These rules of
transformation
are directed at the facts describing the
world.
world.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
" This point of embodiment represents the end o f literature.
It is in this sense that Finnegans Wake also points toward the more fully embodied aesthetic o f what Artificial Intelligence promises.
We should at least ask what kind ofliterature can withstand the leverage exerted by a materialism so thoroughgoing as to dissolve the soul, or what might be left of our belief in
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immaterial essence, and then remain aesthetic, protecting what we understand as the "immateriality" of meaning, of our minds, and ofour attachments?
We might not recognize Finnegans Wake as art; we might not know what it is or does. In many ways it is not a work o f art, but rather a text which requires one to create orgenerateanaestheticthroughwhichandinwhichitwillberecognizedandfunction. It re-enacts not our everyday experience, nor the ordinariness o f our being awake, but the everynight experience and the ordinariness of our being asleep. It is literally a mind in a vat in which the controls organizing the coherency of its input have failed and exposed the mind's mediated relation to the world, to that which controls this input (a demon, a god, ourselves? ).
The unit o f coherence in the Wake should be defined not as a sentence as such, but as a statement which simultaneously functions as a locally relevant sentence and an illustrative(? )orinterpretative(? )recapitulationoftheWakeitself. Inotherwords,the nonsense ofthe words gains meaning not as language about anything other than
themselves as a continual form of self-justification. The Wake rewrites knowledge claims as value claims in order to construct being or a selfor a text as an axiological matrix that can function with ontological force.
An artificial intelligence program is, even if it fails, a form o f art in the way that FinnegansWakeisaformofart. Ifeachattemptstorepresentandembody(tobecome)a formofmind,thentheyeachalsofunctionasakindofmetaphysicsortheology. Artificial Intelligence, as embodied theology, attempts to construct whatever used to be called spirit within the mechanical logic of scientific materialism and mathematics. This is at least one
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way o f explicating Vico's definition o f art as that which "does its utmost to give a body to spirit" (Scienza nuovapr. bk. iii, chp 26). AI, therefore, attempts to transform a language into an ontological aesthetic, to give a language ontological force. I f we accept Wittgenstein's caution not to organize our descriptions ofthe mind as ifit were an immaterial body, then the Cartesian mind/body problem is replaced by the problematic relation between soul and being, soul and God, that is more like the theological puzzles concerning the soul that Aquinas considered.
Finnegans Wake attempts to construct a grammar determined by ontological commitmentsthatarenotafunctionofrepresentingthingsandsubstances. TheWake's non-substantive ontological commitments are (an) aesthetic. Thus, articulating the logic, or the demands ofthis aesthetic, constitutes a grammar, or a set of shifting grammars, of an inner mental life-world, invoking our everyday life not only through our night-time experience but as an experiment on and within the sleep-generated fall into skepticism and intermittent idealism.
I do not mean to suggest that we should think in opposition to science in the way that Heidegger attempts in his later work; the demand, instead, is to think through and as a function of the materialism that defines the limit of any ontological claim. We can make differing,butnotopposing,ontologicalclaims. Ifartoffers,asBeckettassertsinMolloy, the "laws ofthe mind", what can we discover about the logic oftheir formation, the significance of their form, their etiology, meaning, continuity, hopefulness, effect if we acceptorconsiderthisoffer? TheselawsarenotmonumentsofamentalHammurabi.
Our brain works without a homunculus operating the levers. The unity of mind that
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allows for a directed and effective response to stimuli, even in animals with rudimentary brains,isafiction,avirtualunity,abiologicalaesthetic. This,ofcourse,pointstoboth some idea o f a priori categories and to the physiological pre-conditions for vision, language, taste, etc. But it also allows one to ask in what way does how we use words depend on how our brain uses words, on how our brains use us using words? From within our biology and our form of life, the functional unity of mind and language, as an aesthetic, exists as a response to the pressures our thinking, consciousness, planning, doubting, making exerts on instinct, desire, physiological needs and so on. We cannot enter into our biology through the portal o f this unity o f mind; but we can respond to it.
Werespondbytyingourselvestoandseparatingourselvesfromthisbiology. Our making ofthe world, ofour perception, out ofwhatever given or set ofcategories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds all sorts o f meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we are. One might sideline this "what we are", or one might answer it, if one could self- reflect outside of knowing. Wittgenstein sets up aesthetic barriers to protect his separation of grammar from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back into our practices and our being (how should one understand the interaction and difference between being
and identity in the Investigations? ). In order to pressure grammatical analysis into the aesthetics of our temporality, I will constructs the limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one of the axes Wittgenstein uses to map our form of life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme
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in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse of words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?
Poetry, in all its complexity, even in its modernist distortion, is not opposed to or leftoutofordinarylanguage. Literaryartarticulatesthedifferentconstituentlevels,the barely conscious aspects present in varying degrees and kinds in our ordinary language. Wittgenstein points to this, although in an unfortunate two-level image, as surface grammar and depth grammar. It is between surface and depth that we create our different kinds o f sense and nonsense. One should speak not o f depth grammar, but o f a complex set o f depth grammars. It is the logic and the aesthetics generated out o f these depth grammars, as they invoke and distort our surface grammar and as they turn about each other, that describes the limits ofwhat counts as a mind. These limits of mind function as symptoms o f an aesthetic prejudice. The shifting between language games, the waxing and waning of our form of life in describing a limit of mind enacts through these changes a
multiplicity o f times. This enactment is the form o f our being within the world. What is the relation of this Wittgensteinian aesthetic (the limits of the human) with the aesthetic animating Finnegans Wake, with the interaction between time and language brought out in
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the failure o f Artificial Intelligence, in general, and the weakness o f Heidegger's construction o f being toward the future and toward a thing?
My dissertation is structured as a kind of dialogue between Finnegans Wake and PhilosophicalInvestigations. In any such exchange the question ofwhat counts as such a dialogue is continually reformulated. I find myselftrying to write in an idiom that allows Finnegans Wake and Investigations to make a kind of mutual sense, with the attending dangeroflosingsensealtogether. Thisdialogueisdirectedatthelogicalformalisms underlying Artificial Intelligence and more specifically at the causal mechanisms I describe inmytheoreticalmachine. Oneofmyconclusionsisthatsuchadialogue,sodirected, describes a theology, that is, the articulation of the semantic limits of our language and mind as ontologically significant. That is to say that in all three o f these texts aesthetics functions with theological import. I read Modernism, and its investigation of our language, as an attempt to construct a self-consuming calculus or machine that will write the world as poetry.
An engagement with these texts cannot take the form o f an argument. Interpretations have no ground: "every interpretation together with what is being interpreted, hangs in the air: the former cannot give the latter any support" (PI ? 198). Interpretations,consequently,requirecontinualjustification. Wecanevaluateboththese
justifications and the ontological efficacy o f the interpretations themselves (experiment in science is one way o f doing this). One must work not only to avoid confusing allegories (and other interpretive apparatus) for causal descriptions, but also to avoid confusing interpretations for meanings. If literature and its study and philosophy are involved in the
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problem o f meaning they should, at least, operate in the confusion between meaning and interpretation.
I imagine the ideal commentary on Finnegans Wake would be to interpret a set of texts as interpretations ofthe Wake, without mentioning or including the Wake. This would be a way o f writing toward Finnegans Wake as a limit, itself. I am not writing such a commentary, but I am attempting to think and write towards and at the limits of language described by Finnegans Wake, Philosophical Investigations, Heidegger's "Das Ding", Eliot's The Waste Land and a number of secondary texts. All of these texts generate ontologies o f fragments, condensations o f time, localized and shifting temporal- series: jug-time in Hiedegger, um-time in Keats, subjunctive-time in Eliot, language-game and philosophical time in Wittgenstein, between-time in Joyce. These fragments o f time describe in various ways models of animation as expressions of the limits between sense and nonsense, mind and world, the animate and the inanimate, and so on.
I will use myselfand a plethora oftexts to speak for other texts, for other people, for myself, and for machines. I am neither speaking in my voice nor letting these texts speakintheirs,norevenventriloquizingwiththesetexts. Icontinuallyaskwhetherany language is mine or whether any text means anything that is more than fantasy. It might seem that I am trying to speak and write as an 'our', as some ill-defined expression o f the humanspecies. Anyofusmightspeakthisway,appealtoourhumanityinthewayan ordinary language philosopher might appeal to his or her language. But such a use of 'our' is as problematic as an 'I' or 'you' or 'he', 'she', and 'it'. I can speak from neither a subjective (except temporally) nor an objective position, but towards and in relation to
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both,adjudicatingtheirclaimsonmeorusoranyone. IfIwritebetweenmyselfandthese texts, then I am trying to figure this 'between' as an inhabitation fit for an 'our' figured in relation to the limits o f sense and being that emerge under the pressure o f thinking.
