Three basic principles underlie the post-modernistic critique of literary interpretation (and, by extension, other social sciences).

First Principle

The first is that one should have no compunctions about taking a philosophical approach.  There is no point simply in juxtaposing one text against another.  This does not however invalidate the need for, or the utility of, an attempt at deep analysis beyond the text’s workable surface.  “[T]he most powerful and apposite readings of literary works may be those that treat them as philosophical gestures by teasing out the implications of their dealings with the philosophical oppositions that support them” (Culler, 1982, p. 149).

Second Principle

The second is that the structuralist tradition gives short shrift to other alternative accounts, which simply are different, or potentially even more explanatory.  An unequivocal interpretation of a text is a “privileged reading” that simply “suits our purposes” whereas “to be authentic in (our) postmodern condition” is “to admit the indistinguishable fictionality of all interpretive models” (Waugh, 2001, p. 304).

Paul Ricoeur (1970) originated this critique of structural discourse.  Any attempt to discern the meaning of a text hypothesizes a gap between its “real” meaning and its “apparent” meaning.  Consequently one believes the text “presents us with a challenge to believe that [its] true meaning … emerges only through interpretation” (Stewart, 1989, p. 296).  We become “suspicious” of the text.  What is required in order to alleviate this “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a radical critique of the very possibility of understanding and interpreting the text, to begin with (Gadamer, 1984, p. 73).

Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Heidegger all engaged in this style of analysis.  It leads, however, to another problem, which is that each of them perpetuated singular world-views, inconsistent with the others.  This argument now primarily is associated with Jacques Derrida (1967) and deconstructionism.  For example, Homer schematized persons into “heroes” and everybody else.  Dante’s paradigm was sinners versus saints.  Western philosophy is based on the concept that individuals are “rational,” which entails its opposite; and the Judeo-Christian tradition’s views of all of us as creatures of God.  “All these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle” (Waugh, 2001, p. 354).  None is transferable or for that matter even intelligible to any of the others.  Rather than “adding up” to a composite whole, they “cancel each other out.”  Derrida characterizes this as a “demand for narrative.”  However, “No one inflection enjoys any absolute privilege, no meaning can be fixed or decided upon.  No border is guaranteed, inside or out,” (1979, p. 87, p. 78). (1)

Derrida’s theme has been echoed in the works of philosophers in the British-American academic community such as Richard Rorty (1981).  Says Rorty, both contemporary analytic (e.g., Wittgenstein) and continental philosophy (e.g., Heidegger) offer “parallel deconstructions of philosophy’s traditional claim to privilege, to be the discipline that adjudicates the claims to knowledge advanced by the others.”  There is “no such foundation to knowledge.  Each discipline offers its own way of knowing, and philosophy should not place itself in a position of privilege vis-à-vis these ways of knowing” (Dasenbrock, 1989, p. 9).

In the social sciences, Max Weber averred that nature is blank – a tabula rosa, with universal and unconditionally valid laws. (2)  We then in turn impose culture onto it and culture recursively makes us the types of beings we are.  To continue with the above example, there really were heroes for Homer and there really were sinners for Dante.  The Greeks had heroes (instead of saints) with their respective attributes because that’s what challenged them as they existed in their spatio-temporal environment.  Someone like Odysseus is both a cultural precipitate and a cultural catalyst.  Homer’s template has no inherent or atemporal meaning.  It pertained, to the extent it did, only to the culture he described.  Different cultural perspectives best are regarded as typological categorizations or ways of parsing nature.

As expressed by the Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus:

The Greeks … lived in a moral space that gave direction and meaning to their lives.  In the same way, the Medieval cathedral made it possible to be sinner or a saint and showed Christians the dimensions of salvation and damnation.  In either case, one knew where one stood and what one had to do. … For the Greeks, what showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians, saints and sinners, rewards and temptations.  There could not have been saints in Ancient Greece.  At best there could only have been weak people who let everybody walk all over them.  Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages.  Such people would have been regarded as pagans – prideful sinners who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God.

(Dreyfus, 2008).

Structuralist interpretations, on the other hand, strive to an inherent meaning from the text.  The resulting synchronic paradigm comes at the expense of any plurality of interpretations.  There always is something contradictory about mapping the open and unfolding processes of narrative on to static or circulating structures.  Structuralist analysis of narrative are “like trying to account for a game of solitaire by demonstrating that the pack was organized into four suits of thirteen different values”  (Connor, 2004, p. 64).  Most structuralists prefer their own interpretations, but even as they do, their bias must be based on the prospect that many other interpretations are possible – a possibility they dismiss.

Third Principle

A third problem is that of the author’s “intent,” to the extent it is possible even to hypothesize such a state of mind.  Most structuralist readings depend on extra-textual evidence and biographical facts about the author’s life.  They frequently however do not support the proffered interpretation, or beleaguers it even further because they are inconsistent with the text itself.  Under Derrida’s view the author cannot control the meaning of the text, since it functions autonomously from authorial intention.  A text can have multiple meanings, one of which might be intended, but none of which uniquely are compelled.

Dreyfus’ colleague at Berkeley, John Searle, addressed this issue in the context of his theory of intention.  In his influential debate with Derrida, Searle (1994) says there are two ways to interpret a text: one based on “literal sentence meaning” and another based on “speaker meaning.”  Under the former, “the meaning of the text consists in the meanings of the words and sentences of which it consists.”  The latter is “what the writer intends to mean” (within the confines of the language and background assumptions of which the text is a narrative).  In this second sense one must “insist on understanding the author’s intentions in understanding the text” (p. 652).

Searle invites us to consider a hypothetical case where one comes across a series of marks on a beach somehow comprising the words to a verse of Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”  “[T]hese marks certainly look as if they constituted a sentence composed of English words,” but it isn’t necessary for them to have been produced intentionally (p. 649), unless they were.  “[D]ifferent tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions” (p. 658), some of which might be opaque (as with this particular example).  These different approaches are not necessarily incompatible.  They are not “competing answers to the same question, but noncompeting answers to quite different questions” (p. 655).

Searle can be read as supporting a structuralist program.  If the meaning of a text can be derived from its words and sentences then it may cohere into a single, intra-textual perspective (subject to Derrida’s critique).  One also can appeal to the author’s overt statements and background for evidence as to what he or she meant.  Even on this second definition, though, most structuralist readings fall short simply because the lives of authors have numerous internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

An Example – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

To illustrate these principles further I will consider Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  One way to read Moby Dick is as a critique of monotheism or onto-theology (that is, the idea that the being of specific entities can be explained in terms of other specific entities, such as a god).  “Theology” (θεολογία) is discourse about god or gods – religion, conventionally understood.  Onto-theology defines a god as the originator of being.  In the Judeo-Christian Tradition the God of Abraham and Moses produced or caused everything that is.  Taking a post-modernist view, however, referring to God simply is “telling a story” – tracing one form of entity (us) back to its origin with some other entity (God).

From the post-modern standpoint this conceptual misunderstanding has pervasively infiltrated the Judeo-Christian literary and narrative tradition and its metaphysics (Heidegger, 1955).  Classically, metaphysics (also a Greek word) is the study of “being as such,” the “first causes of things” or “things that do not change” (Ingwagen, 2007).  It “establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is” (Thomson, 2000, p. 297).  Each culture has its own metaphysics.  By “codifying and disseminating an understanding of what entities are, metaphysics provides each historical ‘epoch’ of intelligibility with its ontological bedrock.  And by furnishing an account of the ultimate source from which entities issue, metaphysics supplies intelligibility with a kind of foundational justification that … Heidegger characterizes as ‘theological.’”  Theology “reflects a series of historical transformations in our metaphysical understanding of entities are” (Thomson, 2005, p. 8).

The development and progression of Western metaphysics (since the ancient Greeks and the archaic Israelites) has resulted in a proliferation of distinctions such as “reality versus appearance” and “the rational versus the irrational,” all of which Heidegger rejects.  It is a short step from Heidegger’s definition of onto-theology to include monotheism in the sense of Abrahamic religions (primarily Judaism and Christianity, but also – never mentioned by Heidegger – Islam) (Westphal, 2001, p. 9 – 16; Crowe, 2007, p. 187). (3)

Under this polytheistic interpretation, Melville is against onto-theology.  The primary evidence of this tendency is Ahab’s folly of attributing cognition to an insensate beast.  To set forth several more: there is no single “right” perspective to describe the whale – its image can’t be depicted while it is in its natural habitat (the ocean) and it loses its shape on land (Chapter 55, Chapter 56).  Science doesn’t understand it and is unable to explain its migratory patterns, social behavior or even physiology (Chapter 79).  It moves its tail unpredictably in myriad different directions (Chapter 86).  It is covered with hieroglyphic scars (so for that matter is Queequeg).  It is white – the absence of color (Chapter 42).  Its spout can’t be distinguished against the backdrop of sea and sky (Chapter 85).  The sound it makes when spouting is a kind of white noise.  The whale skeleton of the Bower in the Arsacides (Chapter 102) is both a cathedral and a prison.  The trees surrounding it rustle like a weaver’s loom, the sound of which also is white noise.  We are immersed in it and deafened by it as it obscures the meaning of individual discourse, just like we are blinded by the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42).

