[The title of this post refers to Rorty's paper "Texts and Lumps," so here's Rorty describing experiences relevant to the rest of the post. But it isn't a post about Rorty, so you don't need to watch the video to understand what follows. And you certainly don't need to have read "Texts and Lumps."]
If you said of someone: 'She has a mind, all right, she just never has anything to say', you would probably mean that the person is so unthinkingly conventional, or so cowed and terrified of expressing any thought of their own, that there is no point in talking to them, you get no real response.
(Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, p. 10 )
This is a really good book, but this sentence horrifies me. There is a sense in which it's true that some people are not worth talking to, but if you think about it from the point of view of the "cowed and terrified" person... We're in "All the Lonely People" territory here, or this bit of "If You're Feeling Sinister":
Hilary went to her death because she couldn't think of anything to say
Everybody thought that she was boring, so they never listened anyway
There are interesting questions about the ethics of social interaction, because there is such a thing as trying to keep a conversation going, and so of not trying hard enough to do so. There could be a gender aspect to this too. Tracey Thorn (in My Rock'n'Roll Friend) says of Lindy Morrison and the men in The Go-Betweens that:
She understands and appreciates the beauty that also comes out in the songs, but living and working with their introspection and angst is draining, exasperating, she thinks it is very self-indulgent boy behaviour. A woman wouldn’t get away with it. A woman has to try harder socially. Has to placate, keep things running smoothly, not make unnecessary demands.
Still, there does also seem to be such a thing as not being able to think of anything to say. And something like a spectrum of social awkwardness with mild, perhaps even pleasant, shyness at one end and autism at the other. Autism is one of Eugen Bleuler's "four A's" of schizophrenia (the others being alogia, ambivalence, and affect blunting).
A comment of Wittgenstein's on schizophrenia is well known:
The greatest happiness for a human being is love. Suppose you say of the schizophrenic: he does not love, he cannot love, he refuses to love – where is the difference?
“He refuses to . . .” means: it is in his power. And who wants to say that?!
(Culture and Value, p. 87e.)
He also has this to say about his own inability to express himself (not necessarily in social situations):
Often I feel that there is something in me like a lump which, were it to melt, would let me cry or I would then find the right words (or perhaps even a melody). But this something (is it the heart?) in my case feels like leather & cannot melt. Or is it only that I am too much a coward to let the temperature rise sufficiently?
(Public and Private Occasions, p. 11)
It is not clear to him whether the problem is a moral one or something for which he couldn't be blamed. But, we might ask, who would want to say it is in his power? (Perhaps an encouraging friend. Perhaps someone who has been hurt by his silence. Or perhaps the question should be left rhetorical.)
On another occasion he seems to have thought that he had a (perhaps unrelated) inability, not a culpable failing:
Although I cannot give affection, I have a great need for it.
(Wittgenstein quoted by Norman Malcolm, Portraits of Wittgenstein, p. 302)
And he knew he was not alone in having this need:
I wish you could live quiet, in a sense, & be in a position to be kind & understanding to all sorts of human beings who need it! Because we all need this sort of thing very badly.
(Portraits of Wittgenstein, p. 287)
As for what people who have this kind of inability (or any other, for that matter) should think, Michael Kremer (paraphrasing Augustine, I think) is excellent on this:
[P]ride judges that God could have, and so should have, made me better than I am, second-guessing God's wisdom and trying to replace it with human wisdom. Humility, on the other hand, is acceptance of what I am as good enough. This is combined with gratitude to the Creator for my existence, an attitude that implies the recognition that if God saw fit to create me, I must have been worth bringing into existence.
(“The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense”, pp. 48-49)
A few chains of association such as are my wont.
