Your complimentary articles You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please Answer from… Albert Einstein Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference. Aristotle To actualise its potential. B.F. Skinner Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will. Buddha If you meet the chicken on the road, kill it. Carl Jung The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being. Charles Darwin It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. David Hume Out of custom and habit. Douglas Adams Forty-two. Emily Dickinson Because it could not stop for death. Epicurus For fun. Ernest Hemingway To die. In the rain. Henry David Thoreau To live deliberately… and suck all the marrow out of life. Hippocrates Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas. Jack Nicholson ‘Cause it [censored] wanted to. That’s the [censored] reason. Jacques Derrida Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD! Jean-Paul Sartre In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road. J.F. von Goethe The eternal hen-principle made it do it. Karl Marx It was a historical inevitability. Ludwig Wittgenstein The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualisation of this potential occurrence. Machiavelli So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained. Mark Twain The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated. Nietzsche Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you. Plato For the greater good. Pyrrho the Skeptic What road? Ralph Waldo Emerson It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it. Salvador Dali The Fish. The Sphinx You tell me. Thomas de Torquemada Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out. Timothy Leary Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take. Werner Heisenberg We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast. Zeno of Elea To prove it could never reach the other side. (This piece has been floating around the world on the Internet. We haven’t managed to identify the twisted genius who concocted it; if it was you, please contact us and we’ll credit you in the next issue. Many thanks to Hans Pietersen (South Africa), Wei-Choon Ng (Singapore) and Kessack Young-Smith (UK) for forwarding it to Philosophy Now.)
Posted at 00:02h in Philosophy “Why did the chicken cross the road?” is a common riddle joke, with the answer being “To get to the other side”. It is an example of anti-humor, in that the curious setup of the joke leads the listener to expect a traditional punchline, but they are instead given a simple statement of fact. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” has become iconic as an exemplary generic joke to which most people know the answer, and has been repeated and changed numerous times over the course of history. Alternatively this is a pun. Crossing the street or road is likely to cause the chicken’s death and so it will be “on the other side”, a euphemism for death. Below you can find some of the most popular answers. Buddha: Therefore, on the road there is no chicken, no road, nor perception of the road, nor impulse to cross it, nor consciousness of the road, no feathers, no beak, no clawed feet, no chicken. No road no chicken no crossing… only the great prajnaparamita of the empty form of chicken and the empty form of the road, and that emptiness; gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. “But, O Buddha,” said Sariputta, “what is that crossing the road before us at this moment?” And the great One replied,”A chicken, Sariputta.” “But why, O great One, does it cross the road?” “To get to the other side, Sariputta.” Om. Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained. Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it. Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road. Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being. Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference. All these answers remind us that there is not only the reality of the chicken, there is not only one answer to the problem of the chicken. As with many things in the world, it depends on the context – perspective, report, point of view, fundamental assumptions. This is important for innovative thinking, whether it is about chickens or the laws of the physical universe. Sources: 1. WIKIPEDIA "Why did the chicken cross the road?" (Last Updated On: March 22, 2021) If you’ve ever been told a joke in your life, you’ve been asked why the chicken crossed the road. You hate the joke, we hate the joke, we know the answer has always been “to get to the other side.” At least it serves as the prime example of anti-humor so if you’re one of those people who has to explain humor, there you go. Also by definition it means “why did the chicken cross the road” is not a joke. As anti-humor, it’s an anti-joke. So keep that in mind if you want to roast someone we suppose. Anyway nobody likes dissecting humor so we’re going to do it. Why did the chicken cross the road? When Did the Chicken Cross the Road?While the anti-joke itself is quite old–dating back to at least the 1840s, it’s most definitely not the oldest joke. In 1847 the question appeared in The Knickerbocker, a New York magazine. We’re humans and humans are social creatures; humor in some abstractly unrecognizable form has likely existed as long as we’ve been able to communicate emotion. “’Why does a chicken cross the street?’ Are you ‘out of town?’ Do you ‘give it up?’ Well, then: ‘Because it wants to get on the other side!’” But the idea of “humor” comes from ancient Greek humoral medicine, which actually has nothing to do with being funny. Humoral medicine is about balancing your internal fluids, which were thought to control your physical and emotional health. Humors were body fluids. If you were wondering when the oldest joke was, many trace it back to the Sumerians in 1900 BC. What do you think was the first joke? Pause a second and see if you can guess. A fart joke. It was a fart joke. “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” How Did the Chicken Cross the Road?There are a lot of theories to humor, let’s see if we can’t apply some of them to chickens crossing the road. One theory surrounds relief; we find things funny because we want to reduce tension or nervousness. Not great for explaining why chickens cross the road, unless chickens also take walks when they’re annoyed at their co-workers making anti-jokes. Do chickens joke about people crossing the road? The era of Plato and Aristotle gave us theories of superiority. We find things funny as a form of schadenfreude. Things are funny because they are less fortunate or otherwise inferior to us. Considering humanity as a race, we definitely do think ourselves superior to chickens. Also, there’s the common reading that the chicken trying to “get to the other side” doesn’t mean the chicken wants to get to the other side of the street. It could be a pun about death, and the chicken might just be super depressed and wanted to get hit by a car. Considering the common college urban legend that getting hit by a campus vehicle means free tuition, maybe the chicken was just buried in student debt. Too real, let’s talk about computers instead. The human brain is super efficient, and it has to manage a lot of stuff. That’s why we have illusions, because sometimes the shortcuts get things cross-wired in our brain. So when we’re communicating, our brains are always trying to figure out what’s going to happen next so we can focus on the most likely outcomes. You’ve probably experienced a less unconscious version of this when you were about to have a conversation you were anxious to have. “I’m gonna say this if they do this but I’ll say that if they do this other thing.” If you want someone else to experience that anxiety, tell them you need to talk with no context. Anyway, the point is our brains are dedicating power to figuring out where things go. When someone asks “why did the chicken cross the road” (or any other question), we immediately try to figure out the answer. The point of a joke is to catch us off guard on some level, and we might find things funny because the punchline didn’t line up with our subconscious flowchart of the conversation. Honestly the chicken probably crossed the road because it knew we would overthink it and talk about it literally 170 years later. Well played. If chickens are all crossing the street, they all have a place to go, right? See if you know where they went here. Commentscomments |
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