Moralism

Stephen Mulhall says that:

Brown’s Hobart Wilson is someone whose inextinguishable vitality is capable of inducing a conversion in others—of suddenly revealing (surprisingly, even shockingly) that what I had hitherto regarded as morality’s unquestionable priority over non-moral values and interests was in fact a deeply constricting refusal on my part to appreciate the turbulent heterogeneity—the sheer unruliness—of our experience of one another and of the world we share. [Maria Balaska, ed., Cora Diamond on Ethics, p. 184]

Mulhall’s words might suggest that vitality is a non-moral value, which in turn might lead one to think that it is, after all, a value, and so could perhaps be added to a list of virtues, or some such thing. This would go against his point about unruliness and the importance of being open to it, however. His point, I take it, is not that there are various values, some moral and some not, but that Wilson’s vitality is a radically different kind of good from moral values. Hence Mulhall’s reference to “turbulent heterogeneity”. We can write lists of heterogeneous values or virtues, but doing so might obscure just how different some are from others. There is something mysterious about Wilson’s vitality, as Diamond emphasizes. Or perhaps the mystery concerns not so much his vitality itself as what is good about this vitality. Why should it seem good that the “currents of life run very strong in him” (Diamond, p. 210)? Not, surely, because such currents are beneficial to social animals. It’s more mysterious than that, although connected with more obviously normal virtue such as Wilson’s allegedly never complaining about his lot.

Diamond begins with a kind of Rawlsian idea from D. A. J. Richards, according to which “we would accept, in an appropriately defined ‘original position’, a moral principle about mutual love ‘requiring that people should not show personal affection and love to others on the basis of arbitrary physical characteristics alone, but rather on the basis of traits of personality and character related to acting on moral principles.’” (Quoted in Diamond, p. 198) Bernard Williams calls this “righteous absurdity” and Rai Gaita calls it moralistic. It is less obviously terrible to me, but I think I see the objection. I take Richards’ point to be motivated by the thought that who someone is, what they are like as a person, should matter in romantic and sexual attraction, not only what the shape or color of their body is, as if they were an object (and as if, perhaps, a robot might be just as good). This does not seem objectionably moralistic to me.

It's really the reference to moral principles, and perhaps just to principles, that spoils things. Without the word ‘principles’ Richards might be taken to be saying only that personality and/or character should matter and that it shouldn’t be only bad or immoral aspects of someone’s personality that attract one to them. Love based on shared racism would not be good, for instance. Another problem with the idea of moral principles here is the initial question that Richards sems to be asking: “What moral principle about mutual love would be most acceptable?” Must we have a moral principle for this? Does everything have to be governed by moral principles?

Things change if the “personal affection and love” in question includes the love between siblings or between a parent and a child. If Richards is saying that no one should love their family members just because they are their family members then that seems moralistic. Or if he would object to love between the last two people on earth just because they were the last two people on earth then that seems obnoxious too. But, as I say, I think it is really the mention of “moral principles” that turns what might be a good thought into a bad one.

It's interesting to relate this to what Amia Srinivasan has to say about the “right to sex.” To what extent are we responsible for who we find attractive? To what extent can we try to change? As Srinivasan says: “[S]imply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial.” [Note the word ‘simply’ here. Srinivasan does think it’s true that no one is required to have sex with anyone else.] Personal preferences, she says, are never just personal. That might be going too far—a preference for people with long arms or eyes of two different colors might be purely idiosyncratic, I would think, but her point is that common preferences are often either racist or approximately as bad as racist preferences. A certain kind of rejection of Richards’ idea might obscure this problem.

Srinivasan is eager to avoid any coercion, going farther than I might in that direction. She says, for instance, that “As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred.” Maybe this is true, as a matter of politics. But if a middle-aged or older man prefers women much younger than himself and insists that they be white and blonde, must we treat this as sacred? Better left alone maybe, although if a close friend or one of his children wanted to suggest to him that there could be something dodgy about his taste in women then I don’t think I would object.

What Srinivasan is really concerned about is not this, though. Instead she wants us to explore, both in thought and practice, I think, the space between a moralizing dictation of politically correct sexual preferences, on the one hand, and a complacent conservatism about existing prejudices, on the other.

Openness to the turbulent heterogeneity and unruliness of the world and its various goods is necessary for such exploration to go well. Without it the exploration (and the thinking it involves) either won’t happen at all or else it will take the form of guilt-driven relationships (possibly only imaginary ones) that one has been convinced one ought to enjoy. What we need, it seems, is neither moralism nor complacency but a willingness to see what is there to be found.

Stephen Mulhall talks to Alan Montefiore

Mulhall's magic

I talked a bit about Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle here and here. This is the last post I intend to write about it, and it's about the part of the book I like the most. Near the end, Mulhall refers to "the sheer wild particularity [...] of each individual thing harbouring a refusal to conform to or be exhausted by any of our orderings of things." He quotes Chesterton saying that, "A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree"

(Cf. Tolstoy:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? 

Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.") More respectably, Chesterton writes that, "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact, and its mystery.")  

Mulhall connects this with Wittgenstein on the two different kinds of plant whose seeds look identical but which reliably produce plants of the type from which each came. In such a case, Wittgenstein remarks, to insist that there must be a difference in the seeds, even though we cannot detect one, "only shows what a powerful urge we have to see everything in terms of cause and effect." The beauty of Wittgenstein's story is that it never goes beyond the observable (imaginary) facts, which makes it undeniable, and yet it is hugely discomfiting to the mindset it takes aim at. It's like Kant without the metaphysics (Kant aimed, as I see it, to show the Dawkinses of his day that science can never show religion to be false), or attacking positivism by being more positivist than the positivists. Basically, by actually sticking to the undisputed facts it reveals how much metaphysics there is in the view of many people who proudly think of themselves as sticking to the facts. 

And when we do stick to the facts in this way (cf. also Tractatus 6.53) we are freed from unjustified assumptions about the laws of nature and cause and effect. Focusing on the thing itself means bracketing the principle of sufficient reason, which means seeing things how Schopenhauer says we should see things if we are to perceive objectively and achieve peace.

Mulhall's riddle

Some questions that you might want to ask Stephen Mulhall when you read his new book:

1. if talk about God is nonsense, why bother?
2. if talk about God has a use, mustn't it thereby have a meaning after all?
3. if you accept that nonsense is nonsense, that there is no significant nonsense, then how comfortable can you be, or should you be, with the idea of deliberate uses of certain kinds of nonsense? Even if you aren't guilty of chickening out, are you nevertheless sneaking around? 

