No More Learning

For Helen Vendler "BTTB" is the wake of the "complex mind . . . which we came to know in the opening stanza of the ode" (149). She posits the mind as that which functionally unites, enacts and is described by the languages of truth and sensation. Although I think Keats wants to introject philosophical standards for truth into aesthetic experience (see Vendler, 147-52), the "BTTB" equation functions not as a statement of
factortheory;itisnotaknowledgeclaim. Vendlerarguesthatthis"riddlingmotto" articulates this identity as an expression o f the urn's language within a Platonic realm whereBeautyandTruthhavea"simultaneousandidenticalexistence"(149). Thus,she believes that this statement is a prepositional statement about this Platonic realm. Vendler criticizesthisasafailureofdiction. Sheconfusestheanalysisofhowthisknowledge
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
claim works (either as a proposition or within the poem) with the analysis ofthe effect this claim has on the meaning of the poem, as if'"Beauty is truth, truth beauty5" answers the motives o f Keats in writing the poem or, anthropomorphically, o f the poem itself in 'speaking5.
Can meaning be equated with motive? Motive is not a cause of the words, nor doesitdeterminetheirunderstandability. Theascriptionofmotiveconceptualizes intentionality as an external interpretative frame to the poem. The effect ofthese last lines, Vendler argues, while incomplete and "not structurally complex enough to be adequate . . . to what we know o f aesthetic experience - o r indeed to human experience generally5 (152), determines the relation between Truth and Beauty as "constitutive o f creative expression, and the mind is permitted its allegorizing, interrogatory, and prepositional functions5(151). Inheruseof'adequate,5Vendlerassumesthatadaequatio,the correspondence ('equal to5in a number of senses) between statement and world (in this case experience) describes the criterion oftruth for poetry or for language in general or
for Keats. The fact that she claims that Truth and Beauty function as representative concepts in two different kinds of languages articulating, at least for Keats, different domains, suggests that Keats is pressuring the philosophical use (or meaning) of 'know5. He is not claiming that we only "need to know5"BTTB5because it is adequate to our experience; how would we determine its adequacy? "'Truth is Beauty5is not a statement of predication but an identity statement, and thus it articulates different aspects or appearances as a unity. In this it is a name, like 'the duck-rabbit picture5. Faced with such a picture we can recognize a duck or a rabbit or a duck-rabbit picture. If I say "Duck is
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
105
Rabbit,RabbitDuck'thisisonlytrueofthispicture. Itisnotafactlike'thatisapicture ofa duck. ' One does not say 'that is a picture ofa duck-rabbit picture'. 'Duck is Rabbit' is a metaphysical statement not an epistemological statement, and thus not subject to any criteria of adequation. If I always only see either a duck or a rabbit then how do I recognize the picture as a duck-rabbit picture? In fact it can function as that kind of picture depending on how I use it. As Wittgenstein says, "I can see it in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with" (PI p. 210). If I have different pictures of ducks and rabbits I might then say 'these are not all duck-rabbit pictures,' or 'Duck is not always Rabbit'.
If we read other poems with different claims would we then say 'Truth is not Beauty'? Would such a claim counter Keats' claim? Because this is not a statement of predication we cannot compare it to any experience. It remains a statement about the relation between the words 'Truth' and 'Beauty' for the um, that is, a rule about how to use these words within um language. If another um in another poem, or maybe if an artificially intelligent computer described 'Beauty' and 'Truth' as non-identical we would conclude this is a different language. This difference would again be a metaphysical difference. We could not adjudicate between them and say this statement is closer to my experience. Weneverexperienceanynon-predicativeidentityrelationoftheform'Xis Y'. We use identity statements as the ends ofthought. As it does in the ode, an identity statement describes the limits ofmind or world, a description ofthe possibilities of
meaning available for perception or interpretation.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The um is a thing which we ventriloquize into speaking a truism whose meaning cannot be determined, whose epistemological value and application to our experience remainsmysterious. Sowhyventriloquizethisclaim? Tobeteasedoutofthoughtisto face the ontological limits o f our thinking through language. All we can know as mortals onearthisthelimitofourknowing. AllofKeats'previousquestionswere epistemological questions, questions of fact. None of these questions are answered. If our conclusions about the unanswerability ofthese questions remain within an epistemological register we would say visual representations or ocular sensations are not commensurablewithlanguage. Theyareonlycommensurablewithineithertheworldor
within the unity o f experience o f a subject. Thus, V endler's appeal to a complex mind means she interprets their unity as a function of some transcendental subject. An interpretation that described the unity between language and the visual as a given o f the world would have to describe human vision and language as natural systems under the aspectofasingleworld. Eithersolutionfailstorecognizethatthepoemreframesthese questions outside oftheir epistemological force: not a duck or a rabbit but a duck-rabbit picture without any other possible pictures.
