Philosophy as Comedy
Plato wrote in a letter:
‘I suppose there is nothing which, when heard by the world, sounds more ridiculous than these proposals, while to those who are properly gifted by nature, there is nothing which seems more wonderful, and full of inspiration’ (Plato 1963 p.1567; 314 a)
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He thereby codified a suspicion - frequently raised by philosophers; That the general public would simply not understand their work - and would ridicule it. Plato had, of course good reason to suppose this. Socrates had been effectively ridiculed by Aristophanes, as a sophist, atheist and shirt thief; able to convince anyone that right was wrong (Aristophanes 1973 p.152-159; 904-1131). This ‘smear’ was so effective (in spite of the fact that the play in which Aristophanes did this - ‘The Clouds’ was a flop), that Plato’s Socrates# felt it necessary, twenty years later, and on trial for his life, to answer it, in preference to answering the specific accusations made against him (Plato 1963 p.5 19b-20). Humour could hurt philosophy and Plato knew it. And yet things are never quite so simple. Not only did Plato allegedly keep a copy of The Clouds by his bed, and recommend it to others to read, but also comedy had a very important role within his dialogues. Socrates’ irony, and absurd stories (whose absurdity Plato draws attention to, by having Socrates apologise for it (Plato 1963 p.459; 415a-c) are an integral part of the dialogues. Both Socrates and those he torments are open to some sort of ridicule. What really differentiates the two is their responses to it. Socrates’ opponents invariably go silent, leaving Socrates to finish the argument by himself (Plato 1963 p.288; 505 and p.1; 27a), whilst Socrates is prepared to stop, and start again (Plato 1963 p.14, 368). Humour is not something external to philosophy therefore, but something which philosophy can use for its own purposes. Both macro-purposes concerning how a new philosophy establishes itself within existing traditions, and micro-purposes, that treat humour as one of the ways through which philosophy is thought.
However, before one can examine these purposes, one first has to clarify exactly what humour might be. This is of course a very complex question, and one far beyond the scope of this paper. All I can attempt to do here is to outline one particular theory of humour, that of Bergson (Bergson 1999) - and show why it might matter to the way we do Philosophy. Bergson suggests that laughter arises when we see someone or something that is living, behaving as if it were a simple mechanical object. These mechanisations of the living can occur at two levels. Firstly there are those that are purely physical, such as a facial expression or mannerism that is frozen or exaggerated. Secondly there are those that Bergson suggests involve a rigidity of thought. Cervantes’ Don Quixote (or Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland# ) read tales and novels so much that their minds are warped by them. They seek to mould things to their pre-existing fantasies, rather than letting their minds respond to given circumstances. Don Quixote mistakes windmills for giants, Catherine Morland (in ‘Northanger Abbey’) mistakes a list of dirty laundry for a message from some tragic dead heroine.
In all these kind of cases Bergson suggests the audience or witnesses end up being able to predict a person’s behaviour in a way that we would not normally be able to do. A person becomes like a marionette of which ‘we get hold of some of the strings ...and actually work them ourselves (ibid p.20).
However, when Bergson turns to consider the social role of comedy, a tension in his interpretation is revealed. On the one hand, Bergson suggests a functionalist reading of comedy, as any society involves a ‘very delicate adjustment of wills’, which in turn involves a ‘constant striving after reciprocal adaption’. Hence failure to adapt is potentially socially dangerous. Laughter, and the threat of ridicule, are the means to ensure this continued mutual co-adaption. Eccentric behaviour, behaviour that will not adapt, is isolated, ridiculed, and thereby undermined, so that society can reassert its collective identity (ibid p.23 and 150-153). Comedy will always deal with appearances and surface phenomena - and never deeper phenomena. It has nothing to do with the individual as such, indeed Bergson will go so far as to suggest that comedy exists within a suspension of normal feelings. Comedy only has to deal with specific individualisation, which it seeks to undermine, in order to reassert general identity. On the other hand, Bergson freely confesses that many of society’s traditions are in themselves ludicrous.To be eccentric might not mean that one somehow lacked the ability to think organically, but rather that one had it too much - i.e. just thought in a different way, and according to a different tradition. Each of the traditions finds the other ridiculous - and a third party might well laugh at the pair of them. For example, all through Aristophanes’ The Clouds, both tradition and Socratian thought are ridiculed. Hence the peasant character Strepsiades in laughed at for believing that rain was caused by Zeus pissing into a colander; but then Socrates is laughed at for arguing that thunder is caused by clouds whirling about, and colliding. Later on in the play, the tradition (in the form of the ‘Right Argument’) is revealed as a lecherous fool - while the new thinking (or ‘Wrong Argument’) is a “smart alec” full of ludicrous verbal tricks. Each seeks to ridicule the other, and thereby opens themselves up to ridicule.
