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 anti-metaphysicans have all the good lines.