May
31
Meaning, Knowing and Metaphor: On a Section from Wittgenstein’s "Blue Book"
Filed Under philosophy | 4 Comments
To my readers: This is two thousand words long, and no, it is not a paper I wrote that I’m posting. This is original, and is meant as a blog post. All the passages that are pertinent are listed in the text below, even if they are a bit out of order, and can be used to assess if my commentary does them justice.
I should say that this commentary could be wholly inaccurate. I am focusing only on one passage of the Blue Book, and while I’ve read the entirety of it before, as well as a considerable amount of other things by Wittgenstein, a thorough commentary on the Blue Book might prove a lot of these thoughts speculative.
for Nancy
1. The library metaphor, and the possibility of progress in philosophy:
“Imagine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be many ways of sorting them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up several books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arranging the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that therefore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books which belong together was a definite achievement, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved. - The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. E.g. to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.”
- Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book”, pg. 45 of the Harper Torchbook Edition
2. Context of this quote
The immediate context of this passage is that it is situated in the midst of a tricky discussion about “meaning.” The question the Blue Book started with is “How do we account for the meaning of ‘meaning’?” The tricky thing about “meaning” is that to give it a definition, of course, would mean that we already knew what “meaning” meant.
So on BB 43 Wittgenstein reaches this preliminary conclusion:
“Meaning” is one of the words of which one may say that they have odd jobs in our language.
He then uses a metaphor to describe this: Imagine an “institution” with “functions,” like an office (”office” is my idea). If you wanted to know what the office in question does, you’d ask what the employees do there. Some type, some take care of finances, some take care of the mail and mailing. All one has to ask is what is being, or what numbers the people in the office are working with, or what sort of mail they get, and one knows what the “office” is doing more specifically.
It looks like an “institution,” then, can be defined by “function.”
But we can imagine this office hiring a guy to do other things, right? Things like making pizza runs for the employees working overtime, or emptying out garbage, or working with a special project. Would that “function” define the “institution”? Of course not.
Hence, Wittgenstein says What causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are tempted to describe the use of important ‘odd-job’ words as though they were words with regular functions (BB 44). We expect the uses of “meaning” to deliver the same information that knowledge of what is typed in an office would deliver; the uses of “meaning,” though, refuse to give that info, even as they do many very important but diverse things.
It is after this discussion that Wittgenstein talks about something that seems to be an abrupt change of pace. This “something” resides between the metaphorical discussion of meaning and the quote about the library being organized above:
The reason I postponed talking about personal experience was that thinking about this topic raises a host of philosophical difficulties which threaten to break up all our commonsense notions about what we should commonly call the objects of our experience. And if we were stuck by these problems it might seem to us that all we have said about signs and about the various objects we mentioned in our examples may have to go into the melting-pot.
The situation in a way is typical in the study of philosophy; and one sometimes has described it by saying that no philosophical problem can be solved until all philosophical problems are solved; which means that as long as they aren’t all solved every new difficulty renders all our previous results questionable. To this statement we can only give a rough answer if we are to speak about philosophy in such general terms. It is, that every new problem which arises may put in question the position which our previous partial results are to occupy in the final picture. One then speaks of having to reinterpret these previous results; and we should say: they have to be placed in a different surrounding (BB 44).
The big question is: Where did these two paragraphs come from? The first one talks about “personal experience.” What does that have to do with anything regarding “meaning” and “odd-jobs”? The second one talks about every new problem/advance in philosophy threatening all others - how does that tie into “personal experience,” and all the other topics mentioned?
I think the topic of “personal experience” comes merely from the fact Wittgenstein used a metaphor to describe how “meaning” works. The problem with a metaphor is that it doesn’t define any of the elements it uses; it is not a strict logical accounting that can be analyzed. It depends, rather, on one speaker just “knowing” that his audience has had certain experiences, and trusting that he can build an analogy that can be followed.
Metaphor is quite different from the proto-language games and the other thought experiments which are genuinely analytic, which try to force us to break down the very particular uses of language so we can get a grasp on where the philosophical problem is coming from. Wittgenstein had presumably used these sorts of tactics earlier (I forget, it’s been 4 years since I read the Blue Book entirely), but metaphor, which he’s using to try and resolve this situation right now, is a vastly different method than those others.
