Georg Friedrich Meier: Thoughts about jokes (1744)

 

(1718-1777)
By Skara kommun - Georgius Fridericus Meier; Uploaded by Magnus Manske, CC BY 2.0 

It seems almost a joke in itself to read an author from the Wolffian tradition of philosophy discussing the merits of jokes: how could such a system, with a penchant for droll rules, help us to understand imaginative and unruly world of jokes? Yet, this is exactly what Georg Friedeich Meier sets out to do in his Gedanken von Schertzen - to find rules by which to decide which jokes are effective and which are not. Just like an artist might not be able to explain why her works are beautiful, similarly a joker might not know why some joke is particularly funny.

To clarify a bit, Meier is not a pure Wolffian, but more precisely, hails from the tradition of Baumgarten. Now, while Baumgarten’s metaphysics was, on the whole, more intellectualist than Wolff’s, which still had some empiricist leanings, in one particular aspect Baumgarten’s philosophy was more receptive to the messiness of such topic as jokes. Baumgarten accepted that in addition to the clear and distinct perfection of conceptual thought, senses have their own kind of perfection, embodied in the new discipline of aesthetics. Baumgarten hadn’t at this point published his work on aesthetics, mentioning it only briefly in his psychology, but Meier as his student probably knew about Baumgarten’s more concrete ideas.

In addition to the obvious idea that jokes should induce laughter - at least when time and audience are right for them - Meier notes that jokes are dependent on two faculties, wit and sharpness. These two faculties are in a sense opposite: while a sharp mind provides distinct notion of separate entities, wit notices all correspondences between them, such as similarities of qualities and quantitative proportions. Mere wit is not enough for a joke, or otherwise allegories could be jokes, but neither is mere sharpness nor making people laugh - conceptual analysis is no joke and neither is any old prank.

Now, what makes a joke good or bad, Meier says, can depend either on the topic joked or on the very form of the joke. He at once concentrates his work on the latter kind of perfection. Still, he does note that topic can affect our overall enjoyment of joke: a blasphemous joke can make us uneasy, no matter how good it technically is.

Formal perfection of joke consists simply in showing wit and sharpness and making people laugh. Meier specifies this rather obvious remark by giving more definite criteria for the perfection of a joke. A good joke, Meier says, must be both complex and novel - or at least complex and novel jokes are better than simple and unoriginal ones. Complexity of a joke - or more precisely, joke impressing many ideas at once - entices imagination and causes pleasant emotions, when we have the ability to conceive many things at once. Novelty, on the other hand, shows that the joker has originality and not just good memory. An old joke might have seemed funny at first, but becoming too familiar it has lost its ability to make us laugh. Thus, a good joker doesn’t repeat her stories over and over again.

A good joke shouldn’t be just witty, Meier notes, but it should also be sharp. In other words, the connections uncovered in a good joke should not be too obvious, because mere similarity does not induce laughter. What this means in practice is, for instance, comparing very small and insignificant things with great and significant things and finding unexpected similarities. Especially funny, Meier says, is putting apparently contradictory matters on the same level, which he considers to be the essence of irony. The more points of contact uncovered for sharply distinguished things, the more perfect the joke is. All of these points of contact need not be made explicit, and indeed, it is better if many of them are left implicit. Furthermore, these points of contact should concern the essence of things, thus, Meier concludes, mere word plays are very imperfect jokes and a sign of bad taste (here Meier shows his own personal taste).

Meier also notes that good jokes should be unexpected. A joke told after a number of other, similar jokes has not much of an impact, because the ideas suggested by it are too distinct in our minds. Instead, a perfect joke should be preceded by ideas of a very different sort, being like a flash of sudden witticism. Thus, Meier notes, a joke told in the middle of very serious lectures requiring conceptual distinctness is a sign of great wittiness, and even more witty is when a person jokes at the time of her own death. Because a joke should be completely unexpected, audience should not have too much time to think about the matter beforehand, so it should not be preceded by any lengthy introductions. Particularly to be avoided is laughing before one’s own joke.

In addition, Meier notes, a good joke should have all the marks of beauty, that is, sensuous perfection. Firstly, a good joke should produce a clear idea of what it attempts to convey. That is, audience should not need any detailed explanations to understand it. Then again, a good joke should also be lively, which means that it shouldn’t be too conceptualised and analysed, just like geometrical explanation of a beautiful object is not beautiful. This means that jokes should not be too long. In order to combine clarity and brevity, jokes should be aimed at the specific audience listening to it. Finally, best jokes should concern true matters, although good jokes can also be told of things someone believed to be true, such as pagan gods.

