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? Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
The Grammars o f Self-Reflection and Temporality as the Limits o f Language in Finnegans Wake, Philosophical Investigations, and Cognitive Science
A thesis presented by
Brett Ryan Bourbon
to
The Department o f English and American Literature and Language
in partial fulfillment o f the requirements for the degree of
Doctor o f Philosophy
in the subject of
English and American Literature and Language
Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts July, 1996
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? UMI Number: 9710397
Copyright 1996 by Bourbon, Brett Ryan
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? (C) 1996 BY BRETT RYAN BOURBON All rights reserved.
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? Abstract: Constructing a Replacement for the Soul: The Grammars of Self- Reflection and Temporality as the Limits of Language in Finnegans Wake, Philosophical Investigations, and Cognitive Science
In my dissertation I explore how literary art can function as a kind o f cognitive philosophy. I begin with the proposition that Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds they spawn, attempt to articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to blow our heads off. This possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Wittgenstein'sPhilosophicalInvestigations, and my own description of a hypothetical machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within which it figures itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as describing an aesthetic. Both texts do not articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein called our "forms of life," our attunement within our language, culture, history, psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for human beings to inhabit this 'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In writing towards and at the limits of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our species-being, and it this speaking enact the particularity of meaning instantiated through my particular involvement in language. Both Investigations and the Wake explore the limits o f what it means to be human by examining how linguistic meaning works throughtheinteractionsbetweensenseandnonsense. Ianalyzehowtheshiftingbetween language games, between sense and nonsense described and enacted within Finnegans WakeandPhilosophicalInvestigationsarticulatesamultivalenttemporalsense. I investigate the ways in which the limits between sense and nonsense construct a grammar of temporality that is simultaneously a literary aesthetic and a theory of mind. Time becomes a grammatical effect. The theoretical machine I have designed pressures the
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? interpretative limit between the animate and the inanimate and between sense and nonsense toward the ontological limits described by causal languages. My dissertation is an attempt to describe the ways in which such grammars determine what counts as human.
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? TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abbreviations, i
Etymologies, ii
A Note on the Interpretation o f Finnegans Wake, iii
1. I.
INTRODUCTION: Constructing a Replacement for the Soul, 1
FRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKING 2. From Soul-making to Person-making, 21
2. 1 Personalidentityandimpersonalsalvation, 29
2. 2 "timeliquescingintostate,pitilessagegrowsangelhood", 38
2. 3 Spiralingfrominterpretationtocause, 55
3. RomanticFragmentsandModernistMachines, 62 4. Keats' Version of Finnegans Wake, 103
5. The Distance between the Soul and the Mind, 113 6. TheWakeanGrammarof'Between', 167
H. THE SEMANTICS OF IDENTITY AND THINGS (Eliot's The Waste Land and Heidegger's 'Das Ding')
m .
7. Semantics of Identity and Mind, 213 8. (How) Can things mean? , 249
8. 1 Matter, 258
8. 2 What is a thing? : Functionalism, 269
8. 3 A Thing is a Temporal Condensate o f a Semantic Chain, 275
8. 4 The Ontological-Semantics of 'weilen', 280
8. 5 TeXevTTjteatevreXexeia(etverbumtemporalenomini), 296
8. 6 Animamundiseuorbis, 319
9. 'Weileri* in The WasteLand, 328 9. 1. Thunder-talk, 328
9. 2 On the road to objecthood, 348
9. 3 The visibility of the subjunctive, 383
THE SEXUAL ONTOLOGY OF THE PSYCHE
(Finnegans Wake)
10. The Sexual Ontology of the Psyche, 399
10. 1 Conversation with God and Self, 399
10. 2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues", 413
10. 3 "RenovetheBible":thelogicofcreationinGenesis, 424 10. 4 AnnaLiviaPlurabelle, 436
10. 5 Masculinetautology, 448
10. 6 Thelimitsofwhy, 453
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? IV. WITTGENSTEINIANTIME
(Philosophical Investigations)
11. The Ontology of Time, 460
11. 1Knowingtime, 465
11. 2 Inhabiting time, 477
12. The 'I* in the Nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations, 493
13. GrammaticalTime, 532
13. 1 Physiognomyofasoul, 532
13. 2 Understanding, or not, how not to go on, 540
13. 3 The theology o f sentences, 556
V. MACHINE TIME: THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING A FUTURE
14. Machine Time, 571
