MA Philosophy
Master’s Thesis
So As Not To Cry: Laughter in
Nietzsche, Bergson, and Beckett
Abstract
This paper shall attempt to bring select theories of laughter into a position relevant to contemporary works. Chapter one is a description of Bergson’s theory of laughter. As Bergson’s is a fully formed structure, it will act as the framework of a laughter theory with which the rest of the paper shall continue to utilise. From the analysis of Bergson’s laughter being a socially coercive theory, a Nietzschean view of social coercion is described in chapter two. This is then paired with Nietzsche’s own views on a form of laughter that contrasts with Bergson’s. Nietzsche claims this laughter is a signifier of the greatness man is capable of. Finally, with both Bergson and Nietzsche’s response in mind, the theories of laughter will be contextualised with a postmodern usage of humour. This is done by comparing Nietzsche’s higher laughter with the humour present in Beckett’s works and then juxtaposed with later trends of postmodernity, as critiqued by Wallace in the late 90s. The paper argues that Nietzsche’s hopes for humanity’s propensity for greatness are still valuable and have a distinct relevance to the way in which we consume comic material in the 21st century. Keywords: Bergson, Nietzsche, Beckett, Wallace, Laughter, Comedy, Humour, Postmodernism
Table of Contents
Abstract...1
Introduction...3
Chapter 1 – Bergson’s Theory of Laughter...5
A Brief History of Humour...5
Oh, the Humanity!...7
Elastic People...9
The Three Forms of Laughter...11
The Laughter Finishing School...13
Chapter 2 – Nietzsche’s Two Forms of Laughter...17
Bergson’s Laughter As Nietzsche’s Tyranny...17
Laugh Übermensch, Laugh!...20
Laughing in a Loop – The Eternal Return...22
Amoral Humour...26
Tragic and Comic Wisdom...29
Chapter 3 – What This All Really Means...33
Nietzsche, the Postmodernist...33
Beckett, the Postmodernist...35
Beckett’s Tragic Laughter...38
The Postmodern Irony Problem...41
It’s Not All Doom and Gloom...44
Concluding Remarks...46
Introduction
Laughter permeates all. There is no human culture ever recorded that was without laughter. For this reason, a philosophical study of what makes us laugh is not indulgent but necessary. It is a thread as dominant in the fabric of society as power and suffering, both common topics in the works of many philosophers. In this thesis I wish to bring theories of laughter back into a light of contemporary relevance. The work of Bergson is interpreted through a Nietzschean lens and finally put to test amongst the milieu of postmodernity. My reason for doing this is that I believe in Nietzsche’s work there is a fascinating insight into the nature of laughter as a signifier of man’s potential. Nietzsche’s primary occupation concerned what humanity should do, when all possible direction is lost from the world. Pitted against postmodernity’s lacklustre smirk in the face of success, Nietzsche’s insight remains relevant and pertinent.
To understand Nietzsche’s thoughts on laughter, they must first be put in the context of the common theories that purvey philosophies of humour. For this reason, the works of Bergson populate the first chapter. Bergson’s insight into the mechanical nature of laughter, as a response to common human situations frames how radical Nietzsche’s theory is. Bergson considers laughter to be a response to the loss of randomness in the acts of
individuals. The laughter that this loss precipitates is indicative of a societal need to remove such mechanisms. Bergson believes laughter conditions people, that it shames them into acting in ways closer to what is human.
It is precisely with this shaming gesture that Nietzsche takes umbrage. Concerned with the radically free individual, Nietzsche separates the laugh into that which subjugates and that which emboldens man. This separation is what chapter two is principally concerned with. The laughter of the herd is the damning term that Nietzsche coins for Bergson’s
assessment of laughter. Unable to strike a path of one’s own in the world, the herd individual laughs down at what sticks out as incongruous. As Nietzsche gives a negative normative evaluation of Bergson’s laughter, he supplements it with his own. The higher laughter is totally different from its herd counterpart. It is in Nietzsche’s view a symbol of the embracing of much of his philosophy. When Nietzsche’s Übermensch can accept the death of God, the eternal return, and then pursue their own passions and remould morality into something their own, then they will laugh. The higher laughter however is importantly a bittersweet one, as it recognises that the irony in courageous self-aware attempts to create meaning in a universe that is definitively lacking it.
The irony in Nietzsche’s laughter becomes pronounced in chapter three. Comparing the ironies of Nietzsche’s laughter with the ever present irony in postmodern works, Nietzsche’s laughter is put into a contemporary context. To do this I utilise the works of Beckett as a representative of postmodern irony through his usage of dark biting humour in plays like Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s work contains many similarities with Nietzsche’s higher laughter that were then lost with the proliferation of the postmodern genre. Finally I
critique the form from the perspective of Wallace’s critique of postmodernity’s growing ambivalence to the world catalysed by the unrelenting ironic humour that has populated the pages and screens of the late 20th century. Through this I hope to show that the unsatisfying cynicism of current works of art are not a result of inevitability, but a consequence of
forgetting to laugh the higher laughter, which remains even more compatible with our lives than when Nietzsche first wrote of it.
Chapter 1 – Bergson’s Theory of Laughter A Brief History of Humour
1900 was an important year. The turn of the century brought with it the formation of the British Labour party as well as AJAX, Amsterdam’s premier football club. Notably, the year included the deaths of Oscar Wilde and one infamous German philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. Topping it off, Henri Bergson, half way through his life, published his essays on Le rire, or in English, Laughter. The essays focused largely on the place of the comic in society whilst saying “very little about laughter”1 focusing away from “laughter as a bodily
expression”2 and more on why we laugh.
But let us first have a brief look at the philosophical battlefield to which Bergson was entering. Bergson was certainly not the first philosopher to tackle laughter, or more
specifically comedy and humour.
Comedy, in Ancient Greece, was often obscene socio-political commentary including highly successful Greek comedic writers such as Aristophanes. Despite this, there is
remarkably little written on the form by Aristotle, who, as opposed to Plato, valued the arts greatly. Although there are mentions of comedy in The Poetics, the form is not tackled with the same rigour that Aristotle allowed for the tragic. Whether this is because another book exists that more heavily covers comedy is a point of contention. The Tractatus Coislinianus is regarded as a likely work of Aristotle3 by a few scholars.
