Homo ridens

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The term Homo ridens ( Latin laughing person) goes back to a formulation of the Greek philosopher and thinker Aristotle , who considers laughter to be a specific characteristic ( proprium ) of the human being. Several authors have taken up this formulation , which has since become one of the gay epithets .

In medieval debates, human beings are constantly used as an exemplary example for essential definition and accidental definition or specification of propria or essential and nominal definitions. For example Thomas Aquinas in the commentary on the Aristotelian second analytic. The Buridan Quaestiones in Analytica Posteriora discuss many logical-semantic individual problems using the predication “homo est animal risibile”. Or Guy de Chauliac explains: The essence definition of human beings is “rational living being”, the accidental definition is “being able to laugh”. Leibniz also uses the human capacity as an example of a fallacy from “everything that laughs is human” to “everything human is laughing”.

In one verse, Rabelais also mentions laughter as a proprium of man. This phrase is often seen as typical of the Renaissance attitude towards humor, comedy and laughter and has numerous contemporary precursors.

Johan Huizinga , who had presented a much-quoted representation of the human being as a playing being (homo ludens), put it:

“... that it is precisely the purely physiological function of laughing that is exclusively peculiar to humans, while they have in common the meaningful function of playing with animals. In contrast to animals, the Aristotelian homo ridens describes humans as almost even purer than homo sapiens. "

Even Helmuth Plessner addressed the topic of an essay: laughter and tears of 1941. He sees two strange man expressions.

Konrad Lorenz agrees with this view and a. Plessners and sees in it an affective counterpoint to the classical definition of man as a rational being.

The philosopher GB Milner developed a theory with the focus of the laughing person, i.e. with reference to the human ability to develop humor , to laugh and in this way e.g. B. to feel adrenaline and noradrenaline , joy, relief and amusement and thereby create and promote social contacts.

literature

  • P. Santarchangel: Homo ridens . Estetica, Filologia, Psicologia, Storia del Comico, Florence 1989.
  • Gerhard Schmied: The human riddle - answers from sociology , Barbara Budrich, Opladen 2007, p. 150f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aristotle: De partibus animalium 3,10 (673a9): monon gelan tōn zōōn anthrōpon. In the translation of Theodoros Gazes : homo animalium unus titilletur, et cutis tenuitas est, et quod solus omnium animalium rideat.
  2. ↑ Expositio libri Posteriorum Analyticorum lib. 2 l. 3 n. 4: Quarum una est quod quod quid est sit proprium: quaelibet enim res habet propriam essentiam sive quidditatem. Et quia non omne quod est proprium alicui pertinet ad essentiam eius, sicut risibile homini; ideo requiritur secunda conditio, quod praedicetur in quid. And l. 8 n. 6: Et per hunc etiam modum dicitur esse una ratio, quae est expositiva nomis, vel manifestativa ipsius rei nominatae per aliqua accidentia: ut si dicatur quod homo est animal risibile susceptibile disciplinae.
  3. ↑ Guy de Chauliac, ed. Jean Canappe: Opuscules de divers autheurs medecins, Jean de Tournes, Lyon 1552: “la diffinition essentiale de lhomme, cest animant raisonnable, la diffinition accidentale de lhomme, cest animant risible, ou né à rire.” (P. 25) “Estre risible, cest a dire estre né, & apte à rire, conuient à tout homme, & au seul homme, & en tout temps ". (P. 35) Quoted here. according to Barbara C. Bowen: Enter Rabelais, laughing, Vanderbilt University Press, 1998, p. 19. There subsequently several other examples z. B. from Montaigne.
  4. ^ Leibniz: Difficultates quaedam logicae.
  5. ↑ So in the end of the instruction to the readers (aux lecteurs) in his main work Gargantua et Pantagruel from 1532 to 1552/1564, u. a. in: Les Oeuvres romanesques, trans. F. Joukovsky, Paris 1999, p. 5.9; Oeuvres Complètes, Paris 1955, p. 2.
  6. ↑ See for example Bowen 1998 and already the article by Bowen: Le rire est le propre de l'homme, in: Etudes Rabeliennes 21 (1988), 185-190; Daniel Ménager: La Renaissance et le Rire, Paris 1995, p. 5; G. Husso: Lucien philosophe du rire ou "Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'Homme", in: A. Billault (ed.): Lucien de Samosate, Lyon 1994, pp. 177-184.
  7. ^ Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens , Reinbek 1991, p. 14.
  8. ↑ In: H. Plessner: Gesammelte Schrift , Vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 201–387.
  9. ↑ K. Lorenz: Das so-called Böse , Vienna 1963, p. 258.
  10. ↑ See Milner: Homo Ridens. Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humor and Laughter . In: Semiotica 5/1 (1972), pp. 1-30.