Contrasted with the whale’s relentless monochromaticity are various other phenomena suggesting the plentitude of nature.  To cite several examples: Pip hopefully spots a swarm of “multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.  He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (Chapter 93).  When Ahab nails a doubloon to the mast (Chapter 99), each of the sailors has a different perception of its nature as a talisman.  Even the whale’s spout acts as a prism, breaking white light into the colors of the spectrum.  The colors of this rainbow invite a plethora of different explanations.  The Bower of the Arsacides is a colorful carpet, woven by God.  A “weaver God” who “reveals the rainbow” facilitates this polyglot understanding.  By focusing intently on one objective – Moby Dick – Ahab loses visibility of everything else.  The whale is white only for those who want for it to have a settled meaning, which it doesn’t have.  These reference points are evidence of Melville’s endorsement of an essentially polytheistic perspective. (4)

We know as a matter of his biography however that Melville was “nurtured in orthodox Calvinism by his Dutch Reformed mother and minister; yet by the time he wrote Moby Dick, he had not only lived among cannibals and whalemen but had ‘swam through libraries’” (McIntosh, 1986, p. 23).  His interest was not so much to “attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas,” such as polytheism.  Rather, “his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life” (Herbert, 1986, p. 113). (5)  His “revolutionary impact upon the novel form does not derive from Christianity’s absence – a formal experimentalism released from the grip of conventions that have their roots in a defeated Protestant orthodoxy – but precisely from its continued presence” (Franchot, 1998, p. 157) (emphasis added).

Such a program hardly can be interpreted as anti-onto-theological.  “Melville’s quarrel with authority was a complex affair, and to strip his profoundly symbolic writings down to theological allegories … is reductive” (Bezanson, 1953, p. 268).  He rejects the “simplifications, reductions and isolations” of dualisms such as monotheism versus polytheism.  In its place he substitutes a “language of wonder” that preserves a “fascination with the particulars of the natural world” while simultaneously embracing and critiquing our assumptions about it (Luck, 2007, p. 5).  This enables us to see outside of our “traditional ways of thinking about religion and spirituality” (Coffler, 2006, p. 112).  In addition to encountering the “realm of the transcendent,” Melville also wanted to “dramatize [both the] parallel failures of human striving (Ahab) and knowing (Ishamel)” (Buell, 1986, p. 61) (emphasis added).

The ideal culture Melville envisions is one that permits these different perspectives to cohabitate, or in which they become entirely irrelevant.  Melville is not an “individualist” or “personality driven.”  Nor is he some kind of a latter-day ecologist, concerned only with man’s depredations against nature. (6)  He is far more concerned with achieving a balance between purposeful human action and the world that constrains it – including not only nature, but also human culture, history and conventions.

Culture is produced by human social interactions such as the squeezing of the hands (Chapter 94).  On such occasions we attune ourselves to social practices and become sensitized to the corresponding intuitions they evoke.  They are created, manifest themselves, and we are aware of them (to the extent we are) only within the space of this “clearing.”  They are a precipitate of dwelling, standing against the homelessness of wandering and an individualistic stance towards the world. (7)

Although not referring to Melville, two modern social theorists have expressed this idea with particular clarity: Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor.  In his essay “Civil Religion in America” (1967, p. 175), Bellah elaborated on Rousseau’s definition of “civil religion,” redefining it as “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity.”  It is “neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.”

According to Taylor (1989, p. 512), “We are now in an age in which a publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings is an impossibility.” (8)  As a result, we have “tended to displace in importance the sense of belonging to large scale collective agencies” (Taylor, 2007, p. 484).  This is contrary to our nature, because “to make the demand for meaning is not an optional stance.  It is central to our humanity” (p. 584), and cultural institutions are an “indispensable matrix of civilizational order” (p. 491).  Any contemporary definition of self “requires answers totally dependent on cultural or moral contexts, frameworks, or orientation – human categories of personal and social action, of value” (Tauber, 2006).  This is appropriate because (man) is “a self-interpreting animal.  He is necessarily so, for there is no such thing as the structure of meanings for him independently of his interpretation of them; one is woven into the other” (Taylor, 1987, p. 46). (9)

The outcomes envisioned by Bellah and Taylor do not imply an anti-onto-theological critique.  They do not iterate a rigid monotheism or an anti-onto-theological opposition to it.  As if anticipating Bellah and Taylor, Melville does not fault monotheism per se.  All religions “employ a controlling hierarchy; with narrow doctrines that restrain and control people’s choices and lives.”  But Moby Dick should not be read as depicting a “battle between good and evil with Ahab as the human hero trying to destroy the symbol of evil in the whale.”  Ahab may be a “madman who is convinced that he has the right and the power to pursue his personal goal as symbolized in Moby Dick, a mere creature in nature that has little or no interest in humans.”  But this isn’t Melville’s point.  What is wrong is any form of religion that structures the world “in such ways as to be available to empower an Ahab, who believes that he has the knowledge of good and evil and may act for the rest of his society, nation, or the world” (Elliott, 2005, pp. 190 – 191).  In juxtaposing Ahab against Moby Dick, Melville “forces the reader to contemplate the Absolute suddenly placed in what appears to be the ordinary contingencies of life, and then to consider the consequences” (Obenzinger, 2006, p. 181).  All of which illustrates Melville’s conception of a dynamic clearing situated beyond the categories of faith. (10)

Melville also suggests a resolution of the apparent impasse between monotheism (as embedded in the Judeo-Christian Tradition) and the more “authentic” understanding of being.  In this respect, while it is (trivially) true that “no single artist … can ever represent an entire culture,” there is a profound sense in which Melville is “truly representative of the kind of humanity that gives meaning to culture (Bryant, p. 4).  Moby Dick “conceives one last and greatest quest for a whole vision of a whole world” (Grenberg, 1989, p. 93).

Endnotes

(1) In fairness to Heidegger some commentators disagree with Derrida that Heidegger should be lumped into the same category as Marx and Freud.  Heidegger does more than simply “attempt to relinquish philosophical ties to the past.”  He calls for a “fundamental reinterpretation of them” thereby allowing for “reinterpretation at a revivified ontological level constantly in view of the question of being” (Mei, 2007).  Dreyfus (1991, p. 36) recognizes this dynamic in the structure of Being and Time (MacAvoy, 2001, p. 463; Russell, 2008, p. 97).

(2) Seen in this light a better interpretation of the whiteness of the whale (Chapter 42) is not the absence of color or the embodiment of malevolence.  Our inability to classify it is symptomatic of our own ontological confusion (Werge, 1969, p. 96).  We are confused because of the ambiguity of the interface between man and nature.  “Melville’s careful disorderly reading of antiquity’s inscription of the whale attests to myth’s ambiguities.  His use of the whale in classical myths confirms the persistent permeability of myth’s borders and Melville’s celebration of that permeability.  The mythical whale-man and the recorder of tales remind us that myth grants us complexity and, in its variations, compounds the complexity of narrative’s desire.  The cumulated variations, the diversity of competing accounts of any myth, preserve and safeguard contradictions.  For Melville, myth-maker, selective reader, and purposeful natural historian, these variations extend a chase on ancient waters beyond a three-day pursuit of Moby Dick toward the ever-receding horizon and the morphing shape of the whale” (Djelal, 2006, p. 53).

(3) It would have been truer to the phenomena Heidegger described if he had not disapproved of monotheism per se.  He should be more interested in opposing the initial juxtaposition of experience into categories such as monotheism versus polytheism, to begin with.

(4) Although he does not mention him, Dreyfus’ account is a more sophisticated version of (and may have been inspired by) Thompson (1952).

(5) In this respect Melville may come close to realizing Derrida’s objective of “going beyond” philosophical interpretation.  Whenever one does so, one establishes a dichotomy, if only to distinguish between one’s own perspective and other less-preferable ones, and to explain why yours is better.  Derrida wanted to establish a vocabulary that is “intrinsically and self-evidently final, not merely the most comprehensive and fruitful vocabulary we have come up with so far.”

In doing so, of course, Derrida himself offered a theory.  Setting this criticism aside as more-or-less trivial (which it is), the move one has to make to get behind the bivalency of interpretation – to  “write about philosophy unphilosophically, get at it from the outside, be a postphilosophical thinker” – is far from clear.  It can’t be “pretending to say the same old thing while subversively putting a new spin on the old words.”

Derrida’s advice is to use “noninferential associations” (such as those suggested by literature) instead of “inferential connections” (such as those demanded by formal reasoning), a process he calls différance, which somehow avoids inter-explicable oppositional concepts.  It is not at all clear it is possible to make such a maneuver to effect such an outcome.  To the extent it is, Melville is within shouting distance of it, because he is not juxtaposing monotheism with polytheism.  Melville’s “quarrel” is not so much with God as with the conceptions of God in the two religious traditions (Herbert, 1977; Sherrill, 1978, p. 325).  Melville can be seen as creating a new discourse that attempts to overreach these distinctions.  Quotes are from Rorty, 1984, p. 5, p. 10, p. 13.

(6) “The interfusion of self and non-self, of metaphysics and earthly domains, resists eighteenth-century rationalism and positivism, which required that nature be objectified and placed at a distance so that it could by systematically studied. … The comprehension of nature as a mechanical system – although at first buttressing eighteenth-century deistic theology – ultimately removed God from the world” (Harvey, 2006, p. 72).

(7) This is not some kind of private mental universe.  Melville “discovered that the universe is an infinite sum of concepts, a universal conceptual brotherhood.”  He realized “that the actual and anonymous universe remains shielded and impervious to man exactly because this opaque net of concepts or masks, like an impenetrable wall, intervenes. … In its anguished effort to perceive the world, [our mind] constantly creates more and more names, weaving thus more and more ‘eyelets’ into that net, and making, thus, its prison even more stifling. … Every new concept the mind invents in order to create itself or to define its identity is also a new disguise of itself, a replacement or substitution of its own self, a new mask” (Christodoulou, 2001, p. 162).

(8) Taylor specifically invokes Odysseus: his homecoming “from the realm of the monstrous, the threatening, of the limit situation, to the joys of ordinary life with its rhythmed flow of time” is “one of the constitutive experiences of modernity” (p. 627).

(9) Dostoyevsky actually accomplished this synthesis in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).  “His religion is Orthodoxy because it is the religion of the Russian people” (Mirsky, 1949, p. 283) (emphasis in original).

