Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

Sally Rooney’s new novel is possibly her best yet. It’s hard for me to judge, since it’s so relevant to topics I have a special interest in, which makes it appeal to me in ways it might not to others.

I take Intermezzo to be primarily about what to do concerning sex (and religion) in this age that might seem to lie between the age of Anscombe’s Catholic Christianity (at least in Rooney’s Ireland) and whatever is to come. It could also be read as a consideration of the differences between Anscombe’s traditional views on sex and religion and Wittgenstein’s still demanding but much less traditional views. He believed in God in some sense and was a Christian, at least in his own mind, in some sense, but he was nowhere near as orthodox or clear in his views as she was, and he considered Anscombe to be narrow-minded. He was somewhere in the LGBTQIA+ realm, especially the G, B, and A parts of that ballpark. 

Why call the novel Intermezzo if that is what it is about? One of the main characters in the book, Ivan Koubek, is a chess-player.  Ryan Ruby points out that intermezzo has a chess-related meaning in his review here.

Wikipedia explains this meaning as follows:

The zwischenzug is a chess tactic in which a player, instead of playing the expected move (commonly a recapture), first interposes another move posing an immediate threat that the opponent must answer, and only then plays the expected move. It is a move that has a high degree of "initiative". Ideally, the zwischenzug changes the situation to the player's advantage, such as by gaining material or avoiding what would otherwise be a strong continuation for the opponent.

 

This kind of move is also called an intermezzo or an in-between move. More commonly, ‘intermezzo’ means a short dramatic composition or piece of music that comes between two other, longer pieces. It sounds to me as though it could refer simply to something that comes between two other things or, in chess, to the messy period in dialectical progress that comes before what will later be evident progress.

So what does this have to do with Anscombe? I have mentioned Ivan Koubek already. His brother Peter and his ex/girlfriend Sylvia Larkin are two more major characters. Peter’s and Sylvia’s relationship is complicated, originally because of an accident she suffered a few years earlier. An overheard conversation between doctors includes this information:

 

History of chronic refractory pain following traumatic injury. Road traffic accident. […] The old life of pleasure gone and never returning. (p. 14)

 

The “old life of pleasure” that has gone includes her sex life.

Compare this with the ending of Anscombe’s paper “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer” (in her Collected Papers Volume III, pp. 82-96). Speaking of sexual intercourse with the intention not of performing “a generative type of act” but for one or both of the people involved to achieve orgasm, she asks:  

 

if it is indeed all right to do this for good ends, then it is excessively difficult to see why after all the act need closely resemble a normal complete act of copulation; supposing that to have been made very difficult, say by a crippling accident to the wife, why should the couple not achieve sexual climax by mutual stimulation, rather than hold themselves obliged to a heroic degree of continence?  

 

A large part of what Intermezzo is about is what Peter and Sylvia, or any couple in this situation, should do. Since they are not already married, my understanding is, the Catholic view is that they should not get married.

 

Code of Canon Law in section 1084:

 §1. Antecedent and perpetual impotence to have intercourse, whether on the part of the man or the woman, whether absolute or relative, nullifies marriage by its very nature. (Quoted from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent)

 

They should either stay single, holding themselves to what might be considered a heroic degree of continence, or Peter should find someone else to marry.

This is roughly the position taken by Sylvia. Her relationship with Peter will not work, she believes, so he should find someone else. She says this not on religious grounds, although those might be lurking in the background, and not really sincerely. In reality, they both still love each other and want to be together, although their lives get even more complicated when Peter falls in love with one of the other women he dates. What to do about this (kind of) situation is another big question that the novel raises without really answering.

Philip Larkin is quoted in the novel early on, and Sylvia’s sharing his last name is probably not just a coincidence. The quotation is from “Church Going,” a poem about an atheist’s feeling the pull of religion, or at least a church. Here’s how it ends, including the bit that Rooney quotes:

 

[…] though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

 

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

 

Ruby writes:

 

Rooney’s engagement with Christianity in her fiction is less-often remarked on, but far more prevalent [than Marxism in her fiction]. Sylvia has a ‘sincere and transcendent love of Christ’, which is sometimes also a ‘terrifyingly real and serious fear of Christ’. Margaret ‘seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship’, and that, ‘in the eyes of God’, her loyalty to this new ‘way of being’ may demand sacrifices of her, including ‘her pride, her dignity, her life itself’. When she asks Ivan if he believes in God, Ivan articulates a theory of divinity as a kind of aesthetic principle.