This thinking has set up a complex pattern o f ocean currents and winds. Theological currents course through interlaving Aristotelian and Pre-Socratic currents. Music and opera move both above and below throughout troubling especially the waters of my discussions of Wittgenstein and The Waste Land. Cognitive science currents swirl around everything as do literary winds and the tides o f analytic philosophy and so on. Reading becomes a way o f sailing.
While operating in this confusion literature and philosophy must acknowledge that while we must write toward (and in relation to) the metaphysics o f science, the ontological limits it describes, they are not sciences. We cannot pretend that their are any binding rulesonthekindofinterpretation(s)artdemands. Interpretationrequirescontinualself- reflection because, in large degree, its claims are unbounded and thus meaningless. We must understand how this nonsense works both in relation to meaning, let's say the use of words within language games and our form(s) of life, and determines what kind of claim it can legitimately make on us.
Meaning embodies ontological claims, at least through the semantics o f 'to be'. J. L. Austin argued in "A Plea for Excuses" that "[wjhen we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or 'meanings' whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use words to talk about: we are using sharpened awareness ofwords to sharpen our perception of, though
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not as final arbiter of, phenomena"(130). Interpretation requires both justification for its claims(thelogicofitsallegory)anditsapplication(itsscope). Thusonecanproducea literary philosophy by investigating the semantics o f 'to be' within the procedures and structures o f self-reflection or self-forgetting that enact the justification o f the limits o f meaning and interpretation.
My initial question, 'Can I construct a mind out o f aesthetics? ,' should be modified, therefore, into something like three questions: How are literary aesthetics implicated as a form ofmind through a description ofthe grammar ofhow temporality (our negotiation between sense and nonsense) is embodied as the logic animating self- reflexive language games? ; how are our ontological commitments enacted, described, and undermined in this grammar? ; and what is the role ofjustification in enacting and determining the limits, interrelation, and confusions between meaning and interpretation?
The construction of a mind within the specific language games leading to Artificial Intelligence programs is an attempt to give art enough ontological force to justify itself withinthelogicofscientificmaterialism. Anontologicaljustificationofartisamind,a principle of animation determining what can function as a form of life. How do we function between meaning and interpretation? Confronting this question requires putting the legitimacy of literature, philosophy, and cognitive science at risk: "Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's own way of seeing things. (And what one
expects ofthem)" (CV16e). 1
1Augustine, in De Trinitate, pursues a language of thought directed, through the Bible, towards God: Search is a striving for discovery, which is the same things as finding; and things found are as it were "brought forth" -w e remember the connection between the Latin words partus and
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repartus--andsocomparablewithanoffspring. Thebringingforthcanonlybeintheknowledge itself,wheretheyare(aswemaysay)shapedandformed. . . Accordinglywemaysaythatthe mind's "bringing forth" is preceded by a kind of striving, by which, in the seeking and finding of what we desire to know, knowledge is bom as an offspring. (IX)
If such a search could not be directed toward God but only toward facts, others, language, and interpretations, what kind o f knowledge would be produced? :
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. rebelled against. them, and so on?
The common behavior o f mankind is the system o f reference by means o f which we interpret an unknown language. (PI? 206)
Anyone can find anyplace, any person, or any text foreign, and on another day, in another mood find this sameplace,person,ortextsoordinaryastodissolveintoobviousness. PhilosophicalInvestigations, Finnegans Wake, and Artificial Intelligence programs all describe ways o f negotiating, mediating, facilitating, and resisting this oscillation between confusion and clarity, between the visibility and transparency o f what Joyce calls the "world, mind".
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I
FRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKING
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From Soul-making to Person-Making
'Is it possible for a machine to think? ' (whether the action o f this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics or possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behavior o f organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that we don't know a machine which
could do the job. The question is not analogous to that which someone might have asked a hundred years ago: 'Can a machine liquefy gas? ' the trouble is rather that the sentence, 'A machine thinks (perceives, wishes)' seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked 'Has the number 3 a color? '. (BB47)
Wittgenstein pictures being human under the aspect of what he calls a form of life, or rather the complex o f language games, activities, history, biology, culture, and so on that constitutes humans as humans: "Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part o f our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing" (PI? 25). In this he imagines our humanness as a semantic function (what it is to be human is what it means to be human) under the ontological aspect ofthe self-limiting totality ofthis humanness as determiningallpossibleactions. Thisisnotaconfusionorhypostatizationofsemantic categories into ontological concepts ofthe kind that Wittgenstein demythologizes (understanding, time, meaning, and so on). It is a theological claim like "We cannot imaginethe'reality'ofGod. " 'Thinking','perceiving',and'wishing'functiononlywithin
Notes for this chapter begin on page 60.
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our form o f life through our participation in, inhabitation within and use o f language (games).
Our problem is not how to identify an intelligent machine. Such an epistemological question might be answered by the behavioristic Turing test, where the ability o f a machine to fool a human into thinking it also is a human would determine the successorfailureoftheprogram. Aconsciousmachine,however,wouldbeamachine which would mistake us as a form of itselfj within its own, and not our, form of life. The question we can ask that can lead us to artificial intelligence, therefore, is "Could a machine o f'kind X' mistake us for a machine o f'kind X'? ", where what it means to be recognized or 'mistaken for' can be established by observation (of machine Xs) as an
interpretation o f their behavior. Calling this machine species 'kind X', labeling it a member of a species is already to picture these machines within our systems of understanding and representation. Attempting to describe such 'kind X' machines generates a kind o f nonsense equivalent to that generated by let's say Aquinas' attempts to prove (and hence describe) God's existence. This kind o f nonsense might seem to be a- something-else-besides-sense:nonsenseastranscendence. Such'descriptions',however, are rational meditations on the relation between our thinking and being and the limit of this thinking and being understood as dependent on that limit.
A meditation on God, on the possibility that interpretation, the demands of intentionality, teleology, and allegory, constitutes the world, can look identical to a meditation on the inanimate, on the possibility that there exists no possibility or that causes (evenifonlyexplanations)constitutethemindasaneffect. Thesetwopossibilities,
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interpretation after the fact in relation to putative final causes and the description o f proximate causes, together describe a machine, the inanimate defined through function (teleology) and functioning (causes: mechanisms), and together describe art, the inanimate definedthroughfunctionandfunctioning. Thispictureofmachinesandartarepicturesof us: our form(s) of mind, our identity, our mind, our being Darwinian machines and human beings, beholden to measures and qualities.
The failure to justify the limits o f interpretation (God) and o f causation (mechanics) can be survived by making and interpreting ourselves toward those limits. But nothing may count as such a making and interpreting. Cognitive philosophy under one aspect, Theology under another, Literature under a third promise this making and interpreting, but such promises must be justified. We have no intelligible language with which to speak about art which does not risk constructing itself as a form o f mind, and, therefore, as a pseudo-mechanism, as nonsense.
If I ask seriously 'Can a machine mistake us . . . ? ' how would I begin to answer that question? If I transmute 'Can I a machine mistake us . . . ? ' into 'How can we make a machine o f "kind X' mistake us for a machine o f "kind X '? ', I would already be pursuing a methodology: we can know what we can make, therefore, we must make what we want to know. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis o f concepts, and science as the use o f these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, while at least a terrifying proposal (and useful as such), allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinction between philosophy
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and science within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine (see chapter 14).
In his essay on "The Influence ofDarwin on Philosophy," Dewey pictures the possibilities o f thought circumscribed by the limits o f being described by evolution:
Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object o f knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate an object of study together with the consequences that then flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, but assumption, lies outside. (311)
Joyce also describes this Darwinian limit:
The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfinade world that you can't believe a word he's written in, not for pie, but one's only owned by natural rejection. Charley, your my darwing! So sing they sequent theassentofman. Tilltheygoroundiftheygoroundagainbeforebreakpartsand all dismissed. (FW252. 24-28)
Thisisapictureofscientificconstraint("putstraitonthespot"). Evolutiondescribesthe relation between the inanimate and the animate through the rules o f scientific epistemology and constructs as part o f this epistemology the rules and possibilities for how any living being is made.
