“MAKING REASON THINK MORE”

Abstract

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant’s “incongruity theory” of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the beautiful and the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant’s aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant’s argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject’s purposes can nevertheless advance the subject’s rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter.

Keywords:

• Kant
• laughter
• aesthetics
• judgment
• beautiful
• sublime
• critique

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

The author thanks the anonymous reviewer for his or her generous comments and helpful suggestions. Sincere thanks also go to Samuel Chambers, William Connolly, Andrew Cutrofello, Tripp Rebrovick, Zach Reyna, Jon Masin-Peters, and the participants of the 2015 Western Political Science Association panel “Painful Sensations, Radical Affects, and Corporeal Autonomy.” Deepest thanks are reserved for Ayla Amon for always reading my work carefully and offering guidance and support.

1 As Guyer notes, the first two editions of the third Critique leave this “Remark” unnumbered. However, the Remark falls between sections 53 and 55, and in order to avoid confusion with the text’s numerous other “Remarks,” I will refer to it as section 54.

2 All Kant citations in this article refer to the standardized page numbers of the Akademie Ausgabe. Unless otherwise indicated, all italics and parentheses belong to the original text.

3 See Meredith’s Introductory essay to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Hounsokou’s “Exposing the Rogue in Us,” Godfrey’s “The Aesthetics of Laughter,” and Arnold’s “Laughter, Judgment and Democratic Politics.”

4 For various takes on how the third Critique bridges the gulf between nature and freedom, see Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom, Raymaekers’s “The Importance of Freedom,” and Zammito’s The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

5 While Kant briefly examines laughter generated by two other practices, namely naiveté and caprice (335–36, §54), his analysis of these sources of laughter is much shorter and, in my view, less philosophically rich than his examination of laughter generated by joking. For more on Kant’s account of laughter produced by naiveté and caprice, see Hounsokou’s “Exposing the Rogue in Us.”

6 Importantly, Kant’s analyses of laughter here and in the Anthropology almost exclusively concern witty joking that occurs at dinner parties (Critique of the Power of Judgment 305–06, §44; Anthropology 264–65, 278–81). Because Kant discusses laughter in extremely narrow terms, section 54 does not provide a comprehensive “Theory of Laughter,” and we should resist the common characterization of Kant as, as Morreall puts it, one of the “most famous proponents” of “the incongruity theory” of laughter (16).

7 While Kant often considers joking and music in the same breath, he does not hold the two arts in equal esteem. At different points Kant includes and excludes music from the category of beautiful art (329–30, §53; 332, §54), but he always describes joking as an agreeable art (305, §44; 332, §54). The proximity of joking to an ambiguous art like music further evinces its liminal status in Kant’s aesthetics.

8 Here and below I prefer Pluhar’s translation of Bewegung des Gemüths as “mental agitation” over Guyer’s choice of “movement of the mind.” “Agitation” better captures the forceful, disorienting effects of laughter and the sublime.

9 In addition to Nichols’s “Laughter as Gesture,” see Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (198–99), Banki’s “Humor as the Inverted Sublime,” Borch-Jacobsen’s “The Laughter of Being,” and Marmysz’s “Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity.”

10 Here I once again prefer the Pluhar translation. Pluhar’s rendering of Stimmung as “attunement” better grasps the importance of the relation between the understanding and the imagination than Guyer’s more literal translation of Stimmung as “disposition.”

11 Perhaps this is why Kant affords laughter such an important role at dinner parties. Because it straddles the boundary between sensuous and cognitive pleasure, laughter is uniquely positioned to satisfy the dinner party’s dual mandate of promoting “good living” and moral virtue (Anthropology 277–78).

12 Following Hounsokou, my use of “genus” and “species” here and below is non-technical in nature and serves simply to distinguish between a group (e.g., the beautiful and the sublime) and its subgroups (e.g., laughter).

13 Laughter’s status as the transcendental condition of possibility for the beautiful and the sublime may dispel some of the mystery about why Kant devotes so much attention to laughter in the third Critique.

14 To be clear, my claim that laughter constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant is not a historical argument. There is no evidence that Kant himself conceives of laughter as more important than the beautiful or the sublime. My contention is instead a philosophical argument about the relation between these three judgments in Kant’s aesthetic system. Insofar as the beautiful and the sublime are related to one another as modes of unifying nature and freedom, they both necessarily presuppose laughter as their transcendental condition of possibility.

15 I utilize the Pluhar translation for this quotation. Pluhar’s rendering (“it makes reason think more”) captures the stimulative and generative force that the imagination exerts on reason more effectively than Guyer’s translation (“it gives [reason] more to think about”).

16 Importantly, when an aesthetic idea “makes reason think more,” it does not necessarily transform reason’s ideas; it only stimulates reason to transform its ideas. In other words, jokes do not always yield new or revised ideas of reason. However, as noted above, the particularly powerful agitation of the mind that occurs in laughter suggests that laughter exerts a greater stimulative effect on reason than an aesthetic idea acting in isolation.