No More Learning

The failure to justify the limits o f interpretation (God) and o f causation (mechanics) can be survived by making and interpreting ourselves toward those limits. But nothing may count as such a making and interpreting. Cognitive philosophy under one aspect, Theology under another, Literature under a third promise this making and interpreting, but such promises must be justified. We have no intelligible language with which to speak about art which does not risk constructing itself as a form o f mind, and, therefore, as a pseudo-mechanism, as nonsense.
If I ask seriously 'Can a machine mistake us . . . ? ' how would I begin to answer that question? If I transmute 'Can I a machine mistake us . . . ? ' into 'How can we make a machine o f "kind X' mistake us for a machine o f "kind X '? ', I would already be pursuing a methodology: we can know what we can make, therefore, we must make what we want to know. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis o f concepts, and science as the use o f these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, while at least a terrifying proposal (and useful as such), allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinction between philosophy
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and science within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine (see chapter 14).
In his essay on "The Influence ofDarwin on Philosophy," Dewey pictures the possibilities o f thought circumscribed by the limits o f being described by evolution:
Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object o f knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate an object of study together with the consequences that then flow from it, and no intelligible question can be asked about what, but assumption, lies outside. (311)
Joyce also describes this Darwinian limit:
The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere waterstichystuff in a selfinade world that you can't believe a word he's written in, not for pie, but one's only owned by natural rejection. Charley, your my darwing! So sing they sequent theassentofman. Tilltheygoroundiftheygoroundagainbeforebreakpartsand all dismissed. (FW252. 24-28)
Thisisapictureofscientificconstraint("putstraitonthespot"). Evolutiondescribesthe relation between the inanimate and the animate through the rules o f scientific epistemology and constructs as part o f this epistemology the rules and possibilities for how any living being is made. These rules of transformation are directed at the facts describing the
world. Ahistoryabouthowanyonecametobe(atwhateverlevelofcomplexity),despite whatever ideological or axiological assumptions and patterns underlying it, exhibits forms of being whose status must be determined. Thus, it is easier to write a history of a person (whose ontological status is relatively stable), than it is a history o f literature when this is
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not understood as the history o f book, but the history o f meaning figured as both a particular text and functioning and created within or by the general forms of a number of totalities: language, society, ideology, biology and so on. How does one determine the relation between any particular and any whole when the ontological status o f the particular is always at stake? The self-reflection on the ontological status o f the units within any history or grammar is not a species of historiography or science, but a semantics of remaking what counts into what matters, in Joycean terms an 'evoluation', a story of
becomingthatisfundamentallyastoryofevaluation. Butanystory,asastory,willbe meaningless outside of our application of it to an aspect of our world (as a story of recognition). How do we find ourselves in a story? Such an application, however, requires a theory justifying the correlation of a theory (or allegory) with our experience. Darwin's power is partly a function of our necessary involvement within the picture of becoming (both o f what is real and what something is). The controversy surrounding it is alsoafunctionofthisnecessaryinvolvement. Thereisadifferenceinfindingoneselfina story and finding oneselfas a story. How do we find ourselves as a story?
Wittgenstein, by and large, rejected the relevance o f scientific discovery (specifically Darwin's) to the conceptual work of philosophy, the analysis of how we use language and configure ourselves within this usage (the grammar). Wittgenstein's understanding o f philosophical grammar was primarily normative, and thus contingent on particular normative standards, but without a clear picture of how grammars change. Similarly while he recognized, and he himselfwas engaged in, the construction of new language games and new grammars, he did not analyze or describe this process of
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creation. This was partly because the philosophical problems arose when one either operated outside of a coherent grammar (or language game) or when the application of a grammar (a usage or interpretation) was not seen to be nonsense. Wittgenstein's relatively static picture of grammar made it difficult for him to appreciate the philosophical significanceofDarwin. AlthoughIwillnotexaminethissignificanceinanydetailinthis dissertation, the interaction between ontological and identity claims in Darwin opens up the problem of self-reflection in its theological dimension (a dimension which also collapses ontology and identity into grammar).
