No More Learning

Is poetry linguistic self-reflection ofthis sort? or ofany sort? How is the temptation to appeals to identity, underpinning the truth possibilities o f self-reflection, implicatedintheconstructionofnotionsofvalueandjustification? Whatleadsfromthe
justification ofpoetry to a theory ofmind? What use or value or sense can a theory of mind constructed as part of such a justification have? All ofthese questions ask about how we use the verb of 'to be' as the limit between our conception of mind and world. The first question asks for either a definition of poetry, which would require further
justification, or for examples of poetry in relation to each other as they describe themselves. Any generalization about poetry remains so tied to changing expectations, personal responsiveness, prejudice, and so on that only poems can themselves make such claimsandgivethemselvesasevidence. Poemsthenatleastofferanopportunityto ventriloquizeouropinionsasaneffectofreading. Butclaimsaboutpoetryareinteresting in the ways they justify themselves and less in the substance o f their description and claims.
How can a poem become its own justification? Because we do not know what it means for a collection ofwords or phrases or lines or sentences to reflect upon themselves, not understanding any form of self-reflection besides our own, any claim about poetry's self-reflection allegorizes our reading of a poem as simultaneously an object which produces meanings, as a mechanism o f some sort, and as a phenomenological
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self-reflection on our own reading, described, we imagine, as the interaction between the semanticsandsyntaxofapoem. Poetryis(orcanbe)anautonomousmechanismdirected towards us and an expression o f our reading towards the poem.
Asking "what does 'is' mean? " (a question o f semantics and syntax) and "what 'is' is? " (in what way does it exist? ) are not questions but riddles. The riddle o f 'to be', even in Eliot's fragmented symbolism o f subjunctive identities and Heidegger's ontological myth of revealing existing, asks, as Ammons does in his anti-symbolist poetry, how "this measure moves/ to attract attention. . . not to persuade you, enlighten you, not necessarily to delight you, but to hold you" (Sphere, 30). How the world holds us, how things hold us, and how we behold it and them, in containment or continuity or context or conflict, as genitive, dative, or ablative relations, requires justification, such as beauty, goodness,
truth, correspondence, coherence, desire, identity, fear, dread, despair. We inhabit an 'is' through our justification o f our kind of inhabiting. We can construct this how in art or in a description of our mind or in moral judgment; or we can express this holding in our questioning o f why this world holds us? why these things?
Russell describes the grammatical distinctions in our use o f "to be" :
The word is is terribly ambiguous, and great care is necessary in order not to confound its various meanings. We have (1) the sense in which it asserts Being, as in "A is"; (2) the sense o f identity; (3) the sense o f predication, in "A is human"; (4)thesenseof"Aisa-man". . whichisverylikeidentity. Inadditiontothese there are less common uses, as "to be good is to be happy"; where a relation of assertions is meant, that relation, in fact, which, where it exists, gives rise to formal
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implication, Doubtless there are further meanings which have not occurred to
me. (64n)
These four classifications can be further described as (1) assertions o f existence (as in the quantifiers Vx and 3y; or, the Scholastic existentia, that something is); (2) x=x; and more questionably x=y; (3) Quine writes "Predication joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true or false according as the general term is true or false o f the object, if any, to which the singular term refers" (Wordand Object, 96), in this case the use o f the copula is restricted to claims about objects; (4) a definition and in this sense
both an identification and the inclusion of something within a class or set or category. As in category 4, these distinctions often function as aspects of each other, or presuppose each other, collapse into each other. 17
Prepositional and predicate logic analyzes the way in which the words 'or', 'and', 'not', 'if. . . then', 'every', 'some', 'necessary' and so on function in and structure statements or propositions as either True or False. Lyric poetry, and I am tempted to say most o f what counts as literature, let's say its narrative force and world-making force,
functions through instantiating the pronominal and the adverbial limits (primarily the demonstratives 'this', 'that', 'here', 'now') constituting the domain within which referential language functions. The limits of our language are non-referential. They constitute the world as temporal. Pronouns constitute our relation to the structures of our grammar and to the world determined by our perception and biology as a discursive event. Both pronouns and the adverbs 'now' and 'here' set up an indeterminate set of referential andmeaningpossibilities. Theycansubstituteforeachotheraswaysofmarkinga
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sentence as a sentence in a language, an utterance as an utterance. Are they existential markers or temporal markers, guarantors, implicit or not, that in speaking this sentence I am alive? T points, therefore, in two directions: toward my inhabitation o f the world and my inhabitation o f language, where my utterance functions as a reflection o f this act o f uttering. Such self-reflection can then be used as an allegory onto which statements o f 'I am'candescribeme. Thisisawayofputtingtheobjectfirst,mythirdpersonstatusasa 'me', which is animated becomes an 'I am' through self-reflection.