Meier doesn’t have that much to say about what in a good joke makes someone laugh, because he admits that genesis of laughter is still not very clear. He does point out that laughter is primarily connected to positive ideas, although it can have mediate connection to negative ideas, such as when we laugh at our enemies. He also notes deformities and roguery as examples of things causing laughter, although too great a deformity causes empathy and too great a roguery anger. A general rule Meier concludes from these examples is that laughter happens when we observe incongruities in unimportant trifles. Then again, laughable as such is no true joke, if the aspects of witticism and sharpness are missing. Thus, funny anecdote is not yet a joke nor is a laughingstock a witty joker. Similarly, although a good performance can enhance the effect of a joke, performance as such does not make anything a joke.

Martin Knutzen: Philosophical study of immaterial nature of soul (1744)

While most of the philosophers of the Wolffian school were busy writing grandiose compendiums of philosophical disciplines, Knutzen, the teacher of Immanuel Kant, was satisfied with more succinct treatment of individual problems. For instance, Philosophische Abhandlung von der immateriellen Natur der Seele (a translation from Knutzen’s Latin original) treats the nature of human soul. In fact, it is a defense of the immateriality of latter, against materialists, who would state that soul is nothing else but a material thing.

Knutzen’s work divides into two parts, first of which positively argues that soul is immaterial, while the second criticises the materialistic arguments against the immateriality of the soul. While the first part of the treatise is not that original, it is at least a good summary of the usual Wolffian argument for the immateriality of the soul.

The starting point of Knutzen’s argument is the simple experience that we are conscious or aware of things. This what is conscious of things is then called soul, without first any indication whether soul is material or immaterial. Now, one thing soul can be conscious of is the soul itself. An important condition for this self-consciousness is the ability to distinguish oneself from other things - this ability is something we’ll see even Fichte emphasising as an important part of human self-consciousness.

Next question Knutzen makes concerns the conditions of the capacity to make distinctions. Firstly, he notes that the soul must have representations of several things, secondly, these various representations must belong to the same subject, and finally, the representations must be compared by this same subject. In other words, soul, as the subject of these various acts, must form an absolute unity - a sort of focus, from which all these “rays of action” start. In particular, the soul cannot be a mere unified complex of parts, Knutzen says, which wouldn’t really be an absolute, but only accidental unity.

Knutzen’s proof is then almost complete. What he still requires is to show that matter is no absolute unity. This he can do easily, because matter was defined to be a complex substance consisting of many parts, which were also substances. To make things even clearer, Knutzen asks us to consider, in a Condillacian manner, a statue that would think itself. Part of such a statue might represent one part of the statue and another part would represent another part. Yet, such a combination of representations would be no unified representation of the whole statue. At most, one or more indivisible parts of the statue might think of the whole statue and at the same time of themselves, but such an indivisible part - a monad - would then not be a complex substance nor material.

The second, bit more original part of Knutzen’s book is dedicated to showing faults in arguments purporting to show materiality of soul. Furthermore, Knutzen considers the question why people endorse materialism. He comes up with two answers. Firstly, he suggests that materialists are often unable to understand anything beyond what they sense and thus unable to fathom the existence of something that cannot be sensed, such as an immaterial soul. Secondly, he insinuates that many materialists just wish to discredit the idea of immortality, so they wouldn’t have to worry any retribution of their sins.

Knutzen considers seven different arguments for material nature of soul:

1) A clear reason for a materialist understanding of soul is that body appears to determine soul in many ways: for instance, bodily weaknesses and old age hinder thinking. Knutzen notes that these facts could also be explained by suggesting that soul uses body as an instrument when thinking something - when the instrument is somehow flawed, like when the body ages, thinking becomes difficult for soul. If an old person would suddenly get a new, young body, its ability to think would be increased.

2) Knutzen has rejected the first argument of materialists, because he thinks causal interaction between soul and a body is at least as good an explanation for certain facts that could be explained materialistically. Now, another argument for materialism starts particularly from this supposed interaction between soul and body - all causality requires substances touching each other, which makes sense only when these substances are material. Knutzen is able to quickly deal with this argument, because there is no clear reason why all causality would happen through direct contact, and indeed, Newtonian account of gravity appeared to show that even material substances could affect one another through long distances. In the end, Knutzen notes, there is no need to assume that an instrument would have the same essence as its user, just like a violin is very different from a violin player.

3) Yet another argument for materialism starts from similarities in the behaviour of parents and their children, which could be explained if souls were produced from the souls of their parents. Knutzen notes that just because soul of a particular parent and a particular child are similar, other children in the same family might bear no resemblance to their parents. In any case, the similarities in behaviour might be attributed to the similarities of instruments used by souls, that is, bodies.

4) Another materialistic argument begins from the natural assumption that soul appears to undergo changes - while we are conscious of this now, we will be conscious of another thing later. If we then assume that all changes are based on motion, then soul would have to be a movable thing and therefore material. Like with an earlier argument, Knutzen can simply deny that all changes require motion - indeed, it is quite conceivable that even some material changes, like when colour of an object changes, might not need motions.