These rules of transformation are directed at the facts describing the
world. Ahistoryabouthowanyonecametobe(atwhateverlevelofcomplexity),despite whatever ideological or axiological assumptions and patterns underlying it, exhibits forms of being whose status must be determined. Thus, it is easier to write a history of a person (whose ontological status is relatively stable), than it is a history o f literature when this is
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not understood as the history o f book, but the history o f meaning figured as both a particular text and functioning and created within or by the general forms of a number of totalities: language, society, ideology, biology and so on. How does one determine the relation between any particular and any whole when the ontological status o f the particular is always at stake? The self-reflection on the ontological status o f the units within any history or grammar is not a species of historiography or science, but a semantics of remaking what counts into what matters, in Joycean terms an 'evoluation', a story of
becomingthatisfundamentallyastoryofevaluation. Butanystory,asastory,willbe meaningless outside of our application of it to an aspect of our world (as a story of recognition). How do we find ourselves in a story? Such an application, however, requires a theory justifying the correlation of a theory (or allegory) with our experience. Darwin's power is partly a function of our necessary involvement within the picture of becoming (both o f what is real and what something is). The controversy surrounding it is alsoafunctionofthisnecessaryinvolvement. Thereisadifferenceinfindingoneselfina story and finding oneselfas a story. How do we find ourselves as a story?
Wittgenstein, by and large, rejected the relevance o f scientific discovery (specifically Darwin's) to the conceptual work of philosophy, the analysis of how we use language and configure ourselves within this usage (the grammar). Wittgenstein's understanding o f philosophical grammar was primarily normative, and thus contingent on particular normative standards, but without a clear picture of how grammars change. Similarly while he recognized, and he himselfwas engaged in, the construction of new language games and new grammars, he did not analyze or describe this process of
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creation. This was partly because the philosophical problems arose when one either operated outside of a coherent grammar (or language game) or when the application of a grammar (a usage or interpretation) was not seen to be nonsense. Wittgenstein's relatively static picture of grammar made it difficult for him to appreciate the philosophical significanceofDarwin. AlthoughIwillnotexaminethissignificanceinanydetailinthis dissertation, the interaction between ontological and identity claims in Darwin opens up the problem of self-reflection in its theological dimension (a dimension which also collapses ontology and identity into grammar).
In Finnegans Wake evolution underlies the process ofbecoming and dissolution, in both its moral and epistemological dimension, that organizes our pictures ofthe night, in the same way that Vico's New Science, the Egyptian Book o f the Dead, Freud's Interpretation o fDreams do. HCE, one of the central 'figures' in Finnegans Wake, is himself"a theory none to rectiline ofthe evoluation ofhuman society and a testament of therocksfromalldeaduntosometheliving"(FW73. 31-33). Evolutionincludesan evaluation, at least an ontological commentary on the dead from which anybody and everybody came: matter has been educated through what we call evolution. Such a commentary is 'ontological' because such a process produces whatever is-real, and the success o f such a production acts as an ontological comment, even judgment. This ontological language, o f course, can only 'say' existence and 'betray' absence or extinction. It is not a 'language' that anyone must understand, but is an education that we all enact and embody.
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Science expresses a negative metaphysical fact: a description o f ontological limits without foundations. Hilary Putnam describes the loss o f foundations attending science:
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whetherwewanttobethereornot,sciencehasputusinaposition o f having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position--and no end to it is in sight -- is that o f having to philosophize without 'foundations'. (24)
If science destroys metaphysical answers and cannot provide substitutes, in what sense is the atomic bomb a 'metaphysical fact'? Science, or rather the enactment of scientific knowing in technology, enacts ontological limits, not within its descriptions of the world, but in the way these descriptions correlate the world in relation to itself. Putnam unconsciously recognizes this metaphysical force when he writes 'whether you want to be there or not," an acknowledgment of ontological limits determining our possibilities, even if not in an absolute sense (an allegory of self-annihilation).
We replace foundations with limits in relation to which we correlate ourselves. We function and exist within systems from which we cannot exit, and these systems determine what counts as animate, conscious and human. The threat that these systems will determine our animation, consciousness and humanity as inanimate, as deterministic fictions, and as inhumane is the great theme ofFinnegans Wake and, after it, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
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The war does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even o f the sort the Germans have engineered, ein V olk ein Fuhrer--it wants a machine o f many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is i t . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness--not a life at all, really. (Gravity's Rainbow, 152)
Technology enacts proximate causes through the process of its function and functioning. Such functioning describes a localized teleology, what Joyce called an "odium teleologicum" (L. odium theologicum) a hatred o f theological teleology (FW264. 04-05). The War might also only look like God. "[0]ur silent passing into the machineries of indifference" (482) means our translation into a fragment within a system defined by its functionandfunctioning. Gravity'sRainbowunderstandsthisseductiontobeadiscovery about how we enter and exit the world: "Whether you believe or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling --a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out ofyour soul, something--for the Rocket" (784). Resistance is hardly the point, although it can seem like all that is left to being human, but even this might be describing a technique (and thus the effort Heidegger puts in re-defining techne). Resisting the "beckoning" of the rocket, Pokier "hunted, as a servo
with a noisy input will, across Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonalsalvation"(473). Thisisnotaproofofanything,butamodemproverb.
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2. 1 Personal identity and impersonal salvation
In an essay saving Hume from the claim that he had separated 'is' from 'ought', Alasdair MacIntyre links "what is good and right" with "what we need and desire", countering the Kantian translation of morality into formalism:
We could give a long list ofthe concepts which can form such bridge notions between "is" and "ought": wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure, happiness, health-- and these are only a few. I think there is a strong case for saying that moral notions are unintelligible apart from concepts such as these (Against the Self-Images o f the Age, 120)
Part ofthe special status ofthe words 'wanting', 'needing', 'desiring', 'pleasure', 'happiness', 'health' is the way they mean, as interpretations of our stances toward the world, others, and ourselves. These interpretations are, then, posited as internal states or somehow constitutive o f who we are.
In "God and the Theologians", MacIntyre describes "a whole group of theologies which have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance" (,Against, 23) He argues that "we have no language to express common needs, hopes, and fears that go beyond the immediacies o f technique and social structure. What we do have is a religiouslanguage,whichsurviveseventhoughwedonotknowwhattosayinit. Sinceit is the only language we have for certain purposes it is not surprising that it cannot be finally discarded. But since we have no answers to give to the questions we ask in i t , it remains continually in need o f reinterpretation, reinterpretation that is always bound to
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fail. . . within theological discourse, as Feurbach and Marx saw, we are bound to remain blind to the human significance of theological discourse" (23). The confused use of theological language to express an atheistic content, as a mask for the failure o f both atheism and religion, has been transplanted into literature both in ideological criticism (in which moral prejudices are disguised) and in versions o f the symbolist faith in 'art for art's sake,'anidentificationofthedeepestinhumanlifewithart. Thisisamasquethat Geoffrey Hill recognizes: "The major caveat which I would enter against a theological view o f literature is that, too often, its is not theology at all, but merely a restatement o f the neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery" ("Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement', 17). What would constitute an adequate theology? Such a question has nothing to do with doing science, but it can only be answered in relation to the ontological limits enacted in science. Artificial Intelligence attempts to work out of the mental, phenomenological, qualitative, and intentional in relation to the requirements o f scientific determinism, the demands of the rationality or logical coherence of the world. Cognitive science investigates the relation between quality and quantity, when quantity describes a common limit between our knowing and the world. I will say nothing about the possible success of such an endeavor. Its form, as I describe it here, however, retains the same structure as the theological picture of the mind as the soul. One can at least say that cognitive science is directed toward the same limit that theology has figured as between humansandGod. Cognitivescienceunderstoodasatheologyofmindisadescendentof what Coleridge called, in Biographia Literaria, a "Genuine Philosophic Poem" (156), a poem that enacts our moral stances as ontological commitments.
