- A bear vs “the Bear”
We shall discuss not one bear out of many but “the Bear”,
being the ideal bear that our minds can perceive, a bear from which all
bearhood is obtained; for it does not seem useful to discuss the characteristics
of an individual bear out of a demography of bears. I note in passing that some
have argued that there is no such ideal “Thing”, being as it is that sense-data
from the material world alone does not (and cannot) allow us to posit the
existence of ideals; nor, indeed, does Plato make any strong claims of our
intellectual ability to grasp such a world of ideals. For these philosophers,
what makes a “thing” a “thing” is merely what we are accustomed to mean when we
call it a “thing”. Leaving that aside, I will refer to “the bear” as a
shorthand description for “the bear which lacks no things bearly”.
- Does the bear have intellect?
Biologically speaking, it should come as no surprise to
us that the bear has a brain which is capable of neural activity. Indeed, when
we think, briefly speaking, our brains are engaged in such activity sufficient
for us to have a certain complexity of thought. Coupling this with what
Descartes refers to as our apperception, we are aware not merely of incoming
sense-data simpliciter, but also of a “self” that receives this sense-data.
Now, there may be good grounds for doubting whether the bear has quite this
type of self-consciousness, and therefore whether the bear can critically
recognise a complex state of affairs, i.e., when he is not merely prompted by
what we might fairly call his “animal instincts”. Some, such as Nagel, have put
forward strong arguments that as we have no grasp of the psychology of any
other animal apart from our own, i.e. what it is like to be that other animal,
correspondingly, we have no idea at all what, objectively speaking, that
animal’s consciousness would be. There is, however, some evidence to suggest
that certain animal species are capable of solving complex problems and
displaying complex emotions, suggesting some tendencies towards the
intellectual. Putting aside our doubts for now, we pass on to the next
question, which goes slightly more to the heart of the present query.
- Is the bear’s intellect (and
sense of humour) intelligible to us?
The chief difficulty with a discussion centred around the
concept of humour in the present context is that humour is, for all our usual
intents and purposes, a mental state distinct to homo sapiens sapiens. As I
will argue later, even accepting that the bear might possess a mental state in
which he recognises a state of affairs as humourous (and even this much may be
doubted), it is quite unlikely that such a mental state is in any sense one
which is intelligible to us. Indeed, as previously discussed, we harbour
reasonable doubts as to whether the bear is sufficiently capable of complex
thought, or indeed, self-consciousness. I note in passing that
self-consciousness might fairly be regarded not only as a premise for an
individual’s ability to recognise complex states of affairs, but also, as an
aside, perhaps the significant element in certain types of self-deprecating
humour. Nonetheless, we should begin by first discussing principal states of
affairs which we might find humourous (or, interchangeably, as comedic), and
then whether the bear might have both the nous and then also the emotional
capacity to recognise comedy.
Briefly, Gaiman (the author) pithily describes a joke as
any passage containing as necessary (but for obvious reasons, not sufficient)
elements a truth and an exaggeration. More generally, psycho-sociologically
speaking, theories of humour have converged around incongruity, namely, that we
find funny situations which appear strange. Perhaps immodestly, we think that
we can explain humourous situations by their coherence with these theories.
Thus, according to Morreall, we laugh when we feel superior, when we feel
relief, or when we feel pleasantly amused by the incongruous. For example, we
would probably laugh if a giant pumpkin appeared in our bathtub (but not if it
were a cougar).
While there is some evidence that certain species of
animals display their feelings of amusement by laughter, or perhaps
proto-laughter, it is not clear whether these animal species would, on
experiencing superiority, relief or incongruity, engage in a display of
amusement in line with these theories. The difficulty here is not with the
theories themselves, but with their application: we run again into the core
issue which Nagel treats, viz, that concepts of superiority, relief and
incongruity are complex and sociologically informed, so that these concepts
almost certainly mean different things between species inter se. As
Wittgenstein put it, if a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
Accepting therefore that even if the bear might be capable of complex thought
and self-awareness, and even if the bear could conceivably display amusement in
language or as behavior intelligible solely to his own kind, there is however
no shared mode between the bear species and our species by which we can
comprehend such a display. Accordingly, we cannot even begin to apply our own
intuition to determine the presence of humour in the bear’s understanding. As
an example, the bear might point to something with a claw and say to another
bear, in his own way, that’s “beary” funny, and they might share a giggle.
However, for us this is not even bad humour, this is strictly unintelligible.
Put the other way around, there is no syntactical sentence, much less any joke,
which we could put in words to the bear, even if the bear spoke the language,
by which the bear could understand our meaning (much less our humour), no
matter how eloquent we might be.
Thus, even if the bear could “have” a sense of humour, it
would be a bear’s sense alone, and more significantly, there would be nothing
humanly intelligible (or humourous) about it.