5) Locke famously noted that while matter as such appears to have no capacity to think - as shown by material substances that do not think - God with his omnipotence would surely be capable of giving the matter a power to think, which would make the assumption of immaterial soul superfluous. Knutzen’s answer is that the idea of thinking matter is a complete contradiction, thus, even God could not make matter think, no matter how omnipotent he is.

6) It is a pity that most German philosophers of the time considered animals only in brief snippets, leaving their status in the world system quite unclear. Still, many philosophers had noted that animals did have souls, but their souls differed crucially from human souls - while humans could think, animals probably didn’t. Knutzen notes that materialists might insist that animal souls can think and that they are material, which would suggest that same things could be said about human souls. While it would be easy to deny that animals think, Knutzen does not do this, but admits that animals might have this capacity. Yet, he at once points out that animal souls cannot then be material.

7) The last straw of the materialists is to insist they can explain all phenomena of human consciousness materialistically, so that no supposition of immaterial substances is required. Knutzen goes very far in describing the current theories about nerve fluids etc. Yet, he finally notes, there seems to be no clear connection between thinking and movements of nerve fluids.

Christian Wolff: Natural right 4 - Forms of trade

Wolff continues his account of different types of contract with such where both sides of the contract give and receive something. Simplest form of such a contract is what he calls permutatio, where straightforwardly one person gives something to another person, who in turn gives something else to the first person. What is traded in permutatio might be physical things, but they might also be anything else, like rights to use a thing or certain amount of work.

Wolff notes that permutatio is valid only if certain rules are obeyed. Permutatio must, firstly, be consensually agreed upon. Furthermore, things traded in permutatio must be owned by the people giving them, that is, one cannot trade what belongs to someone else. Traded things need not be delivered at the same time nor immediately after agreeing to permutatio, but the agreement creates an obligation to deliver the agreed things.

A rather peculiar form of permutatio is what Wolff call permutatio res sua cum sua, that is, trading one’s thing with that same thing. What Wolff means is that in this type of permutatio one person gives a thing at a certain time and the other person returns that same thing later. The main difference to ordinary borrowing of a thing seems to be that unlike with borrowing, the ownership of the thing changes for a while to the second person. Despite this, the second person cannot give the traded thing away, before returning it to the original owner.

In all forms of permutatio, Wolff adds, the traded things should be equally priced. Wolff does admit that this is not an absolute obligation - a person can use permutatio to give more in exchange to the other, but then this extra can be interpreted as a donation. Wolff also notes that price can be defined in two ways, firstly, as what a thing is considered to be priced commonly or by experts, and secondly, what an individual considers the price to be according to her particular feeling toward the thing in question. Wolff notes that the first type of price is the true price, while prices based on individual feelings should be considered only if both sides of the permutatio accept the evaluation of things according to this price.

The most important form of permutatio is emtio venditio. The defining element of the emtio venditio is for Wolff that one person is thought to give a price of the thing given by the other person, or more particularly, sum of money corresponding to this price. The person giving he thing is called venditor (seller), while the other person in this contract is emtor (buyer).

Just like permutatio in general, emtio venditio is valid only if certain conditions apply, such as consensuality and the seller owning the thing sold. Wolff also adds such considerations that a person cannot sell something that does not exist - although she can make the conditional promise that she will sell a thing, if it does exist in the future - and that a person cannot buy something she already owns - although she can pay for the possession of this thing.

A peculiar characteristic of emtio venditio is that it involves an explicit or implicit negotiation for the price of the thing. This is especially important in case of people promising to buy or sell something, because such a promise has an implicit condition that both parties must agree upon the proper price of the thing. Even if a promise is in this case conditional, it creates obligations for the person who promised: for instance, a person promising to sell a thing cannot sell it to anyone else during the negotiations for the price.

Wolff notes that in addition to determining the price of the thing sold and bought, the buyer and the seller can agree upon conditions when the price will change. For instance, faults in the thing can lower its price, while delays in the payment can make it higher.

More generally, many details in different types of contract depend on what is agreed upon by the people signing the contract. A good example of this is what Wolff calls arrha - a separate payment that one side of the contract gives in order to confirm the validity of the contract. If no other conditions are stated, arrha changes the actual contract in no manner and specifically it need never be paid back. Then again, Wolff notes, arrha is often an additional ingredient in emtio venditio, so that it is counted as a partial payment of the actual purchase (what we would call a down payment), and the contract might state some further conditions, when the down payment has to be paid back by the seller.