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In Finnegans Wake, pursuing a Don Juan scene o f seduction, Juan (a version o f Shem the artist brother) "asking coy one after sloy o n e . . . (and all o f course just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in sprite of fun) for Juan, by the way, was by the
way ofbecoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human being that ever was called man, loving all up and down the whole creation . . . " (FW431. 04;08-12). What kind of education is this? For Juan's fun this pursuit means 'dropping] a few stray remarks" (FW431. 01-02). These fragments promise and seduce and teach "the twentynine hedge daughters . . . learning their antemeridian lessons o f life" (FW430. 03- 04). Fragments seduce the will: Wittgenstein seduces with such fragments; Austin seduces with such details. Any language or language game seduces with fragments (metaphoric possibilities), keeping their application, legitimacy, and ontological status in
the background. Commenting in one o f his manuscripts (part o f which was collected in Culture and Value), Wittgenstein frames the seduction of an object as the conflict between our what we want to see and how we live (the truth enacted in our practices):
Tolstoy: "The significance o f an object lies in its universal intelligibility" . That is partly true, partly false. When an object is significant and important what makes it difficult to understand is not the lack of some special instruction in abstruse matters necessary for its understanding, but the conflict between the right understanding o f the object and what most men want to see. This can make the most obvious things the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will (MS 213, 406-7: CF17)1
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The condition I am following finds that seductions premise new versions o f myself and new limits to my world. If I hear Thoreau ask "Who bolsters you? " (Walden 26), do I answer some seductress or some future or myself, my will, my fictions?
I concern myselfwith what 'making' means and what limits I make myself(or anyone makes themselves) toward: "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places" (Walden 90). This indifference I think is a mistake, and marks such an awakening as another dream. Our awakening involves at a fundamental level not only our recognition of our humanity, but the recognition of humanity(asaparticularkindoflimit). Thoreauimaginesthatthisplaceisalwaysthe same, a sameness guaranteed by our common species-being, and if we imagine this as our form o f life we confuse the content o f our life with the meaning o f its form. This meaning may not be determined solely by who we are or even what we are, but may emerge as meaning only as how we are anything at all.
Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually be executed, Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we axe. (Walden 90)
Both the world and we are constituted in this nextness, what in Finnegans Wake is continually formulated as being between. The double possibility o f meaning through who we are and how we are offers us a fulcrum on which we can lever ourselves into willfulness, that in copying the process of our own evolutionary making we become more fullyawakeinrelationtoit. Thoreaupicturesthisdoublepossibilityasthegivenofour
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nature ("We are not wholly involved in Nature" [Walden 91]). He pictures our stance toward it as determined by perspective ("With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sanesense"[Walden91]). Doestheworldseduceusinthesamewayasthisnextnessto ourselves and others seduces us simply through our involvement (interestedness) with it?
When thinking about what came to be Ulysses, Joyce rejected Christ as the greatest western hero in favor o f Odysseus, because Christ had never lived, in love, with a woman, and thus had avoided the primary realm in which Joyce understood (male) heroics to survive in the modem world. Can we understand the need or pursuit or possibility of love to be subsumed under Thoreau's categories o f neighborliness, or resoluteness, or nextness, or interestedness? What does it mean for all intimacies to be collapsed into a single realm of sociability opposed to the solitude into which Thoreau writes himself? If Thoreau resists one kind of skepticism, denying his reduction into simply one who knows and thus exposes Nature's nextness and his own nextness to himselfj why does this nextnessnotexplicitlynameloveaspartofitspurview? WaldenseemstohideThoreau's fanaticism in the face of Love (a Leontes in disguise as a natural scientist), as if Love is notevenapossibilitytobeexplicated. Howcanapoliticaleconomyfunctionifitisnot also a psychology o f intimacy? I expect Thoreau at times to speak like St. Paul and allow for marriage, although he himself does not understand the desire and would wish people to live in chastity as he does.
One then wonders about the need to translate the Vulgate's Carilas as Love. Is it the "piety of thinking" that translates love into our desire for (or our relationship to) God and our soul, as if those are the only realms in which doubt about the thing in itself can
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find satisfaction? Isn't that another fantasy, almost a fantasy o f science? ("Because 'women' are too hard to understand or trust? ", some man might say). Or should we follow Heidegger in quoting Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite that "love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves"? 2 In this case knowing and loving both become forms o f pantheism, as if believing in someone's love is like believing in things (by this I mean that the survival o f skepticism requires a kind o f pantheism, o f a sortthatconfusesimaginedmindsforimaginedworlds). Ifthistooisakindof romanticism, then can we explain part ofwhat is different about how Thoreau tries to awaken us (and reanimate our language) and how Heidegger tries to reconfigure and recover our relationship to Being by caricaturizing Thoreau's allegory as one ruled by irony and Heidegger's allegory as one ruled by metonymy? (Romanticism here defines the need for a kind of allegory, as a way of protecting the distance between things and people, andbetweenourconfusionandtruth). Ironywillcreateaconfusionbetweenfragments
andauthor. Thetruthorontologicalstatusormeaningorapplicationofanysentence(or fragment), because o f this confusion, must be continually redetermined (justified). The rule o f metonymy produces justification as an effect, displacing the need for justification in the description of our stances toward and within these totalities (this is how Hiedegger avoids skepticism in Being and Time).
These stances are in some fundamental sense moral stances. In a "Lecture on Ethics" he gave not long after he returned to Cambridge in 1929, when he was still in the grip o f his Tractarian system, Wittgenstein describes the limit between facts that describe the world (and can be true) and statements of "absolute value" that describe ethics,
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aesthetics (as a form of ethics), and religion. He calls ethics "an enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living" (PhilosophicalOccasions,38). IntheTractariandescriptionofthelogicoflanguage, propositions are all on the same level. No statement can have a logical priority. Ethics, however, requires just such a priority. Judgments of relative value can be translated into statements o f fact, as in "better or worse. " Ethical judgment, however, must act as a frame in which all statements o f fact have meaning, and thus such judgments cannot themselves
be statements o f fact:
If I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to be quite obvious, it seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter o f which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write such a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are all vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our
words will only express facts. (40)
Ethics describes and enacts a transcendent limit to the world. A true book of ethics, however, describes not only this limit but is enacted through and as the perspective of a particular 'I', which in the Tractarian picture is also a transcendent limit of the world.
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Consequently, such a book ofEthics becomes this 'I', constituting the meaning ofthe worldinthepracticesofaperson(thisT). Allotherbooksofethicsceasetofunctionas books o f ethics within the world so constituted. They, in effect, spontaneously combust (ceasetobeseenorunderstoodasbooksonethics). Atruebookofethics,therefore, both animates an T and delimits a world. These ontological consequences mean such a book describes a kind o f ontological ethics. This kind o f link between ontological consequences (figurations of the world and o f'I') are possible only within the kind of coherent theological language MacIntyre describes (I say nothing about the content of such a language). It is the consequence of our economies, technologies and sciences that such a language must operate in relation to the limits o f the world also construed as physical and quantifiable (this does not mean that such languages would be scientific or mathematical,farfromit). Itisunclearthatanylanguagecouldregainthiskindofforce
and coherence (this is why so much is at stake in the way in which we conceptualize the relation between the qualitative and the quantitative).
Wittgenstein'spictureofontologicalethicsisakinto hislatterunderstandingofa true philosophy. Written in 1930, after Wittgenstein had shifted from his Tractarian picture of a transcendent limit between 'I' and language to a fluid (and in some way phenomenological) conception of our involvement in language, the following remark was included in Philosophical Investigations: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them" (? 128). This agreement would follow from the obviousness o f any real thesis (clearly philosophy does put forward theses, but because they do not evince immediate and
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universal agreement, they are not theses in Wittgenstein's sense). In 1931 (December 9), Wittgenstein responding to Waismann's attempt, in a book to be entitled Theses, to render the Tractates into a number of dogmatic theses, articulates his shift away from describing the limits o f sense (and o f philosophy) through describing the logical structure o f facts (and thus as a set o f propositions):
As regards your Theses, I once wrote if there were theses in philosophy, they wouldhavetobesuchthattheydonotgiverisetodisputes. Fortheywouldhave to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. . . controversy always arises through leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I once wrote, The only correct method o f doing philosophy consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to, What the other person is not able to do is to arrange the rules step by step and in the right order so that all questions are solved automatically. (183-84)
The transcendent limit describing ethics in the Tractates is now constituted as the relative ground o f our ordinary language (and experience). This ordinariness describes our involvement within the world as both our ontological commitments, our transparent language use, and our values: "The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-- becauseitisalwaysbeforeone'seyes)"(PI? 130). Consequently,philosophyshould "simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since
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everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (PI? 126).
