No More Learning

What is to be illustrated is obvious--the proverb. Is the interpretation clear? Keats' claim about proverbs is itselfa proverb illustrating another proverb--"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. " Something becomes real in this sense when one views one's life as such an illustration. In this case, Keats offers us an ontological criterion in order to make sense, or rather to make the world in which the first proverb functions: Proverbs become proverbs to us when our life illustrates them, because nothing is real until we experience it. Experiencing is a kind of illustration--that turns the type (the proverb) into the token (the proverbfo r us: we can use it because we have become its token: this is an illustration of meaning from given types into particular tokens: from language to us). The proverb is meant to be true in all cases, let us say, within its world, or within the language game in which we mean (self-reflection or instantiation within the language game) as an illustration o f the proverb, where we can measure ourselves as real (as defined by the proverb: the proverb measures us), and we can measure the proverb as True: "'p' is p". Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves as one ofthose cases, within the totality defined by that "all". Whatever is real
is something we have experienced, in which case everything we have experienced is real to
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us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb, let us say it is a true statement about what is real, i. e. , what we experience, when we recognize it as an accurate description o f what we count as real.
Proverbs for Keats, therefore, are curious examples of aspect seeing. Instead of seeing a duck or a rabbit, however, we see ourselves, our life--as a narrative? a picture? what do we see? But what is illustrated for whom? The proverb does not illustrate our life, weillustrateit. Thusitisseeingourselvesasanillustrationandtheproverbasa descriptiontobeillustrated. ThetransformationofProverbintoproverbandourlifeinto an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change ofbeing but as a transformation of aspect. The proverb is not strictly speaking a description of our life but it is a way of our seeing ourselves, a description ofmeaning as opposed to experience; that is why we illustrate it.
Adams is calling for a more radical transformation, an objectification o f himself mirroringhisnarrationofhislifeinthirdperson. TheironyofAdams'provocationto become a formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss o f humanity is required in order to be. Human beings have become fragments under the gears o f the totality o f the world. This inversion marks the end not only o f human beings but o f human beings as Newtonian machines, as clay pot with gears inside. It is as if the demands o f the world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens, or, more specifically formulaic, descriptions ofthe world in order to enter into the conditionsofbeingandactingdeterminingwhatisreal. Ineffectourabilitytomeasure the proverb as True becomes impossible, collapses into our vanishing into a formulation of
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the criteria determining the real. This is a way of saying that we are replaced by ontologicalcriteria. Ourexistenceisimpotentbeforeorwithoutthesecriteria,these determinations. Do we imagine someone in Adams' world asking "Is this formula true for me? " as one might about a proverb? Adams can only become real if he refigures himself as what counts as real in what he already knows and what he cannot resist as Real. Skepticism in this world begins as a case ofseeing oneselfas unreal and the world as real;
oneself as a projection, a fantasy, a dream: the world exists, but do I?
The systematic totalization of the real, where we are presented neither with objects
nor fantasies, but with the conditions of reality, where the criteria determining what counts asrealbecometheobjectswesee,removestheworldassomethingweexperience. Our science is not a science o f empiricism, but an attempt to determine and articulate ontological conditions or descriptions. By this I mean that empiricism has been replaced by metaphysics. The picture underlying much o f biology is "Genes determine what counts as a human being": it is not that we illustrate the genes--we manifest them in a particular way; we are determined by them, and, therefore, they are always ours in a way a proverb canneverbe. Aproverbisanideal,aplatonicformunderwhichwegainrealityandit
gains truth; a string o f nucleic bases describes us for the world, into the real, where being human as opposed to being a chimpanzee is the effect o f this description enacted through biochemistry. Are we true copies? Maybe, but that either means we are positing other determining factors, environment for example, or we lose our claim-usually our life, to being human. Genes make us real. Biology is becoming, as Chemistry has already become, o f course in varying degrees, engineering. One does- not have to think o f science
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in this way, it is, as Wittgenstein might say, the picture is forced upon Adams and to a large degree upon us. But it is a picture that competes with another cultural picture--half Cartesian, with our bodies as forms to be filled, and halfromantic, with the filling allegorized onto language, the world, and our pictures of ourselves.