(10) Heidegger’s concept of “clearing” also is a better way to understand the Bower of the Arsacides.  Its weaver god is does not suggest polytheism.  It is the integration of nature and human purpose.  Penelope also weaves the shroud of Laertes; her name incorporates the Greek word for “web” or “wool” (πήνη).  She cunningly unravels it each night to avoid remarriage to one of the suitors, just as she interprets the plot of Odysseus’ return.  Weaving is her counterpart to Odysseus’ wandering (though she is more successful in controlling the course of events) (Felson-Rubin, 1996, p. 166).

References

Bellah, R. (1967).  Civil Religion in America.  Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96(1), 1 – 21.  Reprinted in (1970), Beyond Belief (pp. 168 – 189).  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Bezanson, W. (1953).  Review of Thompson (1952), Melville’s Quarrel with God.  Modern Language Notes, 68(4), 266 – 268.

Bryant, J. (1997).  The Persistence of Melville: Representative Writer for a Multicultural Age. In Bryant, J. (1997).  Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays (pp. 3 – 30).  Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Buell, L. (1986).  Moby Dick as Sacred Text.  In Brodhead, R. (Ed.), New Essays on Moby Dick (pp. 53 – 72).  New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Christodoulou, A. (2001).  The “Tragicalness of Human Thought” – an Introduction to Melville’s Theory of Knowledge.  In Marovitz, S. & Christodoulou, A. (Eds.), Melville “Among the Nations” (pp. 159 – 174).  Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Coffler, G. (2006).  Melville’s Allusions to Religion.  Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 8(1), 107 – 119.

Connor, S. (2004).  Postmodernism and Literature.  In Connor, S. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (pp. 62 – 81).  Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Crowe, D. (2007).  On the Track of the Fugitive Gods: Heidegger, Luther, Hölderlin.  The Journal of Religion, 87, 665 – 675.

Culler, J.  (1982).  On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Dante.  Divine Comedy.

Dasenbrock, R. (1989).  Redrawing the Lines – An Introduction.  In Dasenbrock, R. (Ed.), Redrawing the Lines – Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (pp. 3 – 26).  Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1967).  Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.  In Writing and Difference (pp. 351 – 370).  London, England: Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1979).  Living On.  In Deconstruction and Criticism (pp. 75 – 176).  New York, NY: Continuum.

Djelal, J. (2006).  The Shape of the Whale: Flukes and Other Tales.  Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 7(2), 47 – 53.

Dostoyevsky, F. (1880).  The Brothers Karamazov.

Dreyfus, H. (1991).  Being-in-the-World.  Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2008).  Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics.  Retrieved on October 15, 2008 from U.C. Berkeley Web site.

Elliott, E. (2005).  Wandering To-and-Fro – Melville and Religion.  In Gunn, G. (Ed.), A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (pp. 167 – 205).  Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Felson-Rubin, N. (1996).  Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.  In Schein, S. (Ed.), Reading the Odyssey – Selected Interpretive Essays (pp. 163 – 184).  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Franchot, J. (1998).  Melville’s Traveling God.  In Levine, R. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (pp. 157 – 185).  New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Gadamer, H. (1984).  The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.  Man and World, 17, 313 – 323. Reprinted in Shapiro, G. & Sica, A. (Eds.), Hermeneutics – Questions and Prospects (pp. 54 – 65).  Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Grenberg, B. (1989).  Some Other World to Find – Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman Melville. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Harvey, B. (2006).  Science and the Earth.  In Kelley, W. (Ed.), A Companion to Herman Melville (pp. 71 – 82).  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Heidegger, M. (1927).  Macquarrie, J. & Robinson E. (1962) (Trs.).  Being and Time.  New York, NY: Harper One.

Heidegger, M. (1955).  The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics.  In Stambaugh, J. (1969) (Tr.), Identity and Difference (pp. 42 – 74).  New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Herbert, T. (1977).  Moby Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled.  Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Herbert, T. (1986).  Calvinist Earthquake: Moby Dick and Religious Tradition.  In Brodhead, R. (Ed.), New Essays on Moby Dick (pp. 109 – 140).  New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Homer.  Odyssey.

Inwagen, P. (2007).  Metaphysics.  Retrieved on October 15, 2008, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Luck, C.  (2007).  The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby Dick, and the Marvelous.  Leviathan – A Journal of Melville Studies, 9(1), 3 – 23.

MacAvoy, L. (2001).  Overturning Cartesianism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Rethinking Dreyfus on Heidegger.  Inquiry, 44, 455 – 480.

McIntosh, J. (1986).  The Mariner’s Multiple Quest.  In Brodhead, R. (Ed.), New Essays on Moby Dick (pp. 23 – 52).  New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Mei, T. (2007).  Heidegger and the Appropriation of Metaphysics.  Heythrop Journal.  Retrieved October 15, 2008, from Wiley Interscience database.

Melville, H. (1851).  Moby Dick.

Mirsky, D. (1949).  Whitfield, F. (Ed.).  A History of Russian Literature From Its Beginnings to 1900.  New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Obenzinger, H. (2007).  Wicked Books: Melville and Religion.  In Kelley, W. (2007) (Ed.), A Companion to Herman Melville (pp. 181 – 196).  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Ricoeur, P. (1970).  Savage, D. (Tr.).  Freud and Philosophy.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rorty, R. (1981).  Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, R. (1984).  Deconstruction and Circumvention.  Critical Inquiry, 11, 1 – 23.  Reprinted in (1991) Essays on Heidegger and Others.  Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, M. (2008).  Is There a Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Being and Time?  Inquiry, 51(1), 97 – 118.

Searle, J. (1994).  Literary Theory and Its Discontents.  New Literary History, 25, 637 – 667.

Sherrill, R.  (1978).  Review of Herbert (1977), Moby Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled, The Journal of Religion, 58(3), 324 – 325.

Stewart, D. (1989).  The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.  Journal of Literature & Theology, 3(3), 296 – 307.

Taylor, C. (1987).  Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.  In Rabinow, P. & Sullivan, W. (Eds.), Interpretive Social Science – A Second Look (pp. 33 – 81).  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Taylor, C. (1989).  Sources of the Self.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (2007).  A Secular Age.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tauber, A. (2006).  The Biological Notion of Self and Non-Self.  Retrieved on October 15, 2008, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Thompson, L. (1952).  Melville’s Quarrel with God.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thomson, I.  (2000).  Ontotheology?  Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8(3), 297 – 327.

Waugh, P. (2001).  Postmodernism.  In Knellwolf, C. & Norris, C. (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism – Volume IX – Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (pp. 289 – 308).  Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Werge, T. (1969).  Moby-Dick and the Calvinist Tradition.  Studies in the Novel, 1(4), 484 – 506. Reprinted in Davey, M. (2004) (Ed.)  A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (pp. 96 – 98).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Westphal, M. (2001).  Overcoming Onto-Theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Wordsworth, W. (1798).  A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.  In Hayden, J. (1981) (Ed.), William Wordsworth: The Poems, v. 1.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

In an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times former presidential candidate Mitt Romney weighed in with his views regarding Detroit’s request for loan guarantees. While I think Mr. Romney basically is an idiot, I have to say his views on this point are well-considered. Detroit has no more entitlement to a bailout than any other American industry.

That being so Mr. Romney succumbed to what I will call the “expertise fallacy.” He stated: “management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.”

I have been through this issue a dozen times in the entertainment industry. For example, Chrysalis Records recruited Joe Kiener, a tennis shoe executive. Angel Records recruited Steve Murphy, a book publishing executive. EMI Music recruited Terri Santisi, who for all I know now is preparing tax returns at H. & R. Block. As adept as they may have been in their respective fields, none of these executives had the slightest idea of what they were doing in the record business.

I’ll never forget a record company convention I was at in Palm Springs, California.  At the time Chrysalis Records had a big hit with Sinead O’Connor’s cover of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U.”  Kiener and I were talking and he says, “I’m busy planning her 4th single” (i.e., the one that was to be the fourth one after “Nothing Compares 2 U”).  I said, “Joe, shouldn’t you be worrying about her next single first?”  I liked Kiener and thought he was a nice guy, but he didn’t understand a word of what I was saying.  Shortly afterwords O’Connor shaved her head and started insulting Pope John Paul II, which was the end of her major label career.  God knows how much marketing money Kiener spent on this quixotic notion.

The premise underlying the expertise fallacy is that there are two separate knowledge bases. One pertains to the “industry” and the other pertains to a substantive field of endeavor, for example, “finance” or “marketing.” Companies delude themselves into believing the latter trumps the former and that people from other unrelated enterprises must know something they don’t.

This isn’t how the phenomenology of expertise works. As analyzed by experts such as Hubert Dreyfus, it is a series of steps to acclimatize oneself to the nuances and dynamics of a particular firm, how it is situated in the marketplace, and the product handling characteristics of what it has for sale. Every industry has its own specialized and non-fungible set of customs, conventions and protocols. Strategies that may work for consumer products companies such as Procter & Gamble have little in common with the nuances required to originate, market, promote and distribute records or movies. It only is coincidental these terms even are used interchangeably when in fact they have completely different meanings.

I make this observation ecumenically. While I am not aware of specific examples, I am sure record or film industry executives would not be very good at selling underarm deodorant.

One of the main differences between consumer entertainment software (CDs, DVDs, video games, etc.) and other types of consumer products (laundry detergent, groceries, etc.) is the economics of replication. Consumer entertainment software is inexpensive to duplicate (and has become even less so with the increasing obsolescence of physical goods). The only investment required is to originate it (e.g. recording costs for a record, the negative cost for a film). This cost in turn is amortizable over the number of units sold. As it is recouped, its per-unit cost becomes increasingly small (and one of the key measures of a project’s success is the rate of this recoupment).

Consumer product companies, on the other hand, incur very little in the way of fixed cost. And, their marginal per-unit cost always will be higher because they are selling a physical thing. This leads to completely different product life cycles, handling strategies and marketing campaigns. The ways in which these are structured will depend more on the particular industry than on some set of general theoretical principles.