Lyric enacts an exemplary expression o f language (exemplary o f what? ) as a referential system constituting the T . A poem is not strictly speaking about or picturing an 'I ', but causes an 'I ' to become instantiated as meaningful, marking language as ours by exposing how we speak this possession and thus offering itself as justification for this ownership. Justification means making visible the rules (the translation o f the pronouns and adverbs into 'to be' into 'to have'). Art in this sense exemplifies the psychological
and the grammatical, as the limits constituting the negative space of'I' and 'me', as objective, as an expression o f a body, and thus as 'mine'. Lyric as the poetry o f being-a-
moment and narrative as the poetry o f succession, o f being-in-the-world are ontological arguments through which we enter the world as real (but not only through good art, but through songs, phrases, perceptions, objects, lyric effects or attention, narrative logics, the failure o f which would be catatonia).
How to enter the world and language is tied to how we exit them. This relation between entering and exiting is the problem of the Sibyl in The Waste Land. The complicated metaphysics ofthe last section ofthe poem, "What The Thunder Said", are
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built from the riddling thematic strands and ontological implications radiating from Eliot's initial introductory quotation:
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampula pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: SiPuXXa tt QeXiq; respondebat ilia; a7to0aveiv 0eXa>. "
For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in ajar at Cumae, and when the
acolytes said, 'Sybil, what do you wish? ' she replied, 'I wish to die. '"
Apollo has granted the Sibyl eternal life, but because she failed to request eternal youth, she continues to age and shrink in size. Her small withered body is kept in a suspended
jar. Thus, we can recognize two temporal patterns: continuity and decay. The Sibyl's immortality consists o f her continued existence and identity as who she is. Although her form changes, the animating essence within it remains identical in every moment. The Sibyl's soul and body describe identity and loss. Her personal identity supersedes dynamic change, and thus separates her from the mortal metaphysical universe in which time, as Aristotle claims, can best be understood as loss. The Sibyl's containment in a bottle symbolizes this separation.
Change is marked by her shrinking, her continual decay and loss of physical substance,becominglessandless. Sheexistswithinaninfiniteregressionconstitutingnot onlyherworldbutherselfaswell. FortheSibylherimmortalityonlyservestocontinue her suffering as an old and aging woman. Immortality is an extension through time of an animatingessence,containedwithinthephysicalformofbeing. Thisessenceisnot separate from the form o f being, for it is the body itself which is immortal. Her physical
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form, however, is endlessly disintegrating. Thus, the continuity o f her being manifests itself in the dissolution o f this same being: the continuity o f being flows through the dissolution o f being.
Although the Sibyl contains the immortal and mortal natures o f Christ, the non- transcendental metaphysics o f her being prevent any symbolic equivalency between them. Without the ability to transcend the decay o f her body, she remains trapped in a self- destructive spiral, which cannot regenerate her. Christ's ability to transcend his physical form and reach a spiritual reality allows him to integrate both spiritual and physical realms withinhisownidentity. Thisintegrationopensapathwaybetweenboththeserealms, through which power flows into the material world, and through which mortal flesh can reachGod. Christhealsthesickandviolatesnaturallawsthroughhisdirectconnection with the realm of spiritual power, for he is the Son of God (MK. 2. 2-12). Similarly, after his death he spiritually transcends his physical form and is resurrected in his spiritual form.