The second paragraph, about whether we can make any progress in philosophy or not, ties into the first as metaphor’s depending on “personal experience” forces one to address a radical skepticism. If “personal experience” is going to lead us to Truth, how on earth is it going to do so? After all, I don’t share the same experiences you do, & you don’t share mine. There is no guarantee we actually speak the same language, even. For all I know, an invisible presence around you might shield you from my words and prevent you from hearing anything I speak and tell you something entirely different from what I say, something that only coincidentally prompts a response from you that looks like a perfectly rational response to me.
Wittgenstein does not address this radical skepticism directly. Instead he asserts that yes, difficulties arise. Does that mean we want to throw out everything that has come before?
3. Back to the library
What’s curious about the library metaphor isn’t just that he’s using a metaphor to defend his use of metaphor, but also this:
1. We can take the books one at a time, and put them in the right place on the shelf.
2. We can take several books at once and put them on the shelf, declaring them to be a unit that makes a coherent whole.
Who on earth puts books on a shelf one at a time? It’s not only laborious, but in some sense counterproductive. After all, if philosophy is grammar, and concerned with the use of words, then words don’t work because we utter one - they work because there is a context, because we understand something about a given situation which makes the word make sense. Yet, I think, those who are looking for a logically perfect language have to put books on a shelf one at a time. Each word must have its proper place, and its referents must be accounted for entirely.
It is option #2, books in units, that allows Wittgenstein to say there might be a way to conceive of progress in philosophy. It is a major achievement if one book can be placed next to another, and that place is certainly the right place. It doesn’t even matter if the books get shifted again, as long as they get shifted as a unit, for that is what is a philosophical achievement.
Which makes me wonder: Is progress in philosophy really possible? Wittgenstein has given us a picture of what it might look like, but he has not decisively routed the objection he posed, which is that some philosophical difficulties could cause the whole of past philosophy to be reconsidered. He has suggested that such a momentous happening would occur because of an emphasis on personal experience, but has used another metaphor, one again dependent on personal experience (imagine how hard it is to sort a library) to try to steer clear of the consequences of the other use of metaphor (again, its persuasiveness being reliant on personal experience).
Wittgenstein is very aware of all that is going on: The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know (BB 45). He gives one example of this as understanding that two books, when they most certainly should be together, can still be moved around as a whole. And he is going to go on and say that a lot of other problems arise from “personal experience” as the basis of philosophizing.
But how do we deal with his two great uses of metaphor? And how do they relate to knowing?
4. Metaphor and knowledge
It is obvious to me that the two metaphors make sense, even while they don’t put - esp. the latter one - certain philosophical objections to rest. The first one explains how “meaning” works. The second one explains how progress in philosophy might be possible.
Using the second one, we can see a purpose for philosophy that would create such progress. The trick would be for philosophy to be dedicated not to skepticism, but to keeping us from making claims we shouldn’t make. The philosophy of Wittgenstein’s day was in (like much philosophy today) a pre-Kantian mode in need of critique. Frege and Russell wanted their logically perfect language that was going to make science that much easier and eliminate or prove that there was a God blah blah blah. One way of keeping philosophy in line is to appreciate its power in letting us understand how deeply some things relate, things that we wouldn’t expect to relate. A good example of “two books going together” is the research that shows that strong verbal and mathematical skills are complementary. We know this from Godel’s work in logic: arithmetic is incomplete and of infinite richness not because it is tied to the absolute certainty that attracts many to mathematics, but because of its roots in the richness of language. Math is a language, and we understand that better because of philosophy.
Re: Wittgenstein’s use of metaphor and his inability to completely rid himself of the problems “personal experience” creates - he might be against something deeper than he has conceived. Heidegger would insist that certain questions aren’t just things we ask, but things we are, and they can’t go away. Wittgenstein would concede, I think, and then get caught, at least from these passages. For Heidegger’s questioning runs at just as deep a level, if not deeper, and pushes philosophy in another direction, one that does not look for little results but for purpose itself. Such a direction depends upon the fact that we do think, when we do philosophy, that all prior knowledge is questionable, and all progress to date is questionable. And why shouldn’t we think that?
Technorati Tags: wittgenstein, philosophy, heidegger
Powered by ScribeFire.
