The Morality of Laughter

9. Machine Scholarship: Analytical Philosophy • Zombies as Machine Men Machine Political Theory • Baby Selling

Machine Scholarship My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. Ludwig Wittgenstein The satire of philosophic nonsense is one of the oldest literary forms. Aristophanes mocked Socrates’ otherworldly views by portraying him suspended in the air and worshiping The Clouds. Voltaire’s Candide is an ironic comment on optimistic rationalism and Leibnitz’s jargon of “suf‹cient reasons” and “pre-established harmonies.” Not so long ago, Tom Stoppard parodied the self-referential world of analytical philosophy in Jumpers. “That was the year of ‘The Concept of Knowledge ,’ your masterpiece, and the last decent title left after Ryle bagged ‘The Concept of Mind’ and Archie bagged ‘The Problem of Mind’ and Ayer bagged ‘The Problem of Knowledge.’”1 Analytical Philosophy What I should like to examine, however, is how philosophers themselves have used ridicule to deliver a knockdown blow to nonsensical theories. How is philosophy different when the philosopher employs a sense of humor? Few fragments remain of Democritus, alas. The “laughing philosopher ” never left home without a mocking look on his face, trying with “all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim . . . the vilest and most pro›igate town in all Thrace,” as Sterne put it. However, in the 1920s and 1930s a school of philosophy arose that proclaimed that most prior philosophizing was nonsense in the best sense of that term. The move129 9 ment was called logical positivism, and took a very narrow view of what counts as a meaningful utterance. A sequence of words is meaningless unless it is either a de‹nition (“‘Red’ is a primary color”) or an empirical statement about the world (“This pen is red”). De‹nitions teach one a language, but if one already speaks it (knowing the de‹nition of “primary color,” for example) they tell one nothing. That leaves empirical statements, which to be meaningful must be testable or veri‹able, at least in the weak sense that we can imagine a state of the world in which the statement is either true or false. Under this veri‹cation principle, metaphysics , ethics, and aesthetics are all bogus disciplines. They appear to be saying something, but on closer examination are seen to be composed of pseudostatements that, being unveri‹able, are entirely devoid of meaning . To illustrate how the veri‹cation principle excludes pseudostatements , a leading logical positivist, Rudolf Carnap, examined a passage from Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics? What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; being alone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyond being—nothing. What about this Nothing? . . . Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e., the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? . . . We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation . . . Where do we seek the Nothing? Anxiety reveals the Nothing . . . That for which and because of which we were anxious, was “really”—nothing . . . Indeed: the Nothing itself—as such—was present . . . What about this Nothing?—The Nothing itself nothings.2 Not only did Heidegger write all this, but the italics are in the original. For sheer lunacy it is hard to beat, and Carnap no doubt recognized that he was onto some(noth)ing. For what can we say about nothing? The layman might think there is nothing to worry about, but for the metaphysician that is just the problem. To whom shall we turn for an answer? Is no one able to de‹ne nothing? Then surely he can—but where shall we ‹nd him?3 Carnap’s wit lay in recognizing the possibility of laughter when words lose their meanings and a sentence in proper grammatical form is shown on analysis to be devoid of meaning. What Heidegger said wasn’t true, of course; worse still, it wasn’t even false. Even when he “nothed.” We might as well try to ‹nd the meaning of a piece of music. Or as Carnap put it, “metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.”4 the morality of laughter 130 Logical positivism originated in Vienna, but was brought to England by A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. After graduating from Oxford in 1932, Ayer traveled to Austria, where he met Carnap and his fellow members of the Vienna Circle. Returning to England six months later, Ayer wrote Language , Truth and...