The Christian pattern of creation involves a complicated equivalency and transformation between the creator, the act of creation, and the created. For the Sibyl, however, the identity o f being exists as the dissolution o f being. Within this model there is no transformation between the mortal and the immortal. The Sibyl when she asks to die, desires to make a transformative leap between two conditions o f being: her immortal decayandherdeath. Thismeanstodisconnecttheidentity/physicalexistenceunitythat sustainsher. Shewishestoreenterthedynamicsofmortallife,asopposedtoChrist's desire to re-become pure spirit. The identity of her being, that is, her immortality, however, cannot be disassociated from her physical form. She might describe us because
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she has no soul. Change, therefore, cannot enter that substanceless gap between existence and non-existence. Unlike the Christian pattern o f transformation, the gap between identities is not contained within the being o f the Sibyl, as it is in the equivalence between Christ, God and the Word. This equivalence implies an established transformative link between these three forms o f being, though which they can become one another. The Sybil's being remains isolated in a single state, albeit a complex one, but one without the ability to transcend this gap. Although the Sibyl's immortality is physically dependent on her physical form, there is no link between this form and her immortal form, which would allow for a transformation between them. Such a transformation would result in a
transcendence o f either her aging or her immortality, which is not possible.
The Sibyl's life answers a riddle: What can simultaneously and in a every moment
be both what McTaggart called a temporal B-series and an A-series? The B-series represents time as a chain of before and afters, as if on a number line. The A-series is the nuncfluens, the flowing now, that is, an existential mark ofthe present, in relation, however, to a future and present. Already the A-series works as if it were a sliding point, withoutprivileginganyparticularnow,ontheB-series. (TheB-series,likewhatIwill show to be Heidegger's condensation oftime into things, translates past nows into thing like points--within what Heidegger calls the ontic, what looks objectively real, the external representation of time as a timeline. ) The A-series, although it fails to capture Dasein's existential relation with the world determining Temporality in Heidegger, is phenomenological in scope. The problem in our riddle is how to translate an A-series into also a B-series. The measure o f before and after, a timeline, a series o f dates, is
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isomorphic with the size ofthe Sibyl, and thus even if she lost her memory, the changing size ofher body marks and measures, as a real effect, the movement oftime. The Sibyl was three feet before she was two feet, and now she is two inches. From this we can project her height if not infinitely divided, then divided to the point at which she would cease to be alive as the Sibyl, and thus her height, regardless o f the now, measures time as afunctionofherbeing,herform. TheSibylcanbeseenasanembodiedsymbolofakind of Time, an ontological clock. In a typical clock the changes o f state, in a digital clock 12:00 to 12:01, follow a pattern of repeating, predetermined changes. Even if the Sibyl shrank and then regrew according to a regular cycle, however, she would not become an
ordinaiy clock, even ofthe sort the change in seasons might seem to describe or express. The changes in her body, even if describing a cycle o f shrinking and regrowing, contradict the world as we know it, even as Petronius knew it, and certainly they contradict the logic andfactsofphysics,chemistry,biology,etc. Thechangesinherbody,therefore,either change the entire world in a fundamental way (something we know, as much as we know anything, is not true) or her infinite regression inside herjar functions in an alternate world, she exists in our three dimensions and then in higher dimension(s) not ours, although similar in certain ways with the fourth dimensional description oftime. Her changes in state are relative to our world and her memory changes in substance: she has a differentkindofbeingwithinasimilarbutdifferentworld. Inthisherlifemightbea picture of a life in Hell. Is Hell part of our world or just parallel? This is an explanation of
why the bad are not always punished in our world.
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Immortality conserves identity as subsistent and continuous being. Her continual shrinkingdescribeschangeasinfiniteregression. Changeortimerequiresasubstrateof continuity to be visible as such, what Aquinas calls identity, following in the history of Trinitarian theology, and what Aristotle calls ousia and on following Parmenides. This difference expresses different kinds o f time and different kinds o f subsistence. For the time being, we can ignore this difference. Time in both cases exists as an effect of alterations in form; it is a meta-description generated from self-reflection, either objectively in the changes in and among things in relation to the stability of our observing perspective (this describes the Tractarian non-psychological T ) or subjectively as changes in the form or consciousness of humans, animals, plants, objects relative to the stability o f either consciousness or our perceptual frame. 18
The Sibyl epigraph itselfreplaced a quotation from Conrad's Heart o fDarkness ("The Horror! The Horror! ") that Pound thought inadequate. Kurtz's exclamation of surprise, judgment, and moral despair functions at the same level as the utterances and quotations within the poem, and thus cannot serve to frame the poem itself. The depth of "The Horror! The Horror! " lies in why Kurtz cried out, in the vagueness or difficulty in understanding to what it refers, and in the complexity o f vision and understanding necessary to voice this horror. Conrad internalizes the disjunction between morality and power that Machiavelli describes in The Prince, translating it into a skeptical problem, a problemabouthowtoknowtheworldandoneself. ThisiswhatthenonsenseofThe Waste Land does as well. But "[t]he horror" should be a part ofthe poem, not its frame. The Sibyl clocking time and the world by her continual loss o f herself (and it) might have
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criedoutfromthesameentrapmentintheincommensurableasKurtz. TheSibylasksfor her death, as a response to the horror o f life, out o f a metaphysical disjunction between meaning and reality, that for her is marked by identity (being who she is) and time (shrinking into an eternity o f isolation), and for Eliot and for us might describe the ontological descriptive power ofphysics, the indifference ofwhat Davidson calls sciences attempt to "extrude the concept of causality in favor of strict laws" (297) and the domain ofmeaningconstitutingsubjectivity,culture,etc. InthisquotationfromPetronius'
Satyricon, the Sibyl is already entrapped within a foreign language, speaking Greek when she was in fact Roman, and already a story within the mendacity o f low-character (Trilmachio), decayed already from a prophetess into a ship in a bottle (her ampulla: ajar for liquids, a container of feminine essence, but also bombast, inflated talk: proicit
ampullas; if the Sibyl is not Cassandra, then at least her truths now sound absurd not just because she speaks from inside ajar and in a foreign language, but because we put her there).
