If it is asked: "How do
sentences
manage to represent?
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
A painted face looks like a face because we can recognize it as a face (people have faces): "The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes o f it" (PI?
454).
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? We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind). " We go up to the thing we mean.
"When one thinks something, it is oneselfthinking"; so one is oneselfin motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed
not
Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone. ((PI? ? 455, 456, 457) Ourpicturesofourlanguageuseareboundupinmetaphors. Thesemetaphors,asis explicit in this case, are the means by which we allegorize ourselves into our language. Thinking or speaking describes a movement that changes one's relation to the world, in a way like going up to a person does. If I go up to you I instigate a relationship in which everything means something to you and me, even if I do or say nothing else ("going up to someone" means to enter into that space within which attention is demanded, although the limitsofthisspacevaryfrompersontopersonandculturetoculture). Howisthinking like "rushing ahead"? This seems like a description of the limits of self-reflection, but only if going up to someone is not oneself (can we run up to ourselves? ). In ascribing a physiognomy to words we allegorize them as persons, where their meaning is like their mind.
13. 2 Understanding, or Not, How Not to Go On
The clearest invocation ofthe possibility ofthe future as an essence ofour form of lifeintheInvestigationsoccursinWittgenstein'sdiscussionofhope: "Onecanimaginean animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p.
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? 174). How are the workings of "the phenomena of hopes" (as one kind of "Meaning") related to the grammar ofunderstanding entered into through Wittgenstein's description of "how we go on", in a mathematical series, for example, or in reading Finnegans Wake? The collapse and slippage between these two kinds o f meaning determine the limits o f the problem of "meaning" in both the Investigations and the Wake. In this, these texts come up against Melville's short story "Bartleby. " The story describes the frustration and attraction of a narrator who, as a lawyer, has hired Bartleby as a scrivener. Bartleby, however, soon begins a slow renunciation o f the claims and authority human beings (or society) have on him by reducing his own will to nothing more than a refusal to do anything. Bartleby slowly dies. How could Joyce and Wittgenstein answer or respond to the rejection of any possiblejustification of life, understanding, communication, community, or hope expressed by Bartleby? Bartleby's refusal to reply to all requests put on him, to all interchange beyond his "I'd prefer not to" leaves him a cipher, part o f a code lost to language because it (I mean "he") is lost to all human community, existing at the limit of language, except for his, therefore curious responses (why respond at all? ). He
has lost any future. We inhabit the possibility of a future as the ground of our being, signaled by our hoping, but embodied in our language and thus susceptible to denial.
Bartleby's refusal o f meaning answers a child's asking "What should (or can) I do now? " : heanswerswithhisownacceptanceofhisboredom. Whyisitorhowcoulditevenbe possible for a child to ask such a question? (What is signaled by the difficulty o f knowing whether to ask "why" or "how" here? ). If we have forgotten the child's question what have we replaced it with? Are our everyday practices enough like those o f animals to say
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? that this question is no longer relevant in the way it is not for them? How (and why) does the justification Bartleby fails to find underlie our uses o f language? Bartleby has reduced himselfj in a kind o f devolving exhaustion, to a single intention attached to a single desire: to refuse through a complete disengagement from all external, relative to his single intention, demands and intentions. This intention is circular, a continual negation o f the future and therefore an assertion o f a presentness, which does not even include any desire (except his resistance). Without a future or a future directed set o f desires Bartleby has erased hope from his world. He has diminished himselfto the edge of humanity. He remains human primarily through the exercise of his will to resist the demands or appeals directed toward him. This is a way of again asking what is the theological dimensions of
Wittgenstein's use o f the soul in Philosophical Investigations?
I f the moment seems to describe human consciousness, the structure o f the future
as a possibility seems to be described by a machine. Wittgenstein analyzes the figuration ofthe future as a machine:
The machine as symbolizing its action: the action o f a machine--I might say at first--seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? --If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined. (PI? 193)
In this the possibility o f a movement seems determined by the structure o f the machine. The parts could o f course fail, but "in many cases we don't think o f that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. " The machine symbolizes its own action, and thus it embodies as the aspect of its structure
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? a kind of self-reflection in which its future is determined as a function of what it is. In this itsfunctioningfollowsanidealizedpathalreadytranscendentwithinitsdesign. Amachine seems to generate time through its determined changes in state, the unrolling of a pattern determined by its structure (or seemingly what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein calls, with some ambiguity as Ramsey points out, "the form o f representation [which] is the possibility that the things are so combined with one another as are the elements o f the picture" (2. 1511). Machine time can be described by a diagram o f the machine itself,
where its future actions, its description o f its own changes by those changes, is derived from "the movement of its parts from it [the diagram] (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series 1, 4, 9, 16. . . . ). " Such a series , a time-line ofbefore and afters, and our translation into such a machine would translate McTaggert's A-series into a B-series, the existential now into an objectified history, the formula o f dynamism Adams uses to figure himself within a Godless universe.
Wittgenstein diagnoses the mistake in this picturing o f the machine's future movements as if these movements were objects "already lying in a drawer and which we then take out. " These future movements are the way we configure the future for the machine. If faced with an actual machine we no longer assume its parts will not fail. Thus we can see the machine under two different aspects: the putative movements in (1) the machine-as-symbol which functions "far more determinably than in (2) the actual machine. " Thepredeterminedmovementsinthemodelofthemachinesymbolizingitself might seem to be already present in the symbol itself (PI? 193). The motion o f the machine, the movement describing time, seems condensed into the design of the machine
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? made manifest in the machine itself as if the machine were a drawing o f itself at all possible moments.
Wittgenstein goes on to investigate this seeming presentness o f the future in the machine as symbol: "When does one have the thought: the possible movements o f a machine are already there in it in some mysterious sense? -- Well when one is doing philosophy" (PI? 194). Putting philosophical pressure on our descriptions of machines separates the concept of the possibility of movement from our actual usage of the "phrase 'possibility of movement' when we are talking about a given machine". We imagine because of the defined character of the parts and actions of a machine that the possibility of its movement is somehow part of it, "like a shadow of the movement itself. "2 This possibility, this shadow, we imagine attached to that which is (or can) move; we imagine an entire world constructed out of possibility and tangent to every actual movement and change. Aheadofit? alongsideit?
Wittgenstein asks how we use the phrase "possibility of movement when we are talking about a given machine? " An answer:
We say "Experience will shew whether this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not say "Experience will shew whether this is the possibility ofthis movement": 'so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility o f precisely this movement'. (PI? 194)
If we say Adams wants to formalize himselfj so that he describes a kind of logical engine, does one ask o f him "Will experience show whether this formula (or any description) is a formuladescribingbeingasaformula? "Apossibilitydoesnotexistwithintheworld. This
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? is not an intentionality ofgears and wheels, but a figuration ofbeing human as an effect of a being described by the mechanisms ofthe world (made visible for Adams in the laws of physics). Human beings become fictions ofthe world, fictions which we can best interpret through, at least for Adams, a kind of metaphorized science.