Some answers to the first question can be found in the passage I quoted earlier. For one thing, "everything in creation is a potential source of imagery for the divine, and the more of it we activate in religious language the better, since only thus can we acknowledge God’s superabundant variety." If religious language is nonsense then I'm not sure how successfully it can acknowledge anything about God, but the superabundant variety of creation, and the excellence of what is so superabundantly various, I would add (although I think a sense of appreciative wonder is already implicit in Mulhall's words, so I'm not adding much), can certainly make you want to sing its praises. For another thing, the "transcendence of God is best acknowledged precisely by following out the consequences of attributing contradictory attributes to him; for if he is both male and female, and we know that no person can be both male and female, we thereby appreciate that our idea of him as a personal God is itself a misrepresentation—a necessarily unsuccessful attempt to delineate that which is beyond delineation." Wonder might leave us speechless, or mouthing something with obviously minimal content, such as "Wow!", but Mulhall argues that it is better to speak:

The best way to appreciate the transcendence of God to human language is [for the reason just quoted] not to fall into silence, avoiding even the assertion that nothing is assertable of him, or to attempt some inconceivable synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather endlessly to employ that language in relation to him, and endlessly to experience its inevitable collapse upon itself.  

Silence, I suppose, can too easily become mere silence, "There are no words" a thoughtless cliche. The surest sign of being "lost in wonder, love, and praise" is that you attempt to express this wonder, love, and praise, even if you are bound to fail. These attempts at expression, though, it seems to me, since they are bound to fail, have to be understood as something like symptoms rather than as ends worth pursuing in themselves or means worth choosing for the sake of some other end. As Wittgenstein says at the end of the Lecture on Ethics, they are "a document of a tendency in the human mind." This makes the question "why bother?" moot. It is like asking why anyone should laugh when they are amused. Mulhall does have an answer, though, to anyone who thinks we should actively try to stop talking like this.

His answer to the second question, about whether religious talk must have a meaning after all, since it has a use, is this: "It could only mislead to say that being shouldered out of our language-games is just one more language-game, or to declare that words have a grammar when they fail us just as they do when we effortlessly employ them to word the world." In other words, as I understand it, you could call the use of (nonsensical) religious language a language-game, but it isn't a good idea. That seems fair enough.

The third question is the one that bothers me the most, although I'm not sure how troubling it really ought to be. Involuntary babbling praise is obviously OK (or: there is no point in trying to rule it out as somehow 'illegitimate'), but it isn't theology. Nonsense can be used deliberately though, as satire or in a reductio, for instance. This doesn't sound like theology either, though, although here my ignorance of theology feels like a problem. Perhaps there could be theological anti-theology that deliberately used nonsense to burst balloons and bring its targets back to earth and/or God. Some of Kierkegaard's work might be thought of this way. But this would always be a negative, reactive project.

Mulhall apparently accepts something like this idea, although he focuses on theology as a reaction to philosophy rather than to other theology. As he sees it, "In short, theology discloses philosophy’s perennial aspiration to a God’s eye view as both essential to its nature and essentially beyond its own grasp—not exactly because there is no such perspective, but rather because that perspective is and can only be a ‘perspective’, hence belongs to God alone, and so is realizable only as and through faith." So, roughly, theology shows something even if it has nothing to say ("the linguistic constructions to which theology is driven do not constitute an intelligible language"). Mulhall doesn't put it this way, though, talking instead about theology's not knowing something that philosophy does not know and yet nevertheless having something to tell it.

Still, you might wonder whether Mulhall hasn't just claimed on theology's behalf to know (or say) the thing that he says theology can tell (or show) philosophy. You might also wonder what idea of nonsense is at work in the following passages:

This recalls the Thomist claim that the perfections apply to God, but do so more appropriately or fittingly than they do to us. For in giving expression to that semantic priority by knowingly violating the grammar of ordinary perfection talk (e.g. by saying that God is loving if and only if one says that he is Love), we maintain the appropriate theological balance between acknowledging scriptural authorization for characterizing our relations to God as personal whilst not characterizing God as a person (hence, as subsumable under categories, genus, and species). 

and:

The only way of making sense of Abraham is to grasp the point of his not making sense—to see him as having a very particular use for a very specifically generated kind of nonsense.

As sophisticated as Mulhall's take on the story of Abraham and Isaac is, does he perhaps still (or thereby) come too close to making sense of what he says does not make sense? And is it really possible to maintain both that theology is nonsense and that one can maintain the appropriate theological balance between one thing and another by knowingly violating the grammar of ordinary perfection talk? That makes it sound as though there is a right way to violate these rules, and hence that such 'violation of grammar' is in fact an activity with rules of its own. I'm not sure what I think about these things. But this third question seems more serious than the first two.

More nonsense

I'm enjoying Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle very much. Here he is on religious language:

...insofar as God is the source of all that is, possessing in his being all the perfections he causes, then everything in creation is a potential source of imagery for the divine, and the more of it we activate in religious language the better, since only thus can we acknowledge God’s superabundant variety. And yet, using language in all these ways simultaneously will inevitably lead to us speaking contradictorily about God (as male and female, light and darkness, weakness and strength); and nothing we say about him can conceivably capture his nature anyway. But that transcendence of God is best acknowledged precisely by following out the consequences of attributing contradictory attributes to him; for if he is both male and female, and we know that no person can be both male and female, we thereby appreciate that our idea of him as a personal God is itself a misrepresentation—a necessarily unsuccessful attempt to delineate that which is beyond delineation.

The best way to appreciate the transcendence of God to human language is thus not to fall into silence, avoiding even the assertion that nothing is assertable of him, or to attempt some inconceivable synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather endlessly to employ that language in relation to him, and endlessly to experience its inevitable collapse upon itself. Religious language is thus essentially self-subverting language; the repeated collapse of its affirmations into complete disorder is its mode of order—it is, one might say, the only way the ‘language-games’ woven into honest, transparent religious language-games should be played.

British Wittgenstein Society Newsletter

[Warning: the following consists of little but bragging, although there is also a link to videos of talks by various Wittgenstein-related philosophers.]

The latest BWS Newsletter contains a short piece by Anshel Cohen, a student at Cambridge, about the 8th BWS Annual Conference. He writes:

One highly interesting lecture was Rowan Williams’ on Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and the Gospels, which uncovered many unexpected connections between these topics. However, my favourite talk was by Duncan Richter,...