The Sibyl describes an ontological myth, embodying in her body, identity, and being an indeterminate allegory, a description with an unclear referent that conceptualizes asrealaseeminglyphysicallyimpossiblestate. Thedistortionofherfatefromthe everyday condition o f humanity marks her difference as an aspect o f our being human. The hypostatization o f the identity o f being as what counts as existing within the continuation of time describes a picture of how we think of ourselves: the picture that we existintime,butaredefinedbyauniqueessence,ouridentity. TheSibyl'spredicament demonstrates the absurdity ofthis picture (this does not mean we can dismiss it, however;
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by claiming that either the principle o f identity as being or time are fantasies). More importantly, it demonstrates the effect ofthis metaphysical model on how we are within the world, a model linking subjectivity, here understood to be the continuity that expresses itself as a sense o f loss, to the metaphysics o f a world determined by change, time and loss. If we exist as able to speak, we mark our utterance by either time and identity, an 'I' or a 'now', as our subjectivity. Subjectivity embedded in time constituted by change functions as identity in relation to this change. Any domain of personal experience (subjectivity) or o f possession (grammatical 'I') which functions and exists under the same ontological description as change (time) generates the condition o f the Sibyl as a picture
of being human. The Waste Land enacts this picture within an attempt to make it meaningful, to give it a language within which the ontology o f things and objects, call this a picture o f science and technology from a distance brought on by the despair o f thinking oneself an object extruded from an animate tradition o f cultural existence and integration. Such a mirror hopes to show the way out o f the mirror.
The adequacy o f Eliot's new epigraph lies in its descriptive power in collapsing the realm o f conceptual self-reflection (who she is: her continuing identity) into a name referring,throughoutthediminishmentofthematterofherbody,tothisself-reflection. In such a state questions o f the form "what is it? " "what is true? " can be confused with questions o f the from "who is it? " "is she real? "
If The Waste Land asks "who is the Sibyl? ", where does it leave us after it becomes the answer? Do we recognize it as an answer? That would be to recognize it as theexemplarofourownlives. Itisnotjusttheworldthatwewouldhavetoreach
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through this possibility, the world would make us into this possibility. This is the way in which the claims of our humanity might suffer under the pressure of natural selection (Darwin) or amorality (Machievelli). Instead of resistance or despair or irreverence the demands o f this pressure require that we twist the problem around such that we describe how our human inheritance, our language and appeals to meaning, our theology and morality can arise and operate within the ontological descriptions that seem to dissolve their force and efficacy.