What happens when we separate "the possibility o f movement" from a particular usage and hypostatize it as somehow present in the machine, finding the future somehow present in the present? Would Wittgenstein's therapy dissolve Adams' translation of himself into a machine (dynamo) or formula, his analogizing himself as a possibility made manifest through the workings of nature? If one becomes a formula one's future is determined, present in the formula itself. At the very least this is a misunderstanding of thenatureoftheuseofmathematicsinphysics. Thisusageisimmenselycomplicated. Mathematical functions can serve as representations, interpretations, measurements, descriptive metaphor and so on. Does this mean that mathematics functions as a language? How could a mathematical syntax correlated with data function like a full blownlanguage? Couldsyntaxembodyafuture? AnaspectofAdams'misunderstanding, however, exposes a deep problem: what is the relation between description and metaphor? A more fundamental version of this question is what is the relationship between
algorithms and metaphors? In this question there lies another book (fully present? ). But this question points at the nature of the mistake Wittgenstein is investigating. The confusion about the future, as if it were present in the present, arises whenever we imagine that the meaning or future sense of something lies in a picture of it, in a symbol, in the thing-itself when we are not using it but when it serves to stand for itself. Their are two
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? confusions here. The first confusion follows from the extraction o f signs and objects from their ordinary use into some meta-description. In the second confusion, the process of symbolization makes visible the future in such a way that it gets attached to any meaningful unit within this process as ifpart ofthe physiognomy ofthis unit. Things can symbolize themselves. What Wittgenstein is exposing here is the grammatical structure of the future, and the temptations for distortion that attend our functioning within symbol systems:
"But I don't mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use causally and as a matter o f experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some sense present. " But of course it is, 'in some queer sense'! Really the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression "in a queer way". The rest is all right; and the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language game for it from the one in which we actually use it. (PI? I95)
The sense o f the future being present in a word or in the 'now' is the result o f how these words or any 'now' emerges and functions within a grammar which describes the future within its symbolic processes. Because this symbolic structure can seem to collapse into a word it seems to excavate within a word a possibility for meaning which is at the same time a possibility for the future. This future, however, is not present in the word in any real sense. It is rather a part of our grammar. Because words and the 'now' function within language (or a symbolic grammar) they can symbolize themselves (as can a machine). Thisself-symbolizationextractsthewordorthe'now'fromitsgrammar. At this point the future (or meaning) seems "in some sense present" in a "queer way. " We
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? have brought the word or the 'now' to the surface without its grammar, and thus the future use seems present in the word.
When we attempt to describe our experience as if this experience were not embedded in language games, as if we grasped the future first before our use of the word 'future' in a particular language game, our experience seems odd (Cf. Edward's failure to lose himself when he loses his wife). For Wittgenstein this oddness is an effect o f a mistake. Adams, however, translates himself into machine metaphors because o f a failure of moral language (of the sort MacIntyre describes in After Virtue), which makes any morality incoherent. This incoherence he understands as an effect of the collapse of an ontology (theology) in which a moral stance is binding because it is embedded in a set of ontological commitments. Adams' asks, in effect, can we make moral sense in any version of our language? One could also ask what kind of moral pressure do science and technology place on the coherence of our ordinary language? (This question is one result of my inquiry).
Earlier I presented a scene describing one way o f recognizing the force o f this question. I wrote, "As in the machine symbolism of Yeats the symbols of identity constituting 'What The Thunder Said', the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which we might find ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as containers for our minds, and in this offer o f our translation into the structure of a thing we project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us. The logic o f identity, o f equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' o f existence, articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The Waste
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? Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the crucial analogy. The temptation toward a theory o f identity as a theory o f meaning builds minds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit o f death that constructs our lives as containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious lands, shapes, and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container. "
And Wittgenstein might respond: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -- In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? --Or is the use its life? " (PI? 432). We have two kinds ofuse here. Does use give signs a kind oflife, as ifthe words are puppets or wind-up toys; or are they hammers and saws, with no hidden strings or engines. Thedifferenceseemstobeoneofhowmediatedourrelationistothesewords. Do we give them their power to then go and do their work, or is their energy and use always intimately ours. But Eliot or Joyce might also asks 'Do all uses offer the same life? ' Shouldn't we also be debating about kinds o f life? This would be to revisit the history and conceptual logic ofthe development ofthe soul from distinct eschatological and psychological souls, what Arbman called, in his study o f the Vedic soul, the free soul and the body-soul, into a unified soul under the semantic rubric of the free soul. J.
Breamer argues that a similar conceptual unification took place in Greece, where Homer's description o f human beings under the aspects o f many souls, the body-soul (thymos, noos, and menos) and the free soul (psyche) is later unified in the Psyche. Aristotle in his history of the soul in Book I ofDe Anima organizes the development of a united soul around the principle of movement (kinesis) and of perception (disthesis). Such principles define one set o f criteria for animation. Aristotle transforms these criteria into the
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? characterization o f the soul as "the first entelecheia o f a natural body that potentially has life" (De anima. 11. 412a). ( I do not explicate what this means here; I think, however, Heidegger's animation o f the thing is a development o f this definition o f the soul as a descriptionoftheworld. Itrytoshowthisinmyanalysisof"DasDing"; partofwhatI need here is the idea that we enter into language through the figure of its animation).
"In use it [a sign] is alive" describes our use o f words as if tools, where the hatchet vanishes into an extension o f our arm. Or as if I found an order floating my way and I accept it as directed to me. I accept it into me; this is my act o f will and understanding. The order is an algorithm and once understood takes over my body (or mind) and I act. So someone might say "There is a gulfbetween an order and its execution. It has to filled by the act of understanding. " Can we refuse the order if we understand it? Wittgenstein does not invoke the will, but points to the will as a negative, as what would answer his question: If I give an order to someone--"How does he know at all what use he is to makeofthesignsIgivehim,whatevertheyare? "(PI? 433). TheWillfillsthisrole,butof course to offer the will as an answer here is simply to offer another black box. Is this different from becoming alive?
If it is asked: "How do sentences manage to represent? "--the answer might be: "Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you use them. " For nothing is concealed.
How do sentences do it? --Don't you know? For nothing is hidden.
