No More Learning

546
? have brought the word or the 'now' to the surface without its grammar, and thus the future use seems present in the word.
When we attempt to describe our experience as if this experience were not embedded in language games, as if we grasped the future first before our use of the word 'future' in a particular language game, our experience seems odd (Cf. Edward's failure to lose himself when he loses his wife). For Wittgenstein this oddness is an effect o f a mistake. Adams, however, translates himself into machine metaphors because o f a failure of moral language (of the sort MacIntyre describes in After Virtue), which makes any morality incoherent. This incoherence he understands as an effect of the collapse of an ontology (theology) in which a moral stance is binding because it is embedded in a set of ontological commitments. Adams' asks, in effect, can we make moral sense in any version of our language? One could also ask what kind of moral pressure do science and technology place on the coherence of our ordinary language? (This question is one result of my inquiry).
Earlier I presented a scene describing one way o f recognizing the force o f this question. I wrote, "As in the machine symbolism of Yeats the symbols of identity constituting 'What The Thunder Said', the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which we might find ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as containers for our minds, and in this offer o f our translation into the structure of a thing we project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us. The logic o f identity, o f equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' o f existence, articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The Waste
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
547
? Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the crucial analogy. The temptation toward a theory o f identity as a theory o f meaning builds minds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit o f death that constructs our lives as containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious lands, shapes, and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container. "
And Wittgenstein might respond: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -- In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? --Or is the use its life? " (PI? 432). We have two kinds ofuse here. Does use give signs a kind oflife, as ifthe words are puppets or wind-up toys; or are they hammers and saws, with no hidden strings or engines. Thedifferenceseemstobeoneofhowmediatedourrelationistothesewords. Do we give them their power to then go and do their work, or is their energy and use always intimately ours. But Eliot or Joyce might also asks 'Do all uses offer the same life? ' Shouldn't we also be debating about kinds o f life? This would be to revisit the history and conceptual logic ofthe development ofthe soul from distinct eschatological and psychological souls, what Arbman called, in his study o f the Vedic soul, the free soul and the body-soul, into a unified soul under the semantic rubric of the free soul. J.
Breamer argues that a similar conceptual unification took place in Greece, where Homer's description o f human beings under the aspects o f many souls, the body-soul (thymos, noos, and menos) and the free soul (psyche) is later unified in the Psyche. Aristotle in his history of the soul in Book I ofDe Anima organizes the development of a united soul around the principle of movement (kinesis) and of perception (disthesis). Such principles define one set o f criteria for animation. Aristotle transforms these criteria into the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
548
? characterization o f the soul as "the first entelecheia o f a natural body that potentially has life" (De anima. 11. 412a). ( I do not explicate what this means here; I think, however, Heidegger's animation o f the thing is a development o f this definition o f the soul as a descriptionoftheworld. Itrytoshowthisinmyanalysisof"DasDing"; partofwhatI need here is the idea that we enter into language through the figure of its animation).
"In use it [a sign] is alive" describes our use o f words as if tools, where the hatchet vanishes into an extension o f our arm. Or as if I found an order floating my way and I accept it as directed to me. I accept it into me; this is my act o f will and understanding. The order is an algorithm and once understood takes over my body (or mind) and I act. So someone might say "There is a gulfbetween an order and its execution. It has to filled by the act of understanding. " Can we refuse the order if we understand it? Wittgenstein does not invoke the will, but points to the will as a negative, as what would answer his question: If I give an order to someone--"How does he know at all what use he is to makeofthesignsIgivehim,whatevertheyare? "(PI? 433). TheWillfillsthisrole,butof course to offer the will as an answer here is simply to offer another black box. Is this different from becoming alive?
If it is asked: "How do sentences manage to represent? "--the answer might be: "Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you use them. " For nothing is concealed.