Woo hoo! (The talk in question is this one, on "The Value of Clarity".)

There's a video of the talk here. Perhaps more interestingly, the same link takes you to videos of the talks given by Gabriel Citron, Genia Schӧnbaumsfeld, John Milbank, Stephen Mulhall, Rowan Williams, Sophie-Grace Chappell, Michael Scott, and Wayne Proudfoot 

 

More videos

If you liked the video of Cora Diamond's recent lecture you might want to see if there's anything here you've missed:

Russell on Wittgenstein, Sea of Faith documentary on Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein the movie

Cora Diamond speaking at Gregynog in Wales, 2011

Rai Gaita at the same conference

Stephen Mulhall on Wittgenstein (part 1, part 2) and as one of Melvyn Bragg's guests in a program on guilt

Stanley Cavell on "The Wittgensteinian Event" (and more Cavell here)

Lars Hertzberg in conversation with Frederick Stoutland on Georg von Wright and at Gregynog

An interview with Stephen Mulhall

Here.

Humane Philosophy

This looks like a good site. It includes a video lecture by Anthony Kenny, the text of a lecture by Stephen Mulhall, and another video lecture by Peter Hacker. And a lot more besides. 

The concept of prayer

In case you don't always read everything at Jon Cogburn's blog I thought I'd draw your attention to the comments on this post. Thomas Carroll makes good points, in response to some of which Jon mentions Carroll's new book, which looks like essential reading. In the introduction Carroll writes:

The approach to reading Wittgenstein on religion advanced in this book is a variation on the ethical-therapeutic interpretations developed by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Stephen Mulhall. 

Sounds good to me.

Rhees's builders

It's been a while since I read Rush Rhees's paper "Wittgenstein's Builders," which criticizes Wittgenstein's suggestion that a four-word language used by builders ("slab!", etc.) might be a complete language. But re-reading the first pages of the Investigations it struck me that Wittgenstein makes other, (seemingly) related, bizarre claims. Take the first paragraph of §19:

It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. -- Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering Yes and No -- and countless other things.— And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

It is easy to imagine countless forms of life? To imagine a life in which people only talk when giving orders and reports in battle? Do they fight all the time? Is that easy to imagine?

Why is Wittgenstein telling us that this is easy to do?

Surely the careful reader will remember §19 upon reaching §25, which tells us that:

Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.  

This is contrasted with the most primitive forms of language, which even animals might have. The implication seems to be that the builders are not (really, fully) human. So then how easy can it be to imagine their form of life?

Then of course there is the shopkeeper of §1. He comes to mind when reading §53, which reads in part: 

(We don't usually carry out the order “Bring me a red flower” by looking up the colour red in a colour chart and then bringing a flower of the colour that we find in the chart;...)

Presumably Wittgenstein is aware, then, that his shopkeeper is unusual. How unusual is he? As strange as the builders? Wittgenstein does say in §1 that "It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words," but could this be part of what we are asked in this paragraph to imagine? That is, it might not be a claim that Wittgenstein makes. Rather, as with the builders, it might be something that he asks or tells us to imagine, without claiming that the example is realistic. Apart from what he says in §19, that is. 

So back to §19 and what it says about the builders. Can we imagine the language and form of life of A and B? We can picture it. Wittgenstein describes their language, and we could make a cartoon, say, in which they build all day, eat in silence, and then go to sleep. In that sense we can imagine such a form of life. Does it seem oddly inhuman though? Yes it does. In that sense we cannot imagine human beings living like this for long, as a way of life. So can we really imagine such a life or not? Paraphrasing PI 47 we might say: That depends on what you understand by 'imagine.' And that, of course, is not an answer to, but a rejection of, the question. 

It also depends on what you count as a language, or as a form of life. And I don't think that's just a matter of defining form of life as a technical term. It depends on what we count as life or as living. 

In the section of Inheritance and Originality on the builders, Stephen Mulhall calls the words of the PI "treacherous from the very beginning" (p. 52). He notes that Baker and Hacker have pointed out problems with the content of the builders' language, such as its lack of syntax, which we might normally expect to be a feature of any language. And Rhees sees problems with the context of this 'language': it does not connect with other recognizably human concerns, such as most of the ones mentioned in §25. So is it or is it not really a language? It seems to me that we can say what we like, as long as we face the facts. But what that means is not really clear. Is it facing the facts to add all sorts of details to Wittgenstein's picture, providing a background or adding flesh to the skeleton he provides? Or is that a refusal to accept the facts as given, like wondering about irrelevant details of Hamlet's family tree as if they must exist? Is it realistic to make a cartoon more lifelike or, on the contrary, to accept it as a cartoon? It depends on our purpose, surely. The builders' language is introduced in connection with Augustine's account of how he learned language, but the builders' language, bound up with construction, is quite different from anything Augustine describes. 

On pp. 56-57 Mulhall goes through three Cavellian ways of taking the primitiveness of the builders: they are something like Neanderthals, primitive beings; they might be quite sophisticated but their language is primitive; or they are an allegory of modern life. I'm simplifying, but that's roughly it. If we choose one of these options, though, then we are settling a matter that is not, in itself, settled. We are imposing our own ideas. Mulhall writes that, "If we accept for a moment that it is an essential part of Wittgenstein's challenge to us as readers to fill in the unspecified wider context of the builders' lives, then  ..." but why should we accept this, even for a moment? Why not leave the unspecified unspecified? If we insist on specifying certain details, or insist that without them we are not really imagining a language (or not really imagining a language, or a form of life) then we haven't thereby discovered anything about anything but ourselves, about what we are prepared to accept as imagining or as language or as life. 

The contrast with animals is relevant here, too, I think. Do animal forms of communication count as language? That is up to us, at least in part. The essence of language is expressed by grammar, and we have a say in what that means. 

I think I'm largely, but perhaps not exactly, agreeing with Mulhall here. And there is more to read and think about on all this. But I'll leave it here for now.   

A bit of singing and dancing

I keep meaning to do some real work and then other things come along instead. Similarly with blogging. One of these days I'll have a go at proper philosophical blogging (if that's what you want, Matthew Pianalto, Reshef Agam-Segal, and Daniel Lindquist have been managing to do great stuff despite its being summer), but I haven't managed much of that lately. In the meantime, Rupert Read has some interesting reflections on sport that I'd like to try to respond to. He touches not only on sport but on politics and other things too.