May
31
"That Time of Year," Indeed: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 as an Introduction to New Criticism
Filed Under poetry, shakespeare | 1 Comment
Sonnet 73
Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth steal away,
Death’s second self, which seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
A reading of Sonnet 73
Ashok Karra
1. First Impressions: You probably read this poem at first (if you don’t have formal training reading poetry) and went “Huh. It’s about getting older, death, and love.” That first impression is not to be discarded: it is very accurate and very helpful.
What I am going to show you now is a method for working with those impressions. The method should make you fearless: you should be able to approach any work of literature, any poem, maybe even art and film and music and be confident that while you will not figure everything out, you will have important and thoughtful things to say about a work.
2. Critical Method: Formal & Thematic Approaches. The fancy terminology is my own. The concepts behind both approaches are simple, and you will need to use both approaches to understand poetry generally.
Formal: Every work has an internal speaker and an internal audience. (A dialogue between two participants shows this principle exactly.) The author of a work ought to be considered an external speaker, as he is speaking to us indirectly through his art. Biographical information about the external speaker, such as gossip about an author’s life, is usually irrelevant to a poem, or causes greater confusion about the poem itself. Also, if I were to say “I, Ashok, a dude born in 1980 and a horrible student, am the audience for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73,” that “I” would be an external audience. The trick is to find whom the speaker is talking to through what the speaker is talking about.
What we want is for the author’s art to speak to what we feel is important, not for the author himself to speak directly to us.
- I should say that this is only one way of looking at a poem. There are historical approaches, and reader-response theory, and a million other ways to work through literature. Nonetheless, I think you will find this way the most satisfying. -
Thematic: When one gets stronger at reading works, or realizes that certain themes are always at play in certain authors or artists, one can track what elements mean what through continuity of theme, and can see how an artist/author is responding to certain ideas, or other artists.
- Let us see these approaches in action, shall we? -
3. Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: Begin by noting that a sonnet has a formal structure which helps interpretation greatly: there are three stanzas of 4 lines, each stanza with a particular rhyme scheme, and a couplet at the end.
Now this poem is a bit tricky, because the major idea is in the couplet. Nonetheless, I want to walk through this poem stanza by stanza.
Stanza 1:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
“Thou” (internal audience) and “me” (internal speaker) are the puzzles: what is the relation between these two? What importance is it to us?
“Thou” sees a time of year in “me?” That must be a metaphor for one’s seeing a friend age. The age is a peculiar age - it is a time in life near death; after all, one can say Spring is when one is born, and Winter is when one dies. The speaker is at a strange moment in life, for he is at late Autumn. He does not know when he will die - hence the confused order of “none, or few.” It should be “few, or none,” but the speaker is clearly in some turmoil about death. Hemight not want to die, after all.
Now the rest of the image is a tree image. Cf. Rousseau in Emile - I think the tree is a symbol of a man of immense learning. A tree places its roots in the ground and grows outward. Firmly rooted in the Earth, it literally branches everywhere, giving shelter and protection (knowledge is useful, and it is useful when it is directly related to Earthly things, no?) while staying at rest (a man of learning must study, like roots sucking up water, and his knowledge means he is very difficult to sway).
But this tree has lost its leaves, and lost the music it once enjoyed and allowed the world to hear, and it does not look like it will be a legacy of any sort, or will live on in some way. A speaker in turmoil about death needs something more substantial than a tree image to consider what made his life worthwhile, or to find some other hope that will help him confront his own death.
Stanza 2:
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth steal away,
Death’s second self, which seals up all in rest.
Here the image is that of light - again, an image of learning or knowledge. But the sunlight is attacked by “black night.” It is “night” that has agency, it is “night” which is attacking the light as day passes on, not so much light on its own receding.
Again, note that this image is unsatisfactory to the speaker. While he feels the internal audience understands his immense learning and quest for knowledge, both the images introduced with “in me” so far have failed to aid the speaker himself make sense of his own predicament.
You might want to ask yourself what the difference between the light and tree images is on a more personal level. I think that “night” is the struggle one has with oneself when one is thinking about death, actually: As one gets older, one’s immense knowledge is literally clouded by the awareness that it could all be for naught. Such a tension erases one’s own knowledge, as it destroys the lack of worry needed for true contemplation.
But that is my own thought.
