No More Learning

121
would say, our temptations toward skepticism or fanaticism) make visible the limits in relation to which we negotiate the ways in which we make sense to ourselves and to others (and this is why these limits seem ontological).
The meaning ofthis scientific language game is determined not only in our ability to map the experience "seeing light" and "brain stimulation" into our ordinary experience, but in it being 'our' experience, 'our' brain', and 'our' questions. The experiment makes sense because another person can stand in for all other people (within a certain statistical model). Thisstandinginmeansthattheexperimentismeaningfulwithinasymbolsystem (where people can stand in for each other as examples of a person) outside of which the experiment cannot get. This symbol system (which expresses the meaning o f any particular person as a human person) is what Thoreau highlights by imagining a form of life which can view people from both the inside and the outside. His construction o f this limit-person, however, was not part of an epistemological language game about what people think or are thinking or see or are seeing and so on. His picture imagines the limit ofbeing human (in all its dimensions, including our knowing) as being humanity or humanityconscious(ifthese'people'arefromonotherplanets). Thisislikeaskingfor
the meaning ofbeing human as opposed to the meaning of'human being'.
W e can see this if we compare where the semantic weight lies in the phrase 'how are consciousness and brain states related in our ordinary life? ' (a slightly altered version
of Wittgenstein's paradox) when used in ordinary life and in some relevant scientific language game. In ordinary life Wittgenstein wants to say 'how are "consciousness" and "brain states" related in our ordinary life? ' 'Consciousness' and 'brain states' make little
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
122
sense in this usage. In cognitive science, when consciousness and brain state are sufficiently defined experimentally (or conceptually), the semantic pressure should be marked "how are consciousness and brain states related in 'our' ordinary life? " One could include "ordinary life" as well, but it would simply be a further elaboration ofthe use of"our". I highlight "our" here not because ofepistemological reasons (as iftempted by solipsism), but rather because it is our species being, our interchangability (statistically) within the experiment that marks both its target (what is to be explained) and the limit the experiment is trying to define (how do human brains function as human consciousness? ).
This is the same 'our' Thoreau's thought experiment highlighted. In cognitive science, this 'our' defines a limit within a complex set of language games organized around causality. Thoreau'suseof'our'marksashiftinglimit(whatcountsasoursandwho counts in his use [my, your, our use]) within a complex set of language games organized around meaning and interpretation.
Because Wittgenstein makes visible human beings (as forms of life) within language games (or in relation to their failure) all limits can be analogized as some version ofthelimitbetweensenseandnonsense. Senseandnonsensecanfigureasanontological limit because we enact this limit as the form o f our activities; that is we constitute this limit in our language games and their failure through the way in which our activities (physical, linguistic, interpersonal and so on) mean to and for us. This kind of limit is different from interpretive limits like those between animate and inanimate (a classificatory limit) or betweenconsciousnessandbrainstatesorbetweencauseandinterpretation. Thesenseof
these limits is expressed by the ways in which they configure and express sense or
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
nonsense, and thus they are judgments. Although, sense and nonsense can be used as judgments as well, they have a further sense in that they describe (self-reflexively) grammar. Wittgensteinasserts"Essenceisexpressedbygrammar"(371). Thisrather cryptic claim, which one might first reads as 'whatever something is is expressed by our use of language within the order that is our social and personal practices, normative linguistic rules, criteria ofjudgment, knowledge, biology, and so on that constitutes our formoflife. ' Thiskindofreadingfollowsfromareplacementofterms. Itremains unclear within what kind o f language game it could function. The next remark seems to offer a target for it to do its work:
Consider: "The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one can milk out o f this intrinsic necessity into a proposition" (PI? 372)
"Essence" is translated into "intrinsic necessity". "Grammar" is translated into "arbitrary rule". This is a way of interpreting 371 in relation to the Tractarian picture of the relation between a proposition and the world. Wittgenstein had argued that essence was expressed through the logical form o f both objects and propositions (this logical form being tautological). These tautologies order the world (actually order the limits of the world) accordingtoanessentialnecessity:"Inlogicnothingisaccidental: ifathingcanoccurin an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing" (2. 012). A 'thing' is an object. These objects are essential parts o f atomic facts (2. 011). "The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts"(l. l 1). These objects (of which Wittgenstein never gave an example) constitute facts according to the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
possibilities that "must lie in the nature of the object" (2. 0123). Thus, knowing an object (and the facts which it can constitute) requires that one know the "internal qualities" that describe"thepossibilitiesofitsoccurrenceinatomicfacts"(2. 0123). Thenecessityof relationsdeterminingobjectsisnotfullymatchedbyanecessityinlogicalnotation. Any symbol system has accidental elements (the shape o f notations), but the logic o f the notation is such that once a system is established a logic o f relations is established: "if we have determined anything arbitrarily, then something else must be the case. (This results from the essence o f the notation). " (3. 342). 6 The picture o f language use in
Investigations, however, rejects any necessity separate from the conventions and practices orderingthegrammarofourlanguagegames. The Tractatuspictureofnecessitycan only be retained if it is understood as an arbitrary rule. But such a rule is neither an object nor an internal relation.