What makes things humorous in this conflict is not just the conventional ‘displaced aggression’ - but that it also involves a battle between different ontologies. The aim of each side is to ‘comprehend’ the other - and thereby show it as merely a ‘mechanical’ product of forces that their own tradition understands and encompasses. So Aristophanes presents Socrates as a liar, a thief and an atheist, whilst Plato portrays Aristophanes (Plato 1963 p.543; 190a-e) as a slyly egotistical buffoon, who is incapable of abstract argument, and wants to confuse love with sex, and reduce both to the bizarrest of fables. Each seeks to comprehend the other within their tradition - and thereby reduce the other to a caricature of themselves. Humour is not, as Bergson would have it, the revenge an outraged society enacts on the odd, but rather, implies a society that is a battle ground of differing interpretations. All of which use humour in their mutual aggressive comprehensions of each other.
Philosophy, in one sense at least, is bound up with humour. In that - from its outset it is the subject that sees its role as revealing the absurdity in other’s arguments. One might be tempted to go even further and say that there is a sense in which philosophies are defined by exactly what they find ludicrous, be that Atheism, God, metaphysics, Zeno’s paradoxes, predestination... Part of the job of a philosopher is to uncover new ludicrousnessess - and thereby render ‘common sense explanations’ ridiculous. Perhaps one might so as far as to say philosophy books are some of the longest, and most involved jokes in the world. These ‘jokes’ then have the fascinating twist that the butt of the joke are not individuals but ways of thinking - and therefore may, in some sense or other, include many of the readers of the book, readers who may or may not realise that it is their way of thinking that is being sent up. The effect of these ‘jokes’ will be very convoluted. Some readers taking up all the joke - others none, and yet others will take up only parts, which they will try to assume within new different jokes. Philosophy is frequently not content with finding things wrong (as a mathematician might), so much as silly.
Plato’s Socrates is therefore the arch philosopher. He responds to arguments he does not like with two very interrelated comic strategies, namely irony and absurdity. Both strategies involve the same basic methodology. The victim is forced, through a string of questions (sometimes unrelated), to uphold a view that it clearly wrong (and which Socrates will then mock). For example in his trial, Socrates makes Meletus confess firstly that wicked people have a bad effect; And also that people always desire to do what is good for them; and finally that Socrates has intentionally corrupted others. Which allows Socrates to reply -
‘Why Meletus, are you at your age so much wiser than I at mine? You have discovered that bad people always have a bad effect, and Good people a good effect...Am I so hopelessly ignorant as not even to realise that by spoiling the character of one of my companions, I shall run the risk of getting some harm from him?’ (ibid. p.12; 25 d-e).
While at another point in the text he mocks the absurdity of Meletus’ suggestion (again forced under constant questioning) that all the members of the assembly jointly have a good effect on the young - and that Socrates alone has a bad one. The absurdity of which leads Socrates to conclude that Meletus clearly ‘never has bothered his head about the young’.
Behind both of these strategies is the same basic one - that Socrates is showing, through humour, that his opponent’s arguments are simplistic, and mechanistic. Meletus has not really thought through the question of ‘what does or does not help the young’. All he has done (as Don Quixote or Catherine Morland might in his situation) is thoughtlessly and mechanistically apply tradition. He cannot prove what he says, or even demonstrate it - it is revealed as a mere automatic application of traditional thought, and therefore is exposed to the full force of Socrates’ irony.
