Metaphysical (Bergsonian) hilarity

[alice wellintown]

When I mentioned the smell of Bergson, a more astute reader of WG
noted that we would encounter an allusion to Bergons on laughter. Here
from Wiki:

In the idiosyncratic Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,
Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself, but of how laughter
can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd
edition of the essay).[6] He describes the process of laughter
(refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its
reality[6]), used in particular by comics and clowns, as the
caricature of the mechanism nature of humans (habits, automatic acts,
etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert
matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms).[6]
However, Bergson warns us that laughter’s criterion of what should be
laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause
serious damage to a person’s self-esteem.[26] This essay made his
opposition to the Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.[6]

Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's
intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation of the
scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in
published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell[33] George
Santayana,[34] G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Julien Benda,[35] T.
S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget,[36] Marxist
philosophers Theodor W. Adorno,[37] Lucio Colletti,[38] Jean-Paul
Sartre,[39] and Georges Politzer,[40] as well as Maurice Blanchot,[41]
American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah
Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William
Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W.
Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern
Synthesis) and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, The
Phantom Table).[citation needed]

The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, while free-thinkers[who?]
(who formed a large part of the teachers and professors of the French
Third Republic) accused him of spiritualism. Still others have
characterized his philosophy as a materialist emergentism — Samuel
Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their
forebear.[6] According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports
himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published
courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges
that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of Les Deux
sources de la morale et de la religion, is the inner principle of his
whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other
commentators.

Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated
him with Bergson.