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? But given this answer: "But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed" one would like to retort "Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view. "(PI? 435)
Wittgenstein resists the view that language "goes by so quick. " This sense of effervescence expresses a dissatisfaction with ordinary language, which can seem "too crude" to capture phenomena that, as Augustine writes, "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". What eludes us when we use language? Nothing. Then why do we insist that something eludes us? If we ask "how do sentences do it? ", mean something or anything, we have made them into agents,withintention,willandtheabilitytoact. Theanimationofthesesentencesmakes them surrogates for ourselves and thus embeds them in the world we imagine ourselves inhabiting. Sentences seem limited by time if they are extracted from their grammar (usage). If words (or sentences) function like agents then their ordinary usage, their grammar, functions like time does for us. What eludes us about a sentence when we remove that sentence from its use is its use.
The simplicity with which Wittgenstein would like to describe the way sentences represent, that is, in their grammar, as if how they represent is that they represent, where representation is itself the how, suggests that the complexity o f the question, and its animation of language is a function of how sentences are embedded in time. We cannot ask how a sentence represents because that is what sentences are (when they represent), but we can ask how sentences describe the limits of our temporal environment (because
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? this is what we do when we speak). Speaking can seem complex for simple reasons, as cognitive scientist Herbert Simon argues:
Aman,viewedasabehavingsystem,isquitesimple. Theapparentcomplexityof his behavior over time is largely a reflection o f the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself. (65)
I quote Simon here only to suggest that the role o f time in our characterization o f our confusion over how a sentence represents marks time as the environment o f language.
One cannot correlate a clock, a temporal scale, to time itself or to the world as one can a ruler to space. 12:00 does not pick out something in the world. We use 12:00 to mark or form the totality of our experience as a limited whole (limited temporally, and thus possessable). This marks our relation to the world as a meta-description. An atomic clock or the world, itself, constitutes time as the expression of the limit of the real. Different kinds o f clocks reveal different kinds o f worlds.
'Grief describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of ourlife. Iftheman'sbodilyexpressionofsorrowandofjoyalternated,saywith the ticking o f a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation o f the pattern ofsorrow or ofthe pattern ofjoy. (PI p. 174)
A poem ("The Prelude") or a novel (The Brothers Kamarozov) or a movie (Penny Serenade), might, however, serve as such a clock, in broad outline and in specific scenes generating emotional responses triggered by the alternating series o f representations forming a narrative. The Waste Land removes the narrative structure and pattern of identification that usually allows for the creation of emotional responses in an audience.
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? The fragments and bits o f dialogue, the shifting T makes the unstable scenes and moments of clarity grammatical shifts that funnel our emotions into our frustration over reference, or the underdetermined meaning ofthese references within the 'meaning' ofany particularsetoflines,andintotheshiftsbetweensenseandnonsense. Thisalsoisaclock, where ourjoy and sorrow maps onto our understanding and confusion or our investment ofemotional significance into moments ofsublimity, ofrecognized authority, of unconscious resonance, ofcliche, ofvoice and pronoun (taking the position of T , 'you', 'we' and 'they' [this last being a significant conceptualization o f one's own understanding, subjectivity, and self as an object relative to the poem])
The nature o f clocks: The number-signs on both analog and digital clocks are non- referring signs. This is not the case with spatial measurements, where the numbers on a ruler pick-out a defined set of points in the world. If I am walking some distance and I glance at my watch ever so often and say at 2:00 I am here, and here is across from X. Or At 10:30 1 was reading The Waste Land, or I was reading the line "My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad, Stay with me. " In the first case time is correlated with place. This correlation allows us to answer the question 'How far away is the moon? ' with the temporal designation three days. The correlation is really a triangulating mapping o f the numbers in the watch world and differences in the space-world onto my experience or possible experience: both place and time refer to me. But is using a measure o f time the same as using a measure of space even if both measurements resolve themselves in my subject position? In my "I am here" the demonstrative tells me to establish my position at
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? this point, seemingly saying I exist at the point now. This 'now' is a temporal frame organizing and expressing the possibilities of succession within my relation to space. 3
How do we measure ourselves in relation to the future? How do we measure the future as ours? One answer might be 'in hope. ' Plotinus distinguishes between what is in timeandtime. ThisseemslikethefallacythatWittgensteinarguesagainstintheBrown book, but Plotinus' version does not just reify time. It translates time into our being alive, our soul: "Time is the life (Coorjv) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another" (in. 7. 11. 43-5). (Is time, therefore, a possibility of movement animating, as a kind of potential, the soul? ) This is a description of the modifications of our stances within and towards language games within our forms of life. ? (C)riv and piov, while not identical with any of Wittgenstein's terms, describe aspects of what he means by formsoflife. Thelifeofthesoulandwaysoflifetogethermanifestformoflifewhenit describes our common humanity; this is a way of understanding our form of life under the aspect o f what Wittgenstein means by the soul when he says "The human body is the best picture of the human soul" (PI p. 178) and "If one sees the behavior of a living thing ones sees its soul"(PI? 357). In this last case one recognizes a living thing (not necessarily a human being) as distinct from an automaton. In the first case one recognizes a human
being as distinct from an animal, a recognition ofthe possibility that the body in front of mecanhope: "Onecanimagineananimalangry,frightened,unhappy,happy,startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p. 174). Wittgenstein continues, "Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a
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? character o f human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )" (PI p. 174).
Hope is a temporal mode, a kind o f expectation diminished from being probable into being possible (when it is not used as a synonym for "intention'). 4 Human beings can invest themselves in this possibility as if discovering themselves in their language, discoveringtheshapesoftheiridentityintheexpressionsoftheirdesire. Thelossofhope is used to explain the surrender of life: 'he died because he lost hope. ' Hope can be used to mark uncertainty: 'I intend to go to the moon, or at least I hope to. ' Statements of my intention abstract potential actions into a picture o f the future, that is to say, our investment in the statement "I intend to X" is part of a story that imagines my actions completed in the future.