Has Wittgenstein displaced the immanence of possibility described by the internal qualities of an object into the immanent possibilities described or expressed as grammar? The next remark provides a kind o f answer, reasserting the link between essence and grammar: "Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar)" (? 373). An object is not defined by its internal qualities, by any immanent property. It emerges as an object within the logic of criteria and the actuality of practice (see also
PI? 293). Wittgenstein is placing a kind of hylomorphic pressure on language. That something is remains an absolute limit. This limit is expressed through what something is. Grammar can seem a theology because it expresses that something is (existence: an analogue for matter) through the form (essence: what kind o f object anything is)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
somethinghasforuswithinanygrammar. Inthissentence"[F]orus"means'forusas human beings': An arrow drawn on a page points "only in the application that a living beingmakesofit. Thispointingisnotahocus-pocuswhichcanbeperformedonlybythe soul"(PI? 454). Wittgensteinunderstandsustobejustifiedinouractions,our understanding, our meaning, our knowing to follow (or come to a stop) in the forms of life that constitute us as human beings: "What has to be accepted, the given, is --so one could say--formsoflife"(PIp. 226). Thisgivendescribesthelimitwithinwhichwefunction,a kind o f fundamental limit in practice because "only o f a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is
deaf; is conscious or unconscious" (PI? 281).
The conceptual difference between the inanimate and animate, however, describes
an interpretive limit. Imagining people as automata, "alone in my room", as if alone in my head, is like making a fiction. If you stand in front of another person and imagine "this seeming-person is a machine" you might either laugh and find these words meaningless or "youwillproduceinyourselfsomekindofuncannyfeeling, orsomethingofthesort. . . Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example" (PI? 421). There is nothing arbitrary about this example; it might have been also seeing magical symbols in clouds or the course of human life in the stars. An analogy can
generate a poem, but if I imagine that this course o f stars causes my character or determines the course of my life I am speaking nonsense. How did I move from interpreting shapes or movements as like myselfto a theory of causation without the limits
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
126
o f experiment that justify the use o f causal language? Someone who sees swastikas in the cross-pieces of a window might be a Jew or a Nazi, or it might be 1939. But if I see a human being as a machine how do I see myself? We are on the edge of a moral abyss, an abyss Wittgenstein marks by his example. In fact he challenges the reader to imagine a group of children as "mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism. " Such interpretations describe a limit between sense and nonsense; the failure to understand that one has reached such a limit requires one to enter into this nonsense as if it were a coherent language game, and thus a coherent world and form o f life from which one views one's ordinary life as uncanny.
If our forms of life act as the ground ofjustification for our interpretations, it is not a metaphysical ground about the world, but a defacto metaphysical ground for 'us'. To say justification must stop or it would not be justification is to offer a definition of
justification: ajustification mustjustify, not be in need ofjustification itself. It must be an unmovedmover. ThisisthesamelogicthatAquinasusestoarguethatthesoulcan perceivematterbecauseitisnotmadeofmatter. Thedifferencemakesperception possible. Thus the soul is incorporeal and therefore self-subsistent, or immortal. Such a model of perception is false if we take it for a theory about the mind (it violates the laws ofconservationofmatterandenergy). Itis,Ithink,however,notatheoryofthissort. The soul is not viewing the material world as if on a screen. Rather the soul describes the limitthatdeterminesperceptionasperception. Thesoulistheformofourlife,orrather theformoflifethatisconstitutedpartlybyourmaterialperceptions. Thesoulisnotan entity at all. In Wittgenstein, "forms of life" describes a limit concept that is the ground of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
127
justification (for knowing, perceiving, understanding, acting and so on) because it is itself the expression o f this knowing, perceiving, understanding, acting and so on.
