?*frowny face*
No. The emotions, man, the emotions you miserable Frenchman. Christ. So I moved on, I don't know to whom, but I did not find many chuckles. I found learned treatises on war, on death, on the "meaning of life," which seemed in all instances to be preamble to death. When I got to the 20th century the essence of man seemed to come down to sex in a vat. With the exception of Richard Rorty there was no place in philosophy for light-heartednes. "Serious. This is serious stuff, suh. We must be serious. One does not cackle."
Either before or after philosophy, I don't remember the order now, I did learned researches into art, mainly painting. Now, painting has always given me a calm that I get nowhere else. I don't know how to explain it any better. For most people I know, "ennui" is the better fit. I love art, I loved art, I loved reading about and looking at art. I didn't pay much attention to subject matter; if a painting made me "feel" I didn't care if it was a Van Eyck or a Rothko. But at some point I received a vague impression that the portraiture, the epic scenescapes were, like philosophy, serious. Great battles, great men, monarchs, heroism. I have frequently illustrated this here blog with a header image of, usually, some ridiculously overwrought dramatic painting to poke fun at something.
A few weeks ago, I think it was when I was following Manchester City-Paris Saint-Germain, I googled "happy" "joy" "party," like that, to find a classical painting as illustrative accompaniment to a post of the glee I felt at a City goal. Nada. The adult closest I could find were bawdy, drunken tavern scenes. I found a couple of paintings of children happily playing some game, in one, a boy dancing with his hands over his head looked old enough for me to use and I did.
Playing. *light bulb* The human species has lived lives that have been "nasty, brutish, and short," absolutely. That's just fact. The Dark Ages, the Plague, the Rape of Shanghai, war, Donald Trump. People have had terrible times But hardly any found life so painful to endure that they ended it. What got them through? Not that you will find any of this in philosophy or great painting, but people at all times, and in the worst of times, had moments of fun. They played games, told jokes, had sing-alongs, whatever. My son is a social worker and works with at risk children of incarcerated parents. He called me in his car on the way home from the field one afternoon and told me of a sight he had seen: a little girl pushing her little brother in a shopping cart through a derelict project that they called home. The kids were playing; in horrific conditions they were having a little fun. I remembered asking my mother one time what it was like living through the Depression. "Oh Benjamin, we were too poor to notice." Made me laugh. I remembered reading The Good Earth. "Lung" or whatever the husband's name was, was an illiterate Chinese peasant. His wife, whatever her name was, was an illiterate Chinese peasant, but they farmed out of the Chinese good earth a good, prosperous lifestyle for awhile. When the Boxers came through they may have been Martians or Americans for anything Lung knew of the goings on beyond his farm. Same with my mother. The Depression didn't touch her life as a coal miner's daughter. They had what they had and didn't have what they didn't have. Mum had a great life.
Laughter is not a lifestyle. Laughter is a moment. Serious is a lifestyle. Dreadful is a life condition but human beings leaven their seriousness and their life horrors with moments of laughter and play. Every human life has done that in every time of their life.
Human beings are distinguished from the other animal forms by the size and quality of our brains so I understand Descartes boiling us down to minds in a vat. Indeed, humans have little to recommend ourselves besides that. We're not a very handsome species. Our sight is not as keen as a falcon's; our hearing not that of a dog; we can't scent things like bloodhounds. Based on the quality of the senses if you were a Martian before the Ice Age and surveyed the lifeforms on Earth, you wouldn't have picked those ugly, deaf, dumb and blind beings for survival, much less domination of the rock. But still, man as mind-in-a-vat was absurd.
What distinguishes humankind from the other animals is laughter. Yes, dogs can smile, yes, they can play, yest they can have fun. But do any of them have a Henny Youngman? It is that, the moments when we lighten our world and others' with our ability to laugh, to cackle till our facial muscles ache and our bellies hurt that is the most distinctive feature of our species. Man is at his best at play.