The disorder ofour language is a function ofthe disorder ofour culture and its failure to organize human life in relation to the order ofthe world enacted through science and technology. The effect ofthis is to require the kind ofjustification ofone's being, identity, life, picture o f the world that Conrad asks for when he requires that art justify itself in every line if it is to be called art (The Nigger o f the Narcissus). This can be understood as a drive toward totality, as either a resistance or response to, what Adams' calls, "that path of newest science [where] one saw no unity ahead--nothing but a dissolving mind" (434). I f "Mind and Unity flourished or perished together", then the dissolution o f the unity guaranteed by God results (at the time Adams was writing) with
"Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had once seen lines of will. Adamsconcludes"thatthesequenceofmenledtonothingandthesequenceoftheir society could lead no further, while the mere sequence oftime was artificial, and the sequence o f thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence o f force" (382). Adams further reduces the grounding o f moral being in the recognition o f a common humanity to therecognitionofuniversalizingconstitutiveforces. Theproblemofmoralapplication that concerned Kant, however, is dissolved into individual powerlessness: Act is replaced with being acted upon. Human beings mean as the nexus of forces within the world. In
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being the nexus o f forces the relation between being human and the being o f the universe is constructed as a pure limit, as a contentless unit o f self-reflection:
The sum o f force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he is the sum ofthe forces that attract him. . . The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection o f his own unity, containing all forces except himself. (474-75)
This unit o f self-reflection is contentless because unity is the act o f self-reflection itself (notthecontentofthisreflection). Consequentlyself-reflectioncanonlygeneratesymbols not the forces that constitute what is (476).
For Adams the sense of life requires some commonality, some meta-identity into which the seemingly incommensurable logics, forces, sequences o f the dynamo and virgin can be converted: this identity is his mind (383). Adams required that intellectual energy reduce into a kind of physical energy, or that they both reduce to some more primal form o f energy. This is one way o f conceiving Artificial Intelligence. Such a picture, however, lacksanyscientificvalueorvalidity. Adams'translatesourpictureofthemindintoan analogic language in which incommensurable and irreducible realms could be re-valued. Mind in this sense separates from materiality but so does science, in that they both are mapped into the language of special objects, concepts, forces, energy, or mathematics, and in this allow human values to be refigured with ontological force. Such force remains, however, only analogic, and with Adams, therefore, depends on scientific ignorance, not suspended belief, and on philosophical naivete.
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In Y eats the temptation o f Adams' reductive conversion o f mental into physical, a version o f which he pursued in "Sailing to Byzantium," is itself converted into a kind o f hierarchical equivocation:
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory o f changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
What is it that is described as possibly miracle, bird or artifact? "All that man is"? The bodily form ofthe golden bird ofthe emperor's smithies? Whatever is also "image, man or shade" of the previous stanza? These are all versions ofthe soul or rather versions of the mind following our intentionality backwards from the things it picks out to the limits oflanguage pointing inward. The realm ofspirit, itselfanalogic for that which or who fears death and desires immortality (hades' crow), gains a greater claim on us, a claim greater than bird or handiwork. But is this partial priority only for us, as a function of our desire for its power? Do 'we' identify, commit, and recognize ourselves to and within this realm? The miracle is that we find ourselves planted and crowing within the mythic, star-lit golden bough, like the cocks of Hades. The equivocation between "image, man or shade" and "miracle, bird, or golden handiwork" is not resolved by the "more miracle than. . . ",
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but shifts from asking 'what is it? ', and expecting an answer to 'who is it? , to asking 'which world do we inhabit, a world ofmiracle or handiwork? ' Are these the same world?
Is our choice between being image or handiwork? Miracle and handiwork are both possibledescriptionsofhumanbeings. Withinthepoemtherearenowaysorresources for deciding between these two possibilities. Miracles cannot resist their degradation into handiwork and then into mire and blood.