 

Beauty, or at least beauty of a certain kind, Ivan explains, makes him think there is a meaning behind everything. He connects this with belief in God.

Near the end of the novel Peter and Ivan each describe themselves as trying to believe in God.

Ruby also quotes a character (it’s Sylvia as registered in Peter’s consciousness, I think) referring to the “Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.” Anscombe says something very similar. I have in mind especially things she says in an unpublished document which I don’t have permission to quote here, but also her claim in a 1972 letter to The Human World that, according to contemporary literature, “we are all crawling around in shit, that all is hopeless and absurd.” Sylvia is a bit like Anscombe, but not exactly like her. She doesn’t believe what Anscombe believes, and is at least somewhat open to possibilities that Anscombe rejects.

Rooney does not preach, but she does suggest some options to consider. One of these is that we do not yet have the concepts we need to think very well about all this. Perhaps our ideas of God will do, but our ideas about love and sex might need some revision. Here Rooney sounds a bit like Paulina Sliwa. Sliwa introduces the notion of what she calls hermeneutical inquiry, which she characterizes as making sense of the situation one is in. (See Paulina Sliwa “Making Sense of Things: Moral Inquiry as Hermeneutical Inquiry” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2023, pp. 1-21.) For instance, a woman who has been raped (the example Sliwa focuses on) might take some time to realize this. Partly this could be because one is reluctant to acknowledge such a repellent truth, but it might also be because one associates certain ideas with rape (a stranger in an alley or overt threats of violence, for instance) and one’s own case might not match these stereotypes.

 

This is not simply a matter of working out “how to conceptualise one’s experience” though, Sliwa argues. Rather, it is a matter of trying to find a perspective on one’s experience:

 

A perspective is a complex set of interconnected cognitive, affective, and motivational dispositions: dispositions to find salient, to be moved by, to see as explanatorily or morally significant, to see a situation as similar to or different from another. A perspective is thus a way of making sense of a situation. (p. 2)

 

The confused rape victim does not lack the word or concept ‘rape’. Nor is it that she suffers from “uncertainty about which option from a menu is the correct one” (p. 5). Rather, she is confused and needs to find “a different way of looking and feeling about the subject matter at hand” (p. 5). The idea that what has happened to her is rape might not occur to her until some way into her attempt to make sense of things. And when that idea does occur to her, it might well not be immediately obvious that ‘rape’ is the right word to use. So she isn’t simply at a loss for words. She is engaged in an intellectual process that will, if successful, result in her learning something about her situation.

What she needs is to find the right, most apt, perspective, Sliwa says. Perspectives are not just words or concepts, but they are expressed by words. For instance, one perspective on what has happened is expressed by the words “dealing with an asshole” (p. 12). Another is expressed by “rape.” I think this point might be expressible in terms of conceptualization, but, if so, Sliwa is surely right that this is not a simple matter of hitting on the right word.

 

Rooney has a similar idea about choosing a name for something from a given assortment of options. She talks about what Peter and Sylvia are as:

 

A philosophical problem. When they go out together, to be mistaken for what they aren’t. Or rather: to be mistaken for what they are. And how is that possible. To see a man and a woman walking together: to name in the mind their relationship to one another, as it were automatically. Which is to select from the assortment of existing names the one that seems appropriate to the particular case. To say to oneself that in relation to the man, this particular woman must be a friend, or else a girlfriend, or a wife, or sister. An act of naming which stands open to correction, but correction only in the form of replacement: that is, the replacement of one existing name for another. If you are mistaken in thinking this woman my friend, that means merely that you have chosen the wrong term from the assortment, and therefore that I can correct you by supplying the appropriate one in its place. The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, says Wittgenstein, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent. Because the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and woman may be both correct and incorrect at once. Each name including within itself a complex of assumptions. (p. 400)

 

Rooney quotes Wittgenstein here, but she might equally have quoted Iris Murdoch (who, like Anscombe, was also born in Ireland). Murdoch writes:

 

if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. (“The Idea of Perfection” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 329.)

 

Contemporary sexual ethics seems to be a bit of a mess, in the sense that a lot of people seem to be unhappy about what is expected or what actually happens or both. Women continue to be treated badly. There is a lot of involuntary celibacy. More people seem to want to get married than actually manage to do so. Dating is often said to be an unpleasant or disappointing experience. Whether we would do best to go back to traditional values or press on with the current ones or find something new seems to be a live question.

