The Science of Laughter: Helmuth Plessner's Laughing: and Crying Revisited

Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 38: 41–69
DOI: 10.1007/s11007-005-9003-0
c Springer 2006
The science of laughter: Helmuth Plessner’s Laughing

and Crying revisited
BERNARD G. PRUSAK
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Abstract. This paper investigates what there is to be learned about the human condition from
our capacity to laugh, what the medievals called our “risibility.” It is argued that Helmuth
Plessner’s philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter presented in his Laughing and
Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior has much to teach us yet today, nearly
seventy years after its publication. In particular, it is argued that physiological explanations
of laughter need to be supplemented by attention to “the whole human being,” the focus
of philosophical anthropology since Herder. Plessner was one of the principal figures in the
movement of philosophical anthropology in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.
According to him, the outbreak of an autonomous reaction of the body in laughter “may be
understood if, instead of the obscure and schematic ideas of the connection of mind and body
conceived under the influence of metaphysical doctrines, the relation of man to his body, that
is, his eccentric position in existence, forms the foundation.”
It is a commonplace with a long and august history in the philosophical tradi-

tion that the capacity to laugh, or “risibility,” is proper to human beings. This
claim has its roots in Aristotle’s physiological investigations, in particular his
observation in the Parts of Animals that no other living things laugh (673a9).
Very early, commentators on Aristotle’s logic, in particular his Topics, came to
use risibility as the example of what Aristotle calls there a “property” (idion).
In the Topics, Aristotle uses as his example “grammaticality,” the capacity to
learn our “letters,” as a child does in what we call to this day grammar school.
“A property,” Aristotle writes,
is that which, on the one hand, does not show the essence of a thing, but on
the other hand belongs to it alone and can be predicated convertibly of it.
For example, a property of human being is that it is receptive of grammar.
For if he is a human being, he is receptive of grammar, and if he is receptive
of grammar, he is a human being.1
To clarify this example somewhat further, we can say not only, “A human
being is a thing that is receptive of grammar,” but as well, “A thing that is
receptive of grammar is a human being.” Aristotle goes on to remark that “no
one says that a property can belong to something else. For example, [no one
says] that sleep is a property of human being.” Sleep is not “proper” to us.
42 B. G. PRUSAK
Other living things sleep the same as we do. But only a human being, Aristotle
claims, is receptive of grammar.
On this understanding of grammaticality, it is not identical with rationality –
the Aristotelian essence of human being – but seems to be an expression of
it. In other words, it is by virtue of our rationality that we are receptive of
grammar. A human being need not, however, know her letters in order to be
a rationally able human being, which is the critical point. In our day as much
as Aristotle’s, it is more than thinkable that a human being should never learn
her letters. Yet there are other ways that she can express her rationality – for
example, by laughing at a joke, or for that matter in embarrassment.
Apparently it was appreciation of the “reasonableness” of laughter that
led Porphyry, Boethius, and the medievals en masse to use risibility as the
example of a property.2 Yet to say that laughter is proper to human beings
is not to say all that much. As a modern philosopher writes, “We know, or
we have been taught on the very threshold of our scholastic training, that
Homo est animal risibile, but nowhere in our course of philosophy were we
told the reason why.”3 The reason for this reticence could have been the
ambiguity of the question. The question of “why” we laugh can be taken in
several different ways. It can be taken as a question of laughter’s occasions
(what makes us laugh); a question of laughter’s functions (what ends laughter
serves); or a question of laughter’s mechanisms – in rough Aristotelian terms,
as a question of efficient, final, or material causality. But none of these three
questions seem to fall within the competence of present-day philosophy. The
present-day philosopher might well seem lost talking about laughter, as if
she had taken a wrong turn into the provinces of the sciences, in particular
physiology, psychology, and sociology. For the study of laughter, the research
scientist Robert R. Provine declares, has in this last century exited from “its
prescientific phase” and made the “transition from [the] philosophical to [the]
empirical,” from anecdote to data.4 On the basis of this data, the very restriction
of risibility to human beings has become questionable. The long and august
history of the claim that the capacity to laugh is proper to human beings does
not protect this claim from skepticism. Instead, this history ought to invite
skepticism. For the fact is that, until quite recently, our knowledge of our
most likely rivals to this monopoly, the anthropoids or “man-like apes,” was
not only very limited, but saturated with fantasy.5 Accordingly, the relevance
of the philosophical tradition to the study of laughter might appear to be a
thing of the past.
The aim of this paper is to rebut such conclusions by revisiting and retriev-
ing Helmuth Plessner’s philosophically ambitious explanation of laughter pre-
sented in his Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior.6
First published in German in 1940 (in the Netherlands, where Plessner had
THE SCIENCE OF LAUGHTER 43
been living in exile from Germany since 1934), and translated into English
in 1970, this text is today largely forgotten or ignored.7 Yet Laughing and
Crying is a classic example of philosophical anthropology, which Plessner
characterizes as “the systematic discussion of questions of the structure of
human nature.”8 The project of his philosophical anthropology, to put it gen-
erally, is to investigate “how the psychological is clasped together with the
physical” – in other words, what it is like to live in, with, and as a human
body.9 The project of Laughing and Crying is to investigate the conditions
of possibility of these two forms of expression “in the basic figure of human
existence under the spell of the body” (LW 211/LC 11).
Plessner’s thesis in Laughing and Crying is that these two forms of expres-
sion – which he sees as two species of the same genus – outstandingly disclose
“the secret composition of human nature,” which in turn “constitutes the basis
of laughing and crying” (LW 236, 235/LC 33, 32). My reason for restricting
this paper to laughter is to facilitate the exposition of this “secret composition.”
There are at least two reasons that recommend laughter as a means to begin
to work out an account of human nature. First, laughter is a quite puzzling be-
havior. In scholastic terms, it appears to be part active, part passive. Typically
at least, laughter is more than a mere bodily reaction. We laugh in a different
sense from the sense in which we sneeze or cough – and yet laughter, too, is
an automatism that seizes and shakes us. Pondering this puzzle seems likely
to give us some insight into what “we” are. Second, laughter brings us face-
to-face with “the vexed specter of the mind-body problem.”10 For example,
according to Kant, “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transfor-
mation of a strained expectation into nothing” (his italics). Kant is thinking
here of laughter at jokes. Hypothesizing that “some movement in the organs
of the body is harmonically bound with all our thoughts,” he submits that it
will easily be understood “how to this sudden transposition of the mind – now
to one standpoint, now to another in order to contemplate its object – may
correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our
intestines, which communicates itself to the diaphragm.”11 Whence laughter.
Laughter here is precisely an afterthought. Body twitchingly follows mind.
Kant’s mind-body “parallelism” finds few supporters today; but do we have
a better explanation for the outbreak of laughter than his? In brief, the thesis
of this paper is that Plessner does.12
1. Between phenomenology and physiology
As Plessner remarks, typically at least, “It is not my body but I who laugh . . .
and for a reason, ‘about something’” (LW 227/LC 25). To be sure, laughter
44 B. G. PRUSAK
is not ordinarily under voluntary control. Though good actors may learn to
laugh convincingly, most often we do not laugh “as purposefully as we would
select a word in speech.”13 Yet though laughter is not typically voluntary – we
usually cannot break out laughing on command – we also do not merely suffer
it in enveloping passivity. We cannot typically laugh on command, but we are
nevertheless personally implicated in our laughter. “Why are you laughing?”
is a valid question. Sometimes we make ourselves receptive of laughter by
devising or placing ourselves in situations that will elicit it. Other times our
laughter betrays our habits of attention, emotional sympathies and sensitivi-
ties, or prejudices. Moreover, the question, “Why are you laughing?” is unlike,
“Why are you sneezing?” to which the appropriate answer most often is, “I
have a cold” or “I have allergies” – in other words, see my body.14 Normally
at least, laughter does not happen just automatically. It is a way that we more
or less habitually comport ourselves on a number of different occasions for
a number of different reasons. For this reason, the zoologist Adolf Portmann
writes, laughter cannot be categorized simply as either controlled/voluntary
or spontaneous/non-voluntary. It falls between these two extremes.15
These points admittedly call for clarification. In Provine’s words, whether
we choose to laugh “is one of the most important and neglected questions about
laughter.” As he sees it, “Many philosophical and social scientific analyses
bear the tacit assumption of intentionality and conscious control,” which he
rejects as a “myth.”16 His cursory review of the philosophical literature on
laughter leads him to conclude that philosophical analysis of laughter has
traditionally been vitiated by what he calls “the ‘rational person’ hypothesis –
namely, its common sense but incorrect premise that the decision to laugh is a
reasoned, conscious choice.”17 Yet, besides remarking that we cannot typically
“access [on command] the neurological control mechanism for spontaneous
