Why Are Philosophers Not Funny People?

On the Resistance to Learning

What to do, what to do? The hedgehog wants to laugh  (source)

The people of reason will ask: If it's such a good idea, and so obvious, why didn't everyone else think of it before? Does it seem logical to you? Why isn't it being done already today? How come it hasn't been said already? What's new about it at all - if it's so logical and obvious. And from the exact opposite side they will ask: If everyone else didn't do it before - what's wrong with the idea? Apparently it's not such a good idea, and not so logical, and they had a good reason. Explain to me how it's possible that only you thought of it? Does that sound logical to you? Reasonable logic probably says that it's probably not a good proposal, and the innovation is nonsense. And this response of the smart, logical, thinking people - this is the weakness of logic in the face of learning. The innovation itself - is not logical.

If the world works according to logic - there shouldn't be innovation, only logic. After all, all political theory and democratic rationale are built on the idea that people are logical - but people are not logical, not because they are stupid, but because they are learning creatures. Therefore, the logical response - is not learning-oriented. The world cannot be built on reason - but on learning alone. Because there is no reason - even reason is learned. In fact, learning is the creation of new logic. The very logical questions themselves, which resist learning, show the difficulty of learning - that is, why it wasn't done before. If it's "logical" - how can it be that no one thought of it before? And if it's not "logical" - that's exactly why it wasn't done. Logic is a form - that is, a spatial structure - that has no time, and therefore no development (which is content). Logic is a good framework for mathematics, but not for the development of mathematics. The next breakthrough in the foundations of mathematics will be a formal framework for the development of mathematics, which is a lacuna in mathematics today: there is no conceptualization of mathematical learning itself, but only a language in which its results are written. After all, the deep and true meaning of mathematical proof is not as a text written in correct grammar, but as a method.

Let's ask: What is the value in learning? Where can we see it? How can we see at all that there was learning, and not just more thinking or regular action of the system, without changing it (but just another change it made)? How will we distinguish between just thinking and learning? Through resistance. Here the meaning of resistance to learning is revealed: without it there is no learning. If there was no resistance - there was probably no new idea. Only this way can we measure the size of the innovation, or even understand the innovation: to understand what was new and why it's new. There is no innovation outside of specific history - and specific resistance. Because there is no criterion for learning, that will decide that there was learning here (for example, in approaching a goal - because the goal itself depends on learning). There is no external criterion, learning is only from internal considerations (considerations - as opposed to criterion).

But unfortunately, even resistance itself is not a redeeming criterion, with which we can decide that if there are opponents it's a good idea that advances learning (as in "resistance" in psychology). Because there is of course resistance also to a bad and dangerous idea. Just claiming about a creation that it aroused resistance, for example that it is "resistant" or "subversive" or "oppositional" - this is neutral to its value and therefore an empty and harmful superlative from a critical perspective. This learning emptiness characterizes contemporary art, and this is the damage caused to it by "critical" criticism: the automatic turn against the current stream creates a fractal and repetitive structure, with endless streams and sub-streams of no value and direction. It's easy to resist "just" to show off "resistance". But if the innovation is indeed included in learning history in retrospect - only the initial resistance to it is the last way left to measure the size of the achievement and innovation, because afterwards it becomes self-evident, trivial, and it's hard to understand how innovative it was in real time. Resistance is the material in which learning is recorded.

But resistance cannot be an external criterion for innovation for an even deeper reason: truly innovative ideas don't receive resistance, but ignorance. When the innovation is too fundamental - no one opposes you. For them to oppose you - it needs to be on the same plane, to arouse a counter-force, while a great innovation is a ground shift, and creation of a new plane - new ground. For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. People resist even minor changes within the world, but precisely to the creation of the world no one resisted. So was ignorance the external criterion for great innovations? No, because it's always symmetrical (it must be symmetrical, because there is no external criterion for learning!) - ignorance is also of a worthless idea, or lacking innovation, or lacking meaning. So perhaps the future can be an external criterion? That is, can we at least in hindsight determine the value of an innovation according to its influence in the continuation of learning history, or according to the level of resistance and ignorance it encountered? Not sure, because there can always be a bad innovation that will be accepted in the short term. Maybe only if we're talking about the distant future, if we are believers (belief is the belief in learning itself as a criterion - we believe that the system will not err in the end, in the long run. And this is the last secular belief left).