What we need might be new names or new complexes of assumptions. Which, as Rooney (or Peter) notes, is a social as well as a philosophical problem. And for that we would need to pay attention, thinking both carefully and imaginatively. In the meantime, in this intermission between the moral world that Anscombe (and most of Ireland) lived in and some possible new one that might be to come, we have to struggle to make sense of how we live and ought to live, including what to call things. (Assuming, that is, that we don’t simply agree with Anscombe. But Rooney seems to take this for granted.) Rooney’s contribution to the struggle is bringing up the apparent need for it, and getting us started on exploring some options, drawing the attention that is needed to at least some of the places where it needs to go.

Schulte on Wittgenstein in 1929

Joachim Schulte's review of Wittgenstein's Philosophy in 1929 says this about my contribution to the collection:  

Duncan Richter (in “The Good, the Divine, and the Supernatural”) discusses central    concepts from Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics, that is to say, concepts like those mentioned in his title, the distinction between relative and absolute value, “absolute safety”, “experience par excellence”, and other notions well-known to readers of that   lecture and the secondary literature dealing with its topics. The background of Richter’s reflections is a discussion between Cora Diamond and Michael Kremer. These authors focus on certain passages from Philosophical Investigations, in particular §107, which is read as referring to “a conflict” that could be seen as having taken place in Wittgenstein’s thought around 1929. This interpretation is fruitfully illustrated and supported by quotations from Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, “Some Remarks on Logical Form”, the Lecture on Ethics, and in many cases Richter’s characterisations of Wittgenstein’s words hit the nail on the head, for instance when he says of the better part of the lecture that it is “like one long false start” (p. 203). A good deal of the content of Richter’s piece is alluded to by a quotation from MS 107, where Wittgenstein notes in November 1929: “If something is good, then it is also divine. Strangely this summarizes my ethics. |Only the supernatural can express the supernatural” (Richter, p. 195). He is surely right in   foregrounding this passage, even though he misreads Wittgenstein in claiming of this remark that “even he [Wittgenstein] admits that it is strange” (this claim is repeated on p.208, where Richter speaks of “Wittgenstein’s strange identification of the good with the divine”).  Strangeness, however, is attributed, not to the quoted remark, but to the observation that the first sentence serves, or suffices, to summarise his ethics.

I agree that Wittgenstein attributes strangeness to the fact that "If something is good then it is also divine" summarizes his ethics. But why is this strange? Is it because Wittgenstein's ethics can be summarized in just one sentence? That doesn't seem so strange. It seems most likely to me that it is because the view that if something is good then it is also divine is in some sense strange. By 'strange' I don't mean false, of course. But it is unusual, and perhaps hard to understand. 

I don't argue for this reading in the paper, as I probably should have, but I don't think it's a misreading.

Wittgenstein and Ethics

For the next ten days or so this new book by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen is available to download for free. It's highly recommended, as is looking out for other books in this series. 

Rachel Fraser on Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies

Although I have yet to read the book under review, I have some thoughts about Rachel Fraser's criticism of Sophie Grace Chappell's new book Epiphanies. All quotes from this in the Boston Review. Bits that seem extra important to me are in bold.

Chappell’s proposal for managing disagreement is what she calls “a republic of conversation.” We should explore together our various epiphanies. Only extremists—those whose epiphanies preclude such conversation—will be excluded. This, of course, is textbook political liberalism. As such, it inherits much of the dreamy unreality characteristic of liberal visions of collective life. There are particular agents with their private projects. Sometimes those agents come together. When they do, their conduct is governed only by the thinnest of requirements: be tolerant, be respectful.

This seems unfair. Chappell is not responsible for the alleged faults of other members of the same tradition or family of views. And Chappell offers, apparently, a proposal (concerning what we should do), while Fraser criticizes a “fantasy” of how our collective lives are lived.

This is a fantasy. Our collective lives are always governed by a thicket of normatively structured institutions—institutions that orient us to a particular conception of the good. [...] Arguably, it is just these thickets which enable conversation. Meaningful discourse requires an interpersonal infrastructure, which cannot be laid in a normative vacuum; it needs some lifeworld to bed into. But it seems to be within just such a vacuum—all moral content thicker than civility pumped out—that Chappell proposes we converse.

Evidence that Chappell proposes conversation in a moral vacuum? None that I can see. But, of course, I haven't read the book.

