The logic of being daft....

Hi

My recent short post yesterday was an admission that I'm perhaps a wee bit lower of mood than I had previously contemplated, or been willing admit. Last night I received an invite over to friends house  and after some deliberation decided to go. They have two children, the youngest of which is 2 yrs old, fearless and funny, never failing to raise a smile. It occurred to me upon my return that I haven't really got much in my daily life that's "fun" presently.

Then a small voice from the depth of my head asked:

"what's fun anyway?" 

It's dictionary definition is "doing something for reason of it own enjoyment" or something like that.

So..yup you guessed it.. I googled a "philosophical" definition of "fun"

Now I didn't come up with much on "fun" per see, but I did find some interesting things about "humour" and "laughter":

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

By all accounts the early greeks such as plato and his contemporaries had dim view of laughter and merry making, seeing it as a lack of self control and unworthy. It seems that they were so wrapped up in the seriousness of their "questions of being" that they had no time for such things as would make the experience of living that much more enjoyable, which was I thought quite odd.

I bet it was a laugh a minute in 350BC Athens.

Yet Aristophanes wrote "Clouds", a satirical play where he mercilessly took the Mickey out of Socrates and others. So laughter wasn't an alien concept.

Here though, the opinions of the early thinkers begin to make sense. It's not the laughter and humour that's the issue. Its is why we laugh.

Plato and his contemporaries .. Aristotle etc, saw laughter at someone as a sign of one being unaware of self. For example we might laugh at a fool who believes themselves more competent than they are, yet in so doing we show ourselves to be somewhat self absorbed, believing ourselves above those being ridiculed. This we might now called a form of bullying, and thus the correlation between the early greeks disapproval of laughter and an immoral action begins to make sense.

But what of laughing together and shared experiences of fun? Well I haven't delved into this in any depth, as tbh I might leave that for another time. But it puts me in mind of a piece I read on the value of friends some years back....

Sadly I can't find it, or who wrote it, nor can I remember where or how I read this, but essentially the point of the piece was that "friendship" is not something critical to life, as for example food, water, or air might be. We can live without it.

Rather it's the case that friends, (and I'm gonna add in shared fun here) are something which gives meaning to life, and thus enriches it's value.

Whist having friends has no survival worth to the processes of life per see, they are one of those things that add great worth to survival, and to life itself.

So, perhaps the lesson here is that when looking at serious, sometimes dry, sometimes personal topics, not to get bogged down in them. To remember that life isn't all about logical arguments and morally acceptable viewpoints. Sometimes its about doing precisely the opposite. The illogical, the silly, the daft.

Because our ability to do that, to enjoy the moment, is where life and the living of it truly resides.

As you'll see in the video, something I once knew rather well, and seem to have forgot.. ;-)

So, with that in mind I'm gonna chuck on some tunes and get ready for the seat post parts arriving this week. I need to go fall of my bike a few times. 

Sarah