"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false? " - I t is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language theyuse. Thatisnotagreementinopinionsbutinformoflife. (PI? 241)
This agreement becomes visible as a ground in our interpretations o f each other as human. Wittgenstein uses the concept o f form(s) o f life to describe the limit o f grammar, o f sense and nonsense, that which describes the limit between language games, our shifting involvement in language games. Our agreement in judgment, not just in definition, is required in order that our application of criteria, as well as the criteria themselves, in knowing, measuring, interpreting and so on, are consistent enough to allow for meaning and communication (PI? 242). The content of our agreement is expressed in our
understanding and communication, but it is made visible in our recognition o f each other ashuman. Thus,formoflife,likeKant'scategoricalimperativeandGoodman'spictureof when art is art (when it is an example of or is recognized as art), acts as a limit to these conceptualizations of essence (what something is: good or art).
Form o f life functions as a ground only within our interpretations, that is, we can only use the phrase 'form o f life' as justification when we have exhausted our answers to why we do something. It cannot answer or explain how we do something without begging the question. It does not function as a ground in our knowing, perceiving, understanding and so on. Rather our form o f life is expressed in these actions. Wittgenstein suggests that we are misled by our way ofjustifying our belief, for example,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
128
that something will happen in the future. We say, "This is a good ground, for it makes the occurrence probable"'(PI? 482). What this means, however, would be better expressed as 'a good ground expresses probability'. This is a definition not an explanation (or even a
justification).
What kind ofground andjustification is enacted inFinnegans Wake! It is not an
epistemological ground, but rather it enacts the fantasy Thoreau imagined o f seeing through another's eyes as if through God's. In Finnegans Wake, the demand to "Renove the Bible" is answered, "by the grace of Votre Dame", with "winding your hobbledehom" into a "dreambookpage" (579. 10; 428. 17-19). J. B. Steams in his discussion o f the use and representation o f dreams in classical poetry, suggests that "the dream fills the role of messenger between the divinities or the spirits of the dead and living mortals. Consequently, the poet, who often regards himself as a priest o f the gods, sometimes receives inspiration by means o f dreams, or, at least, assigns dream as his reason for composing"(ix-x). Joyce creates a language that allows dreams o f this kind to be spoken.
Finnegans Wake becomes the intentional domain, a domain articulating the possibility of aboutness, linking whatever might be this divinity, the soul, the insubstantial, language itself, mind with the human, the physical, substantial, language again, referring as opposed to being. This is at least one dimension ofthe double speak behind Joyce's puns. Although one can extract dreams from the text, versions ofPearl, The Divine Comedy, and ordinary dreams o f desire, fear, shame, etc. , it is the domain in which these dreams functionthatformsthesubstanceofthetext. Ifthe Wakewereadreamthenitwouldbe about a kind of psychology. The possibility for dreams to mean anything is a function of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
129
their functioning as a kind o f language or thinking separate from psychology, in a way analogous to Frege's separation of logic from psychology (dreams can mean not as dreams but within our interpretations, within our waking life, as descriptions within language). Freud insures this public domain through his construction o f a particular language game into which dream experience as the manifestation of the content of our mind could be allegorized and therefore analyzed: in this way allegory is transformed into a meta-language.