How do sentences do it? --Don't you know? For nothing is hidden.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
549
? But given this answer: "But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed" one would like to retort "Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view. "(PI? 435)
Wittgenstein resists the view that language "goes by so quick. " This sense of effervescence expresses a dissatisfaction with ordinary language, which can seem "too crude" to capture phenomena that, as Augustine writes, "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". What eludes us when we use language? Nothing. Then why do we insist that something eludes us? If we ask "how do sentences do it? ", mean something or anything, we have made them into agents,withintention,willandtheabilitytoact. Theanimationofthesesentencesmakes them surrogates for ourselves and thus embeds them in the world we imagine ourselves inhabiting. Sentences seem limited by time if they are extracted from their grammar (usage). If words (or sentences) function like agents then their ordinary usage, their grammar, functions like time does for us. What eludes us about a sentence when we remove that sentence from its use is its use.
The simplicity with which Wittgenstein would like to describe the way sentences represent, that is, in their grammar, as if how they represent is that they represent, where representation is itself the how, suggests that the complexity o f the question, and its animation of language is a function of how sentences are embedded in time. We cannot ask how a sentence represents because that is what sentences are (when they represent), but we can ask how sentences describe the limits of our temporal environment (because
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
550
? this is what we do when we speak). Speaking can seem complex for simple reasons, as cognitive scientist Herbert Simon argues:
Aman,viewedasabehavingsystem,isquitesimple. Theapparentcomplexityof his behavior over time is largely a reflection o f the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself. (65)
I quote Simon here only to suggest that the role o f time in our characterization o f our confusion over how a sentence represents marks time as the environment o f language.
One cannot correlate a clock, a temporal scale, to time itself or to the world as one can a ruler to space. 12:00 does not pick out something in the world. We use 12:00 to mark or form the totality of our experience as a limited whole (limited temporally, and thus possessable). This marks our relation to the world as a meta-description. An atomic clock or the world, itself, constitutes time as the expression of the limit of the real. Different kinds o f clocks reveal different kinds o f worlds.
'Grief describes a pattern which recurs, with different variations, in the weave of ourlife. Iftheman'sbodilyexpressionofsorrowandofjoyalternated,saywith the ticking o f a clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation o f the pattern ofsorrow or ofthe pattern ofjoy. (PI p. 174)
A poem ("The Prelude") or a novel (The Brothers Kamarozov) or a movie (Penny Serenade), might, however, serve as such a clock, in broad outline and in specific scenes generating emotional responses triggered by the alternating series o f representations forming a narrative. The Waste Land removes the narrative structure and pattern of identification that usually allows for the creation of emotional responses in an audience.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
551
? The fragments and bits o f dialogue, the shifting T makes the unstable scenes and moments of clarity grammatical shifts that funnel our emotions into our frustration over reference, or the underdetermined meaning ofthese references within the 'meaning' ofany particularsetoflines,andintotheshiftsbetweensenseandnonsense. Thisalsoisaclock, where ourjoy and sorrow maps onto our understanding and confusion or our investment ofemotional significance into moments ofsublimity, ofrecognized authority, of unconscious resonance, ofcliche, ofvoice and pronoun (taking the position of T , 'you', 'we' and 'they' [this last being a significant conceptualization o f one's own understanding, subjectivity, and self as an object relative to the poem])
The nature o f clocks: The number-signs on both analog and digital clocks are non- referring signs. This is not the case with spatial measurements, where the numbers on a ruler pick-out a defined set of points in the world. If I am walking some distance and I glance at my watch ever so often and say at 2:00 I am here, and here is across from X. Or At 10:30 1 was reading The Waste Land, or I was reading the line "My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad, Stay with me. " In the first case time is correlated with place. This correlation allows us to answer the question 'How far away is the moon? ' with the temporal designation three days. The correlation is really a triangulating mapping o f the numbers in the watch world and differences in the space-world onto my experience or possible experience: both place and time refer to me. But is using a measure o f time the same as using a measure of space even if both measurements resolve themselves in my subject position? In my "I am here" the demonstrative tells me to establish my position at
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? this point, seemingly saying I exist at the point now. This 'now' is a temporal frame organizing and expressing the possibilities of succession within my relation to space. 3
How do we measure ourselves in relation to the future? How do we measure the future as ours? One answer might be 'in hope. ' Plotinus distinguishes between what is in timeandtime. ThisseemslikethefallacythatWittgensteinarguesagainstintheBrown book, but Plotinus' version does not just reify time. It translates time into our being alive, our soul: "Time is the life (Coorjv) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another" (in. 7. 11. 43-5). (Is time, therefore, a possibility of movement animating, as a kind of potential, the soul? ) This is a description of the modifications of our stances within and towards language games within our forms of life. ? (C)riv and piov, while not identical with any of Wittgenstein's terms, describe aspects of what he means by formsoflife. Thelifeofthesoulandwaysoflifetogethermanifestformoflifewhenit describes our common humanity; this is a way of understanding our form of life under the aspect o f what Wittgenstein means by the soul when he says "The human body is the best picture of the human soul" (PI p. 178) and "If one sees the behavior of a living thing ones sees its soul"(PI? 357). In this last case one recognizes a living thing (not necessarily a human being) as distinct from an automaton. In the first case one recognizes a human
being as distinct from an animal, a recognition ofthe possibility that the body in front of mecanhope: "Onecanimagineananimalangry,frightened,unhappy,happy,startled. But hopeful? And why not? " (PI p. 174). Wittgenstein continues, "Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
553
? character o f human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )" (PI p. 174).