Stanza 3:
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This is the image that is the most satisfactory to the speaker: Why? Well, what’s happening is that a large fire, a fire that consumed enormous energy, it putting itself out - putting itself out through using up its fuel rapidly and throwing up ashes into the air that blanket it eventually.
Why is this good? It is a notion of death where death is not something that happens to us, but comes about by us using life as best we can. This is a very humanist notion of death, although I think the life of St. Thomas Aquinas can be said to fit into this pattern, sort of (he worked himself to death). The larger point is that death is here, in a sense, in one’s control.
Couplet:
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Here, the internal audience is credited with realizing that love and death are intimately connected, and that is the true knowledge. If we cannot die, we cannot love. And so love increases with a certain awareness of death and how people are struggling with death and how to make sense of life.
May
31
Originially published 2006-06-07.
Are You There?
W.H. Auden
Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.
The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.
The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.
Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
Commentary:
Imagination, born from pain, gives us true love in our dreams. “Dear flesh and bone” is there; the price is two different aches, though - one pain from the absence of the lovers’ body, the other from the absence of his soul. Those pains correspond to “the ache of being with his love, and being alone.”
The literal reason why they correspond is that we are not given an instance in the poem of anyone actually having a lover. The only thing that comes close is the dream of the second stanza. The three stanzas before the last give us the pain of youth, childhood, and the aged, in that order. Narcissus, a youth, can be said to be self-absorbed because he believes love is real: the problem of youth is the arrogance which stems from actually having something to believe in, one’s dreams. The child’s “pain” comes from a different problem: it is unclear the child has pains. The list of water, fire and stone implies a fourth element: wind. A child is mischievous like the wind, taking everything for granted. Can taking everything for granted be said to be a hallmark of love? Of course not - if the child has a “pain” as regards love, it is the lack of love coming from the child’s inability to conceive an Other. Finally, Proust very much thinks love a “subjective fake:” “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, was very good btw, and all you really need to read of Proust’s in order to see this. In that work, Proust turns to nature over and over again to search for meaning in life, and when we realize that, we realize that jumping into a lake or acting like the wind are also manifestations of humanity mimicking nature.
The distance which creates love is written into the world. The lack of a lover’s body is nowhere more apparent than in loving your own reflection; the lack of a lover’s mind is nowhere more apparent than in jumping from tree to tree in joyful, thoughtless bliss. Yet the lack of body, for Narcisssus, comes about because he thinks he understands that which he sees: the reflection and him share the same mind, he hopes. Similarly, the child, in not thinking, is the sensuality of the world: being young, he does not just recall the newness that creation speaks, he also demonstrates, in his activity, the truest love of body in play. Who cares how nature thinks? What matters is that it is there, and wonderful.
Now that we have exhausted this poem quite a bit, the cryptic final stanza should make more sense. The want for otherness is less a “want” but more a realization of self. If you look at what you want, you see who you are. And so it cannot be said that we are alone, inasmuch we are creatures of desire.
May
31
Does "a kingdom care?" On Emily Dickinson’s "Read, sweet, how others strove…"
Filed Under dickinson, poetry | Leave a Comment
Originally published 2006-02-27.
Read, sweet, how others strove…
Emily Dickinson
Read, sweet, how others strove,
Till we are stouter;
What they renounced,
Till we are less afraid;
How many times they bore
The faithful witness,
Till we are helped,
As if a kingdom cared!
Read then of faith
That shone above the fagot;
Clear strains of hymn
The river could not drown;
Brave names of men
And celestial women,
Passed out of record
Into renown!
Commentary:
There are those who are courageous because they value truth over faith (”they bore the faithful witness,” stanza 1), and those who are courageous because of their faith (stanza 2), it seems. Those who have faith seem to win a very great glory.
If that division holds, then this poem is a simple expression of faith.
But we’re dealing with Emily Dickinson here. That division does not hold. Notice the last lines of the second stanza: some names have “passed out of record into renown.” Would that not be an apt description of the people being read about in the first stanza, the ones that teach the speaker and whoever/whatever is dear to her to be “stouter,” “less afraid,” and provide, generally, “help” independent of a kingdom?
“Read then” can mean, therefore, two things: it can mean an event that happens after the first stanza, or it can mean the same event as that which occurs in the first stanza. (An example of the logic of the latter: “If you do A, you then do B” - it is entirely conceivable A = B, or B is some integral component of A.) I take the second stanza to be an elaboration of the first, not a contrast.