We flip aspects from miracle to handiwork in the rest ofthe stanza. The light is no longer traced back to a tapestry of stars but to "the moon embittered. " Crowing can be heard as "scorn aloud". The mechanical form ofthe earlier bird returns as "changeless metal". The sublimation into the "glory" ofthis metal or into the miracle at best remain aspects of the "common bird or petal/ And all complexities o f mire or blood. " The demand forjustification that propels Adams into the figure ofthe machine remains the condition of our being within these complexities of chaos, life and death. The movement Adams finds himself attracted to gets formalized in the "dancing floor', but again as a pun in which an object as the context for human activities, as a version of the world, can be read as dancing itself (synecdochic identity encapsulating human interaction: as in let's go to a dance, where what is to be done becomes totalized as a place, activity, and social entity all
analogized through the transformation o f verb into noun as a kind o f thing). This too is a way o f animating the inanimate.
These versions o f animism and mind-making resist transcendence and moral development through a kind of instability (chaos for Adams; the pull of mire and blood for Yeats) that inverts romantic soul-making. What is being made, described, converted, etc.
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becomes mysterious, even it if one calls it "mind" the varying aspects with which it conformsemptiesthistermofanysense. Itiswewhoareindangerofbecoming senseless,nottheworld(asonemightimagineKeatsfearing). Adams'problemof introjecting chaos into order can be seen both as organizing the forces o f the world according to a religious sense and in projecting the scientific order describing the world into the chaos ofthe mind.
If Yeats desires transformation in "Sailing to Byzantium", then it is not into the self-beggettor, the magi, but into a machine that mimics the form o f art in its body in order to speak within what is itself a formed world, and beyond this into the ear o f the powers determining the wealth, the power, the freedom ofthis world: the emperor somewhere off stage. WhatYeats'narratorinvestsinthe"formtheGreciangoldsmithsmake"isthe desire to be made, to function as a symbol o f some whole. (Not to use the world like Keats, but to be used by something besides the world). Both an "aged man. . . studying monuments o f its own magnificence" or "Soul clap its hands and sing" act as an "it"; the choice here between singing and studying does not offer to make us human. The objectification o f both ourselves and what we study as things lies confused in our desiring and knowing: ". . . sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is. " If we imagine that desire operates in the face of objects pinched off into otherness, itness, then our failure to know ourselves, except as dying animals, and thus as nothing to desire or nothing stable, translates into a fragmented form of life, "[a] tattered coat upon a stick",ifnotforthedelusionsofyouth. Thisform,emptiedanddecaying,akintothe
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Sibyl prefacing The Waste Land, cannot be filled, but only remade into a stability that tries to work language to a standstill in paradox:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic ofa wall
These icons can act upon us as a golden bird made by the decree ofthe emperor in order tokeephimselfawake. Hisgoldsmithsbecomethewayinwhichhe(allofuswithinour heads)talkstohimself(toourselves). Orthepoeticvoicecanspeakasaproductofthe empire, and thus talk to lords and ladies. In every case, however, these 'human beings' and 'things' speak ofwhat they already know: "Ofwhat is past, or passing, or to come. " If as tattered coats and decaying animals the soul or aged man knows not what it is, then the measureofthisignoranceliesinthemeasureoftime. Thismeasure,however,liesoutside ofthe caring about what is past, passing, or to come. Being made into pure form and animated by sages mastering his soul determines being human as, what Yeats will call in
"Byzantium," "an image, man, or shade": "I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. "
In "Sailing to Byzantium", he calls to these sages to "be singing-masters of my
soul", as if this singing could animate him through his being possesses (by a formula maybe) by another (a revocation ofLocke's grounding our freedom in our own self- possession). This is an inheritance as a form ofbeing possessed, (an inheritance that possesses one, something not unknown to happen). This possession and the gathering up "into the artifice of eternity" is a way ofturning Keats "illustration" into our becoming, what Wittgenstein calls, a "machine-as-symbol", the seeming representation o f a future as apredeterminedexpressionofamachinesstructure. Ifwestudyourmonuments,these
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machines or golden birds or words, we measure them as things made, as diagrams of our ownmaking,andthusasproductsofhowwemadethem. Thismightbethemeasuringof a space for a wedding bed in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro", or the confused resistanceto andmarkingoftimeandofdesirebyElizabethBishop'snarrator"studying" the "Monument", or a critic's, or an engineer's, or a philosopher's description o f a text or a mind. But as Figaro measures out his bed he sings, and in this measures himself as the music and in duet with his wife's singing.
