SAE Laughter · II: This Judgment Is Mine
SAE 笑论·二：这一判是我的
At 12DD laughter is a tendency; at 13DD it becomes a judgment. This paper sets out what that shift brings. 13DD is where the subject is; its execution of negation is reflexive, able to negate its own negation. With this, laughter for the first time has an owner: this judgment is mine.
One clarification first: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes. Whether the construct is afterwards kept as it was, revised or abandoned is for the subject to judge separately; reflexive negation is a further act of the subject, which may come before the laugh, after it, or along with it, but is not in that laugh.
The paper discusses four kinds of laughter that newly appear at this layer. Self-mockery is publicly pointing out the remainder of one's own construct; it has the same object as another 13DD relation to oneself, punitive self-judgment, but the opposite focus. Contagious laughter is seeing that one has not seen: others' laughter is taken as a clue that they have already seen a remainder, and what I laugh at is my standing on the side of not having seen; the clue may be wrong. Laughter on a misjudgment is still cannot-not, and at 13DD its judgment can be retracted after the fact; being correctable does not mean it is corrected every time, nor that the laugh was justified. Onlooker's laughter is seeing another trapped in a construct without comparing oneself with him, and Kant's example of the Indian is its touchstone; the laughter of suddenness within one person is illustrated by a pun.
The contrasts take up Socratic irony, Schopenhauer on irony, Kierkegaard on irony as negativity, and Bergson's "something mechanical encrusted on the living." This paper parts from all of them at the same point: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes, nor does it make negation its business.
Keywords: 13DD, subject, reflexive negation, self-mockery, contagious laughter, laughter on a misjudgment, onlooker's laughter, Socratic irony, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard
1. From Tendency to Judgment: Reflexive Negation
1.1 What 13DD Is
SAE Psychoanalysis (II) defines 13DD as self-without-purpose: self-awareness has emerged, and the chisel-construct cycle is for the first time seen by itself, but there is no direction yet. The product of its chisel is self-reference, "it is I who am doing these things"; its remainder is its own finitude. On this basis the series locks in the following: the subject is at 13DD, the position that can carry out negation reflexively, able to negate its own negation.
Reflexivity is the key to this layer. SAE starts from "not" (非), and negation runs through every layer; the failure of a prediction at 12DD is also a negation, except that no one knows it is oneself doing the negating. What is different at 13DD is that negation is for the first time taken as one's own, and so can also turn round and negate one's own earlier negation.
1.2 What Laughter Gains
Paper I said that 12DD laughter already has part of the structural material of the Overview's formula, but still lacks an owner to claim it, and lacks the reflexive gap between seeing and not having seen. At 13DD both appear. This change brings laughter four new things:
- The construct can be my own. For the first time the subject knows that a certain construct is its own, and so can point out its remainder: this is self-mockery (Section 2).
- Not having seen can be my own. The subject can see itself standing on the side of not having seen, and so there is contagious laughter (Section 3).
- A judgment can be retracted. Since one can negate one's own negation, the judgment in laughter on a misjudgment can be corrected after the fact (Section 4).
- Another's construct can be seen as a construct. A reader of the story of marking the boat to find the sword (刻舟求剑) sees the man of Chu trapped in a construct: this is onlooker's laughter (Section 5).
The Overview's seeing grid applies only from this layer on: 12DD has no subject who knows "I have seen" or "I have not seen"; 13DD has one.
1.3 A Preliminary Clarification: Laughter Does Not Decide Whether the Construct Stays or Goes
What is the relation between reflexive negation and laughter? This series answers: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes.
After this laugh the construct may stay as it was, may be revised, or may have been abandoned long before; whether it stays or goes is for the subject to judge separately, and is not settled by this laugh. Reflexive negation can negate the validity of a construct, including my own earlier reading. It can happen before the laugh, as when one mocks oneself over a plan long since abandoned; after the laugh, as when a laugh on a misjudgment is later retracted; or along with the laugh, as in "I actually thought that, just now." But what laughter judges is not this negation. All that laughter judges is: this construct is in view now, and it still has such a remainder.
This is also where this series draws its line against Hurley et al. On a provisional comparison based on existing summaries of their work, they tie laughter to whether a belief stays or goes: the belief is detected and cleared out, and a reward is given. In this series laughter is tied not to staying or going but only to the remainder. The line falls not at whether the construct topples, but at where laughter lands. This runs through the sections that follow, and matters most in the section on self-mockery.
