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Why is it funny to see a man slip on a banana peel? A hundred years ago, the French philosopher Henri Bergson thought about this and came up with an unusual idea about why we laugh. Laughter, he decided, is our reaction when we unexpectedly encounter an event which reminds us that we are infinite souls trapped in finite, rather clumsy bodies.* There is more to this idea that meets the eye of modern reductive Western science. You will find that it rewards contemplation. Parallel to Bergson's insight, let me ask another simple question: Why do we wear clothes? Let us immediately enumerate the obvious answers. We wear clothes for: 1. Protection / warmth. 2. Identity / status. 3. Decoration. 4. Ritual (religious, political, corporate). We enumerate those reasons quickly in order to acknowledge their validity--and their inadequacy. Following Bergson, is it not also possible that we wear clothes in an attempt to deny the reality which the man slipping on the banana peel reminds us of? That is, to deny (both to others and to ourselves) that we are infinite souls trapped in finite, rather clumsy, smelly bodies? Clothes occasionally are designed to highlight and focus attention on this body part or that body part (bodices, codpieces, midriffs, etc.). But the primary focus to which clothes always drive us is the face, and the eyes. The eyes. The--if you will allow me--seat of the soul, window to the heart. Which leads us to what I would call "the fashion fallacy." Go to a nude beach, and you will find, after the first few minutes, that your primary focus--even with no clothes in sight--is the face, and the eyes. By wearing clothes, we deny not only our goodness, our wholeness, we also deny our finite infinitude. In a kind of childish bit of metaphysical trompe l'oeil, we think clothes will distract us from the "awful" body reality which we inhabit. A nude beach experience provides ample evidence that we needn't bother. Clothes neither make nor unmake the man nor the woman. They are a denial of that which, it turns out, we need neither fear nor deny.
*I find it depressing that, at about the same time, another European, one S. Freud, was also thinking about humor. The fact that Freud went in the direction he went--in and down, all the way to the anus--is only yet another symptom of the human neurosis which we try to corral and limit by labeling it the "German" problem. (This piece is No. 21 in the "Idea Man" series.)
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