In Finnegans Wake evolution underlies the process ofbecoming and dissolution, in both its moral and epistemological dimension, that organizes our pictures ofthe night, in the same way that Vico's New Science, the Egyptian Book o f the Dead, Freud's Interpretation o fDreams do. HCE, one of the central 'figures' in Finnegans Wake, is himself"a theory none to rectiline ofthe evoluation ofhuman society and a testament of therocksfromalldeaduntosometheliving"(FW73. 31-33). Evolutionincludesan evaluation, at least an ontological commentary on the dead from which anybody and everybody came: matter has been educated through what we call evolution. Such a commentary is 'ontological' because such a process produces whatever is-real, and the success o f such a production acts as an ontological comment, even judgment. This ontological language, o f course, can only 'say' existence and 'betray' absence or extinction. It is not a 'language' that anyone must understand, but is an education that we all enact and embody.
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Science expresses a negative metaphysical fact: a description o f ontological limits without foundations. Hilary Putnam describes the loss o f foundations attending science:
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whetherwewanttobethereornot,sciencehasputusinaposition o f having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position--and no end to it is in sight -- is that o f having to philosophize without 'foundations'. (24)
If science destroys metaphysical answers and cannot provide substitutes, in what sense is the atomic bomb a 'metaphysical fact'? Science, or rather the enactment of scientific knowing in technology, enacts ontological limits, not within its descriptions of the world, but in the way these descriptions correlate the world in relation to itself. Putnam unconsciously recognizes this metaphysical force when he writes 'whether you want to be there or not," an acknowledgment of ontological limits determining our possibilities, even if not in an absolute sense (an allegory of self-annihilation).
We replace foundations with limits in relation to which we correlate ourselves. We function and exist within systems from which we cannot exit, and these systems determine what counts as animate, conscious and human. The threat that these systems will determine our animation, consciousness and humanity as inanimate, as deterministic fictions, and as inhumane is the great theme ofFinnegans Wake and, after it, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
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The war does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even o f the sort the Germans have engineered, ein V olk ein Fuhrer--it wants a machine o f many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is i t . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness--not a life at all, really. (Gravity's Rainbow, 152)
Technology enacts proximate causes through the process of its function and functioning. Such functioning describes a localized teleology, what Joyce called an "odium teleologicum" (L. odium theologicum) a hatred o f theological teleology (FW264. 04-05). The War might also only look like God. "[0]ur silent passing into the machineries of indifference" (482) means our translation into a fragment within a system defined by its functionandfunctioning. Gravity'sRainbowunderstandsthisseductiontobeadiscovery about how we enter and exit the world: "Whether you believe or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling --a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out ofyour soul, something--for the Rocket" (784). Resistance is hardly the point, although it can seem like all that is left to being human, but even this might be describing a technique (and thus the effort Heidegger puts in re-defining techne). Resisting the "beckoning" of the rocket, Pokier "hunted, as a servo
with a noisy input will, across Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonalsalvation"(473). Thisisnotaproofofanything,butamodemproverb.
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2. 1 Personal identity and impersonal salvation
In an essay saving Hume from the claim that he had separated 'is' from 'ought', Alasdair MacIntyre links "what is good and right" with "what we need and desire", countering the Kantian translation of morality into formalism:
We could give a long list ofthe concepts which can form such bridge notions between "is" and "ought": wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure, happiness, health-- and these are only a few. I think there is a strong case for saying that moral notions are unintelligible apart from concepts such as these (Against the Self-Images o f the Age, 120)
Part ofthe special status ofthe words 'wanting', 'needing', 'desiring', 'pleasure', 'happiness', 'health' is the way they mean, as interpretations of our stances toward the world, others, and ourselves. These interpretations are, then, posited as internal states or somehow constitutive o f who we are.