Wolff goes through a number of other possible additions to an emtio venditio:

• Addictio in diem: This additional clause provides the seller an opportunity to accept during a certain period a better offer, even if the sale has otherwise been completed. The better offer need not be one with more money involved, but it can have otherwise better conditions, such as a more certain payment.
• Lex commissoria: This additional clause states that unless buyer pays during certain period of time, the sale becomes invalid. Seller is then free to trade the thing with someone else. Then again, if the seller accepts even a partial payment from the buyer, the lex commissoria becomes invalid.
• Pactum de retrahendo: An additional clause stating that if the traded thing is sold anew, it should be sold to a certain person, at least if this person is willing to pay the same price as other potential buyers. Thus, if the thing is sold to someone else, this person has the right to revoke the sale.
• Pactum de retrovendendo: This additional clause gives the seller a right to buy the sold thing back during a certain period. If nothing else is agreed upon, the price for this new sale should be same as the original. This clause means that the buyer cannot sell the thing to someone else during the time when the clause is valid.
• Pactum de redimendo: This additional clause is almost same as the previous, but here it is the right of the buyer to sell the traded thing back.

Whatever clauses are added to an emtio venditio, the ownership of traded thing should in general be transferred as soon as possible to the buyer. This means also that if the thing produces some further profits - or indeed, expenses - these belong to the buyer. Like many other details, Wolff notices, the buyer and seller can agree upon some other conditions, such that the profits should still belong the seller for a certain time.

One should only buy things from their owner. Yet, Wolff adds, the buyer cannot always know for sure whether the seller is the true owner and then she just has to assume the seller is. If then it is revealed afterwards that the owner knew nothing about this, she has a right to start eviction, that is, remove the thing from its possessor (i.e. the supposed buyer). In this case, the seller is obligated to pay for the buyer any expenses caused by eviction

A form of emtio venditio Wolff picks for a special consideration is what he calls locatio conductio, where what is sold is either work or use of a thing - in effect, concept of locatio conductio combines both work relations and rents. The seller in locatio conductio is called locator, while the buyer is called conductor. As soon as this type of contract has been agreed upon, the locator is obligated to provide the conductor with the work or the use of a thing. Similarly, conductor is obligated to pay for these, even if she later decided that she did not need the work or the use.

Just like with emtio venditio in general, there are certain rules governing what the locator and the conductor can do. For instance, no unlawful work (thefts, murders etc.) can be sold or bought. Furthermore, if the contract sets some restrictions on ways how the thing in question can be used, the conductor cannot break them. Then again, if if the conductor is not using a thing, locator cannot sell its use to another conductor without getting a permission from the first conductor.

Usually it is the owner who has the sole right of selling the use of a thing. An important exception is that the conductor or the buyer of this period of use can sell this use again. Similarly, if conductor has bought a period of work from locator, she can sell this work to a new conductor. This right of further locato conductio, or as Wolff calls it, sublocatio, is inherent in the notion of locatio conductio: if locator wants to forbid such a further sale of the use of thing or the work, conductor can then renounce the whole contract.

In case of locatio conductio involving use of a thing, locator is obligated to provide the conductor with a thing that is suited to the use it is contracted for. If locator is unable to do this, the contract becomes invalid: for instance, if locator has rented a house and because of repairs the conductor cannot live there, the contract falls apart. Conductor, on the other hand, is obligated to return the thing back to locator without any damages, except such as can be expected from normal wear and tear.

A rather peculiar form of locatio conductio is socida. In this case, the locatio conductio concerns use of cattle. Socida gives the conductor a right to use a herd of cattle with one prevision - if one of the herd dies, conductor should replace it. Thus, the herd, as it were, is indestructible, or as the colourful expression says it, made out of iron.

Wolff ends the book with discussion of two very special questions, societas and usuram. By societas he means a contract between two or more people that they will combine their capitals and work together for a common goal, dividing share in potential rewards and damages. The closest equivalent to modern terms would be company, except that Wolff’s societas is founded only for a definite project and for a limited period of time, although its existence can then be continued by mutual consent. Wolff goes into great detail discussing how profits or losses are to be divided fairly, what conditions regulate a person leaving societas and other similar things we cannot enter here.

The notion of usuram is closely connected to that of mutuum in that both involve a loan of a thing, which is consumed when used, such as money. The only difference is that in mutuum the person taking the loan needs just return what was loaned, but in case of usuram, she has to pay something additional for the use of the thing. In effect, then, usuram is simply a loan with usury or interest.

While we usually think of loans with compound interest, Wolff’s primary example of usuram is a loan where interest is paid just on the loaned sum. He does admit the possibility of interest paid on interest, and furthermore, interest paid on that interest etc., but this is something he considers only in passing.

Wolff’s general opinion is that asking for interest should generally be allowed. Indeed, in a sense he thinks that interest is the norm and loan without an interest is partially a donation. Then again, he wants very strict regulations on when interest can be asked for: this should be allowed, he says, only when the loan is used for a profitable business venture. Then again, if loan is used only for providing for the necessities of life, interest should not be demanded.