Hope is a temporal mode, a kind o f expectation diminished from being probable into being possible (when it is not used as a synonym for "intention'). 4 Human beings can invest themselves in this possibility as if discovering themselves in their language, discoveringtheshapesoftheiridentityintheexpressionsoftheirdesire. Thelossofhope is used to explain the surrender of life: 'he died because he lost hope. ' Hope can be used to mark uncertainty: 'I intend to go to the moon, or at least I hope to. ' Statements of my intention abstract potential actions into a picture o f the future, that is to say, our investment in the statement "I intend to X" is part of a story that imagines my actions completed in the future.
Consequently, I say of someone else "He seems to believe . . . . " and other people say it of me. Now, why do I never say it of myself, nor even when others rightly say it of me? --do I myself not see and hear myself then? --That can be said. " (PI p. 191). I am invested in my use of intention and beliefin the way I am invested in my use of lI': "Think of the fact that one can predict one's own future action by an expression of intention" (PI
p. 191) The fact that intention can devolve into hope, while indicative of a loss of power relative to the world and to others, also exposes the future as not simply the extension of my will (as if an algorithm). A prediction of the future pictures the future as completed, drawing a line from my present through a story o f my actions to a future. My stance toward the future when expressing an intention is as it were a stance toward a story in which that future has expression (or means the completion of my intention). When I
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
554
? express hope I have not drawn such a line between now and tomorrow. Hope describes a stance toward desire or intention, a stance, as it were, from the future looking back, characterizing my present intentions as possible. Why is hope not a stance toward the future as is intention? I f an intention is a prediction, o f my future, o f what I will do, hope is a description o f myself in the present. How is such a description possible? When I say 'I hope someday to have a house in Greece' I am saying that I want a house, but I am unsure if I will successfully obtain one. Have I erased "intend' and replaced it with hope, as if I
had in mind the present and the future without any intervening story (a story expressing faith maybe) connecting these two moments? Hope is an interpretation o f my intentions. My intention is a story of continuous action from now to the future (a future figured withinthestory). Thusaninterpretationofintentionisaninterpretationofacompleted action,anactioncompletedinthefuture. Mydoubtsaboutthepossibilityofthis completion, that characterize many uses of hope as opposed to intention, require that I view my intentions as it were from their completion, or from any moment of completion within the story. This viewing orjudgment, therefore, takes place as it were from the future. For example when 'I say I hope to go to the store', I might only mean 'I intend to go to the store. ' But if I say 'I hope I can go to the store' I underline my uncertainty that I will be able to go to the store. This uncertainty arises as an evaluation o f the stories I might tell myself about going to the store. For example 'given the weather, I will not be able to walk to the store. '
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? 13. 3 The theology of sentences
Tofindourselvesinthefutureistofindourselvesinourlanguage. Machines describe intention and humans express hope as two different ways o f making present the possibility of a future. The adjudication between machine time and human time as both aspects of our stance within our language toward ourselves, language, and time constitutes a debate about the soul. Philosophical Investigations and Finnegans Wake describe the limits of our humanity within such a debate. They, therefore, articulate a kind o f theology. Not, however, a theology o f the word, but o f the phrase (answering how we inhabit meaning) derived from Frege's "Es genugt, wenn der Satz als Ganzes einen Sinn hat; dadurch erhalten auch seine Theile ihren Inhalt" (Grundlagen ? 60). I call this theology in order to indicate the demand this kind of conception of meaning places on our conceptionsofholism.