2. Self-Mockery: Publicly Pointing Out the Remainder of One's Own Construct
2.1 Structure
In self-mockery the construct is one's own: a plan of one's own, an image of oneself, a whole understanding of one's situation. The self-mocker sees that this construct still has such a remainder, and points it out publicly. The plan may still be in place or may have been abandoned long ago; that has nothing to do with this laugh (1.3). So self-mockery is not self-negation but self-pointing-out.
Diogenes Laertius, in Lives of Eminent Philosophers II.36, records a saying of Socrates for which there is a documented source: Xanthippe first scolded him and then threw water over him, and Socrates said: did I not say that after Xanthippe's thunder would come rain? The text records only the remark, not any laughter; what this paper takes from it is the structure of self-mockery. His composure is the construct, being drenched is the remainder, and both are in view at once; he put the remainder into words.
2.2 Self-Mockery as Teasing
A more widely circulated line is also reportedly Socrates': marry a good wife and you will be happy; marry a bad one and you will become a philosopher. No reliable original source for it has been verified; this paper takes only its structure. Socrates laughs at his own construct, but the remainder he points to also lies in the listener's construct: "a good life comes from good circumstances," and setbacks are mere losses. That difficulty and setback give rise to thought is exactly the point this construct has not gathered in.
Pointing with oneself as the target has two advantages. First, the only one put on display is himself; the listener need not first become the one laughed at. Second, the lesson is not spelled out: "difficulty gives rise to thought," stated outright, would become instruction; he merely laughs at himself, and the listener has the chance to understand on his own. This is one way in which teasing comes close to cultivation (Paper III).
But this is only a possibility, not a guarantee. A teacher who says before the class "even a dimwit like me has got it" makes himself the target, yet may still drive some student who has not yet got it into embarrassment. Self-mockery makes room for the listener; whether the room is really left depends on whether the other is free not to laugh, and free to disagree, without being penalized.
2.3 Self-Mockery and Self-Judgment
SAE Psychoanalysis (III) places punitive self-directed guilt in the 13DD swamp: "I am not good enough," "everything I do is wrong"; the subject is present, but judges itself without direction. Self-mockery has the same object, one's own construct, but the opposite focus. Self-judgment focuses on the construct, and the construct's failure is chewed over again and again; self-mockery focuses on the remainder, the construct's failure is seen as a remainder, and so one can laugh.
This gives 13DD laughter no small place. Psychoanalysis II says that self-awareness can become a swamp of self-awareness: the more one observes, the more anxious one becomes. Self-mockery is another outlet for the same self-observation: not leaving the swamp by gaining a direction (that is the business of 14DD), but seeing the failure of one's own construct as a remainder, so that no one loses. It does not solve the problem of direction, but it may loosen repeated self-punishment for a time; what one's relation to oneself is after this laugh must still be looked at separately.
3. Contagious Laughter: Seeing That One Has Not Seen
3.1 Structure
A roomful of people bursts out laughing; someone who has just come in, not yet knowing what they are laughing at, laughs along. In the Overview's seeing grid this is the cell "the other sees, I do not." Laughter is contagious: others' laughter is taken by the hearer as a clue that they have already seen some remainder; if one has not yet made it out oneself, one also finds oneself funny.
What is being laughed at here? The construct laughed at is my own present understanding, and it has a remainder: the thing the others have seen, which I have not yet seen. What I see is precisely that I stand on the side of not having seen. The original point of the laughter and the reflexive object here are not the same: the others laugh at some r; I laugh at "I have not seen r." This requires 13DD reflexivity: the subject must be able to take its own not-seeing as an object. An infant laughing along with adults may be a case of contagion, but this is still only 12DD tendency, because the infant cannot see its own "not having seen."
3.2 The Clue May Be Wrong
Another's laughter is a fallible clue; it cannot by itself certify what he has seen. By the Overview's inner–outer grid, outward laughter can be empty: polite laughter, and laughter in conversation that merely accommodates, have the expression without the judgment. So when I take others' laughter to mean "they have seen something," that is an inference. If the inference is wrong, the "my not having seen" that I am laughing at may have had nothing there to be seen.
Canned laughter has to be handled by its conditions. A laugh track may have recorded real laughter, or may be merely dubbed in; knowing that it is a recording does not automatically rule out taking it as a clue that others once saw something. Only if a viewer mistakes dubbed-in sound, behind which there is no corresponding judgment, for the reaction of others who saw and judged the same remainder, and this mistake enters his own laugh, is it a laugh on a misjudgment. What exactly was mistaken must be made clear: whether anyone was there, whether they really laughed, whether what they saw was this very remainder. This route shows precisely that there is judgment in contagious laughter: if it were mere imitation of a sound, there would be nothing to be fooled about.