Would we say here then that the music illustrates him measuring out this bed? And if we silence the music do we have a scene like the following described by Wittgenstein?
Put a ruler against this body; it does not say that the body is of such-and-such a length. Rather is it in itself--I should like to say--dead, and achieves nothing of what thought achieves. "--It is as if we had imagined that the essential thing about a living man was the outward form. Then we made a lump of wood in that form, and were abashed to see the stupid block, which hadn't even any similarity to a living being. (PI? 430)
A bed and a wooden body--asleep maybe, a "humptyhillhead" as Joyce calls such a sleeper seems to have lost something essential. No amount of measuring will be able to describe the nighttime experience of any block of wood, human or not. Such a picture of our humanity is a picture ofdeath: what ifthe block ofwood looks like you? And then you might ask with Descartes in the First Meditation: "How could I deny that these hands and this body is mine, were it not that I compare myself to certain persons . . . who imagine
that they have a earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or made o f glass? " Such a
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picture is o f a Romantic fragment, a hedgehog, "complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world" : one picture o f a human being. (What's the history o f this? ). A modernist fragment like a modernist machine works differently. The movement
from microcosm to macrocosm, the universe in a grain o f sand, is replaced by golden birds in a Byzantine court or by a disjunction between the logic of the world (the real) and our willing or choosing; or as Conrad describes it "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness ofone ofthose misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination ofmoonshine" (Heart ofDarkness, 7). In this the machinery has not been replaced by something else, we will still find wheels and gears and a dead pumpkin-head frightening our neighbors if we look, but we find ourselves within another 'machine' designing these wheels and gears, and we do not know how to describe this machine. We can see its effects in Darwin's discussion of intentionality and evolution:
Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrivedforit. Onthesameprinciple,ifamanweretomakeamachinefor some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for that propose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery o f many ancient and distinct specific forms. (197)
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Dennett understands this as a kind ofinterpretative functionalism, where there are neither "real functions . . . [nor] real meanings": "Mother Nature doesn't commit herself explicitly and objectively to any functional attributions; all such attributions depend on the mind-set of the intentional stance, in which we assume optimality in order to interpret what we find" (Intentional Stance, 320). How this intentional stance arises is of course obscure. Intentionality in this case is only normative within a particular interpretation or framework.
Evolution describes a temporal unfolding of seeming intentionality, in which possibilities exist only as a function o f changes which have particular applications that can result, according to particular complex etiologies, by an accident o f design, in a seeming intentionaleffect. InConrad'ssensesurvivingislikelisteningorbeing"onthewatchfor the sentence, for the word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air o f the river" (Heart o fDarkness, 45). Function organizes what is the case into possibilities for further functions, propelled by change. What is this change? Evolutionary theory instantiates change as a particular kind o f time, mapping or mimicking the physics o f time into our own being, our own bodies and minds as extensions of all animal bodies and minds.
We exist within a non-teleological (not described by function), non-purposeful machine, that we totalize into "Mother Nature" or "Logic" or "Physics". And yet there is a difference between such intentional fictions (as ways o f animating the descriptive laws o f science) and the great Christian AI, the Virgin Mary, that Adams calls a "goddess because o f her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction-- the greatest and most
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mysterious o f all energies" (384). The modem dynamo that Adams opposes to the Virgin has force but no value; it reproduces by organizing human beings into patterns o f force but it cannot be embodied: artists "felt a railway train as power; yet they. . . constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art" (388). This, if nothing else, will force art to change.
Our seeing ourselves blinks the context of our being ourselves into sight, illuminating not the world as a clock, but the force o f succession turning us into a clock to measure this succession. Ontologically this blinking o f our world and ourselves into mutualvisibilitydeterminesthelimitofourbeingorofourunderstanding. Thislimitand this blinking constitutes the symbolic condition of our temporality.
1The discussion of soul-making is in the letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 14,1819.
