or not they believe in free will, should take more cognizance of mitigating circumstances than they do now. A baby damaged by prenatal cocaine exposure who grows up to be an addict and petty thief deserves mercy; a billionaire whose tax evasion robs his fellow citizens of tens of millions of dollars deserves none. But no philosophical convictions are needed to arrive at these conclusions, only humanity and good sense.
And whether or not we have free will, isn’t punishment also justified as deterrence? Surely, the prospect of a long stretch in prison (or quarantine) would give pause to at least some murderers, rapists, and persons scheming to overturn a fair presidential election? And beyond that, punishment serves as a public affirmation of the values of a family or society. We are embodied beings: Values cannot only be preached; they must sometimes be enforced.
At a certain point, one may ask, what is really at stake in this debate? Sapolsky appears to harbor no metaphysical designs on readers; he spins his intricate, ingenious causal webs only, in the end, to enlarge our sympathy for life’s failures. Mitchell does seem to have a humanity-affirming philosophical agenda. “You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent,” he often reminds the reader, implying that these are things a scientific materialist must, in strict logic, deny. But I strongly doubt that any scientific materialist anywhere in the multiverse would deny that she can take action, make decisions, or be a causal force, or that she is an agent, or does things for reasons. She might, though, think that all her choices are caused, which, Sapolsky would say, is perfectly compatible with taking actions, making decisions, being a causal force, or acting for reasons. Elsewhere, Mitchell warns readers not to believe anyone (presumably the insidious scientific materialist) who suggests that we are merely “a collection of atoms pushed around by the laws of physics.” To which our scientific materialist might reply that we are indeed very highly organized collections of atoms, molecules, nerves, muscles, and hundreds of other components, pushed and pulled by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics, along with intimations from philosophy, history, and art, and constantly adjusting to and modifying those influences from a center that is provisionally but not permanently stable. This, she would say, is how one can be an agent without free will.
With what I hope is due deference, I humbly disagree with both Sapolsky and Mitchell, and even with my deeply revered William James. Perhaps the question of free will is not so momentous. Philosophers have been debating about it for thousands of years, Mitchell observes. “That these debates continue today with unabated fervor tells you that they have not yet resolved the issue.” Indeed, they haven’t. Perhaps they should take a break. Perhaps it is a controversy without consequences. Perhaps whether we are free or fated, morality and politics, science and medicine, art and literature will all go their merry or melancholy ways, unaffected.
Notwithstanding Sapolsky’s hopes and Mitchell’s fears, whatever we decide about free will, the world—even the moral world—will look the same afterward as before. This, along with our millennia-long failure to make appreciable, or any, progress toward an answer, suggests that we are in the presence of a pseudoproblem. James himself, in “The Will to Believe,” written a dozen years after he defended free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” conceded that “free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” The moral and political worlds run—to the extent they run at all—on generosity and imagination, mother wit and sympathetic understanding. These can answer all our questions about moral responsibility and moral obligation without our having to solve the insoluble conundrums of free will.
A new round in an old debate: “Free at Last?,” from @hedgehogreview.
* Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
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As we wrestle with responsibility, we might spare a thought for Henri-Louis Bergson; he died on this date in 1941. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding of reality…. many, but not Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, nor Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result, in philosophical circles, of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic, and in the religious and spiritualist studies communities, of Bergson’s seeming embrace of the concept of an overriding/underlying consciousness in which humans participate.
Indeed, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson’s doctoral thesis, first published in 1889, dealt explicitly with the question we’re considering, which Bergson argued is merely a common confusion among philosophers caused by an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended– the introduction of his theory of duration.
“I’ve not never heard of that”*…
This website [is] devoted to the speech of one of the country’s most interesting but most often misunderstood regions—southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia. Some have romanticized the English spoken there as the language of Shakespeare and admired its authenticity and inventiveness. Others have scorned or dismissed it as uneducated, bad grammar, or worse. Too rarely has it been appreciated for what it is—the native speech of millions of Americans that has a distinguished history and that makes Appalachia what it is just as the region’s extraordinary music does.
Appalachian English is an umbrella term referring to the social and geographical varieties found in a large mountain and valley region encompassing all or parts of eight southern states: West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, and northwestern South Carolina. Historically and structurally it is closely related to Ozark English, and it shares many features with varieties of English spoken in the Deep South.
At this site you’ll find a wealth of information and resources. There’s enjoyment to be had in exploring, but if you’re looking for a site that’s just for entertainment or one with funny spellings, you’ve come to the wrong place. Too many of them are around already. As two natives of East Tennessee who have heard hill speech for a long time and have written about it, we have designed this site to present not only how Aplapachian people talk, but also some of the history and the flavor of that talk. It focuses especially on the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, but the speech of the Smokies is typical of much of what you’ll hear elsewhere in the region, though not as strongly as a couple of generations back.
At a professional conference some years ago, one of us on our bus tour happened to sit next to a linguist from the University of California (who is now at an Ivy League school). He asked me what my special interest was, and I said, “Appalachian English.” He responded, “Oh, Appalachian English is one of my favorite dialects. Does anyone still speak it?” The question sort of took me aback, but I looked at him for a moment and replied, “Yes, I’d say about twenty million people do.” He seemed a bit confused, so I explained that plenty of people from the region actually choose to talk the way they do and that their distinctive English is probably here to stay. Their speech helps define who they are, whether they live in Kentucky or have moved to Detroit to work in a plant. He looked out the window…
Explore Appalachian English— and be sure to take the vocabulary quiz.
* an exemplary Appalachian English sentence
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As we head for the hills, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri Bergson; he was born on this date in 1859. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding reality…. many, but not the likes of Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, and Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic.
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