Search

Analyzing the importance of joy, laughter, and cheerfulness in Nietzsche's thought, this volume addresses an under-examined topic in the secondary literature. By exploring disparate aspects of these interrelated emotions it provides new insights into his key ideas.The contributors-among them philosophers and political scientists-illustrate the significance of these feelings to reveal political ramifications of their affirmative potential and their broader role in Nietzsche's philosophical aims. These include how the joyful disposition Nietzsche commends informs his free spirit's self-overcoming, attempts to revalue all values, and prospects of ultimately transfiguring humanity.Among other topics, scholars assess the Übermensch and shared joy, learning to laugh at oneself, Schopenhauer's jokes, Pascal's cheerfulness, and the Dada movement's subversively playful aesthetic. By contemplating Nietzsche's emphasis on joy and laughter, the volume reveals a thinker who, far from being a caricature of hopeless nihilism, is in fact the hitherto unrecognised champion of an alternative liberatory politics.

Examining the multiple non-humorous meanings of laughter, this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor, without humans, and without humanism. Providing a bold new theory of modernism's affects, Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature, film, and philosophy. From William James's trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter – defined by its ability to “crack up” and destroy, whilst opening new horizons of perception.Examining the creative operation of posthumorist laughter, this book explores how various stylists of the form-from Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous-use it as a tool to unsettle, reconfigure the individual human, and shape different forms of humanist discourse.

This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne's'Tristram Shandy'and shows Sterne's deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant's underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer's more complete account and identifies humor's place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz's work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but also to its style. The book concludes with an explication of French philosopher Henri Bergson's claim that laughter is a response to mechanical inelasticity.

This book analyzes Western and Chinese philosophical texts to determine why laughter and the comic have not been a major part of philosophical discourse. Katrin Froese maintains that many philosophical accounts of laughter try to unearth laughter's purpose, thereby rendering it secondary to the intentional and purposive aspects of human nature that impel us to philosophize. Froese also considers texts that take laughter and the comic as starting points, attempting to philosophize out of laughter rather than merely trying to unearth reasons for laughter. The book proposes that continuously unraveling philosophical assumptions through the comic and laughter may be necessary to live well.

Diese phänomenologische Studie bietet im historisch orientierten ersten Teil eine umfassende mentalitätsgeschichtliche Analyse der Deutung und Bewertung des Lachens von der europäischen Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Kritisch analysiert werden die wichtigsten und folgenreichsten Argumentationsmodelle. Der zweite, systematische Teil führt die anthropologisch orientierte Argumentationstradition auf der Grundlage der Neuen Phänomenologie von Hermann Schmitz fort und beschreibt das Lachen in seinen drei Grundtypen als Bekundungs-, Interaktions- und Resonanz-Lachen auf den verschiedenen ontogenetischen Stufen von Lachmündigkeit als Spiel von personaler Emanzipation und personaler Regression wie auch als synergetisch-synästhetisches Gesamtverhalten bei verschiedenen Einstellungen und in verschiedenen Situationen. Ausführlich stellt Lenz Prütting dar, dass die Fähigkeit zum Lachen in seinen verschiedensten Formen dem Menschen eigen ist, ihn erst zum Menschen macht. Er lädt ein, das Lachen und den Humor als wichtige Lebensfunktionen anzusehen.'Es gilt ein Werk anzuzeigen, wie es wohl nur alle hundert Jahre einmal zustande kommt, speziell über diesen Gegenstand, aber so noch nie geschrieben worden ist, und das, obwohl sich über einen Zeitraum von zweieinhalb Jahrtausenden ausnahmslos alle westlichen Denker damit befasst haben'. Burkhard Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Seit jeher treibt das Lachen als anthropologische Grundkonstante Philosophen, Wissenschaftler und Künstler um. Obwohl sich der Mensch im Lachen nonverbal verständigt, bleibt diese soziale Geste höchst komplex, da in ihr Limitation sowie Transgression, Einschließung wie Ausgrenzung stecken. Lachen wurde in der Geschichte teils als wahnsinnig, blasphemisch oder destruktiv, ebenso häufig aber auch als gutmütig, heilig und heilend konnotiert; Lachen ist ein paradoxes Phänomen. Im Band soll durch Interdisziplinarität diesem Paradoxon Rechnung getragen werden. Mit Beiträgen von Nina Bartsch, Peter Friedrich, Holger Glinka, Niklas Hebing, Felix Hüttemann, Alexander Jaklitsch, Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Nicola Kaminski, Peter Kuhlmann, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Lenz Prütting, Linda Simonis und Klaus Thomalla.

L'avènement de la métaphysique dans la Grèce antique s'est constitué sur le modèle tragi-mélancolique, en excluant de sa démarche le rire inextinguible des dieux de la mythologie. Dès lors le rire est proscrit, on l'interprète comme étant la manifestation du diable dans l'homme. Il s'agit ici de réhabiliter le rire dans le discours philosophique, d'où l'élaboration d'une métaphysique du rire.

This book claims that a tragicomic outlook—the kind that echoes in black and gallows humour and the'laughter through tears'of Jewish humour—is the most effective way to manage what Freud called the'harshness'of everyday life.

'This book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of humor, especially in the dialectic context of joking and laughing—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). Thus, this book offers a new theory (that is, the metamorphic theory of humor) to go beyond the existing approaches in the literature on humor in a novel way.'

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor.Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Despite popular opinions of the ‘dark Middle Ages'and a ‘gloomy early modern age,'many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, entertained and ridiculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed, and this from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works where laughter determined the relationship among people. In fact, laughter emerges as a kaleidoscopic phenomenon reflecting divine joy, bitter hatred and contempt, satirical perspectives and parodic intentions. In some examples protagonists laughed out of sheer happiness and delight, in others because they felt anxiety and insecurity. It is much more difficult to detect premodern sculptures of laughing figures, but they also existed. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures.

The Mirror of Laughter presents a theory of humor and laughter by examining their relationship to human behaviors. Kozintsev is especially interested in the relationship between biological and cultural factors that influence behaviors. He divides his work into four chapters, the first of which establishes a theme of the book, focusing on the study of meaning from the perspective of philosophy and psychology, while examining linguistic theories of humor.The second chapter examines biological data regarding laughter and the evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. It demonstrates the author's interest in studying humor objectively by detailing physiological reactions and underlying psychological issues. The third section on play, including linguistic play, distinguishes between orderly and disorderly play. While orderly play has no biological roots and is synonymous with culture, disorderly play is rooted in the pre-human past. The final chapter discusses the conflict between culture and nature and how culture has transformed the original semantics of laughter.Kozintsev seeks to understand the relationship between the biological, cultural, and social origins of humor and, from here, he seeks to create new understanding that only the alliance of several disciplines could provide. All of this is done while the author challenges many popular ideas of humor, such as that humor is inherently related to hostility. Originally written in Russian, this work makes great strides towards its goal, and it does so in an interesting and enlightening way.