2 We can say both kinds ofjustification but only show the consequence of this saying, that is, our involvement within and commitment to our language (games).
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4
Keats' Version ofFinnegans Wake
Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" works its way "[b]etween a stare and a sough" ('sough':moan,sigh;FW264. 10-11). Theumseemstopresentitselfassomethingto know. But this knowing is senseless unless the um can mean something.
Thus, the poem finds itself mediating between the demands and the grammar o f 'being' and 'meaning'. The um wears its content, speaks its pictures, a tattooed head. Does the poetic voice or KeatsortheUmanswerthequestionsthispoeticvoiceputstotheum? Thisisthefirst set o f questions:
(I) "What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape o f deities or mortals, or of both, in Tempe or the dales o f Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipe and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? "
If not an answer, the response is "unheard melodies": the water in the pictured tea pot boils: the youth is beneath the trees as if contained in this unheard song, unable to kiss his beloved,sheunabletofadeintoloss. Isthisananswer?
This is the second set o f questions:
(II) "who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest, leads't thou that heifer lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garland drest? What little town by the sea shore, or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, is emptied o f this folk, this pious mom? "
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A little town (either amidst mountains or beside the sea) will remain silent. Keats animates the town by addressing it by 'thou' and claiming that it will not speak (as if it could) or tell asoulwhyitisdesolate. Suchsilentform,thesemarblemenandmaidensoverwroughtin passion and into stasis (as if art in its purity translates the human into something alien) seduce us into this beyond, renouncing the aboutness o f thought: "Thou, silent form, dost
tease us out of though as doth eternity". These forms tease Keats into questions, which seem answered by default, by virtue o f a rhetorical latching onto the clarity o f form and content offered by the aphorism in the last stanza: "'Beauty is truth and truth beauty'" (henceforth abbreviated as "BTTB"). "BTTB" pretends to be a synthetic statement giving
us, what Cora Diamond critically calls, "an explanatory account ofthe relation between thinking and the standards proper to it. So we may look for metaphysical truths to which our thinking ought to properly correspond" (13).
For Helen Vendler "BTTB" is the wake of the "complex mind . . . which we came to know in the opening stanza of the ode" (149). She posits the mind as that which functionally unites, enacts and is described by the languages of truth and sensation. Although I think Keats wants to introject philosophical standards for truth into aesthetic experience (see Vendler, 147-52), the "BTTB" equation functions not as a statement of
factortheory;itisnotaknowledgeclaim. Vendlerarguesthatthis"riddlingmotto" articulates this identity as an expression o f the urn's language within a Platonic realm whereBeautyandTruthhavea"simultaneousandidenticalexistence"(149). Thus,she believes that this statement is a prepositional statement about this Platonic realm. Vendler criticizesthisasafailureofdiction. Sheconfusestheanalysisofhowthisknowledge
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claim works (either as a proposition or within the poem) with the analysis ofthe effect this claim has on the meaning of the poem, as if'"Beauty is truth, truth beauty5" answers the motives o f Keats in writing the poem or, anthropomorphically, o f the poem itself in 'speaking5.
Can meaning be equated with motive? Motive is not a cause of the words, nor doesitdeterminetheirunderstandability. Theascriptionofmotiveconceptualizes intentionality as an external interpretative frame to the poem. The effect ofthese last lines, Vendler argues, while incomplete and "not structurally complex enough to be adequate . . . to what we know o f aesthetic experience - o r indeed to human experience generally5 (152), determines the relation between Truth and Beauty as "constitutive o f creative expression, and the mind is permitted its allegorizing, interrogatory, and prepositional functions5(151). Inheruseof'adequate,5Vendlerassumesthatadaequatio,the correspondence ('equal to5in a number of senses) between statement and world (in this case experience) describes the criterion oftruth for poetry or for language in general or
for Keats. The fact that she claims that Truth and Beauty function as representative concepts in two different kinds of languages articulating, at least for Keats, different domains, suggests that Keats is pressuring the philosophical use (or meaning) of 'know5. He is not claiming that we only "need to know5"BTTB5because it is adequate to our experience; how would we determine its adequacy? "'Truth is Beauty5is not a statement of predication but an identity statement, and thus it articulates different aspects or appearances as a unity. In this it is a name, like 'the duck-rabbit picture5. Faced with such a picture we can recognize a duck or a rabbit or a duck-rabbit picture. If I say "Duck is
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Rabbit,RabbitDuck'thisisonlytrueofthispicture. Itisnotafactlike'thatisapicture ofa duck. ' One does not say 'that is a picture ofa duck-rabbit picture'. 'Duck is Rabbit' is a metaphysical statement not an epistemological statement, and thus not subject to any criteria of adequation. If I always only see either a duck or a rabbit then how do I recognize the picture as a duck-rabbit picture? In fact it can function as that kind of picture depending on how I use it. As Wittgenstein says, "I can see it in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with" (PI p. 210). If I have different pictures of ducks and rabbits I might then say 'these are not all duck-rabbit pictures,' or 'Duck is not always Rabbit'.