Consequently, I say of someone else "He seems to believe . . . . " and other people say it of me. Now, why do I never say it of myself, nor even when others rightly say it of me? --do I myself not see and hear myself then? --That can be said. " (PI p. 191). I am invested in my use of intention and beliefin the way I am invested in my use of lI': "Think of the fact that one can predict one's own future action by an expression of intention" (PI
p. 191) The fact that intention can devolve into hope, while indicative of a loss of power relative to the world and to others, also exposes the future as not simply the extension of my will (as if an algorithm). A prediction of the future pictures the future as completed, drawing a line from my present through a story o f my actions to a future. My stance toward the future when expressing an intention is as it were a stance toward a story in which that future has expression (or means the completion of my intention). When I
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? express hope I have not drawn such a line between now and tomorrow. Hope describes a stance toward desire or intention, a stance, as it were, from the future looking back, characterizing my present intentions as possible. Why is hope not a stance toward the future as is intention? I f an intention is a prediction, o f my future, o f what I will do, hope is a description o f myself in the present. How is such a description possible? When I say 'I hope someday to have a house in Greece' I am saying that I want a house, but I am unsure if I will successfully obtain one. Have I erased "intend' and replaced it with hope, as if I
had in mind the present and the future without any intervening story (a story expressing faith maybe) connecting these two moments? Hope is an interpretation o f my intentions. My intention is a story of continuous action from now to the future (a future figured withinthestory). Thusaninterpretationofintentionisaninterpretationofacompleted action,anactioncompletedinthefuture. Mydoubtsaboutthepossibilityofthis completion, that characterize many uses of hope as opposed to intention, require that I view my intentions as it were from their completion, or from any moment of completion within the story. This viewing orjudgment, therefore, takes place as it were from the future. For example when 'I say I hope to go to the store', I might only mean 'I intend to go to the store. ' But if I say 'I hope I can go to the store' I underline my uncertainty that I will be able to go to the store. This uncertainty arises as an evaluation o f the stories I might tell myself about going to the store. For example 'given the weather, I will not be able to walk to the store. '
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? 13. 3 The theology of sentences
Tofindourselvesinthefutureistofindourselvesinourlanguage. Machines describe intention and humans express hope as two different ways o f making present the possibility of a future. The adjudication between machine time and human time as both aspects of our stance within our language toward ourselves, language, and time constitutes a debate about the soul. Philosophical Investigations and Finnegans Wake describe the limits of our humanity within such a debate. They, therefore, articulate a kind o f theology. Not, however, a theology o f the word, but o f the phrase (answering how we inhabit meaning) derived from Frege's "Es genugt, wenn der Satz als Ganzes einen Sinn hat; dadurch erhalten auch seine Theile ihren Inhalt" (Grundlagen ? 60). I call this theology in order to indicate the demand this kind of conception of meaning places on our conceptionsofholism. Itaketheologytodescribenotmetaphysicalclaimsaboutthe essence ofthe world or existence, but to describe the relation between totality (in versions of holism) and Actuality (in Aquinas' sense of existence being the highest form of actuality). 5
Investigations and the Wake are theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). I say they 'are' this, but what is hidden in this 'are'? Do they describe, define, function as, mimic, exist as, enact, appear as, invoke, evoke, expose, express,orembodythesedelimitations? Thestatusofbothofthesetextswithintheirown reflection on mind, what they are, is not a question about their truth value. How would we determine if they are true? What would count as the criteria for truth here? They do not refer to a mind or minds; or rather, if they do refer to something like a mind that
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? simply displaces the question of what they are or if they are 'true' to the truth of whatever this mind is and to the legitimacy and form o f their referring. How can we approach a mind? Maybe when we talk to someone or read a message or a treatise or some remarks. The complexity built into the 'are' in 'Investigations and the Wake are . . . ' determines both texts and the problem o f 'to be' as 'theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). ' I am describing a version o f the relation between theology and time that begins to set out how we convert ourselves in and out o f kinds o f time in
Investigations.
The form of Wittgenstein's description of our embedded inhabitation of our language and world, unlike Heidegger's in Being and Time, generates time as a grammatical effect not as an existential condition. Our sense of time is more like a report about the relation between our practices and actions (linguistic, physical, emotional, cognitive, etc. ) and what counts as the world within the complex interaction o f these practices. "WhoIam"isanembodimentofadynamicmetaphysics,theexpressionof which, however, cannot constitute a substance, but rather constitutes a kind of aesthetic with moral force. Such an aesthetics is better understood as theology: the expression o f a complex totality o f shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize, these practices. (How is this a form of Aristotle's
energeia or entelechial Energeia describes the self-supporting activity, as opposed to the incomplete process ofdynamis, that describe a functioning toward an end. But as an activity, energeia describes this end in its activity; it is self-generating according to a similar structural logic of dialectic mediation in Hegel, leading to absolute knowledge as
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? energeia leads to the Prime Mover, the "energeia o f nousf' [Meta. 1072b], The soul, as "the first entelechia of a natural body that potentially has life," enacts a similar circular movement allowing for the soul to cause the movement of the body or other things by being their final cause. The point o f this brief comparison is to draw out the structural circularity that describes grammar or our involvement in language as describing a kind of energeia, where form o f life describes an entelechia not understood as a final cause but as a grounding limit that actualizes [as opposed to causing] our human language as human language. Such comparisons are dangerous because they ignore both the philosophical and historical complexity involved in both cases. Courting that danger is necessary, I think,ifwearetounwindtheconceptsofmetaphysicsintotheiraestheticforce. This does not mean that one should ignore the conceptual logic o f Aristotle's terms and the very different conceptual logic underwriting Wittgenstein's analysis and grammar [as part of the very different histories in which they thought], but it does mean that the form of this logic has a metaphoric force that can constitute a language game, as an object of comparison, which engages our involvement in our own language more fully than would a more conceptual and historical analysis. 6)
Let me return to the 'who I am' as "an expression of a complex totality of shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize these practices. "--This is not to say that the 'I' is some hidden limit, an ich-in- sich. It is not a thing in the sense that it can or cannot be represented. Representation would be beside the point. One cannot, after all, represent a commitment, a gesture, a feeling, a desire, an understanding, a disposition except as ordering time.
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? The declaration or report "I understand" does not describe a mental state. Wittgenstein describes a situation in which someone is presented by someone else (A) with a mathematical series (4, 6, 8, 10): "He watches A writing his numbers down with a certain feeling oftension, and all sorts ofvague thoughts go through his head. Finally he asks himself: 'what is the series of differences? ' He finds the series . . . and says: 'Now I can go on'" (PI? 151). What counts as understanding the series here is not just writing down the correct numbers of the series. A computer could generate such a list, but does it understand the series? The processes within the computer for determining the formula of any series o f numbers does not describe understanding the series as some mathematical process. The computer uses a set of algorithms or heuristics to match the series of numbers with a method o f generating them. Such procedures describe ways o f going on (with the series), but not an understanding either o f the series (as a mathematical series for example) or o f what it means to go on. But why should we be concerned with "what it means to go on"? Wittgenstein is arguing that there is no common process called understanding that is common to all cases of understanding. In the case of the computer we might say that the computer must embed its generation of a particular series within an understandingmodule. Thecomputerwouldbeinastateofunderstandingwheneverthe mathematical description of a series could be inputted into this module. This picture of
understanding, o f course, says nothing about what it means to understand, other than attaching "I understand" to some mathematical process.