In Finnegans Wake every attempt at allegorical mapping shifts into another within the text, so that no stable language game or meta-language can organize our experience, even if we want to call it a dream. The linguistic aesthetic distortions Joyce puts English through conflates whatever grammar is left with the ontological possibilities picked out, exposed, created by this grammar (its ability to talk about itself as something, although thing is a misanalogy here). Language is mapped onto itself in such a way that the constitutive temporality enabling language (I will have to show what this means) becomes itself the formalized limit between the private and the public, that is, this limit is the form oflanguage. Thisformorlimit,whereFinnegans Wakebecomesitselfaformof temporality, functions as if the human and divine had collapsed into language. Any interpretative mapping that names a sentence to be about god(s) or human(s) falls into contradiction. Instead the text articulates the point or the moment, but these are again misanalogies (when does it mean? ) that calls forth the demand for this allegorizing. The text is neither human nor divine but the condition for both materiality and the soul to matter to us, in the way dreams matter to us. This might be called a language of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
130
conversion, where conversion becomes the determining change o f what we experience as time, or a language of confession
Faced with "Som's wholed, all's parted" (FW563. 30) we ask ourselves or our book "what does it mean? ". The sentence does not seem to be about anything exactly, and any interpretation offered must simultaneously construct an interpretive frame. In whatever particular story or character elements one extracts from a sentence or a fragment of the Wake, it is possible to trace two intentional strands: the language points 1) to an absent sleeper, an intentional object that exists as a negative point, an impossible beyond, and(2)simultaneouslytothe Wakeitself,aself-reflectionorversionoftheentiretext: where each sentence functions as a justifying aesthetic for the whole and as an example of this aesthetic: an exemplar, a representative representation. In both cases the intentional dimension of language has been lost, we cannot grasp either the sleeper or the Wake itself; the intentional drive of any particular string of words points but not at anything understandable. The effect ofthis is not to undermine the intentionality, the aboutness of language, but rather serves to expose the mechanisms of intentionality through which language functions, or rather we, as readers, become the mechanisms o f intentionality, continually adjudicating between sense and nonsense as a way o f figuring our relation to
any particular set of words or phrases.
Failed or vanishing intentionality calls forward the demand and need for
justification, but not the epistemological justification of a true belief, nor even of acting or action: the demand is whether to count the World as Mind or to count myself within a world. 7 Finnegans Wake highlights intentionality not as a logical or even a linguistic
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
131
problem, but as a problem of confession. Finnegans Wake is a confession in which both who confesses, what is confessed, who the confession is being directed to, who actually does hear the confession, and what the moral consequences o f and response to the confessionareblank. Thisblankness(theabsenceofintentionaltargets)enactsthe grammar of Wittgenstein's remark that '"You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed'. --That is a grammatical remark" (? 717). This follows not simply from a definition of God, but from the way in which human language configures its own boundaries.
Bretano, in his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, describes the intentional as what constitutes our mental experience (partly as a counter to Cartesian dualism):
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence o f an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although they do not always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, injudgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (88)
TobeaboutXseemstorequirearelationbetweenthinkingorathoughtandX. Any relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus if intentionality is understood as a relation one would require an infinite number of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
132
relations. (R) The verbs 'refer', 'symbolize', 'suggest', 'point' are all black boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If, however, the object does not actually exist (as in 'I hope to build the tallest building in the world'), the problem has shifted to the status of this object. Brentano uses the model o f the imaginary object as pattern for describing all o f our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness o f our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In many ways this is simply to replace the mystery of the aboutness o f our language with the mystery o f the immanence o f the world in our statements. Itcannotserveasanexplanation(acausalmodel)butonlyasadescriptionof our mental experience (and this is, o f course, how phenomenologists normally understand it).
The status o f such language as description and not as explanatory (in a causal sense) is what Wittgenstein means when he says "The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process" (PI? 222). The meaning of the confession lies in what can be understood as a consequence ofthe truth that is "guaranteed the special criteria oftruthfulness" (PI? 222). If statements about my mental content are understood as confessions they form a particular language game whose grammar (terms, claims, possibilities, application, usage, scope) allows me to speak, as it were, in my voice. Confessions in this sense are like dreams (as Wittgenstein suggests). We do not know that we at night actually experienced the dreams we remember and report. I am using 'actually' here as part o f a pseudo- scientific language game. What would be a non-actual experience?