Concerning theories of humour, there is a general split into three distinct categories: The Superiority Theory, The Incongruity Theory, and The Relief Theory4. The Superiority Theory has the longest history associated with it, having been written on from Greek
philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, to Hobbes, who bears its most oft repeated banner, that:
“Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves”5.
The superiority theory is made distinct by its belief that the inner mechanism of laughter is one where the ego seeks a raising of the self in the wake of the laughed-at other. “According to Baudelaire, laughter at the comic – first and foremost, the spectacle of ‘a man falling on the ice’ – is based on an ‘unconscious pride’ and a need to assert our superiority over the objects of our laughter.”6
The superiority theory however, runs into trouble when we
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consider jokes that cause nobody harm or shame. To borrow a line from Douglas Adams: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”7 Adams’ absurd humour does not seem to rely on the eminence over anyone that Hobbes stipulates so vital to laughter, yet there are many funny absurd jokes.
Second is the Incongruity Theory. The theory states humour is found chiefly in moments of inconsistency from our perceived expectations of the norms of our society and world. “We live in an orderly world, where we have come to expect certain patterns among things, their properties, events, etc. We laugh when we experience something that doesn’t fit into these patterns.”8 Kant gives a metaphysical expression of the effect.
“Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the
representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.”9 Our expectations are originally strained, but then deflate into something harmless. The effect is akin to the prehistoric man seeing a shadow and worrying for a lurking predator, to have the expectation broken by a bunny leaping out the bushes. The breaking of
expectations to create a humorous situation is quite believable. Absurd humour fits this structure with ease. The unlikely nature of the metaphor used in the ship joke immediately severs the sentence’s ties with a predictable alternative. Another example of incongruous humour is slapstick comedy. Upon finding that he has too much luggage to fit both it and him in his car, Mr Bean’s alternative of piloting the vehicle on its roof with an assortment of levers entering through the sunroof provides classic fun for the British viewer that is so used to respecting the social and legal norms of the Highway Code. The incongruity theory also takes into account how such humour that relies on the unexpected can become tiring and cliché when a new norm of absurdism is established.
Incongruity though, also does not go undisputed. Is incongruity sufficient for humour and laughter? “The incongruity theory also suffers from the obvious problem that we do not laugh at all occasions of incongruity.”10 In tragic situations, norms are subverted just the same. Say Mr Bean’s car prank had gone sour by his falling from the roof of the car where he sat perched. This violation of the Highway Code would be violent, unusual, and certainly unfunny. However, if Mr Bean were riding upon his car and were he to come across a particularly low hanging bridge, despite a similar tragedy for Mr Bean, this one would be quite funny. Perhaps this is just my sense of humour. Either way, incongruity is seemingly not sufficient for comedy. Bergson agrees, “I do not see… why ‘disharmony,’ as disharmony,
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should provoke from its witnesses a specific manifestation such as laughter, while so many other properties, qualities, or flaws leave the spectator’s facial muscles unmoved”11.
The final of the three is the Relief Theory, populated by Sigmund Freud. The theory postulates the release of energy “where the energy that is relieved and discharged in laughter provides pleasure because it allegedly economizes upon energy that would
ordinarily be used to contain or repress psychic activity.”12 Coming in Freud’s book Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, published in 1905, Bergson would not comment on the impact of the theory. In current philosophical circles, it is also the least written on and discussion generally favours the superiority and incongruity theory13. Bergson took to disputing the need to sort humour into one of the previous theories exclusively. “We do not laugh at just any incongruity or disproportion, but at a quality ‘that this disproportion can in some instances disclose,’ namely, life sending up itself in the guise of the mechanical.”14 Here Bergson alludes to the mechanical that he postures as the centre of his theory of laughter. This mechanical is what the focus of laughter is, encompassing the peculiarity laughed at with incongruity as well as the failure laughed at with superiority. “Bergson answers this need by coupling superiority theory with the incongruity theory. According to Bergson, we laugh not just at any incongruity, and not just at any ‘conception of some eminency in ourselves,’ but when we see an incongruity that, as we see things, needs bettering. Or so Bergson would have us believe. In laughter, Bergson writes, we find ‘an unavowed intention to humiliate’ and an unconscious arrière-pensée to correct and to instruct’.”15
Oh, the Humanity!
“The Comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN.”16 Bergson states triumphantly as he begins his treatise over the laughing creatures that we are. Beginning his anthropological enquiry he charges the human as the only being capable of laughter. With this he dispels the rest of the animal kingdom to a realm of mere anthropomorphism. The cackle of a hyena and guffaws of a chimpanzee may resemble on the surface the act of laughing, but this is where the familiarities end. The laughter at the comic, the laughter that is the topic of his book is exclusively heard in the society of humans. Critchley offers some explanation for why he considers this: “humour is a shared or intersubjective practise that requires the assent of others.”17 Our laughter is magnified by the crowd. Though we may laugh alone, we certainly do not laugh as much. Robert R. Provine’s research into the sociability of laughter shows that although we do laugh alone in that “other things being equal, whether at a cocktail party or the cinema, a large crowd laughs more than a small
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one”18. Augustine pointing out that despite being rarer, we do in fact laugh quite heartily on our own, “when no one else is present, if something extremely ridiculous is presented either to the senses or to the soul”19. However, to remove the social from the setting of the
individual is to ignore that the human is a social animal even when not directly surrounded by others. Many feminists argue that the “personal is political”, so perhaps the personal and the private are also social. When Bergson states that, “Several have defined man as “an animal which laughs.” They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at;” he begins a train of thought on just how the human does separate itself from the universe through its comic gaze.
What we do and do not laugh at is essential in seeing Bergson’s division between the animal kingdom and the human. We recognise someone immediately as peculiar and out of the social order if they are incapable of laughing. “Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious.”20 But what is it that we laugh at that makes us so visibly human, or humane? Bergson claims that our laughter is only ever directed at the human. When we laugh at something in nature such as a somewhat phallic rock formation, we are not laughing at nature itself, but its resemblance to what is laughable in the human. And our laughter at the human is also restricted more to what is considered human in the context of the average human. This is displayed through our laughter at the deformed. “A deformity that may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate.”21 This however is debatable when considering the human freak shows of yore. However, Bergson is intent on relegating the laughable to the purely human and social. The anthropological space that humour exists in is indicative of the fat that “many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another”22. Whereas drama typically does not lose much of its appeal when it is transported to other cultures, comedy rarely receives the same reception. If we consider the difficulties in translating a joke, the humps along the way are far more diverse than the sheer untranslatability of puns. That many jokes rely on taking elements of social conduct into question is what drives the critical element of
Bergson’s theory. If comedy is to have any relation to congruity, we must first have a society to be our control of standard congruence.