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? We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind). " We go up to the thing we mean.
"When one thinks something, it is oneselfthinking"; so one is oneselfin motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed
not
Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone. ((PI? ? 455, 456, 457) Ourpicturesofourlanguageuseareboundupinmetaphors. Thesemetaphors,asis explicit in this case, are the means by which we allegorize ourselves into our language. Thinking or speaking describes a movement that changes one's relation to the world, in a way like going up to a person does. If I go up to you I instigate a relationship in which everything means something to you and me, even if I do or say nothing else ("going up to someone" means to enter into that space within which attention is demanded, although the limitsofthisspacevaryfrompersontopersonandculturetoculture). Howisthinking like "rushing ahead"? This seems like a description of the limits of self-reflection, but only if going up to someone is not oneself (can we run up to ourselves? ). In ascribing a physiognomy to words we allegorize them as persons, where their meaning is like their mind.
13. 2 Understanding, or Not, How Not to Go On
The clearest invocation ofthe possibility ofthe future as an essence ofour form of lifeintheInvestigationsoccursinWittgenstein'sdiscussionofhope: "Onecanimaginean animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p.
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? 174). How are the workings of "the phenomena of hopes" (as one kind of "Meaning") related to the grammar ofunderstanding entered into through Wittgenstein's description of "how we go on", in a mathematical series, for example, or in reading Finnegans Wake? The collapse and slippage between these two kinds o f meaning determine the limits o f the problem of "meaning" in both the Investigations and the Wake. In this, these texts come up against Melville's short story "Bartleby. " The story describes the frustration and attraction of a narrator who, as a lawyer, has hired Bartleby as a scrivener. Bartleby, however, soon begins a slow renunciation o f the claims and authority human beings (or society) have on him by reducing his own will to nothing more than a refusal to do anything. Bartleby slowly dies. How could Joyce and Wittgenstein answer or respond to the rejection of any possiblejustification of life, understanding, communication, community, or hope expressed by Bartleby? Bartleby's refusal to reply to all requests put on him, to all interchange beyond his "I'd prefer not to" leaves him a cipher, part o f a code lost to language because it (I mean "he") is lost to all human community, existing at the limit of language, except for his, therefore curious responses (why respond at all? ). He
has lost any future. We inhabit the possibility of a future as the ground of our being, signaled by our hoping, but embodied in our language and thus susceptible to denial.
Bartleby's refusal o f meaning answers a child's asking "What should (or can) I do now? " : heanswerswithhisownacceptanceofhisboredom. Whyisitorhowcoulditevenbe possible for a child to ask such a question? (What is signaled by the difficulty o f knowing whether to ask "why" or "how" here? ). If we have forgotten the child's question what have we replaced it with? Are our everyday practices enough like those o f animals to say
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? that this question is no longer relevant in the way it is not for them? How (and why) does the justification Bartleby fails to find underlie our uses o f language? Bartleby has reduced himselfj in a kind o f devolving exhaustion, to a single intention attached to a single desire: to refuse through a complete disengagement from all external, relative to his single intention, demands and intentions. This intention is circular, a continual negation o f the future and therefore an assertion o f a presentness, which does not even include any desire (except his resistance). Without a future or a future directed set o f desires Bartleby has erased hope from his world. He has diminished himselfto the edge of humanity. He remains human primarily through the exercise of his will to resist the demands or appeals directed toward him. This is a way of again asking what is the theological dimensions of
Wittgenstein's use o f the soul in Philosophical Investigations?
I f the moment seems to describe human consciousness, the structure o f the future
as a possibility seems to be described by a machine. Wittgenstein analyzes the figuration ofthe future as a machine:
The machine as symbolizing its action: the action o f a machine--I might say at first--seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? --If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined. (PI? 193)
In this the possibility o f a movement seems determined by the structure o f the machine. The parts could o f course fail, but "in many cases we don't think o f that at all. We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine. " The machine symbolizes its own action, and thus it embodies as the aspect of its structure
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? a kind of self-reflection in which its future is determined as a function of what it is. In this itsfunctioningfollowsanidealizedpathalreadytranscendentwithinitsdesign. Amachine seems to generate time through its determined changes in state, the unrolling of a pattern determined by its structure (or seemingly what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein calls, with some ambiguity as Ramsey points out, "the form o f representation [which] is the possibility that the things are so combined with one another as are the elements o f the picture" (2. 1511). Machine time can be described by a diagram o f the machine itself,
where its future actions, its description o f its own changes by those changes, is derived from "the movement of its parts from it [the diagram] (Just as we can give someone a number by telling him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series 1, 4, 9, 16. . . . ). " Such a series , a time-line ofbefore and afters, and our translation into such a machine would translate McTaggert's A-series into a B-series, the existential now into an objectified history, the formula o f dynamism Adams uses to figure himself within a Godless universe.
Wittgenstein diagnoses the mistake in this picturing o f the machine's future movements as if these movements were objects "already lying in a drawer and which we then take out. " These future movements are the way we configure the future for the machine. If faced with an actual machine we no longer assume its parts will not fail. Thus we can see the machine under two different aspects: the putative movements in (1) the machine-as-symbol which functions "far more determinably than in (2) the actual machine. " Thepredeterminedmovementsinthemodelofthemachinesymbolizingitself might seem to be already present in the symbol itself (PI? 193). The motion o f the machine, the movement describing time, seems condensed into the design of the machine
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? made manifest in the machine itself as if the machine were a drawing o f itself at all possible moments.
Wittgenstein goes on to investigate this seeming presentness o f the future in the machine as symbol: "When does one have the thought: the possible movements o f a machine are already there in it in some mysterious sense? -- Well when one is doing philosophy" (PI? 194). Putting philosophical pressure on our descriptions of machines separates the concept of the possibility of movement from our actual usage of the "phrase 'possibility of movement' when we are talking about a given machine". We imagine because of the defined character of the parts and actions of a machine that the possibility of its movement is somehow part of it, "like a shadow of the movement itself. "2 This possibility, this shadow, we imagine attached to that which is (or can) move; we imagine an entire world constructed out of possibility and tangent to every actual movement and change. Aheadofit? alongsideit?
Wittgenstein asks how we use the phrase "possibility of movement when we are talking about a given machine? " An answer:
We say "Experience will shew whether this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not say "Experience will shew whether this is the possibility ofthis movement": 'so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility o f precisely this movement'. (PI? 194)
If we say Adams wants to formalize himselfj so that he describes a kind of logical engine, does one ask o f him "Will experience show whether this formula (or any description) is a formuladescribingbeingasaformula? "Apossibilitydoesnotexistwithintheworld. This
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? is not an intentionality ofgears and wheels, but a figuration ofbeing human as an effect of a being described by the mechanisms ofthe world (made visible for Adams in the laws of physics). Human beings become fictions ofthe world, fictions which we can best interpret through, at least for Adams, a kind of metaphorized science.
