Humorous Attitude? Bullough me!

Marmysz describes the humorous attitude as a “talent of capacity for reinterpretation. The humorist, upon encountering incongruity, demands of it that it makes some contribution to the enjoyment of life.” (152)

Humorous attitude brings to mind the term aesthetic attitude. Maybe we can understand the relationship to the enjoyment of nihilist humor but diving into this idea further. What is the aesthetic attitude and the psychical distance? To figure out how we all might laugh at the tragic state of our human condition, thus enjoying the possible reality of nihilism itself, we might ponder the idea of psychical distance from the 1912 article by Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle”. Now this is a very proper piece of aesthetic work, not one I would normally think of when pondering humor, which is hardly ever proper.

Fart.

See? Not proper.

But with a humorous attitude, perhaps we can have the proper humorous experience of it.

So what is Bullough talking about when he uses the term psychical distance? He describes it as a spatial, temporal distance from an object. Aristotle too speaks of certain distances required in the experience of art (heck, when you see an Aristophanes play, you probably want some spatial distance since real fees would sometimes be used on stage!) There is the temporal distance, and for Greek tragedy, this meant something like placing the play in an earlier mythological age. Bullough writes, “[t]emporal distance…remoteness from us in point of time….has been declared to be a factor of considerable weight in our appreciation.”

Bullough uses the example of fog to elaborate on the idea of distance. He says one should imagine looking at fog while at sea. As a sailor, our practical response to fog would be: ANXIETY, FEAR, ANNOYANCE, DANGER, DISTRESS (boy, he’s a serious John carpenter fan, this Bullough). Now, to achieve the psychical distance to the fog and enjoy it on some different level, you must abstract from the experience of the fog. When you abstract from experience the idea of the fog, remove your practical needs from the experience, you can encounter the fog this way: BEAUTY, SMOOTHNESS, SHADES OF GRAY (okay, damn, can’t use that phrase any more), SHADES OF OFF-BLACK, DIFFUSE LIGHT, SUBLIME, NATURE’S POWER. Bullough says that the distance needed to have an experience of beauty requires we remove our personal interests and self from that experience, allowing us to abstract it. He says, very much in Kantian fashion, “the distance appears to lie between our own self and its affection….anything that affects our being, bodily, or spiritually…Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are sources of vehicles of such affections.” The fog, transformed by this mental process by which we remove ourselves from the experience, our personal needs and interests that is, puts us out of our actual selves, allows this fog, the object of fear normally, to “stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” and become an object of beauty for us. For Bullough, it is a negative process, in that it cuts out our means-end side of our everyday experience. But positively, it produces an entirely new experience of interpretation (of the thing as beautiful). But do not forget: the distance view is not our normal mode of existing, nor should it be, for Bullough.

Now here’s where it gets very juicy and tantalizing to apply to the tragic/comic enjoyment of nihilistic humor. This psychical distance requires “a sudden view of things from their reverse….[it] comes upon us as a revelation, and such revelations are precisely those of art.” Aristotle anyone? Incongruity and Kant anyone? Aristotle requires a good tragedy have a reversal. Kant and many incongruity theorists of analytic persuasion say the enjoyment of incongruity is a reversal and a resolution. The joke is the inciting incident, the revelation is that this is the comedic context, and the resolution is the punchline. This is not necessarily the view I agree with, but the view from the Kantian humor tradition (that’s the joke, really- Kantian humor tradition).

Bullough argues that distance is required for the beautiful, much like Kant says beauty is outside of what is agreeable.  Bullough says (drum-roll) “IT IS A SPECIAL MENTAL ATTITUDE.” And I typed that in call caps. Yeah, it is serious.

Now how to we have distance and also emotional experience when viewing art? Bullough says this concern is the “antinomy of Distance”, that we have to have personal experience but it can only be expressed in detachment from the experience. Art is something we experience not with our personal desires and needs, but outside of ourselves. Schopenhauer says art is a place where our self disappears. Kant says something like “it is universal but personal, above the self but experienced as selfless”.

What? I’d like a square circle please. Is that on the philosophical menu today?

But maybe this might be the beginning of a discussion of comic persona versus actual comic, a nihilistic view versus actual nihilist, and this is how we come to laugh.

Here comes the philosophical fog of doom:

There is a voice emanating from the fog screaming “DICKIE, DICKIE, DICKIE! And no, it is not an adult film title or something worn with a tuxedo. George Dickie is the philosopher who challenged the idea of psychical distance and the aesthetic attitude, perhaps the same sort of premise Marmysz is putting forth to explain our enjoyment of dark humor. And I think Dickie defeated it for good. But next time, I will salvage whatever I can from this view, taking our the antinomies and saving something about distance, but a distance that will not remove the self. As Dickie argues in his 1964 article “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude”, YOU CANNOT BE WITHOUT A SELF WHEN VIEWING ART! DUH!!! WE JUST ATTEND TO ART DIFFERENTLY THAN OTHER ACTIONS! GROW UP!!!!

All quotes pulled from http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r9.html Accessed Sept 23 2016