Laughter
is key in Santayana, as one can see by reading his works. The 2019
Bulletin of the Santayana Society dedicated to his thought (Overheard
in Seville)
has a great article on this issue written by Lydia Amir entitled “ʻI
Stand in Philosophy Exactly Where I Stand in Daily Lifeʼ:
The Special Case of Laughter,” from which some words like these
could be quoted here:
Laughter occupies a
privileged place in the liberation, or inward philosophic salvation,
that Santayana’s philosophy purports to offer. Indeed, Santayana
views his task as the modernization of the Aristotelian account of
the good life. Its aim is to incorporate in the ethics he proposes
the values foreign to the Greeks that we uphold. He recognizes
Benedict Spinoza’s undertaking of a similarly motivated project,
but is unsatisfied with Spinoza’s lack of appreciation for
imagination and the arts as well as with his mysticism. Santayana’s
ethics is predicated on two tenets: that the forms of the good are
diverse, and that the good of each animal is definite and final. The
needs to uproot and to gain self-knowledge follow respectively these
tenets, and both are necessary for the Santayanan good life.
Laughter’s role is to enable deracination and self-knowledge, and
its main function lies in liberating from false restrictions and
uniting the self with spirit. Laughter is Santayana’s main tool of
liberation, first as laughter at others’ peculiar madness of
considering their own good as the only good and then as self-laughter
at one’s own madness of doing the same.
[A]lthough nature is a surd, by mocking herself she rises somehow above her own condition, echoing the situation of the philosopher, who first laughs at the world and then at himself. Nature transcends herself through mocking her own forms, but needs the child’s smile or the philosopher’s laughing understanding to do so. At least, this is how Santayana wishes to see her. It is notable that it is through laughter that he purveys the spiritualization of nature that his philosophy advances. This is so because laughter, being a bodily and a spiritual phenomenon at the same time, functions for us as Hermes, the laughing messenger of the gods, would do. He translates matter in spirit, enabling both a disengagement and a union, a combination that can only be felt as humorous, because it is unsolvable.
Many know of the adage, “When you smile, the whole world smiles with you.” Is this Santayana’s message? Or is it, “The whole world smiles, smile with it.” Because Santayana believes the latter while knowing he can only assert the former, his smile is ironic.
[A]lthough nature is a surd, by mocking herself she rises somehow above her own condition, echoing the situation of the philosopher, who first laughs at the world and then at himself. Nature transcends herself through mocking her own forms, but needs the child’s smile or the philosopher’s laughing understanding to do so. At least, this is how Santayana wishes to see her. It is notable that it is through laughter that he purveys the spiritualization of nature that his philosophy advances. This is so because laughter, being a bodily and a spiritual phenomenon at the same time, functions for us as Hermes, the laughing messenger of the gods, would do. He translates matter in spirit, enabling both a disengagement and a union, a combination that can only be felt as humorous, because it is unsolvable.
Many know of the adage, “When you smile, the whole world smiles with you.” Is this Santayana’s message? Or is it, “The whole world smiles, smile with it.” Because Santayana believes the latter while knowing he can only assert the former, his smile is ironic.
The
article can be read by clicking on the PDF sign in HERE (p. 49). These words remind me that Santayana and Molière share this key thought about laughter in common, as I wrote in another essay in 2018.
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