If we read other poems with different claims would we then say 'Truth is not Beauty'? Would such a claim counter Keats' claim? Because this is not a statement of predication we cannot compare it to any experience. It remains a statement about the relation between the words 'Truth' and 'Beauty' for the um, that is, a rule about how to use these words within um language. If another um in another poem, or maybe if an artificially intelligent computer described 'Beauty' and 'Truth' as non-identical we would conclude this is a different language. This difference would again be a metaphysical difference. We could not adjudicate between them and say this statement is closer to my experience. Weneverexperienceanynon-predicativeidentityrelationoftheform'Xis Y'. We use identity statements as the ends ofthought. As it does in the ode, an identity statement describes the limits ofmind or world, a description ofthe possibilities of
meaning available for perception or interpretation.
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The um is a thing which we ventriloquize into speaking a truism whose meaning cannot be determined, whose epistemological value and application to our experience remainsmysterious. Sowhyventriloquizethisclaim? Tobeteasedoutofthoughtisto face the ontological limits o f our thinking through language. All we can know as mortals onearthisthelimitofourknowing. AllofKeats'previousquestionswere epistemological questions, questions of fact. None of these questions are answered. If our conclusions about the unanswerability ofthese questions remain within an epistemological register we would say visual representations or ocular sensations are not commensurablewithlanguage. Theyareonlycommensurablewithineithertheworldor
within the unity o f experience o f a subject. Thus, V endler's appeal to a complex mind means she interprets their unity as a function of some transcendental subject. An interpretation that described the unity between language and the visual as a given o f the world would have to describe human vision and language as natural systems under the aspectofasingleworld. Eithersolutionfailstorecognizethatthepoemreframesthese questions outside oftheir epistemological force: not a duck or a rabbit but a duck-rabbit picture without any other possible pictures.
The commensurability o f the allegorical, interrogatory, and prepositional functions of the mind with the "silent form" of the um is determined, by Vendler, in a disguised allegory between the complex mind betrayed in the poem with the interpretive possibilities thatallowustodiscoverthismind. Sheunderstandsthatinan"artcorrespondingtothe sense of sight, Truth as well as Beauty has become a constitutive expression" (151). Constitutive ofwhat? Ofthat which is expressed? Then the identity oftruth and beauty
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constitute the possibilities of allegory, interrogation and assertion simultaneously as a functionofthemindofthepoet-readerandoftheurn'slanguageormind. Thiswould mean that art means what it is, and what it is can be described by allegory, through interrogation, and as propositions. The allegories, questions and propositions (including "BTTB"), however, do not function as allegories, questions or propositions in the poem.