Itaketheologytodescribenotmetaphysicalclaimsaboutthe essence ofthe world or existence, but to describe the relation between totality (in versions of holism) and Actuality (in Aquinas' sense of existence being the highest form of actuality). 5
Investigations and the Wake are theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). I say they 'are' this, but what is hidden in this 'are'? Do they describe, define, function as, mimic, exist as, enact, appear as, invoke, evoke, expose, express,orembodythesedelimitations? Thestatusofbothofthesetextswithintheirown reflection on mind, what they are, is not a question about their truth value. How would we determine if they are true? What would count as the criteria for truth here? They do not refer to a mind or minds; or rather, if they do refer to something like a mind that
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
556
? simply displaces the question of what they are or if they are 'true' to the truth of whatever this mind is and to the legitimacy and form o f their referring. How can we approach a mind? Maybe when we talk to someone or read a message or a treatise or some remarks. The complexity built into the 'are' in 'Investigations and the Wake are . . . ' determines both texts and the problem o f 'to be' as 'theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s). ' I am describing a version o f the relation between theology and time that begins to set out how we convert ourselves in and out o f kinds o f time in
Investigations.
The form of Wittgenstein's description of our embedded inhabitation of our language and world, unlike Heidegger's in Being and Time, generates time as a grammatical effect not as an existential condition. Our sense of time is more like a report about the relation between our practices and actions (linguistic, physical, emotional, cognitive, etc. ) and what counts as the world within the complex interaction o f these practices. "WhoIam"isanembodimentofadynamicmetaphysics,theexpressionof which, however, cannot constitute a substance, but rather constitutes a kind of aesthetic with moral force. Such an aesthetics is better understood as theology: the expression o f a complex totality o f shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize, these practices. (How is this a form of Aristotle's
energeia or entelechial Energeia describes the self-supporting activity, as opposed to the incomplete process ofdynamis, that describe a functioning toward an end. But as an activity, energeia describes this end in its activity; it is self-generating according to a similar structural logic of dialectic mediation in Hegel, leading to absolute knowledge as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
557
? energeia leads to the Prime Mover, the "energeia o f nousf' [Meta. 1072b], The soul, as "the first entelechia of a natural body that potentially has life," enacts a similar circular movement allowing for the soul to cause the movement of the body or other things by being their final cause. The point o f this brief comparison is to draw out the structural circularity that describes grammar or our involvement in language as describing a kind of energeia, where form o f life describes an entelechia not understood as a final cause but as a grounding limit that actualizes [as opposed to causing] our human language as human language. Such comparisons are dangerous because they ignore both the philosophical and historical complexity involved in both cases. Courting that danger is necessary, I think,ifwearetounwindtheconceptsofmetaphysicsintotheiraestheticforce. This does not mean that one should ignore the conceptual logic o f Aristotle's terms and the very different conceptual logic underwriting Wittgenstein's analysis and grammar [as part of the very different histories in which they thought], but it does mean that the form of this logic has a metaphoric force that can constitute a language game, as an object of comparison, which engages our involvement in our own language more fully than would a more conceptual and historical analysis. 6)
Let me return to the 'who I am' as "an expression of a complex totality of shifting practices that do not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize these practices. "--This is not to say that the 'I' is some hidden limit, an ich-in- sich. It is not a thing in the sense that it can or cannot be represented. Representation would be beside the point. One cannot, after all, represent a commitment, a gesture, a feeling, a desire, an understanding, a disposition except as ordering time.