Explanatory model for cultural dynamics and its phenomena: The Fool and its metamorphosis in the context of cultural dynamics.

What we perceive as cultural phenomena and products or what we read, watch, listen to and enjoy- e.g. forms of art- emerge from certain dynamics taking place between the natural and cultural world. The natural world consists of the empirical world and its concepts. The cultural world works with that kind of input and images a chosen selection. Everything that is created in the cultural world could be defined as cultural output. To understand the relationship and process, a further classification of input and output is needed. Natural input could be further segmented into natural identities that form the human being essentially. Natural identities are nothing concrete but an abstract concept that is inborn and nothing to be learned. One example for an identity would be love we all perceive, experience and produce in every imaginable facet. By ‘performing’ such an identity, the natural world gains instantiations of this identity and as a consequence the experience of them enrich and further develop our knowledge and skills about this identity. In the next step, the natural input, which is given by what we perceive, know and basically are, creates a source and trigger for the cultural output as human beings urge to explain their environment as well as themselves and hence reflect the world and everything within it. This urge and need could be found in the method human beings use to learn. According to Aristotle, our in-born method to learn is imitation. So, this cultural environment tries to convert the natural input to cultural output on the level of imitation. The dissertation aims to describe this conversion and processes between nature and culture on their macro- and microcosmic level to discover the elementary parts dominating the constitution of cultural phenomena, their functioning and thus, their aesthetic effect. Here, the focus lies on the cultural identity of the ridiculum incorporated by the aesthetic effective entity, the fool in comedy, its archetype, prototypes and prototypical patterns triggering laughter. To achieve that, it is essential to consider the Wirkungsgeschichte of the figure the fool and the prototypical basis of Plautus’ servus callidus for Shakespeare’s wise fool in regard to the ridiculum’s formulae, which work on an abstract level and are here termed patterns. First of all, the pattern has to fit into the generic and associative context it is situated in to be able to deliver aesthetic coherence in regard to its belonging cultural identity. The patterns themselves fulfil this agenda in their complexity, which takes place over the whole cultural product. On a concrete basis, their realization and content is ‘decoded’ in the cognitive processing prompting and accompanying the aesthetic experience. So, it could be argued that each pattern is created for the sake of meaning and aesthetic experience. This analytic model emphasises the aesthetic efficiency and forces the researcher to analyse the cultural product into its abstract parts, the patterns. The result is the comparability of these functional parts, their reception and as such their productivity. The investigation of the patterns and their concrete devices in the text will rely on philological, linguistic and psychological analysis of chosen passages taken from Homer’s Margites, Plautus’ comedies, Shakespeare’s plays and Matt Groening’s series The Simpsons.