14. 1. Constructing a Time Machine (the Self-Inductor) Limit between Cause and Grammar, 571
at the
14. 2 Time-machinelinguist, 577
14. 3 Generating the present from language, 580
14. 4 A wink in time means two, 588
14. 5 "Be! Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces! ", 589
14. 6 The logic o f short-term prediction, 592
14. 7 The continuous future: hearing of and speaking in the new
worldorder, 594
14. 8 Another blueprint o f time, 596
14. 9 Mental imperialism: to make the world as mind, 596
14. 10 Time and the other, 597
14. 11 Looking for Mr. Goodmachine, 600
14. 12 Meta-temporal identities: the modeling o f others as syntax,
601
14. 13 Negative entropy, 605
14. 14 Re-building ourselves in the other, 606
14. 15 The pursuit o f death, 608
14. 16 Learning from the future, 609
14. 17 Inside a Chinese box, 610
14. 18 The I as the not-I: Using the future to build other machines,
611
15. EPILOGUE: But what have I denied the existence of? , 614 Bibliography, 616
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? Abbreviations
All references to Finnegans Wake (abbreviated FW) in the following dissertation are identifiedparentheticallybypageandlinenumber. AllreferencestoPhilosophical Investigation (abbreviated PI) are identified parenthetically by section number or where appropriatebypagenumber. Otherworksfrequentlycitedareidentifiedparenthetically by the following abbreviations:
CPE BT
DD
NS
BB
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co. , 1952.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (NY: Harper and Row, 1962); Sein und Zeit.
(Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993) Where relevant references are identified by the page number in the English translation, followed by the page number in the original German.
. "The Thing". In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. NY: Harper, 1971; Vortrage undAufsatze.
Stuggart: Gunther Neske, 1954. 1will refer to the German throughout, and in specific cases will identify the German text as "Das Ding".
Vico, Giambattista. The New Science o f Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. References will be to paragraph number and not page number.
Wittgenstein,Ludwig. TheBlueandBrownBooks. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1952.
CV_________ _________________ . Culture and Value. Ed. G. H. Von Wright with Heikki Nyman. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
PG
TLP
_________________ . Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. Anthony Kenny. Berkeley: U o f California P, 1974.
_. "Philosophy" (Big Transcript) In Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951. Ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann. Indianapolis:
Hackett, Pub, 1993.
. TractatusLogico-Philosophicus. Trans. C. K. Ogden. NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.
References will be to
section number.
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? Etymologies
The etymologies I use to interpret Finnegans Wake and to describe aspects of our philosophical grammar were developed through consulting the following works:
Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. Trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables, Fla. : U ofMiami P, 1973.
Buck, Carl Darling. A Dictionary o fSelected Synonyms in the Principle Indo- European Languages. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949.
Gransaignes dHauterive, R. Dictionnaire des racines des longues europeennes. Paris: Larousse, 1949.
Liddell, H. G. and R. Scott. Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1871. Onians, R. B. The Origin o fEuropean Thought about the Body, the Mind, the
Soul, the World, Time, andFate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1951. Onions, C. T. et al. The OxfordDictionary o fEnglish Etymology. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1966.
Oxford English Dictionary. Compact Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.
Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary o f the English Language. NY: Macmillan, 1959.
Pokomy, Julius. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch. Bern, 1959. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. NY: Oxford UP, 1983.
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? A Note on the Interpretation ofFinnegans Wake
In my interpretations ofFinnegans Wake I have drawn on number of standard resources. These resources will not always be cited specifically within the text when the information is o f a general nature:
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study o fLiterary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1974.
AdalineGlasheen. ThirdCensuso/"FinnegansWake:AnIndexoftheCharacters and Their Roles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Helmut Bonheim. A Lexicon o f the German in Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967.
Clive Hart. "Index of Motifs," in Structure cmdM otifin Finnegans Wake. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1962, p. 211-47.
Roland McHugh. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1980.
Louis O. Mink. A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. Brendan 0 Hehir. A Gaelic Lexiconfor Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U of
CaliforniaP, 1967.