An experience is an experience. Unlike my conscious experience my experience o f a dream cannot be ?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
133
divorced from my telling it. I may be deceived about my dreams but I have no way of determining this. The question in telling my dreams, like expressing my intentions and making confessions, is about my truthfulness but not about the truth of my claims. You can only determine their truth by judging my truthfulness:
The question whether the dreamer's memory deceives him when he reports the dream after waking cannot arise, unless indeed we introduce a completely new criterion for the report's 'agreeing' with the dream, a criterion which gives us a concept o f 'truth' as distinct from 'truthfulness' here. (PI p. 222-23)
In Investigations, the 'immanent objectivity' described by Brentano has been displaced into the normative structures ordering and determining our language use, marking the relation between sense and nonsense. Intentionality, broadly speaking, should be understood in Wittgenstein as grammar. The intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458):
"An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs "Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such". (PI? 458)
Such a picture while it makes our mental content accessible to others reduces aboutness to agreement and usage. Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, when the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
134
poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation oftruth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionality toward us such that we describe (in our reading and in our person) the fulfillment oflanguage. The consequence ofthis picture is that intentionality becomes a mode o f interpretation. People, texts, artifacts, and machines have an intentionality if they agree with the normative criteria for fulfilling an intention or for acting (or thinking or
believing) towards something. 9
The Wake pictures intentionality as a theological problem, or rather as our
theological dwelling in the world where all of our words, or rather where "[e]very letter is a godsend" (FW269. 17): "Plunger words what paddled verbed. Mere man's mime: God has jest" (FW486. 09-10). Humans attach themselves to the world through representation (mime) while God attaches himselfthroughjest. What is the nature of God'sjest? What is a God-joke (besides the created world and life itself)? There could be no other joke for God. Finnegans Wake describes such a world, a world that is a misrepresentation of God or ofa dreamer or ofa body or ofa brain, mind, world or ofsome beyond: it is at every level o f organization, what Wittgenstein calls, a grammatical joke:
The problems arising through a misrepresentation of our forms of language have the character o f depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms o f our language and their significance is as great as the importance of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
135
our language, -- Let us ask ourselves: why do we fell a grammatical joke to be
deep! (And that is what the depth of philosophy is. ) (PI? 111)
What are examples o f grammatical jokes? 'Time passes (like a log). ' I might explain how time can pass in this way by saying that 'time flows like a river'. There is a sense to this kind of talk, but it is not sense about time (but rather about our involvement in language). I will recover this sense in chapter 11. The nonsense o f this time-talk is various. I first picture time passing as if it were a thing passing by on a river; this is an picture o f the present. Ithenexplainthispicturebysayingtimeflowsliketheriveronwhichthelog passes; this is an image o f past, present and future. Instead o f seeing that time cannot be both ofthese, we might imaginethat this is part ofa complex picture oftime flowing (we could add boats and call them words; and mention refuse against the riverbank and call
these memories). Anna Livia Plurabelle forms just such a picture o f time as a river. I f she is understood as a theory, then we have hypostasized a complex analogy (that again has sense as an enactment o f our involvement and confusion within language and the world, and is not a picture of either us or the world).
Grammatical jokes describe limits. This is one o f the best grammatical jokes in Investigations: "In what circumstances should I say that a tribe had a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness? " (PI? 419) I am tempted to to describe an anatomy o f limits and boundaries, but such an anatomy would tend toward a theory of limits. And a theory of limits is exactly what is not needed. The picture of limits I am sketching is meant to describe our invovlment within language through the shifting limits that determine sense and nonsense as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
136
enactments o f models o f mind (animate/ inanimate, consciousness/ unconscious, and so on)andkindsoftime. Thisinvolvmentisplastic. Themeaningofourinvolvment, therefore, can describe both a moral education (a configuration of ourselves as human) and an ontology (what is real). The distance between these two meanings is one way o f describing what I am calling the distance between the soul and the mind. This distance, or difference, does not describe, however, an epistemology or the limits o f reason (as in Kant).