3.3 "What Are You Laughing At?"
The most natural thing for someone who has caught the laughter to say is "What are you laughing at?" The question links contagious laughter to the Overview's seventh thesis: what laughter expects of others is openness to being questioned. Under the way of submitting to questioning that this series advocates, he takes the others' laughter seriously while standing ready to be told: either they tell him what they saw, and he judges again; or they tell him it was really nothing, and he retracts the judgment of the laugh he has just laughed. The latter case is exactly the correction that Section 4 takes up.
3.4 Another Layer in Why Crowds Laugh More Readily
The Overview says that a group hearing a joke laughs more readily than one person alone, and one candidate explanation is that "whom one is laughing at" is sometimes multi-layered: the construct of the person in the joke, my own construct, and the construct we share. Contagious laughter adds another layer: in a crowd I may not only see together with everyone, but may first see that I have not seen. Both layers are judgments and both are within scope; only the part that laughs along without judgment, just because it hears laughter, falls among the exclusions.
4. Laughter on a Misjudgment, and Correction
4.1 A Wrong Judgment Is Still Cannot-Not
The Overview, Section 5, says that judgment and inner laughter are two sides of one event: once the judgment is made, the laughter follows irresistibly; even when one has judged wrongly, it is still cannot-not. Here is a hypothetical: someone who has believed a rumor takes an action of another's as absurd and laughs; later he learns the facts were otherwise, and the action had a different reason. The laugh has already happened, but the judgment was wrong.
Misjudgments have several sources. First, the remainder laughed at is invented: in a joke that runs on a stereotype, the construct has been slipped in by the teller himself, and the group laughed at does not have that remainder. Second, the clue is wrong: the canned laughter of Section 3. Third, the reading of the construct is wrong: the person in the joke did not in fact have the expectation you assumed. In all three cases the laughter arises just the same, so laughter cannot be used to prove that one has judged correctly.
"That isn't funny" is therefore an objection with content. Often it is saying: that remainder does not exist, or the construct being laughed at is one you fitted onto someone else. That people argue over whether a joke is funny is itself a sign that laughter belongs to judgment.
4.2 13DD Can Retract Its Own Laughter
At 12DD tendency admits of no misjudgment, as Paper I has explained. At 13DD the subject can negate its own negation, and so can retract the judgment of the laugh it has just laughed: "I misread that just now; it isn't funny." Retraction is the business of reflexive negation, not of that laugh (1.3).
Two overstatements must be guarded against here. First, being able to correct is not the same as always correcting: many laughs on a misjudgment are never retracted. Second, being able to correct does not mean that the laugh was thereby justified: a laugh can be both a real laugh and a wrong judgment. What reflexivity provides is the possibility of correction, not a guarantee for the laughter.
4.3 Retraction and Embarrassment
When a laugh on a misjudgment is retracted, embarrassment often comes with it. This fits the distinction of focus in the Overview, Section 3: at this moment attention has turned back to one's own construct (my reading of a moment ago), and to its failure, so one no longer laughs but feels embarrassed or apologetic. If at this moment one can see one's own misjudgment too as a remainder and focus on it, one laughs at oneself, and this brings us back to the self-mockery of Section 2: "I actually thought that, just now." The same retraction can land on embarrassment or on self-mockery; the difference, again, lies in where attention lands.
5. Onlooker's Laughter and Suddenness Within One Person
5.1 Onlooker's Laughter
The Lüshi Chunqiu (吕氏春秋), in the chapter "Chajin" (察今, "Examining the Present"), tells this: "A man of Chu was crossing the river when his sword fell from the boat into the water. At once he carved a mark on the boat, saying, 'This is where my sword fell.' When the boat stopped, he went into the water from the place he had marked to look for it. The boat had moved on, but the sword had not (舟已行矣，而剑不行)." The man of Chu's construct is to locate the sword, which did not travel with the boat, by a notch that moves with the boat. This construct still has such a remainder: the boat has moved. The reader sees it; the man of Chu does not. The text does not record anyone laughing; the one who laughs is the reader.
Of the same kind is "covering one's ears to steal a bell" (掩耳盗铃). In the original, the Lüshi Chunqiu chapter "Zizhi" (自知, "Knowing Oneself"), the bell is a zhong (钟), not a ling (铃): a man stole a bell too big to carry on his back and meant to smash it and take it away in pieces; at the first blow the bell rang out, and, afraid that others would hear it and come to take it from him, he hastily covered his own ears. His construct is "if I cannot hear it, no one else can either"; the remainder is other people's ears. Paper I mentions that very young children often cover their own eyes and think they are well hidden (the reading there is disputed, a separate matter); covering one's ears to steal a bell looks like the adult version, and what the reader laughs at is an adult stuck in a child's position. There is also one among the stories of Nasreddin: he lost his key inside the house but went to look for it under the streetlamp, because that was where the light was.
