Nietzsche’s Joy

Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (1):117-139 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

No Fool Like an Old Fool.Maryanne J. Bertram - 1988 - Philosophy Research Archives 14:333-342.
Belief and the Basis of Humor.Niall Shanks & Hugh LaFollette - 1993 - American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (4):329-39.
Laughter, freshness, and titillation.Karl Pfeifer - 1997 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):307 – 322.
The laughter of the Thracian handmaid. About the unworldliness of philosophy.Christina Schües - 2008 - Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch Fur Antike Und Mittelalter 13 (1):15-31.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-01-09

Downloads
48 (#293,064)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jason Wirth
Seattle University

Citations of this work

Humour in Nietzsche's style.Charles Boddicker - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (2):447-458.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references