The commensurability o f the allegorical, interrogatory, and prepositional functions of the mind with the "silent form" of the um is determined, by Vendler, in a disguised allegory between the complex mind betrayed in the poem with the interpretive possibilities thatallowustodiscoverthismind. Sheunderstandsthatinan"artcorrespondingtothe sense of sight, Truth as well as Beauty has become a constitutive expression" (151). Constitutive ofwhat? Ofthat which is expressed? Then the identity oftruth and beauty
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
107
constitute the possibilities of allegory, interrogation and assertion simultaneously as a functionofthemindofthepoet-readerandoftheurn'slanguageormind. Thiswould mean that art means what it is, and what it is can be described by allegory, through interrogation, and as propositions. The allegories, questions and propositions (including "BTTB"), however, do not function as allegories, questions or propositions in the poem.
The um is speaking about the poem not itself. The poem, however, is not an expression by or of the um, except maybe in the last stanza. The poem describes the um as the limit o f knowing. "BTTB" expresses the only thing the um can be or say if it were animate: 'I am the limit o f your knowing'. Thus the allegories and questions and propositions can not be about the um but about language and its rules o f description. "BTTB" is more like a rule of description, and therefore not a constitutive expression. The um is not expressing itself in our language, but offering a rule under which we could describe it if we could construct a language game with this identity as an ontological condition. "BTTB" does not construct being or meaning or urns or minds; it describes a rule for counting something as real within a language that can describe the same thing as true or beautiful in all and every case. Does the urn's use of such a language game (it may be that this statement is the only statement in such a game, and thus it is all one can know about such a game) constitute it within that language game? No: the urn's language is
confined to this statement alone, as such the statement does not express anything about theumforus. Wemightbetemptedtorecognizethisphraseasalinguisticequivalentof the um within our language game: a symbol ofthe visual. But the um remains absent. The statement gives us an ontological rule by which to recognize a language that includes
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
108
both the epistemological questions ofthe poetic voice (at least until the last stanza) and theworldpicturedontheum. Wearenotgiventhatlanguage. Suchalanguagewould constitute,inKeats'terms,amindorsoulthatisnothuman. Thus,theconfusionover who is speaking in the last stanza: has the narrator died? and who makes the claim that "BTTB" is all you need to know? The seeming self-sufficient clarity o f the aphorism does not express a proposition, nor represent a denouement within some unified perspective. Such a unified perspective is not possible and such a proposition would be senseless within
the logic o f the earlier questions.
"BTTB" is a limit between the language game described by the initial
epistemologicalquestionsandtheworldonthevasedescribedinthesequestions. This worldneverspeaks. Theum,thelimitwhich'noone'or'thing'inthatworldcanknow or see, speaks to us. The um seems a topographically inverted Cartesian theater, and speaks therefore as both a world (for its pictures) and a mind for us. This animation, I think, seduces Vendler into using "constitutive expression" in describing "BTTB". This could only be an expression if the identity between Truth and Beauty constituted the urns animation, somehow defining the mechanics or the organics o f um life and consciousness (these are identical here). I think Vendler understands Truth and Beauty as the constitutive facts o f two necessary but not sufficient languages determining a mind as a mind (as both conscious and alive):
Haunting these odes, up to this point, is the absence o f any real exploration o f the "lower" senses o f taste and touch; and o f these odes is itself incomplete as a metaphor for Keats' total experience of art as he knew it in poetry- its
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
109
dependence on the senses, its inceptions in reverie, its fertile, constructive activity in the mind, its powerful embodiment within a resistant medium, its reception by the greeting spirit, its representational validity, its allegorizing tendency, its luxurious beauty, its philosophical truth, its momentary glimpse o f divinity, its sense o f active intellectual and critical power and mastery" (152).