On the commercial corruption of 'sport' he writes:

As our climate-damaged sport-saturated ‘summer’ continues, it’s worth taking a moment perhaps to reflect on the concept of ‘sport’, and what it means today.

Take recent Wimbledon tennis finalist Andy Murray, for instance. Murray said on Radio 4 in the run-up to that final that he only enjoys winning, not playing / taking part – he regards tennis purely as a job. If so, he is a tennis player for the age of faceless soulless capitalism: an obscenely-over-rewarded workman. 

There's a lot going on here: climate-change, 'sport', soulless capitalism, and obscene rewards, for instance. Let me say a few words (literally) about each of these, to remind myself where I stand, if nothing else, before moving on.

Climate change: this recent article is worth reading, though also depressing. My view is basically that we are doomed unless global or nearly global action is taken. That's not to say that no one should bother recycling or walking when they don't have to drive, say, but that kind of individual effort won't save us. Another aspect of my view that is worth mentioning here is that Rupert Read makes heroic efforts in this department and puts me to shame. By this I don't mean simply that I admire him for what he does. I mean literally that I feel shame when I do things like drive or run air-conditioning, and I consciously connect this shame with him. Rupert would walk or ride a bike, I tell myself. Rupert would put up with this heat, or use a fan, or something. I'm not him, but I do genuinely (an earlier draft of this sounded sarcastic--I hope that's no longer true) admire his work for the environment, and the integrity he shows in doing it.

'Sport': I'll get back to this.

Soulless capitalism: a bad thing, but the other kind of capitalism is something I rather like. I don't buy the idea that everything government-run is bound to be inefficient and bad. Whatever you might think of the United States' socialized military, it's surely better than Blackwater. But I'm not a socialist. I like small businesses, family-run farms, and the like. It's big business that doesn't seem so good. Especially any business deemed too big to fail and therefore given public money. If we need businesses that big, it seems to me, they should be publicly owned, so that we share the profits as well as the risk and the cost of keeping them going.

Obscene rewards: I'm all for progressive taxation, and against enormous inequality.

OK, where was I? Later in the same article Read says:

In another, earlier, interview Murray also claimed, ‘My body feels like a machine.’ These words will be of interest to a philosopher like Merleau-Ponty, or Zygmunt Bauman. They are a confession of a way of living the body and of experiencing oneself as an industrial object, and a commodity, which is critiqued beautifully also by a philosophical neurologist like Iain McGilchrist (see my piece at http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=3398). They reveal the ethos of an activity that goes beyond inspiring youngsters to work hard to achieve high aspirations. Rather it fills youngsters with the idea that it is OK and admirable to be alienated from your own body; that winning is all that matters; that joy is unimportant.

So now we have the commodification of the body as well. That's a bad thing. Whether that's really what's going on with tennis players like Murray (and I think Andre Agassi said that tennis was a joyless job to him too) is another matter. Some of the comments below Read's post address this question. Machinification is everywhere, though, including the slow death of the humanities and the growth of distance learning. As Read implies, this is linked with a kind of consequentialism without utilitarianism, without hedonism. Winning is all that matters, joy is unimportant. This is the attitude of soulless capitalism, and it's the attitude that Read seems to be primarily against.

This marks the difference between 'sport' and sport. As he writes here:

I have serious reservations about modern spectator ‘sport’. I think it isn’t really…sport any more. It is a kind of madly-over-rewarded professional body-machinisation and semi-prostitution.

And:

When referring to these professional capers, we should always put the scare-quotes in place… (As Confucius would have it: the most important task for a public intellectual is the rectification of names. The name of ‘sport’ has now been thoroughly turned on its head. We need to recover the old meaning (As in ‘What sport we had!’ Or ‘Now that was sporting!’).)

I'm not sure about the semi-prostitution idea (though women's beach volleyball is a possible exception), but the main idea, as I see it, is that professional sport has become joyless. It bears the hallmarks (excessive financial rewards, machinification of the people involved, exclusive focus on winning) of soulless capitalism, and involves precious little fun. This is, at least in general (and it is meant as a general point, after all), true.

Read also suggests that the Olympics causes people to "forget about solidarity with the Arab Awakening, to forget about the collapsing Euro, to forget about our day-by-day smashing of biodiversity and destruction of a liveable atmosphere." And that it increases nationalism. And that instead of watching sports people should be out playing them instead. All of which is questionable. It is possible to watch the Olympics and care about, or even do, other things as well. Nationalism, at least in the United States, is not likely to increase because of the Olympics. We're already pretty much at saturation point. And I would blame the commentators before I would blame the games themselves. I also don't like the idea that we should not watch but play. Why not do both? What if you can't play? Mark Edmundson said something similar about music, and my sense was that he just doesn't really like music. If you want to be in a band, good. But no one should feel that they have to be. And no one should stop listening to good music, or watching good sport, because of some participation ethic. If you want to join a team, fine. If you would rather go running on your own, also fine. If something else is your thing, fine too. We're not boy scouts. Part of the point of sport and art is to express yourself. The self part of that is important, and it requires freedom, including freedom not to join in.

What's good about both art and sport is the quasi-religious aspect (which brings with it an idolatrous aspect, of course: as I was sort of getting at here) and the aesthetics. Am I really going to try to talk about the aesthetics of art? I suppose not, but I will talk about the aesthetics of sport, or of sport as art. Or I'll let other people do so:

That's Stephen Mulhall, from Inheritance and Originality. Here's Geoff Dyer on the marathon in the 2004 Olympics:

Victory and triumph over adversity (as supremely achieved - twice - by Kelly Holmes) are uplifting, but defeat and failure can be utterly transfixing, too. [...]

When Elfenesh Alemu went past her, Radcliffe realised that not only would she not win gold but that she was out of the medals. [...] It was like watching someone having a complete crack-up before your eyes. As such it made superb television. (The grassy verge on which she ended up even lent a Zapruderish touch to the footage.) Athletes deny nine-tenths of themselves so that they can pack the remaining tenth with incredible intensity and purpose. While plenty of people succumb to the urge to give up (going to the gym, trying to be an artist), it goes pretty much unnoticed. But for Radcliffe this was both a public and complete ontological collapse. And it happened, let's not forget, on the very day that that icon of modern despair, Edvard Munch's The Scream was stolen. Who needs art when you've got sport?