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? The declaration or report "I understand" does not describe a mental state. Wittgenstein describes a situation in which someone is presented by someone else (A) with a mathematical series (4, 6, 8, 10): "He watches A writing his numbers down with a certain feeling oftension, and all sorts ofvague thoughts go through his head. Finally he asks himself: 'what is the series of differences? ' He finds the series . . . and says: 'Now I can go on'" (PI? 151). What counts as understanding the series here is not just writing down the correct numbers of the series. A computer could generate such a list, but does it understand the series? The processes within the computer for determining the formula of any series o f numbers does not describe understanding the series as some mathematical process. The computer uses a set of algorithms or heuristics to match the series of numbers with a method o f generating them. Such procedures describe ways o f going on (with the series), but not an understanding either o f the series (as a mathematical series for example) or o f what it means to go on. But why should we be concerned with "what it means to go on"? Wittgenstein is arguing that there is no common process called understanding that is common to all cases of understanding. In the case of the computer we might say that the computer must embed its generation of a particular series within an understandingmodule. Thecomputerwouldbeinastateofunderstandingwheneverthe mathematical description of a series could be inputted into this module. This picture of
understanding, o f course, says nothing about what it means to understand, other than attaching "I understand" to some mathematical process. Wittgenstein could respond, speaking for the computer, "And how can the process o f understanding have been hidden, when I said 'Now I understand' because I have understood? ! " The computer would have
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
559
? to feel the tension o f not knowing, that is express its uncertainty as a set o f behaviors that it could interpret as confusion (the computer would have to be human). In the same way, "Iunderstand"isaninterpretationofwhatIdo,ofmygoingon. Thisinterpretationisa way of describing my behavior in language, in a way that I figure my stance toward the future as my intention in language or my interpretation o f my stance toward my intentions as hope in language. "Understanding", "intention", and "hope" do not describe mental processes, they describe my expressions and actions as meaningful within language. This language is accessible to everyone who speaks my language, and thus my understandings, intentions, and hopes are not private states: "Try not to think of understanding as a 'mental process' at all. . . . In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process" (PI? 154). There is nothing within my head that justifies my response but the circumstances in which I am embedded, the context around or within which my statement makes sense as about something.
The statement "I cannot go on" is not only a description (or interpretation) of my behavior, it is also an expression of my exclusion from the language game in which a series makes sense. If I say "I don't understand what you mean" our conversation stops, or you mightstartexplainingagain. Imightstillstareatyoublankly,unabletomakesenseof your words or apply them to some situation. I am, as it were, excluded from the language game. IfI finally make sense ofwhat you are saying I might say, 'Now I understand. ' "I understand" expresses my re-entrance into a language game and thus functions as a grammaticaldistinction. Itservestomarkachange.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? "I don't understand" and "I understand", and the innumerable expressions o f 'now I can go on' (including facial expressions, sighs, pauses, and so on) mark the margins of language games, describing our stances toward language games as opposed to within languagegames. Theexpressionofinclusionorexclusionis,therefore,aconfigurationof a self or subject, an 'I', that has meaning only as a grammatical expression of a change. This is, of course, not a change in state (when I understand I am not in a state of understanding). Itisratheragrammaticalmarkerbothformyself(constitutingmeinan interpretation in relation to both language and others) and for others who recognize this as a kind of signal. Consequently, such remarks (and there are many) describe a grammatical and public time. This is a reconstitution of the Tractaricm show/ say distinction and its description ofthe subject as the limit ofthe world as a variety oftemporal distinctions within Investigations. I think, however, the temptation to dissolve temporality in grammar confuses the way in which this temporality works and emerges. I think Wittgenstein mistakesthetheologicaldimensionsofhisownwork. Thekindoftemporalskeptical
confusions that lead to either Parmenides (no change) or Heraclitus (all change) are submerged under the Cartesian threat (the residual power ofpicturing as a metaphor for Wittgenstein is a part of his resistance to investigate the ontological dimension of
Investigations, which would mean thinking more fully into "form o f life").
My world waxes and wanes through the breakdown and shiftings between acting
through and within seamless language games, marking a kind of change in our world. Such markings constitute a temporal experience (seemingly a way o f measuring ourselves and the world). This would require default language games directed toward our loss of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? understanding or meaning (under certain pressure time might serve as such a default language). These kinds o f language games constitute not only the night-time world o f the Wake, but they order our self-reflection as a series o f unanswerable why-questions (resisting answering our losses of selfand world with what-questions, with our reduction into substance).