laughter,” Provine is silent on what the experience of laughing is like.18 Both
research and common sense support the claim that laughter is not typically
the product of a conscious choice. But they contradict the claim that laughter
is non-voluntary and irrational (ordinary language serving as the voice of
common sense: we laugh “and for a reason, ‘about something’”). To be fair,
Provine never explicitly makes this second claim; he rests satisfied with the
first. He thereby leaves, however, much work to be done.
The psychologist L. Alan Sroufe’s studies of the development of laughter
in the first year of a child’s life supply a place to begin. It is established that
most children first laugh at about four months.19 The incidence of laughter
increases between the second and third trimesters of life, as do the varieties
of occasions that elicit it.20 “At first, physically vigorous stimulation is most
potent”: intrusive tactile and auditory stimulation such as repeatedly kissing
the child’s stomach; tickling at the termination of the game “I’m gonna get
you”; and walking and talking “BOOM BOOM BOOM.”21 83 (1976): 178.
Come the second half of the child’s first year, laughter becomes more social
and begins to correspond to visual stimulation: for example, peek-a-boo. This
trend intensifies, with twelve-month-olds laughing most at “items that pro-
vide[] an obvious element of cognitive incongruity – mother walking like a
penguin, approaching with a mask, sucking on the baby’s bottle, and sticking
out her tongue.” Further, older babies begin to take an active role in the pro-
duction of such occasions. Whereas an eight-month-old may have laughed at
pulling a cloth from her mother’s mouth, at twelve months even more laugh-
ter accompanies “stuffing the cloth back into mother’s mouth.”22 In sum, “the
infant’s progress is from response to intrusive stimulation . . ., toward smiling
and laughing in response to stimulus content, and finally toward an ever more
active involvement in producing the stimulus itself.”23
Sroufe interprets these findings with the help of Jean Piaget’s theory of
development. Piaget’s central concept is the “schema,” which he defines as a
“sensorimotor concept or, more broadly, the motor equivalent of a system of
relations and classes.”24 In other words, a schema is a way that we have to do
with and organize our world, or what another psychologist calls an “abstract
knowledge structure” that is at once generated through our experience and
enables us to come to terms with it through ongoing assimilation and accom-
modation. In one of its simpler forms, a schema is like a script “embodying
knowledge of stereotyped event sequences”: of what may be expected when
within a rule-bound context of interaction.25
What is remarkable about the development of laughter is that it goes
hand-in-hand with the development not only of more complex and power-
ful schemata, but of the capacity to coordinate different schemata (tactile,
auditory, visual, cognitive, etc.).26 The occasions that elicit laughter from
children tend to be occasions when the schemata that the children bring to
bear at once do and do not apply. The child’s mother does not normally walk
and talk “BOOM BOOM BOOM”; but there she is. In peek-a-boo, she is there,
and then not there, and then there again; she is somehow there and not there
at once. Yet although the occasions that elicit laughter from children tend to
have in common that they present an incongruity – a characteristic that holds
even for tickling, which is an ambivalent form of contact that is at once intru-
sive and recessive, attractive and repulsive – the so-called effective stimulus
also comprises such factors as setting (home or laboratory); familiarization
time; previous experience; “dynamic aspects of presentation” (whether, for
example, the boomer is face-to-face with the child or behind her back); and
the identity of the agent (whether it is the child’s mother or a stranger).27
In short, if incongruity is necessary to cause laughter, it is nevertheless
insufficient.
46 B. G. PRUSAK
This fact is important for explaining laughter. Yet it is not the only relevant
consideration. When a child is confronted by an incongruity, she stops what-
ever else she was doing and adopts what is called an “orienting response,” char-
acterized by “orientation of the sensory receptors, muscular quieting, heart
rate deceleration, [and] increased blood flow to the brain” – in a word, “ten-
sion.”28 This tension is necessary for laughter’s release, as Herbert Spencer
postulated, though in the terms of a now-defunct physiology, more than a cen-
tury ago. According to Spencer, the purposeless muscular activity of laughter
is what happens when purposeless nervous energy has nowhere else to go.
Needing to be discharged, it takes “the most habitual routes,” which means
first “the organs of speech” since it is through the jaws, tongue, and lips
“that feeling passes into movement with the greatest frequency,” and second
the muscles of respiration since they too “are most constantly set in action
. . . by feelings of all kinds.” Spencer then explains laughter at incongruity
as the blowing off of nervous energy that had suddenly been made exces-
sive by the bringing to nought of a train of thoughts and emotions.29 As a
commentator puts it, “Spencer makes the study of laughter a hypothetical
hydrostatics.”30 Like incongruity, however, tension too is insufficient to cause
laughter. Critically, the child’s own character and willfulness have to be reck-
oned with. During the orienting response, the child evaluates the stimulus
situation in its total context.31 Depending upon the child’s evaluation, and
especially upon whether she feels secure or insecure, “the same stimulus situ-
ation can lead to either strong negative or positive affect,” either screaming and
tears or laughter. “Within broad limits, no set amount of tension automatically
leads to negative affect.”32 Instead, where the tension leads depends upon the
child.
Plessner’s remark that “[i]t is not my body but I who laugh. . . and for a
reason, ‘about something,”’ underscores this same basic point: typically at
least, laughter is an expression of the person who laughs, and not merely
a bodily event, even when it wracks us and renders us helpless to put an
end to it. By contrast, so-called pathological laughter, which occurs as a
symptom of pseudobulbar palsy, gelastic epilepsy, and psychiatric disorders
such as schizophrenia, does not express, but suppresses its victim’s person-
ality. As the clinical literature is careful to note, it is in fact problematic in
these instances to speak of laughter unproblematically since the victim of
pathological laughter does not so much laugh as suffer paroxysms of “mock
laughter.” As one classic account puts it, either the acoustic or facial man-
ifestation is “intrinsically different, or else the emotion behind the laughter
is absent, or so disordered as to render the sounds inappropriate, contradic-
tory, or purposeless.”33 Or in the words of another: “The manifestation is
‘sham mirth’ or ‘mock laughter’” in a triple sense: “The laughter is a mock
or sham and it mocks the laughter at the time, but this is the greatest mock-
ery of all, that the patient should be forced to laugh as a portent of his own
doom.”34
Laughter properly called is a meaningful, expressive behavior. It is mean-
ingful in two ways. First, it refers to something other than itself, namely, the
occasion that elicits it. So when we see a person or persons laughing, we
assume that they are laughing for a reason that at least someone, perhaps the
laughers themselves, could indicate to us. We assume, that is, that there is
some answer to some variant of the question, “What’s that all about?” The
second way in which laughter is meaningful is by being expressive (or we
could say self-referential). Laughter bodies forth something about the laugher
herself, whether it is that she is joyful, titillated, full of fun, amused, embar-
rassed, or despairing. The claim that laughter is meaningful and expressive
holds even for laughter at tickling. Laughter at tickling is not a mere bodily
event: not just anybody, in any circumstances, can make us laugh by tickling
us. As Provine observes, “Tickle involves more than the sensory physiology
of touch and the physical properties of the stimulus. . . . The identity of the
bearer of a physically identical feathery touch makes the difference between
a ticklish delight and an ordeal.”35 Laughter at tickling is as much about our
relationship with the tickler as it is about the movements that she makes with
her hand. We laugh at what this person is doing to us in these circumstances.
To be sure, it is true that even the laugher may sometimes be unsure of
or perplexed by the occasion of her laughter. In Leibniz’s terms, we may
know clearly that a remark is funny, while knowing only confusedly how it
is so.36 (As the anthropologist Mary Douglas observes, we often need to take
into account “the total social situation” in order to understand what makes
a remark a joke.)37 More generally, we may know what we are laughing
about without knowing just what makes it laughable. Our awareness of the
occasion of our laughter may vary in distinctness. Further, we may be unsure
of, perplexed by, or even oblivious to what our laughter discloses about us. In
other words, what laughter expresses may exceed what it means to the laugher,
or what the laugher takes it to mean. For example, Ralph Ellison has devoted an
exquisite essay to trying to understand “an extravagance of laughter,” “a self-
immolation of laughter over which I had no control,” that he experienced in
attending a comedy in the 1930s. At the time, he acknowledges, he was unable
to put the meaning of his “helpless laughter” into words. Doing so requires
him to plumb the depths of “the confounding, persistent, and embarrassing
mystery of black laughter” in American society. But that his laughter was
meaningful was evident to him though its precise meaning was not. There
was also never any question to him that he was responsible for his laughter,
despite its buffeting of him. To the contrary,
48 B. G. PRUSAK
while I wheezed and choked with laughter, my disgusted lucid self dra-
matized its cool detachment by noting that things were getting so out of
control that Northern white folk in balcony and loge were now catching fire
and beginning to howl and cheer the disgraceful loss of self-control being
exhibited by a young Negro who had become so deranged by the shock
wave of comedy. . .; a young man who was so gross as to demonstrate
his social unacceptability by violating a whole encyclopedia of codes that
regulated proper conduct no less in the theater than in society at large.38
Now, how to explain such a “disgraceful loss of self-control”? Physiology