Kant argues that our experience never determines a boundary but moves "from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned thing" (Prolegomena, 59). In Kant, the metaphysical limit of experience, which "must lie quite without it," describe something akin to Wittgensteinian grammar, but here understood as grounded in reason, "by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor strays beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the knowledge o f a boundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is contained in it" (Prolegomena, 59). The phrase "as befits the knowledge o f a boundary" is a definition of boundary (a requirement not a description). While such a boundary marks a limit to what we can know (for beyond it is "an empty space"), we can knowthenatureofsuchaboundary. Thedistinctionbetweenknowableandunknowable, however, presumes criteria that can apply to what is beyond the boundary o f the knowable
constitutingitasunknowable. Suchaboundary,tobemetaphysical,wouldsetitselfas the negation ofthe ground ofbeing: a kind ofnothing. This does not make such a boundary absolute, but the formulation of such boundaries discovers the limits of the humanrelationtothepossibilitiesofbeing. If'thepossibilitiesofbeing"issenseless,orif
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
137
any category cannot mark or determine its own boundaries, the effect is not to dissolve the concept of limit or boundary, but to leave nothing but such limits and boundaries, shifting under the pressures our involvement and application o f the concepts (knowing, being, thinking, caring, and so on) puts on these markers. But "to leave nothing but" is itself a description of a limit, and at first blush seems to follow Kant's discussion of natural
theology, which "being constrained to look beyond this boundary [of human reason] to the idea of a Supreme Being. . . in order to guide the use of reason within the world of sense according to principles o f the greatest possible unity" (Prolegomena, 59). My claim here, however, is that the instability o f boundaries and limits pressures our involvment in language (our understanding, interpretations, even reasoning) into disunity that is not organized into time as either a metaphysical ground of experience or by consciousness (a transcendentalapperception)butasagrammar(timeisasymbolicgrammar). Thisisnot meant as a theory oftime, but as a stance within our language that configures the world as meaningfulinaparticularway. Iamtryingtobringoutthismeaning. Thus,when Wittgenstein describes the grammar of our use of "game" as a way of describing how we inhabit the limits of our human form(s) of life, he is not describing the unified concept of 'human being':
The rales of grammar may be called "arbitrary", if that is to mean that the aim o f the grammar is nothing but that o f the language.
If someone says "If our language had not this grammar, it could not express these facts" --it should be asked what "could" means here. (PI? 497)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The limits o f being human describe jokes; these jokes punctuate our involvment in language as different kinds o f time and as different versions o f redemption. In this picture or description o f time and language there is no transcendent anything: "As things are I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by anyone. --But would the following be possible too: mankind has never played any games: once, however, someone invented a game--which no one ever played? " (PI? 204).
The different versions ofthe first riddle ofthe universe inFinnegans Wake are all grammatical jokes. "The first riddle of the universe" is called forth in the chapter VII portrait o f Shem the penman as part o f the continual battle between the artist and prankster Shem and his moralizing brother Shaun. The opposition between the two brothers,asbetween"allears"and"all. . ",betweenShemtimeandShaunspace, collapses not only into two aspects o f the universe, but into different kinds o f language. This is the first version o f the riddle:
"dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the u niverse: asking, when is a man not a man? : telling them to take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet unminted, to the winner.
(FW170. 03-09; boldface added)
P. McCarthy argues that this riddle begins the dramatization that will continue for the rest of the book of "the struggle of the guilty mind toward renewal" (79). Whatever we think about the nature of human guilt, the Wake is certainly concerned with our education; our
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
139
soul-making. This concern for our soul, however, is the same as a concern for our pleasures and our commitments and our body that can be figured as a concern about what
we imagine an education entails: "Is the Co-Education o f Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable? "(307. 03-04).
As McCarthy notes various forms ofthe first riddle ofthe universe appear seven times, and in this at least offers a week o f questions, all o f which are versions o f the
Wake:
1) the first riddle o f the universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . . --all give
up? --; when he is a --yours till the rending o f the rocks,--Sham. (170. 3-24)
2 ) . . . to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle o f his juniverse) with a tintumtingling and a next, next and next. . . while itch ish shome. (231. 1-4)
3) When is a Pun not a Pun? (307. 2-3)
4 ) . . . the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asmae. (356. 2-14)
5) . . when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! (495. 6-7).
6) Here is a homelet not a hothel. (586. 18)
7) The first and last rittlerattle ofthe anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam
whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12)
These riddles are pictures o f fragments. Fragments are structured like riddles, and thus their integration o f completion and incompletion, o f particular and totality (system), o f act and continuity require the same double vision required to recognize when a pun is and is
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
140
not a pun. Fragments, as I suggested earlier, are forms o f ironic self-reflection o f exactly the sort described by "When is a Pun not a Pun? " (307. 02-04). A pun is only a pun when we laugh, or only when we recognize, hear or see, (at least) one word in another. This doublness(orindeterminacy)ofmeaningmakespunsaspeciesofirony. Readingthe Wake does not mean one understands the answer to these riddles (that might be part o f a higher level interpretation). Instead, I think, reading should consist in asking these question as if they were your own questions. This kind o f interrogation constitutes the self-reflexivestructureofthe Wakeasinterrogativefragments.
