Humor as a Privileged Grasp of Deep Truth I: Preliminaries and an Initial Outline

The second chapter gives an initial outline of humor’s privileged access to truth. It develops the idea that humor allows us to see things freshly through the way it flouts and so steps outside of the sense of those things. Because the argument is that humor gives us the truth of being, the chapter begins with some explanation of what this means, as well as of some related metaphysical concepts, independently of their relevance to humor. In addition, it addresses the logical issues with the idea of gaining insight into a form of sense by going beyond (or “stepping outside”) the boundaries of that sense.