But the only compass, certainly in real time, is internal to the system, because it is learning - whether there is deep learning here, and how deep it is, and not just another regular change. That is, learning is always a matter of judgment - and not of criterion. Because even if we do choose the criterion as future - it's not relevant because it's in hindsight. Why is there no general criterion, and we will never find it? Because learning is always in the specific case. It has no method (method is logic, not learning). Therefore, there are always many specific changes that pretend to be learning - and therefore a lot of noise. There are many worthless innovations, and everyone wants attention, or funding, or respect. Therefore, the "success stories" of our time are not a glimpse into the future, and do not filter the more important innovations, but on the contrary: they mark precisely the less deep developments - and therefore the less long-term.

That is, just as the theory of relativity determines that there is no objective point of view external to the universe that is not dependent on the observer, so the "learning relativity" determines that there is no objective point of view outside the learning system that is not dependent on the learner, and it is not possible to bypass the need to act within the system, that is, within the resistance and ignorance. Ignorance is the empty space that allows within it the beginning of learning, just like the empty space that allows creation. If the force opposing learning in the world is evil, the Sitra Achra (the other side), then ignorance is deeper than it, and touches on the very ability to create a world - to space. When God created the world - he received general ignorance, and indeed: "ignorance" is from the language of creating a "world" [Translator's note: In Hebrew, the words for "ignorance" (hit'almut) and "world" (olam) share the same root]. We always start inside the womb, and only then come into the world. Cry.

This is the way of the world: First-order innovations, intra-systemic, like rabbis and kabbalists, or certain writers, receive acceptance and reception. Second-order innovations, on the border of the system, like Hasidism, receive resistance and opponents. And third-order innovations, outside the system in the deep empty space, receive darkness. Ignorance is disagreement about what the plane of meaning is at all. Therefore if you are courting a woman and receive resistance - you still have a chance (and risk), because you arouse emotion. Not so if you receive ignorance. Abraham - was ignored. Moses - was opposed. And Joshua - was accepted (and therefore the book of Joshua is the least interesting). As is known, first they ignore you and laugh at you, then they get angry at you and fight you, and finally you win - and they agree with you. We can see here the transition from the stage of absolute ignorance to the stage of resistance through laughter. When they mock you, you already arouse an initial reaction, but still don't really threaten. Therefore humor is the key into consciousness from the empty space, the surrounding outside the skull - into the learning system called thought.

Because what's funny about it? Why does humor "work"? Humor is what they are not yet able to grasp and understand - but are able to grasp that there is something to grasp: they understand that they don't understand, and this is the perceptual embarrassment and surprise (the moment of understanding humor) and discovery. Humor is the point where parallel planes of perception meet for the first time - and don't connect (it itself is a mismatch!). And since our brain is built for learning and rewards it - humor is a moment that the brain enjoys: the moment of creating interest. If they ignore you, try to arouse at least a chuckle in the other side. The moment the girl twisted her mouth, or she can no longer not smile - you already have a shadow of attention, and you start to scratch consciousness from the outside. Humor is created when learning is borderline, that is when you touch the boundary of thought from the outside, with the help of interest (the learning interest). When learning knocks on the door from outside the logic of the people of logic - then the absurd in their eyes is the key. If you ridicule them, as we opened here - you are even able to reduce resistance to learning, at least at the opening point. Why then has philosophy almost never used humor? Why is humor such a rare rhetorical device in philosophy?

Well, for the same reason that humor doesn't survive in history. It's almost never funny after a hundred years, and very rarely will it be funny after a thousand, even if in real time it was the funniest thing in the world. It's not because we are funnier and cooler than those old farts, and we discovered more sophisticated and refined humor. After all, why for example in poetry and prose do they surpass us? Is it possible that they were really more talented and cultured and sophisticated and refined? This stems from the difference between these two forms of thinking. What is humor? The moment of meeting between two perceptions that is not logical, that is the moment of exit from regular logic, of the people of logic and reason, but one that does not yet express any new logic at all. This is a breaking of the old order, without a threatening alternative. It is pre-learning, and from humor itself nothing is learned. Therefore it doesn't even need meaning - even nonsense will work.

Therefore it's not true that humor expresses new perceptions - humor is a subversive force and not a constructive one, it is subversion and not frontal opposition, it is terror and not fighting (that is, it is a weapon against ignorance). Humor undermines totalitarianism but doesn't build democracy, and therefore it doesn't actually threaten the regime. It's like a breach in the wall of resistance, but without the army behind it, without presenting the next perception, it has no meaning in itself. Humor that has no philosophy behind it - is a random act of sabotage. The people of logic hurry to repair the wall and the world continues to ignore as usual. Humor is the trick - and not the invasion itself, and not capable of overcoming resistance by itself. And as a trick it tends to surprise, to disrupt, to arrive indirectly at the target, to precise timing, to search for a breach, and to crooked redundancy that sometimes trips itself up (see Ehud Barak) - which is sophistication. But as a text moves away from us, its degree of specificity - dependent on time and place - decreases, and therefore it does become greater, but what to do - humor is a very specific thing. Logic aspires to the most general, timeless, but learning tends towards the particular case, rooted in time. And in timing - punch!