All of these are onlooker's laughter: seeing another trapped in a construct, seeing that construct's remainder, without comparing oneself with him. Kant's example of the Indian is its touchstone: Kant says outright that we laugh not because we think ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man. If comparison comes in, "I'm certainly cleverer than the man of Chu," then one's own purpose (self-elevation) enters the construct laughed at; that is the comparative laughter of Paper III, what Hobbes gives as the second cause.
Onlooker's laughter requires being able to see another's construct as a construct, that is, to know that the other's way of grasping differs from mine. This is adjacent to the capacity that, according to Paper I, the judgment in sly laughter requires, but goes a step further. The judgment in sly laughter requires representing the other's present not-knowing as the state of another subject (Paper I, 4.2); to look on at the man marking the boat to find his sword, one must see that his grasp is wrong, and that requires understanding false belief, which comes at around four years of age (Wellman, Cross and Watson 2001), within the 13DD window of Education as Subject-Condition. This paper places onlooker's laughter at 13DD, as a candidate.
5.2 Suddenness Within One Person
A folk saying, passed around without punctuation: 下雨天留客天留我不留. Reading one: 下雨天，留客天，留我不？留！ ("A rainy day, a day for keeping guests; will you keep me? Keep you I will!"). Reading two: 下雨天留客，天留我不留。 ("The rainy day keeps the guest; heaven keeps you, I do not."). The reader goes along with one parsing, suddenly finds there is another, and laughs.
Here the construct is the reader's own parsing; the remainder is the other parsing. Both readings hold, and "still" reaches the layer of validity; no one loses, and no one is harmed. The gap lies within one person and closes in an instant, so it is sudden: the one who had not seen is oneself a moment before.
Told a second time, the same sentence often no longer has this gap, because the remainder has already been seen; whether it is really gone must be checked case by case. Yet an old joke between old friends still draws laughter. This is the core pressure case registered in the Overview, and its two candidate explanations (laughing at the construct of outsiders, who still have not seen; stepping back into the self that had not yet seen) are only candidates, not presumed exhaustive. This paper does not answer it here.
This is also the shared example the Overview chose for its comparison with Hurley et al. How their framework would handle it, this paper does not answer on the book's behalf: what gets revised may be the premature commitment "there is only this one reading," or it may be something else. On this series' side, both parsings are in view, and laughter does not decide whether either one stays or goes. Which is right must wait to be settled until the original has been read.
6. Contrasts: Socratic Irony, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Bergson
6.1 Socratic Irony
In the dialogues Socrates professes ignorance and only asks questions, letting the other walk step by step into his own perplexity. In this series' seeing grid this is a sustained "I see, the other does not": Socrates has seen the remainder of the other's construct, but does not spell it out; he lets the other walk there himself. It has two components, belonging to two papers. One is the posture of self-mockery: "I know nothing," setting himself out in plain view (Section 2 of this paper). The other is holding back and pointing by asking: this is already doing things with laughter, and belongs with the sly laughter and teasing discussed in Paper III. Whether irony can become cultivation must be tested passage by passage: if the other has no room to disagree, holding back can also become oppression.
6.2 Schopenhauer on Irony
Schopenhauer discusses irony in The World as Will and Representation, volume II, chapter 8: irony is jest hidden behind seriousness, beginning in seriousness and ending in a smile; and the example he names is precisely Socrates' attitude toward Hippias and others, feigning agreement with the other until the outcome leaves the other himself perplexed. This description already captures the temporal structure of irony: a sustained interval whose end point lies with the other. This series' disagreement with him is still the one point of the Overview, Section 2: in his framework laughter is the outcome of a contest in which intuition prevails over the concept; in this series laughter does not judge victory or defeat, and the end point of irony need not be the defeat of the other's construct; it may also be that the other sees the remainder for himself, and he and Socrates each laugh.
6.3 Kierkegaard on Irony as Negativity
In The Concept of Irony (1841), Kierkegaard characterizes Socratic irony as infinite absolute negativity. This paper cites this from memory; the original is to be verified. If so, irony comes very close to 13DD reflexive negation: both are a negation in no hurry to posit anything.