This experience is translated into a set o f 'languages,' which prove "aesthetically grotesque",butwhichexhibit"amind"unwillingtoabandontheselanguages. Ifthe identity o f Truth and Being functions as an ontological claim at the limit between different language games then this picture o f poetry as the 'constitutive expression' o f a mind fails. Vendler's analysis highlights a disjunction between this experience of poetry and these languages o f the mind, between existential phenomenalism and a transcendental aesthetics, experience and construction. Poetry, therefore, for Vendler, becomes the continual attempt to construct a language (constitutive expressions) adequate to this experience.
The requirment that these languages overcome this disjunction (between the experience ofreading, or seeing, and what is said, the content ofwhat is read or seen) hypostatizes this aesthetic experience as separate from the languages that describe it (if only partially) and enact it. This aesthetic experience, however, is always and only some set of such languages. Someone might answer that the experience is not restricted to reading the words. While this is true, to imagine poetry as the site o f some experience is
toenterintoandfunctionwithinitslanguage. Theinadequacyofpoetrywouldbethe inadequacyoflanguage. TheinadequacyoflanguageinthesensewithwhichVendleris using 'inadequacy', however, is primarily a function o f the incommensurability o f language
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
110
with all o f our sensory information. It is unclear whether something can 'mean' outside of language. (This does not mean that one should not or does not profoundly distrust the meanings within language). Poetic experience, therefore, exists to the degree with which we respond to its language as a language. There is no remainder only different poetries definingdifferentlanguagegames. Iftheidealizedadequacyisnotsomeidealizedworkof art then it is simply our experience ofthese supposedly inadequate language games.
Underlying the claim that this language fails is the demand that poetry not only describe but reenact our experience as its own, that it be animate and conscious.
By such a standard art will continually fail until it is translated into a linguistic being. Thus the inadequacy o f the ending o f the Ode is because it is only the urn that is animate. Such animation, however, cannot be described through a correspondence theory o f truth (even a metaphoric one). How does one measure the adequacy o f a language to describe or enact aesthetic experience and not include the aesthetic experience of that poem itself? The demand for an animate poem becomes the necessity o f a perspective that includes both the poem and our experience, and therefore becomes a demand for God. The demand for adequacy is thus incoherent because no poetic language could ever be
adequate, nor in fact can adequacy even be determined orjudged. What Vendler is describing as inadequate is her realization that "BTTB" cannot serve as an epistemological claim about either poetry or the vase and as a description of our experience of the urn through either poetry or experience. "BTTB" is inadequate as a 'constitutive expression' of a mind. Vendler assumes that such an expression can be measured against experience. There is no language game or experience which one can measure with "BTTB" as a either
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Ill
a proposition or an expression. In other words one cannot get outside of one's aesthetic experience nor outside of one's languages in order to judge them.
In this sense "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'" is arbitrary, an expression of an ontological commitment that cannot bejudged. It might illustrate our life but not interpret it. Thus "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" offers an interpretative frame. Ontological criteria offer interpretive frames, and thus interpretation cannot constitute them, but is limited by them. ThisiswhatWittgensteinmeans,Ithink,whenheclaimsthatjustificationmustend or else it would not be justification.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
5
The Distance Between the Mind and the Soul
The semantic distance between the two parts o f a single marginal phrase in Finnegans Wake describes the distance between what is stake in the difference between a mind and a soul. I am not sure what kind o f claim the concept o f the soul can have on us.
