Henri Bergson

Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an abstract definition,—a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life? At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic than on the field within which it must be sought.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Skyline
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. März 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9788827595459
• Artikelnr.: 52016812

Autorenporträt

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a renowned French philosopher and writer, known for his insightful and original contributions to the fields of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics. Born in Paris, Bergson's philosophical ideas greatly influenced 20th-century thought and continue to resonate today. Bergson's work emphasized the importance of intuition and lived experience over purely rational and intellectual analysis. Through keen observation and philosophical analysis, Bergson examines the social, psychological, and physiological aspects of humor, offering profound insights into the nature of comedy and its role in human society. Bergson's philosophical ideas and writing style had a profound impact on a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychology, and film theory. He received numerous accolades for his work, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.¿