In "God and the Theologians", MacIntyre describes "a whole group of theologies which have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic substance" (,Against, 23) He argues that "we have no language to express common needs, hopes, and fears that go beyond the immediacies o f technique and social structure. What we do have is a religiouslanguage,whichsurviveseventhoughwedonotknowwhattosayinit. Sinceit is the only language we have for certain purposes it is not surprising that it cannot be finally discarded. But since we have no answers to give to the questions we ask in i t , it remains continually in need o f reinterpretation, reinterpretation that is always bound to
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fail. . . within theological discourse, as Feurbach and Marx saw, we are bound to remain blind to the human significance of theological discourse" (23). The confused use of theological language to express an atheistic content, as a mask for the failure o f both atheism and religion, has been transplanted into literature both in ideological criticism (in which moral prejudices are disguised) and in versions o f the symbolist faith in 'art for art's sake,'anidentificationofthedeepestinhumanlifewithart. Thisisamasquethat Geoffrey Hill recognizes: "The major caveat which I would enter against a theological view o f literature is that, too often, its is not theology at all, but merely a restatement o f the neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery" ("Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement', 17). What would constitute an adequate theology? Such a question has nothing to do with doing science, but it can only be answered in relation to the ontological limits enacted in science. Artificial Intelligence attempts to work out of the mental, phenomenological, qualitative, and intentional in relation to the requirements o f scientific determinism, the demands of the rationality or logical coherence of the world. Cognitive science investigates the relation between quality and quantity, when quantity describes a common limit between our knowing and the world. I will say nothing about the possible success of such an endeavor. Its form, as I describe it here, however, retains the same structure as the theological picture of the mind as the soul. One can at least say that cognitive science is directed toward the same limit that theology has figured as between humansandGod. Cognitivescienceunderstoodasatheologyofmindisadescendentof what Coleridge called, in Biographia Literaria, a "Genuine Philosophic Poem" (156), a poem that enacts our moral stances as ontological commitments.
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In Finnegans Wake, pursuing a Don Juan scene o f seduction, Juan (a version o f Shem the artist brother) "asking coy one after sloy o n e . . . (and all o f course just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in sprite of fun) for Juan, by the way, was by the
way ofbecoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human being that ever was called man, loving all up and down the whole creation . . . " (FW431. 04;08-12). What kind of education is this? For Juan's fun this pursuit means 'dropping] a few stray remarks" (FW431. 01-02). These fragments promise and seduce and teach "the twentynine hedge daughters . . . learning their antemeridian lessons o f life" (FW430. 03- 04). Fragments seduce the will: Wittgenstein seduces with such fragments; Austin seduces with such details. Any language or language game seduces with fragments (metaphoric possibilities), keeping their application, legitimacy, and ontological status in
the background. Commenting in one o f his manuscripts (part o f which was collected in Culture and Value), Wittgenstein frames the seduction of an object as the conflict between our what we want to see and how we live (the truth enacted in our practices):
Tolstoy: "The significance o f an object lies in its universal intelligibility" . That is partly true, partly false. When an object is significant and important what makes it difficult to understand is not the lack of some special instruction in abstruse matters necessary for its understanding, but the conflict between the right understanding o f the object and what most men want to see. This can make the most obvious things the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will (MS 213, 406-7: CF17)1
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The condition I am following finds that seductions premise new versions o f myself and new limits to my world. If I hear Thoreau ask "Who bolsters you? " (Walden 26), do I answer some seductress or some future or myself, my will, my fictions?
I concern myselfwith what 'making' means and what limits I make myself(or anyone makes themselves) toward: "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places" (Walden 90). This indifference I think is a mistake, and marks such an awakening as another dream. Our awakening involves at a fundamental level not only our recognition of our humanity, but the recognition of humanity(asaparticularkindoflimit). Thoreauimaginesthatthisplaceisalwaysthe same, a sameness guaranteed by our common species-being, and if we imagine this as our form o f life we confuse the content o f our life with the meaning o f its form. This meaning may not be determined solely by who we are or even what we are, but may emerge as meaning only as how we are anything at all.
Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually be executed, Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we axe. (Walden 90)
Both the world and we are constituted in this nextness, what in Finnegans Wake is continually formulated as being between. The double possibility o f meaning through who we are and how we are offers us a fulcrum on which we can lever ourselves into willfulness, that in copying the process of our own evolutionary making we become more fullyawakeinrelationtoit. Thoreaupicturesthisdoublepossibilityasthegivenofour
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nature ("We are not wholly involved in Nature" [Walden 91]). He pictures our stance toward it as determined by perspective ("With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sanesense"[Walden91]). Doestheworldseduceusinthesamewayasthisnextnessto ourselves and others seduces us simply through our involvement (interestedness) with it?
When thinking about what came to be Ulysses, Joyce rejected Christ as the greatest western hero in favor o f Odysseus, because Christ had never lived, in love, with a woman, and thus had avoided the primary realm in which Joyce understood (male) heroics to survive in the modem world. Can we understand the need or pursuit or possibility of love to be subsumed under Thoreau's categories o f neighborliness, or resoluteness, or nextness, or interestedness? What does it mean for all intimacies to be collapsed into a single realm of sociability opposed to the solitude into which Thoreau writes himself? If Thoreau resists one kind of skepticism, denying his reduction into simply one who knows and thus exposes Nature's nextness and his own nextness to himselfj why does this nextnessnotexplicitlynameloveaspartofitspurview? WaldenseemstohideThoreau's fanaticism in the face of Love (a Leontes in disguise as a natural scientist), as if Love is notevenapossibilitytobeexplicated. Howcanapoliticaleconomyfunctionifitisnot also a psychology o f intimacy? I expect Thoreau at times to speak like St. Paul and allow for marriage, although he himself does not understand the desire and would wish people to live in chastity as he does.
One then wonders about the need to translate the Vulgate's Carilas as Love. Is it the "piety of thinking" that translates love into our desire for (or our relationship to) God and our soul, as if those are the only realms in which doubt about the thing in itself can
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find satisfaction? Isn't that another fantasy, almost a fantasy o f science? ("Because 'women' are too hard to understand or trust? ", some man might say). Or should we follow Heidegger in quoting Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite that "love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves"? 2 In this case knowing and loving both become forms o f pantheism, as if believing in someone's love is like believing in things (by this I mean that the survival o f skepticism requires a kind o f pantheism, o f a sortthatconfusesimaginedmindsforimaginedworlds). Ifthistooisakindof romanticism, then can we explain part ofwhat is different about how Thoreau tries to awaken us (and reanimate our language) and how Heidegger tries to reconfigure and recover our relationship to Being by caricaturizing Thoreau's allegory as one ruled by irony and Heidegger's allegory as one ruled by metonymy? (Romanticism here defines the need for a kind of allegory, as a way of protecting the distance between things and people, andbetweenourconfusionandtruth). Ironywillcreateaconfusionbetweenfragments
andauthor. Thetruthorontologicalstatusormeaningorapplicationofanysentence(or fragment), because o f this confusion, must be continually redetermined (justified). The rule o f metonymy produces justification as an effect, displacing the need for justification in the description of our stances toward and within these totalities (this is how Hiedegger avoids skepticism in Being and Time).
These stances are in some fundamental sense moral stances. In a "Lecture on Ethics" he gave not long after he returned to Cambridge in 1929, when he was still in the grip o f his Tractarian system, Wittgenstein describes the limit between facts that describe the world (and can be true) and statements of "absolute value" that describe ethics,
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aesthetics (as a form of ethics), and religion. He calls ethics "an enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living" (PhilosophicalOccasions,38). IntheTractariandescriptionofthelogicoflanguage, propositions are all on the same level. No statement can have a logical priority. Ethics, however, requires just such a priority. Judgments of relative value can be translated into statements o f fact, as in "better or worse. " Ethical judgment, however, must act as a frame in which all statements o f fact have meaning, and thus such judgments cannot themselves
be statements o f fact:
If I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to be quite obvious, it seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter o f which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write such a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are all vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our
words will only express facts. (40)
Ethics describes and enacts a transcendent limit to the world. A true book of ethics, however, describes not only this limit but is enacted through and as the perspective of a particular 'I', which in the Tractarian picture is also a transcendent limit of the world.
