PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER: THE SEARCH FOR A NEW PARADIGM

The article examines problems that have long been an obstacle to the creation of the philosophy of laughter as a separate problem field. The first obstacle: rationalism and rationalistic supremacy in relation to everything sensual, irrational, spontaneous. The only thing that reconciled rationalists with the phenomenon of laughter was the concept of its indirect utility. The second obstacle lies in the general orientation of philosophy towards moralism, which prevailed until the time of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Philosophers voluntarily or involuntarily "pull" the facts under the conclusion that seems morally justified to them. The third obstacle to the development of the philosophy of laughter remained for a long time the religious prejudice that laughing is sinful. It is interesting that religious philosophers such as E. E. Shaftesbury, J. G. Haman, and S. Kierkegaard questioned this thesis, thus starting the history of systematic philosophical study of laughter. The fourth reason, which was an obstacle to the development of the philosophy of laughter, we see in the ambition of philosophers, each of whom magnified his own theory, rejecting the theories of other thinkers. For example, Schopenhauer a priori rejected the Kantian understanding of laughter, referring it to this kind of “mistakes” that are not worth proving. The fifth reason that inhibited the development of the theory of laughter is the abstraction of most philosophers from the variety of real “laughter” in favour of some generalized “laughter in general”, which, in fact, does not exist. On the basis of postmodern practices of intertextuality and deconstruction, mutual complementarity and practically equal value of various approaches to explaining the phenomenon of laughter are demonstrated. Postmodern (and metamodern) methodologies allow combining different paradigms of the theoretical understanding of laughter, which do not contradict, but complement each other. At the same time, the collective discourse of the philosophy of laughter does not act as an eclecticism of different views and approaches, but as a harmonious polylogue of philosophical traditions. Due to the inexhaustibility of the object and the subject of research, as well as the need to rethink many cultural phenomena (in particular, clarification of the place of laughter practices in the culture of Ukraine in different historical periods), significant prospects for further research arise.