SHAFTESBURY AND HUTCHESON: Enthusiasm and Humor

I discuss Shaftesbury’s proposal, much discussed in his time, that enthusiasm is best addressed by humor (not argument, nor political measures), in his “Letter on Enthusiasm” (1708) - a suggestion, I argue, that can be developed further by recourse to Francis Hutcheson’s incongruity theory of humor in his 1725-1726 “Reflections upon Laughter.” I propose that for Shaftesbury and Hutcheson enthusiasm is primarily to be understood as an aesthetically mistaken state, that is, a socially infectious emotional responsiveness to something (a conception of God) wrongly taken to have the aesthetic value of grandeur. Humor, another socially contagious form of emotional responsiveness, can correct that mistake, on their analyses: it unmasks “false grandeur” by showing up incongruities among the imaginatively associated ideas that compose the enthusiast’s conceptions of God and world.