All o f this is a way o f saying that we do not experience time at all. Time functions as a grammar (ours) expressing us as seemingly against a world (ours), as musical notes against noise, or as something like the inaudible melody emerging as, what Charles Rosen calls, "a structure ofsound" out ofSchumann'sHumoresk:
The inaudible in Schumann's music is not conceived, as in Bach, as a theoretical structure which can only be imperfectly realized in sound, but as a structure of sound which implies what is absent. The actual heard sound is primary, a sound here o f improvising an echo, an accompaniment to a melody which exists only in its reflection; a performance which does not bring out this shadowy quality and the flickering uncertainty o f the rhythm is a betrayal o f the score. In Bach the notation implies something beyond the reach of every realization, but in Schumann the music is a realization which implies something beyond itself. (10)
Using the "structure o f sound" as an analogy for time, and therefore for the T , is important to me because it describes the absent dreamer in Finnegans Wake. Joyce inverts Schumann's musical structure. The inaudible becomes 'the actual heard sound", a nonsense that "implies what is absent. " The logic o f the unconscious, while appearing as a masque o f characters, points always to a single unconsciousness (one could say an
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
562
? exemplary one). Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the Wakean dream we find that any paragraph provides us, as John Bishop says, "with as set of vectors that point to an absent content--'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' of whose 'trapped head' the process of reading the Evening World leads. " The (unconsciousness of our "humptyhillhead," our "one stable somebody" "aslip" in the text, becomes the underlying organizational locus around which the text can be understood, aroundwhichitwaswritten. Thislocusistheinaudible,andthetemporalconditionsof our form of life emerge out of the ontological crisis attending everynight.
The enfolding o f syntax and semantics in Finnegans Wake follows the description of musical intelligibility that Schopenhauer gave in his later essay "On the Metaphysics of Music" :
music is a means o f making intelligible rational and irrational numerical relations, not, like arithmetic, with the aid of the concept, but by bringing them to a knowledge that is quite direct and simultaneously affects the senses. The connexion o f the metaphysical significance o f music with this its physical and arithmetical basis rests on the fact that what resists our apprehension, namely the irrational relation or dissonance, becomes the natural image of what resists our
will, and, conversely, the consonance or the rational relation, by easily adapting itselfto our apprehension, becomes the image of the satisfaction of the will, (n, 450-51)
The will becomes visible in music (in our hearing music) as the description of an interpretive stance we take from within music: 'I understand this music (or as music)! ' or
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
563
? 'I do not understand this music (or as music)! '. This hardly does justice to Schopenhauer, but it does resonate with Wittgenstein's description o f will as an interpretive stance within language.
How is "Understanding a sentence. . . much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" (PI? 527). Understanding must be distinguished from "the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes" (PI? 154). Such hearing, like "a pain's growing more and less," is a perceptual state with defined duration. But my understanding of a word is not a continuous experience (as if all the words I understand paradebeforeme). Howthenismyunderstandingakintounderstandingathemein music? Wittgenstein says,
What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why isjust this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say "Because I know what it's all about. " But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to 'explain' I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says "Don't you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn" or "This is as it were a parenthesis", etc. How does onejustify such comparisons? --There are very different kinds ofjustifications here. (PI? 527)
I can understand music (at least I can recognize that something is music from within a form of life within which that music makes sense as music), but how can I explain what it is about? "About" seems like the wrong word here. Music is contentless as something that can be translated into words. Thus the point at which I can say I understand music
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
564
? but I cannot explain it marks a kind of limit point (as Wittgenstein says, this phrase of music "is as if a conclusion were being drawn" etc. ). These analogies are justified primarily by their success in explaining how this music is music, or how it might mean something as music. The criteria for the success o f my explanation might entail you saying "I understand".