– not philosophy – is competent to explain what mechanisms underlie laugh-
ter’s production.39 Psychology – not philosophy – is competent to explain
what skills must be in place in order for laughter to take place (for example,
the ability to coordinate different schemata). Cultural anthropology and so-
ciology also have competencies that philosophy does not. Just what people
laugh about – what jokes and comic antics they recognize as jokes and comic
antics – varies from culture to culture, society to society, gender to gender,
even person to person. And just how people laugh varies not only personally,
but according to what Douglas calls a given culture or society’s “thresholds
of toleration of bodily relaxation and control.”40 Cross-cultural studies and
studies of the congenitally deaf and blind support the conclusion that human
laughter is composed of basic physiological and phonetic patterns that cannot
be attributed exclusively to socialization.41 Yet, as Douglas remarks, “what
passes for a ripple in one culture can be taken as a series of uncouth jerks in
another.”42 According to Ruth Benedict, the people of Dobu in northwestern
Melanesia think so little of laughter that they seek to exclude it altogether.43
By contrast, Colin M. Turnbull observes that “[w]hen pygmies laugh it is
hard not to be affected; they hold onto one another as if for support, slap their
sides, snap their fingers, and go through all manner of physical contortions.
If something strikes them as particularly funny they will even roll on the
ground.”44 These differences correspond by and large to a culture or society’s
rules of formation, which require methods of collecting data, as well as critical
reflection, to discern.
Yet these explanations – though legitimate and instructive, reducing laugh-
ter to its mechanisms, skills, and rules of formation – do not tell the whole
story. An article recently published in the journal Science, “Electric current
stimulates laughter,” may serve to clarify this point. The authors of this article
report that “electric stimulation in the anterior part of the human supple-
mentary motor area (SMA) can elicit laughter,” increasing in duration and
intensity “with the level of stimulation current.” The subject, a sixteen-year-
old girl suffering from intractable seizures, experienced mirth or merriment
during the application of this current and offered “a different explanation [for
her laughter] each time, attributing the laughter to whatever external stimulus
was present.” The fact that the subject “was able each time to invoke a stimulus
context that ‘explained’ the laughter” is especially remarkable: it gives reason
to think that there is “a close link between the motor, affective, and cognitive
aspects of laughter” and that the neuronal network underlying laughter “is
activated as a whole by the stimulation of any of its constituent units.”45
These findings represent an important contribution to our knowledge of
laughter. Yet there is more to explaining laughter than describing its units
or parts. To think that there is not is to commit what the neurologist Kurt
Goldstein calls the “fallacy of ‘isolation”’: to make the mistake of abstracting
an organism’s behavior from the organism’s relation to its environment.46
Normally at least, which is to say outside of the laboratory or operating room,
laughter is not merely the product of an electric current, but a way that we have
to do with one another and the world. For this reason, an account of laughter’s
units or parts does not tell us all that there is to know about it. It is one thing
to explain the mechanics of this or that behavioral capacity; it is another to
explain the exercise of those capacities in our lives.47 (After all, laughter could
be restricted to the laboratory or operating room, an experimental curiosity
rather than a daily reality.) To this end, we need to envision the behavior
in what Plessner calls its “original living context,” “the concreteness of our
existence” (LW 216, 373/LC 16, 148). His question reads, “How is it possible
that man . . . can lose his relation to his own body in so characteristic a way?”
(LW 372/LC 148)
Lest the accusation be brought again, I want to underscore that I am not
claiming either that we consciously and purposefully choose to break out
laughing – ordinarily at least we do not – or even that we must consciously
give ourselves over to laughter in order to break out laughing (as, by contrast,
we typically must give ourselves over to crying in order to break into tears).
But neither is laughter merely a bodily event. In Plessner’s words, typically
at least, the loss of control that we experience in laughter “is not willed –
it appears in overpowering fashion – but it is also not merely suffered and
endured. Instead it is understood as expression and meaningful reaction,”
often superficial, sometimes deeply revealing of the laugher’s personality
(LW 274/LC 66).
To this point, the method of first-person phenomenological description is
illuminating. This method “begins with the phenomenon as it is given in
pre-problematic experience,” Plessner writes with his friend and sometime
coworker the biologist F.J.J. Buytendijk, “and proceeds step by step in the
elucidation of its structure and immanent description of its ‘meaning.”’48 Yet
it also has to be recognized that the phenomenological method’s power to
illuminate has a limit. Daniel Dennett has marked this limit forcefully: “The
50 B. G. PRUSAK
phenomenology of laughter” – a first-person description of the phenomenon –

“is hermetically sealed: we just see directly, naturally, without inference, with
an obviousness beyond ‘intuition,’ that laughter is what goes with hilarity” –
though it also goes, he apparently does not see, with despair, embarrassment,
joy, play, titillation, etc. “All this is obvious. As such it seems to be in need
of no further explanation. . . . But all we really have here is a brute – but
definitely explicable – fact of human psychology,” the province of what he
calls “materialistic science,” to which Dennett accordingly advises that we
turn.49
Yes, but also no. Yes: according to Plessner, the philosopher must not lose
herself “in the delights of intuition. Should what is discovered through phe-
nomenology allow no further explanation, philosophy nevertheless has the
task of going beyond it to its sources, which to be sure is no longer feasi-
ble by purely phenomenological means,” namely, by means of the so-called
transcendental reduction leading to what Husserl calls “pure egological in-
vestigations.”50 The phenomenological method can take us only so far. It can
throw light on laughter’s “structure” – what the experience of laughing is like,
or how we find ourselves disposed when we laugh – and meaningfulness; but
it cannot explain the eruption of the bodily expression itself. Its source lies
beyond the reach of intuition. For this reason, Plessner uses the phenomeno-
logical method as an “instrument,”51 but states a need for an “original method”
to extend phenomenology’s reach (LW 232/LC 29).
But also no: Plessner rejects a move like Dennett’s to “materialistic sci-
ence” as premature. While acknowledging that physiology – not philosophy
– is competent to explain the mechanisms that underlie laughter, “the fact of
the participation of some mechanism or other,” Plessner claims, “can be un-
derstood only from the perspective of the whole human being” (LW 373/LC
148). The move to physiology is a reductive move. But, to reiterate, typically
at least, it is not merely our bodies but we who laugh. When we laugh, we do
not consciously and purposefully lose control of our bodies; yet it is we who
lose it. Apparently, then, breaking out into laughter is a capacity that we have
as persons, which is to say neither simply as bodies, nor simply as minds, but
as living creatures of flesh and blood, what Plessner calls “the whole human
being,” the focus of philosophical anthropology since Herder.52
According to Plessner, the key to this puzzle lies in the form of human bodily
existence, or what he calls its structure. By making structure his theme, Pless-
ner evades both the behaviorist Scylla and the phenomenological Charybdis.
That is, he neither narrows his focus to “forces operating upon the organ-
ism from without,” as B.F. Skinner’s “functional analysis” does, nor restricts
himself to “Bewusstseinsanalyse,” as Husserl’s phenomenology does.53 Some
examples might prove helpful. As Portmann remarks, a significant difference
between human beings and most if not all other animals seems to be that we can
objectify ourselves.54 Suicide, for example, appears to be a properly human
behavior. Another remarkable example is human speech, which Portmann
distinguishes from animals’ cries. To be sure, an animal’s cries meaningfully
express its emotional state. But they are unlike our speech, in which we ar-
ticulate our voice into signs of meaning that can represent states of affairs
independently of how we happen to be disposed. Critically, a condition for
the possibility of human speech is that we learn to objectify our own voices.55
To this end, the intensive babbling that is exhibited by young children is an
important first step.56 Through babbling, a child becomes acquainted with her
body – her lungs and larynx, the cavities of her mouth and nose, and her lips,
tongue, and teeth – as an object under her control.57
Ordinarily at least we do not take much note of the bases of our behavior.
In doing whatever it is we have to do, we coordinate our bodies with our
intentions and think nothing of it. Putting on the body, as Virginia Woolf puts
it, comes as easily to us as washing and dressing in the morning.58 Yet not
everything is always so simple. Sexuality, for example, presents noteworthy
complications, as does pregnancy. (In Woolf’s words, “who shall measure the
heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s
body?”)59 Generally speaking, things can become so unruly that we no longer
know what to do with ourselves: take drastic action, emit what the sociologist
Erving Goffman calls “words of exclamatory imprecation, such as hell or
shit,” or blanch, blush, cry, smile, swoon.60 Depending upon how seriously
we take ourselves and the situation, we can also, of course, laugh. Should we
laugh in such situations, our laughter is what Plessner calls an “expressive
reaction of disorganization[]” (LW 327/LC 111). It documents a crisis in our
relation to ourselves: we no longer know what to do or say, cannot find a
way with actions or with words (LW 378/LC 152). Yet we are not done for
altogether. Instead, a bodily automatism does our “talking.” As the vernacular
nicely puts it, we “lose it.” But we can lose possession of our bodies only
since we had it to begin with – by virtue of the form or structure of human
bodily existence. As Plessner puts it, “Only somebody who has himself can
lose himself.”61
Before proceeding any further with this argument, I want to anticipate an
objection that was already suggested in my introduction. This objection is that
the capacity to laugh is not proper to human beings, but exhibited as well by
the anthropoids or man-like apes. If this objection is true, laughter loses its
promise to give us insight into what is distinctive to the human condition.
In order to assess this objection, we must turn to what different authorities
have written. That chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and other primates, no-
tably the Barbary macaque, produce a laughter-like vocalization and exhibit
52 B. G. PRUSAK
a laughter-like behavior is firmly established. “The community of certain ex-