Simon Critchley adds an interesting insight in a chapter of his on Bergson,
complementing his theory with that of Wyndham Lewis’. Earlier he notes that “When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh out loud… But when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting and if we laugh at all then it is what Beckett calls ‘the mirthless laugh’, which laughs at that which is unhappy.”23 Beckett’s work
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contains many kinds of laughter not considered by Bergson, but these will be discussed further later, after encountering Nietzsche’s laughter and how postmodernity has
transformed humour. In Critchley’s chapter, he takes issue with Bergson’s one way street from animals to humans. “Do we not also laugh when a thing gives us the impression of a person?”24 Critchley is expressly contrasting Bergson’s claim that the comic comes about when the mechanical of nature is enacted by the living being. Contrary to Critchley’s belief, this point is agreed upon by Bergson in his admission that “you may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.”25 What Critchley’s point does do is to distinguish more clearly how human Bergson’s theory is. Wyndham Lewis’ point that we find humour in the thing acting as a person, but that “from that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.”26 So Critchley makes the connection that “it is not so much a person behaving like a thing or vice versa that is the root of the comic, but rather – surprise, surprise – a person acting like a person. That is, there is something essentially ridiculous about a human being behaving like a human being”27. We are particularly amused by the actions of the human as a distinct thing from nature. That distinction between the human and the rest is what Bergson formulises to be the cause of humour. Bergson then formulates that humour is found in the occasions when the person resembles nature. Critchley’s addition then is that the human resembling nature is a particularly human trait itself.
Elastic People
Much of Bergson’s theory of laughter revolves around elasticity and our relation to it as the source of comedy. As humans, according to Bergson, we are elastic people. We perceive our course and alter, responding to the ever changing facets of human society, which is also a shifting progressing thing. Bergson writes:
“Were events unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would evolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the
impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that
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singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.”28
The contrast between the progression of human life and the mechanical nature of the thing is precisely what Bergson is implying by his claim that we laugh when man imitates a thing. This imitation is termed as mechanical inelasticity. “THE ATTITUDES, GESTURES AND
MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACT PROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE.”29
This distinction between the human and the thing echoes in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. His work on existentialism focused on the separation of the world into Being and Nothingness. Handily he titled his greatest work precisely that. People, according to Sartre, were unlike objects in that our purposes were not imbued in our creation. Whereas a teapot is moulded out of clay with the particular task of one day brewing tea, the same cannot be said of man.30 This difference is essential to Sartre’s existentialist ontology. When crossed, it mandates the Sartrean accusation of bad faith, whereas for Bergson it is laughter. “What is essentially laughable is what is done automatically.”31 The thing that we laugh at for its difference from humanity is something that acts in manners that do not shift towards a changing landscape. This inability to change, or inelasticity, can be represented through two concepts. “The two core concepts in Bergson’s discussion of laughter are rigidity (raideur) and repetition. The comic figure possesses, or better, is possessed by un effect de raideur, a certain stiffness or inflexibility which is emphasized through an absentminded, almost unconscious, mechanical repetitiveness.”32
Having in the previous section shown that the human is unique in its being the laughing animal, I will now extrapolate on what it is that makes actions non-human, or thing-like, in Bergson’s view. “Our mental state is ever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these inner movements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeat themselves, and so would keep imitation at bay”33. What Bergson describes is a somewhat hopeful view on humanity. In this he finds he source of comedy to find placement between the previously mentioned theses of incongruity and superiority. This theory includes the incongruity of a human acting in ways that are not to be expected. When the viewers
presume the radically free Bergsonian individual, but are presented with someone acting off kilter to this imagining, then humour is sourced. On the flip side of this we have the occasion of congruence also accounted for if it is a source of comedy. Namely, when people act precisely as we expect them too, as if being pulled by strings. This can be seen through the act of attending the show of an impersonator. Within the walls of the theatre, we expect a certain kind of show, and when an impersonator impersonates excellently, we are presented
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with the expectation to the tee. And yet, these shows are often accompanied by showers of rapturous applause and laughter. Bergson can answer for this laughter. “To imitate anyone is to bring out the element of automatism that has allowed to creep into his person. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is also comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic, not only that of a man, but that of society also, and even the disguise of nature.”34 Here the thing is not just a nonhuman entity, but also the abstracted human, stripped of its depth. “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.”35
To add to the mechanical inelasticity that humour requires, is also the divorce of the emotions from the comic, according to Bergson. We must detach ourselves from our
emotional involvement with the other to find them funny. The other can act as a thing, and that thing is something we do not feel sympathy for. “To see us as laughable requires at once emotional disinterest and a species of intellectual interest. We must interest him, not in our singularity, but in what we represent, a comical deviation from the norm.”36 Laughter is an intellectual response, even if it represented by such uncontrollably volatile human functions. “Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind, - a sane type of madness, one might say.”37 This connects the emotional detachment of laughter, with the humanity it must surround itself in. We laugh when human represents a thing, but it must always be in relation to the human. This leads us now to what we find funny in particular, as exemplified by Bergson in his text.
The Three Forms of Laughter
Laughter is separated out into three separate essays. Their purpose is to evolve the subject matter until we reach the conclusion of laughter’s ulterior motive as a socially coercive thing. However, the three sections also accurately distinguish what to Bergson’s mind exist as the three different categories of laughter to come about. These are laughter emanating from: 1) Movements of the body, 2) Situations and words, and 3) Character traits.