Automobile companies have plenty of reasons to be insecure right now. There is no reason to suspect, however, that executives from some outside industry will be any smarter than the present incumbents. In fact they most likely will be less successful because they don’t know a thing about making or selling cars. In appealing to the alleged “expertise” of industry outsiders, Mr. Romney is making a significant conceptual error.

The way signs work is complex enough as it is.  Not only is there the sign, but also: that which is signified; the person responding to it; and the social conventions that give it meaning.  A “stop sign” at an intersection, for example, has no inherent or intrinsic properties.  It commands us to brake the car, and we do so, because it’s a traffic law.  Among other effects, this has social utility, because it tends to minimize the likelihood of collisions, with their attendant personal and economic cost.  So strong is this pull that most of us still come to a halt, even at 2:AM, when there are no other cars for as far as the eye can see, because we are acculturated to obey the rule. 

In principle, though, the stop sign could be almost anything else.  It could be square instead of hexagonal; green instead of red; and be inscribed with the word “go,” instead of the word “stop.”  What’s important is the semiotic relationship between these elements, their mode of signification, the behavior triggered by the sign, and the web of meaning surrounding these elements.

The power of the stop sign depends on human agreement.  As characterized by John Searle, it is an “institutional fact,” as opposed to a “brute fact,” such as the height of Mount Everest, The Construction of Social Reality 2 (1985).  It is an invisible feature of our “socially constructed reality.”  It is not functional, like a screwdriver, which needs to be a certain shape in order to accomplish its purpose.  Nor is it world-constrained, like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge.  Hoover Dam had to be built at the narrowest gorge in the Grand Canyon in order to effectively block the flow of the Colorado River.  The Golden Gate Bridge was built as a straight line between to promontories defining the entrance to San Francisco Bay.  It does not meander in, say, a semi-circular pattern.

Screwdrivers, dams and bridges are not signs, thought they may be incorporated into them and later acquire a signifying role, e.g., a scenic picture of the Golden Gate Bridge may come to mean, “Visit San Francisco on Holiday.” 

Signs per se, on the other hand, are arbitrary.  Their combination of symbols just as easily could mean something else.  Their meaning, as Searle says at 12, is “observer relative.”  Observer-relativity in turn depends on (1) the agreement (or imposition) of function; (2) cooperative behavior; and constitutive rules, which exist only because of the human institutions that adopt them.  These in turn comprise a set of “background capacities,” enabling us to function in the world, 129.

Unfortunately, Searle misleading calls element (2) “collective intentionality,” 23, which assumes a kind of teleology.  As economists such as Fredrich A. Hayek have observed, teleology “occurs only on the level of the individual, who has purposes planned only for the short-term future.  The entire system has a teleological structure only in so far as those individual teleologies interact to govern the dynamical behavior of the entire system.”  The long-term evolution of a biological or economic system, however, is “unpredictable and any trends which may be visible at a given time could be reversed in the future,” Barrow, J. & Tipler, F., The Anthropic Principle 140 (1986).

Whatever its provenance, the schematic of signs breaks down in the case of strange signs.  By “strange signs,” I mean signs that, because they are (or can become) ambiguous, end up not doing their job.  They either are ignored; communicate no meaning; or actually communicate a meaning that is not at all what was intended by the creator of the sign.  Three examples I will consider are: (1) the pedestrian no-crossing sign at the border checkpoint in San Onofre, California; (2) the Carl Sagan space probe plaque; and (3) the (proposed) sign at the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

 1.            The San Onofre Check-Point Sign

This sign is intended to communicate a warning to immigrants not to run across Interstate 5, which is the high-speed freeway the border check-point intercepts.  The reason why immigrants should not attempt to cross the freeway at this point is because a fast-moving automobile may strike them.  This risk is exacerbated at night.  Night-time crossings are probable because they supply a cover of darkness, which in turn minimizes the likelihood of interdiction by Border Patrol agents.  Darkness, however, considerably reduces visibility on the freeway. 

The problem with this sign is that, as a matter of historical fact, it actually has encouraged immigrants (primarily, persons of Hispanic origin) to cross at this point.  They think the sign means to run across the freeway at the spot where the sign is posted, in order to get to the other side.  This is an example of the sign potentially meaning – and having actually meant – the exact opposite of what was intended.

 2.            The Carl Sagan Space-Probe Plaque 

Carl Sagan notoriously designed a plaque that was attached to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft.  It signifies essential aspects of life on Earth.  Supposedly, any extra-terrestrial being with sufficient intelligence to decode it thereupon would become apprised of human existence and some of its characteristics.

The decipherability of the plaque blatantly depends on an application of the anthropic principle.  As characterized by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle 1: “[O]ur location in the Universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.  The basic features of the Universe, including such properties as its shape, size, age and laws of change, must be observed to be of a type that allows the evolution of observers, for if intelligent life did not evolve in an otherwise possible universe, it is obvious that no one would be asking the reason for the observed shape, size, age and so forth of the Universe” (emphasis in original).  This mild version of the anthropic principle almost certainly is true, albeit vapid.

A stronger version, though, goes on to claim that “the Universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage,” Barrow & Tipler 6 (emphasis in original).  In other words, the Universe has to be the way it is, and we have to be in it here on the planet earth, if for no reason other than we perceive it and are capable of making the observation that we do so.  Anthropicists cite recent hypotheses from string theory in modern physics suggesting that, even though in principle there could be any number of possible multi-worlds or alternative universes, in fact very few of them have the unique combination of physical and mathematical properties necessary in order to support life. 

In fact, this hypothesis is absurd, since there are an infinite number of possible galaxies and worlds, and infinity divided by infinity, no matter how small, still is infinity.  “[T]here are other miracles which could occur and lead to anthropically acceptable worlds with a vastly larger probability than our world,” Susskind, L., “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory,” (2003).

In principle, evidence cited in support of the anthropic principle could be entirely coincidental, Carr, B.J. & Rees, M.J., “The anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world, 278 Nature 605 (Apr. 1979).  To demonstrate its validity, one would have to “multiply reality” “to such an extent that very special events like emergence of Life become quite possible.”  This number, however, would have “to be fairly huge in order to accommodate all the unlikely events leading to modern picture of Life,” Kamenshchik, A. & Teryaev, O., “Many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory and mesoscopic anthropic principle,” (2007). 

A further problem arises from the potential number of observers resident in the many possible alternative worlds.  “The anthropic principle claims that what we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.  So it is natural that the probability should not be proportional to the number of observers, rather, it is just the probability for the existence of observers.”  The “anthropic selectional effect does not become stronger just because there can be more observers … there should be an infinite number of observers. … This is more than the finite number of observers like us.  So the question is, why we are human observers, not freak observers. … But if freak observers are infinite, we can not be typical. … [I]f there are both a finite number of humans and a finite number of freak observers (or without freak observers) in our universe, then the anthropic probability for our universe should be infinitely small compared with some other universe with infinite number of freak observers, which can be self-consistently realized,” Li, M. & Wang, Y., “Typicality, Freak Observers and the Anthropic Principle of Existence,” (2007).

Sagan’s space-probe plaque assumes that extra-terrestrial life will be able to understand and decode its inscriptions.  It depicts artifacts of our world, which may not pertain, or in fact be completely different from, those found in any potential other world.  That possible world, if it exists, will be as unintelligible to us, as ours is to them.

3.            The Yucca Mountain Sign

Yucca Mountain is designed as a repository for spent uranium, fuel rods and other waste generated by nuclear power plants.  Its premise is that, rather than carefully storing this detritus at the site of the nuclear power plant where it is generated, it should be tidily packaged and then safely transported to a central location.  Yucca Mountain is located in Nevada, conveniently upwind from Las Vegas.  Las Vegas residents previously have been subjected to large doses of nuclear radiation from early above-ground atomic test experiments.  Evidently some more radiation from spent nuclear fuel rods won’t hurt them, and actually might contribute to their social and environmental well-being.

Yucca Mountain is designed as a repository for spent uranium, fuel rods and other waste generated by nuclear power plants.  Its premise is that, rather than carefully storing this detritus at the site of the nuclear power plant where it is generated, it should be tidily packaged and then safely transported to a central location.  Yucca Mountain is located in Nevada, conveniently upwind from Las Vegas.  Las Vegas residents previously have been subjected to large doses of nuclear radiation from early above-ground atomic test experiments.  Evidently some more radiation from spent nuclear fuel rods won’t hurt them, and actually might contribute to their social and environmental well-being.

The spent nuclear fuel rods will continue to be radioactive for, say, 10,000 years.  It therefore has been thought to be desirable to install some kind of a “universal warning sign” or “permanent marker” in order to designate their location.  Only with such a marker will our distant progeny be able to avoid intrusion into, or interference with, the site. 

The problem is that any sign assumes our descendants will be able to understand its semiotics and signification.  It is highly dubious whether this is so. We cannot, for example, interpret Stonehenge, or the pyramids in Egypt.  They are relics of previous cultures, and our successors surely will face the same difficulty.  This is so even if they might be able to redeploy the nuclear waste for beneficial purposes, e.g., they have devised more efficient extraction or utilization techniques.  Assuming either good or bad, the sign remains incomprehensible.

For that matter, there is no reason to believe they will have language, to begin with.  They might not have any form of communication at all.  They might not even exist as life-forms analogous to us.  And, as with the San Onofre border check-point, there is significant risk that any form of sign actually might encourage the very behavior it was designed to deter.  This could be a disastrous consequence if, as life-forms, they are vulnerable to the same proclivities, as are we.

In conclusion, the concept of the Yucca Mountain sign is futile in principle.  At best, we can rely only on the dangerous nature of the site being transmitted through the evanescent media of pop culture, such as the internet.  When these media (or their successors) expire, then so will knowledge of the site.  Any other alternative is a waste of time.  While this in and of itself is a trivial objection, the sign also is faulty in principle.  The danger of future misinterpretation of it far outweighs any plausible beneficial effect.