We should at least ask what kind ofliterature can withstand the leverage exerted by a materialism so thoroughgoing as to dissolve the soul, or what might be left of our belief in
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immaterial essence, and then remain aesthetic, protecting what we understand as the "immateriality" of meaning, of our minds, and ofour attachments?
We might not recognize Finnegans Wake as art; we might not know what it is or does. In many ways it is not a work o f art, but rather a text which requires one to create orgenerateanaestheticthroughwhichandinwhichitwillberecognizedandfunction. It re-enacts not our everyday experience, nor the ordinariness o f our being awake, but the everynight experience and the ordinariness of our being asleep. It is literally a mind in a vat in which the controls organizing the coherency of its input have failed and exposed the mind's mediated relation to the world, to that which controls this input (a demon, a god, ourselves? ).
The unit o f coherence in the Wake should be defined not as a sentence as such, but as a statement which simultaneously functions as a locally relevant sentence and an illustrative(? )orinterpretative(? )recapitulationoftheWakeitself. Inotherwords,the nonsense ofthe words gains meaning not as language about anything other than
themselves as a continual form of self-justification. The Wake rewrites knowledge claims as value claims in order to construct being or a selfor a text as an axiological matrix that can function with ontological force.
An artificial intelligence program is, even if it fails, a form o f art in the way that FinnegansWakeisaformofart. Ifeachattemptstorepresentandembody(tobecome)a formofmind,thentheyeachalsofunctionasakindofmetaphysicsortheology. Artificial Intelligence, as embodied theology, attempts to construct whatever used to be called spirit within the mechanical logic of scientific materialism and mathematics. This is at least one
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way o f explicating Vico's definition o f art as that which "does its utmost to give a body to spirit" (Scienza nuovapr. bk. iii, chp 26). AI, therefore, attempts to transform a language into an ontological aesthetic, to give a language ontological force. I f we accept Wittgenstein's caution not to organize our descriptions ofthe mind as ifit were an immaterial body, then the Cartesian mind/body problem is replaced by the problematic relation between soul and being, soul and God, that is more like the theological puzzles concerning the soul that Aquinas considered.
Finnegans Wake attempts to construct a grammar determined by ontological commitmentsthatarenotafunctionofrepresentingthingsandsubstances. TheWake's non-substantive ontological commitments are (an) aesthetic. Thus, articulating the logic, or the demands ofthis aesthetic, constitutes a grammar, or a set of shifting grammars, of an inner mental life-world, invoking our everyday life not only through our night-time experience but as an experiment on and within the sleep-generated fall into skepticism and intermittent idealism.
I do not mean to suggest that we should think in opposition to science in the way that Heidegger attempts in his later work; the demand, instead, is to think through and as a function of the materialism that defines the limit of any ontological claim. We can make differing,butnotopposing,ontologicalclaims. Ifartoffers,asBeckettassertsinMolloy, the "laws ofthe mind", what can we discover about the logic oftheir formation, the significance of their form, their etiology, meaning, continuity, hopefulness, effect if we acceptorconsiderthisoffer? TheselawsarenotmonumentsofamentalHammurabi.
Our brain works without a homunculus operating the levers. The unity of mind that
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allows for a directed and effective response to stimuli, even in animals with rudimentary brains,isafiction,avirtualunity,abiologicalaesthetic. This,ofcourse,pointstoboth some idea o f a priori categories and to the physiological pre-conditions for vision, language, taste, etc. But it also allows one to ask in what way does how we use words depend on how our brain uses words, on how our brains use us using words? From within our biology and our form of life, the functional unity of mind and language, as an aesthetic, exists as a response to the pressures our thinking, consciousness, planning, doubting, making exerts on instinct, desire, physiological needs and so on. We cannot enter into our biology through the portal o f this unity o f mind; but we can respond to it.
Werespondbytyingourselvestoandseparatingourselvesfromthisbiology. Our making ofthe world, ofour perception, out ofwhatever given or set ofcategories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds all sorts o f meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we are. One might sideline this "what we are", or one might answer it, if one could self- reflect outside of knowing. Wittgenstein sets up aesthetic barriers to protect his separation of grammar from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back into our practices and our being (how should one understand the interaction and difference between being
and identity in the Investigations? ). In order to pressure grammatical analysis into the aesthetics of our temporality, I will constructs the limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one of the axes Wittgenstein uses to map our form of life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme
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in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse of words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?
Poetry, in all its complexity, even in its modernist distortion, is not opposed to or leftoutofordinarylanguage. Literaryartarticulatesthedifferentconstituentlevels,the barely conscious aspects present in varying degrees and kinds in our ordinary language. Wittgenstein points to this, although in an unfortunate two-level image, as surface grammar and depth grammar. It is between surface and depth that we create our different kinds o f sense and nonsense. One should speak not o f depth grammar, but o f a complex set o f depth grammars. It is the logic and the aesthetics generated out o f these depth grammars, as they invoke and distort our surface grammar and as they turn about each other, that describes the limits ofwhat counts as a mind. These limits of mind function as symptoms o f an aesthetic prejudice. The shifting between language games, the waxing and waning of our form of life in describing a limit of mind enacts through these changes a
multiplicity o f times. This enactment is the form o f our being within the world. What is the relation of this Wittgensteinian aesthetic (the limits of the human) with the aesthetic animating Finnegans Wake, with the interaction between time and language brought out in
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the failure o f Artificial Intelligence, in general, and the weakness o f Heidegger's construction o f being toward the future and toward a thing?
My dissertation is structured as a kind of dialogue between Finnegans Wake and PhilosophicalInvestigations. In any such exchange the question ofwhat counts as such a dialogue is continually reformulated. I find myselftrying to write in an idiom that allows Finnegans Wake and Investigations to make a kind of mutual sense, with the attending dangeroflosingsensealtogether. Thisdialogueisdirectedatthelogicalformalisms underlying Artificial Intelligence and more specifically at the causal mechanisms I describe inmytheoreticalmachine. Oneofmyconclusionsisthatsuchadialogue,sodirected, describes a theology, that is, the articulation of the semantic limits of our language and mind as ontologically significant. That is to say that in all three o f these texts aesthetics functions with theological import. I read Modernism, and its investigation of our language, as an attempt to construct a self-consuming calculus or machine that will write the world as poetry.
An engagement with these texts cannot take the form o f an argument. Interpretations have no ground: "every interpretation together with what is being interpreted, hangs in the air: the former cannot give the latter any support" (PI ? 198). Interpretations,consequently,requirecontinualjustification. Wecanevaluateboththese
justifications and the ontological efficacy o f the interpretations themselves (experiment in science is one way o f doing this). One must work not only to avoid confusing allegories (and other interpretive apparatus) for causal descriptions, but also to avoid confusing interpretations for meanings. If literature and its study and philosophy are involved in the
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problem o f meaning they should, at least, operate in the confusion between meaning and interpretation.
I imagine the ideal commentary on Finnegans Wake would be to interpret a set of texts as interpretations ofthe Wake, without mentioning or including the Wake. This would be a way o f writing toward Finnegans Wake as a limit, itself. I am not writing such a commentary, but I am attempting to think and write towards and at the limits of language described by Finnegans Wake, Philosophical Investigations, Heidegger's "Das Ding", Eliot's The Waste Land and a number of secondary texts. All of these texts generate ontologies o f fragments, condensations o f time, localized and shifting temporal- series: jug-time in Hiedegger, um-time in Keats, subjunctive-time in Eliot, language-game and philosophical time in Wittgenstein, between-time in Joyce. These fragments o f time describe in various ways models of animation as expressions of the limits between sense and nonsense, mind and world, the animate and the inanimate, and so on.
I will use myselfand a plethora oftexts to speak for other texts, for other people, for myself, and for machines. I am neither speaking in my voice nor letting these texts speakintheirs,norevenventriloquizingwiththesetexts. Icontinuallyaskwhetherany language is mine or whether any text means anything that is more than fantasy. It might seem that I am trying to speak and write as an 'our', as some ill-defined expression o f the humanspecies. Anyofusmightspeakthisway,appealtoourhumanityinthewayan ordinary language philosopher might appeal to his or her language. But such a use of 'our' is as problematic as an 'I' or 'you' or 'he', 'she', and 'it'. I can speak from neither a subjective (except temporally) nor an objective position, but towards and in relation to
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both,adjudicatingtheirclaimsonmeorusoranyone. IfIwritebetweenmyselfandthese texts, then I am trying to figure this 'between' as an inhabitation fit for an 'our' figured in relation to the limits o f sense and being that emerge under the pressure o f thinking.
