in order to learn anything about wit. From other passages, however, one discovers that the same authors attribute to wit essential characteristics of general validity in which they disregard its relation to the comic.
K. Fischer’s characterization of wit which seems to be most satisfactory to this author runs as follows: “Wit is a playful judgment” (p. 51). For an elucidation of this expression we are referred to the analogy: “How æsthetic freedom consists in the playful contemplation of objects” (p. 50). In another place (p. 20) the æsthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we expect nothing from this object—especially no gratification of our serious needs—but that we content ourselves with the pleasure of contemplating the same. In contrast to labor the æsthetic attitude is playful. “It may be that from æsthetic freedom there also results a kind of judgment, freed from the conventional restrictions and rule of conduct, which, in view of its genesis, I will call the playful judgment. This conception contains the first condition and possibly the entire formula for the solution of our problem. ‘Freedom begets wit and wit begets freedom,’ says Jean Paul. Wit is nothing but a free play of ideas” (p. 24).
Since time immemorial a favorite definition