pressions in distinct though allied species, as in the movements of the same
facial muscles during laughter by man and by various monkeys,” has been
a theme of biological research at least since Darwin, to whom the quote
belongs. “Young chimpanzees,” Darwin observes, “make a kind of barking
noise, when pleased by the return of any one to whom they are attached,” a
noise that “the keepers call a laugh.”62 More recently, J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff
has identified “two primate displays” that appear to be homologous to human
smiling and laughter: what he calls the “‘grin’-face” or “silent bared-teeth
display” and what he calls the “play-face” or “relaxed open-mouth display”
(his italics). The latter is “characterised by a rather widely opened mouth,
and lips that remain covering all or the greater part of the teeth.” The “free
and easy nature of the eye and body movements” distinguishes this display
from aggressive open-mouth staring. The relaxed open-mouth display is “of-
ten accompanied,” van Hooff writes further, “by quick and rather staccato
breathing” that may or may not be vocalized and “typically accompanies
the boisterous mock-fighting and chasing involved in social play.” He specu-
lates that this display “may function as a metacommunicative signal that the
ongoing behavior is not meant seriously, but is to be interpreted instead as
‘mock-fighting.’”63
The language used in descriptions of anthropoid laughter, however, indi-
cates the complexity of categorizing it: this language is often infected by scare
quotes and other qualifications. Frans Plooij, for example, writes that chim-
panzees “‘laugh,”’ but explicitly warns that this behavior is “not to be equated
to human laughter.”64 According to Provine, it is a “common misperception
that laughter is exclusive to human beings”; yet he qualifies the laughter of
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, “and perhaps other primates” as “laugh-
like” (my italics) and moreover affirms that laughter is “species-typical – that
is, characteristic of our species.”65 Robert and Ada Yerkes write that, in play
or “when chased, mauled, or tickled, young orang-outans (often) chuckle,
grunt, gurgle, and exhibit distortion of facial features which might readily be
taken, or mayhap mistaken, for smiling or laughter.” They also quote with ap-
proval Wolfgang Köhler’s observation that “[t]here is a certain resemblance to
our laughter in [chimpanzees’] rhythmic gasping and grunting when they are
tickled, and probably this manifestation is, physiologically, remotely akin” to
human laughter (my italics); and agree with him that the chimpanzee “neither
laughs nor weeps in anything approaching the human sense of the terms.”
Nevertheless, they write, “we are still impelled to defend, from the standpoint
of general descriptive value, the use of such terms.”66 In brief, caveat lector!
Even Darwin, it is worth noting, gives himself wiggle room by speaking of
what “the keepers call a laugh.”
There is evidently good reason for all these qualifications. According to

Provine, even chimpanzees, the most “man-like” of the anthropoids, “lack a
clear equivalent to human conversational laughter in which two physically
separated individuals look at each other, gesture, or vocalize before breaking
up into a fit of laughter.” Instead, chimpanzee laughter is typically “the inci-
dental by-product of play,” predominantly of a rough-and-tumble variety.67
Significantly, the chimpanzee “seems permanently incapable of understand-
ing merry human laughter”: the “about-ness” of human laughter is baffling to
it.68 Moreover, the chimpanzee is “occasionally observed [in its confusion]
to retaliate or take revenge against men or other animals that laugh at it,”
and its own laughter often quickly degenerates into screaming.69 These facts
suggest that, despite all similarities, chimpanzee laughter – or “laughter,” to
speak more accurately – is a behavior qualitatively different from most types
of human laughter, laughter at tickling possibly aside. Interestingly, the in-
cidence of “laughter” among chimpanzees declines as the animals mature, a
trend that also holds for laughter provoked by tickling and physical contact
among human beings: Provine speaks in this regard of an “age-related decline
in tickle.”70 Yet human laughter diversifies as we mature. Where chimpanzee
“laughter” ends, human laughter just begins.
2. The eccentric position
To recall, Plessner claims that there is a need for an “original method” to

understand the outbreak of laughter; from his perspective, neither the phe-
nomenological method, nor the reductive procedures of “materialistic sci-
ence” will do. Instead, the method that he employs in Laughing and Crying
is hermeneutic, proceeding as we do when we put forth an interpretation of
a text and then go back to the text itself – in a circular movement – to de-
termine whether the interpretation makes sense of it. This method may be
compared with John Rawls’s in A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s aim in this work
is to set forth principles of justice that clarify and bring order to “our con-
sidered convictions” or pre-theoretical judgments. As he puts it, “we work
from both ends,” mutually adjusting principles and judgments in the hopes of
achieving what he calls reflective equilibrium, a state where “our principles
and judgments coincide.”71 In Laughing and Crying, our ordinary ways of
talking about laughter play the role of Rawls’s “considered convictions.” In
place of Rawls’s two principles of justice, Plessner brings to bear a thesis
about the structure of human bodily existence that was first elaborated in his
1928 work, The Echelons of the Organic.72 This book supplies the background
to Plessner’s study of laughter. Having some understanding of The Echelons
54 B. G. PRUSAK
of the Organic, accordingly, is necessary for understanding Laughing and

Crying.
What is most important in The Echelons of the Organic for Laughing and
Crying is the concept of “positionality,” which Marjorie Grene characterizes
as the “way in which an organism ‘takes its place’ in an environment.”73
Plessner’s purpose in introducing the concept of positionality is to move be-
yond mind-body dualism without either reducing one to the other, or vacating
philosophy of questions of bodily existence altogether, as he criticizes “[t]he
cleverly chosen perspective of existential analysis” for doing (LW 236/LC 33).
As Jürgen Habermas remarks, “the relation in which body and environment
stand to one another becomes the key to an anthropology.”74
Plessner’s point of departure is what he calls the “bed of behavior [Schicht
des Verhaltens].”75 Here behavior is to be understood, not merely as a se-
quence of movements, but as the way an organism bears itself in relation
to its environment – more simply, interacts with it. Plessner speaks of the
“bed” of behavior presumably because behavior is a multi-layered thing.
A piece of behavior can be analyzed into a multitude of parts or factors:
biochemical, neurophysiological, psychological, sociological, etc. His claim,
however, is that behavior is not wholly explained by breaking it down into its
parts.
As warrant for this claim, Plessner draws from the biologist Jakob von
Uexküll’s work on organisms’ body plans (Baupläne). Uexküll is interested,
Plessner summarizes, not in the evolutionary origins of organisms’ body plans,
but in how they function or what they do.76 What Uexküll found, to let him
speak for himself, is that an organism’s body plan “automatically establishes
the animal’s environment.” Only a naı̈ve anthropocentrism could suppose that
“all sea animals,” by way of example, “live in a world uniformly common
to all. Closer study teaches us that each of these thousand-fold variant forms
of life is in possession of an environment unique to it, which is reciprocally
conditioned by the animal’s body plan.” Consequently, we can say that, “[i]n
the world of the earthworm, there are only earthworm-things, in the world of
the dragonfly, there are only dragonfly-things, and so forth.” Even more sig-
nificantly, we can also say that an organism’s behavior depends not only upon
its biochemistry, neurophysiology, etc., but upon the form or structure of its
bodily existence. For this structure opens the organism to its environment and
to the possibility of meaningfully interacting with it.77 In Plessner’s words, an
organism’s structure “prescribes [the organism’s] possibilities of behavior.”78
There are two consequences to focusing upon the structure of an organism’s
bodily existence. First, if it is true that an organism’s structure prescribes the
organism’s “possibilities of behavior,” then an explanation of an organism’s
behavior in terms of its parts does not tell the whole story. We also need to
know the contribution of the organism’s structure. (The difference is between

“part-analysis” and the “systems-theoretic study of wholes.”)79 The second
consequence to focusing upon the structure of an organism’s bodily existence
is to place the body in a new light. Plessner draws a distinction between what
he calls Leib and Körper. Leib and Körper represent two aspects of bodily
life. Körper is the animate body – Plessner calls it “belebter Körper” – and
as such the object of physiology.80 A precise English translation of Leib is
not readily available, but I think that colloquial expressions can convey what
is meant. Whereas Körper is the body as it is alive, Leib is the body as it
is alive to what is around it: reaching out beyond itself, encountering others,
investigating and discovering what there is to be done and had. In other words,
Leib is the body in its directedness toward its environment, “on which it plays
and which plays on it.”81
In The Echelons of the Organic, the concept of positionality serves Plessner
to distinguish different types of Leiblichkeit. For example, both chimpanzees
and human beings have Körper and Leib (or Körperleiblichkeit, to speak like
Plessner). But the chimpanzee’s Leiblichkeit – how it is alive to things –
is different from that of a human being. In Plessner’s terminology, they are
differently positioned toward the environment. As Plessner sees it, a basic
difference between an animal such as a chimpanzee and a human being is that
the animal is focused upon “the here-and-now.” The upshot is that the chim-
panzee’s “very own being is hidden to it”; in experiencing its environment, “it
does not experience – itself.”82 In other words, while its existence is an issue
for it, its existential condition is not. These claims should not be overextended.
According to Plessner, a chimpanzee’s own being is hidden from it as such,
that is, as its own; hence it does not experience itself as a self. By contrast,
for better or worse, it is the human condition precisely to be exposed to our
condition as an animal. The human being “has itself, it knows about itself, it
is remarkable to itself, and for this reason is it I . . . . ”83 We stand not only
at the center of things, but over and against ourselves at the same time, in the
middle and on the periphery at once. This position Plessner names “eccentric
positionality.”84
The philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker allows us to pursue these reflections
further. Baker distinguishes “two grades of first-person phenomena: weak
and strong.” An animal with a weak sense of self – she gives as an example
a dog – “is the center of his universe. He experiences things from his own
egocentric perspective.”85 Yet a dog is incapable, significantly, of recognizing
himself before a mirror. In this respect, he is a representative animal. “[M]ost
organisms,” the psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. reports, “persist in show-
ing other-directed rather than self-directed behavior in response” to mirror-
image stimulation. “While [they] are ostensibly conscious of themselves as
56 B. G. PRUSAK
a result of visual, chemical, and proprioreceptive feedback, in principle this