This thinking has set up a complex pattern o f ocean currents and winds. Theological currents course through interlaving Aristotelian and Pre-Socratic currents. Music and opera move both above and below throughout troubling especially the waters of my discussions of Wittgenstein and The Waste Land. Cognitive science currents swirl around everything as do literary winds and the tides o f analytic philosophy and so on. Reading becomes a way o f sailing.
While operating in this confusion literature and philosophy must acknowledge that while we must write toward (and in relation to) the metaphysics o f science, the ontological limits it describes, they are not sciences. We cannot pretend that their are any binding rulesonthekindofinterpretation(s)artdemands. Interpretationrequirescontinualself- reflection because, in large degree, its claims are unbounded and thus meaningless. We must understand how this nonsense works both in relation to meaning, let's say the use of words within language games and our form(s) of life, and determines what kind of claim it can legitimately make on us.
Meaning embodies ontological claims, at least through the semantics o f 'to be'. J. L. Austin argued in "A Plea for Excuses" that "[wjhen we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or 'meanings' whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use words to talk about: we are using sharpened awareness ofwords to sharpen our perception of, though
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not as final arbiter of, phenomena"(130). Interpretation requires both justification for its claims(thelogicofitsallegory)anditsapplication(itsscope). Thusonecanproducea literary philosophy by investigating the semantics o f 'to be' within the procedures and structures o f self-reflection or self-forgetting that enact the justification o f the limits o f meaning and interpretation.
My initial question, 'Can I construct a mind out o f aesthetics? ,' should be modified, therefore, into something like three questions: How are literary aesthetics implicated as a form ofmind through a description ofthe grammar ofhow temporality (our negotiation between sense and nonsense) is embodied as the logic animating self- reflexive language games? ; how are our ontological commitments enacted, described, and undermined in this grammar? ; and what is the role ofjustification in enacting and determining the limits, interrelation, and confusions between meaning and interpretation?
The construction of a mind within the specific language games leading to Artificial Intelligence programs is an attempt to give art enough ontological force to justify itself withinthelogicofscientificmaterialism. Anontologicaljustificationofartisamind,a principle of animation determining what can function as a form of life. How do we function between meaning and interpretation? Confronting this question requires putting the legitimacy of literature, philosophy, and cognitive science at risk: "Working in philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's own way of seeing things. (And what one
expects ofthem)" (CV16e). 1
1Augustine, in De Trinitate, pursues a language of thought directed, through the Bible, towards God: Search is a striving for discovery, which is the same things as finding; and things found are as it were "brought forth" -w e remember the connection between the Latin words partus and
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repartus--andsocomparablewithanoffspring. Thebringingforthcanonlybeintheknowledge itself,wheretheyare(aswemaysay)shapedandformed. . . Accordinglywemaysaythatthe mind's "bringing forth" is preceded by a kind of striving, by which, in the seeking and finding of what we desire to know, knowledge is bom as an offspring. (IX)
If such a search could not be directed toward God but only toward facts, others, language, and interpretations, what kind o f knowledge would be produced? :
Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. rebelled against. them, and so on?
The common behavior o f mankind is the system o f reference by means o f which we interpret an unknown language. (PI? 206)
Anyone can find anyplace, any person, or any text foreign, and on another day, in another mood find this sameplace,person,ortextsoordinaryastodissolveintoobviousness. PhilosophicalInvestigations, Finnegans Wake, and Artificial Intelligence programs all describe ways o f negotiating, mediating, facilitating, and resisting this oscillation between confusion and clarity, between the visibility and transparency o f what Joyce calls the "world, mind".
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I
FRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKING
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From Soul-making to Person-Making
'Is it possible for a machine to think? ' (whether the action o f this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics or possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behavior o f organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that we don't know a machine which
could do the job. The question is not analogous to that which someone might have asked a hundred years ago: 'Can a machine liquefy gas? ' the trouble is rather that the sentence, 'A machine thinks (perceives, wishes)' seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked 'Has the number 3 a color? '. (BB47)
Wittgenstein pictures being human under the aspect of what he calls a form of life, or rather the complex o f language games, activities, history, biology, culture, and so on that constitutes humans as humans: "Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part o f our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing" (PI? 25). In this he imagines our humanness as a semantic function (what it is to be human is what it means to be human) under the ontological aspect ofthe self-limiting totality ofthis humanness as determiningallpossibleactions. Thisisnotaconfusionorhypostatizationofsemantic categories into ontological concepts ofthe kind that Wittgenstein demythologizes (understanding, time, meaning, and so on). It is a theological claim like "We cannot imaginethe'reality'ofGod. " 'Thinking','perceiving',and'wishing'functiononlywithin
Notes for this chapter begin on page 60.
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our form o f life through our participation in, inhabitation within and use o f language (games).
Our problem is not how to identify an intelligent machine. Such an epistemological question might be answered by the behavioristic Turing test, where the ability o f a machine to fool a human into thinking it also is a human would determine the successorfailureoftheprogram. Aconsciousmachine,however,wouldbeamachine which would mistake us as a form of itselfj within its own, and not our, form of life. The question we can ask that can lead us to artificial intelligence, therefore, is "Could a machine o f'kind X' mistake us for a machine o f'kind X'? ", where what it means to be recognized or 'mistaken for' can be established by observation (of machine Xs) as an
interpretation o f their behavior. Calling this machine species 'kind X', labeling it a member of a species is already to picture these machines within our systems of understanding and representation. Attempting to describe such 'kind X' machines generates a kind o f nonsense equivalent to that generated by let's say Aquinas' attempts to prove (and hence describe) God's existence. This kind o f nonsense might seem to be a- something-else-besides-sense:nonsenseastranscendence. Such'descriptions',however, are rational meditations on the relation between our thinking and being and the limit of this thinking and being understood as dependent on that limit.
A meditation on God, on the possibility that interpretation, the demands of intentionality, teleology, and allegory, constitutes the world, can look identical to a meditation on the inanimate, on the possibility that there exists no possibility or that causes (evenifonlyexplanations)constitutethemindasaneffect. Thesetwopossibilities,
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interpretation after the fact in relation to putative final causes and the description o f proximate causes, together describe a machine, the inanimate defined through function (teleology) and functioning (causes: mechanisms), and together describe art, the inanimate definedthroughfunctionandfunctioning. Thispictureofmachinesandartarepicturesof us: our form(s) of mind, our identity, our mind, our being Darwinian machines and human beings, beholden to measures and qualities.
The failure to justify the limits o f interpretation (God) and o f causation (mechanics) can be survived by making and interpreting ourselves toward those limits. But nothing may count as such a making and interpreting. Cognitive philosophy under one aspect, Theology under another, Literature under a third promise this making and interpreting, but such promises must be justified. We have no intelligible language with which to speak about art which does not risk constructing itself as a form o f mind, and, therefore, as a pseudo-mechanism, as nonsense.
If I ask seriously 'Can a machine mistake us . . . ? ' how would I begin to answer that question? If I transmute 'Can I a machine mistake us . . . ? ' into 'How can we make a machine o f "kind X' mistake us for a machine o f "kind X '? ', I would already be pursuing a methodology: we can know what we can make, therefore, we must make what we want to know. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis o f concepts, and science as the use o f these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, while at least a terrifying proposal (and useful as such), allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinction between philosophy
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and science within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine (see chapter 14).
In his essay on "The Influence ofDarwin on Philosophy," Dewey pictures the possibilities o f thought circumscribed by the limits o f being described by evolution:
Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object o f knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate an object of study together with the consequences that then flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, but assumption, lies outside. (311)
Joyce also describes this Darwinian limit:
The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfinade world that you can't believe a word he's written in, not for pie, but one's only owned by natural rejection. Charley, your my darwing! So sing they sequent theassentofman. Tilltheygoroundiftheygoroundagainbeforebreakpartsand all dismissed. (FW252. 24-28)
Thisisapictureofscientificconstraint("putstraitonthespot"). Evolutiondescribesthe relation between the inanimate and the animate through the rules o f scientific epistemology and constructs as part o f this epistemology the rules and possibilities for how any living being is made.