I do not think it can be used coherently within the systems of meaning within which the modem world and societies are found. And yet I am driven to its use when trying to describe (let alone understand) the mutual and equally powerful claims Finnegans Wake,
Philosophical Investigations, and cognitive philosophy have on me. I do not think this is just a personal anomaly or perversion, but it is the consequence ofwhat is at stake in all three.
Thisisapictureofthemindasa"mindfactory"inFinnegans Wake: "ANTITHESIS OF AMBIDUAL ANTICIPATION. THE MIND FACTORY, IT GIVES AND TAKES. " (FW282. R4).
This is a picture o f the soul:
"AUSPICIUM. AUGURIA. DIVINITY NOT DEITY THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES. " (FW282. R4)
How these describe a mind and a soul entails understanding what kind of claims any description of the mind or soul can have on us. Negotiating the distance between what we might call a mind and what we might imagine as a soul enacts (or describes) the kind of moral self-reflection that Augustine described in his Confessions: "But while he was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind,
Notes for this chapter begin on page 165
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
113
my own back where I had placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you set me before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered with sores and ulcers. (Confessions, Vm. vii: derived from Seneca De Ira 2. 36. 1). How is this kind o f self-reflection enacted without a God? What kind o f moral self-reflection can we construct or inhabit when our ontological limits are constructed as a conflicting set of fragments of science, technology, social prejudice, anachronistic religion, psychological
fantasy, and so on? In Finnegans Wake this moral self-reflection, or rather the confession that is involved in attempting to read it, is directed at the limit(s) between sense and nonsense.
In order to provide a place to begin from which to measure the difference between mind and soul I will provide very brief sketches o f the soul as Aquinas conceptualized it (as the most complete and coherent presentation of the soul)1and of the mind as it is broadly understood in cognitive science.
The soul, or let's say the distinction between divinity and deity, is an interpretative definition expressed through a set of stances toward the future (Auguria), toward oneself in relation to the totality of the world, and toward others as human. Aquinas describes these distinctions as expressing the distinction between the animate and inanimate. He describes the soul "as the first principle of life in those things in our world which live; for
we call living things animate, and those things which have no life, inanimate. Now life is shownprincipallybytwoactivities,knowledgeandmovement"(SummaIa. 75. I). Aquinas is careful to establish that "not every principle of vital action is a soul, for then the eye would be a soul. " The soul is not related to the body as in a burning coal heat is to the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
114
coal--butasparttowhole,likethehumanhandistothebody. Butthisanalogyis misleading. As Aquinas asserts in Disputed Questions on the Soul, the soul is not a diminished and inessential part like a hand, but the soul "as the [substantial] form ofthe body has the role of fulfilling or completing \perficiens\ the human species". This is Aquinas version ofAristotles definition ofthe soul as "the first entelechia (completion, actuality) of a natural body that potentially has life" (De Anima, n. 412a). There is a tension in Aquinas' use of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Aristotle describes a kind of functional unity between form and matter that could be understood to rule out the immortality o f the soul, yet such immortality is required within Aquinas' Christian theology. This is a problem ofboth identity (what survives? ifmy body is absent in what sense can my soul be identified with me? ) and subsistence (how can form exist separate
from matter? ). Aquinas solves this problem by arguing that only something which is not mattercouldpercievematter. Thustheremustexist,therefore,anincorporealsomething thatisnotboundtothebody'sdecay. Thisisimportantherebecauseitdescribesa tension between our being human, which requires the unity o f body and soul, and our involvementwithinthetotalityoftheworld. Aquinas'descriptionofthesoulasself- subsistent (because non-corporeal) leads to a description of being human within the greater totality of the world described by the soul (and ultimately by God):
Therefore, since the human soul, insofar as it is united to the body as a form, also has its existence raised above the gody and does not depend on it, it is clear that the soul is established on the borderline between corporeal and separate (purely spiritual)substances. (DisputedQuestionsontheSoulIc)2
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
115
This means that the soul is an interprative limit (not causal) for both my world and my being human.