I am sick and tired of hearing George Bush (most notably) refer to people as “folk.”  Mr. Bush is not the only one with a predeliction for frequent misuse of this term, although he is the most notable example.  I now cringe whenever it is uttered by anybody, even if the context is benign. 

From an etymological standpoint “folk” means indigenous culture.  It typically is spatially localized to a particular community.  It frequently (though not necessarily) comprises a “tradition” or set of historical practices shared by members of a discrete social group.  It has a number of precipitates such as “folk psychology,” which is a common-sense set of beliefs and assumptions underlying everyday knowledge and practices.  From an anthropological perspective, local “folk” thought (Völksgedanke) can be contrasted with the common mental “endowment” we all share (Elementargedanke).

Bush uses the term negligently to mean “everybody.”  The reason why he does this is because he is striving to seem ordinary and unassuming even though he is President.  His motive is to attempt to ingratiate himself with the populace.  Instead of doing so he just seems stupid or condescending.  His public opinion polls are at a record low.

Like Porky Pig said, “that’s all, folks!”

There was a widely-reported news announcement today that Nancy Reagan had endorsed John McCain for President of the United States.  I certainly don’t have anything against Ms. Reagan, who strikes me has having conducted herself with dignity and comportment during a long and illustrious career.  Neither do I have anything against Mr. McCain, though I do wish he wouldn’t mumble quite so much, and I think he’s too old and generationally-embedded to be President.

What was irritating were Ms. Reagan’s remarks.  “Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed,” she said. 

This strikes me as being an extreme mis-use of language.  Few things could be as meaningless as a post-facto endorsement.  The whole point of an endorsement is that the endorser lends weight and prestige to the endorsee, thereby assisting the endorsee to achieve traction with whomever it is to whom the endorsee is attempting to appeal.  Conceptually, endorsing somebody after “everything was decided” is like deciding to place a bet on a race-horse after the race has ended. 

If this is Ms. Reagan’s, or Mr. McCain’s, concept of an “endorsement,” then something is seriously amiss.

1. “Napoleon ordered his troops to advance” is a performative. “To order” entails there is somebody doing the ordering, that is, Napoleon. The syntax of this sentence is straightforward. There are two participants: Napoleon, and the troops. Napoleon is the subject, the originator of the action described by the verb (“ordering”). The troops are the object, the target of the action originated by the subject (Napoleon).

2. “The troops were ordered by Napoleon to advance” (or, “The troops were ordered to advance by Napoleon”) is (1), reformatted in passive voice. Passive voice shifts focus from verb subject (Napoleon) to verb object (the troops). Although the troops now are the ostensible subject, however, they still are the ones whom Napoleon ordered to advance. There is no ambiguity as to who gave the order. The troops would not have advanced on their own accord, had it not been for the order. Napoleon therefore remains the “real” subject, and the troops remain the “real” object. Their respective roles as participants in the scenario of advancement have not changed. Neither has the relationship between the parties within the verb’s argument. Napoleon still is the originator of the action (the utterer of the performative), and the troops still are its target. The sentence still describes the same events in the world.

3. What were the circumstances under which Napoleon ordered his troops to advance? Surely Napoleon had not simply conceived an abstract desire to do so. Rather, he was responding to conditions on the ground. Such as: a breach in the enemy lines; an opportunity to encircle his foe; good prospects for a frontal assault; or any other military maneuver. He was a great general, because he could do this with ease and facility. We might say, “Assessing (evaluating) conditions on the ground, Napoleon ordered his troops to advance. This, however, only tells us something about Napoleon. It does not illumine the conditions on the ground, which prompted Napoleon to issue the order. We still do not know anything about the troops, other than they advanced. They did not advance on their own accord. They advanced because Napoleon ordered them to do so.

4. “Responding to (in response to) conditions on the ground, Napoleon ordered his troops to advance,” is a modest improvement. It eliminates some of the psychological features of “analyzing,” “considering,” and similar activities. So does “Conditions on the ground solicited Napoleon (afforded to Napoleon the opportunity) to order his troops to advance.” However, with both, we still have the imperious Napoleon.

5. “Napoleon was solicited (afforded) by conditions on the ground, to order his troops to advice. (5) is the passive reformat of (4). We already know Napoleon is the verb’s subject (the issuer of the order). (5) improves on (4), though, because it de-emphasizes his role. It eliminates redundancy, by refocusing the sentence on those aspects of the situation identified at (3). Although grammatically less correct, passive voice reduces the prominence of the subject, and promotes verb clause intelligibility.

(5) remains, however, just a verbose rendering of (1). We hypothesized performatives always imply a strongly-asserted self. We have not been able to devise a counter-example. Nor, in principle, will we ever be able to do so, no matter how exfoliated (and impractical) the expression.

Because of this, performatives are dissimilar to other world-changing verbs. “Napoleon’s troops advanced in response to conditions on the ground” is active voice. The troops might be lizards seeking out the heat, and we still could use this sentence to describe their activity, without fear of embarrassment or contradiction. It doesn’t commit us to a theory of mind – either as to Napoleon, or the troops. Rather than doing the ordering, “Napoleon’s” becomes an ascriptive predicate of the troops (an adjective). For that matter, they also wore blue jackets, fired muskets, and wore mustachios.

But enough with Napoleon, let’s consider a different example. What we are looking for is a series of words (an expression) highlighting the agent-actor characteristic of performatives, by juxtaposing it against a non-performative phrase. So, when asked, “why did you rob banks,” the depression-era outlaw Willie Sutton apocryphally replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Mr. Sutton did not say, “because I wanted to,” or use any other intention-importing verb. Properly understood, Mr. Sutton was responding to his milieu, i.e., financial institutions with currency. The bank made him do it, or predisposed him to do it, or made him feel like doing it, or activated his instinct to do it.

1. “I robbed the bank” leaves little doubt as to who did what. Mr. Sutton originated the action of robbing, and it was the bank that was robbed. Mr. Sutton, however, was not asked to make a first-person avowal. He was answering a question. His response yields improved action-to-world fit.

2. The passive voice formulation is, “The bank was robbed by me.” As we observed earlier, passive voice is less preferable grammatically, than active. Mr. Sutton’s response, though, better accommodates the relationship between the parties, as Mr. Sutton’s answer explains. This is not so with performatives. Implied verb intentionality can’t be eliminated, regardless of voice.

Austin certainly was aware of the world-changing nature of performatives. He does not, however, dwell on the issue of the agent uttering the performative; the conditions in the world prompting its utterance, or, for that matter, conditions in the world thereafter. Like his fellow British Empiricists, he tacitly assumes a “self in opposition to “world.” The former incants a verb formulation, and a new iteration of the latter magically appears.

How to Do Things with Words was infelicitously titled. Possible reformulations such as How Things Are Done with Words, or How to Accomplish the Doing of Things with Words, or How Words Are Used to Accomplish the Doing of Things, only exacerbate the problem. Regardless of what else may be going on, no “things” are being “done.” The existing title emphasizes the existence of these “things,” whatever they may be. This results in the needless proliferation of unwanted objects, and is ontologically superfluous. A more accurate title might be, How to Accomplish Results with Words, or How You Can Change World-States with Words.

How to Do Things with Words implies there is someone doing whatever it is that is being done. It emphasizes the existence of counterpart “selves” using words – not changed world-states. In this respect, it is like the performatives it describes and evaluates.

Austin’s use of the verb “do” also is annoying. It shares this with the Hollywood locution, “let’s do lunch,” or, “I’ll do the meatloaf” (instead of the performative, “I order the meatloaf”). In German, the verb “machten” means either “do” or “make,” depending on context. The improper speakers of “do” certainly don’t mean they intend to cook lunch (or fabricate the meatloaf).  If Austin was German, but retained a British sensibility, he might have entitled his book, How to Make Things with Words.  If he had “gone native,” he might have evolved this to, How the World Makes You Use Words to Say Things.

Best might be a title such as, How a State of Affairs in the World Solicits a Language User to Deploy a Certain Style of Verb in Order to Modify that State of Affairs. I concur it is unlikely Austin ever would adopt this formulation. Its tongue-twisting absurdity shows how the syntax of performatives can lead to a potentially counter-intuitive result. Austin’s Theory of Performatives accounts for a self; words; and an altered world. It does not account, however, for the pre-altered world, which is integral to understanding the performative’s context and meaning.

§243 – §315 of the Philosophical Investigations suggest a large quantity of imprecise notions, which is typical of Wittgenstein. I don’t want to call them “concepts” or “ideas,” and certainly not “propositions.” The definitions of each of these words is different, and they imply other contexts. “Proposals” might work, but that makes it sound as though Wittgenstein had deposited certain meanings into them, whatever those are. This well might be the case, but probably isn’t. I don’t want to prejudge the issue, because it’s easy with Wittgenstein to over-interpret the text – a peculiar form of granular analysis. The biggest problem might be “calling” or “naming” “them” at all, because doing so implies they are “things” or “entities,” susceptible to being “referred to” or “designated as” such, which Wittgenstein most certainly would eschew. In fact, I am hesitant even to say they suggest some-“thing” or any-“thing” to begin with, again because of that pesky word “thing,” which implies they can be pointed out, or defined ostensively.

By the same token, they (whatever they are, or might be) certainly suggest more than merely no-“thing,” understood as the absence of some-“thing,” or any-“thing.” Taking a stand as to what “they” actually are, or might be, may make it impossible to discern exactly what (if anything) Wittgenstein is saying, or trying to stay. Wittgenstein certainly is engaging in some form of activity, otherwise he wouldn’t have written down any words, to begin with, much less the specific words he used. Rather, he would have sat there with his hands neatly folded, or embarked upon some other form of activity. In doing so, he would not necessarily have to be thinking about §243 – §315, or writing anything down, or wondering what words he was going to use, or anything at all. He could have been listening to music, or eating a sandwich, or whatever else he was doing.