These rules of transformation are directed at the facts describing the
world. Ahistoryabouthowanyonecametobe(atwhateverlevelofcomplexity),despite whatever ideological or axiological assumptions and patterns underlying it, exhibits forms of being whose status must be determined. Thus, it is easier to write a history of a person (whose ontological status is relatively stable), than it is a history o f literature when this is
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not understood as the history o f book, but the history o f meaning figured as both a particular text and functioning and created within or by the general forms of a number of totalities: language, society, ideology, biology and so on. How does one determine the relation between any particular and any whole when the ontological status o f the particular is always at stake? The self-reflection on the ontological status o f the units within any history or grammar is not a species of historiography or science, but a semantics of remaking what counts into what matters, in Joycean terms an 'evoluation', a story of
becomingthatisfundamentallyastoryofevaluation. Butanystory,asastory,willbe meaningless outside of our application of it to an aspect of our world (as a story of recognition). How do we find ourselves in a story? Such an application, however, requires a theory justifying the correlation of a theory (or allegory) with our experience. Darwin's power is partly a function of our necessary involvement within the picture of becoming (both o f what is real and what something is). The controversy surrounding it is alsoafunctionofthisnecessaryinvolvement. Thereisadifferenceinfindingoneselfina story and finding oneselfas a story. How do we find ourselves as a story?
Wittgenstein, by and large, rejected the relevance o f scientific discovery (specifically Darwin's) to the conceptual work of philosophy, the analysis of how we use language and configure ourselves within this usage (the grammar). Wittgenstein's understanding o f philosophical grammar was primarily normative, and thus contingent on particular normative standards, but without a clear picture of how grammars change. Similarly while he recognized, and he himselfwas engaged in, the construction of new language games and new grammars, he did not analyze or describe this process of
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creation. This was partly because the philosophical problems arose when one either operated outside of a coherent grammar (or language game) or when the application of a grammar (a usage or interpretation) was not seen to be nonsense. Wittgenstein's relatively static picture of grammar made it difficult for him to appreciate the philosophical significanceofDarwin. AlthoughIwillnotexaminethissignificanceinanydetailinthis dissertation, the interaction between ontological and identity claims in Darwin opens up the problem of self-reflection in its theological dimension (a dimension which also collapses ontology and identity into grammar).
In Finnegans Wake evolution underlies the process ofbecoming and dissolution, in both its moral and epistemological dimension, that organizes our pictures ofthe night, in the same way that Vico's New Science, the Egyptian Book o f the Dead, Freud's Interpretation o fDreams do. HCE, one of the central 'figures' in Finnegans Wake, is himself"a theory none to rectiline ofthe evoluation ofhuman society and a testament of therocksfromalldeaduntosometheliving"(FW73. 31-33). Evolutionincludesan evaluation, at least an ontological commentary on the dead from which anybody and everybody came: matter has been educated through what we call evolution. Such a commentary is 'ontological' because such a process produces whatever is-real, and the success o f such a production acts as an ontological comment, even judgment. This ontological language, o f course, can only 'say' existence and 'betray' absence or extinction. It is not a 'language' that anyone must understand, but is an education that we all enact and embody.
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Science expresses a negative metaphysical fact: a description o f ontological limits without foundations. Hilary Putnam describes the loss o f foundations attending science:
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whetherwewanttobethereornot,sciencehasputusinaposition o f having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position--and no end to it is in sight -- is that o f having to philosophize without 'foundations'. (24)
If science destroys metaphysical answers and cannot provide substitutes, in what sense is the atomic bomb a 'metaphysical fact'? Science, or rather the enactment of scientific knowing in technology, enacts ontological limits, not within its descriptions of the world, but in the way these descriptions correlate the world in relation to itself. Putnam unconsciously recognizes this metaphysical force when he writes 'whether you want to be there or not," an acknowledgment of ontological limits determining our possibilities, even if not in an absolute sense (an allegory of self-annihilation).
We replace foundations with limits in relation to which we correlate ourselves. We function and exist within systems from which we cannot exit, and these systems determine what counts as animate, conscious and human. The threat that these systems will determine our animation, consciousness and humanity as inanimate, as deterministic fictions, and as inhumane is the great theme ofFinnegans Wake and, after it, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
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The war does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even o f the sort the Germans have engineered, ein V olk ein Fuhrer--it wants a machine o f many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is i t . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness--not a life at all, really. (Gravity's Rainbow, 152)
Technology enacts proximate causes through the process of its function and functioning. Such functioning describes a localized teleology, what Joyce called an "odium teleologicum" (L. odium theologicum) a hatred o f theological teleology (FW264. 04-05). The War might also only look like God. "[0]ur silent passing into the machineries of indifference" (482) means our translation into a fragment within a system defined by its functionandfunctioning. Gravity'sRainbowunderstandsthisseductiontobeadiscovery about how we enter and exit the world: "Whether you believe or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling --a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out ofyour soul, something--for the Rocket" (784). Resistance is hardly the point, although it can seem like all that is left to being human, but even this might be describing a technique (and thus the effort Heidegger puts in re-defining techne). Resisting the "beckoning" of the rocket, Pokier "hunted, as a servo
with a noisy input will, across Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonalsalvation"(473). Thisisnotaproofofanything,butamodemproverb.
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2. 1 Personal identity and impersonal salvation
In an essay saving Hume from the claim that he had separated 'is' from 'ought', Alasdair MacIntyre links "what is good and right" with "what we need and desire", countering the Kantian translation of morality into formalism:
We could give a long list ofthe concepts which can form such bridge notions between "is" and "ought": wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure, happiness, health-- and these are only a few. I think there is a strong case for saying that moral notions are unintelligible apart from concepts such as these (Against the Self-Images o f the Age, 120)
Part ofthe special status ofthe words 'wanting', 'needing', 'desiring', 'pleasure', 'happiness', 'health' is the way they mean, as interpretations of our stances toward the world, others, and ourselves. These interpretations are, then, posited as internal states or somehow constitutive o f who we are.
In "God and the Theologians", MacIntyre describes "a whole group of theologies which have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance" (,Against, 23) He argues that "we have no language to express common needs, hopes, and fears that go beyond the immediacies o f technique and social structure. What we do have is a religiouslanguage,whichsurviveseventhoughwedonotknowwhattosayinit. Sinceit is the only language we have for certain purposes it is not surprising that it cannot be finally discarded. But since we have no answers to give to the questions we ask in i t , it remains continually in need o f reinterpretation, reinterpretation that is always bound to
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fail. . . within theological discourse, as Feurbach and Marx saw, we are bound to remain blind to the human significance of theological discourse" (23). The confused use of theological language to express an atheistic content, as a mask for the failure o f both atheism and religion, has been transplanted into literature both in ideological criticism (in which moral prejudices are disguised) and in versions o f the symbolist faith in 'art for art's sake,'anidentificationofthedeepestinhumanlifewithart. Thisisamasquethat Geoffrey Hill recognizes: "The major caveat which I would enter against a theological view o f literature is that, too often, its is not theology at all, but merely a restatement o f the neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery" ("Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement', 17). What would constitute an adequate theology? Such a question has nothing to do with doing science, but it can only be answered in relation to the ontological limits enacted in science. Artificial Intelligence attempts to work out of the mental, phenomenological, qualitative, and intentional in relation to the requirements o f scientific determinism, the demands of the rationality or logical coherence of the world. Cognitive science investigates the relation between quality and quantity, when quantity describes a common limit between our knowing and the world. I will say nothing about the possible success of such an endeavor. Its form, as I describe it here, however, retains the same structure as the theological picture of the mind as the soul. One can at least say that cognitive science is directed toward the same limit that theology has figured as between humansandGod. Cognitivescienceunderstoodasatheologyofmindisadescendentof what Coleridge called, in Biographia Literaria, a "Genuine Philosophic Poem" (156), a poem that enacts our moral stances as ontological commitments.
