The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, sociology, education, analytic training, political economy, rhetoric. and related subjects.
Humour and Cruelty is coauthored by Professor Giorgio Baruchello, who teaches philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Akureyri, Iceland and Professor Ársæll Arnarsson, head of faculty at the University of Iceland School of Education.
The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of wit and humor.
As the publisher’s description page explains,
Humor has been praised by philosophers and poets as a balm to soothe the sorrows that outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows cause inevitably, if not incessantly, to each and every one of us. In mundane life, having a sense of humor is seen not only as a positive trait of character, but as a social prerequisite, without which a person’s career and mating prospects are severely diminished, if not annihilated. However, humor is much more than this, and so much else. In particular, humor can accompany cruelty, inform it, sustain it, and exemplify it. Therefore, in this book, we provide a comprehensive, reasoned exploration of the vast literature on the concepts of humor and cruelty, as these have been tackled in Western philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, especially psychology. Also, the apparent cacophony of extant interpretations of these two concepts is explained as the inevitable and even useful result of the polysemy inherent to all common-sense concepts, in line with the understanding of concepts developed by M. Polanyi in the 20th century. Thus, a thorough, nuanced grasp of their complex mutual relationship is established, and many platitudes affecting today’s received views, and scholarship, are cast aside.
Professor Baruchello’s ResearchGate profile notes:
I am a philosopher of Continental education and Analytic training. In my works, I combine both traditions to pursue fascinating topics: mortality, cruelty, axiology, political economy, humour, rhetoric.
Here are some thoughts about humour by authors, many of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
False Humour differs from the True as a monkey does from a man…. I have here only pointed at the whole species of false humorists; but, as one of my principal designs in this paper is to beat down that malignant spirit which discovers itself in the writings of the present age, I shall not scruple, for the future, to single out any of the small wits that infest the world with such compositions as are ill-natured, immoral, and absurd.
- Joseph Addison, Essays & Tales, True & False Humour
JESTER, n. An officer formerly attached to a king’s household, whose business it was to amuse the court by ludicrous actions and utterances, the absurdity being attested by his motley costume. The king himself being attired with dignity, it took the world some centuries to discover that his own conduct and decrees were sufficiently ridiculous for the amusement not only of his court but of all mankind. The jester was commonly called a fool, but the poets and romancers have ever delighted to represent him as a singularly wise and witty person. In the circus of to-day the melancholy ghost of the court fool effects the dejection of humbler audiences with the same jests wherewith in life he gloomed the marble hall, panged the patrician sense of humor and tapped the tank of royal tears.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him.
- Thomas Carlyle, in ‘Schiller” (1831), in Fraser’s Magazine; later in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1839)
There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world.
- Václav Havel, in an address upon receiving the Open Society Prize awarded by Central European University (24 June 1999)
The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.
- Søren Kierkegaard, in Stages on Life’s Way (1845)
Dictatorship… is devoid of humor. The basic reason why Americans will never endure a dictator is… their sense of humor.
- Emil Ludwig, Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
- Christian Morgenstern
Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
- George Saintsbury, in A Last Vintage
Jesters do often prove prophets.
- William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), Act V, scene 3
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
- Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”, Against Interpretation (1961)
A bitter jest, when it comes too near the truth, leaves a sharp sting behind it.
- Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), XV
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel — a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
- Horace Walpole, Letter to Sir Horace Mann (31 December 1769)
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, A View from the Asylum
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
- Christopher Morley
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)