What happens when we separate "the possibility o f movement" from a particular usage and hypostatize it as somehow present in the machine, finding the future somehow present in the present? Would Wittgenstein's therapy dissolve Adams' translation of himself into a machine (dynamo) or formula, his analogizing himself as a possibility made manifest through the workings of nature? If one becomes a formula one's future is determined, present in the formula itself. At the very least this is a misunderstanding of thenatureoftheuseofmathematicsinphysics. Thisusageisimmenselycomplicated. Mathematical functions can serve as representations, interpretations, measurements, descriptive metaphor and so on. Does this mean that mathematics functions as a language? How could a mathematical syntax correlated with data function like a full blownlanguage? Couldsyntaxembodyafuture? AnaspectofAdams'misunderstanding, however, exposes a deep problem: what is the relation between description and metaphor? A more fundamental version of this question is what is the relationship between
algorithms and metaphors? In this question there lies another book (fully present? ). But this question points at the nature of the mistake Wittgenstein is investigating. The confusion about the future, as if it were present in the present, arises whenever we imagine that the meaning or future sense of something lies in a picture of it, in a symbol, in the thing-itself when we are not using it but when it serves to stand for itself. Their are two
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? confusions here. The first confusion follows from the extraction o f signs and objects from their ordinary use into some meta-description. In the second confusion, the process of symbolization makes visible the future in such a way that it gets attached to any meaningful unit within this process as ifpart ofthe physiognomy ofthis unit. Things can symbolize themselves. What Wittgenstein is exposing here is the grammatical structure of the future, and the temptations for distortion that attend our functioning within symbol systems:
"But I don't mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use causally and as a matter o f experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some sense present. " But of course it is, 'in some queer sense'! Really the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression "in a queer way". The rest is all right; and the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language game for it from the one in which we actually use it. (PI? I95)
The sense o f the future being present in a word or in the 'now' is the result o f how these words or any 'now' emerges and functions within a grammar which describes the future within its symbolic processes. Because this symbolic structure can seem to collapse into a word it seems to excavate within a word a possibility for meaning which is at the same time a possibility for the future. This future, however, is not present in the word in any real sense. It is rather a part of our grammar. Because words and the 'now' function within language (or a symbolic grammar) they can symbolize themselves (as can a machine). Thisself-symbolizationextractsthewordorthe'now'fromitsgrammar. At this point the future (or meaning) seems "in some sense present" in a "queer way. " We
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? have brought the word or the 'now' to the surface without its grammar, and thus the future use seems present in the word.
When we attempt to describe our experience as if this experience were not embedded in language games, as if we grasped the future first before our use of the word 'future' in a particular language game, our experience seems odd (Cf. Edward's failure to lose himself when he loses his wife). For Wittgenstein this oddness is an effect o f a mistake. Adams, however, translates himself into machine metaphors because o f a failure of moral language (of the sort MacIntyre describes in After Virtue), which makes any morality incoherent. This incoherence he understands as an effect of the collapse of an ontology (theology) in which a moral stance is binding because it is embedded in a set of ontological commitments. Adams' asks, in effect, can we make moral sense in any version of our language? One could also ask what kind of moral pressure do science and technology place on the coherence of our ordinary language? (This question is one result of my inquiry).
Earlier I presented a scene describing one way o f recognizing the force o f this question. I wrote, "As in the machine symbolism of Yeats the symbols of identity constituting 'What The Thunder Said', the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which we might find ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as containers for our minds, and in this offer o f our translation into the structure of a thing we project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us. The logic o f identity, o f equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' o f existence, articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The Waste
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? Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the crucial analogy. The temptation toward a theory o f identity as a theory o f meaning builds minds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit o f death that constructs our lives as containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious lands, shapes, and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container. "
And Wittgenstein might respond: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -- In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? --Or is the use its life? " (PI? 432). We have two kinds ofuse here. Does use give signs a kind oflife, as ifthe words are puppets or wind-up toys; or are they hammers and saws, with no hidden strings or engines. Thedifferenceseemstobeoneofhowmediatedourrelationistothesewords. Do we give them their power to then go and do their work, or is their energy and use always intimately ours. But Eliot or Joyce might also asks 'Do all uses offer the same life? ' Shouldn't we also be debating about kinds o f life? This would be to revisit the history and conceptual logic ofthe development ofthe soul from distinct eschatological and psychological souls, what Arbman called, in his study o f the Vedic soul, the free soul and the body-soul, into a unified soul under the semantic rubric of the free soul. J.
Breamer argues that a similar conceptual unification took place in Greece, where Homer's description o f human beings under the aspects o f many souls, the body-soul (thymos, noos, and menos) and the free soul (psyche) is later unified in the Psyche. Aristotle in his history of the soul in Book I ofDe Anima organizes the development of a united soul around the principle of movement (kinesis) and of perception (disthesis). Such principles define one set o f criteria for animation. Aristotle transforms these criteria into the
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? characterization o f the soul as "the first entelecheia o f a natural body that potentially has life" (De anima. 11. 412a). ( I do not explicate what this means here; I think, however, Heidegger's animation o f the thing is a development o f this definition o f the soul as a descriptionoftheworld. Itrytoshowthisinmyanalysisof"DasDing"; partofwhatI need here is the idea that we enter into language through the figure of its animation).
"In use it [a sign] is alive" describes our use o f words as if tools, where the hatchet vanishes into an extension o f our arm. Or as if I found an order floating my way and I accept it as directed to me. I accept it into me; this is my act o f will and understanding. The order is an algorithm and once understood takes over my body (or mind) and I act. So someone might say "There is a gulfbetween an order and its execution. It has to filled by the act of understanding. " Can we refuse the order if we understand it? Wittgenstein does not invoke the will, but points to the will as a negative, as what would answer his question: If I give an order to someone--"How does he know at all what use he is to makeofthesignsIgivehim,whatevertheyare? "(PI? 433). TheWillfillsthisrole,butof course to offer the will as an answer here is simply to offer another black box. Is this different from becoming alive?
If it is asked: "How do sentences manage to represent? "--the answer might be: "Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you use them. " For nothing is concealed.
How do sentences do it? --Don't you know? For nothing is hidden.