Ithinkthesecanallbecalledriddlesofrecognition. Theoperateinexactlythe kind of confusion that allows Kant to imagine that the application of moral obligation proceeds through the formal recognition o f when a human being is a human being; he asks when is a moral a moral? Such questions are akin to asking when is a citizen a person? or imagining that it makes sense to understand as a riddle the question 'when is a person a citizen? ' (and thus assuming that it is not a question that can be answered except maybe with always or never; these might be ways of answering the riddle within one picture of democracyorofmonarchy. Atleastforademocracyriddlesmaybethenecessaryformof our political engagement: are all people created equal? ).
These riddles, as points of structural clarity relative to the method of the text itself, set a riddle for the reader; if every phrase is a riddle that requires interpretation, but no interpretation can provide an adequate answer, then what does it mean to recognize the text as riddled, as a riddle, as riddles? The depth ofFinnegans Wake is partly a function of showing how any answer or interpretation to the riddle of the text is anti-climatic in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
141
way that makes the answer seem trivial and thus requires us to find a further riddle that involvesusmorefullyintheriddleofthetext. Thisprocessofgoingoncannotend. Therefore, it is not the answer to the riddles that provides meaning, but it is how we continue asking questions that constitutes reading.
How do we "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23)? The distance between the mind, as a mind factory, and thus as a robot and the dress of intentionality and appearance that makes it seem human, and the soul as 'the gagster in the rogues' gallery" articulates two kinds of humor or nonsense: robot dress (the humor o f one thing leading to the next without reason, call this Chaplinesque) and gagster ro-gallery (the humor o f transgression, call this MarxBrothersOperatic). Theidentificationofgagsterwithsoulrequiressomedefense. I
think "gagster" puns on the word "ghoster" used a few sentences earlier on the same page: "With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing o f ghosters, with the benediction o f the Holy Genesius Archimimus . . . " (FW219. 06-09). This "Archimimus", from G. archimimos, is the chief actor, maybe the puppetry producer, the intentional beyond, the body as the limit of God, or all of the players as the shift through their parts. The humor ofthe gags inFinnegans Wake functions through the confusion of names and words or of phrases and language games where a word and phrase can always mean something else. And thus the soul as the form marking identity (the subsistent soul) and existence (what marks humans as animate and not inanimate) is neither the meaning of a name or word (even organized very broadly into
the categories o f HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy) nor in the grammar o f any particular
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
142
moment of clarity (soul as totality), but is the continuity of shifting between these forms directed toward a vanishing intentionality, in other words, "the gagster in the rogues' gallery". To "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23) is to read the Wake itself as either a riddle whose answer is unknowable or as an answer whose riddle is unknowable (this is another way of describing vanishing intentionality).
So another picture of the Wake: "Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties ofthe late cemented Mr. T. M. Finnegan R. I. C" (FW221. 26-7). Mr. T. M. Finnegan is not cemented anywhere in the text; so in what sense could we say he, and not some other he, is the sleeper? If he is dissolved, or has lent willingly or unwillingly, his properties (his words, his characteristics, his desires and fears and so on) to the further mutations of the "jests, jokes, jigs, and jorums" of the Wake, or other figments, then in what sense are those properties his? Human beings hold a lot of properties in common, and those that distinguish a particular person as a particular person are apparent as a particular configuration, as a unity of form and matter maybe, that once dissolved cannot mark someone as anyone at all.
This is one way o f configuring the problem o f intentionality as aesthetic (moving outsideofalogicalpictureoflanguage). Butthisisnotanaestheticofrecognition(asin Goodman) where our problem is to recognize the intentional object, existent or not, about whichwespeak. Thereisnothingtorecognizeandnorulesorpracticesorprejudicesthat can apply in a way that makes sense. When something makes temporary sense, we have not recognized a version of the world or an example of meaning or aesthetic expression.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
143
Asking when the Wake makes sense picks out the means we use to make sense of it not the sense o f the Wake.