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Consequently, such a book ofEthics becomes this 'I', constituting the meaning ofthe worldinthepracticesofaperson(thisT). Allotherbooksofethicsceasetofunctionas books o f ethics within the world so constituted. They, in effect, spontaneously combust (ceasetobeseenorunderstoodasbooksonethics).
Atruebookofethics,therefore, both animates an T and delimits a world. These ontological consequences mean such a book describes a kind o f ontological ethics. This kind o f link between ontological consequences (figurations of the world and o f'I') are possible only within the kind of coherent theological language MacIntyre describes (I say nothing about the content of such a language). It is the consequence of our economies, technologies and sciences that such a language must operate in relation to the limits o f the world also construed as physical and quantifiable (this does not mean that such languages would be scientific or mathematical,farfromit). Itisunclearthatanylanguagecouldregainthiskindofforce
and coherence (this is why so much is at stake in the way in which we conceptualize the relation between the qualitative and the quantitative).
Wittgenstein'spictureofontologicalethicsisakinto hislatterunderstandingofa true philosophy. Written in 1930, after Wittgenstein had shifted from his Tractarian picture of a transcendent limit between 'I' and language to a fluid (and in some way phenomenological) conception of our involvement in language, the following remark was included in Philosophical Investigations: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them" (? 128). This agreement would follow from the obviousness o f any real thesis (clearly philosophy does put forward theses, but because they do not evince immediate and
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universal agreement, they are not theses in Wittgenstein's sense). In 1931 (December 9), Wittgenstein responding to Waismann's attempt, in a book to be entitled Theses, to render the Tractates into a number of dogmatic theses, articulates his shift away from describing the limits o f sense (and o f philosophy) through describing the logical structure o f facts (and thus as a set o f propositions):
As regards your Theses, I once wrote if there were theses in philosophy, they wouldhavetobesuchthattheydonotgiverisetodisputes. Fortheywouldhave to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course obvious. . . controversy always arises through leaving out or failing to state clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made that could be disputed. I once wrote, The only correct method o f doing philosophy consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another to another person to make a claim. That is the method I now adhere to, What the other person is not able to do is to arrange the rules step by step and in the right order so that all questions are solved automatically. (183-84)
The transcendent limit describing ethics in the Tractates is now constituted as the relative ground o f our ordinary language (and experience). This ordinariness describes our involvement within the world as both our ontological commitments, our transparent language use, and our values: "The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-- becauseitisalwaysbeforeone'seyes)"(PI? 130). Consequently,philosophyshould "simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since
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everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (PI? 126). The determination of our interests is a moral (or ethical concern).
Wittgenstein's engagement with this moral concern as a form o f therapy may, as it does for Freud, excavate any moral content from his versions of ourselves and the world. Or at least it displaces this content from his remarks to his personality. In such a displacement moral concern remains transcendent, something that can be shown in one's practice but not said within one's language. This is a model of confession that honors truthfulness without concerning itselfwith truth. There are, therefore, two aspects of Wittgenstein's picture o f philosophy. Philosophy is a kind o f therapy used to release us from the temptation to philosophize and it is an attempt to get "a clear view o f the world" (Kenny, 2): "[t]he philosophers treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" (PI ? 255) and "[t]he concept of a perspicuous representation (ubersichtliche Darstellung) isoffundamentalsignificanceforus. Itearmarkstheformofaccountwegive,theway
we look at things" (PI ? 122).