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? But given this answer: "But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed" one would like to retort "Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view. "(PI? 435)
Wittgenstein resists the view that language "goes by so quick. " This sense of effervescence expresses a dissatisfaction with ordinary language, which can seem "too crude" to capture phenomena that, as Augustine writes, "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". What eludes us when we use language? Nothing. Then why do we insist that something eludes us? If we ask "how do sentences do it? ", mean something or anything, we have made them into agents,withintention,willandtheabilitytoact. Theanimationofthesesentencesmakes them surrogates for ourselves and thus embeds them in the world we imagine ourselves inhabiting. Sentences seem limited by time if they are extracted from their grammar (usage). If words (or sentences) function like agents then their ordinary usage, their grammar, functions like time does for us. What eludes us about a sentence when we remove that sentence from its use is its use.
The simplicity with which Wittgenstein would like to describe the way sentences represent, that is, in their grammar, as if how they represent is that they represent, where representation is itself the how, suggests that the complexity o f the question, and its animation of language is a function of how sentences are embedded in time. We cannot ask how a sentence represents because that is what sentences are (when they represent), but we can ask how sentences describe the limits of our temporal environment (because
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? this is what we do when we speak). Speaking can seem complex for simple reasons, as cognitive scientist Herbert Simon argues:
Aman,viewedasabehavingsystem,isquitesimple. Theapparentcomplexityof his behavior over time is largely a reflection o f the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself. (65)
I quote Simon here only to suggest that the role o f time in our characterization o f our confusion over how a sentence represents marks time as the environment o f language.
One cannot correlate a clock, a temporal scale, to time itself or to the world as one can a ruler to space. 12:00 does not pick out something in the world. We use 12:00 to mark or form the totality of our experience as a limited whole (limited temporally, and thus possessable). This marks our relation to the world as a meta-description. An atomic clock or the world, itself, constitutes time as the expression of the limit of the real. Different kinds o f clocks reveal different kinds o f worlds.
'Grief describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of ourlife. Iftheman'sbodilyexpressionofsorrowandofjoyalternated,saywith the ticking o f a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation o f the pattern ofsorrow or ofthe pattern ofjoy. (PI p. 174)
A poem ("The Prelude") or a novel (The Brothers Kamarozov) or a movie (Penny Serenade), might, however, serve as such a clock, in broad outline and in specific scenes generating emotional responses triggered by the alternating series o f representations forming a narrative. The Waste Land removes the narrative structure and pattern of identification that usually allows for the creation of emotional responses in an audience.
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? The fragments and bits o f dialogue, the shifting T makes the unstable scenes and moments of clarity grammatical shifts that funnel our emotions into our frustration over reference, or the underdetermined meaning ofthese references within the 'meaning' ofany particularsetoflines,andintotheshiftsbetweensenseandnonsense. Thisalsoisaclock, where ourjoy and sorrow maps onto our understanding and confusion or our investment ofemotional significance into moments ofsublimity, ofrecognized authority, of unconscious resonance, ofcliche, ofvoice and pronoun (taking the position of T , 'you', 'we' and 'they' [this last being a significant conceptualization o f one's own understanding, subjectivity, and self as an object relative to the poem])
The nature o f clocks: The number-signs on both analog and digital clocks are non- referring signs. This is not the case with spatial measurements, where the numbers on a ruler pick-out a defined set of points in the world. If I am walking some distance and I glance at my watch ever so often and say at 2:00 I am here, and here is across from X. Or At 10:30 1 was reading The Waste Land, or I was reading the line "My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad, Stay with me. " In the first case time is correlated with place. This correlation allows us to answer the question 'How far away is the moon? ' with the temporal designation three days. The correlation is really a triangulating mapping o f the numbers in the watch world and differences in the space-world onto my experience or possible experience: both place and time refer to me. But is using a measure o f time the same as using a measure of space even if both measurements resolve themselves in my subject position? In my "I am here" the demonstrative tells me to establish my position at
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? this point, seemingly saying I exist at the point now. This 'now' is a temporal frame organizing and expressing the possibilities of succession within my relation to space. 3
How do we measure ourselves in relation to the future? How do we measure the future as ours? One answer might be 'in hope. ' Plotinus distinguishes between what is in timeandtime. ThisseemslikethefallacythatWittgensteinarguesagainstintheBrown book, but Plotinus' version does not just reify time. It translates time into our being alive, our soul: "Time is the life (Coorjv) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another" (in. 7. 11. 43-5). (Is time, therefore, a possibility of movement animating, as a kind of potential, the soul? ) This is a description of the modifications of our stances within and towards language games within our forms of life. ? (C)riv and piov, while not identical with any of Wittgenstein's terms, describe aspects of what he means by formsoflife. Thelifeofthesoulandwaysoflifetogethermanifestformoflifewhenit describes our common humanity; this is a way of understanding our form of life under the aspect o f what Wittgenstein means by the soul when he says "The human body is the best picture of the human soul" (PI p. 178) and "If one sees the behavior of a living thing ones sees its soul"(PI? 357). In this last case one recognizes a living thing (not necessarily a human being) as distinct from an automaton. In the first case one recognizes a human
being as distinct from an animal, a recognition ofthe possibility that the body in front of mecanhope: "Onecanimagineananimalangry,frightened,unhappy,happy,startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p. 174). Wittgenstein continues, "Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a
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? character o f human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )" (PI p. 174).
Hope is a temporal mode, a kind o f expectation diminished from being probable into being possible (when it is not used as a synonym for "intention'). 4 Human beings can invest themselves in this possibility as if discovering themselves in their language, discoveringtheshapesoftheiridentityintheexpressionsoftheirdesire. Thelossofhope is used to explain the surrender of life: 'he died because he lost hope. ' Hope can be used to mark uncertainty: 'I intend to go to the moon, or at least I hope to. ' Statements of my intention abstract potential actions into a picture o f the future, that is to say, our investment in the statement "I intend to X" is part of a story that imagines my actions completed in the future.