Once we start thinking of ethics as a social technology, systematicity and argument take on a different hue. It’s hard to be all that piecemeal or poetic when thinking about how to organize social institutions. We may live by our visions, but they can’t write our social policy. And some of us are doomed to live within a moral order that we disavow. This, I am inclined to think, is an unavoidable feature of human life: there could not be a form of life both neutral and meaningfully collective.

Once we do what?! Can this be a good idea? I would think that piecemeal is the only way to think about social institutions. Pretty much for reasons that Fraser gives. We are borin into a world of such institutions and they shape the way we think. We can destroy everything but only literally, only physically. We cannot imaginatively or intellectually wipe the slate clean and then think afresh from there. Wiping the slate clean removes the tools we need to think with. We are stuck with something like reflective equilibrium as the best or only option for social evaluation.

Moving on... So, to converse (meaningfully and collectively) we need a lifeworld. This will not be neutral. And so neither can we ever be. OK.

But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be articulate. In other words, you owe me an argument. The vision of the good life that our social institutions encode should be explicit and contestable. And to be explicit and contestable—well, that sounds a lot like the law, and less like art criticism (at least as Chappell conceives it). Arguments can be challenged, rather than merely traded, in a way that visions cannot. 

Couldn’t one equally say, “But if we can’t be neutral, we should at least be civil, tolerant, and respectful”? And surely articulating a vision of the good life need not, and usually will not, take the form of putting forward an argument. And how contestable will a vision be that is encoded into the social institutions that enable the very conversation in which alone it can be contested? Somewhat, no doubt, but imperfectly or awkwardly, I would think, at best.

This seems like the key to the mystery here. There's an ideal (that seems visible in Fraser's thinking) of stepping back to get as clear a view as possible of social norms so that they can be critiqued and changed as desired. But there is also a recognition that we cannot do this except from within a lifeworld that is not completely separable from those norms and institutions. Which makes Chappell's view seem more correct than Fraser's. 

Wittgenstein's Philosophy in 1929

 

Edited By 

Florian Franken Figueiredo

The book explores the impact of manuscript remarks during the year 1929 on the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. Although its intention is to put the focus specifically on the manuscripts, the book is not purely exegetical. The contributors generate important new insights for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his place in the history of analytic philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s writings from the years 1929-1930 are valuable, not simply because they marked Wittgenstein’s return to academic philosophy after a seven-year absence, but because these works indicate several changes in his philosophical thinking. The chapters in this volume clarify the significance of Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy in 1929. In Part 1, the contributors address different issues in the philosophy of mathematics, e.g. Wittgenstein's understanding of certain aspects of intuitionism and his commitment to verificationism, as well as his idea of "a new system". Part 2 examines Wittgenstein's philosophical development and his understanding of philosophical method. Here the contributors examine particular problems Wittgenstein dealt with in 1929, e.g. the colour-exclusion problem, and the use of thought experiments as well as his relationship to Frank Ramsey and philosophical pragmatism. Part 3 features essays on phenomenological language. These chapters address the role of spatial analogies and the structure of visual space. Finally, Part 4 includes one chapter on Wittgenstein’s few manuscript remarks about ethics and religion and relates it to his Lecture on Ethics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Wittgenstein in 1929 Andrew Lugg

Part 1: Mathematics and Thinking the New

1. Wittgenstein’s Struggle with Intuitionism Mathieu Marion and Mitsuhiro Okada

2. The Origins of Wittgenstein’s Verificationism Severin Schroeder

3. Searching in Space vs. Groping in the Dark: Wittgenstein on Novelty and Imagination in 1929-30 Pascal Zambito

Part 2: Method and Development

4. The Color-Exclusion Problem and the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic Oskari Kuusela

5. What Would It Look Like? Wittgenstein’s Radical Thought Experiments Mauro Luiz Engelmann

6. Phenomenological Language: "not possible" or "not necessary"? Florian Franken Figueiredo

7. Hypotheses as Expectations: Ramsey and Wittgenstein 1929 Cheryl Misak

Part 3: Phenomenology and Visual Space

8. Simplicity in Wittgenstein’s 1929 Manuscripts Michael Hymers

9. Temptations of Purity: Phenomenological Language and Immediate Experience Mihai Ometiță

10. Speaking of the Given: The Structure of Visual Space and the Limits of Language Jasmin Trächtler

Part 4: Ethics

11. The Good, the Divine, and the Supernatural Duncan Richter

The Creation of Wittgenstein

 

