El humor como límite en la tradición occidental

Abstract

This thesis develops a philosophy of humor from a relational ontology approach. In general, laughter theories have tried to answer, during the 20th century, the question why do we laugh? This is a very relevant question. However, the question which establishes this research is the next one: What role does humor occupy within Western thought? The main hypothesis is that humor operates as a limit in Western tradition. This means that humor takes a role and a tension place between the infinite and the finite that happens in human existence. Nevertheless, humor does not appeal to transcendence in the way that faith does. The infinity in humor is elsewhere. In this thesis, humor as a limit is expressed in three ways: as doubt, as exception and as excess. Through these three notions, an approach is sought to the conflicts that humor finds in Western tradition, as well as a difference is catched, and that difference allows distinguishing humor from other categories that, although they have a certain similarity in the gesture, they are very different from humor. As a doubt, as an exception and as an excess, humor accounts for the impossibility to subsume the whole reality to an abstract Universal, to a logic of representation where the particular only has place as a representation of the Universal. In this sense, the study of humor as a limit defines it as a key agent in the emergence of the singular and, therefore, as a tool to study a dimension alien to the Universal/particular scheme. The operability of humor as a limit implies rethinking the theories of incongruity. These theories share the idea that humor occurs in the face of some kind of incongruity. This idea is shared and extended by this thesis: thinking about humor as a limit means thinking about the ontological reverse of incongruity. But, what is incongruous, inappropriate, or shocking about humor? The background of all the humorous incongruities is not a nature, an a priori or an essence, but a perplexity before the paradoxical duality that shapes existence.