The eventual outcome of this problem (understood in the sense of what happens at the conclusion of a process, not as a specific result, which might be a “thing”) well may be we have do away with certain nouns and articles altogether, if only because of the false ideations they import. The nouns we probably can keep are those that unambiguously refer to objects, items or things that actually exist in the world, or that might exist – items like rocks and trees, and unicorns. We can point to them, or hypothetical rearrangements of them, and possibly even devise a word for them. The nouns with which we must dispense will be those implicating mental representations of the foregoing, including perceptions, thoughts, ideas, memories, and all other forms of activity allegedly occurring in the “mind,” whatever that is (if it is any-“thing” at all). In a way, this may be what Bertrand Russell was trying to get to, when he defined a class of two or three nouns that could refer unambiguously, such as “this,” “that” and “I.”

The reason why Wittgenstein’s notions are imprecise is because they are not tightly compacted, or proprietary. Anybody can grab onto them, and define them pretty much however they want. Wittgenstein well might subscribe to some of these deployments, others he would reject entirely as ill-conceived, or an inappropriate extrapolation from whatever it is (or might be) that he meant. And, as per above, we know he meant some-“thing,” otherwise, he wouldn’t have written down the words he wrote, to begin with. Or, better phrased: we might approximate what Wittgenstein meant, if he would assent to some formulation of it, if it was presented to him for approval or rejection – if it was sufficiently determinate, and within the penumbra of what counts as “close enough.” In order to elude any problem of reference, perhaps he would evidence his agreement (or lack of it) only by nodding his head up, or down, as the case might be.

They are, then, a congeries of notions, partaking of varying degrees of definiteness or precision, situated at various distances from the core of whatever it is that Wittgenstein is attempting to express. Like planets, orbiting the center, in concentric circles.

Going back to the start, I also hesitate to use a verb stronger than the text “suggests” the notions. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say these sections of the Philosophical Investigations “state” or even “imply” (insert appropriate word for whatever “it” “is,” or might be). Because that indicates, or tends to indicate, intentional, meaning-conferring activity on Wittgenstein’s part. Wittgenstein well might deny ever having engaged in same, because it would be a form of “mental noun,” like having an “intention,” which he probably would want to avoid.

Even the process is dubious, because it implies Wittgenstein deliberately “selected” certain words that somehow “matched” whatever it was in his head, that he was attempting to express. In much the same way one might pick out produce at the grocery store, carefully inspecting each potato, in order to determine its fitness and suitability for the purpose of including it as a menu item in one’s dinner.

This simple exegesis casts some doubt on Wittgenstein’s enterprise, if his objective is to eliminate all things mental. For surely he would not have written down the words he in fact used, unless he discerned some relationship, however abstract, between them and what he wanted to express. We might even call it the “idea” he wanted to express, without committing ourselves to the existence of some-“thing” tangible that lived inside of his head. His words might be vague, and they may not completely envelop the topography of the idea.

This potential difficulty is exacerbated by the German language, which specializes in attempting to match words with ideas, simply by adding on more syllables to the words – sometimes expanding their potential applicability, sometimes restricting it. It fundamentally is unlike its parent language, Latin, which has a clear structure of subject – verb – object. It is easy to diagram Latin sentences. Latin invites this form of analysis, because it is particularly serial. Its syntactical structure also implies a robust notion of self. If Latin has an excess of “subject” nouns, then German is partakes of an excess of compound “object” nouns, together with their exfoliated adjectival appendages.

Despite this, somehow, the words Wittgenstein uses are “close enough” to express his thoughts, in the context of discourse in which he is engaged – that is, philosophical analysis. Which, for Wittgenstein, paradoxically might result in an outcome where the words “mean” no-“thing” at all, either to him, or for us, bewildered as we are in our attempts to extract meaning from them.

Let us consider two more examples of, or analogies to, this type of activity. A camera with a zoom lens situates the image to be photographed in a certain perspective. It also enables the photographer to focus on that image; and select a focal length (the “f”-stop), which is the depth of field of the focus. And, a notch filter for the sound engineer performs a similar function. The engineer selects a particular frequency to be boosted or cut; and then the “q” factor, which is the shape of the envelope surrounding the frequency – the range of frequencies surrounding the center, which also will be affected. That zone can be narrow or wider, either in fixed increments (like an f-stop), or on a variable basis, depending upon the type of control.

Both of these are analog processes, in that they involve interaction between light or sound, on the one hand, and perspicuous activity on the part of the person performing the task. The person performing the task must deploy tools of sensory perception in order to discern which looks, or sounds, “best” (or, at least, “better than” some other iteration of same). In the same manner, Wittgenstein must select the words to express his ideas.

There is no particular reason why this is, or must be, a “conscious” process. Most of the time, we write down words, or natter on in conversation, without the slightest “idea” of what we are trying to say (or, only a “general” idea, or a heading in a “vague direction”). We just open our mouth, and out come the words. It certainly would be wrong to say (again, for most of the time) that we “pick out” individual words to use.

Nor does the photographer necessarily have a “mental representation” of the photograph-to-be (how it should “look”), or compare one “mental representation” of it to another, say, when changing zoom-perspective or focal length. Fashion photographers, for example, attempt to induce their models to assume a number of different poses, attitudes and expressions, and are content blithely to snap away, hoping that one of the pictures felicitously captures or depicts what transpired during the session.

And, the sound engineer may spend hours fiddling with the equalization of different frequencies, all with a view towards making the sound recording sound as “good” as possible, with reference to some standard. Even less so than the photographer, that paradigm is not a “mental representation.” Rather, it depends on the engineer’s background, experience, and skill at differentiating (and then selecting from) any number of possible outcomes.

Still, we deploy certain words, instead of others. A musician writes down certain notes, instead of others. An artist chooses certain colors from a palette, instead of others. Even the chef selects particular vegetables from those on offer at the market. This process cannot be random, or chaotic. If it was, then, any old word, or any old note, or any old color, or any old vegetable, would do – which simply isn’t the case.

In order to be explanatory, or to explore his own assumptions, Wittgenstein ought to clarify exactly what’s involved in this process. But he doesn’t. Rather, if anything, he suggests we ought to do it, on his behalf. His words are elusive. This might mean he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about. Or, he cannot express himself articulately. Giving Wittgenstein more credit, he may be eschewing mere exposition. He invites us to participate in the process of understanding. We are not simply readers, rather, collaborators. To cooperate with Wittgenstein effectively, we in turn must import our own concepts, structure, meaning, framework, assumptions, and uses of language.

Many things Wittgenstein says are absurd. In many instances, he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he’s talking about. He fails to address the issue properly, or parse it in a manner that makes sense. There are few things more amusing than contemporary philosophers who slavishly worship at the altar of Wittgenstein.

One of my personal grievances is that he has an annoying habit of using an imaginary interlocutor to express matters of importance, or at least they seem as though they are, or might be. This rather gives the impression that he’s a little child, wanting his mother to see something clever he’s just done. The imaginary interlocutor might just be a cover Wittgenstein uses, when he reaches impasse. Like a salmon about to spawn, he swims up a stream, to a tiny, closely-confined pond. The pond is so far removed from the mainstream of the river, that he no longer has the ability to navigate his way back. Where he would confront the rush of culture, and society – the main stream, or commonly accepted version, of what he’s trying to observe and articulate.

None of this particularly would matter, except for Wittgenstein’s stated objective, of doing just that – to expose the backgrounds, the contexts, and the applications, of words. How they are used, and how they intersect with “mind,” if they do, or if that’s possible, to begin with.

On the other hand, many of Wittgenstein’s insights are brilliant. But it’s hard to tell which is which.

For Wittgenstein, the best outcome might be a “brain transplant” between him and you, or me, or us. In this way, his thoughts could be transferred to us seamlessly, without loss of nuance, and without the intervention of words, each participating in some degree of indeterminacy. This particularly is so for nouns attempting to name, or characterize, or describe mental events or activity. And, verbs describing mental processes, as to which there is some kind of an outcome or result.

This, of course, isn’t possible. Words, properly understood, are the troublesome intermediaries. Even if we break through the penumbra of vagueness, we still are left with the problem of “why those words, instead of others.” Why did Dostoyevsky, or Melville, or any other great novelist, use the words they did, instead of others? Why did Mozart pick the certain notes he did? Surely, they weren’t just random – otherwise, anybody could do it. Part of what makes them great artists is their skill at instinctively selecting the “best” word (note) to use. [I hesitate to say “intuitively,” because that implies a level of cognition that well might be absent.]

But, “best” with reference to what? Even if we don’t attribute to them any “conscious” objective, we haven’t avoided the issue. Because if it comes down to sheer skill, like a championship tennis player, or a grand master at chess, there still has to be some standard, or criteria, for what counts as “good.” In a game, it is winning – there is a way of scoring one performance, as “better than” another. It is implausible, though, this would be sufficient for Wittgenstein’s purpose. Because some people can’t stand Dostoyevsky. Some people find Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, to be unlistenable. On the other hand, I think they’re so amazing, that I no longer can listen to Bach, or Brahms, or Beethoven, or other crusty old German composers. There is a reason for these different outcomes, and I think I know what it is. For now, though, Wittgenstein has enough trouble enough explaining the fact they’re different, to begin with.

In the absence of suitable technology, then, we have no choice but to parse the text as delicately as possible, and with as much deference and discretion as we are capable of mustering. Keeping in mind that it is possible to read the same section of the Philosophical Investigations for several hours, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, as different issues keep revealing themselves with each methodology. It’s not possible to establish a protocol, or a procedure, for reading the text, that will result in the maximum extraction of whatever is, or might be, there to be extracted.