Tears of one kind or another were everywhere in evidence at these games. Enough were shed on my sofa to leave me repeatedly and blurrily amazed by sport's capacity to reach depths of emotion that used to be regarded as the preserve of high art. [...] At a time when our responses to everything - especially so-called tragedy - are consistently being cheapened, coarsened and, preprogrammed, sport accesses some zone of shared feeling that remains mysterious in spite of the familiarity of the clichés by which it is routinely articulated. Wordsworth claimed to have thoughts that lay "too deep for tears" but the tears that left Matthew Pinsent a quaking hulk on the podium came from so far within they were practically chthonic.

[...] The majority of the occasions that left me blubbing involved some display of sportsmanship like this: when the decathletes, shattered by their exertions of the last 36 hours embraced each other; when the beaten Bernard Lagat shared El Guerrouj's joy at winning the 1500 metres that had eluded him for so long.

By contrast, the idea that winning is the only thing has become so entrenched in football as to render the sport abhorrent as often as it is thrilling (it was also one of the reasons why the Euros ended up being such a bore). 

Mulhall and Dyer alert us to the art that sport can be, even if we also recognize that the joyless and selfish obsession with one's own victory that Read decries does exist and is a blight.

But is it art? Dyer focuses on the elicitation of emotion, but Mulhall talks also of style, elegance, innovation, of a form of communication, and of seeing, and making visible, something that no one else sees. I think he's right, and that this is enough to make talk of art perfectly appropriate.

Does sport share other features with art? In August 1930 Wittgenstein wrote:

The work of art compels us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.[)]

But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is—as I believe—theway of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.  [copied gratefully from here]

Do Manchester United (when playing at their best) capture the world sub specie aeterni? Do Olympic athletes? They don't show us an object in the right perspective, because they aren't engaged in representational art. What they do is closer to music or to dance than still-life painting or photography. But there is a sort of ecstasy that comes from seeing incredible skill. Incredibility is the key, I think. When we ask "How did they do that?" we aren't looking for information, as a fellow athlete or coach might. We mean !, not ? And although this is a crude thing to say, great music does something like that too. You might not shout "Woah!" in the middle of a piece of music, but that's roughly what happens. There is a feeling almost of physical movement (not your toes tapping but something like floating or flying, a weightlessness inside that can come on quite suddenly), and a mental transportation. The idea that art presents the world timelessly comes from Schopenhauer, and  it was he also who said that the inner nature of the world, behind or beneath the phenomena we know as the world, is music. Phenomena are sensible expressions of this inaudible music in, I suppose, roughly the way that dance is a visible expression of music. The world as Schopenhauer sees it is a performance of music, something like a song or a dance. By instantiating a Platonic form each kind does its own dance: trees do the tree dance, bears do the bear dance, and so on. (Although really there is only one dance, so trees perform the tree part of the dance, bears the bear part, etc.). And sport is, or can be, something like this. Of course if Schopenhauer is right then everything is like this, but Wittgenstein's point is that it takes an artist to make it clear that any given thing is like this. A dance, not to the music of time, but to the music of no-time, the eternal music, the music of time standing still while Beckham bends it or Ronaldo corkscrews it or Kagawa sees and executes a pass that no one else could see was there to be made. At its best sport reminds us what we are, what we can be, and that what we are includes unimagined possibilities.

This is at odds with the soullessness of soulless capitalism. Good sport wakes us up, invigorates, makes us wonder. Yes we (merely) spectate, but that's what you do with art. And yes, even in the best of all possible worlds there will be more bad plays than good. Many more. But the experience needn't ever be soulless. It needn't be completely passive. We can respond emotionally to what we see.

The soulless capitalist model of sport is not like this. If the crowd does not cheer or sing loudly enough, music and even singing noises will be piped in. Fans must not get so excited that they stand up (Manchester United fans in particular get in trouble for this). Everything that can be sponsored will be sponsored. And, of course, winning is all that matters. There are exceptions to all these rules, but this is the pattern. Fans are consumers, there to be managed and milked of their money. Individuality is bad for business. You are supposed to buy and wear the team shirt, eat your prawn sandwich, and then go home. The same as everyone else. And like them you are supposed to focus on the lowest common denominator, the result.

All of that is bad. But the enemy isn't sport. Bill McKibben says in his article on global warming that "we have met the enemy and they is Shell." In football the enemy is the Glazer family, Sheikh Mansour, and Roman Abramovich. In general the enemy is big corporations and their power over ever more areas of our lives. Because of this power there is little anyone else can do except vote for whichever politicians seem most likely to restrain their power. We can also, though, battle the mindset that favors, and is therefore favored by, corporations: the desire to turn people into sheep or machines, something obedient and predictable; the value-system that puts success (understood in simple consequentialist terms) above everything else; and the blind faith that huge, private corporations are necessary and even good.

The love of sport allows people to see what damage is done by this kind of soulless capitalism. Anything that brings true joy is the enemy of soullessness. That might not be Andy Murray, but I wouldn't reject all professional tennis, or football, or the Olympics because of the worst aspects of contemporary sport. Fun and games are not yet incompatible.

Interview with Stephen Mulhall on Wittgenstein

Looking around for what other videos on Wittgenstein might be out there, I found this:

It's Stephen Mulhall speaking for twenty-five minutes about Wittgenstein's life and ideas. Not surprisingly, it's very good indeed. The interview is part of a video timeline project, which looks worth checking out.

Uncalm seas

Stephen Mulhall has a strong paper available online at the Nordic Wittgenstein Review. Calling it (merely) strong might make it sound weak, but I want to avoid calling it fine or wonderful, words I'm in danger of overusing. It's as strong as a large, bald man with an impressive moustache wearing a leopard skin. If I can work my questions about the paper into something coherent I might post that something as a comment on the journal's website. My questions all concern the last part of the paper, "The sea was dark green with shades of yellow, and not nearly as calm as before..." (Mulhall is quoting from a different translation of this story by the Grimm brothers).

