The Irony of Philosophical Inquiry

Yesterday, I spoke briefly with a student in my graduate student cohort about her experience studying the philosophy of happiness and well-being. She brought to light a strange irony about the way her engagement with the literature on happiness and well-being affected her own life. She said that the more time she has spent with the literature, the more she has overthought whether she has been living her life in congruence with the values she’s come to find important. By spending so much time thinking about happiness and well-being, she has ironically in some way eroded her own.

She asked me whether I had a familiar experience as somebody who studies the philosophy of humor. I’ve never been asked such a question and it really got me thinking: Do I find things less funny now? Do I overthink the jokes that I make to the point that humor is compromised?

I don’t think so.

But I do think that I have ceded my ability to get lost in laughter. I surely find things funny, and I think that jokes I make are greatly improved as compared to those I made before I started studying humor. Hearing a joke, however, has become more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral experience. When I watch stand-up specials on Netflix, I listen with a critical ear that perks up at the detection of incongruities relevant to humor and laughter. When I ask a friend to tell me the best joke they’ve heard, it’s almost as if I am listening to the joke with that same intensity present when I mark up an academic text.

Humor, purportedly the most primal expression of enjoyment, has become something of a cerebral exercise to me. Whether this is good or bad, I have no clue. I am sure, however, that experiences like mine or my happy-philic cohort member reveal something deeply ironic about philosophical practice:

Spending time with a concept as an intellectual detracts from experiencing things associated with it as a human being.

In his Republic, Plato argued that society ought to be ruled by so-called “philosopher kings,” members of a ruling elite that would use philosophy as the basis for exercising power and enforcing rules. The rationale he offered was greatly concerned with the deeply enlightened nature of these individuals. Perhaps, it isn’t enlightenment at all that makes a philosopher distinct from an individual who doesn’t grapple with philosophical quandaries. But rather, it is the fact that philosophers remove themselves from the astonishment of human experience with every new project they take on.