The mind enacts this relationship between the totality o f the world and the particularity ofthe person from the inside as it were, as the difference between the causal functioning ofthe brain and the causal history ofevolution. What Joyce calls a "mind factory," as a picture ofthis doubleness, is a factory ofsensation and thought and a factory making minds. The mind, as a mind factory, describes the causal mechanisms through which mental functions are constituted. One way o f construing the mind is as a list o f problems to be solved, as, for example, the "essential twelve issues" o f cognitive science: "beliefsystems, consciousness, development, emotion, interaction, language, learning, memory, primary perception, performance, skill, and thought". 3 The relation between these problems is complicated and not understood.
All ofthese descriptions of mental abilities are interpretations o f what we are and how we function. Cognitive philosophy attempts to test and analyze these interpretations by determining their causal function.
The point in any cognitive theory where the relation between the causal functioning o f the mind produces the possibility o f interpretation does not simply try to resolve or dissolve Cartesian dualism, but in effect construes the mental (meaning, interpretation, signification, valuation, involvement and so on) as ontological (as having the force o f the actual). Any critique o f metaphysics must analyze this point o f interaction as the fundamental site of ontological concern in cognitive science (other sciences are less concerned with the relation between meaning and being except as a methodological
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
116
concern; this relationship, however, is the substantive problem in cognitive science). Herbert Simon describes the mind as "a system that produces thought, viewed at a relatively high level of aggregation: say, at or above the level of elementary processes that require 100 milliseconds or more for their execution. . . . The primitives o f mind, at the level I wish to consider, are symbols, complex structures o f symbols and processes that operateonsymbols"(AndroidEpistemology,24). Inanessayentitled"TheComputer Model o f the Mind," N. Block further describes such a symbol system:
The way to discover symbols in the brain is to first map out rational relations among states o f mind and then identify aspects o f these states that can be thought ofassymbolicinvirtueoftheirfunctions. Functioniswhatgivesasymbolits identity, even the symbols in English orthography, though this can be hard to appreciate because these functions have been made rigid by habit and convention. (830). 4
As a symbol system the brain is described by it various functions. Functions, however, are a special kind of cause in which the process proceeding through causal mechanisms gain meaning within the broader context of the environment in which they have meaning or significance(thereisagrammaticalrelationbetween'function'and'ought'). Tosay somethinghasafunctionisofferaninterpretation. Theenvironmentortheverybiology ofa creature can offer such an interpretation ifthe function ofa biological mechanism allows a creature to survive or to replicate itself or when the mechanism itself survives or replicates itself. This is another description o f the causal logic justifying the description ofPollock's Oscar as animate.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
117
The distance between the constitution o f being human as a soul or as a mind reflects a continuum from interpretative definitions describing the limit of our being human (soul)tothefunctional/causalmodelsincognitivescience(mind). Thiscontinuum describes an historical development in the kinds of metaphors, analogies and models used to describe the constitutive relation between an 'I' and the world: wax, tablet, mirror, lamp, camera obscura, wind-harp, reed, plant [organism], homunculus, container, theater, bicycle plus cyclist, society of agents. 5 Every model includes both interpretative elements, often setting out what has to be explained (that is, being human, animate, intelligent, conscious,havingintentionality). Thesignificanceofthemovefromtheearlier
interpretive definitions and the later functional models is not their exclusion o f the other, but rather in the way they highlight the difference within their own description between the interpretive pole (the inanimate/ animate distinction, for example) and the functional pole (howitworks). Cognitivesciencewantstoturnafunctionalmindintoaninterpretive soul.
