My Grand Apologetics Project Part 3 (a)

See these previous posts:

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

Part 3: The Phenomenology Of The Human Adventure

In the first post from Part 2 I wrote about the experience of life as risk and venture. For most people, I think, life at it's finest is experienced as indeed a risky venture, and that at our finest moments we embrace this as something ultimately good. Another way to say this is that life is an adventure, a journey, or a story. I think most people experience life this way at least from time to time. The question as to whether embrace vulnerability is a question of whether we let that experience of life as venture determine the way we will look at the world. But this sense of life as venturesome is vague and hard to talk about. I think there are a series of other paradigmically human experiences that, when we reflect upon them, have qualities that buttress the two experiences I spoke about earlier. Taken together, they form the background for the entire human adventure.  Here what I will be doing is phenomenology. I will talking about what it is like to experience life this way. At the end of this section I will draw together all I have said thus far to try to form some kind of epistemological outlook, which will then guide us through the rest of my apologetics enterprise.

a. Redeeming Laughter

Humor is an experience most everyone can relate to. I don't know that I have ever met a person who was completely humorless, though I have met a few that were pretty darn close. Laughter is part of what gives life meaning, and it is hard to imagine the good life without it. What's more, laughter is a key part to dealing with hard times and grief. One of the miracles of the human condition is the ability of people to laugh in even the most difficult of situations. But laughter may be one of the least reflected-upon experiences we have. We laugh and we engage in humor, but we rarely really think about humor (one important exception to this is Peter Berger's REDEEMING LAUGHTER, upon which this section is based, I highly recommend it.) This may be a good thing. Humor is one of those things that seems like it would die if we thought about it too much. But the whole point of the religious enterprise, I think, is being reflective about one's own humanity and one's human encounter with the world. So have you ever stopped and thought about what humor is like? What it is like to laugh? The truth is that if one stopped to think about it, and catalogue one's thoughts, they  could go on and on forever, and not have said enough. And that in itself is revealing. One of the first things I want to point out about the phenomenology of laughter is that it is in some sense ineffable. One could talk and talk about it and one still would not have said enough. Laughter, in a sense, transcends language. We can never really capture what it is like to laugh in some simple rational formula.

Some would point out that humor is culturally conditioned, and this too is true. There is actually a lot of humor in the Bible, but few people are able to 'get it' because of the cultural differences between the ancient Hebrews and, say, your modern westerner. But I think there are some features of laughter and humor that cut across culture. One aspect of laughter and humor is that it is cathartic. This accounts for it's ability to help relieve grief. Think about how a joke works. In a joke a story is told that builds up tension, the punch line, or the laughter is the release of that tension. So, one phenomenological feature of laughter is catharsis. Another, which was just touched upon, is tension. But tension between what? It can be anything, any dichotomy can serve to create the tension necessary to produce laughter. Often dichotomies include the dichotomy between the human and natural world (think about jokes where animals act like people), between power and weakness (political jokes), or between life and death even (jokes about ghosts or the afterlife). Dichotomies differ throughout societies and so tension can take different forms among different peoples, and this is the reason for the cultural differences, but incongruence, tension between dichotomies, is fundamental to humor. So here we have a few features of humor: ineffability, catharsis, tension between dichotomies. Let me suggest, though, that underlying the varying dichotomies that create humor, there is a deeper one that cuts across all cultural lines. Behind the various tensions that make various jokes and bits of humor possible, is one fundamental incongruence, and that is the incongruence between the pain of the world and the joy of the humorous moment.

When we tell a joke, or when a humorous scene comes up, all that is serious, dangerous and threatening in the world is, for a moment, bracketed off. Additionally, the normal and serious power struggles of the world are thrown upside down. In the political joke of the homeless man on the corner, the most powerful man in the world is made the but of the joke of the weakest man in the world. For a moment, the homeless man runs the world. When we step into humor, all that makes life difficult is bracketed off, and we step into a world where the most important thing is joy itself, the joy of laughter. And that is the point I want to make here. Whatever you believe about what the world is in itself, when you listen to a joke, when you watch a stand-up comic, when you watch an animal do something humorous, for that moment you step into a world where the only thing that matters is joy. The serious and dangerous world is set aside as unimportant, and joy itself is made the most important thing in the world. That is just the phenomenology of laughter an humor. It has the power to heal because it has the power to remove a painful world and replace it with one that makes joy its center. This is why we can bracket off normal moral rules and give people a wider moral berth when it comes to making a joke. When someone is offended by a joke whose real end is humor itself, and not the insult that might be the means and mode of the humor, we will usually defend the comic with the words "he was only joking". Humor produces a universe of joy, if only for a moment, and we are willing to sacrifice great swaths of the seriousness of the world, no matter how serious we indeed know them to be, to make sure that world has a place in ours. That is because, I think, we all know that a life full lived, indeed a meaningful life, has to have a place for laughter in it. We will never allow the world of the serious to push the world of the comic out of it completely. Now, we move into the world of the comic only briefly. It is completely reasonable to think of this as but a momentary illusion and escape from the world. I am not at this point arguing it is anything else. I only need one to grant me this one thing: if the world was as we experience it to be in laughter, then we would have to put joy at the center of our worldview. All that is required at this point is an acknowledgment of my phenomenology, an acknowledgment that indeed that is what humor is about. We are still at the level of premises here.