Brendan O Hehir and John M. Dillon. A Classical Lexiconfo r Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
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? 1
Introduction: ConstructingaReplacementfortheSoul
In the following dissertation I explore how literary art can function as a kind of cognitive philosophy. I begin with the proposition that Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds they spawn, attempt to articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to blow our heads off. This possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and my own description o f a hypothetical machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within which it figures itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and Wittgenstein'sPhilosophicalInvestigationsasdescribinganaesthetic. Bothtextsdonot articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein calls our
"forms o f life," our attunement, as Stanley Cavell phrases it, within our language, culture, history, psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for human beings to inhabit this 'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In writing towards and at the limits of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our species-being, and in this speaking enact the particularity o f meaning instantiatied through my particular involvement in language. Both
Investigations and the Wake explore the limits ofwhat it means to be human by examining how linguistic meaning works through the interactions between sense and nonsense. Artificial Intelligence programs embody one way of conceptualizing the limit of our humanity, and as such embody an aesthetic, a failed aesthetic whose failure pressures the relation between our inhabitation of time and meaning into a kind of clarity nascent within both Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations. The theoretical machine I design
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1
? at the end o f my dissertation is meant to pressure the interpretive limit between the animate and the inanimate and between sense and nonsense toward the ontological limits described by causal languages. My dissertation is an attempt to describe the ways in which such grammars determine what counts as human.
In describing these grammars I analyze how the shifting between language games, between sense and nonsense, described and enacted within Finnegans Wake and PhilosophicalInvestigationsarticulatesamultivalenttemporalsense. Thelimitsbetween sense and nonsense construct a grammar oftemporality that is simultaneously a literary aestheticandatheoryofmind. Timebecomesagrammaticaleffect. Thisconclusionnot only challenges Heidegger's conception ofthe temporality ofDasein, it also suggests the depth of our misunderstanding about how we function within various holisms (from sentences to language games to our forms of life). In answer to this misunderstanding I attempt to describe how the logic of human temporality and the possibility o f language simultaneously enact each other as systems of symbolization organizing the world and one's relationship to it. In chapters devoted to various ways in which we confuse minds for worlds (theologically, mechanically/ logically, and socially), I describe the ways in which the ontological, or rather the criteria determining what counts as real, collapses into modes of self-reflection. These modes ofself-reflection, the theological, the mechanical, and the social, determine the limits of mind enacted in my three 'texts'. I describe the
grammar o f these modes in order to demonstrate how we construct ourselves through the dynamic interaction o f our everyday and every night uses o f language, and in their generation of our sense of time, of the possibility of a future as an aesthetic.
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? Such an aesthetic cannot entail the abandonment o f the claim truth exerts on our self-descriptionsandsubjectiveexpressions. Wecannottakecareofourselveswithout "truth".
The man who seeks truth becomes a scholar; the man who wishes to act out his subjectivity can become a writer; but what must be done by the man who seeks that which lies between the two? (Robert Musil)
I'm tempted to think Musil is being funny, or at least ironic, when he asserts that a scholar seeks truth. But if we take him seriously, and maybe replace "scholar" with "scientist," the anxiety in which he finds himselfbecomes clear. Roughly, the truth Musil thinks the scholar (or scientist, in my case) seeks is that which can be verified, that which can be found and tested as an objective fact or principle, or if we want to extend Popper's emendationtothispositivistnotionoftruth,thatwhichcanbefalsified. Thistruth
remains independent, at least in its ontological claims, o f meaning, the acting upon or ordering o f the world within a subjective frame, construct, system, etc. Certainly scientific "truth" serves and is used within a whole series of language and ideological games, but its claims about the world, which are never meant to be absolutely true, cannot speak to the significance o f these claims in relation to our desire to justify our lives: in other words,
you can use science to give meaning to life but you cannot be scientific when you do this. The modem individual, the man without qualities, is hamstrung between that which is true but meaningless and that which is meaningful but false. The perception o f this seeming separation is the foundational virus sparking literary modernism. Modernism could not domesticate this anxiety. It remains unresolved, simply because literature and maybe all
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3
? the arts do not have the means to resolve it. One can easily reformulate this anxiety back into any originary moment o f the modem (defined by different disciplines or conceptualizations o f culture) that one thinks important. One o f these, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum betrays the need, opened up by science and materialism, to collapse the world intoourownconsciousnesssuchthatthetruecanremainmeaningful. Thecostofthis attempt is the seductiveness ofmodem skepticism, the generation of a self an identity, a consciousness grounded in our knowing.