[consciousness] is quite different from self-consciousness.”86 By contrast, a
mature human being, Baker writes, normally “not only has a perspective, she
also has a conception of herself as the source of a perspective.” As such she
is “not only able to think first-person thoughts . . . but is also able to attribute
first-person thoughts” to herself, as we do in indirect discourse: “I wish that
I,” etc. Baker calls a subject capable of exhibiting such a strong sense of self
a person, a terminological decision with which Plessner agrees.87
Admittedly, there exist difficult cases. As Baker acknowledges, “Chim-
panzees’ self-recognition seems to fall between weak and strong first-person
phenomena.”88 In a study in the late 1960s, Gallup found that “after the second
or third day [of exposure to a mirror] chimpanzees began to use the mirror
to respond to themselves.” This finding leads Gallup to speculate that “man
may not have a monopoly on the self-concept.”89 But this conclusion appears
precipitate. Baker presents three reasons for denying that “chimpanzees with
a capacity for self-recognition. . . have a full-blown first-person perspective.”
First, “self-recognition in chimpanzees requires direct intervention by mem-
bers of another species.” It is not a normally developing behavior, but depen-
dent upon this intervention. Second, “the chimpanzees’ self-consciousness,
if that it what it is, is bound to the circumstances in which it was devel-
oped.” It does not play itself out in other behaviors. “Finally, it is not clear
to what extent the chimpanzees’ self-recognition is a conceptual ability as
opposed merely to an ability to discriminate” between first-person and third-
person, self and other.90 Discriminating between ourselves and others is not
the same as conceiving of ourselves as ourselves with so-called categorial
intentionality. At least on earth, this capacity appears to be reserved to human
beings.
There are also transitional cases. Though denying that infants ever experi-
ence “a period of total self/other undifferentiation,” the psychologist Daniel
N. Stern dates the development of the “categorical,” “objective,” or “concep-
tual” self to a period between eighteen months and two years.91 His thinking
compares with Piaget’s. According to Piaget, the newborn child is “egocen-
tric,” assimilating its environment to its own basic organic functional activity.
Development enters a new phase when the child begins both to accommodate
itself to the fact that its environment resists assimilation and to make room
for it in its novel and fascinating otherness. The child’s subjectivity gradually
becomes what Piaget calls “decentered.” That is, the child comes to realize
that it experiences its environment from a center, both from one point of view
among others and among others’ points of view.92 To be sure, the child re-
mains the center of its world, as we all do throughout our lives; but normally
at least we develop consciousness of the relativity of our point of view and an
awareness of ourselves as a center of awareness – in Plessner’s terminology,

eccentric positionality.
It is a basic thesis of Plessner’s thinking that eccentric positionality is a
constitutive principle of human behavior, opening us to possibilities unknown
to other animals. Here his thinking compares with Baker’s, who observes that
other animals “can attempt to survive and reproduce, but – being unable to
conceive of themselves in a uniquely first-personal way – they cannot try
to change their natural behavior,” presumably because they cannot separate
themselves from what they are driven to do.93 Where Plessner’s thinking is
unusual is in the attention that he gives to our bodily existence. The concept
of eccentric positionality concerns, not the relation of “body” and “mind”
as somehow distinct substances, but the experience of living as, in, and with
a human body – experience that may be taken for granted and given little
reflection, but whose worthiness for reflection is indicated immediately by
the different locutions (‘as, ‘in,’ ‘with’) that can be used to discuss it.
We exist, Plessner writes, at once as bodies and in bodies, or in his German
“als Körperleib-im Körperleib” (LW 240/LC 36). These two orders of experi-
ence impose themselves upon us ineluctably. My body is at once “the absolute
focal reference of all things” in my environment and one thing among others
in which I am mysteriously located, while yet standing somehow over and
against it (LW 240/LC 36). I am it, yet I also enjoy a strange “distance” from
it. In a word, human bodily existence is eccentric. It imposes upon us the
duality of being bodies and having bodies.
To be sure, these ways of talking generate endless philosophical problems.
Yet Plessner makes a plea for “a new confidence in everyday experience”
(LW 232/LC 29). According to him, human bodily existence is “necessar-
ily ambiguous,” suggesting “powerful motives and arguments for both the
idealistic and realistic theories of consciousness or nature” (LW 241-242/LC
36). The polemics between these theories, Plessner suggests, “can no more
be brought to an end than prevented” given the ambiguity of the situation that
they contest.
Plessner’s interest, however, lies not in polemics over idealism and realism,
but in what he calls the “brokenness” of human bodily existence: the fact that,
from the day of our birth, we are confronted with the challenge of mastering
the bodies that we ourselves are – binding a breach that, logically, appears as a
scandal. It is tempting to say that brokenness is a consequence of eccentricity.
Yet this way of putting the relation between the two has the disadvantage
of implying that eccentricity is prior in time to brokenness. Eccentricity is
not prior in time to brokenness. Brokenness is how our eccentric position is
expressed in our bodily existence. As Plessner puts it, our eccentric position
“means a real break for [our] being [Dasein]” (LW 235/LC 32). It is by virtue
58 B. G. PRUSAK
of the fact that we not only are bodies, but have bodies that, paradoxically,
we must learn to appropriate what is most properly ours.
In Plessner’s language, “bodily existence for man is a relation . . . between
himself and himself (or, if we want to be exact, between him and himself)”
(LW 239/LC 35). Freed from the domination of instinct, we are at once enabled
and obliged “to take [our] life in hand” – to lead our lives rather than simply to
live.94 Whereas animal behavior is based upon “a reciprocal bond between the
whole organism and its milieu,” human behavior is based upon “at the same
time a reciprocal bond between the human being and himself” (LW 209/LC
9). We make our way in the world not simply by finding ways to relate to it,
but to that end by finding ways to relate to ourselves: not only our bodies and
voices but, it is true, both the quasi-anonymous voices “in our heads” and the
rag-and-bone shop of the heart. We are supplicants before ourselves.
At least after childhood and in health, Plessner acknowledges, the broken-
ness of human bodily existence is often inconspicuous, so much so, in fact,
that it might well seem incredible, a theoretical construct rather than a fact
about our lives. Against this objection, he observes that “we need only de-
mand of our body some unaccustomed activity to find ourselves faced again
with problems like those of a child learning to walk” (LW 242/LC 37). Ar-
guably, however, such an event is more an anomaly than representative of a
rule. Normally at least, as I observed earlier, we coordinate our bodies with
our intentions and think nothing of it. The question arises, then, whether and
where the brokenness of human bodily existence is attested on a regular basis
in our experience. What evidence, in other words, is there for “the secret com-
position of human nature”? Or is it so secret that only the initiated, who have
learned to repeat after Plessner, know (or believe that they know) of its reality?
3. From phenomenon to “foundation”
With these questions, the stage is set for Laughing and Crying. On Plessner’s
interpretation, our eccentric position both “constitutes the basis” of laughter
and is outstandingly disclosed by it (LW 235, 236/LC 32, 33). To put it another
way, we are capable of breaking out into laughter because of our brokenness,
which our breaking out into laughter reveals.
According to Plessner, laughter is neither a form of speech, nor a gesture,
nor strictly an expressive movement like the exultations of joy or contortions
of rage. To be sure, like the exultations of joy or contortions of rage, typically at
least laughter is “immediate, involuntary, and intrinsically unrelated to others,
that is, without purposeful character, even if the presence of others is necessary
for the release of the expression” (LW 257-258/LC 52). Yet laughter often
lacks the transparency of other expressive movements. A picture of a joyful

face gives us a picture of joy. A picture of a laughing body gives us a picture of
. . . perhaps joy, perhaps embarrassment, perhaps despair, or even an uneasy
mixture of all three. The upshot is that, as another author puts it, “A discourse
on laughter is always a discourse on the opacity of signs.”95
Plessner puts this point as follows: whereas “the animation of the body
reaches its high point” in outbursts of feeling, “[e]xactly the opposite takes
place in laughter” (LW 274/LC 65, 66). In laughter, “The living transparency
of the body reaches . . . its low point. Bodily reactions emancipate themselves.
The human being is shaken by [these reactions], buffeted, made breathless”
(LW 275/LC 66). As the theatre critic John Lahr vividly writes, “To watch
inspired laughter register with an audience is to be present at a great and
violent mystery. Faces convulse, tears stream, bodies collapse, not in agony
but in rapture.”96 Yet – at the heart of this mystery – this disorganization
of our physical existence is understood as meaningful. Our loss of con-
trol is paradoxically self-expression. The human being “loses the relation
to his physical existence, but he does not capitulate as a person.” Instead,
our body “takes over the answer, no longer as an instrument of action, lan-
guage, gesture, or expressive movement, but as body,” that is, automatism
(LW 276/LC 67).
We laugh, Plessner observes, at unanswerable situations that at once bind
and repel us by such means as ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity of
meaning: situations such as titillation, the comic, jokes, and embarrassment
(LW 359, 363/LC 138, 142). For the person who laughs in such situations,
“there is no other answer, even if others do not understand his mood, take
him to be silly. . . , and find other types of behavior more to the point” (LW
359/LC 139). He has arrived “at a boundary which thwarts every possibil-
ity of accommodation” (LW 360/LC 139). To be sure, if the unanswerable
situation is “serious,” which is to say a threat to our well-being, we do not
typically laugh. Instead, we are liable to panic or even to lose consciousness.
Yet laughter is not only reserved for situations that we can “laugh off”: situ-
ations that need not be taken seriously, or that we do not take seriously even
though, from another point of view, they might not seem to present much
of a “laughing matter.” The choked laughter of embarrassment and hollow
laughter of despair make matters more complicated. As Plessner sees it, they
do not, however, compromise the unity of the phenomenon. In all of these
occasions, our laughter is a manifestation of disorganization which, normally
at least, is understood as meaningful. As he puts it in a later essay, our laugh-
ter is a reaction “gone astray in a meaningful way.”97 The automatism that
overcomes us is not written off as a sneeze or cough typically is, but taken as
an expression with something in it to understand.
60 B. G. PRUSAK
To be sure, there are possible counterexamples. So-called polite laughter