Bergson’s first chapter relates to the comic in forms and movements, which Bergson finds to underline the general nature of comedy when it evolves from the noticing of mechanical inelasticity. Before this, he describes comedy of the form, detailed through the explanation over imitation. Someone’s form is humorous “(a) if he seems disguised, (b) if his physical being dominates or is in strong contrast to his inner, moral being, or (c) if he gives the impression of being a thing, not a person.”38 The inelasticity of the form is then
enhanced by its motion. Here we have this mechanical inelasticity displayed to us through
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physical comedy, probably best expressed in the genre of slapstick. We have been describing comedy as mostly culturally bound, however slapstick and the comedy of the body
supersedes other forms by being only bound to the human. The works of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton have been enjoyed by many cultures all over the world. Where slapstick remains distinctly Bergsonian is in its necessity on the human and its relation to the
machine-like thing for the source of comedy. The machine is the unadaptable thing that continues with its task despite its surroundings. In this sense we laugh at absentmindedness. We laugh at the man who falls over having been walking along unaware of his path. We laugh all the more when they have a preconceived notion of what they are doing and they find themselves duly mistaken. This is magnified by the distance between their previous notions and the eventualities of their fall. “Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star.”39 Both examples would display someone’s mechanical inelasticity; however, the second is magnified by the feeling of superiority that the watcher can take part in. “We laugh if our attention is diverted to the physical in a person when it is the moral that is in question.”40 Our laughter is not concerned with the emotions of the person, only the physical resemblance to the machine. Alongside this, Bergson brings our attention to the moral nature of slapstick comedy which is
suppressed from view by the presence of the humorous body. But we still remain judging creatures.
The comic element in situations and in words begins with our discovery of this mechanical inelasticity in our conversation and linguistic relations with each other. By this measure we move towards a form of comedy that is more exclusive to the specifics of a culture, owing to the restrictions of legitimate translation of meaning.
“A word is said to be comic when it makes us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes us laugh either at a third party or at ourselves. But in most cases we can hardly make up our minds whether the word is comic or witty. All that we can say is that it is laughable.”41
Once again is it the effect of words making the person abstract, and thing-like, that the word becomes humorous. “In a comic repetition of words we generally find two terms; a
repressed feeling which goes off like a spring, and an idea that delights in repressing the feeling anew.”42 We have emotional reactions to the sentences we are listening to. We expect certain things of sentences, and that expectation includes the natural evolution of thought through the continued speech. When we are met with repetition, this expected evolution is replaced by a jerking, scratched record. And so our wants and needs of the conversation are replaced by the jovial topic of the person speaking acting according to
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mechanical notions again. The comic situation is then a broadening of the comic use of words. When a situation is affected in this manner, it is by the comic language’s interplay. “A comic meaning is invariably obtained when an absurd idea is fitted into a well-established phrase-form.”43 Whereas the laughter of the body was one of superiority, this laughter is now of the incongruous. “A comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to take literally an expression which was used figuratively.”44 Here we see that such incongruities of language are related to the body through their use of laughter at the inelastic, the inability to alter towards that which the physical or literal situation present. Moreover, these two forms of comedy share what will populate the next section, that both contain a social stigma of expectations of actions.
“The comic in words follows closely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with the latter, in the comic in character.”45 Bergson finished with the section that most pertains to his overarching theory of social coercion through laughter. The comic of the character is directly taken from the moments in which the personalities of others cause them to act in ways which are deemed unacceptable in civilised society. This may seem contradictory, in that a very socially conscious individual may seem even more on tracks than one disengaged from norms. However, Bergson makes a subtle distinction; that the individual acting out of sorts is deemed to be doing so from faculties beyond their character’s control. In an intriguing comic revaluation of Camus’ L’Étranger, Patricia J.
Johnson notes how the comic in character is the vital part missing from the public seeing the novella as humorous. The contrasts between Meursault’s actions and that of society are unnoticeable because the story is entirely from his viewpoint. “It is axiomatic that the individual is not funny to himself, for if he were aware of his comic attributes, he would, according to Bergson, correct them: comedy of character, says Bergson, is always dependent on unawareness and insensitivity.”46 This is at the heart of the disengaged social theory that Bergson has created for laughter. It adheres strictly to the society of humans and their natures, whilst also not allowing us to engage emotionally with the subject of our laughter. Instead we watch intellectually, removed from the human involved, at the socially inept being.
The Laughter Finishing School
What is the act of laughter then? We have so far discussed the event that precludes laughter, but not about the moment of laughter itself. Nor have we spoken of the moment after the laughter. Mechanical inelasticity has been explained for how it is shown through the social creature’s actions, and that this inelasticity results in laughter. But why is the relation of laughter, as the reply, appropriate? Bergson here takes from the superiority
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theory and adapts it. Instead of being merely a result of our feeling higher, it is instead an attempt to mould the other towards seeming like us.
“Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body… in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom – scarcely as a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture.”47
Thus, Bergson finds that our laughter is sourced as a method of forming the asocial being into one that fits into our conception of society. “This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.”48 This is an essential function when considering that comedy is sourced through a social setting. Therefore it requires a generalised understanding of what the social setting is. “In order for the incongruity of the joke to be seen as such, there has to be congruence between joke structure and social structure – no social congruity, no comic incongruity.”49 This is how Bergson’s theory combines the theories of incongruity and superiority. The cause of the laughter is through the displacement of expectations, à la incongruity, and the
function of the laughter is a social one, à la superiority. However, instead of Hobbes’ belief that we feel a sense of superiority in ourselves, Bergson focuses more on a degradation of the other. However, this forces us into a position where we are always laughing downwards; at people and never with people.
“Joking is a game that players only play successfully when they both understand and follow the rules.”50 There is a clear reliance on awareness of a society and its customs, however, must we always be laughing at people? When two friends spar in witty remarks, are they constantly degrading the other to be more socially competent with each turn? It would feel odd to suggest so. Critchley considers how when people laugh “they mock, parody or deride the ritual practises of a given society, as Milan Kundera remarks,
‘Someone’s hat falls on the coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born’.”51 We are not laughing always at a person, but society itself. Critchley is writing in reflection on a far wider reaching understanding of comedy than Bergson had at the time to react upon. Considering this, I believe Bergson’s reply would come from the particular nuance of what he means by society. If, as Critchley writes, we are finding humour in the rituals of society, then perhaps the socially corrective function is founded in
subcultures that actually express the thoughts and ideas of the populace. We are all familiar with how the driving force in culture that dictates the rites and rituals can be out of touch with the true lives of those involved. One only needs to think of the oblivious marketing
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departments attempting to sell products to audiences they have only an abstracted
knowledge of. Every time a group of white male political strategists sit around a boardroom discussing how to engage with either women or minorities, we become violently aware of the gulf between the overriding lawmakers and a true image of culture’s manifestation. Therefore, there is still the degradation that Bergson speaks of. Maybe we can formulate it towards the gatekeepers and politicians of this world. Bergson describes the laughable as “causing something to appear mean that was formerly dignified.”52 “The anti-rite of the joke shows the sheer contingency or arbitrariness of the social rites in which we engage.”53 Humour, then, finds through the surreal act of defamiliarizing ourselves with our
surroundings, an effect of empowerment against the tired social rites that may no longer have relevance. It is this goal which political satire aims at.
