joyful science

The Joyful Science

Is there philosophical humour? We could probably do with it,

philosophy being as it is so demoralizing and hard. What passes for

humour in philosophy these days, however, is the feeble pun, or a

cutesiness that reaches its nadir in Jerry Fodor.

There have been funny philosophers: Hobbes and Hume on occasion,

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard more consistently, Russell, Austin, the

sometimes nasty humour of Plato's Socrates and Peter Geach, and the

lighter charms of Gerry Cohen, whose autobiographical book on

egalitarianism is one of the enduringly valuable comic-political works

of all time. Also, the collection of Proofs that P, and the

Philosophical Lexicon.

But these are trivia, and my question was of course quite seriously

meant. According to legend, Wittgenstein once said that a serious and

good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely

of jokes. His own work provides few compelling examples. From

Philosophical Investigations:

It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I

know I am in pain.

This is unlikely to have them rolling in the aisles. But I like his

question, also in the Investigations, "why do we feel a grammatical

joke to be deep?"

I once invented a joke of the kind Wittgenstein apparently approves,

but it unfortunately depends on verbal presentation.

Q: (pointing) What's that?

A: A demonstrative pronoun.

Even presented verbally, I'm afraid, the joke is very bad. But it has

a philosophical moral, albeit it a boring one, about the confusion of

use and mention.

No doubt Wittgenstein had bigger fish to fry. His "grammatical jokes"

were meant to expose confusions deeper than the one I found, to drag

us spluttering but smiling from the seas of language in which we are

otherwise likely to drown. I am tempted to understand Wittgenstein's

attitude in relation to this aphorism by Mary Douglas (from her

anthroplogical essay, "Jokes"):

A joke is a play upon form that affords an opportunity for

realising that an accepted pattern has no necessity.

This goes along with a family of readings that make Wittgenstein some

sort of conventionalist: one who accepts the contingency, or at least

the arbitrariness of "grammar". It is a topic I would like to think

more about; I don't know how to read Wittgenstein on necessity. But at

least this seems true: it is distinctive of Wittgenstein to resist a

metaphysical conception of necessity, the kind of conception on which

a necessary truth must flow from, and be explained by, what it is to

be one thing or another.

Without that conception, the constructive project of philosophy - that

of deriving necessities from the natures of things (analysis in a

newly metaphysical guise) - is bound to lapse. That would make some

sense of Wittgenstein's therapeutic and anti-theoretical approach.

A hard question: how to adjudicate the matter, even if we can be clear

about it?

I won't begin to do that here, returning instead to my principal

topic: philosophical humour. Does it have a non-trivial, but

non-Wittgensteinian form? I suppose there is always the absurd

example, the joke that brings out the necessity of what is necessary,

not the space for an alternative. But while this is not as bad as the

pun, or Jerry Fodor, it is pretty drab all the same. I am afraid the