– the little ripple of laughter that sometimes greets a feeble joke, especially
if there is a bond of affection between speaker and listener – is perhaps the
most refractory. This laughter can be perplexing to non-laughers and even
somewhat off-putting in its obsequiousness. It appears to be a conditioned re-
sponse, occasioned by the laugher’s representation of the situation at hand as a
situation calling for laughter. The possibility of such a response is apparently
unique to human beings, depending upon the ability “to separate functionally
parts of [our] organism from the rest, subject [these parts] to specific isolated
stimuli, and let the reactions run off by themselves.”98 Over time, the response
can become habitual, which is to say ready-to-hand given the appropriate cir-
cumstances. Polite laughter accordingly has a touch of the instrumentality of
gesture to it, a suggestion that is seconded by the fact that it is often inter-
changeable with a smile. The upshot is that polite laughter neither conforms
to Plessner’s analysis, nor subverts it. Instead, like so-called conversational
laughter, polite laughter presents a difficult case.99
Importantly, however, it seems that it need not be claimed that every occa-
sion of laughter readily conforms to Plessner’s analysis. Given the fact that
we are capable of extending the use of our bodies “beyond the ordinary limits
of nature,” as actors especially learn to do, it seems likely that there will be
exceptions, or at least a plethora of difficult cases.100 The question to ask is
whether Plessner’s analysis of laughter as an expressive reaction of disorga-
nization gives us what he claims it does: “paradigmatic penetration,” insight
into laughter’s exemplary occasions (LW 277/LC 69). I believe that it does
and that attention to the ways in which we ordinarily talk about laughter sup-
ports this judgment. The writer Michael Joseph Gross recalls breaking into
laughter during a visit with his severely Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. After
much excited preparation, she has just uttered an unintelligible, yet seemingly
significant word, “Hesus,” which may or may not be “Jesus,” and if it is may
mean any number of things. Apparently satisfied with this communication,
she withdraws into enveloping, inexpressive silence. “We laughed a little bit,
awkwardly,” Gross writes of himself and his sister. “It broke the tension.
Which was necessary because, really, what do you do with that?”101
Often at least, and to a greater or lesser extent, all that we can “do” in such
situations is to “lose it,” whether in laughter or in tears, or sometimes both at
once. According to Plessner, the outbreak of an autonomous reaction of the
body “may be understood if, instead of the obscure and schematic ideas of the
connection of mind and body conceived under the influence of metaphysical
doctrines, the relation of man to his body, that is, his eccentric position in
existence, forms the foundation [Grundlage]” (LW 372/LC 148). To be sure,
“The study of the means by which the sudden change to automatism takes
place” is and always will be “the business of physiology” (LW 375/LC 150).
But, to reiterate, “the fact of the participation of some mechanism or other. . .
can be understood only from the perspective of the whole human being.” For,
typically at least, we laugh, and not merely our bodies, and not just randomly,
but for a reason.
Toward the beginning of a very dense and rich paragraph, Plessner ob-
serves that, for most demands of daily living, “action and speech, gesture and
expressive movement suffice” (LW 374/LC 150). But on occasions when they
do not – when how we should use our bodies escapes or eludes us, or when we
generally find ourselves at a loss – “disorganization is at hand” and with it the
possibility of falling into one or another form of automatism. Now the ques-
tion is, How is this “fall” into automatism possible? “In such situations, with
which we no longer know how to deal, the referent in terms of which we could
find a relation to our physical existence necessarily falls away.” Cleaving to
Plessner’s German, “that in terms of which [das, woraufhin] we could find a
relation . . . falls away.” ‘That’ is what Austin calls “substantive-hungry.”102
It cries out for further precision – for a noun or words functioning like a noun
to tell us what it means. When precision is not forthcoming, we do not know
what to do with it, or, as we sometimes say in colloquial English, we do not
know what to do with that. (So Gross above: “We laughed a little bit, awk-
wardly. . . . Which was necessary because, really, what do you do with that?”)
Plessner’s point seems to be that situations that lead us to laugh or cry are like
“thats” to which we do not know how to relate. Among other possibilities,
“that” could be an occasion of joy that saturates our expectations, leaving
us unsure what to do with ourselves; an ambivalent sensation, intrusive and
recessive, attractive and repulsive at once; a comic appearance or a joke; or a
fix from which we do not have the least idea how to extricate ourselves.
One way or the other, in such a situation, “The direction is missing in which
we must organize ourselves into the unity of a person with and in our bodily
existence.” Since we do not know what to do with that, we do not know what to
do with ourselves, or more precisely with this body that we ourselves are. The
body with which we typically do as we will and in which we “sit,” controlling
and dominating it, slips away from our control and domination. We “lose it.”
Consequently, “Automatism of some form or other comes into play for the man
who, as a person dominating and controlling his entire existence, is played
out” (LW 375/LC 150). To vary the figure slightly, we are broke. Our laughter
(or sometimes crying) is “an embodiment, as it were, of the estrangement
from [our] own body,” bearing witness to the fact that we are “at the limits
of possible behavior.”103 We can lose control of ourselves, however, only by
virtue of the fact that we had control of ourselves to begin with – only by
virtue of our “eccentric position in existence.”
62 B. G. PRUSAK
To be sure, Plessner acknowledges that his explanation of laughter has its

own limits. A particularly difficult question is how to explain, in Freud’s words,
“the somatic picture of laughter.”104 This question is especially pressing for
Plessner given his claim that laughing and crying belong to the same genus
of expression, or in other words that they are both “expressive reactions of
disorganization.” Why, then, should we laugh, generally speaking, at cases of
“irremediable ambiguity of cues to action” – that is, in situations characterized
by ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity of meaning – but cry when we
cannot see our way at all, or when we find ourselves at our wits’ end (LW
380/LC 153)?
Typically, this question is answered by invoking Darwin’s principle of
antithesis. According to Darwin, once “certain habitual actions” have been
settled upon to serve one state of mind, “when a directly opposite state of mind
is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of
movements of a directly opposite nature.” This principle is supposed to make
it clear why there exist the expressions of laughing and crying instead of only
one or the other. The answer is that, just as joy and sorrow differ, so do laugh-
ing and crying. As Darwin sees it, “Laughter seems to be the expression of
mere joy or happiness” and “[w]eeping . . . the primary and natural expression
. . . of suffering of any kind.”105 But there are two problems here. The first is
specific to these examples, the second general. First, we also laugh in despair
and cry for joy. (In William Blake’s words, “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess
of joy weeps.”)106 These counterexamples seem to undercut not only the sim-
ple equation of laughing and joy, crying and sorrow, but Darwin’s principle of
antithesis and consequently his explanation of the diversity of expressions. For
it appears that “directly opposite state[s] of mind” sometimes take the same
expression. Second and more fundamentally, however, what makes one move-
ment “directly opposite” to another? In what sense, to employ the same exam-
ples, are laughing and crying “directly opposite”? It seems that this criterion
lacks any definite criteria. As such it is endlessly plastic, but finally empty.107
For himself, Plessner observes that, speaking generally, “[o]penness, im-
mediacy, eruptivity characterize laughter,” whereas “closure, mediacy, grad-
ualness [characterize] crying” (LW 368/LC 146). He claims that there is a
correspondence between these forms of expression and the respective occa-
sions of laughing and crying. “The laughing person is open to the world,”
and the occasions of laughter generally strike us “suddenly, overwhelmingly”
(LW 369/LC 146). By contrast, the crying person has a tendency to with-
draw from the world. Moreover, the occasions of crying “touch” us, gently
but persuasively, and we must give ourselves over to our tears (LW 371/LC
147). Correspondences can be drawn, then, between form of expression and
occasion. Nevertheless, the “picture” that we see guards, in laughing and
crying alike, a measure of opacity. Perhaps the reason why moralists have
traditionally found laughing and crying so disturbing is that, unlike expres-
sive movements, they can be so difficult to read. If, in Wittgenstein’s words,
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” laughing and crying
suggest that the soul loves to hide.108
Notes
1. Aristotle, Topica, trans. E.S. Forster (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960),
bk. 1, ch. 5, 102a18–22, 282.
2. See Helen Adolf, “On Mediaeval Laughter,” Speculum 22 (1947): 251–253.
3. André Bremond, “Hints on Risibility,” The Modern Schoolman 7 (1940): 29.
4. Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000), 11–
12.
5. See Robert M. Yerkes and Ada W. Yerkes, The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 1–26. Jane Goodall dates the lifting of our
“darkness,” or our “dawn of understanding,” to the early decades of the twentieth century
with the work of Wolfgang Köhler and Robert Yerkes. See Goodall, The Chimpanzees
of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986),
5–14, especially 7–8.
6. Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen men-
schlichen Verhaltens in vol. 7 of his Gesammelte Schiften, Ausdruck und menschliche
Natur, ed. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Ströker, et al. (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1982), 201–387; English trans., Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits
of Human Behavior, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1970). Further references will be given parenthetically;
LW will stand for Lachen und Weinen, LC for Laughing and Crying.
7. An exception to this rule is Simon Critchley’s On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002),
8–9, 28–29, 109.
8. Plessner, “Anthropologie, Philosophisch” in Evangelische Kirchenlexikon. Kirchlich-
theologisches Handwörterbuch, ed. Heinz Brunotte and Otto Weber (Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956), 138. See also his 1956 essay “Über einige Motive der
Philosophischen Anthropologie” in vol. 8 of his Gesammelte Schriften, Conditio hu-
mana (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 123.
9. Plessner, “Über einige Motive der Philosophischen Anthropologie” in Conditio humana,
123.
10. Marcel Gutwirth, Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1983), 8.
11. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer, 7th ed. (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1990), §54a, 190, 192; English trans., Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard
(New York: Hafner, 1951), 177, 179.
12. Henri Bergson’s Le rire might be considered another candidate. See for discussion my pa-
per “Le rire à nouveau: Rereading Bergson,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
62 (2004): 377–388.
64 B. G. PRUSAK
13. Provine, Laughter, 49.