Eliot constructs an aesthetic, a language game, a poem in which the Sibyl's predicament, her soul embodied as a kind of eternity, can seem true or real: The Waste Land in all of its voices constructs the Sibyl's form of life, her condition, a community in which she can be understood and which she would recognize as her own; The Waste Land is the Mind of the Sibyl. Even for us to hear Eliot's personal grip against the world we would have to recognize her form of life to be ours, and this language to be ours; the process of reading or of training to survive the poetics of The Waste Land offers us a language in which we can express or articulate our soul as the Sibyl's. This logic of paralytic identity turns paralysis into subsistence and identity into symbolism. We should read "What the Thunder Said" as oracular in the sense o f Heraclitus: "The Lord whose
oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals but gives a sign" (Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 404d, fragment 93). As a sign these words function not as pointers into some secret truth, the unconscious, a [the] god's mind, or even the future; they mean withinthelogicofsignswhichistheirownspeaking. Onecouldcallthisanewlanguage game or a poetics enacting our mind, subjectivity, or soul (we can not distinguish these
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here) as a subjunctive stance toward ourselves similar to the Sibyl's predicament and her desire to die, to re-enter the limits of mortality. The Waste Land describes being human as being the Sibyl in her glassjar (is she a fly in her fly bottle? ). For The Waste Land, it is the logic, or language game, or poetics, or form of life that is missing and must be constructed out o f the oracle's words: if a riddle or an allegory, it can only be understood if we already understand it. This means the ambiguity ofthe oracle and ofthe poetry stand as a sign of a form o f life embodied not simply as these signs, but it only exists as an oracle, and as poetry, once we understand these signs as meaningful and thus make ourselves anew
within or as a mind that could speak them. In this way they point to a mind or act as expressionsofamindthatisbothoursandnot. Thattheydonotonlypointtous,inour understanding, allows them to be spoken to us as if by god.
As in the machine symbolism of Yeats (chapter 3) 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 of 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 of identity, of equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' of existence, articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The Waste
Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the crucial analogy. Thetemptationtowardatheoryofidentityasatheoryofmeaningbuildsminds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit of death that constructs our lives as
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containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious kinds, shapes, and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container.
The Waste Land wants to be the answer, whatever that might mean or entail, to the riddle: What is made o f words but is akin to the Sibyl? It attempts to translate the ordinary disjunction between these two time series into a form o f being.
Such a translation is a process of symbolization, the engine for generating symbols. Not all symbolization proceeds through such a translation, which is itself already either metaphoricoritselfasymbolandinthisapictureofthepossibilityofusinglanguage. The notion o f time itselfj because it is not an entity within our experience, but can only be seen as an effect. But does this imply a cause? How would we know that time is an effect? The very structure oftime looks like what Cora Diamond calls a great riddle: "'the riddle of life in space and time,' 'the riddle "par excellence'" as Wittgenstein called it, and which he said was not a question" (268). 19 As we saw in Chapter n, the Finnegans Wake version
o f the great riddle is, in its final version: "The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! " (FW607. 10-12). When is a man/name not [nothing] a man/ name whenas it (nested in the world o f objects) is a--but not a thing at all but either watch Finnegans Wake or when he is a watch, timing the
world, which is to clock human language against both the world and our fantasies. The Sibylshrinks, "aWomanoftheWorldwhocanTellNakedTruthsaboutaDearManand
all his Conspirators" (FW107. 03-04). But in Eliot's waste land the saint's quest diminishes any woman; but this diminishment translates identity into the ordering pattern oftime. Canthiskindoftimesupportasoul? AnAristoteliansoulhylomorphically
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identical to the body can produce only the Sibylline immortality. Joyce glosses "Here is a homelet not a hothel" (FW586. 18) when someone gets aetherealized into desire: "Sylphing me when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! " (FW495. 6-7). Paracelsus populates the air with the elemental sylph; this sylph constitutes what in The Waste Land one can call the void and the Sibyl as the holding of the ampulla. How does she dwell in the world? In a "homlet" and not a "hothel"?
1Table TalkandOmnianaofSamuelTaylorColeridge. 2"The Love Song of J. Alfred Pnifrock. "
3 These quotations are both from "Gerontion. "
4"Little Gidding"
5"The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Pnifrock".
6JosiahRoyce'sSeminar1913-1914,ed. GroverSmith. AlsomentionedinLyndallGordon,Eliot's Early Years, 58.
7Psycho-analysis and its spawn oftherapies and descriptions interprets fantasy as modes or expressions of sicknessorhealth. Psychologicalallegoriesconstruedreamsasmeaningfulmanifestationsofembedded allegoricalscenesorpatternsofrelationconstitutingparticularsetsofpsychological'entities'. These manifestationpretendtobecaused,althoughthemechanismsofcausationareunexplained; psychological meaning, etiology and structure, do not map onto the physiology o f the brain. Cognitive science must reduce all forms of qualia, consciousness, feelings, etc. , to the quanitities describing brains, or logic, or mechanism. Thisreductionisresistedbyanumberofphilosophicalblackboxeswitheitherspecial functions or as irreducible states.