Table of Contents

ABBREVIATIONS
1. Introduction, Thomas Wallgren (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Part I: Portraits of Wittgenstein's Literary Heirs
2. Rush Rhees: “Discussion is my Only Medicine” , Lars Hertzberg (Åbo Academy University, Finland)
3. A Portrait of Elizabeth Anscombe, Duncan Richter (Virginia Military Institute, USA)
4. Georg Henrik von Wright – A Biographical Sketch, Bernt Österman (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Part II: Understanding the Editors' Contributions to the Wittgenstein Scholars Have Known and the Philosophical Implications of their Achievement
5. The Letters which Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Georg Henrik von Wright Sent to
Each Other, Christian Erbacher (University of Siegen, Germany)
6. The Revision of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Kim Solin (University of Helsinki, Finland)
7. Naked, Please! Elizabeth Anscombe as Translator and Editor of Wittgenstein, Joel Backström (University of Helsinki, Finland)
8. From A Collection of Aphorisms to the Setting of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy: G.H. Von Wright's Work on Wittgenstein's General Remarks, Bernt Österman (University of Helsinki, Finland)
9. “… Finding and Inventing Intermediate Links”: On Rhees and the Preparation and Publication of Bemerkungen Über Frazers “The Golden Bough”, Peter K. Westergaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
10. Editorial Approaches to Wittgenstein's “Last Writings” (1949–51): Elizabeth Anscombe, G.H. von Wright and Rush Rhees in Dialogue, Lassi Jakola (University of Helsinki, Finland)
11. Art's Part in Wittgenstein's Philosophy, Hanne Appelqvist (Helsinki Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland)
12. Unearthing the Socratic Wittgenstein, Thomas Wallgren (University of Helsinki, Finland)

APPENDIX 1:
Wittgenstein's Will. Facsimilie of G.H. von Wright's exemplar, kept at WWA.
APPENDIX 2:
Table of Writings Published Postuhumously with Ludwig Wittgenstein Named as Author and at Least One of the Following As Editor: Rush Rhees. G.E.M. Anscombe, G.H. Von Wright. Created By Rickard Nylund In Cooperation With Thomas Wallgren.
BIBILIOGRAPHY
- Compiled by Patrik Forss in cooperation with Thomas Wallgren.
NOTE ON ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
- Compiled by Anna Lindelöf in cooperation with Bernt Österman and Thomas Wallgren.

Available for pre-order here.

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe

 

Introduction, Roger Teichmann
Part I: Intention
1. 'On Anscombe on Practical Knowledge and Practical Truth,' Lucy Campbell
2. 'Intention with Which,' Charles F. Capps
3. 'Intention, Knowledge and responsibility,' Rémi Clot-Goudard
4. '"Practical knowledge" and testimony, Johannes Roessler

Part II: Ethical Theory
5. 'Anscombe's Three Theses After Sixty Years: modern moral philosophy, polemic, and "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' Sophie Grace Chappell
6. 'Practical Truth, Ethical Naturalism, and the Constitution of Agency in Anscombe's Ethics,' John Hacker-Wright
7. 'Criterialism and Contextualism,' Gavin Lawrence
8. 'Anscombe on Double Effect and Intended Consequences,' Cyrille Michon
9. 'Anscombe on Ought,' Anselm Mueller

Part III: Human Life
10.'Justice and Murder: The Backstory to Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy,"' John Berkman
11. 'Anscombe on euthanasia as murder,' David A. Jones
12. 'The Knowledge of Human Dignity,' Micah Lott
13. 'Life and Other Basic Rights in Anscombe,' Katharina Nieswandt
14. 'Anscombe: Sexual Ethics,' Duncan Richter
15. 'Linguistic idealism and human essence,' Rachael Wiseman

Part IV: The First Person
16. 'The first person, self-consciousness and action,' Valerie Aucouturier
17. 'Anscombe and Self-consciousness,' Adrian Haddock
18. 'The first person and "The First person,"' Harold Noonan

Part V: Anscombe on/and Other Philosophers
19. 'Anscombe's Wittgenstein,' Joel Backström
20. 'Anscombe and Aquinas,' John Haldane
21. 'Ethics and Action Theory: An Unhappy Divorce,' Constantine Sandis
22. 'Anscombe and Wittgenstein on Knowledge "without Observation,"' Harold Teichman