Introduction

taking laughter seriously in nineteenth-century philosophy

Lydia Moland

pp. 1-13

in: Lydia Moland (ed), All too human, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Philosophers in the nineteenth century took laughter and its related concepts very seriously. Most philosophers before this period treated laughter as tangential to philosophy's core concerns, but beginning with Kant's immediate successors, the family of concepts relating to the laughable—including comedy, wit, irony, and ridicule—took on new significance. They went from describing something derivative about humans to telling us what we, in the most basic sense, are. Well-known philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche offered substantial treatments of these topics; they were also taken up by lesser-known thinkers such as Rosenkranz, Solger, Jean Paul, Bahnsen, and Bergson. The nineteenth century also saw the introduction of humor in particular as a new and distinct aesthetic category. For several philosophers of this period, humor described nothing less than the relationship between the human and the divine and its implications for how humans should live. It described our awareness of our finitude—our fallibility, our petty concerns, our meaningless obsessions—and the amusement tinged with melancholy this awareness elicits. Despite this wealth of theorizing, the nineteenth century is often neglected in studies of the philosophy of laughter and humor. This essay introduces a volume of articles intended to remedy that neglect.