8 We do not write a theory o f knowing in order to determine what we know, but as a means for the world to claim or reject us.
9Paremenides ofElea: Fragments, A Text and Translation with an Introduction. Trans. David Gallop, (Fragment3). Thetranslationismine.
10Sparshott,F. E. LookingforPhilosophy. SeealsoGallop(above)andJ. BarnesThePresocratic Philosphers, 155-230.
11WarrenS. McCulloch. EmbodimentsofMind. Thisquestiondescribesacertainontological- physiological-logical nexus that would allow it to be rephrased as "What is a Number, that a Woman May KnowIt,andaWomanthatSheMayKnowaNumber? " Thepressurethisformulationputson "knowing" compresses thinking into our species-being.
12Cited and translated in Duhem, 360.
13EC: "East Cocker"; BN: "Burnt Norton"; DS: "Dry Salvages": LG: "Little Gidding.
14The Tractatus begins "The world is everything that is the case" in order no"t only to end with an appeal to silence, but in order tojustify Wittgenstein's intuition that "The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem":the problem is a riddle that neither the after life will answer ("Is this eternallifenotasenigmaticasourpresentone? Thesolutionoftheriddleofourlifeinspaceandtime lies outside space and time"[6. 4312])
15This is the use/ mention distinction described by Quine.
16What is being claimed to be identical with what? An object is conceptualized within a specific kind of
discourse, a language game, or under a particular aspect and equivalence is asserted according to the terms,criteria,aspectdefinedbythisdiscourse. Inthesecasestheassertionx=ysuggeststhatundera particular aspect or discourse they can be construed as the same, synonomous, and thus replacable as
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reflections o f each other: x=y is true because each term can be reduced to or substituted for the other and thus they become identical as x=x or y=y; x=x defines x=y describes the relation between x and y.
17 An interesting case o f an attempt to formalize the interrelation between identity, existence, and predicationcanbefoundinthelogicalontologyofthePolishlogicianLesniewski. Hisformalization makesexistenceascountable. Ileavethishereasanoteonlytobringouttheprincipleofcountability[as anassumption]asakindofKantianform: thetheoreticalmachineinmylastchapterispartlydesignedto discoveritselfinthiscounting. Thisdiscoveiyisthelinchpinbetweenalgorithmicfunctioningand metaphoric self-description [of course my machine is nothing but the latter- described as if it were the former]. Lesniewski'slogicallanguagedescribesthecomplexityoftheverb'tobe'throughlogical relations. The means by which this is done shows the possiblitities, assumptions, and limitations o f any suchlogicaldescription. SeeC. Lejewski"OnLesniewski'sOntology"Ratio1(195S),150-76.
18 Compare with Alice in her adventures in Wonderland, 37.
19 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind.
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8
(How) Can things mean?
Eliot sketches the smudges on the Sibyl's glass bottle and mimics the echoing noise o f the world inside the bottle. Hiedgger, in "Das Ding" recasts the glass bottle into athrownpot,ajug,athing. Whatisthesoulofathing? Iquotemypreviousdescription: "In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In other words, he attempts to reconstitute what something is as what it means. These ontological claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the functional condensation of all meanings ofthe verb 'to be' into those aspects of our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect o f things? from within a language that can enact the answer as our re-education; the ontology of things in their participation or inhabitation of Being can look like a psychology of things. Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing? " He takes this question to be asking something like 'How do things exist? ' or 'What exists for us? '. His answer to these question, however, proceeds through asking 'what does "existence" mean? ', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic
Notes for this chapter begin on page 326
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ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of this re-education. "
I want to use this re-education as a way of sketching how time can be translated into a grammar. Strictly speaking, this is not meant as a critique ofHeidegger, as much as an attempt to write an exegesis of "Das Ding" towards the limits of our language exposed under the pressure o f the concepts o f things and o f time that he reads in his description o f a jug. It is at these limits that the relation between animation and semantics offers descriptions o f how we make and inhabit the world in which we find ourselves.