Wittgenstein addressees the problem I am here calling "measuring the distance between mind and soul" with the following question:
"The feeling o f an unbridgable gulf between. consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the considerations o f our ordinary life? " (PI? 412)
This picture of a dualism between consciousness and causal functioning ofthe brain, "accompanied by slight giddiness," arises when I "turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
produced by a process in the brain! ". In turning in this way I am trying to know my phenomenologicalexperienceofconsciousnessassomethingcaused. Wittgenstein describes a picture o f someone trying to do this:
It was a particular act ofgazing that I called doing this. I stared fixedly in front of me--but not at any particular point or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are when I am interested in a particular object). No suchinterestprecededthisgazing, Myglancewasvacant;oragainlikethatof someone admiring the illumination of the sky and drinking in the light. (PI? 412)
The seeming paradox ofbrain states producing consciousness arises because ofthe impossibility o f finding the object "consciousness" within the logic described by cause. There is in fact no such object. There is nothing for this "THIS" to pick out; to point to the boundary o f consciousness from inside consciousness will result in a continual oscillation between pointing to the world and then to myself, and in this case I am moving
from my thought allegorized as my brain to the world conceived, however, as that of whichIamaware. Thismovementisanattempttodescribeaphenomenologicalwhatin relation to what is understood as a physical cause. To say "This is produced by a brain- process" makes sense to say in the context of an experiment, or one might add in a psychiatric examination, or even in a philosophical therapy begun trying to cure a "slight giddiness," but not in our ordinary language.
We have reached a limit point because of an incommensurability between phenomenological experience and physical causation. This incommensurability, however, isnotnecessarilyaproblem. Theparadoxisgeneratedwhenthepictureofagapbetween
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
119
consciousness and brain is not part o f a coherent language game (in which it would be an ordinaryexpression). Theordinarinessofitsuseisafunctionofbothbrainfunctions(or causallanguage)andphenomenologicalexperiencebeingmeaningfultokens. Thisis achieved in Wittgenstein's example by opening someone's skull and stimulating his or her
braininsuchawayastocausehimorhertoseelight. Inthisexample"brainfunction" and phenomenological experience (light) are defined as related concepts. The effect of brain stimulation (whatever it is) is meaningful within the experimental context whose purpose it is to construct causal relations and investigate the status of particular concepts. Thus we can say that questions about the relation between consciousness and the brain (and puzzlement over this relation) make sense within certain language games so constituted. But these language games are constructed in order that they may investigate (and explain within a set o f language games cognate to that defined and enacted in the
experiment) our brain and our phenomenal experience as they both function everyday. One o f the difficulties in science, the one that experiments are constructed to mediate, is how to apply or how to generalize from experimental data to the objects, events or effects being studied. Experiments, which are designed for a reason, are never separate from their application (although they may be problematic). We can speak o f a difference between making sense within a language game and making sense o f a language game, but this does not mean that these two uses o f 'making sense' are disconnected. The scientific context (or language game) Wittgenstein describes is coherent because "THIS" can pick out something understood within the language game. The phrase "THIS is produced by a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
120
brainprocess"mightbeusedcausallyinsuchlanguagegames. Thesegamesthemselves are developed within certain limits and with certain applications.
The problem that Wittgenstein pictures is the impossibility in ordinary language of conceptualizing as objects or as meaningful terms either consciousness or brain functions. What I am calling the application of cognitive science language games (in which both objects and concepts can be suitably defined, where, for example, aspects of consciousness are defined as kinds o f effects), however, requires a special claim about both
consciousness and these brain functions being ours, attaching to our inhabitation o f this pronoun (let's say our use of it to define ourselves as human beings). Such a definition, like Aquinas' picture o f the soul, is not only an epistemological proposition, but it determines the scope or limit of the language game in which such claims can be made.
This scope or limit is part of the application. How words make sense within language
games (horizontal sense) depends on the vertical sense operating through 'our'. What this 'our' means is always at issue. By this I do not mean whether a person can count as an average person, or whether they are a man or a woman, or whether this 'our' can be used
to define a particular group (these might be at issue, but they are not always at issue). This 'our' marks a form o f life as a limit towards which my life or any human life enacts itself as meaningful. Thus, the disjunction between "consciousness and brain-process" is not simply a problem for experiment. It is, however, senseless as an epistemological problem within ordinary language, but it is not senseless as a semantic problem (or a semantic challenge or response or form or limit). This may mean simply that poetry is ordinary language, but I think it suggests that epistemological nonsense (or as Cavell
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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.