To give some context, Mulhall means to defend Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein. This involves such a commitment to the realistic spirit (roughly speaking, a commitment to seeing things as they really are, without imposing any kind of preconceived ideas or framework for thinking on reality) that it is prepared to eschew the usual Wittgensteinian talk of language-games, grammar, forms of life, and so on. The realistic spirit wants the world as we find it, not as it allegedly must be. Mulhall argues also that it involves something like the conception of ethics that we find in Wittgenstein's early work. With that minimal introduction, here is the part of the paper that I want to try to think through (I hope it's all right for me to quote these paragraphs here.):

But is it really credible to regard the realistic spirit with which Wittgenstein works in the Investigations as essentially a further expression of such a transcendental conception of ethical value, as one way in which the orientation of the happy man towards the world as such might find expression (just as that of the unhappy man might find expression in resisting it)? The suggestion might seem less outrageous if we imagine reaching it in two steps. The first is to recall that part of what the realistic spirit – with its absolute or unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality – requires is a willingness to acknowledge such phenomena as great riddles and difficulties of reality, and so a willingness to suffer a kind of philosophical wound – to be shouldered out of our most familiar ways of making philosophical sense of our rich and varied ways of thinking and speaking. For doing so involves drawing on a capacity imaginatively to enter into these ways in which we might intelligibly refuse assignments of meaning or sense to our words, which means finding within ourselves the possibility of (as it were) becoming the person who finds these kinds of satisfaction in nonsense. But to find it possible to mean such refusals just is to discover that we are the kind of person who can find such satisfaction in nonsense; so realizing the realistic spirit in philosophy in these domains is only possible for those who can find in themselves the capacity to make sense of such phenomena as the transcendental conception of ethics that pervades the Tractatus.

Of course, even this initial, local connection between method and vision is contestable. For anyone incapable of making sense of such linguistic techniques will for that reason be incapable of seeing Diamond’s willingness to look with a clear eye even on the kinds of phenomena that manifest it as anything other than an incomprehensible attraction to mysticism and mystery-mongering. The very phrase “aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality” is after all, itself nonsense, being constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific, hence conditioned and relative; so if we can’t make any sense of these difficult realities of our life with words, then the philosophical practice of acknowledging them with a clear eye will inherit exactly the same riddling resistance to intelligibility that the phenomena themselves exemplify. Choosing to acknowledge rather than to deny such phenomena in philosophy is thus as capable of isolating us from one another, rendering us mutually incomprehensible, as are the phenomena themselves.

Let's start with the first of these paragraphs. I wonder whether it might help to go backwards through this, treating it as an exercise in formal logic, and mapping the argument out. It is a dense piece of reasoning. But I'll try to go through it forwards, starting with a simple summary and quotation of some key parts: One thing that the realistic spirit requires is a willingness to acknowledge phenomena of a certain kind. And this means or requires a willingness to suffer a kind of wound. The words "For doing so..." make me stop and think (doing what--recalling, requiring, acknowledging, being shouldered out, making philosophical sense, thinking, speaking?), but I take it that this refers to acknowledging the phenomena in question, and the "for" means to connect this acknowledgement with the willingness to suffer. The one involves the other, Mulhall is saying, because it "involves drawing on a capacity imaginatively to enter into [...] ways in which we might intelligibly refuse assignments of meaning or sense to our words." And this means "finding within ourselves the possibility of (as it were) becoming the person who finds these kinds of satisfaction in nonsense." Which in turn "just is to discover that we are the kind of person who can find such satisfaction in nonsense." And "so realizing the realistic spirit in philosophy in these domains is only possible for those who can find in themselves the capacity to make sense of such phenomena as the transcendental conception of ethics that pervades the Tractatus."

One thing I wonder about is whether a willingness to acknowledge certain kinds of phenomena should they arise involves drawing on an imaginative capacity. An absolute or unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality sounds, in itself, easy enough. As if you could just check the 'No' box on the form when it asks you whether you want to impose such conditions. That sounds too passive, though, and too formal. The realistic spirit is surely more active, or requires something more active, than that. At least realizing the realistic spirit will surely be active.

So what does it require us to do? Willingness to acknowledge phenomena is surely not the same thing as the acknowledgement of those phenomena. But if we don't acknowledge these phenomena, what does it mean to say that we are willing to do so? The claim seems a bit hollow. Mulhall ends his essay with the recognition that where one person sees "a matter of fathomless significance, another sees only banality." Let's say I belong in the second camp, seeing only banality. It might be the easiest thing in the world for me to say, quite sincerely, that I am willing to acknowledge phenomena of fathomless significance. I still don't see any. And this does not mean that I am not sincere after all, or that I am sincere but deluded. The other side of this coin is that I might be too willing to see matters of fathomless significance. Charges of "an incomprehensible attraction to mysticism and mystery-mongering" are not always false. One of the difficulties of reality, or one kind of difficulty, is the difficulty of knowing whether you are sane, or the difficulty of dealing with uncertainty about this. Am I experiencing a matter of great significance which others are too blind to see? Or am I crazy? Or not crazy but exaggerating or otherwise distorting the truth? How do I know that my spirit is realistic? And how do I know what the realistic spirit requires here and now? I think that the answer to these questions is that you really cannot know. At least not in any circumstances where it would be reasonable to have doubts, where it is reasonable to imagine someone having doubts.

Finding satisfaction in nonsense is a difficult notion too. I (think I) understand wanting to say something and having this something turn out to be nonsense. But can I then understand realizing that it is nonsense and being satisfied? Without, that is, indulging in complacent mysticism or something of the sort. Say I want to describe a voice as dark brown, or a theme in Brahms as Shakespearean. I do so, and then realize that what I have said makes no sense. But I'm satisfied. It's OK with me. -- I don't think this makes sense. I cannot simultaneously want to say something and see that something as nonsense (in any resolute sense of nonsense, anyway). Of course I can see that I have flaws, one of which might be a tendency to be satisfied with or by nonsense. But the (part of) me that judges myself flawed in this way is not the same (part of) me that is satisfied. UPDATE: After a little more thought I'm pretty sure that Mulhall is just talking about this realization that one is susceptible to this kind of flaw, and nothing more paradoxical than that. The successful reader of the Tractatus does throw the ladder away, after all, after having imagined that its sentences make sense. I don't think this would have to involve a difficulty of reality in Diamond's sense, but I suppose it might. So I have no objection here, just some temporary confusion, which has now passed.

The other thing that bothers me here is this sentence: "The very phrase “aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality” is after all, itself nonsense, being constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific, hence conditioned and relative; so if we can’t make any sense of these difficult realities of our life with words, then the philosophical practice of acknowledging them with a clear eye will inherit exactly the same riddling resistance to intelligibility that the phenomena themselves exemplify." Is "aspiring to an absolutely unconditional refusal to impose conditions on reality" really nonsense? Perhaps it is, but don't we have to do something like look at its use in order to decide the matter? (Or is that backsliding into the kind of unrealistic Wittgensteinianism (Mulhall's) Diamond wants to get away from?) If it is nonsense, can we tell this just by noting that it is constructed on the model of refusals that are context-specific? And is it so modeled?