The simples way to proceed might be to construct a table. Column A sets forth the notion suggested by the text. Column B would ask, “does Wittgenstein agree?” In some cases he might rebuke the notion; in others, accept it; in others, not have the slightest idea of what we are talking about. Column C would evaluate whether the notion actually is so, or, at least, if we “think” it is (itself a conundrum unavoidably suggested by the very nature of this activity). You can pose the following as questions, or aspects of a phenomenological inquiry. Examples:

1. We experience brain activity in response to irradiations on the retina, vibrations in the auditory canal. If these are pleasurable or painful, we well might react behaviorally, with words or gestures. There is a functional, and perhaps even predictable, relationship between the two.

2. We interpolate, or somehow translate, that brain activity, into sensations and experiences, such as pleasure or pain.

3. We use words to identify or characterize these states (though not in the sense of “naming” an “object,” a “mental state,” that resides in the brain). One of the ways in which we do so is by using first-person psychological sentences (“avowals”). Not all uses of words, though, involve this reflexiveness. We are capable of engaging in fluid conversation and discourse, with other people. We communicate with them, and they with us. As we do so, we may not have the slightest “idea” of what we’re talking about.

4. Our brains are confined to our skulls. We do not have television screens on our foreheads, enabling somebody else to peer inside of our brain. The most advanced forms of electroencephalography, MRI, cat scan, and brain surgery cannot begin to account for the wealth of human experience and common sense. In principle, they never will be able to.

5. Because of this, it is impossible for us to experience other people’s sensations. Nonetheless, we understand their descriptions of their sensations, and even their characterizations of ours. This is what happens when you go to a doctor, for example, and describe, or try to describe, an ailment. The reciprocal occurs when the doctor offers a diagnosis. Most of the time, the patient and the doctor achieve mutual understanding. Sometimes, we have “empathy” with another person’s problems or issues. This only is possible because we recognize their experience, characterized by their words, as something uncannily similar to something we also have experienced. We are able to communicate that sense, back to our conversational counterpart.

6. It is impossible for any one of us to have a “private language,” that is, one understood only by its speaker. If this was so, it would preclude any reciprocal, interactive, or communicative effect.

7. We engage in “functional behavior,” that is, the ability to use language, follow rules, manipulate equipment, and the like. In some cases, we have no “sensation” of doing so. We do so with ease, facility, and non-consciously. Any sensations we might have might collapse, or incorporate into, sensation-experiencing behavior (the type of behavior exhibited by someone experiencing that sensation, or one somehow similar to it). Certainly this is all somebody else can perceive, or respond to, if at all.

8. There is, however, no “one way” (much less a “right way,” or even a “comprehensive way”) to describe human activity or endeavor.

9. We deploy cognitive mechanisms and processes, such as doing arithmetic, writing poems, and conceiving of the theory of relativity. We use what J. L. Austin characterized as “performative” verbs, to achieve a result in the world. The world changes when we use them; it is different than it was, before the speaker’s utterance. The use of performatives in turn implies an “intention” to cause, or bring about, a certain state of affairs. If I didn’t want to achieve a certain effect, then I would have used different words, or no words at all. Again, this activity doesn’t necessarily have to be “conscious,” in the sense that it’s subject to more-or-less simultaneous awareness or introspection. However, sometimes, it is.

10. We also have ideas, reflections, memories, and other forms of “mental representations.” We associate ideas quickly and fluently, hop-scotching between one suggestive thought to another. These somehow are triggered, or activated. Sometimes they’re from the distant past, sometimes quite recent. There is, however, a reason why one has Memory A, which leads to Memory B, which leads to Memory C. If this process was random or chaotic, however, then there would be no reason why anybody is able to associate anything with anything. The explanation may be entirely neurochemical, or depend on relative electrical charges of neurons or synapses, or their size, or their flexibility. As with most of our day-to-day activity, it is entirely non-conscious.

11. From time to time, we have “self-knowledge,” that is, we know what we are thinking about, and why we are thinking about that, instead of something else. We “know” what is in the “mind.”

12. Wittgenstein believes philosophy is nothing more than “grammar,” that is, parsing language and how words are used. Because of this, he also is committed to the notion there is no such thing as a “creative” use of language, such as that found in novels, or poetry. It’s a mystery how he was able to write Philosophical Investigations, to begin with. Is this right? It seems dubious, because philosophy deals with “issues,” comprising more than merely the means by which they are expressed.

Put slightly differently, language presents a “procedural” issue. Because it deals with “fit,” in the ways we’ve discussed, it isn’t disinteresting. However, particularly in philosophical or creative discourse, it always is deployed for some purpose or reason. We can be as clear as crystal about words and language, yet the “substantive” problem remains.

The Solution to Wittgenstein’s Dilemma

“Product.”  This term frequently was used in the consumer entertainment software business, back when there was one.  It refers to “things” such as books, records (CDs, cassettes), videos (DVDs, VHS), etc.  My objection to it is two-fold.  First, it is misused to refer to the work embodied in the tangible medium, as opposed to the physical or mechanical instantiation of it.  Second, even when correctly used (in the second sense), it is implicitly derisory to the creator’s effort.  It suggests it isn’t artistic or unique, rather, it’s fungible and replaceable.  Even if the latter is so – and it may be true more often than you think – it still is derogatory.

“Content.”  Which is a convenient lead-in to the successor to “product,” particularly as aesthetic works migrate to the Internet.  “Content” is every bit (get it, bit) as dismissive as “product.”  It demeans the creator’s effort.  It suggests the work’s sole function is to take up space, attract page-views, stimulate advertising dollars, improve search-engine rankings, or the like.  When in fact it should be the primary driver of these activities, not the subordinate one.  By analogy, “articles” in many newspapers, magazines and other print media frequently are regarded merely as “devices” or “carriers” for advertising, and “content” carries the same connotation.

“Folk.”  If I hear our President George Bush refer to “folk” one more time, I think I’ll barf.  Same with the current crop of presidential candidates, together with their “analysts” (oops, I mean “operatives” or “spin doctors”).  “Folk” is a specialized term referring to a narrow affinity-based group, such as an ethnic tribe, a clog-dancing club, people who play “folk music,” and what not.  It cannot and should not be used to refer to “people in general,” or an amorphous group of individuals to which one is attempting to appeal.  Its mis-use in this context reveals the faux-humanization of political discourse, that is, trying to make yourself sound sincere, when in fact you’re not. 

So apologies in advance if we encounter each other and I am mildly remonstrative on the above points.

Mr. Ulin’s criticism completely misses the point. It’s not so much that Bukowski “was” or “wasn’t” unique. Rather, he spoke in a voice that was tremendously evocative of LA as a place, not as an abstract concept, or even an abstract concept of place. More so than any of these other writers, he was responsible for the “De-Disney-ification” of Los Angeles experience. He substituted a real, gritty world for the fantasy world spoon-fed to us by pop culture and the mass media. It’s the antithesis of the American ideal, because it rejects any kind of juxtaposition between alternatives (i.e., this is good, that is bad). Rather, for Bukowski, the whole menu of alternatives is screwed up to begin with. Instead of choosing between unpalatable options, he simply opts out.

There is no evidence Bukowski ever read Derrida, or for that matter even heard of him, Bukowski, however, took deconstructionism to its lowest-to-the-ground, most-fully-parsed, most atomic level. In an effort to eliminate pretense and artifice from his writing, he arrived at a style that disassembled the world into its simplest, most granular elements. The key to his success was that he had no agenda, no theory to advocate, no aesthetic or point of view. He simply didn’t care. As a result, he was open to experience, and open to whatever happened, in its most unstructured, disaggregated, decompiled form.

In this respect, he was way beyond the beats, with whom he sometimes is compared. The beats stood in antithesis to 1940’s literary formalism. Whereas, Bukowski stands for nothing, not even in opposition to something, or anything. His work simply hits the pavement hard, flopping this way and that, like how a fisherman hits a salmon on its head to facilitate its already-suffocating death.Culturally, he gravitated to the lowest common denominator.

As with Derrida, it is highly unlikely Bukowski ever read the philosopher John Rawls, or for that matter even heard of him. Similarly, though, one of Bukowski’s over-arching themes was that a society – our society – should be judged not by what is the greatest good for the greatest number; but rather, how it treats its most downtrodden, its most unfortunate.

There are two ways to psychoanalyze Bukowski. Both are suggestive, because there is so much evidence in support of each. The first is Freudian – obviously he was deeply conflicted, particularly as a result of his pathological relationship with his father, who beat him constantly. The second is Phenomenologically – he writes as if he had no consciousness, that he fully was at one with his world. In order to participate in that world with him, and to partake of it, we need to understand his loathsome self-image, his mid-career of scrabbling hardship, his alcoholism, and his ability to put all of this into words.Here is why, particularly living in Los Angeles, Bukowski will continue to remain relevant.

1. Once I had lunch with a friend at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As we were walking out, a woman jostled him, and then remonstrated him for not making way for her, as she exited the room. He replied, “In the country where I come from, the only question we ask a woman like you, is how much.”

2. Incidents of road-rage are common. I saw a blue corvette cut off another sports car on Sunset Boulevard. They raced around several hair-pin turns. At a stop light, the guy in the blue corvette stopped his car, opened his door, and pulled out what looked like a small-caliber weapon. I quickly turned up a side street, anxious not to get caught in the melee.

3. I was behind a driver, who happened to be a woman, who was behind a gentleman in a sports car, who in turn was behind a large truck. We all were driving up Laurel Canyon. She honked at the guy in the sports car, evidently because he wasn’t moving fast enough, or (sensibly) didn’t want to attempt to pass the truck on the winding road. He got out of his car, and went to the driver’s side of her car. By this time, another car had come up behind me, so I was stuck. Rather than having an altercation, though, she said to him: “Hey, do you want to fuck?” Not as in, have an altercation, but rather as in, have sex.