Through using humour in this manner, philosophers are effectively able to ‘invent’ traditions/schools. The Sophists movement no doubt did exist - but it is clear from the dialogues that individual sophists argued from quite distinct perspectives. Thrasymachus and Polus argue that justice is the will of the powerful, while Gorgias and Protogoras believe that justice and morality do matter (but differ in exactly the way that they view them (ibid p.588 338e , p.249 466e, p.242 460a and p.325 330 respectively). What really unites Plato’s sophists is the fact that Socrates uses the same strategy on each and every one of them - by which he renders them ludicrous. The methodology of uniting one’s rivals through humour or satire resurfaces again and again in philosophy, For example, Kant’s category of ‘rationalist philosophers’ (which includes philosophers who say radically different things) are defined by their collective acceptance of Anselm’s ‘ontological’ proof of God’s existence. Rationalist philosophers are, says Kant, the kind of thinkers who think that thinking God makes God exist, as if thinking one thousand Thalers, somehow made one thousand Thalers actually exist! A tradition is defined then, by its opponents, through humour - and through the fact that even differing proponents within it can be made to appear ludicrous in exactly the same way.
However, philosophers by no means have it all their own way. There is absolutely no reason that rival traditions cannot respond in kind - and attempt to play exactly the same game on philosophy, and thereby unite different ways of thinking, under the same ‘they’re all ludicrous’ bracket. Hence Aristophanes’ Socrates is a sophist, who is obsessed with natural philosophy (and the distance a flea can jump), rather than the Socrates of Plato or Xenophon, who rejects this as mere speculation# . What unites Socrates and the Sophists for Aristophanes, is that there can be no theoretical limit to what is questioned (and the kind of imaginative answers produced). On the one hand one can replace Zeus with a swirl of clouds, on the other, argue convincingly that it is right for children to hit their parents. Aristophanes thereby reduces Sophistry and Philosophy to the same absurdity - accept this, and accept cultural and linguistic anarchy, which for him, and his audience was clearly an absurdity. The only answer to which, (for Aristophanes) is to follow The Clouds’ anti-hero Streppeides, and burn Socrates’ house down, in revenge for the outraged Gods.
In consequence, Plato’s caution about writing, and his concern that others might get hold of his doctrines and laugh at them. Plato knows that laughter matters. That Philosophy has managed to define itself off from both traditional thought, and its rivals through a paradigm of laughter, and that this paradigm has to be maintained at all costs. If his infant philosophy becomes the butt of another Aristophanes, then it will easily lose its power. It will become in the public mind just another crazy sect, and he just another Sophist. Plato, then, had very good reason to want to shelter his philosophy from laughter. But, in Plato comedy has another role to play. In brief it allows, I think, Plato to outline two different. and yet important perspectives.The first, I will call Socrate’s Problem, the second Plato’s Solution. Although it must be stressed at this point that these perspectives do not directly relate to each other - only to two different ways that Plato wishes to use humour.
Socrates’ problem is that he intuitively grasps more than he can actually formally prove (Huby 1998 p.17). Plato makes this fact quite explicit in the text, both in a very direct manner, and as a consequence of the argument. On the one hand Socrates has his daemon, which intervenes in his life, as a voice from outside, and compels him to stop whatever he is doing - and do something else (Plato 1963 p.17; 31d). On the other, faced with an argument he feels he knows, and which others accept (for instance that things act for their own good - ibid p.363; 523a-524), but cannot prove, Socrates invariably invents a myth to support his case (for example, in the ‘The Republic’ the myth of metals, and the story of the cave, in ‘Phaedrus’ the story of the fall - ibid p.747; 514a-b and 499 253d-257c). But Plato clearly shows that Socrates is very aware of the limits of this type of argument. He is either unwilling to tell his stories, as with the myth of metals (which he explicitly refers to as a noble lie - ibid. p.650 414e), or he only tells them when forced, either by his companion or by his inner conscience (ibid p.489 242a-d). Alternatively, he makes sure that he is merely retelling a story that he himself was once told (ibid. p.553 201a). Which simply leads one to the question - if Plato knows that one cannot argue using mythological thought - then why attempt to use it at all?
