Surfacing, or superficial out of superficiality

[Warning: what follows is somewhat experimental. I'm not sure that I really try to say anything very original here, but I do try to put it in an original way. Sometimes when I read it through it appears to make sense, other times, I have little faith that someone else would be able to follow it, or would see the connections that I think are there.]

(I meant to type 'surfaces' rather than 'surfacing,' but I think I like the slip.)

Here's how I write some blog posts: two or three ideas I have or things I read strike me as somehow related and I try to articulate the relation. I suspect these relations are as much invented as discovered, but invention is OK. Today's ingredients: Duck's Roxy Music post, Kelly Dean Jolley's reflections on Wittgenstein's saying that "essence is expressed by grammar," and j.'s thoughts on Wittgenstein on calculating in one's head. Also this. There is also this abandoned post of mine from a few days ago:

Expressing emotion is not like expressing milk. In the latter case, the milk is there before and after the expression. It just changes place. A cry of pain or a look of delight, though, don't move the pain or the delight from inside the body to outside of it. There is no such thing as pain outside a body, and maybe no such thing as delight inside or outside a body.

I can express the pain I feel in my stubbed toe by exclaiming, but this does not get the pain out of my toe (even if I do feel better--the pain does not travel up my leg and out through my mouth). If you hear the pain in my cry you do not hear something that is in my toe (as if you might hear it better if you pressed your ear to my toe), even if the pain in question is in my toe. So if we think of pain as a thing, it will seem to be a very strange kind of thing. It might be better to think of it as not a thing really at all.

So what? Well, something like what goes for pain goes too for thoughts, emotions, and feelings. If these are all weird phenomena that are observable only by their owner then it might seem as though each of us is trapped inside our own body, in an essentially incommunicable world of sensation. Sure, I can tell when you are probably in pain or probably happy, but what your pain or happiness are like, what they really are, is forever beyond my ken. Kant was accused of killing God by reducing him to an unknown x, and there is a sense, I think, in which the reality of other people is denied by this kind of metaphysics or skepticism or whatever we want to call it. Their personhood, one might be tempted to say, is denied by regarding their inner lives as forever unknowable by me. Their status as non-zombies is questioned thereby.

John Searle, as I recall, has 'refuted' behaviorism by encouraging people to pinch their arms and thus prove that pain is real. But if pain is this-sensation-that-I-have-when-I-do-this, then no one else can have it. I can vaguely think that they probably (or even must) have something somehow similar, but this can't mean much to me. (Perhaps they will have an inner life in a secondary sense.) I am then the paradigm, or the host of paradigms, and others are merely inferior copies. Only I have the real thing when it comes to pain, joy, etc. Only I could conceivably have it, since it is defined in terms of my experience. Everyone else is at best a pale copy, a world of ideas to my world of impressions. I am the world of forms, they are caves filled with shadows. I am the only real person. Reality stops at my skin. Everything else is a video game, which, of course, I am stuck playing and might care about. But it can't possibly matter as much as I do.

Everything I do, then, becomes a matter of altering my consciousness, as Sam Harris has almost said. This is one way to make sense of some characteristic features of contemporary life, such as drug use, pornography, and video games. These might sound like solitary pastimes, but you can live solipsistically (as if the world were an experience machine) with others almost as easily as you can alone, and it's usually more fun to do so. They might also sound like typically male pleasures, but stereo-typically female pastimes like shopping could easily be added to the list. (And, of course, plenty of men like 'female' activities and vice versa.) I don't think there is anything essentially gendered about this phenomenon.

In sum, if the ultimate reality is my consciousness or sensations, then everything else is basically just a stimulus. And what stimulates are basically surfaces. So a superficial, two-dimensional life can seem to be both the only one there is and disappointingly flat and (therefore necessarily) empty. Alone in a swirl of sensations I cannot meaningfully communicate with others, even if I know what to do to get them to behave as I want (and which sounds their making spell trouble for me, etc.). I have no peers. The only meaning there could ever be is what I impose on my experience.

I don't mean that all this is connected logically. Rather, there is an understandable tendency to go from Cartesian (but also fairly natural--Cartesianism is not Descartes's fault) ideas about consciousness to a certain deflated and egoistic view of life. Together these things form something like a worldview or picture: psychological phenomena are things that we own, they are inalienable, inaccessible to others, and (hence) we are alone, with nothing to care about ultimately but ourselves, and nothing worth seeking but entertainment.

This view of things is at least somewhat similar to the view that Iris Murdoch saw as dominating modern literature in The Sovereignty of Good (see pp. 8-9). It is reflected, I think, in the character of Leon in Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, who sits at the dinner table attending to the sensation of rolling balls of paper under his fingers and speaks in a nonsense language of his own. And it shows up in the song "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," about the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life in the kind of house to which we are taught to aspire, in which the perfect companion is a blow-up doll.

So how, if at all, can we escape this idea that we are trapped within the surface of our skin and that everything else is merely superficial? What follows is going to be a little fanciful, but I hope it's both bearable and comprehensible. The view of life as two-dimensional seems to come from the picture of reality as three-dimensional. If everything is just atoms bouncing around then what can matter to me except the atoms that bombard my surfaces? And these are the atoms at the surface of other things and people. So to get a three-dimensional view, maybe we need a four-dimensional picture. Meaning is the 'fourth dimension.' 

A two-dimensional drawing can be seen (experienced, not just imagined) as three-dimensional, and a three-dimensional object or event can be seen as meaningful (or not). Something's having meaning distinguishes it hugely from something that has no meaning, but the meaning is not some other, additional object. It is, I want to say, another 'dimension' (not literally, of course) of the thing. A cry of pain is very different from a mere cry (if I am just testing or exercising my vocal cords, say), but not because it is a mere cry plus some other thing: a pain. A look of love is not just a meaningless way of appearing plus (or caused by) the mysterious inner object known as love. 

The seemingly inexpressible, inner 'object' (pain, love, whatever) is contained in its expression in intelligible behavior or language. Expression ruptures the surface, destroying the two-dimensionality of the world. This makes us vulnerable, and we might prefer to retreat into a private world. (Hence, I think, Nick Cave's treatment of the request to "Say something, express yourself" as a kind of torture in "King Ink.") But understanding expression, understanding the fact that meaning occurs, involves understanding that the flat view of the world is false. We are not each a Citizen Kane ruling over a lonely empire of private goods. Part of the value of Wittgenstein's work, and Heidegger's, lies in this, I think. 

This is not to say that we need such work in order to be saved. It has always been possible to avoid Cartesianism and the problems associated with it. But it's good to have all the help you can get.