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In Finnegans Wake, pursuing a Don Juan scene o f seduction, Juan (a version o f Shem the artist brother) "asking coy one after sloy o n e . . . (and all o f course just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in sprite of fun) for Juan, by the way, was by the
way ofbecoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human being that ever was called man, loving all up and down the whole creation . . . " (FW431. 04;08-12). What kind of education is this? For Juan's fun this pursuit means 'dropping] a few stray remarks" (FW431. 01-02). These fragments promise and seduce and teach "the twentynine hedge daughters . . . learning their antemeridian lessons o f life" (FW430. 03- 04). Fragments seduce the will: Wittgenstein seduces with such fragments; Austin seduces with such details. Any language or language game seduces with fragments (metaphoric possibilities), keeping their application, legitimacy, and ontological status in
the background. Commenting in one o f his manuscripts (part o f which was collected in Culture and Value), Wittgenstein frames the seduction of an object as the conflict between our what we want to see and how we live (the truth enacted in our practices):
Tolstoy: "The significance o f an object lies in its universal intelligibility" . That is partly true, partly false. When an object is significant and important what makes it difficult to understand is not the lack of some special instruction in abstruse matters necessary for its understanding, but the conflict between the right understanding o f the object and what most men want to see. This can make the most obvious things the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will (MS 213, 406-7: CF17)1
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The condition I am following finds that seductions premise new versions o f myself and new limits to my world. If I hear Thoreau ask "Who bolsters you? " (Walden 26), do I answer some seductress or some future or myself, my will, my fictions?
I concern myselfwith what 'making' means and what limits I make myself(or anyone makes themselves) toward: "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places" (Walden 90). This indifference I think is a mistake, and marks such an awakening as another dream. Our awakening involves at a fundamental level not only our recognition of our humanity, but the recognition of humanity(asaparticularkindoflimit). Thoreauimaginesthatthisplaceisalwaysthe same, a sameness guaranteed by our common species-being, and if we imagine this as our form o f life we confuse the content o f our life with the meaning o f its form. This meaning may not be determined solely by who we are or even what we are, but may emerge as meaning only as how we are anything at all.
Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually be executed, Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we axe. (Walden 90)
Both the world and we are constituted in this nextness, what in Finnegans Wake is continually formulated as being between. The double possibility o f meaning through who we are and how we are offers us a fulcrum on which we can lever ourselves into willfulness, that in copying the process of our own evolutionary making we become more fullyawakeinrelationtoit. Thoreaupicturesthisdoublepossibilityasthegivenofour
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nature ("We are not wholly involved in Nature" [Walden 91]). He pictures our stance toward it as determined by perspective ("With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sanesense"[Walden91]). Doestheworldseduceusinthesamewayasthisnextnessto ourselves and others seduces us simply through our involvement (interestedness) with it?
When thinking about what came to be Ulysses, Joyce rejected Christ as the greatest western hero in favor o f Odysseus, because Christ had never lived, in love, with a woman, and thus had avoided the primary realm in which Joyce understood (male) heroics to survive in the modem world. Can we understand the need or pursuit or possibility of love to be subsumed under Thoreau's categories o f neighborliness, or resoluteness, or nextness, or interestedness? What does it mean for all intimacies to be collapsed into a single realm of sociability opposed to the solitude into which Thoreau writes himself? If Thoreau resists one kind of skepticism, denying his reduction into simply one who knows and thus exposes Nature's nextness and his own nextness to himselfj why does this nextnessnotexplicitlynameloveaspartofitspurview? WaldenseemstohideThoreau's fanaticism in the face of Love (a Leontes in disguise as a natural scientist), as if Love is notevenapossibilitytobeexplicated. Howcanapoliticaleconomyfunctionifitisnot also a psychology o f intimacy? I expect Thoreau at times to speak like St. Paul and allow for marriage, although he himself does not understand the desire and would wish people to live in chastity as he does.
One then wonders about the need to translate the Vulgate's Carilas as Love. Is it the "piety of thinking" that translates love into our desire for (or our relationship to) God and our soul, as if those are the only realms in which doubt about the thing in itself can
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find satisfaction? Isn't that another fantasy, almost a fantasy o f science? ("Because 'women' are too hard to understand or trust? ", some man might say). Or should we follow Heidegger in quoting Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite that "love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves"? 2 In this case knowing and loving both become forms o f pantheism, as if believing in someone's love is like believing in things (by this I mean that the survival o f skepticism requires a kind o f pantheism, o f a sortthatconfusesimaginedmindsforimaginedworlds). Ifthistooisakindof romanticism, then can we explain part ofwhat is different about how Thoreau tries to awaken us (and reanimate our language) and how Heidegger tries to reconfigure and recover our relationship to Being by caricaturizing Thoreau's allegory as one ruled by irony and Heidegger's allegory as one ruled by metonymy? (Romanticism here defines the need for a kind of allegory, as a way of protecting the distance between things and people, andbetweenourconfusionandtruth). Ironywillcreateaconfusionbetweenfragments
andauthor. Thetruthorontologicalstatusormeaningorapplicationofanysentence(or fragment), because o f this confusion, must be continually redetermined (justified). The rule o f metonymy produces justification as an effect, displacing the need for justification in the description of our stances toward and within these totalities (this is how Hiedegger avoids skepticism in Being and Time).
These stances are in some fundamental sense moral stances. In a "Lecture on Ethics" he gave not long after he returned to Cambridge in 1929, when he was still in the grip o f his Tractarian system, Wittgenstein describes the limit between facts that describe the world (and can be true) and statements of "absolute value" that describe ethics,
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aesthetics (as a form of ethics), and religion. He calls ethics "an enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living" (PhilosophicalOccasions,38). IntheTractariandescriptionofthelogicoflanguage, propositions are all on the same level. No statement can have a logical priority. Ethics, however, requires just such a priority. Judgments of relative value can be translated into statements o f fact, as in "better or worse. " Ethical judgment, however, must act as a frame in which all statements o f fact have meaning, and thus such judgments cannot themselves
be statements o f fact:
If I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to be quite obvious, it seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter o f which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write such a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are all vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our
words will only express facts. (40)
Ethics describes and enacts a transcendent limit to the world. A true book of ethics, however, describes not only this limit but is enacted through and as the perspective of a particular 'I', which in the Tractarian picture is also a transcendent limit of the world.
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Consequently, such a book ofEthics becomes this 'I', constituting the meaning ofthe worldinthepracticesofaperson(thisT). Allotherbooksofethicsceasetofunctionas books o f ethics within the world so constituted. They, in effect, spontaneously combust (ceasetobeseenorunderstoodasbooksonethics). Atruebookofethics,therefore, both animates an T and delimits a world. These ontological consequences mean such a book describes a kind o f ontological ethics. This kind o f link between ontological consequences (figurations of the world and o f'I') are possible only within the kind of coherent theological language MacIntyre describes (I say nothing about the content of such a language). It is the consequence of our economies, technologies and sciences that such a language must operate in relation to the limits o f the world also construed as physical and quantifiable (this does not mean that such languages would be scientific or mathematical,farfromit). Itisunclearthatanylanguagecouldregainthiskindofforce
and coherence (this is why so much is at stake in the way in which we conceptualize the relation between the qualitative and the quantitative).
Wittgenstein'spictureofontologicalethicsisakinto hislatterunderstandingofa true philosophy. Written in 1930, after Wittgenstein had shifted from his Tractarian picture of a transcendent limit between 'I' and language to a fluid (and in some way phenomenological) conception of our involvement in language, the following remark was included in Philosophical Investigations: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them" (? 128). This agreement would follow from the obviousness o f any real thesis (clearly philosophy does put forward theses, but because they do not evince immediate and
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universal agreement, they are not theses in Wittgenstein's sense). In 1931 (December 9), Wittgenstein responding to Waismann's attempt, in a book to be entitled Theses, to render the Tractates into a number of dogmatic theses, articulates his shift away from describing the limits o f sense (and o f philosophy) through describing the logical structure o f facts (and thus as a set o f propositions):
As regards your Theses, I once wrote if there were theses in philosophy, they wouldhavetobesuchthattheydonotgiverisetodisputes. Fortheywouldhave to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. . . controversy always arises through leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I once wrote, The only correct method o f doing philosophy consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to, What the other person is not able to do is to arrange the rules step by step and in the right order so that all questions are solved automatically. (183-84)
The transcendent limit describing ethics in the Tractates is now constituted as the relative ground o f our ordinary language (and experience). This ordinariness describes our involvement within the world as both our ontological commitments, our transparent language use, and our values: "The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-- becauseitisalwaysbeforeone'seyes)"(PI? 130). Consequently,philosophyshould "simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since
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everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (PI? 126).