"Absolutely unconditional refusal" sounds like a normal bit of English to me. "I absolutely, unconditionally refuse to let you in without a warrant." What's wrong with that? Nothing, but this is not what Mulhall is talking about. It's absolute refusal in the sense of not being context-specific that he has in mind. And, it seems worth adding, we are talking about imposing conditions not on any person but on reality. What can that mean? Well, it has to be taken as something like a metaphor. Does that make it nonsense? I wouldn't say so. But I agree with Mulhall that this kind of language (be it metaphor or nonsense) is capable of isolating us from one another, rendering us mutually incomprehensible.  I also agree with him that "the realistic spirit with which Wittgenstein works in the Investigations" is "one way in which the orientation of the happy man towards the world as such might find expression." So I don't think I have any serious disagreement with him ultimately. Perhaps all I have any difficulty with is how he gets from the beginning of these two paragraphs to their end. And that might not be worth commenting on.

Stephen Mulhall, part II

Over at Practice and History of Philosophy, j. is in the process of answering my question, Who is Stephen Mulhall? (My post is here, j.'s answer so far is here and here.) Mulhall provides a description of what he is doing at the end of his book Faith & Reason.

Here he writes:

And what of philosophy in all this? In what sense can this and the preceding chapter be thought of as philosophical investigations, as opposed to poor attempts at edification or the unwitting provision of ample grounds for taking offence? Is there really room here for an exercise of reason that is not an employment of it on one side or another of the existential choice with which Christianity faces us?

Only if the following distinction can be made and observed: the distinction between a description and a defence of (or an attack upon) a form of life. [...] [P]hilosophy can spell out the central features of the forms of life that face one another across the divide between religious and other modes of human existence [...] But it neither can, nor should, attempt to engage in those arguments with, let alone to make that choice for, it readers.

He is not saying that people should not engage in such arguments. What he is saying is that this should not be done in the name of philosophy, as if philosophy or logical argument could spare anyone the need to make existential choices. What he says here sounds right to me, but I wonder whether the distinction he identifies between description and defense (or attack) can be made and observed.

It is worth noting also that Faith & Reason is a relatively old book. It came out in 1994, and Mulhall has published much else since then. His Inheritance and Originality came out in 2001 and ends with a "Concluding Dogmatic Postscript." Presumably the Mulhall of 1994 would not have considered anything dogmatic as philosophy. Perhaps the 2001 Mulhall doesn't either, but I always wonder what exactly it is that he takes himself to be doing. And I think he does too. The last sentence of Inheritance and Originality (before the acknowledgements, bibliography, and index) asks: "But can philosophy acknowledge religion and still have faith in itself?" I don't think the answer is meant to be obvious.

Then in 2002 there appeared an interview with Mulhall in New British Philosophy. Here he describes "a sense that there's some kind of open border between philosophy and literature" as the direction he finds interesting in philosophy. (This is a thought that I am trying to have articulately.) He also says, "My concern was that it is very difficult to see how to go on with and from Wittgenstein without your own voice being completely submerged." Cavell provided a model of how to do this, but he doesn't want to be a sort of ersatz Cavell. He wants to be himself, to speak with his own voice. And, "The trouble with philosophy is that philosophers seem to have an almost inveterate tendency to forget that they're human beings too."

So Mulhall seems to have struggled with the questions of what philosophy (generally) ought to be, or how it ought to be done after Wittgenstein (and after Cavell), and of how he (in particular) ought to speak or write (or think?). This interests me because I have similar questions. But also because I often wonder to what extent he is speaking for himself. In 1994 he seemed to think it was possible to be neutral. Does he still think that? Does he ever still try merely to describe (in his book on private language, for instance)? And if not, then with what authority does he write? In short, I think what I'm trying to say is that his work raises the questions: 1. What is the relation between philosophy and literature?, and 2. What is the authority of literature (and of the kind of philosophy that exists along that open border)? Perhaps there is something wrong with that second question though. And that interests me too.

Philosophy & Animal Life IV

Four striking things that McDowell says:

1. Cavell "concludes that the idea of seeing something as something is not helpful here because if we frame Diamond's thinking in terms of aspect seeing, we do not give proper weight to the fact that for her other animals simply are our fellows, not things we can see as our fellows if we can achieve an aspect switch" (pp. 127-128).  But I suspect Diamond would accept the possibility that someone might fail to see an animal as a fellow being and then, perhaps quite suddenly, start to see it as one.  And that the same thing could happen with a human being.  Doesn't Scrooge come to see his employees differently, to see them as human beings?  The duck-rabbit might not be helpful, because it seems too much like a toy or game, but I think aspect seeing is relevant (and I think Cavell recognizes this).

2. If "one views animals as Diamond does, one would have to see sending them to be turned into food, however friendly one's previous relations with them were, as a betrayal" (pp. 130-131).  Maybe, but I wonder.  Stephen Mulhall talks about the way animals are treated in the little house on the prairie stories.  Must such farmers be regarded as betraying their animals if they take them to be slaughtered, or slaughter them themselves?

3. Costello's "response is over the top" (p. 134), and "does not give such questions [as in what sense factory farming is like the Holocaust] the care they need" (p. 131).  This sounds a bit like saying that she needs to calm down.  Which is understandable, but jars a little nevertheless.

4. A different poem would have been harder for Ted Hughes to write (p. 132).  Would it?  How easy or hard was the first one to write?

The argument from tigers

[UPDATE: This isn't a defense of theism or religion. If that's what you're looking for, you've got the wrong argument from tigers. Feel free to look around while you're here though. For more on my views on religion, click on the "religion" label to the right. In brief, I'm an atheist but not an evangelical one.

UPDATE: This isn't an argument for vegetarianism either. Roughly speaking, it's an argument for tigers. And it's an argument from tigers. Basically: tigers, therefore tigers, or: tigers are awesome, therefore it is good that there should be tigers. This probably sounds silly, but it's a response to an argument to the effect that it might be good if tigers did not exist. My response is that this is absurd, and evidently so to anyone with a proper understanding of what tigers are. For more, read on below.]

Jeff McMahan has an article in which he argues "that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species." Spiros calls it "terrific and provocative." It is not terrific, and what it provokes in me is a kind of grinding despair. It would be all too easy to have an animated, "Ah, but that's precisely where you're wrong!" kind of discussion of this piece. It would be impossible to have what I would consider a serious discussion of it, except as pathological. Stephen Mulhall might offer a very insightful analysis of just what is wrong with this kind of thinking (in fact I think he has already addressed McMahan's work in The Wounded Animal), but I don't see how it could be taken seriously as a piece of thinking. This (i.e. what I have just written) is not an argument, of course, but I'm not sure how to argue with something like this.