2. 2 "timeIiquescingintostate,pitilessagegrowsangelhood"(FW251. 09-10)
Thoreau describes the promise of art as a kind of delusion mapped into our seeing both as a limit to our being (the temptation to solipsism) and the promise o f knowing:
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions ofthe universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several
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constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracletakeplacethanforustolookthrougheachother'seyesforaninstant? We should live in all the ages ofthe world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds ofthe ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! --I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. (Walden, 6)
An artwork o f sufficient complexity to generate and justify its own particular aesthetic drives toward an ideal of neurological identity with others: an adequate aesthetic (of course "adequate" reopens all the questions I am trying to close, so it can only mean at this point something like "convincing", "self-justifying", etc. ) represents an attempt to become an instantiated metaphor, to become someone else without losing oneself and thus existing as a transpersonal identity that sees with the eyes of our species as a whole. The temptation in seeing through another's eyes is not like what motivates someone to say "While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going on in his head"(PI ? 427). In saying this, as Wittgenstein remarks, "one is not thinking o f brain-processes, but o f thought processes. " This desire is, as Wittgenstein describes, that "we should like to know what he is thinking. " The picture o f seeing into someone's head has a use, "apparently contradicting the picture, which expresses the psychical. "(PI? 427). In saying this is not the temptation that Thoreau describes I am trying to suggest that it is not part of a interpretive game. There is certainly something uncanny about Thoreau's picture.
Our ordinary understanding of our involvement in the world is limited to the domain defined by our quiet desperation. Thoreau is not picturing seeing something new about someone. InWittgenstein'spictureandresolutionwewantsomeinformation,andour
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picture o f this desire figures this desire in relation to the limit o f our knowledge (the other person).
Thoreauisnotafterwhatsomeoneseesbuthowwesee. Seeingnotevenasifbut through another's eyes as they see through ours is to be a more complex form of life that has at least four eyes, a network ofbrains, nerves and limbs. The limit to this seeing is not an interpretive limit, where we use physiological (or ontological language) as a metaphor, but an ontological limit; not a limit between people or within a language game, but a limit constituting language: "Incredible the first animal that dreamed o f another animal"(Fuentes, 9). This is what I will later call the limit between the mind and the soul. This is the possibility to confuse the world for a mind and a mind for a world from the inside o f each. In this sense literature becomes a philosophy o f mind, an attempt to construct and embody the mind such that human particularity and separation is reconstructed within a system of identities operating as the ideal or fundamental mind of our form o f life, approaching or enacting our species-being.
From seeing through another's eyes we are transformed into God, collapsing all time, all worlds (whose worlds? ) into our being. This might be a justification or a mad description of art. This fantasy is almost like taking language too seriously, or at least offering up the strangeness of language as so powerful as to undo itself into absurdity, as evidence o f both our extreme alienation and as the means to survive it: to find Descartes' certainty not in himselfbut in others, to allow perception or, within the context of Thoreau's allegory, language to dissolve our ontological limitations into what sound's like divine power. But why does Thoreau jump from seeing through another's eyes to seeing
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through God's eyes ("all ages o f the world in an hour, ay, in all the world o f the ages")? Is this the ontological justification for loving thy neighbor? Do we believe this fantasy? If we did then Wittgenstein could tease us back into sense by correcting our language. And yet this would be a "miracle". The ambiguity o f language, the need for philosophical therapy, protects the distance between us. Thoreau's piece of science fiction here is a version of the quest for certainty, to confirm the existence of other minds by entering into one,orevenasinartificialintelligence,bymakingone. Thoreauassumesananswerto skepticism, like Wittgenstein's notion of a true book of ethics, would re-construct the fundamental ontology of all that defines our lives and our world(s). If we admit that such a reconstruction is impossible, that such certainty is illusory, then what would the construction o f another mind amount t o ? 3
Wittgenstein answers: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (223). But again, what would the construction of another mind amount to? What does 'mind' mean here? If I convert a lion into a human being I have remade my form of life: my biology, species-being, history, culture, society, conceptual, existential, and phenomenological world(s), language, desires, values, commitments. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for being human? At what point would a lion cease to be a lion and become human?
Any attempt to answer this question, or to build a human being or a mind, or a machine X even if limited to a conceptual description (of a lion and a human; what would or should I include in such descriptions? ) or scientific models (in biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, or computer science) are stuck inside our human limitations (ontology,
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phenomenology, language, psychology, biology, etc. ). This means any such question or attempt can always be translated into the question 'what does it mean to be human? ' And what do things mean? A question that can be answered, at least, by science or theology. Itisasurprisethatthesetwoquestionsarerelatedorevenattimesmightseem the same.