A solution to the fear that what is meaningful is not true is to somehow re- conceive ourselves as objects within the purview of science or scholarship, of "truth," and thus to make our attempts at subjective ordering indirectly "true. " Even in this solution, however, meaning apparently has no ontological significance, only survival value. To give meaning or art, as a subset of how we assert our subjective meanings, ontological force, one must construct something that is subjectively meaningful and simultaneously true.
One must build a mind, which is to say that building a mind is a theological exercise. One can indeed conceive of art, as Thomas Mann says in Dr. Faustus, "as mind," both in its attempt to embody truth but also as a result of its own necessary functioning within the possibility o f meaning defined by human subjectivity. Musil, therefore, wants to be a kind of cognitive scientist, or he wants, unbeknownst to himself to think within the domain of inquiry one might call neuro-aesthetics, as much to indicate what it is not as what it exists
between.
Musil finds himselfbetween Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften and
Naturwissenschaften, resisting the drive to reduce the one to the other. Musil's desire to
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? think within a Naturgeisteswissenschaften, secure in its ontological claims without appealing to substance (things) or socio-historical reality, has a history in English. One could make a list and call it a genre, bearing some affinity to G. Steiner's Pythagorean Genre and to Menippean Satire or Frye's Anatomy, and to various attempts to construct a language game, or collection of such games, somewhere between mind and world. These texts, however, articulate the interstices between language games, including their own, and thus unwind themselves into the limit of what counts as human; Thus they examine our formoflifebygeneratingnewforms: TheAnatomyofMelancholy,Browne's
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, Cavendish's Blazing World, Wilkins' Mercury: Swift Messenger, Godwin's Man in the Moone, Vico's New Science, Swift's A Tale o fa Tub,
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Blake's The Four Zoas, Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Poe's tales, Thoreau's Walden, Melville's "Bartleby," the essays ofEmerson and H. James, Finnegans Wake, Meta-fiction, some modem Science Fiction, and Artificial Intelligence programs. The members o f this literary genealogy translate, transform, and negotiate with a comparable (but more central) set o f philosophical texts in order to enter language throughtheseductionof(orresistanceto)metaphysics: BrowneparleyswithDescartes; Cavendish trumps Descartes and Newton; Wilkins translates Leibniz; Vico, Janus-faced, sits beside Spinoza, Sterne sexualizes Locke; Coleridge and Carlyle lie through Kant, Schelling, ei al. , Carroll points at and teases Frege and Freud, and so on. These two strands enter into, and offer themselves as displacements o f the attempt to mediate between the claims of substance (things), of meaning (understanding, justification,
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? knowing, significance, going on, oflife, etc. ), ofthe psyche (the inner/mental, instinct, subjectivity), and o f temporality (objective, scientific, existential, social, developmental, historical). I intervene in these claims through the temptation toward nonsense, or maybe a certain kind o f mind-sickness, resisted, exploited, lanced, and encouraged by Wittgenstein and Joyce (and, for me here, Eliot, Heidegger, Thoreau, Dennett, Cavell, and
B. Johnson).
These literary and philosophical texts can form a complicated 'genre' if they are
understood to ask the question 'Can one construct a philosophy of mind from literary aesthetics? ' This question can seem obvious, a kind oftraditional truism that seems to neednoexplanationasitseemsnottoforAbramswhenhewritesin TheMirrorandthe Lamp that "In any period, the theory of mind and the theory of art tend to be integrally relatedandtoturnuponsimilaranalogues,explicitorsubmerged"(69). Orthisquestion can seem surprising, as if the demands of a theory of mind to attach logic to biology overwhelm the problems of fiction or even the possibilities of meaning. Both the surprise and the ordinariness ofthis question should surprise us. Finnegans Wake and
PhilosophicalInvestigationsenactthissurprise. Theyeachfunctionascomplementary limit cases o f each other in the investigation and enactment o f the limits o f aesthetics as the limits ofmind, and ofthe limits ofmind as the limits ofaesthetics. The relation between mind and art, configured as Abrams shows in similar analogies and metaphors (wax tablet, mirror, lamp, etc. ), exposes how we inhabit our biology and our language. Exploring this inhabitation means describing the limit between sense and nonsense as a formofourbeing(notasonlyananalogyormetaphor). Theanalogiesbetweenmindand
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? art, therefore, should be seen as symptoms and riddles about the problem o f meaning as it constitutes our ontological commitments. The following chapters attempt to listen to and respond to these symptoms and riddles, with the recognition that the ontological status of bothaesthetics(literature)andphilosophiesofmindmustbejustifiedinanewway. The descriptive power o f science and the translations o f these descriptions into technology
challenges the status of the analogies between mind and aesthetics in a way that displaces the implied symmetry o f Abrams' description. The ontological status o f interpretative analogies is not equivalent to the causal relations described in cognitive science.