Early analytic philosophy was connected with modernism. I wonder whether it has degenerated into a form of post-modernism, something essentially playful (see the jokey end of McMahan's essay: "I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment"), essentially unserious.

Search and destroy

One difference between Wittgenstein and Mulhall is that Wittgenstein sometimes feared that all he was doing was destroying things, albeit houses of cards. Mulhall could surely never have that fear. Reading Russell Goodman's Wittgenstein and William James I was struck by this quotation from Wittgenstein on p. 63: "How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James' psychology. Psychology, he says, is a science, but he discusses almost no scientific questions."

The work of Wittgensteinian philosophy, it seems to me, is essentially critical, even if also therapeutic. Goodman's careful reading of Wittgenstein and James shows how their work relates--where it differs, and how, and where it treads the same path. Wittgenstein clearly respected James, but wanted to point out where he went wrong (e.g. in thinking that he was doing science when he wasn't, or in thinking that something must be so when it need not be). This kind of work requires careful reading, but Wittgenstein focuses more on the attempted cure than on documenting the symptoms and defending his diagnosis. Perhaps because he is demonstrating his methods, or perhaps because he felt no need to defend himself.

In this sense some of Peter Hacker's work seems more Wittgensteinian than Mulhall's, at least in terms of what Hacker is trying to do (I haven't read this book, so can't say whether he succeeds). That's not to say that Mulhall is wrong to do what he does, but it is more positive than what Wittgenstein apparently had in mind. This still leaves me with the question of what to make of Wittgenstein's reading (if that's what it is) of Augustine, but I think that will require further investigation of the Investigations. There's also the question of what philosophers should do, but Goodman, Hacker, and Mulhall all provide reasonable models. There's no need for everyone to do the same thing.

The postmodern threat

Jon Cogburn links to some discussion of Derrida. Among these is this from k-punk (who has some interesting thoughts on Morrissey, about whom more below, here). Cogburn seems to agree with k-punk's claims that Derrida always treats everything he writes about as if it were a text (while refusing to ignore the form in which it is "written") and that deconstruction is a kind of pathology that refuses to say Yes or No except, as it were, accidentally.

I don't see anything wrong with treating things as texts, as long as their form is taken into account (including whether they take the form of a text or not). Of course, doing so might be unproductive sometimes, but every attempt to do something risks failure.

It's the second claim that interests me. Or rather, the two claims taken together seem close to getting at some of the worry I have about philosophy done as Stephen Mulhall might be interpreted as doing it. There is a lot to be said for not trying to say anything, it seems to me, especially about the ultimate nature of reality. But then why write books? And, perhaps more to the point, why read books or papers by someone who is trying not to say anything? The complaint about Derrida, I take it, is that there really is no point at all in reading his work, or his later work at any rate, precisely for this reason.

If this is true of Derrida it is not true of Mulhall. At the very least, his work sheds light on the meaning and value of other people's work. But I still wonder whether that's all it does, or whether something of Mulhall himself is there too. And if it is, what exactly is it? And is it good, bad, or indifferent? I have wondered, for instance, whether his work is a kind of Christian propaganda. Perhaps some is. But is all of it? And is an element of propaganda inevitable in work like his (i.e, roughly, reading)? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I once wanted to write a paper about Rorty on feminism called "Sister I'm a Strong Poet," but all I had was a title. In "Sister I'm a Poet" Morrissey sings that he has "no reason to talk about the books I read, but still I do" and that's because he's a poet, i.e. (in part) a poseur. Rorty always struck me (perhaps I was very wrong about this) as having a hard time explaining why he was talking about the books he read. Somehow the point, as I understood it, was meant to be pragmatic and political, but I don't see philosophy changing the world. Perhaps his goal was to divert the philosophically-minded away from useless philosophy (which is not all philosophy) and toward useful political action. Certainly he preferred feminists who wanted action to those who seemed to want only more deconstruction. So I'm not saying that he was a poseur. But there is a danger of mere posing or what k-punk calls "grey vampirism" in talking about books.

I think I'm rambling/erring now (but part of the point of this blog is for me to think out loud, so caveat lector), but one last point. Larkin once said that there are two types of poetry: the kind that tries to say something new and the kind that tries to find a new way to say something old. He preferred the latter type. So do I. This is why I don't much like the idea of trying to say something, because the something in question is meant to be something both new and important. I don't see anything really new in ethics being good. And I don't see anything really new in metaphysics being important. But that's begging the question I suppose.

Wittgenstein's shopkeeper

I have been trying to read what Wittgenstein writes about Augustine and the shopkeeper and the rest as if for the first time, but also slowly and carefully. As well as the danger of failing to do this, of not being careful enough, there is also the danger of going too slowly, trying too hard to be careful, and seeing things or imagining problems that are not really there. But Wittgenstein advised philosophers to take their time, so I think that slowly is the right way to read him. (This does not guarantee success, of course.)

Another danger is that of being influenced by others one has read, including Wittgenstein himself. If we have already been convinced that meaning and use are closely related, perhaps even the same thing, and that explanations do indeed come to an end somewhere, then we might be too unquestioning of the shopkeeper example. If we have read Stephen Mulhall on this example (in Inheritance and Originality or Philosophical Myths of the Fall--the relevant pages can be read online using either Google Books or amazon's "look inside" feature (search for "shopkeeper)) then we might be too quick to regard the shopkeeper as mechanical or zombie-like. Perhaps I have made that mistake.

So let me try to treat the example as realistic. People do use written notes in shopping sometimes. Online shoppers send written lists to shops, in places where goods are hard to find one might hand one's shopping list to the shopkeeper, foreigners might write down what they want, and so on. We can imagine the apples being kept in a drawer of some kind of refrigerator, with different draws for different fruits. People do count out loud, or under their breath. Looking up "red" on a chart sounds a bit odd, but wouldn't be if there were many similar colours (think of all the redlike paint shades you can buy). But we do, I think, have to imagine quite a bit to make the story credible as a scene from anyone's actual life. Wittgenstein has not done anything like this with the quotation from Augustine. Should he have, or is it OK, when doing philosophy at least, to ignore or forget about context?

This remains to be seen as far as the Philosophical Investigations goes. (Or so it seems to me.)