Abstract
An 1814 entry in Schopenhauer’s early manuscripts states that “to a certain extent the greatest problems lying quite close to us are laughing, crying, and music.” To show the importance of laughter in Schopenhauer’s thought, this essay develops his notebook entry by considering how his accounts of laughter, crying, and music inform his views on the human condition. Schopenhauer’s account of laughter as the upshot of perceiving an incongruity between our general conception of a thing or event and the actual perceptual qualities of the thing or event to which the concept refers is integrated with (a) his analysis of crying as essentially the expression self-pity and (b) his assertion of music’s essential seriousness. “Humor” – a species of laughter that recognizes the “seriousness concealed behind a joke” – is shown to apply to the incongruity between the respective interpretations of life as a tragedy and as a comedy to yield an overall conception of the human condition as akin to a theatrical farce, where genuine heroism is impossible and where pity is the appropriate sentiment. Nietzschean laughter is introduced for contrast: Nietzsche’s is a triumphant laughter expressive of his success in the fierce struggle to overcome his deep pity for the human condition.
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- 1.
The word “weeping” [Weinen] in the published translation has here been replaced with “crying.”
- 2.
An example would be Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (1917) which playfully mimics the style of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).
- 3.
Schopenhauer presents his account of laughter initially in §13 of The World as Will and Representation, Volume I (1818), and develops it in the second volume of the second edition (1844) in chapter VIII, “Zur Theorie des Lächerlichen.” The chapter title in the second volume can be translated as “on (or towards) the theory of what is laughable.” The essay will sometimes refer to Schopenhauer’s “theory of laughter” for expository smoothness, but this should be understood more precisely as Schopenhauer’s “theory of what is laughable.”
- 4.
See Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).
- 5.
It is worth noting that Richard Burdon Haldane (1856–1928) had an illustrious career in politics, serving in the United Kingdom as the Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912, and as Lord Chancellor between 1912 and 1915, and again in 1924. He studied philosophy with Herman Lotze in 1874 at the University of Göttingen, which was the university Schopenhauer first attended. Haldane’s translation of Schopenhauer (with J. Kemp) (Schopenhauer 1909a,b,c) appeared when he was 27 years old. Elizabeth Haldane (1862–1937), well-known for her translation of Descartes’s philosophical works (1911) and Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy (1892–96), was Richard Haldane’s sister.
- 6.
Peter Lewis proposes that we define the scope of Schopenhauer’s theory of laughter as covering all and only “intentional laughter,” viz., “laughter directed at some object” (Lewis 2005). This effectively excludes cases of physiologically induced laughter as well as psychologically-grounded hysterical, embarrassed, and nervous laughter, since none involve laughing “at’ anything. Referring to Schopenhauer’s theory as a theory of funniness in the “ha-ha” sense of the word, as here suggested, intends to be compatible with Lewis’s proposal.
- 7.
It is not that the very incongruity between concepts (as universals) and perceptions (as individuals) is itself funny, as some have claimed (Leite 2015). If that were the case, since we are always applying concepts to perceptions, life would be far more funny than it actually is.
- 8.
This passage closely reiterates a notebook entry from 1814 (Schopenhauer 1988a, 210–211), written at the same time as his entry that associates laughter, crying, and music with which we began.
- 9.
Peter Lewis states that “the role of laughter in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision of the world” is “admittedly…only a minor theme in Schopenhauer’s work” (Lewis 2005, 36).
- 10.
See Winckelmann’s “Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1755).
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Wicks, R. (2018). Arthur Schopenhauer: Humor and the Pitiable Human Condition. In: Moland, L. (eds) All Too Human. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91331-5_6
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