How would we answer this question? : What does it mean to be human? Maybe withMiddlemarch, the works ofAristotle, or Bach'sMass in B minorl Ifthis question can only be answered, however poorly, with representative representations, it is not a question but a riddle. A riddle we might answer with our own life. This riddle, however, is not like the duck-rabbit 'riddle', nor like the riddle o f the Sphinx. To know the solution to the Sphinx riddle you have to know how it is the solution, If you are simply told that man is the solution to the riddle, but do not understand why this is the answer you do not understandtheriddle. Knowingtheansweristoknowhowtoapplytheriddleasa description or a picture of human life. One must know what is relevant, what aspect of human life is being pictured by four, then two, then three legs. 4
The riddle 'what does it mean to be human' is not like this. One could call it instead a riddle of the enveloping facts. Every 'answer' to the riddle is a restatement of anotherrelatedriddle. Toanswer'whatdoesitmeantobehuman? 'withBach'sMassin BMinormeanstheriddleofhumanityistheriddleofBach'sMass. Howthisisthe answer cannot be explained except as another riddle. We can never decide what is relevant aswecanwiththesphinx. Wittgensteinarguesthatonemightseesomearbitrarycipherin any number o f ways, "in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with. And
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here there is a close kinship with 'experiencing the meaning of a word"' (PI p. 210). The fiction surrounding 'the meaning of being human' cannot reduce the riddle to anything like a word; we can never decide what is relevant as we can with the sphinx. Joyce represents the riddle of the meaning of being human as (or in) the riddle ofFinnegans Wake:
Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense of even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstancing it isjust as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter's aquantaince . . . straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space o f the time being som definite articles o f evolutionary clothing. . . (FW109. 10-21)
This difficulty of answering this riddle forces us inside the question. We can translate it into philology with the help ofsingle quotation marks: What does it 'mean' to be a 'human being'? We can answer this by showing our uses o f'mean' and 'human being' within whatever conceptual logics they can function. Understood in this way philology becomes the analysis of the functioning of these categories, and in this an analysis of meaning. 'Function', however, is slippery. Does a crystal have a function of growing, or does it simply grow? Function implies a kind of intentionality, a directedness and a teleology. Function in this sense means to unite proximate causation (the causes describing how something works) with final causation (telos). Final causes are either
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epiphenomena (a virus makes you sick not because it is malevolent, but as an effect o f its living) or ascribed interpretations (descriptions o f motives, reasons, and justifications).
The riddle in this philological form, like our use o f 'function', constantly confuses interpretations for cause, as does Freud when he understands the unconscious, an interpretative category, to function as part o f psychic mechanism. Freud offers interpretations and he has no way of establishing that the structures he describes or 'discovers'causeanything. Causescanbetested:ifxhappens,thenyfollows(inclearly defined conditions): Freud cannot establish this kind o f connection. He describes instead motives and justifications and reasons that are interpretations of our actions and expressions. They cannot be tested, only applied.
But Freud's confusion of interpretations for psychic causes is a temptation hard to resist, especially when it can generate important questions. Inquires into the meaning of the phrase 'human being' can generate, for example, the following questions:
What rights do human beings have?
What counts as being human?
How do human beings represent themselves?
In these questions 'meaning' seems to describe the criteria for what counts as being 'human'. The criteria for being human might take the form of descriptions of kinds of humans, a set of traits or properties, or in literature the articulation of a way of being human, as a man or woman, an artist or engineer, or as a member of some ethnic or cultural group defined in whatever way. The meaning o f such descriptions is determined
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by their inclusion or articulation within some allegory, through an interpretation; in this case meaning is often equated with interpretation.
We do not know, nor within this methodology do we have any way of determining thestatusofthesecategoriesorallegories: aretheytrueordotheyevenexist. Wemight be very clever in interpreting some event or the actions or identity of someone in relation to the devil or some demonology but we do not know how to ask within philology, if the devil exists or if this allegory is an adequate explanation of someone, or if we are using this interpretation to further our own ends, the power o f the church against women for example. This may be a result of cultural blindness, but it is blindness nevertheless.
