A Philosophical Joke — Distinctions

Sep 9

Sep 9 A Philosophical Joke

Norman Malcolm, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, writes that “It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).” For a while, I didn’t know what was meant by this. But then one day, I cracked a joke with my friends, and it all suddenly clicked for me what Wittgenstein meant. Here is the joke that did it for me:

I was with my friends, hanging out after a wedding. The family of the bride was going to drive down to the beach to watch the sunset and had asked us if we wanted to join. I looked at my friends and said, “So, do you two want to see the sunset? I don’t need to go—I’ve already seen it.”

Haha, very funny, right? “Do you want to see the sunset?” and “No, I’ve already seen it,” seem like phrases that might fit together but don’t. Additionally, to get the joke—to get why the phrases don’t work together—you have to observe something about how we act with respect to sunsets. There is a bump in our language—that is, an ambiguity around the way we can talk about sunsets. For Wittgenstein, philosophy exists to clear up these ambiguities (but goes astray when people think philosophy is doing anything more to than clearing up ambiguities at the level of our language). This joke does that sort of philosophy by making it obvious that an absurdity exists which is caused by the incompleteness of our language. The joke also points to how our language fails to capture our way of living. This was what clicked for me after I made the joke and thought about why I liked it.

The phrases “Do you want to see the sunset?” and “No, I’ve already seen it,” grammatically seem as if they would fit together because there are other similar cases which fit that syntax well. For example, “Do you want to see the movie?” and “No, I’ve already seen it,” would be a very normal exchange. But something seems odd when we talk about the sunset in this way, and for that reason, the joke works. We’re openly pretending that a category error is normal, and there’s fun in figuring out what that error is.

This means that the joke is revealing something about sunsets. Like movies, sunsets are things that we watch, and can watch multiple times. But, unlike movies, it seems odd that having seen a sunset in the past makes someone never care to see another one again. To get the joke, we have to realize that the way people act with respect to sunsets is different from the way people act with respect to many other aesthetic pieces (e.g. movies, books, plays, etc.).

What is the difference? Perhaps sunsets are different each time, and the responder was failing to acknowledge it. This means that the sunset joke might be similar to this exchange:

“Do you want to watch a movie? We’re not sure which one yet.”
“No thanks, I’ve already watched a movie before.”

Or it might be the case that sunsets—even if they’re nearly identical (perhaps if you live in the same place for a long time)—do not lose their value for looking the same as the sunset from the previous days. The value of the sunset comes from something more than the aspects it shares with other experiences which are less enjoyable on repeated experiences—perhaps it is consistently a nice way to end the day, or it serves as a humbling reminder of one’s place in the world.

In any case, the joke reveals that there is some nuance in our acting which isn’t captured well by our language. It’s as if our language is not developed enough to recognize that sunsets and movies belong in different categories—but with the prompting of the joke, the nuance becomes apparent, and an ambiguity is sorted out.