I want to begin with some confusion about one o f the ways the mind emerges in Being and Time as a way of opening up a set of questions that will lead me through "Das Ding". To recognize something as countable is to know how to count. Knowing how constructsthedomainofthecountable. Thisisthewayinwhichpracticesgain ontological significance. Heidegger in Being and Time, therefore, is correct, I think, to the degree that he says our being-in-the-world necessarily requires and functions within pre-established domains of interaction, something like what Wittgenstein means by forms of life. Heidegger asks, in chapter IV, what allows for the mutual interaction among Dasein, things, and other humans? : "The Others who are thus 'encountered' in a ready- to-hand, environmental context o f equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such 'Things' are encountered from out ofthe world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others~a world which is always mind too in advance' (BT154;118). Heidegger thinks, however, that counting disguises this requirement:
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Even to come across a number o f 'subject' becomes possible only if the Others who are concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are treated merely as 'numerals'. Such a number o f 'subjects' gets discovered only by a definite Being- with-andtowards-one-another. This'inconsiderate'Being-with'reckonswiththe Others without seriously 'counting on them', or without even wanting to 'have anything to do' with them. (BT163)
I f we clarify Heidegger's mood in saying this, we might translate this as "we count so we don't have to count what we count". Is the fact that "count' can also mean 'to matter', 'to have significance or value' an indication of the hidden structure of what Heidegger calls care[Sorge]inknowing? ofanecessaiy(orsupervening)relationbetweenvaluingand knowing?
Answering this question, I think, would involve answering why Heidegger attempts to dissolve empathy into what he calls Being-with, my finding myself already within a world with others:
Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered, is . . . always already world which one shares with the others. (Basic Problems, 297)
We can at least ask: Is Heidegger justified in making empathy dependent on Being-with as a way of grounding Dasein outside of doubt? Does taking a stance toward others as if they had souls undo my doubt that their souls are like mine?
In Being and Time, Heidegger wants to undo the structuring of our being in the world as a form of knowing, determined as a relation between subject and predicate,
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quantified in such a way as to insure that to exist is to be constituted as a metaphyscial form o f identity. The relation between subject and object quantified in this way constructs our subjectivity, our being, within the realm of objects. If such an objecthood is to be resisted as the ground ofour being, then one must reinhabit the meaning ofBeing, recognize as authentic (although the complexity o f this recognition prevents any brief description) Dasein's being in the world prior to its becoming my world. The structure of this involvement is exposed authentically as care (sorge), which is our responsiveness, our being in relation to time, where "being is itselfan issue. " Dasein is "[ejssentially ahead of itself' (BT458;406), "ahead-of-itself-being-aIready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)"(BT237; 192). Temporality is understood as a dynamic involvement within the world against which the identity o f things is constructed, as a resistance. We must re-enter this temporality through care in order to re-enter the ground or the meaning of our being as non-things.
Heidegger's conceptualizing ofDasein as Being in the world, Dasein's proximate and for the most part relation to the world, unwinds the object status o f the world into a relational disposition that places the world and our relation to it before our construction of theworldintothings. Doubtasaspeciesoffailuretransformswhatisready-to-hand(our ordinary usage o f things) into present-at-hand (the presence o f objects as against us) and therefore into things (or what in "Das Ding" he will call objects). As things the objects of our dispositions and intentions, o f our world, lose the guarantee o f their relation to us (in third man arguments, for example); and thus doubt can work its way into skepticism.
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Heidegger constructs "the They" in chapter IV as a replacement for matter as the given form o f our substantiality, and thus as the guarantee o f the world and our relation to it. How can one be an entity and not an identity? How can one be relational and still work within our embodied form? The riddle is 'what is both subject and yet not an identity reducible to a thing? ': We--they, us, "das Man. " Underlying the question o f who is Dasein, in chapter IV, is the question cDo we function as things, as individuals organized as identities? ' For Heidegger, it is the relation between identity and thing that must be avoided, displaced into our Being-with, our existing as a function of our relations withothersandwiththeworld. The"wayofBeing"configuresDasein(anditsBeing)as a disposition and a becoming (a function of time): how do we temporally exist within the everyday? How is this Being within everyday time a disposition toward others? Why do
we count others as versions of ourselves?