14. To be sure, sometimes sneezing is psychosomatically significant. But often a sneeze is
just a sneeze. The same holds for coughing, though coughing is different from sneezing
since we can deliberately cough to express, say, displeasure or dissent.
15. Adolf Portmann, “Die Biologie und das Phänomen des Geistigen” in Biologie und Geist
(Zurich: Herder, 1956), 29.
18. Provine, Laughter, 49, 50.
19. L. Alan Sroufe and Jane Piccard Wunsch, “The Development of Laughter in the First
Year of Life,” Child Development 43 (1972): 1326.
20. Sroufe and Wunsch, “The Development of Laughter in the First Year of Life”: 1336–1337.
21. Sroufe and Everett Waters, “The Ontogenesis of Smiling and Laughter: A Perspective
on the Organization of Development in Infancy,” Psychological Review
22. Sroufe and Waters, “The Ontogenesis of Smiling and Laughter”: 179.
23. Sroufe, Emotional Development: The organization of emotional life in the early years
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88.
24. Jean Piaget, La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant, 9th ed. (Neuchatel: Delachaux
& Niestlé, 1977), 336; English trans., The Origins of Intelligence in Children, trans.
Margaret Cook (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 385.
25. Robert P. Abelson, “Psychological Status of the Concept Script,” American Psychologist
36 (1981): 715, 717.
26. Anthony Ambrose, “The Age of Onset of Ambivalence in Early Infancy: Indications
from the Study of Laughing,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 4 (1963):
177.
27. Sroufe and Wunsch, “The Development of Laughter in the First Year of Life”: 1340 and
Sroufe, Emotional Development, 48.
28. Sroufe and Waters, “The Ontogenesis of Smiling and Laughter”: 183, 181.
29. See Herbert Spencer, “On the Physiology of Laughter” (1860) in Essays on Education
and Kindred Subjects (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1914), 301, 306, 308.
30. Michael S. Kearns, “Herbert Spencer and the Study of Laughter,” Victorian Newsletter 67
(1985): 25. It is worth noting that Freud appropriates Spencer’s explanation. According
to Freud, “laughter arises if a quota of psychic energy that had earlier been used for the
cathexis [Besetzung] of particular psychic paths has become unusable, so that it can find
free discharge.” In other words, laughter is powered by energy that had been used for
repression, but becomes suddenly excessive. As Freud sees it, the techniques of jokes
or at least of “tendentious” jokes all work to release childhood pleasures from adult
repressions. The explosive laugh, he writes, “attests to a good joke” that has transgressed
– for a moment at least – the restraints of civilization. See vol. 6 of his Gesammelte Werke,
Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, ed. Anna Freud, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer,
E. Kris, and O. Isakower (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1940), 164, 111; English trans.,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1960), 180, 96. For a critical discussion of Freud’s theory of jokes, see
Noël Carroll, “On Jokes,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 280–301, especially
281–285.
31. Sroufe and Waters, “The Ontogenesis of Smiling and Laughter”: 180–181 and Sroufe,
Emotional Development, 24.
32. Sroufe, Emotional Development, 93, 95 and Sroufe, Waters, and Leah Matas, “Contextual
Determinants of Infant Affective Response” in The Origins of Fear, ed. Michael Lewis
and Leonard A. Rosenblum (New York: John Wiley, 1974), 60.
33. Redvers Ironside, “Disorders of Laughter due to Brain Lesions,” Brain 79 (1956): 590.
34. J. Purdon Martin, “Fits of Laughter (Sham Mirth) in Organic Cerebral Disease,” Brain
73 (1950): 462, 464. For more recent discussions, see Donald W. Black, “Pathological
Laughter: A Review of the Literature,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
170 (1982): 67–71; G.G. Gascon and C.T. Lombroso, “Epileptic (Gelastic) Laughter,”
Epilepsia 12 (1971): 63–76; and Provine, Laughter, 153–187, who also considers nitrous
oxide or so-called laughing gas, which he reports may provoke a host of reactions besides
laughter depending upon the subject’s disposition.
35. Provine, Laughter, 100. As Provine notes, Darwin records this same observation in The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 198. The context of Darwin’s observation is his argument
that “laughter from a ludicrous idea, though involuntary, cannot be called a strictly reflex
action. In this case, and that of laughter from being tickled, the mind must be in a
pleasurable condition; a young child, if tickled by a strange man, would scream from
fear.”
36. G.W. Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, ed. Laurence Bouquiaux (Paris: Gallimard,
1995), §24, 66–67; English trans., Discourse on Metaphysics, trans. Daniel Garber and
Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 26.
37. Mary Douglas, “Jokes” in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd ed.
(London: Routledge, 1999), 148.
38. Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter” in Going to the Territory (New York:
Random House, 1986), 145, 186, 197, 190, 187–188.
39. Laughter, a contemporary physician writes, “mobilizes the majority of the muscles of the
organism”:not only those of the face, larynx, respiratory tract, thorax, diaphragm, and
abdomen, but of our limbs as well, which may flail or go weak, bending us over or even
obliging us to sit down. The expression “weak with laughter,” it has been found, is not just
a figure of speech: laughter is accompanied by loss of muscle tone and motor inhibition.
The autonomic motor system is implicated, both parasympathetic and sympathetic, with
first deceleration (before we laugh) and then acceleration (when we laugh) of heart rate.
See Henri Rubinstein, Psychosomatique du rire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983), 83, 63 and
S. Overeem, G.J. Lammers, and J.G. van Dijk, “Weak with laughter,” The Lancet 354
(1999): 838.
40. Douglas, “Do dogs laugh? A cross-cultural approach to body symbolism” in Implicit
Meanings, 168.
41. See Mahadev Apte, Humor and Laughter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985),
256–260 and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, “Ritual and ritualization from a biological perspec-
tive” in Human Ethology: Claims and limits of a new discipline, ed. M. von Cranach, K.
Foppa, W. Lepenies, and D. Ploog (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19.
42. Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge,
1996), xxxiv.
43. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 166.
44. Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), 44.
45. Itzhak Fried, Charles L. Wilson, Katherine A. MacDonald, and Eric J. Behnke, “Electric
current stimulates laughter,” Science 39 (1998): 650.
46. Kurt Goldstein, Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology (New York: Schocken,
1963), 10, 232.
66 B. G. PRUSAK
47. Compare John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity
of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 118.
48. Plessner and F.J.J. Buytendijk, “Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks. Ein Beitrag zur
Lehre vom Bewußtein des anderen Ichs” (1925) in Ausdruck und menschliche Natur, 76.
49. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 64–65.
50. Plessner and Buytendijk, “Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks” in Ausdruck und
menschliche Natur, 76 and Edmund Husserl, “Phänomenologie und Anthropologie,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1941): 4, 9. This article gives the text
of a lecture that Husserl presented in Berlin on June 10, 1931 in which he polemicizes
against the “rapidly accelerating turn toward a philosophical anthropology” among “the
younger philosophical generation in Germany.”
51. Plessner, “Anthropologie, Philosophisch” in Evangelische Kirchenlexikon, 138.
52. See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2002), 225. Plessner’s thought can also be linked to move-
ments in his own day; see in this regard Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism
in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996).
53. See B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 35.
Skinner’s behaviorism rejects “[t]he practice of looking inside the organism for an expla-
nation of its behavior” in favor of studying the variables that “lie outside the organism,
in its immediate environment and in its environmental history.” See Science and Human
Behavior, 31.
54. Portmann, Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen (Basel: Benno Schwabe,
1944), 65, 66.
55. Portmann, Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen, 74, 75.
56. Remarkably, according to Cathy Hayes, “Apes do not babble – at least not much.” Hayes
also reports that the baby chimpanzee that she and her husband Keith raised, Viki, often
could not understand words “unless [they] fit the situation.” See The Ape in Our House
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1952), 63, 226.
57. Compare R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1938), 236-237.
58. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 114.
59. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 48.
60. Erving Goffman, “Response Cries” in Human Ethology, 218.
61. Plessner, “Das Lächeln” (1950) in Ausdruck und menschliche Natur, 432.
62. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 19, 131.
63. J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff, “A Comparative Approach to the Phylogeny of Laughter and Smil-
ing” in Non-verbal Communication, ed. R.A. Hinde (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1972), 212, 217.
64. Frans Plooij, “How wild chimpanzee babies trigger the onset of mother-infant play – and
what the mother makes of it” in Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Commu-
nication, ed. Margaret Bullowa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 233–
234.
65. Provine, “Laughter,” American Scientist 84 (1996): 40 and Laughter, 75, 5.
66. Yerkes and Yerkes, The Great Apes, 159, 278-279, 295 and Köhler, Intelligenzprüfungen
an Menschenaffen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1963), 218; English trans., The Mentality
of Apes, trans. Ella Winter, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927), 307.
68. Köhler, Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen, 218, n. 1; English trans., The Mentality