This limitation drives us further into the riddle.
Attempting to distinguish the domains of interpretation and causation force us to investigate the relation between what is real [ontological claims] and what is meaningful [semantic functions]. We retranslate the question into a kind of philosophy: W hat does it 'mean' 'to be' 'human'? 5 What does 'to be' mean? Such a question asks about the semantics of self-reflection. We can now ask what is the ontological, epistemological, and axiological (value) status ofthe criteria, interpretations, categories, and 'entities' generated in the previous versions o f the question. What it means to be human must be understood in relation to the criteria or the processes determining what is real. This 'reality' is unstable, but this instability requires that the descriptions, interpretations, and representationsofhumanbeingsfunctioninrelationandrespondtothisinstability. This entails an attempt to distinguish between interpretations and causes. Cognitive science does this by assuming that only what can be made can count as real (although humans may
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not be the 'maker'): being human must be understood as an effect. The distinctions between animate or inanimate, human and non-human (animal or thing) dissolve in the demand that any such distinctions be produced as a process outside ofthe interpretive structurewhichdefinesthem. Thisdoesnotmeanthatonecanstepoutsideofthe hermeneutic circle, but that the question about whether something is animate and inanimate must also rest on whether such a distinction exists as a product o f causes. Can knowing or recognizing the difference between what is animate or inanimate or between human and non-human mean anything separate from not only how these distinctions are used but also how these distinctions are possible?
Wittgenstein states: 'A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one, although the problem is a conceptual one" (Remarks on the Philosophy o f Psychology I, ? 949). Wittgenstein analyzes how we use our concepts and shows how our instantiation or reification ofthese concepts is often unwarranted. Is that the only conceptual problem? If we agree that our claims about the world (or picture of our mind as inside and the world as outside: o f our understanding as a state, or o f consciousness as states or entities) should only be understood as meaningful within our language and that these claims illegitimately instantiate some truth or reality of our being or the world, then how do we commit ourselves to these concepts as if they were real? If we determine the
grammatical use o f 'understanding' and the rules determining its use as nonsense, we have notunderstoodourinvestmentofourselvesintheconceptofunderstanding. Wittgenstein is looking at the points where we mistake our grammar for ontology. As Hacker argues the claim that 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is not a truth about the world. This
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does not mean that it is false. We cannot say what it would be like for it to be true or false. It is nonsensical because the grammatical rules determining the sense o f something being only red and being only green do not allow for something to be only red and only green simultaneously(//mg/rt 197). 6 Sense describes the possibilities of our language; nonsense describes what has been excluded from our language (PI? 500).
The instantiation o f distinctions that function within language games means that we have a specific problem in determining the status o f these distinctions when they are used to describe ourselves or to instantiate the meaning or cause or functioning of behavior, language, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. All psychological, intentional, ideological language has an unknown and problematic existential status. How do we invest ourselves in our self-descriptive language games? This is not to ask 'Are we conscious? ' or 'Do we have belief states? ', etc. If the logic of language is such that the distinctions formalized as words, or sentences, or concepts function and have meaning only within (a) system(s) of discourse, that is, in relation to other words, sentences, concepts o f a particular language game, then even our interpretative distinctions and models are only a shuffling of tokens
or the working out ofthe logic organizing a particular language game. A working out which has no truth values separate from the rules o f application and criteria o f sense that
constitute the language game as a coherent system o f allegory that people use bound by some conventions. So much o f literary criticism and philosophical analysis devolves into the shuffling oftokens within these systems ofthe extension ofthe number oftargets for allegorical assimilation within a discourse o f a community o f speakers.
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The problem of how we enter into our interpretations or how we are involved in our seeing determines much of Wittgenstein's analysis in the latter part of part I and all of part II of the Investigations. Wittgenstein's description of our involvement in and between language games (in our negotiation between sense and nonsense) describes a form of temporality as one o f the limits o f our mind.