Pivotal to Bergson’s theory however is that comedy disengages us from our
emotions. This is where Bergson begins to show the nastier side of comedy. That although we may sometimes be able to rebel against those in power through it, the mechanism of comedy is more malicious than those exceptions. “Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbour’s personality ceases to affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social life.”54 When we laugh at the hat falling on the coffin, we do see the larger absurdity of the ritual we have all engaged ourselves in; however we also remove an aspect of our reverence for an aspect of society. Community of course is something few are willing to be excommunicated from. “Therefore society holds suspended over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, is none the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter. Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social ‘ragging’.”55 Through this, Bergson responds to replies about the satirical emboldening of comedy that aids the oppressed. Within the strong social ties of suppressed minority groups the fear of social rejection is even higher. “If humour is defined by the limits of the ‘we’ to whom the joke is concerned, if a sense of humour is relative to a shared but specific life-world, then is all humour reactionary and conservative?”56 Bergson is not talking about human society in toto, but the way in which our individual societies
populating the planet work within themselves.
“Humour is a form of cultural insider-knowledge, and might, indeed, be said to function like a linguistic defence mechanism. Its ostensive untranslatability endows native speakers with a palpable sense of their cultural distinctiveness or even superiority.”57 52 [CITATION Hen00 \p 61 \l 2057 ] 53 [CITATION Sim02 \p 10 \l 2057 ] 54 [CITATION Hen00 \p 65 \l 2057 ] 55 [CITATION Hen00 \p 65 \l 2057 ] 56 [CITATION Sim02 \p 90 \l 2057 ] 57 [CITATION Sim02 \p 67-68 \l 2057 ]
Consider the humour of division instead of togetherness; racist, sexist, and bigoted jokes, where we are constantly having a lower group of people denigrated for their otherness. “This essential difference is between tragedy and comedy, the former being concerned with individuals and the latter with classes.”58 We can consider then that Bergson’s laughter of degradation is one that continuously threatens individuals with expulsion from their social group in a fractal pattern. Each community consecutively excluding those that do not live to the standards of it, both with upwards and downwards social mobility. One community excluding into another and then the next community right back. James Cameron’s Titanic features Rose, an upper class woman that forgoes etiquette and is shamed into feeling out of place within the highest decks of the ship. She then takes refuge with the Irish paupers down below, to find her behaviour, still smacking of aristocratic nervous ticks, is also rejected until she can conform. Humour can “put one back in one’s place with the anxiety, difficulty and, indeed, shame of where one is from”59. This is all the more so when we consider how tacitly we must have consented to the norms we are enforcing through such comedy. Most jokes require knowledge to work. The knowledge is knowledge of societal conventions because of the social necessity of comedy. “Most humour, in particular the comedy of recognition – and most humour is comedy of recognition – simply seeks to reinforce consensus and in no way seeks to criticize the established order or change the situation in which we find ourselves.”60
Is there comedy that exists totally outside of the sphere that Bergson has created? Not all comedy is comedy of recognition. So too is not all comedy charged by the differences between social groups. Bergson’s theory is not treated as a final solution to the disparate views on comedy by many philosophers. Like all philosophy, there is much debate still over the three significant theories. For this reason, this thesis will not seek to give a philosophical explanation of humour in such a wide scope. Instead, the reason for explaining Bergson’s theory in such detail is to show how it could be a possible explanation for the source of humour in certain situations. Going forward into the next chapter, I will begin to locate the similarities between believable elements of Bergson’s theory and the works of Nietzsche, who is often felt to be more obscure. This is in service of giving a possible explanation of where at least some humour is found, and not necessarily all.
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Chapter 2 – Nietzsche’s Two Forms of Laughter
Bergson presents the world with a vision of laughter that does not necessarily encompass all of its forms. Moreover, it does not encompass all forms of comedy. What it does do is to provide a form of laughter that is understandable, one that we can consider thoughtfully and presume to have some truth about it. As a fully-fledged theory it also comes equipped with the benefits of being structurally cogent and thus is it a fine basis to begin an evolution of a laughter theory. For this we enlist the help of Friedrich Nietzsche, a natural choice given the topic, considering Nietzsche’s famously cheery disposition. What Nietzsche can add to Bergson is tripartite. First and second are the ways Nietzsche describes laughter
continuously throughout his work. He separates the two according to the “laughter of the herd” and the “higher laughter”, with the former being a perfect fit for Bergson’s
formulation. In addition to this, the “herd laughter” he describes will fit into a vehemently derisive account of society that Bergson’s laughter unmasks. It is through the “higher laughter” that Nietzsche will find some reprieve for what Nietzsche believes to be our rapidly perishing society. Through this special laughter reserved for the Übermensch we will find our telos away from the “Will to Nothingness”. Then in the next chapter we will utilise the difference between Bergson’s Laughter and the Übermensch’s laughter to indict
postmodernism and how it bends towards the laughter of the herd. Before this can be done, we shall track the bridges between Bergson and Nietzsche.