Geometry infects the mind as well as metaphor. The ciphers organizing the mind run not to circles, but for the moment can stand as two overlapping (? ), congruent(? ), tangent(? ) ellipses, in some metaphoric non-Euclidean geometry, one wrapped around a region whose primary focus is Sense and the other whose primary focus is Nonsense. The region o f nonsense is bounded by Finnegans Wake and the region o f sense by Philosophical Investigations. In each case the ellipse includes at its farthest extreme the locus o f the other ellipse. Sense and nonsense, themselves, should only serve as deictic markers of structures, interpretations, possibilities, actions, and functionings whose form and meaning prove intractable.
The Wake and Investigations operate and articulate a self-reflexive language that resists collapsing the mental into analogies of substance, and yet they both retain an ontological claim on our attention. This is only possible to the degree that these works offer themselves as limits within which the transformation o f nonsense into sense (or the reverse) describes the temporal pressure which pushes understanding a sentence into
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? understanding a life (our own). The limits of language explored in the Wake and Investigations, therefore, mediate the relation between how to go on in life, the justification we ordinarily call the meaning o f life, but maybe the sense o f life that prevents us from pressuring our answers too seriously, and how to go on with words, how to go on reading, talking, listening, understanding. The description o f how words mean within particular language games determines the kinds of claims we can make when we use these words. Weleamhowtoapplythesewordstoourcommitments.
Finnegans Wake dissolves sense into the temporality of being. Sense, as a (or the) form o f consciousness, remains, but under the ontological dominance o f temporal change and our, as Joyce calls it, "infrarational senses. " Wittgenstein, in Investigations, dissolves temporality into sense. The aesthetics and logics ofthe repressed or disguised terms, sense in the Wake and temporality in Investigations, build different forms of unconsciousness within these texts, complementary but polarized forms o f mind and worlds. Wittgenstein pulls his investigation toward the pole of sense, articulating the logic o f language games as a way o f restricting nonsense, but not as a way o f denying nonsense anddoubt,butratherasawayofmoderatingtheseundertheaspectofsense. Conversely,
Finnegans Wake delimits sense by stretching its language into nonsense. The Wake approaches what Barbara Johnson calls poetry, "the repository o f knowledge about the resistance o f language to intentional dissolution. And 'absolute randomness' is the outer limit of that resistance" (7). Wittgenstein assumes that philosophy investigates the grammar o f 'is' and Joyce assumes that literature investigates the grammar o f 'mean[ing]\ The limit of resistance that Johnson describes, however, not only configures that
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? randomness as meaningful (as resistance), but undoes meaning or identity or the world as mine or yours or ours. The loss ofintentionality, the aboutness of our language, our involvement in a world as our world, means the dissolution o f the interpretative functions of consciousness. The randomness of "intentional dissolution" is not necessarily the randomness o f a chaotic world, the failure o f cause and effect. It may mean this or it may not. We may simply be asleep or have suffered brain damage or have returned to some earlier stage o f primate evolution or have died. Interpretation might make causal explanations visible and possible, but it does not constitute the world into a proximate causal order.
If this outer limit is the inhuman, the transcendent point toward which skepticism drives, then our machines seem to offer transport beyond the phenomenal limits of our knowing. De Man, Cavell, and Lacan all say as much. Technology would serve as a symptom through which we discover that the brain is the seat of intelligence and not the heart. Machines, and the formalisms animating them, reform our analogies within an increasingly more grounded ontological faith: our analogies gain power not through our
belief, but through their greater intimacy with the substance (means) through which we act. Artificial Intelligence programs, in this sense, and more in their potential than actuality, read us, and not we them, as the limit o f the inhuman, a limit through which we re-interpret ourselves, constructing fundamental othemess as particular philosophical- aesthetics. This is the way to proceed toward a link between meaning and mind through doubting and belief: "His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving" (FW 468. 15-16).