Philosophers, as those who tended to present great and new logic, and not learning, never tended towards humor. And indeed, the moment we moved away from past perceptions, the moment of meeting between two perceptions and planes is no longer funny to us, because neither of them is ours. They are history. And historical humor no longer works on us, because the point of contact and breaking of logic is not with us, but with perceptions and logic of another time and place. Unlike humor, which requires contact, literature is built precisely on such distance - the distancing of perceptions gives them depth, and every trivial perception in the biblical period or Greece becomes radical against modernity. Every realia becomes powerful estrangement. The more a literary text moves away from us, the stronger it becomes, and the result is that even recipes for magic instructions from Mesopotamia gain rare qualities. Not because everyone then was such great and talented writers, but because every writer grows - from a distance. If we ever hear a recording of a Neanderthal telling stories in a cave - his words will sound to us as having impressive literary depth. What imagery! And what a challenging worldview, whose layers that have entered us will reveal depths we never imagined within ourselves. On the other hand, if we hear his jokes around the campfire - they will sound to us like absolute retardation. Gichi gichi.

If so, our important and canonical philosophers create systems of logic and build our perception - and therefore they are serious people, and not funny, because this is our plane of thought. Our logic is no joke. Writers too are serious people (and even their humor becomes serious over time and petrifies), because their worlds are moving away from us with time, as history progresses - because literature is deeply rooted in a certain real context, and reality changes. Therefore these are worlds that are becoming foreign to us, to such an extent that the simplest verse in the Bible becomes mysterious and full of meaning, and every line of Homer dons ancient glory, and hints at another world, hidden and unknown. Even people who deal with Torah all their days and know it by heart (perhaps the closest relationship a literary text receives) - have deeply internalized modern philosophical perceptions, and therefore the enormous distance from the text creates within them a split that constantly requires harmonization and interpretation. Hence orthodoxy is by its nature always a strange mixture by nature: a foreign story from the Iron Age - beneath which is a contemporary thought infrastructure, with no access to the original irons.

Over time, the real and perceptual components - the narrative and philosophical - of that canonical text go on distancing and tearing apart from each other without return. Moses as a person is far far away, beyond the mountains of darkness, on Mount Abarim opposite Peor (what is that?), while Moses as a philosopher is ABC, almost trivial, at the kindergarten level, because we really learned it in kindergarten, completely obvious (what, can you really believe in polytheism? Is it even on our horizon of thought gods without monotheism? Or to bow down and pray seriously to a statue and picture?). As time passes philosophy is internalized more and more until it can no longer be identified, it is the basis of our perception, you hear people on the street speaking Kant for the masses. Therefore, philosophy and literature from the past are mostly serious for opposite reasons: the former deep within us, and the latter far from us. One is deep logic in us, and the other is logic foreign to us, and therefore there is no moment here of meeting perceptions between our logic and illogic, between an internal plane to the system and a nearby external plane, which is humor. We can identify the humor in Homer and the Bible - but it's not funny. We don't really laugh at the corny jokes about wooden statues, with eyes they have but do not see ears they have but do not hear like them shall be those who make them, which was surely hilarious then. Socratic irony was not "ironic" for Socrates, it was simply stand-up (against ignorance, which indeed received resistance), but it no longer works on us, so it's "irony". There is nothing more dependent on culture and period than humor, because it stems from the logic of innovation, which exists only against the background of specific historical learning development (there is no innovation in itself, without background). And philosophy stems from the logic of logic.

And which philosopher did try to make laugh and laugh? Nietzsche, who constantly tried to resist, and to bring planes together: man and superman (but humor of Germans... more serious than logic of Jews). Freud too, who tried to connect the conscious and subconscious, found humor there. Because humor is a meeting between two logics, where one breaks into the other as illogic, but one that has no meaning (because meaning is within a certain plane of logic). Taking something and removing it from its context, or reversing it, are humorous tactics, but philosophy and literature are strategies. Therefore humor, which is characterized by learning specificity and "going out of the system", is suitable for learning precisely. There is no criterion for humor, and it is very rooted in context (and sometimes even in intonation) - that is, it is funny only within the system (in its touch at its edge). The philosophy of learning, more than it is philosophy, is learning, and therefore it is not afraid to be ridiculous - and precisely therefore it is not identified as serious philosophy. It is always a bit of a parody of philosophy. But not just parody. Because it challenges the most basic assumption of philosophy: who said philosophy needs to be serious?