Laughter as sense, a study of meaning

grantor: University of TorontoWhat does our laughter tell us about ourselves? Merleau-Ponty's theory of meaning can be used to explain how laughter reflects the uniquely human capacity to make the world meaningful. Laughter reflects the definitive features of our nature as human beings--that every human act is a gesture, an act of meaning, that every human act is at once carnal and mental, that it is carnal as mental and mental as carnal, and that every human act refers at once to many worlds. In many ways, Merleau-Ponty's career was a conversation with Descartes and Husserl, in which he formed and refined the major themes of his own work: gesture, perception and expression. Merleau-Ponty points out how human gesture establishes within the world different worlds by commanding relations of the second power, relations between relations. A human being can take any thing and bestow on it a meaning other than the meaning that it had in its immediate concrete surroundings. The uniquely human ability to command relations between relations has its foundation in perception, in human incarnation as being-in-the-world, the unique way that human beings inhabit the world through their bodies. My senses do not act individually: together they form a constant unity of sensations. Our incarnate way of being is to be always deploying simultaneous, multiple, reversible fields of sense. Once I master a system of meaning, I have it at my disposal in the same immediate, unthinking way that I have my body; it is lived as an extension of myself. Because the world for us is never just a concrete, physical world but always a field of meaning, a system of relations between relations, our behaviour is always expressive. Expression is not something over and above our everyday activity. Our lower order activities--those we share with living beings that do not gesture symbolically--are subsumed in and re-ordered in the new form of unity that is mind. In this thesis, examples from the humour of the Marx Brothers are used to show how laughter is testament to the fact that every human act borrows from our biological make-up while, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, it "eludes the simplicity of animal life." To laugh is human.Ph.D