The um is speaking about the poem not itself. The poem, however, is not an expression by or of the um, except maybe in the last stanza. The poem describes the um as the limit o f knowing. "BTTB" expresses the only thing the um can be or say if it were animate: 'I am the limit o f your knowing'. Thus the allegories and questions and propositions can not be about the um but about language and its rules o f description. "BTTB" is more like a rule of description, and therefore not a constitutive expression. The um is not expressing itself in our language, but offering a rule under which we could describe it if we could construct a language game with this identity as an ontological condition. "BTTB" does not construct being or meaning or urns or minds; it describes a rule for counting something as real within a language that can describe the same thing as true or beautiful in all and every case. Does the urn's use of such a language game (it may be that this statement is the only statement in such a game, and thus it is all one can know about such a game) constitute it within that language game? No: the urn's language is
confined to this statement alone, as such the statement does not express anything about theumforus. Wemightbetemptedtorecognizethisphraseasalinguisticequivalentof the um within our language game: a symbol ofthe visual. But the um remains absent. The statement gives us an ontological rule by which to recognize a language that includes
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both the epistemological questions ofthe poetic voice (at least until the last stanza) and theworldpicturedontheum. Wearenotgiventhatlanguage. Suchalanguagewould constitute,inKeats'terms,amindorsoulthatisnothuman. Thus,theconfusionover who is speaking in the last stanza: has the narrator died? and who makes the claim that "BTTB" is all you need to know? The seeming self-sufficient clarity o f the aphorism does not express a proposition, nor represent a denouement within some unified perspective. Such a unified perspective is not possible and such a proposition would be senseless within
the logic o f the earlier questions.
"BTTB" is a limit between the language game described by the initial
epistemologicalquestionsandtheworldonthevasedescribedinthesequestions. This worldneverspeaks. Theum,thelimitwhich'noone'or'thing'inthatworldcanknow or see, speaks to us. The um seems a topographically inverted Cartesian theater, and speaks therefore as both a world (for its pictures) and a mind for us. This animation, I think, seduces Vendler into using "constitutive expression" in describing "BTTB". This could only be an expression if the identity between Truth and Beauty constituted the urns animation, somehow defining the mechanics or the organics o f um life and consciousness (these are identical here). I think Vendler understands Truth and Beauty as the constitutive facts o f two necessary but not sufficient languages determining a mind as a mind (as both conscious and alive):
Haunting these odes, up to this point, is the absence o f any real exploration o f the "lower" senses o f taste and touch; and o f these odes is itself incomplete as a metaphor for Keats' total experience of art as he knew it in poetry- its
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dependence on the senses, its inceptions in reverie, its fertile, constructive activity in the mind, its powerful embodiment within a resistant medium, its reception by the greeting spirit, its representational validity, its allegorizing tendency, its luxurious beauty, its philosophical truth, its momentary glimpse o f divinity, its sense o f active intellectual and critical power and mastery" (152).
This experience is translated into a set o f 'languages,' which prove "aesthetically grotesque",butwhichexhibit"amind"unwillingtoabandontheselanguages. Ifthe identity o f Truth and Being functions as an ontological claim at the limit between different language games then this picture o f poetry as the 'constitutive expression' o f a mind fails. Vendler's analysis highlights a disjunction between this experience of poetry and these languages o f the mind, between existential phenomenalism and a transcendental aesthetics, experience and construction. Poetry, therefore, for Vendler, becomes the continual attempt to construct a language (constitutive expressions) adequate to this experience.
The requirment that these languages overcome this disjunction (between the experience ofreading, or seeing, and what is said, the content ofwhat is read or seen) hypostatizes this aesthetic experience as separate from the languages that describe it (if only partially) and enact it. This aesthetic experience, however, is always and only some set of such languages. Someone might answer that the experience is not restricted to reading the words. While this is true, to imagine poetry as the site o f some experience is
toenterintoandfunctionwithinitslanguage. Theinadequacyofpoetrywouldbethe inadequacyoflanguage. TheinadequacyoflanguageinthesensewithwhichVendleris using 'inadequacy', however, is primarily a function o f the incommensurability o f language
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with all o f our sensory information. It is unclear whether something can 'mean' outside of language. (This does not mean that one should not or does not profoundly distrust the meanings within language). Poetic experience, therefore, exists to the degree with which we respond to its language as a language. There is no remainder only different poetries definingdifferentlanguagegames. Iftheidealizedadequacyisnotsomeidealizedworkof art then it is simply our experience ofthese supposedly inadequate language games.
Underlying the claim that this language fails is the demand that poetry not only describe but reenact our experience as its own, that it be animate and conscious.