Wittgenstein's point in making this comparison, however, is to show how our understanding of a sentence (in ordinary life) might be like understanding music. A failure to understand marks the boundaries ofour involvement, it does not describe this involvement. This boundary, however, is our point o f entry into music (or a language game). Wittgenstein focuses his remark on the point o f incommensurabity between languageandmusic. Thisincommensurabilitysignalsourinclusion(orfromtheotherside our exclusion) within a language game. The content of our inclusion (signaled by an awareness of an incommensurability--our inability to explain what the music is about) is the demand that we either recognize the logic of the music within which our stance toward the sound is as toward music, or we reject this logic and therefore the music as anything but noise. Thus this incommensurability signals an ontological demand, a demand to recognize something as a particular thing ("Theology as grammar), but acknowledging (or accepting) the limits of grammar as the limits of my world. My claim that I understand or do not understand this music can be intoned (another kind of meaningful sound) or be accompanied by certain facial expressions that suggest my intention to either learn or reject these sounds as music. My stance in the face of mis- or non-understanding, with its vector of learning or rejection, signals a shift in my state if this state is understood as a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
565
? grammatical state--or rather a shift in the sense of the world. Such a shift changes what is included within that world as sensible, determining often times what and who has a claim on me.
The expression o f these ontological demands (whether to learn a new grammar within which I recognize both Stravinsky's Les Noces as music and myself as hearing music), like the patterns described by my failure or success in performing within language games, keeps time. This time is a measure o f "the life (C(C)t|v) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another. " One way o f imagining the soul, therefore, is as a description o f the changing expressions o f my stance toward the world in which this stance involves a choice (or a possibility) to recognize the essence of something, what something is, within a world, form o f life, language game within which I function. This amounts to a temporal aesthetic. Such an aesthetic attempts to negotiate among what Wittgenstein calls, in Alice Ambrose's notes, the "solipsism o f the present moment: 'All that is real is the experience o f the present moment'," the problem o f duration, and the relations made visible in language games as aspects, attitudes, states, and pictures(p. 25-28). 7We inhabit our temporality neither within a solipsism of the moment,
nor as an epiphenomenon, nor as a given, but as a modulating set o f temptations that both limit and make possible our language use. Wittgenstein resists William James' "'The present thought is the only thinker', which makes the subject o f thinking equivalent to the experience. " It is this equivalence and its temporal solipsism that suggests a stream-of- consciousness as a picture of our consciousness. 8
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
566
? In Investigations and the Wake, time functions, emerges, and disappears through expectation, hope, belief language games, in the narratives describing memory, actions, intentions, and so on. This suggests that there is not a unitary sense of time, but rather a variety o f temporal grammars, themselves shifting in such a way that our sense o f time changes and flies and crawls (and in this change create another temporal grammar, always
atthelimitofsense). ThetherapeuticgoaldeterminingmuchofWittgenstein'slater philosophy seems to dissolve our temporal awareness in the transparency o f our ordinary language use (the time described by any particular language game). At the same time he rejectsthestructurallysimilarmachine-as-symbol-futurity. Therelationbetweenthe grammar o f time enacted in our practices and the meta-temporal limit generated by and excluded from these practices remains obscure. His discussion of this in the Brown Book I find incomplete. All versions of time and the differences expressing them are grammatically embedded: they are just at varying distances from our other practices.
Philosophical time creates the illusion o f no-time, not only in its drive toward viewing ourselves sub specie aetemitatis, but in its use of picturing and representation as the form of truth. But what is the effect of turning this picturing into 'mere' metaphor? Representation as a form o f knowing is in my sense a-temporal. We confuse these versions o f time with consciousness, self-consciousness, and forms o f unconsciousness. Understanding marks a grammatical limit that creates one dimension of time, but in this it only exposes the grammatical embodiment of time in all our language games (I want to say here, invoking Augustine, time is our 'soul'). That we are not self-conscious, i. e. , when 'time flies', means time is experienced as a function of our activity and not as a function of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? our self-reflection. 'Crawling time' is more the condition ofbeing aware ofthe disjunction between this self-reflection and our actions. But in each case time remains a function of our grammar, an expression o f our grammar. The emergence o f time as such a grammatical condition, as an effect within and as our being within our form o f life, posits ourpracticesasfunctioningwithinatotalitythatlimitsusaswhatweare. Icallthisthe emergenceofatheology. Wittgensteindoesnotinvestigatethemeaningofthis grammatical condition, and thus he does not bring out the moral and theological implications of our stances toward ourselves within language.