First attempt on Pascal's plank

"Le plus grand philosophe du monde sur une planche plus large qu'il ne faut, s'il y a au-dessous un précipice, quoique sa raison le convainque de sa sûreté, son imagination prévaudra. Plusieurs n'en sauraient soutenir la pensée sans pâlir et suer." (Pascal, Pensées)

So this is a test for philosophers: a plank above an abyss, the philosopher walks on the plank.

I would certainly turn white, and I would sweat. I would be shaking all over. I might simply faint, in fact. Now imagine we send Woody Allen on the plank (not the real person but the character he plays in his movies, his early ones in particular; let us call him Woody). He is often (or at least twice, in Bananas and Love and Death) sentenced to death, and he gets through the ordeal with much dignity. On the plank, I imagine he would turn back to his tormentors sitting safely a few meters from the chasm, and he would make a joke. Maybe they would laugh. There would be some confusion. Woody might actually escape. Or at least he would get over the fear, or somehow shortcut the fear.

In one of his films, Woody Allen (again, I am not interested in the real person but in the character he plays) says that he started making jokes when facing school bullies as a child. He was weak, he says. It was his only means of defense. The bullies would laugh and he would not get beaten up.

Well, he turned jokes into a metaphysical means of defense. The jokes may be used to escape the bad guys (in Bananas. for instance) but, more often, they somehow enable him to escape the fearsome elements of life: not only the bully who would have him walk on the plank above the chasm, but the void itself that attracts us all. Jokes have this power to tune down the fearsome elements: what we rationally fear - death, horrible diseases, sudden accidents - and what we irrationally fear - the void around Pascal's plank, or the confinement, when the crowded metro stops in the middle of the tunnel, and the light goes off. Maybe there are dark forces around us like school bullies, and they laugh when we make jokes, and they let us alone. The light goes on again, and the metro jerks and starts moving. Maybe we don't get beaten up, by life itself, diseases and accidents, if we have the wit to make a good joke when the time comes. I am not sure to what extent, or on which levels, I believe it or not. In any case, jokes certainly shortcut the fear itself. It is not that it eliminates the thing. The void is still there, it still attracts us, it is still fearsome, but somehow we are no longer afraid, for a few moments.

Possibly neuroscience will discover that laughter is related to a chemical reaction in the brain that inhibits fear. The molecules that produce fear can no longer find their receptors and just linger in the brain, waiting for the laughter to cease. Something like that. Or laughter may be part of a routine, similar to those they teach you in behavioral therapy, like breathing fully and carefully. In fear, I mean panic, you hold your breathing, you can't breath. Concentrating on your breathing, forcing yourself to breath fully, tricks your body into acting as if there were nothing to fear. Now laughter has to do with breathing. Maybe it regulates your breathing out of the panic.

All this may be true, or not. But I believe there is more to it. To really shortcut fear, Woody, on the plank, would not make any joke. He would make a joke about the void itself, or the fear of the void. So laughter is not everything. It is what you laugh about.

Freud explains wit, and to some extent humor, by the fact that a witty joke confers, in a form that is acceptable, an unconscious, or a pre-conscious, message, something that for some reason we do not want to contemplate consciously. We are pleased that we have tricked ourselves into saying aloud what we are not allowed to.

Now, let us put it this way. Standing on Pascal's plank, could my fear come from my inability to contemplate my fear? My inability to look at the void below, and measure the plank which is large enough for both my feet: I have plenty of room. In this case, making a joke would be a way to acknowledge the situation, the void below, and my fear, without having to contemplate the matter seriously. A joke, in Freud's view, is enjoying a gift without opening the package.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is opening the package, and dissecting the gift. Thus philosophy is not a joke. In fact, philosophy kills the joke. Because it makes explicit what was conferred insidiously in the joke. It is analyzing the situation: the fact that I am standing above a chasm, on a plank.

Of course, I could also try to not look below. For instance, I could try and concentrate on a poem, or a mathematical problem, whatever helps me not to think about the situation. That would be a routine, yet another way to escape fear. Both the philosopher and the joker would look down into the chasm. Maybe they can't help it. Maybe routines don't really work on them. In any case, after looking down, and feeling the fear, as anyone would, they take opposite attitudes. Ideally, there should be nothing funny in philosophy, nothing comical. Except that Pascal, who was quite a philosopher, warns us: it doesn't work.