Bergson’s Laughter As Nietzsche’s Tyranny
Bergson leaves a slight ambiguity in his evaluation of his theory. Whilst laughter corrects and shames the individual into a desired form, Bergson makes few normative assertions over this correction. What comments he does make are often more praising then critical. Laughter’s corrective measure is seen as a helpful tool – one that encourages people towards their more human possibilities. “Nature has utilised evil with a view to good. […] We have seen that the more society improves, the more plastic is the adaptability it obtains from its members […] and thus laughter performs a useful function by emphasising the form of these significant undulations.”61 Doing this is essential for Bergson’s larger metaphysical aims, as Mark Weeks writes “It is critical for the tragically driven yet uniquely joyful master-narrative proposed by Bergson that laughter be incorporated rather than assume the more
threatening, but perhaps more seductive, position of a pleasurably ‘evil’ outside.”62 This aligned with Bergson’s need to separate the individual from the “society that would be gradually overcome”63. This need is entrenched in his formally optimistic model of the individual. We are laughing at the mechanical inelasticity in people. Bergson therefore sees us, not as the crude machinations of robotic programming, but free, unique, and willing animals. We are freed by laughter. This “social corrective” instead of coercing us through
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shame into beings inhibited by society, instead strips us of what faults we may accrue in the pursuit of true elasticity.
The optimistic normative claims that Bergson makes over laughter are, however, not shared by Nietzsche. Despite not being alive enough to comment directly on Bergson, his views would be clear. Believing in very similar discourses over the necessity of the yea-saying individual, the one that would rise above the terms of society, the Übermensch; Nietzsche was definitely an advocate of a kind of individual which Bergson believes his laughter would induce. However, paramount to Nietzsche’s philosophy, and in particular his political
philosophy, is the tending against tyrannical forces. Leading the pack in tyranny is the exertion of control through society under the hand of Abrahamic monotheism. Christian society shames us into acting in accordance, and laughter is not an exception to this shaming. “It is a mere variety of social “ragging” – and not a very kind variety at that. In short, confronted with Nietzsche’s suggestion that laughter may be trivial or profound, Apollonian or Dionysian, Bergson must reply that laughter is always of a one un-admirable kind.”64
Through Nietzsche’s callous regard for such forms of correctives is the space created through which Nietzsche’s transcendent higher laughter will be born. What informs
Nietzsche of this position is his theory of a slave/master duality of social positioning that has been created through the insidious work of the Church. The terms ‘slave’ and ‘herd’, with ‘master’ and ‘higher’ being basically synonymous, Nietzsche’s dissection of morals occurs as he attempts a coup on the societal instincts that betray our best selves. The Church and priesthood have, through demonising the natural acts of the strongest of our species, created the fake transcendent goal of heaven and redemption, denied great attributes their valuation of good.
“It is they who have declared: ‘The miserable alone are the good; the poor, the powerless, the low alone are the good. The suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly are the only pious ones, the only blessed, for them alone is there salvation. You, on the other hand, the noble and the powerful, you are all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lascivious, the insatiable, the godless ones’.”65
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche attributes the building feeling of ressentiment to the growth of the Church’s power. Ressentiment is the feeling coming from the man unable to accomplish the feats natural to other stronger beings. Instead of accepting their place as weaker members of the species, they build ressentiment and, as Nietzsche theorises, the “impotent failure to retaliate is to be transformed into ‘goodness’; craven fear into
‘humility’; submission to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (obedience, that is, towards the authority who, so they claim, ordered this submission – they call him God”.”66 This
moralisation of qualities is essential to the society built by religions of ressentiment.
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“In contrast, imagine the ‘enemy’ as conceived by the man of ressentiment. This is the very place where his deed, his creation is to be found – he has conceived the ‘evil enemy’, the ‘evil man’. Moreover he has conceived him as a fundamental concept, from which he now derives another as an after-image and counterpart, the ‘good man’ – himself!”67
Here under the reign of Christ, obedience is king. And so it is through obedience that Nietzsche sources the beginnings of his fears of tyranny.
Few philosophers have such a vibrant catalogue of works that can have their ideas, once stripped of their context, to be declared as far-fetched as Nietzsche’s. However, his allocation of Christian values to the subjugation of the master type leading to social ruin is strengthened through his political position. Nietzsche continuously asks of humanity “what ought we to do?” Never a traditional moralist, Nietzsche still busied himself with question of action for culture and society to reach a desired sense of freedom. Siemens, whilst
discussing one of Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes relates the Christian value system to western democracy.
“Insofar as morality is dominated by the Christian-democratic values of altruism (Einer für Alle) and equal moral worthy (Einer wie Alle), it is having the inevitable consequence of breeding actual uniformity among people (Einer wie Alle), to the exclusion of difference.”68
It is through the political notion that the crowd, advocated through democracy, is actually each individual of that crowd’s worst enemy. No individual will flourish if we must rely on a system that depends on conformity. Nietzsche writes that “Monarchy represents the belief in One wholly Supreme Being, a leader saviour demigod. Aristocracy represents the belief in an elite humanity and higher caste. Democracy represents the unbelief in great humans and an elite society: ‘everyone is the same as everyone’ ‘At bottom we are all self-interested cattle and rabble’”69. It is only through ressentiment that the larger community is ever subject to become these herd animals. Nietzsche extrapolates from the failings of democracy and the oppression of the Church that one of the greatest deterrents to the freedom of the individual is homogeneity. That society acts cruelly against itself due to its social conditioning and that this “social ragging”, whether overt or subtle, is the wall before our emancipation. Now Bergson’s laughter is reframed. Before Bergson wished us to read positivity into the coercive properties of laughter, but in a Nietzschean context things take a bleaker turn. “Laughter suggests to Nietzsche a momentary release of social constraints, a ‘sudden glory’, as Hobbes calls it, and like Hobbes, he ascribes to this experience a
comparatively negative value – in part because of the apparently plebeian conditions of its occurrence.”70 This laughter is exemplified through Nietzsche’s own work and the rare yet
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startling usages of laughter throughout. Laughter comes up most prominently in Nietzsche’s most literary work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. John Lippitt comments on one of the earliest moments in the book, when the hero Zarathustra is dismissed by a crowd through their laughter. “They make it clear that they are not interested in the Übermensch and, mocking Zarathustra, ask him to make them into not the Übermensch but the Last Man.”71 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the character of Zarathustra is not the Zoroastrian profit, but a stand in for the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, which is Nietzsche’s idea of the best possible individual for the time they live in. The Last Man on the other hand is Nietzsche’s symbol for the end of humanity. He fears that without emancipation from the tyranny of Christian values and herd-like mentalities all lead to a path of humanity’s decrepitude.