ReplyDelete1)
In ordinary language "She has a mind, all right, she just never has anything to say" is probably in the nature of hyperbole. It reminds me of Ippolit Ippolitych in Chekhov's short story "The Teacher of Literature", who really has a mind while never having anything to say, everything he says being the likes of: "Summer isn't the same as winter. In winter we have to light the stoves, but in summer it's warm without the stoves. In summer you open the windows at night and it's still warm, but in winter – double-paned windows, and it's still cold... You should sleep in your own bed, undressed... Without food people cannot exist." Even on his death bed he goes on: "The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea... Horses eat oats and hay..."
I think this is the kind of satire which is funny not because it's realistic, but because it's unrealistic. Someone of whom it is said that "she never has anything to say" is not quite like this, and the satire may potentially even show up our disinclination to humour them as mere pettiness.
In German there is the adjective nichtssagend, literally 'nothing-saying', which can be used to mean 'meaningless' (in the sense of having no semantic content), but whose main meaning in ordinary language is 'anodyne'. But sometimes the anodyne is precisely what is called for. Wittgenstein to Drury on the Georgian architecture in Dublin: "The people who built these houses had the good taste to know that they had nothing very important to say; and therefore they didn't attempt to express anything."
2)
For me personally, not trying too hard to keep a conversation going is nothing compared to what I find probably the most infuriating social trait of all: shutting down a conversation while trying to pass this off as merely not trying too hard to keep a conversation going. In Raymond Geuss's memoir of (what a coincidence) Rorty, he writes:
"I suppose anyone who knew Dick knew his sometimes uncanny capacity simply to allow a train of thought that was moving in a direction he found uncongenial to peter out without it ever being completely clear why no further step in the conversation was made. This was not merely a gift or skill he had, but a personality trait that was integral to an aspect of Dick's philosophical make-up [...]"
This is a trait one simply cannot have while hoping to be on terms with me. And it's true, it's perfectly of a piece with the way in which Rorty's philosophy too is infuriating to many, including me. Curt but sweeping claims like "Appeals to ordinary language are of no philosophical interest" (which he says in his reply to Jim Conant in Rorty and His Critics): that's the long and short of it, now be a good sport, can't we talk about something else? NO WE CAN'T YOU POLTROON.
3)
ReplyDeleteKremer: "[P]ride judges that God could have, and so should have, made me better than I am, second-guessing God's wisdom and trying to replace it with human wisdom." But pride can also judge that God couldn't have made me better than I am.
The musicologist Deryck Cooke thought, apparently seriously, that there should ideally be no negative art criticism at all, because alleging that one has a better insight than the artist into what is valuable in art amounts to the sin of pride. "Perhaps it is asking too much of sinful humanity to expect people to admit the validity of contrary opinions", he wrote. In my book on music I associate this with a long remark on Mahler in Culture and Value, which Wittgenstein wraps up by saying: "But what seems most dangerous is to put your work into the position of being compared, first by yourself & then by others, with the great works of former times. You should not entertain such a comparison at all. For if today's circumstances are really so different, from what they once were, that you cannot compare your work with earlier works in respect of its genre, then you equally cannot compare its value with that of the other work."
That is, Mahler wrote music that Wittgenstein didn't like, because the standards for what is good and bad had in Mahler's time moved in a direction Wittgenstein disliked. But because they really had gone in this direction, neither could the old and in Wittgenstein's view superior yardstick be used anymore to establish what kind of criticism of Mahler is good or bad.
I find this outlook oddly admirable (in Cooke's case), and both oddly admirable and oddly under-associated with Wittgenstein (in Wittgenstein's case).
On 2: Rorty's approach to what others say seems to be to ignore it if he finds it uncongenial (although he did sometimes argue against other views, or at least explain how they differed from his) and to interpret it more or less at will if he finds it congenial. There's something to be said for that, but it also seems like a refusal to hold yourself to any external standard, and it doesn't try to help others do anything but sound like you (i.e. Rorty).
DeleteOn 3: Yes, Kremer's sympathetic/grateful view could easily be misused to excuse bad behavior or boost one's ego unjustifiably.