#117: Humor, Beauty, Rightness, and the Divine

July 18, 2014

Many, many years ago, perhaps as many as 30, while having coffee with an attractive woman, I made a small joke. It didn’t have the desired effect, a little laugh and a pretty toss of the head. Instead, she looked at me blankly.

“It’s a joke,” I said, and she replied, “I have no sense of humor.”

I was intrigued by this. It was interesting, actually more interesting than the young lady herself.

“Do you mean that you have a bad sense of humor?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I have no sense of humor.”

This made me think about the expression itself. A “sense of humor.” It implied an analogy between being responsive to funny things and, for example, vision. Vision is a “sense.” We do not, however, have a special verb devoted to perceiving the humor in something as we have a verb, “to see,” for perceiving color and shape. Yet there are clearly people who have very little sense of humor, perhaps, in some cases, none at all (like the lady with whom I was speaking). Following the analogy with sight, such people could be thought of as “humoristically blind.” It’s also the case that some people might be selectively humor blind as when, for example, they fail to find a specific kind of humor funny, e.g. slapstick humor, potty humor, verbal humor, etc.. This might be like being color blind for certain wavelengths.

Our ordinary language therefore sanctions the existence of a sense which does not have a natural “sense-datum” (color, smell, taste, texture, sound) as its object. This led me to reflect on other possible “senses” lacking a proper natural sense-datum in the same way. The first and obvious one is a responsiveness to beauty. We know this, I suppose, because we all accept the platitude that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder”; if that’s the case, then it isn’t in any sense “in the object.” And, as in the case of humor, there are different kinds of beauty.

A third fairly obvious case is that of moral or ethical sensitivity. Certain acts evoke a powerful and perhaps unique sentiment of approval or disapproval. “Outrage” is the name we give to this distinctly moral disapproval. This putative fact has led to the ethical theory usually called “intuitionism” and it is famously represented by the philosopher G.E. Moore. Since it was taken up by professional philosophers, this view is more developed than anything we have for humor. I characterized the story on humor by saying that there is no natural sense datum proper to it and left it at that. It doesn’t follow from this, however, that there exists no non-natural datum at all that is proper to it. The Intuitionists in ethics went down this exact road. They posited non-natural properties of goodness and badness as well as a special kind of perceptual ability in humans attuned to those properties. In short, we are supposed to have a sense, call it “intuition,” by means of which we can detect the degree of goodness present in an act. I suppose that our sense of humor might also be considered intuitive and responsive to the non-natural property of funniness and similarly for beauty.

Here’s a quick illustration of the non-natural properties of humor and outrage.

“I was at the bar the other night and overheard three large women talking at the bar.

Their accent appeared to be Scottish, the Bar was pretty much empty so just for some conversation and company I approached them and asked, ‘Hello, are you three lassies from Scotland ?’

One of them angrily screeched, ‘It’s Wales , Wales you bloody idiot!’ 

So I apologized and replied, ‘I am so sorry. Are you three whales from Scotland ?’

And that’s the last thing I remember.“

The beauty (non-natural property number 2) of this illustration is that it will evoke laughter (non-nat number 1) from some and outrage (non-nat number 3) from others. 

So far, so good, but are there any other candidates for a special sense?

I can think of only one, and it seems to me that it is a very important one. The sense of the divine.

Anthropologists can testify that people everywhere have laughed. They can also testify that people everywhere have decorated. There is little doubt that people everywhere have distinguished among acts as acceptable and unacceptable. And we are absolutely certain that people everywhere have worshiped.

The significance of these facts is that Enlightenment atheists and their current descendants have gotten their understanding of religion quite wrong. Like precocious adolescents, they have attacked theological doctrines with admittedly powerful rational considerations, thinking that they have accomplished something really BIG. Even today, the religiously fanatic atheists do not understand what they are dealing with. The reason is that they themselves have no sense of the divine.

The aggressive atheists are like people who might insist that the mass of mankind is deluded in thinking that anything is funny, who might insist that only stupid people believe in funniness (or beauty or moral rightness). There are no such properties “in the world,” they argue, these are fictions. Such people would be both right and wrong. The important fact which would be eluding them is that the relevant thing is not whether there are non-natural properties of funniness or beauty or rightness, which there aren’t, but that most human beings come equipped with a sense for such properties which rightly or wrongly have always operated in their lives and will continue to do so.

Another way of thinking of this is to note that even for materialistically inclined scientists, there are two possible objects of inquiry in the study of perception. The easy one which has been well explored is precisely how conditions in the world yield a specific perceptual experience. Thus scientists know a great deal about wavelengths and such which generate color perceptual experience. The harder one to study scientifically is the subjective side of the equation, the actual experience. The importance of this second pole in the study of perception can scarcely be over-estimated. The reason is simply that if we didn’t have subjective color experiences, there would be no significance to the various wavelength facts. We know, for example, that the wavelength of visible yellow is around 590mm; but this fact has absolutely no significance to person born utterly blind. It’s only the fact that we have yellow perceptual experience that makes the wavelength fact that there exists a wave of 590mm significant.

Scientists could, therefore, devote a lot of energy to studying the conditions under which people laugh; under which they sigh in the presence of beauty; under which they howl with outrage like liberal progressives before competent governance; and under which they pray. Such scientists might well conclude from all of this that there really is no single property discovered by the sense of humor; no single property discovered by the sense of beauty; no single property discovered by the sense of right and wrong; and nothing “divine” present in the natural world. They would be correct, but they would be missing the point.

People have been laughing and enjoying beauty and condemning evil and worshiping the divine long before the scientists came along with their studies. What the scientists say along these lines does not have the effect of making a good joke any the less funny; it does not make a beautiful sonata any the less moving; an evil act any the less offensive; nor the experience of the divine any the less meaning-conferring on our mundane existence.