“This seems to ring true of the crowd’s laughter at Zarathustra: his radical discourse has come as a threat to what society believes and wants, and so the townspeople dismiss it with scornful laughter. Were we to use the Nietzschean terms, we might call this laughter ‘the laughter of the herd’”72
What Nietzsche provides us with in the example of Zarathustra however is not just that society’s jeering does not correct us to our greater path. We also gain the beginning of Nietzsche’s insight into humanity’s godless redemption, that of the Übermensch, and most centrally to this piece, how the Übermensch is emboldened through its entirely
un-Bergsonian laughter. Yet, there is still hope. “Zarathustra cannot endure to die now because he has not yet laughed this extraordinary laughter.”73
Laugh Übermensch, Laugh!
When reading around the topic of laughter within philosophy, it is understandable to become depressed at times. Laughter, comedy, and humour alike are held in high reverence almost unanimously amongst people. We enjoy laughter. We want to carry on enjoying laughter. But, it seems the philosophers have something against this pursuit. Nietzsche too, sees the value in laughter. He opens his book The Gay Science with a prelude in rhymes named, Jest, Ruse and Revenge; 63 short verses that are often funny, as well as tragic and scathing. His first aphorism furthers his explanation of what is the science that is happy and frolicking.
“To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the veriest truth, - to do this, the best have not hitherto had enough of the sense of truth, and the most endowed have had far too little genius! There is perhaps still a future even for laughter! When the maxim, “The race is all, the individual is nothing,” – has incorporated itself in humanity, and when access stands open to every one at all times to this ultimate emancipation and irresponsibility. –
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Perhaps then laughter will have united with wisdom, perhaps then there will be only ‘gay science.’”74
Through this passage, Nietzsche points to essentials at the core of his philosophy. Nietzsche believes that laughter will point us towards truth, or towards what will become of truth. This is the goal and cause of all humanity, and the answer to what humanity “ought to do”, which explains the seeming contradiction between his claim that “The race is all, the individual is nothing”, given his strong individualist philosophy. It may also shed light on the inherent absurdity that Nietzsche appreciates in the pursuit of meaning in a post-god world. What is clear though is that Nietzsche has a similar goal to Bergson for laughter. They both want laughter to function within their combined “heroic narratives.”75
How is this higher laughter disconnected from the laughter of the herd? Despite Nietzsche’s goals in all of humanity, the laughter must be one that is sourced from the individual and not the coalescence of a group’s pleasures. Gunter writes, “By concentrating on the social function of laughter Bergson was able to explain much that men find laughable. But he was not able to distinguish the laughter of the multitudes, which strikes down genius blindly along with eccentricity in its war against mechanisation, from the higher laughter, which exalts genius at the expense of mere eccentricity.”76 Through the individual the source of humanity’s salvation is found. The individuals willing to accept placement as these “higher individuals” are pronounced by Nietzsche as Übermenschen. As Lippitt writes, “The
Übermensch is the goal for which Nietzsche wishes the best specimens of humanity to aim: a being who represents ascending life, self-overcoming and self-possession. It is important to realise, of course, that though Nietzsche has a very low regard for the common ‘herd’ of humanity, it is not a case of the Übermensch overcoming the herd by overpowering it, but of overcoming the herd instinct within himself.”77 This inner herd instinct is that which comes from the ressentiment of Christianity for Nietzsche, but it could also be interpreted as tendency towards inelasticity that Bergson writes on. “There are innumerable comedies in which one of the characters thinks he is speaking and acting freely, and, consequently, retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed from a certain standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of another who is playing with him.”78 The puppeteer, Nietzsche claims, is the Church. The Church, also being to blame for the creation of the moral archetypes that we now follow, has produced unsavoury beings out of those that are not directly led by the Church’s wants.
“It is society, our game, mediocre, gelded society, in which a human being raised in nature, who comes from the mountains or from adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal.”79
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Therefore it is the role of the Übermensch to live above traditional morality. This is what is meant by the title to Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil. That traditional morals are saturated with the ideals of Christianity, and that in a world where “God is dead”, we must move completely away from our conventional ideas of morality. This dispensing with of morals is precisely the wisdom to which Nietzsche refers to in his Gay Science.
The truth and wisdom that provokes laughter can be interpreted in multiple ways. Pete Gunter gives a rather straightforward account of the emboldened individual laughing at triumph.
“One need not, for example, attempt to conceive the laughter of an
Übermensch to see that the kind of duality with which Nietzsche is concerned is a feature of the most ordinary laugh experience. A few examples should make clear the contrast to which Nietzsche refers. I have in mind particularly the experience of a colleague whose chief amusement for many years was that of riding surfboards: after successfully riding the crest of large, potentially very dangerous breakers, he would explain with no little puzzlement that his most characteristic reaction upon reaching calmer waters was – to laugh. His laughter struck him as perplexing, since, really, there was nothing in his situation that we would ordinarily describe as ‘funny’. It is not difficult to imagine a Nietzschean counterpart to this example: i.e., that of the laughter of a crowd on the bank which finds something comic in an athlete being thrown from his surfboard, or in two surfboards colliding.”80
Gunter’s example demonstrates simply the laughter of success that is at least a core identifying principle to the laughter that Nietzsche describes as one we would find having taken aboard Nietzsche principles of self-overcoming. However, there is more to the story. Nietzsche refers also to a laughter pointed inwards, to laughing at oneself. In this there is the nugget of information that points towards Nietzsche’s loftier goals of undermining meaning in the traditional sense.
Laughing in a Loop – The Eternal Return
“Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognised as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus Aristotle understood it –: but, beyond pity and terror, to realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in
destruction… And with that I again return to the place from which I set out – Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant
myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can – I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus – I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence…”81
So ends Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols, a short work that in many ways attempted to summarise his entire career. Through this final paragraph, he links the affirmation of life to sacrificing the higher types of his current society, forming the main conclusions of his latter period, to the life lessons of the Greek god Dionysus – his very first philosophical topic. Throughout however, he relates emotionally on this process. First in the recognition of the tragic form that his hero is found, Nietzsche transforms the emotional tropes of the genre, “pity and terror”, into “the eternal joy of becoming”. Nietzsche is writing about a joy, a transcendent joy reverberating with the aforementioned joy of wisdom. Here however, that joy is related to becoming, a theme highlighted through his final word “I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence…” Nietzsche’s eternal return is a dubious metaphysical claim, but also an interesting theme to expound his critique on nihilism. John Kress describes that “It is The Gay Science that first articulates Nietzsche’s “most abyssal thought,” the eternal return of the same, called “the heaviest weight”; it is there that the darkest depths of nihilism and pessimism are plumbed; and it is this book that ends with the fateful announcement “the tragedy begins,” the incipit tagoedia of Zarathustra’s going under. The Gay Science is a tragic book, but not in the old Aristotelian sense that it provides catharsis. Catharsis is “the effect of tragedy Nietzsche [rejects] in the interest of laughter.””82
The inescapability of the eternal return also has light shed on it within Bergson’s work. Here however, it is at the root of a punchline. The comic situation is punctuated by its upheaval and reversion.