Myths by themselves then, are no answer to Socrates’ intuitive dilemma. Indeed in a sense they compound it by making it more obvious. It is his use of comedy that proves the key. For, in exactly the same way that comedy can be used to reveal the errors in other’s thinking, it can also be used to assess one’s own. Either directly, as when, Parmenides shows Socrates, that the theory of forms implies that Gods know nothing of humans#. Or, the stories (or extrapolations) that arise from an idea, can involve ludicrous consequences. For example in ‘The Republic’, Socrates’ first simple state is mocked as being a city of pigs, not people. Comedy can therefore function as a test - if an intuitively grasped idea cannot, in some sense, be translated into other ideas, without becoming ludicrous or ‘mechanical’ - then it cannot be right.
There is, however, another way in which an intuitive idea can be grasped. Read on the page, many of Socrates’ stories are frequently just as ludicrous as the tale which Plato has Aristophanes tell, in ‘The Symposium’. There Aristophanes suggests the wonderfully ludicrous idea, that people were originally circular (and composed of what is now two individuals) and could move by rolling over and over. - Which is not so very more far-fetched than Socrates’ suggestion that all human souls were originally winged charioteers, one of whose horses was noble, and the other of which was a hotpotch of different horse parts assembled anyhow. When one falls in love, one’s soul, Socrates suggests, is a fledging, and that to love, is to regrow one’s lost wings (ibid p.499; 253 d-e). What makes Socrates’ story not just another silly myth is the intuitive idea behind it. It is this idea that takes the potentially mechanistic myth and makes it live, in effect transforms it from mere comedy into philosophy. Myth is therefore a testing ground for philosophy, and comedy. If the story remains merely a silly tale, told by a buffoon, then the idea is of no value. But if the idea is strong enough to make the myth live - to render its potential comic elements real and living - then the idea is thereby proved to have some validity. Socrates’ use of myth is in a sense an opposite to Kierkegaarde’s conception of faith. One does not believe because it is ridiculous, rather the intuitive idea itself is powerful enough to transform the ludicrous into the valuable. As Nietzsche noted, Socrates is a buffoon who got taken seriously (Nietzsche 1990 p.41). But, as Nietzsche would not add, that is the point. He tests an idea by off setting it against a joke. If the idea cannot animate it, if the story remains ludicrous, then the idea is no good. But if it breathes life into the ludicrous (the body), and makes it live - then he feels the idea is justified. Socrates then is a buffoon, who deliberately transforms the funny into the serious, in order to prove the value of the serious. No wonder then Plato feared writing, and worried about the comic. For, as he knew too well, it would be easy to transform Socrates back into a buffoon, and ignore his serious side.
However for Plato the writer, comedy offers a solution to quite another problem. In his seventh letter, he claims there are three instruments by which knowledge is imparted (name, definition, and image), as well as the knowledge itself, and finally the thing itself as distinct from any of the rest. Knowledge, and its three instruments will never present one with the essence itself, merely with its qualities. This he suggests leads to great puzzlement and perplexity. Moreover if one does not realise that the problem is a genuine problem in the way that one learns, then one is exposed to the ridicule of unkind critics. The true way to investigate things is to bring the three instruments of knowledge into friction with one another, in the course of ‘scrutiny and kindly questioning’, until the truth is realised in a blinding flash (ibid p.1591 344b). Plato claims that the problem is made more complex by the role of language. Language is not, he suggests, subtle enough to describe what a thing is really like. Language can effectively create chimerical things. For example, one can very easily convince oneself that a thing called pleasure could exist in its own right - and forget that Pleasure, by itself cannot exist save in a state of flux (or becoming displeasure#). It can make no sense, therefore to describe it as a thing - which could, in its own right be the root of virtue. The role of philosophy is therefore to uncover what really (if anything - for example, the Form), can exist in its own right, and what is merely an illusion arising from the way in which we label things.