Associating 'mattering' and 'numbering' (a form of knowing) in 'to count' might
be justified by 'numbering recognizes, and recognition values'. Is this order correct: knowingthenvaluing? Whatdowegainifwereversetheorderandsayvaluing recognizes? Counting is a way of constructing a set. We can mark value within a set or betweensetsbynumberingwithordinals. Isthisanexplanationforthemeaningof'to count'? When it means 'mattering', counting is a way of making value explicit. How can caring become abstracted into counting? What exactly does counting make explicit about caring? Heidegger assumes we can care (solicitude) without counting. But can we care outside o f our need and ability to count (which Heidegger would agree is a function o f our doubting, i. e. needing to know)? (Wittgenstein's resistance to scientific knowing as
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immoral and destructive suggests that a scientific attitude is not a legitimate form o f life, although it can operate with legitimate language games in some domains. ) This might be a way of asking how skepticism makes empathy possible (something Heidegger implies,
BT163). What is the difference between the symbolizing procedures (the structure of identities and relations) which define empathy and solicitude? If solicitude can for Dasein "take away 'care' from the other and put himselfin his position in concern" (BT158), it requiresakindofself-symbolization(toallowforthisreplacement). Tosaythatempathy depends on a greater estrangement between Daseins than solicitude does not at all challenge the similar conceptual relations that construct an Others as something that can be replaced by oneself. The ability to "leap in" for someone else, while it structurally agrees with the condition of the "They", where "everyone is the other, and no one is himself' (BT165), is a Being-with-another by "not 'mattering' to one another" (BT158). Solicitude,therefore,cantaketheformofdenyinganother,orfailingtounderstand. If such a denying is possible, lying is possible. In fact one could understand solicitude-as- domination as a form o f lying based on the symbolization o f the other as someone to be replaced (to be used). Wouldn't this kind of leaping in create conflict? Does this kind of
solicitude meet with opposition? And can it fail?
Similarly, whatever allows us to feel empathy also allows us to lie. How could we
lie without simultaneously ascribing mental states to others, which we then manipulate, assuming our mental state(s) can be hidden? Lying requires both caring ("the other is primarilydisclosedinconcemfiilsolicitude",BT161)anddoubting. Chimpanzeescan bothlieandcount. HowcanwedissolvelyinginBeing-with? Thepossibilityoflyingand
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our need to lie arises out o f our solicitude. Lying can function as the failure to recognize another in the face of one's own desire, such that one can replace one's desire for another. Since this replacement takes place in the context o f Being-with, it represents a turning away that for the Other could be understood as a hiding, This would not be lying only if we could cease Being-with, could erase our mutual identity within the 'They'. Otherwise we are stuck in a split structure, within a doubling, where we remain with the other but in thewayofhisnotmattering. Ontologysplitsfromvaluing. Butwithoutthisvaluingthe ontological relation expressed in Being-with has not content, and could not describe our everyday existence. Heidegger is stuck with the 'They' as the domain in which Being-with functions. Being-with becomes an orientation o f the 'They', within the 'They', as who a particular entity is (what is ontic if not a "non-committal formal indicator"? BT152). The content ofDasein is simultaneously its context (and thus Heidegger seems to avoid the separation between universal and particular). "Our" Being-with, therefore, is not so easily separated from empathy (as concomitant with lying). The ontological unity o f Being-with,
at the level o f complexity o f Dasein, already involves a kind symbolization that allows for counting and doubting. Being-with because it embodies an orientation, and is not simply unconsciousness in the way a lower animal might be unconscious, must conceive of others within a realm in which our orientation might fail, creating the possibility for doubt.
Heidegger resists and ignores this possibility in Being and Time. In "Das Ding" "Being-with" describes our nearness (or relation and involvement both ontologically and semantically) to and with things. Heidegger's philosophical therapy is directed at exposing our "Being-with" within the totality ofthe world as an animate whole. This
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means that "Das Ding" is a manual for animating the world as a means o f re-animating being human outside ofthe temptations ofself-reflection that have reduced being human to consciousness (Descartes) and then to a mode o f knowing (Hegel).
Heidegger's philosophical therapy resists (or Heidegger fails to understand) the meaning and depth of the scientific stance within and towards the world (partly because he collapsesscienceandtechnology). Thisscientificstancewasarticulatedclearlyby Lucretius inDe Rerum Natura: "The dread and darkness ofthe mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts o f day, but only by an understanding o f the outward form and inner workings o f nature" (31). Lucretius attempts to separate psychology, or rather divinity, from physics, while Heidegger wants to collapse both into a more fundamentalstancetowardearth,sky,mortalsanddivinities. Thehistoryofscientific therapy has yet to be written, as has a study investigating the depth of the question 'how is it?