Consequently, I say of someone else "He seems to believe . . . . " and other people say it of me. Now, why do I never say it of myself, nor even when others rightly say it of me? --do I myself not see and hear myself then? --That can be said. " (PI p. 191). I am invested in my use of intention and beliefin the way I am invested in my use of lI': "Think of the fact that one can predict one's own future action by an expression of intention" (PI
p. 191) The fact that intention can devolve into hope, while indicative of a loss of power relative to the world and to others, also exposes the future as not simply the extension of my will (as if an algorithm). A prediction of the future pictures the future as completed, drawing a line from my present through a story o f my actions to a future. My stance toward the future when expressing an intention is as it were a stance toward a story in which that future has expression (or means the completion of my intention). When I
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? express hope I have not drawn such a line between now and tomorrow. Hope describes a stance toward desire or intention, a stance, as it were, from the future looking back, characterizing my present intentions as possible. Why is hope not a stance toward the future as is intention? I f an intention is a prediction, o f my future, o f what I will do, hope is a description o f myself in the present. How is such a description possible? When I say 'I hope someday to have a house in Greece' I am saying that I want a house, but I am unsure if I will successfully obtain one. Have I erased "intend' and replaced it with hope, as if I
had in mind the present and the future without any intervening story (a story expressing faith maybe) connecting these two moments? Hope is an interpretation o f my intentions. My intention is a story of continuous action from now to the future (a future figured withinthestory). Thusaninterpretationofintentionisaninterpretationofacompleted action,anactioncompletedinthefuture. Mydoubtsaboutthepossibilityofthis completion, that characterize many uses of hope as opposed to intention, require that I view my intentions as it were from their completion, or from any moment of completion within the story. This viewing orjudgment, therefore, takes place as it were from the future. For example when 'I say I hope to go to the store', I might only mean 'I intend to go to the store. ' But if I say 'I hope I can go to the store' I underline my uncertainty that I will be able to go to the store. This uncertainty arises as an evaluation o f the stories I might tell myself about going to the store. For example 'given the weather, I will not be able to walk to the store. '
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? 13. 3 The theology of sentences
Tofindourselvesinthefutureistofindourselvesinourlanguage. Machines describe intention and humans express hope as two different ways o f making present the possibility of a future. The adjudication between machine time and human time as both aspects of our stance within our language toward ourselves, language, and time constitutes a debate about the soul. Philosophical Investigations and Finnegans Wake describe the limits of our humanity within such a debate. They, therefore, articulate a kind o f theology. Not, however, a theology o f the word, but o f the phrase (answering how we inhabit meaning) derived from Frege's "Es genugt, wenn der Satz als Ganzes einen Sinn hat; dadurch erhalten auch seine Theile ihren Inhalt" (Grundlagen ? 60). I call this theology in order to indicate the demand this kind of conception of meaning places on our conceptionsofholism. Itaketheologytodescribenotmetaphysicalclaimsaboutthe essence ofthe world or existence, but to describe the relation between totality (in versions of holism) and Actuality (in Aquinas' sense of existence being the highest form of actuality). 5
Investigations and the Wake are theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). I say they 'are' this, but what is hidden in this 'are'? Do they describe, define, function as, mimic, exist as, enact, appear as, invoke, evoke, expose, express,orembodythesedelimitations? Thestatusofbothofthesetextswithintheirown reflection on mind, what they are, is not a question about their truth value. How would we determine if they are true? What would count as the criteria for truth here? They do not refer to a mind or minds; or rather, if they do refer to something like a mind that
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? simply displaces the question of what they are or if they are 'true' to the truth of whatever this mind is and to the legitimacy and form o f their referring. How can we approach a mind? Maybe when we talk to someone or read a message or a treatise or some remarks. The complexity built into the 'are' in 'Investigations and the Wake are . . . ' determines both texts and the problem o f 'to be' as 'theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). ' I am describing a version o f the relation between theology and time that begins to set out how we convert ourselves in and out o f kinds o f time in
Investigations.
The form of Wittgenstein's description of our embedded inhabitation of our language and world, unlike Heidegger's in Being and Time, generates time as a grammatical effect not as an existential condition. Our sense of time is more like a report about the relation between our practices and actions (linguistic, physical, emotional, cognitive, etc. ) and what counts as the world within the complex interaction o f these practices. "WhoIam"isanembodimentofadynamicmetaphysics,theexpressionof which, however, cannot constitute a substance, but rather constitutes a kind of aesthetic with moral force. Such an aesthetics is better understood as theology: the expression o f a complex totality o f shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize, these practices. (How is this a form of Aristotle's
energeia or entelechial Energeia describes the self-supporting activity, as opposed to the incomplete process ofdynamis, that describe a functioning toward an end. But as an activity, energeia describes this end in its activity; it is self-generating according to a similar structural logic of dialectic mediation in Hegel, leading to absolute knowledge as
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? energeia leads to the Prime Mover, the "energeia o f nousf' [Meta. 1072b], The soul, as "the first entelechia of a natural body that potentially has life," enacts a similar circular movement allowing for the soul to cause the movement of the body or other things by being their final cause. The point o f this brief comparison is to draw out the structural circularity that describes grammar or our involvement in language as describing a kind of energeia, where form o f life describes an entelechia not understood as a final cause but as a grounding limit that actualizes [as opposed to causing] our human language as human language. Such comparisons are dangerous because they ignore both the philosophical and historical complexity involved in both cases. Courting that danger is necessary, I think,ifwearetounwindtheconceptsofmetaphysicsintotheiraestheticforce. This does not mean that one should ignore the conceptual logic o f Aristotle's terms and the very different conceptual logic underwriting Wittgenstein's analysis and grammar [as part of the very different histories in which they thought], but it does mean that the form of this logic has a metaphoric force that can constitute a language game, as an object of comparison, which engages our involvement in our own language more fully than would a more conceptual and historical analysis. 6)
Let me return to the 'who I am' as "an expression of a complex totality of shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize these practices. "--This is not to say that the 'I' is some hidden limit, an ich-in- sich. It is not a thing in the sense that it can or cannot be represented. Representation would be beside the point. One cannot, after all, represent a commitment, a gesture, a feeling, a desire, an understanding, a disposition except as ordering time.
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? The declaration or report "I understand" does not describe a mental state. Wittgenstein describes a situation in which someone is presented by someone else (A) with a mathematical series (4, 6, 8, 10): "He watches A writing his numbers down with a certain feeling oftension, and all sorts ofvague thoughts go through his head. Finally he asks himself: 'what is the series of differences? ' He finds the series . . . and says: 'Now I can go on'" (PI? 151). What counts as understanding the series here is not just writing down the correct numbers of the series. A computer could generate such a list, but does it understand the series? The processes within the computer for determining the formula of any series o f numbers does not describe understanding the series as some mathematical process. The computer uses a set of algorithms or heuristics to match the series of numbers with a method o f generating them. Such procedures describe ways o f going on (with the series), but not an understanding either o f the series (as a mathematical series for example) or o f what it means to go on. But why should we be concerned with "what it means to go on"? Wittgenstein is arguing that there is no common process called understanding that is common to all cases of understanding. In the case of the computer we might say that the computer must embed its generation of a particular series within an understandingmodule. Thecomputerwouldbeinastateofunderstandingwheneverthe mathematical description of a series could be inputted into this module. This picture of
understanding, o f course, says nothing about what it means to understand, other than attaching "I understand" to some mathematical process.
