PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 83, 24 January 1941, Page 11

PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER

HE death a few days ago of Professor Henri Bergson has removed the greatest French thinker of recent times, and perhaps the most famous philosopher of our day, said L. S. Hearnshaw, lecturer in pnhilosonhy at Victoria

Se ee ee eh ae ee ae oF ae University ina tribute to Bergson broadcast from 2YA on January 12. The keynote of Bergson’s thinking, said Mr. MHearnshaw, was change,

mobility, freedom. For centuries, philosophers had been looking for an eternal, changeless reality beyond the flux and the movement, the growth and decay of the visible universe. Bergson said there is no such reality. Reality is life, is change, and he presented his ideas with such charm, lucidity and feel-

ing that he was the most widely read philosopher of his day. In his last book, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion," Bergson applied his philosophy to the problems of morality and religion. Perhaps the most charming and most popular of Bergson’s writing is his essay on laughter, and in many ways it well illustrates his philosophic outlook. "We shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition," he

writes, "we regard it above all as @ living thing. We laugh at that which is inelastic and automatic, at something mechanical encrusted upon the living, something unadapted to the moving play of social life, and our laughter is a form of mild social correction." It was too early to assess Bergson’s position in modern thought, but he had certainly grasped problems of vast importance and presented his answers to them with matchless felicity and skill.