“A child is delighted when he sees the ball in a game of ninepins knocking down everything in its way and spreading havoc in all directions he laughs louder than ever when the ball returns to its starting-point after twists and turns and waverings of every kind. In other words, the mechanism just described is laughable even when rectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when every effort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect, merely results in bringing it back to the same spot.”83
Totally out of control, the situation resolves itself to be precisely as it was before. For
Bergson this is a source of comedy. Our protagonist’s efforts are meaningless. A quick glance at any of the most successful sitcoms of the last half century would provide ample examples of the trope. Week in, week out, the Simpsons entertain the most absurd of plans, often to their detriment, yet next week you can be assured the show will start with the family sitting comfortable upon their brown cartoon sofa, blissfully unaware of what ordeals the writers have so recently put them through. Bergson sees this eternal return from the present and
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laughs84. Nietzsche, however, treads the more metaphysical depths of such a notion. As such, he considers the infinite. He cannot detach and simply view the situation as a one-time recurrence, instead Nietzsche deals with the abyss that is eternity. “Eternal recurrence is such an ‘abyssal thought’ because, if everything eternally recurs, this includes that which is small in man, which Nietzsche so passionately loathes. ‘Nothing is worth while’ because the ideal of a future Übermensch, it seems, cannot be realised.”85
Nietzsche does not want us to be depressed by the eternal return. He wants us to embrace the “joy in becoming”. How then do we escape from this abyssal thought and find the joy that laughs in the face of eternity? A guised answer comes in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, his most obfuscated work. Zarathustra tells the tale of finding a shepherd into whose mouth a snake has burrowed and bitten. Crestfallen in his attempt to pull the snake from the shepherd’s mouth, Zarathustra orders him to bite the snake’s head off.
“The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! He spat far away the snake’s head – and sprang up. No longer a shepherd, no longer a man – a transformed being, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had any man laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter – and now a thirst consumes me, a longing that is never stilled. My longing for this laughter consumes me: oh how do I endure still to live! And how could I endure to die now!”86
The symbol synonymous with the eternal return, the snake biting its own tale, is recreated here with the addition of the shepherd being bitten by the snake. A human is part of this cycle now. Through biting the snake’s head off, the shepherd has affirmed their life. They have taken it into their own hands and have, symbolically, broken the loop. But there is a caveat. To do this the shepherd could not remove the snake in its entirety with one fell swoop. If they could, Zarathustra would have succeeded in pulling the snake from the shepherd’s mouth. No, instead they must risk swallowing part of the snake, its head no less. What the shepherd must accept if they want to be rid of the snake is “to give the highest affirmation of life possible: to say a joyous Yes to life despite its negative side, despite its horrors and suffering.”87 The laughter that then follows is a laughter that comes closer to the laughter that featured in The Gay Science. It is the laughter at oneself – the joy of becoming. The pernicious tragedies of fear and terror cannot be abated; instead they must be accepted and only then can we thrive. We laugh because we accept how vile and relentless the call is in the face of the eternal return.
The eternal return is often treated with the brush of fancy. If we are to give a more credible look towards its commentary of temporality, we can also see how Nietzsche may find humour and joy in accepting becoming. Much like how Bergson has interpreted the
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comic situation as rooted in rectilinear motion, he notes that Kant writes that “Laughter is the result of an expectation, which, of a sudden, ends in nothing.”88 Weeks makes a connection through Hobbes to Schopenhauer of the continuous breaking of temporality mentioned within the philosopher’s works. Working closer to the relief theory of Freud, Weeks explains Hobbes’ view that “laughter in some sense collapses temporal consciousness and thereby represents a threat to narratives of historical progression. In fact, there is a sense in which laughter functions in an antithetical relationship with narrative in general, given that narrative is itself a temporal and temporising, phenomenon.”89 To subvert
historical narratives is a concept familiar to postmodernism, and generally is one that stems from the loss of grand narratives faced by Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
“European nihilism” is as Nietzschean a theme as any. Relating Hobbes to
Schopenhauer, Weeks considers that “Schopenhauer’s model acutely described the pleasure in laughter as the effect of a subversion of temporal being and its endless deferral of
gratification in the constant “exertion” of discursive consciousness. Laughter does not satisfy a specific desire, but the disruption of (past and future) tense itself produces a reduction in tension, momentarily relaxing the otherwise relentless dissatisfaction that extends the human, the uniquely temporal being, beyond the immediate and, in a sense, finite demands of biological need. Thus laughter momentarily accesses that world of satiable desire which according to Schopenhauer’s own tragic philosophy of an insufferable will is generally beyond recovery.”90 Weeks is referring to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the world as will and representation, in which Schopenhauer describes life as an endless striving of will, obscured by the representations we perceive. The breaking of the unending striving of the will resulting in a temporal breakage is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s own eternal return. Nietzsche dropped many of the metaphysical claims of Schopenhauer’s, none more readily than his distinction between the will and representations. Because of this, Nietzsche accepts the bondage of time and wishes to find joy in “dominating time from within”91. Nietzsche wants us to laugh at ourselves from the perspective of both overcoming and submitting. In accepting the eternal return, we submit to its inescapability, but it is only through this that we have a laughter that is triumphant and that we can now mould into a being that acts more like an Übermensch. “By ridding himself of his dread of the eternal recurrence Zarathustra achieves the capacity to affirm all time and all being; and loathing and horror vanish in exultant laughter.”92
The higher laughter has now been explained in two terms. The more simplistic laughter of achievement that comes through accomplishment is complemented by a laughter resulting from dealing with the eternal return.
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