of Apes, 307, n. 1.
69. Yerkes and Yerkes, The Great Apes, 292 and Plooij, “How wild chimpanzee babies trigger
the onset of mother-infant play,” 235. Plooij reports that “every observer at the Gombe
Research Centre [during his time there] agreed that a rough-and-tumble play session
between juveniles and/or adolescents . . . that had already lasted for a few minutes was
bound to be finished soon by one of the two partners screaming.”
70. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, 130 and Provine, Laughter, 114–116. Portmann
remarks that “there are curious, sporadic suggestions of . . . human behavior among
playing youth of the higher mammals,” a “difficult problem” on which he refers the reader
to Gustav Bally’s Vom Ursprung und von den Grenzen der Freiheit. Eine Deutung des
Spiels bei Tier und Mensch (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1944). See Biologische Fragmente
zu einer Lehre vom Menschen, 65, 139, n. 13.
71. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971),
19, 20, n. 7.
72. Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische
Anthropologie, vol. 4 of his Gesammelte Schriften, Die Stufen des Organischen und der
Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).
73. Marjorie Grene, Approaches to a Philosophical Biology (New York: Basic Books, 1968),
75.
74. Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophische Anthropologie (ein Lexikonartikel)” in Kultur und
Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 96–97.
75. See Plessner and Buytendijk, “Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks” in Ausdruck und
menschliche Natur, 77–89, 113–114.
76. Plessner, “Die Frage nach der Conditio humana” (1961) in Conditio humana, 162. See
also Die Stufen des Organischen, 107–114, pp. 314–319. “Die Frage nach der Conditio
humana” represents a restatement of Die Stufen des Organischen: in the words of a re-
viewer, “résumé and revision at once.” See Frithjof Rodi, “Conditio humana. Zu der gle-
ichnamigen Schrift von Helmuth Plessner und zur Neuauflage seines Buches: ‘Die Stufen
des Organischen und der Mensch,”’ Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 19 (1965):
703.
77. Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Julius Springer,
1921), 4, 45.
78. Plessner, “Die Frage nach der Conditio humana” in Conditio humana, 163.
79. See Grene, “Aristotle and Modern Biology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972):
412.
80. Plessner and Buytendijk, “Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks” in Ausdruck und
menschliche Natur, 80.
81. Plessner and Buytendijk, “Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks” in Ausdruck und men-
schliche Natur, 121-122.“ Leib is not Leib,” Plessner and Buytendijk write, “because it is
palpable from within and responsive to our impulses, but rather because it has an environ-
ment” and therewith “Umweltintentionalität.” See also Felix Hammer, Die exzentrische
Position des Menschen. Methode und Grundlinien der philosophischen Anthropologie
Helmuth Plessners (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1967), 80–81.
82. Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen, 305, 360.
83. Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen, 363.
84. For a discussion of both the historical background of this concept and its meticulous elab-
oration in Die Stufen des Organischen, see Joachim Fischer, “Exzentrische Positionalität.
68 B. G. PRUSAK
Plessners Grundkategorie der Philosophischen Anthropologie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für

Philosophie 48 (2000): 265–288.
85. Lynne Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 61.
86. Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., “Self-Recognition in Primates: A Comparative Approach to the
Bidirectional Properties of Consciousness,” American Psychologist 32 (1977): 331, 334.
87. Baker, Persons and Bodies, 21, 67, 98. See Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen, 365.
An individual, Plessner writes, that “is a body, is in a body (as inner life or soul), and
outside of the body as the perspective from which it is both, is called a person.”
88. Baker, Persons and Bodies, 62.
89. Gallup, “Self-Recognition in Primates”: 332.
90. Baker, Persons and Bodies, 64, n. 11.
91. Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and
Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 10, 165. While abjuring any
pretensions to say “exactly what the self is,” Stern distinguishes four different senses
of the self: an emergent self, core self, subjective self, and verbal/categorical self. In
each instance he has in mind an “invariant pattern of awareness . . . organizing subjective
experience.”
92. Piaget, La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant, 357–358; English trans., The Origins
of Intelligence in Children, 408–409.
93. Baker, “Material Persons and the Doctrine of the Resurrection,” Faith and Philosophy
18 (2001): 157.
94. Plessner, “Der Aussagewert einer Philosophischen Anthropologie” in Conditio humana,
398.
95. Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995),
44.
96. John Lahr, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization, 2nd ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 206.
97. Plessner, “On Human Expression” in Phenomenology: Pure and Applied, ed. Erwin W.
Straus (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 73. Compare “Elemente men-
schlichen Verhaltens” in Conditio humana, 228. Here Plessner refers to laughing and
crying as “sinnvolle Fehlreaktionen.”
98. Goldstein, Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology, 137.
99. The term ‘conversational laughter’ refers to “laugh particles” or “hehehs” uttered in
speech. In two-party interactions, a speaker often emits a “heheh” in the course of mak-
ing an utterance. In multi-party interactions, someone else often does the same. Along
with facial expression and bodily bearing, conversational laughter serves interlocutors
as a means to signal that an utterance should be taken as humorous and thus, in Michael
Mulkay’s words, “to regulate the production of laughter.” Whether conversational laugh-
ter ought properly to be called laughter, however, is a difficult question. In the above
quote, Mulkay implicitly distinguishes between conversational laughter and laughter
properly called; other “ethnomethodologists” seem to agree. See James N. Schenkein,
“Toward an Analysis of Natural Conversation and the Sense of Heheh,” Semiotica 6
(1972): 344; Phillip J. Glenn, “Initiating Shared Laughter in Multi-Party Conversations,”
Western Journal of Speech Communications 53 (1989): 145; and Mulkay, On Humour:
Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 118.
100. Compare Augustine’s reflections in The City of God, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), vol. 4, bk. 14, ch. 24, 386–393, especially 390.
101. Michael Joseph Gross, “This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers”
in Open House: Writers Redefine Home, ed. Mark Doty (Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf
Press, 2003), 149. Compare Abraham’s and Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 17:17 and 18:12.
102. J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G.J. Warnock (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), 69.
103. Plessner, “On Human Expression” in Phenomenology: Pure and Applied, 70. Compare
“Elemente menschlichen Verhaltens” in Conditio humana, 226.
104. Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, 164, n. 1; English trans., Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 179, n. 5.
105. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 34, 195, 157.
106. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia
Ostriker (London: Penguin, 1977), 184.
107. To be sure, it is noteworthy, as Terrence W. Deacon remarks, that sobbing and laughing
“involve inverse breathing patterns: spasmodic breathing on inhalation (sobbing) ver-
sus spasmodic breathing on exhalation (laughing).” According to Deacon, “This [fact]
indicates that [sobbing’s and laughing’s] sound configurations were selected with re-
spect to one another, as a result of disruptive selection against intermediate ambiguous
forms.” See The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 419. But it seems artificial to represent sobbing and laughing
as “directly opposite” one another. Are they not, after all, alike “spasmodic”? What is
perhaps most remarkable about the principle of antithesis, however, is the blitheness with
which it writes off expressions as merely accidental. The possibility that, as Plessner puts
it, “[t]he physical expressions of laughing and crying can correspond to the occasion and
react to its ‘sense”’ is not even considered (LW 368/LC 145–146).
108. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed.
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), pt. 2, 178. – I thank Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Juliet Floyd,
and Lydia Moland for discussions of earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to
my paper’s anonymous reviewer for several suggestions and references.

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Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 38: 41–69

The science of laughter: Helmuth Plessner’s Laughing

It is a commonplace with a long and august history in the philosophical tradi-

1. Between phenomenology and physiology

Now, how to explain such a “disgraceful loss of self-control”? Physiology

phenomenology of laughter” – a first-person description of the phenomenon –

a laughter-like behavior is firmly established. “The community of certain ex-

There is evidently good reason for all these qualifications. According to

2. The eccentric position

To recall, Plessner claims that there is a need for an “original method” to

of the Organic, accordingly, is necessary for understanding Laughing and

know the contribution of the organism’s structure. (The difference is between

a result of visual, chemical, and proprioreceptive feedback, in principle this

awareness of ourselves as a center of awareness – in Plessner’s terminology,

3. From phenomenon to “foundation”

lacks the transparency of other expressive movements. A picture of a joyful

To be sure, there are possible counterexamples. So-called polite laughter

To be sure, Plessner acknowledges that his explanation of laughter has its

13. Provine, Laughter, 49.

68. Köhler, Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen, 218, n. 1; English trans., The Mentality

Plessners Grundkategorie der Philosophischen Anthropologie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für

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