The disagreement is not over whether the construct is still there. Irony suspends the existing constructs, and suspension does not mean that these constructs are no longer in view or no longer intelligible, so on this point irony is not directly opposed to this series' "still." The disagreement is that irony's negativity is an attitude toward constructs, one that makes negation its business; laughter in this series does not decide whether the construct stays or goes, and so does not make negation its business. Hence this paper can draw on Kierkegaard to show the force of reflexive negation, but cannot draw on him to account for laughter.
6.4 Bergson
In Laughter (1900), Bergson says that the laughable is something mechanical encrusted on the living. His typical example is a person acting out an old habitual movement when the situation has already changed. By the layering in the Overview, 2.2, such examples can be read alongside the layer "still in use, no longer valid": the construct goes on operating as usual after the situation has changed. What corresponds is the individual example; this is not to say that Bergson's whole theory is a special case of this series. He also takes laughter to be society's corrective of rigidity; this function the series hands over to Paper III, "doing things with laughter," and does not put into the judgment of laughter itself.
7. Connections and Contrasts
| Point in this paper | Connection (within SAE) | Contrast (external) |
|---|---|---|
| The subject is at 13DD; its negation is reflexive | SAE Psychoanalysis (II): 13DD as self-without-purpose, self-reference; this series' terminology lock | Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (to be verified) |
| Laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes | Overview, Section 2: "still" and "no one loses" | Hurley et al. (original not yet read) |
| Self-mockery: self-pointing-out | Overview, Section 2 | Diogenes Laertius II.36 (records only the remark) |
| Self-mockery and self-judgment have opposite focus | SAE Psychoanalysis (III): punitive self-directed guilt as the 13DD swamp; SAE Psychoanalysis (II): the swamp of self-awareness | — |
| Contagious laughter and openness to being questioned | Overview, Sections 4 and 7 | Provine (conversational laughter; checked secondhand only) |
| The judgment in laughter on a misjudgment can be retracted; the retraction is not in the laugh | Overview, Section 5: "a wrong judgment is still cannot-not" | — |
| Onlooker's laughter needs no comparison | Overview, 4.5; the 13DD window of Education as Subject-Condition | Kant §54, the example of the Indian; Lüshi Chunqiu, "Chajin" and "Zizhi" |
| Irony and the mechanical | Paper III, "doing things with laughter" | Schopenhauer, vol. II, ch. 8; Bergson, Laughter |
8. Remainders of This Paper
- The layer of onlooker's laughter: candidate 13DD; the age of false-belief understanding, per a meta-analysis, falls within the 13DD window; individual cases are still recorded by the laugher's standing at that moment.
- Kierkegaard: cited from memory; the original must be checked.
- Irony and cultivation: whether Socratic irony is cultivation must be tested passage by passage; the name of irony cannot guarantee it.
- Old jokes: the gap within one person is often gone the second time; old jokes between old friends remain the Overview's core pressure case.
- Hurley et al.: the comparison on the shared pun example must wait until the original has been read.
- Self-mockery and self-punishment: that self-mockery may loosen repeated self-punishment for a time is a statement at the level of phenomena; its relation to the four-cell grid of guilt in Psychoanalysis III must be aligned on the side of the Psychoanalysis series.
Conclusion
At 13DD laughter has an owner: this judgment is mine. The subject can carry out negation reflexively, and so can point out the remainder of its own construct (self-mockery), see its own not-seeing (contagious laughter), retract the judgment of its own laugh on a misjudgment, and see another's construct as a construct (onlooker's laughter). Running through all of these is one and the same point: laughter does not decide whether the construct stays or goes. Retracting, revising and abandoning are all the business of reflexive negation, and are not in that laugh. At the moment of laughter, construct and remainder are both in view. When one's own purpose enters the construct laughed at, laughter has reached 14DD, and that is the business of Paper III.
References
- Han Qin. SAE Laughter · Overview: Judgment and Laughter. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23286244; SAE Laughter · I: Laughter as Tendency. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23287462
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- Kant, I. Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), §54, Remark.
- Schopenhauer, A. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. II, ch. 8. English translation: Haldane & Kemp.
- Kierkegaard, S. Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (The Concept of Irony), 1841. From memory; to be verified.
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- Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book II, §36.
- Lüshi Chunqiu (吕氏春秋), "Chajin" (察今); "Zizhi" (自知).
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- Wellman, H. M., Cross, D. & Watson, J. "Meta-Analysis of Theory-of-Mind Development: The Truth about False Belief." Child Development 72(3), 2001, 655–684. The figure of about 48 months checked against a reprint of the original journal text (p. 663).