Does that mean this poem is a secret atheist’s hymn? Well, the language of faith in the second stanza can’t just be thrown out, and shouldn’t be. It is very clearly the divine being spoken of in the second stanza: faith shines brighter than the “fagot,” a man-made thing; the sound of the hymn is never dulled by the river’s natural chaotic rush. Bravery/divinity ultimately comes from sharing one’s light with others, and leading a life that is distinct, worthy to be praised.
What Miss Dickinson is probably saying is that there are divine human beings on Earth, and that those divine human beings show the rest of us how to love life because they love truth. There is only one truth in this life which is a certainty, though, which is that we will perish. A genuine love of life means that the traditional grounds for hope are not secure; the care of a kingdom is in a deep sense scorned, for if we do love life, we want to forge our own paths, find the truth that matters to us. Nonetheless, this whole process makes those of us who care not for the divine very divine. We will be the peacemakers, we will be those who mourn. We will be those who ask, seek and knock. We will even be meek and poor, for magnanimity doesn’t mean bragging all the time - it means giving so our other virtues are not compromised.
We will want Truth for all of us, and thus that search is not mere atheism, if it is atheistic at all.
There is a reconciliation between religion and irreligion here, but it depends on a tension, and the beauty of the poem is in its forcing us to see that tension and not dismiss it as many of us do in everyday life.
May
31
Industry and Divinity: On Hopkins’ "God’s Grandeur"
Filed Under christianity, poetry | Leave a Comment
God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Commentary:
The quick take on this poem: God’s greatness is in Nature (flames from foil; oozing of oil), but Man does not obey Him, as he seems to not recognize God’s greatness. Instead, Man by means of industry puts himself on and into everything. This alienation from God seems to exhaust a seemingly finite world. Yet “nature is never spent,” and one can see in the promise of a new day the work of the Spirit.
Long take: There are many things going on in this poem - one interpretation I read focused on how the flames coming from foil represented electricity (combine with “charge”) and that was Hopkins’ way of saying that God’s grandeur is there even as science progresses, if we will only look. I want to focus on the question of authority, which I think was badly neglected in the primary commentary I read.
Let us take “charged” to be also implying a task for the world, a task that if completed, will make itself manifest in God’s grandeur. We then confront the images of flame from metal, oil from (presumed) olives. Oil as chrism (olive oil that is perfumed) was used to anoint kings, flame was what descended upon the apostles when they were charged with the spread of the Word. What does it mean that God’s authority comes from natural objects, objects that can give power to the knowing or feed the hungry? What does it mean that kings feed, while the believers are themselves an electric current, the passion driving the world?
It looks like the natural order where divine power is manifest empowers man too much in some way. Hence man does not take into his own reckoning the “rod,” yet another symbol of God’s authority which neatly ties into the electricity metaphor.
In place of the electricity of God, man “trods” through generations. Trade and industry cheapen and exhaust nature, and divorce man from it. Yet it cannot be denied that man gains control of circumstances through such labors. He is alienated but protected from the earth, and his imprint is everywhere. There are no kings that feed or apostles that inspire here. Instead, man has used the soil and trade to duplicate godly sustenance and divine motion. The natural order has corrupted man through the power of suggestion.
Against this bleaker picture is the “dearest freshness.” It is not that man is evil and aggrandizing and consuming; it is more he is mistaken about God’s power. Such a mistake is a fortunate one, because it is an underestimating of the power of nature. Our lights only keep us lit in the black night, but black night will fade away, esp. as we remember Eden, which lies eastward. We remember Eden through that “brown brink” - the sacrifice upon the Cross (?) - that brought forth a morning unlike any other. In the beginning was the Word who presided over Creation. Now that Word has allowed the Spirit to descend, and what is remarkable about the Spirit is not merely his heart, but his wings, a motion most unlike electricity or trodding or trade, as it represents the possibility of an upward motion. Inside of Nature, the whole time, was the whole of the Trinity. It just takes history to realize it, because we humans are very slow creatures.
Notice also that the question of authority has dropped aside. The Son called forth the Spirit and the two that are one in three work as a unity. Man’s attempt to assert control is useless in the face of a God who does not seize responsibility for the sake of power, but shares responsibility in order to empower.