By such a standard art will continually fail until it is translated into a linguistic being. Thus the inadequacy o f the ending o f the Ode is because it is only the urn that is animate. Such animation, however, cannot be described through a correspondence theory o f truth (even a metaphoric one). How does one measure the adequacy o f a language to describe or enact aesthetic experience and not include the aesthetic experience of that poem itself? The demand for an animate poem becomes the necessity o f a perspective that includes both the poem and our experience, and therefore becomes a demand for God. The demand for adequacy is thus incoherent because no poetic language could ever be
adequate, nor in fact can adequacy even be determined orjudged. What Vendler is describing as inadequate is her realization that "BTTB" cannot serve as an epistemological claim about either poetry or the vase and as a description of our experience of the urn through either poetry or experience. "BTTB" is inadequate as a 'constitutive expression' of a mind. Vendler assumes that such an expression can be measured against experience. There is no language game or experience which one can measure with "BTTB" as a either
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a proposition or an expression. In other words one cannot get outside of one's aesthetic experience nor outside of one's languages in order to judge them.
In this sense "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'" is arbitrary, an expression of an ontological commitment that cannot bejudged. It might illustrate our life but not interpret it. Thus "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" offers an interpretative frame. Ontological criteria offer interpretive frames, and thus interpretation cannot constitute them, but is limited by them. ThisiswhatWittgensteinmeans,Ithink,whenheclaimsthatjustificationmustend or else it would not be justification.
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5
The Distance Between the Mind and the Soul
The semantic distance between the two parts o f a single marginal phrase in Finnegans Wake describes the distance between what is stake in the difference between a mind and a soul. I am not sure what kind o f claim the concept o f the soul can have on us.
I do not think it can be used coherently within the systems of meaning within which the modem world and societies are found. And yet I am driven to its use when trying to describe (let alone understand) the mutual and equally powerful claims Finnegans Wake,
Philosophical Investigations, and cognitive philosophy have on me. I do not think this is just a personal anomaly or perversion, but it is the consequence ofwhat is at stake in all three.
Thisisapictureofthemindasa"mindfactory"inFinnegans Wake: "ANTITHESIS OF AMBIDUAL ANTICIPATION. THE MIND FACTORY, IT GIVES AND TAKES. " (FW282. R4).
This is a picture o f the soul:
"AUSPICIUM. AUGURIA. DIVINITY NOT DEITY THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES. " (FW282. R4)
How these describe a mind and a soul entails understanding what kind of claims any description of the mind or soul can have on us. Negotiating the distance between what we might call a mind and what we might imagine as a soul enacts (or describes) the kind of moral self-reflection that Augustine described in his Confessions: "But while he was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind,
Notes for this chapter begin on page 165
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my own back where I had placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you set me before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered with sores and ulcers. (Confessions, Vm. vii: derived from Seneca De Ira 2. 36. 1). How is this kind o f self-reflection enacted without a God? What kind o f moral self-reflection can we construct or inhabit when our ontological limits are constructed as a conflicting set of fragments of science, technology, social prejudice, anachronistic religion, psychological
fantasy, and so on? In Finnegans Wake this moral self-reflection, or rather the confession that is involved in attempting to read it, is directed at the limit(s) between sense and nonsense.
In order to provide a place to begin from which to measure the difference between mind and soul I will provide very brief sketches o f the soul as Aquinas conceptualized it (as the most complete and coherent presentation of the soul)1and of the mind as it is broadly understood in cognitive science.
The soul, or let's say the distinction between divinity and deity, is an interpretative definition expressed through a set of stances toward the future (Auguria), toward oneself in relation to the totality of the world, and toward others as human. Aquinas describes these distinctions as expressing the distinction between the animate and inanimate. He describes the soul "as the first principle of life in those things in our world which live; for
we call living things animate, and those things which have no life, inanimate. Now life is shownprincipallybytwoactivities,knowledgeandmovement"(SummaIa. 75. I). Aquinas is careful to establish that "not every principle of vital action is a soul, for then the eye would be a soul. " The soul is not related to the body as in a burning coal heat is to the
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coal--butasparttowhole,likethehumanhandistothebody.