The dialogues are constructed therefore to, through comedy, to show us the inherent ridiculousness of simply trusting language. Plato attempts to show this in various ways. Firstly he can argue this case very directly, by showing that those who do simply trust in words cannot defend themselves against Socrates’ methodology of forcing them to defend a clearly indefensible argument. For example in ‘Gorgias’, both Polus and Calliclies understand very well that Socrates cheats in arguments and that he transforms his opponents quite strong arguments into far weaker ones. They say as much - and yet both then fall for exactly this same ruse. Plato effectively demonstrates, through the ludicrousness of this situation, the problems that those who do not use language correctly face. Because they do not use words correctly, their strong arguments, can be metamorphosed into weak (and quite different) ones, without them being able to do any thing about it. (Ibid p.265 482 c)
Various other methods are used in the dialogue by Plato, to ensure that language does not take itself too seriously. He will sometimes ensure that the circumstances to which the dialogue refers are ridiculous; - for example the reversal of the normal relation of seducer to seduced in ‘The Symposium’, where the beautiful Alcibiadies tries to seduce the ugly Socrates (ibid. p.564 218 a-e, see also Foucault 1988 p.241). Or again in ‘Phaedrus’ where Socrates’ first speech is told by a hypothetical lover trying to seduce a boy, by pretending he does not love him, and making a speech against love itself. Alternatively, he deliberately constructs continuity errors between dialogues. For example Parmendies is set many years before ‘The Republic’, and yet Parmendies refutes the theory of forms, which is one of the central ideas of ‘The Republic’. Leaving the Socrates of the Republic to look like an enthusiastic fool, who forgot his earlier lesson.The effect is deliberately designed to unsettle, and bewilder - to remind one time and time again of the ludicrousness of taking words - even words offered by Socrates, at face value. The point of philosophy must be to make all language suspect.
Perhaps however, Plato’s use of comedy goes even further than this. It one takes what he says in letter seven seriously, it is clear that he believes that no ideas are simple (in spite of ‘The Republic’). Ideas involve the mind in a perpetual negotiation and change - as one endlessly thinks about that which is - and constructs new (and sometimes conflicting) views about it. Comedy, by which I mean the ability of an idea first to ‘mechanise’ another idea, and then be mechanised in its turn, could be said to be a very important part of this process. On the one hand it offers a methodology for transformation. Ideas make other ideas amusing (and thereby supersede them). On the other it forces us to consider the problematic nature of ideas. An idea can be deeply held and yet in the course of the argument, these views can be questioned, and made at certain times to appear ridiculous. Plato’s dialectic is a comedy of ideas, where simplistic ideas are endlessly being replaced (through comedy) by other (not necessarily more advanced) ideas, and the reader is left in a whirl of comedy, and only partial certainty. A whirl, from which no doubt, Plato thinks his actual philosophy - ‘seen at a glance and all at once’ (ibid p.1591; 344b), offers the solution.
Philosophy has therefore an intimate (and often tortured) relationship with comedy. On one side Philosophy, as a discipline is one that peculiarly needs the ridiculous to justify its existence. A philosopher is someone who explains how the ludicrous happens, and why the comic persists. And who, if they lack ridiculous topics, needs to invent new ones. But comedy is also a methodology for dealing with the inadequacy of ideas to understand the world. The truth is not pure and simple for the philosopher. Comedy is what allows one to highlight this uncertainty, and presents a methodology for replacing one idea with another. So that, in one sense at least, a philosopher, whether it is Nietzsche, or his bugbear Socrates, can say, all they have ever written are bad jokes. But this series of bad jokes, then allows us to stop simplistically accepting one view point, one unsupportable argument, and becoming a bad joke ourselves.
Bibliography;
Aristophanes, trans. & with an introduction by Alan H. Sommerstein Lysistrata/The Acharnians/The Clouds London: Penguin 1973
Bergson, Henri 1919. Laughter An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic trans. by Cloudesley Brereton Fred Rothwell, Los Angeles: Green Integer 1999
Foucault, Michel 1984. trans. Robert Hurley The Use of Pleasure - The History of Sexuality Vol.2 London: Penguin 1988
Huby, Pamela 1967. Greek Ethics Bristol: Thoemmes Press 1998
Neitzsche, Friedrich 1889. trans.Twilight of the Idols London: Penguin 1990
Plato, 1961. Edited by & with introductory notes by, Edith Hamilton & Huntingdon Cairns, (trans. Lane Cooper, F.M.Cornford & others) The Collected Dialogues of Plato (including the Letters) Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980