4. I saw a driver hit another car in a grocery-store parking lot, then simply drove off as if nothing had happened. The lot was crowded, and I was right behind him. Fortunately, it didn’t even look like a fender-bender; neither vehicle seemed to have suffered any damage. A woman, who seemed to be of foreign extraction, hopped out of the bumped car, and started yelling at the guy, who was in the bumping car. She ran around the entire lot, appealing to other drivers to assist her. I’m not sure in what respect they might have been of aid, as she clearly was not injured. The only thing I could think of is that she saw her big chance at a Southern California-style lawsuit simply driving away.

5. Grocery store check-out lines also seem to be common sites of frustration. I saw a gentleman arguing with the clerk, evidently on the premise the automatic scanner had not correctly calculated the correct discount to which he was entitled as a result of his membership in the store’s club. There was a long line behind him, and somebody started grumbling. He turned around, put up his dukes, and said, “You all better get out of here, ‘cause this is gonna take some time! All of you’d better leave!” He actually approached the person immediately behind him in what looked to me to be a threatening and belligerent manner. At least, I’m sure the guy was happy there was a shopping cart between them. As I left, I saw the clerk taking all of his groceries out of their bags, and rescanning them.

6. I went to a seminar at UCLA that took place in Dodd Hall, home of UCLA’s illustrious Philosophy Department. At some point, I went to the men’s room to relieve myself. The gentleman standing several urinals down commented, “Think of all the great philosophers who have pissed here.” There was a job opening for a new Assistant Professor in the Department, and somebody told me they had over 400 applicants. Ironically, the State of California probably lacks sufficient funding to fill the position.

7. Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills in particular, is known for its many cases of horrifically bad plastic surgery. Although it’s hard to decide, I think what annoys me the most, is the women with the big lips. They flubber, babble and drool, like ducks in a pond. While I don’t know for sure what it must feel like to possess such a physical attribute, I imagine it’s something like the Novocain wearing off after a trip to the dentist. Where in God’s name did they get the idea this was attractive?

These are just samples of the daily indignities, of which Bukowski wrote. He occasionally spoke of how he used to survive on PayDay candy bars, and how much he looked forward to consuming their peanuty goodness. I eat one in remembrance of, and solidarity, with him.

It would be like having a mental representation of pure color, and not, say, a color swatch, or something of that color (a “thing” in the “world” to which that color truthfully could be attributed).

A sensation (such as “pain”), though, is not such a “thing” out there in the world, somehow existing independently of its experiencers (which may be the necessary metaphysical counterpart of such a position). Wittgenstein wouldn’t think so; in fact, I think he thinks we don’t even have sensations, to begin with. Or, if we do, they either are irrelevant, or can’t be expressed “grammatically” (in his sense of that term). And of course, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. “[1]

I can’t perform this extrapolation, and I can’t see how it could be done. I think the best case that can be made for such a hypothetical correspondence theory of sensation is that you compare x (the current sensation) with y (a remembered instance of previously having had a sensation which, for some reason, seems sufficiently similar to y, that somehow you recall it).

And thus have what counts as a mental representation of that sensation. Not as a disembodied feeling, but rather as one thoroughly embedded in (the recollection of) a “real-world” event. You then compare the current sensation (x ) with the mental representation of y, and attempt to discern if they’re the same, or different, and if so, by how much, etc. Through some kind of a cognitive process.

To continue laboring in this vineyard, let’s imagine (incoming = I) sensation x may have the attributes

{f ^I₁, f ^I₂, f ^I₃, … f ^I_n},

and (remembered = R) sensation y may have the attributes

{f ^R₁, f ^R₂, f ^R₃, … f ^R_n},

etc. Each f is dynamic (as for that matter are both sets of f ), presenting themselves with varying degrees of force and vivacity, in a manner not unlike the way Hume distinguishes impressions from ideas in the opening paragraphs of A Treatise on Human Nature.[2]

How might this work in practice? Hold out your finger and stick a pin into it. You experience a sensation comprising a certain feature-set, i.e., the sensation is sharp, it is persistent, it may be accompanied by the extrusion of blood, there is swelling, it is localized to the point where you inserted the pin, etc. Being the inquisitive sort, you wonder, just what that sensation is. So you call up the last time you stuck a pin in your finger, circumspectively analyze the feature-set, and conclude it is similar (or, at least, “close enough”).

What would Wittgenstein’s response be to this experiment? He probably wouldn’t have much to say. As he observes at §285, we can’t experience somebody else’s sensations. “Another person can’t have my pains,” §253, because, obviously, they’re not me.

But he then abandons this promising observation in order to pursue two other issues, although he doesn’t clearly distinguish between them. These are: (a) “Knowing that” one has a sensation, such as pain. Here, he says: “It can’t be said of me at all … that I know I am in pain” (§246). If you “knew” you had pain, then you could “doubt” if you had pain, which can be solved by pricking your finger with a pin, as at §288. This simply is “pain,” not “knowledge of” pain.

And, (b) characterizing a sensation, including how it gets named, how we know what other people are saying when they use the word for it, etc. For example, if one says one doubts if one is in pain, we think he doesn’t know the meaning of the word “pain,” §288. “What does that mean [when I say ‘I am in pain’]? Does it mean: ‘If someone else could know what I am calling “pain,” he would admit that I was using the word correctly?’” (§289).

I think Wittgenstein conflates (a) with (b), that is, he doesn’t think it’s possible to know you have a sensation, or be able to differentiate it from other sensations, unless you can say what it is. “Privacy of sensation” thus becomes characterized in terms of its “epistemic expression”[3] – the words used to convey one is experiencing the sensation, such as (for pain), crying or shrieking. “[T]he verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it,” §244. “Crying is not a report about our feelings of pain, but an expression of them; it is not a bit of commentary on our pain behavior, but one of the items in our pain behavior”[4]

Language is communal. Therefore, in order to communicate, you must be able to tell whether your sensation is the same type of sensation as that experienced by everybody else. If sensations were private mental experiences, then in order to do so, we would have to “extrapolate it from our own case”[5] and assume everybody else feels the same way. This, however, is implausible. “If one has to imagine someone else’s pain on the model of one’s own, this is none too easy a thing to do: for I have to imagine pain which I do not feel on the model of the pain which I do feel,” §302.

Furthermore, if sensations were private mental experiences, then “each person’s sensations will be completely inaccessible to everyone else, and so this part of our language will become necessarily unteachable.”[6] Rather, what happens is you learn the meaning of an expression over time by discerning appropriate occasions for its use, e.g., it’s OK to say “ouch” when somebody sticks you with a pin. “Public criteria are needed across the whole range of mental phenomena, and so the language of mental phenomena could not exist in isolation.”[7]

But Wittgenstein isn’t content to leave off there, because he is so insistent we don’t use words to report on the status of an inner mental state or psychological occurrence (e.g., “being in pain”). So he goes on to claim that once we consider “the grammar of the expression of sensation,” the sensation itself “drops out of consideration as irrelevant,” §293. There is nothing for the word to “refer to” – “not in the way slab, pillar, and beam come to refer to building stones,”[8] “We do not learn the concept of intense pain by having intense pains. We learn it by learning the use of ‘intense pain’ and related words in the language” (emphasis in original).[9] Further, “[T]here is no pain … without pain-behavior,” §281, and “we should not in practice be able to learn and teach the word for sensations like pain unless they were outwardly manifested.”[10]

I think Wittgenstein goes too far here. He is right that pain is not a “private object before the mind”[11] and that what counts as pain is not learned by means of an “inner ostensive definition.”[12] As revealed by the futility of our earlier attempt to parse a correspondence theory of sensation, sensations cannot be treated “as if their criterion of identity were very like the criterion of identity of material objects.”[13] He also is right that we don’t engage in a cognitive process of self-introspection, somewhat like that I characterized above, at least while the sensation is happening. Rather, we just are experiencing the sensation, in all of its non-feature set, non-predicative fulsomeness.

However, he is wrong, if he means there never are occasions when we engage in this form of circumspective analysis – though it occurs with reference to specific, remembered incidents, and not some abstract concept. Furthermore, he is wrong if he thinks that just because the use of the word is connected with observable behavior, he somehow has done away with the sensation itself. The sensation is far more than the grammar of its concept, or a grammatical problem. It isn’t some linguistic fiction. Rather, it actually exists.

Wittgenstein tries to hedge his bets here by saying “It is not a something, but not a nothing either!”, §304.[14] This is weasly, though, and he might as well come right out and say he doesn’t think it “exists,” because “a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said,” §304.[15] The fact of the matter, however, is that “sentient creatures … without the command of language, can truly be said to be in pain, without knowing it.”[16]

Here’s an example of just such circumspection at work and in actual practice. I recently went and got my eyes checked, and underwent an examination of the sort an opthamologist typically administers to a patient who needs for glasses (which I do) (yet again). The patient peers into a complex piece of equipment fitted with different lenses, while staring at a chart upon which are printed letters and numbers of different sizes. The opthamologist asks the patient, “What is the smallest line you can see?” or something to such effect, and the patient responds. The opthamologist then flips over a different strength of lens, and the patient is invited to respond to the question, “Is that better? Is that worse?” If the patient isn’t sure, then the opthamologist repeats the exercise. The patient says, “Yes, A is clearer than B,” or vice versa.

In other words, the patient has engaged in a cognitive process, and reached a conclusion of the sort that might be expressed by the phrase, “I know that …”. The patient accomplishes this outcome by comparing the feature-set of incoming sensations (the letters are crisp, the letters are blurry, that’s an “R” and not a “K,” etc.) with the feature-set of the remembered mental representation (the way the alpha-numeric characters appeared when viewed through the previous lens). The patient has to be “referring” to a “mental representation” (or at least engaging in some form of a cognitive process with respect to it), for the simple reason that the previous image no longer physically is present.

Another example is the procedure a medical doctor might deploy when examining a patient. “What are your symptoms? When did it start? How long has this been going on?” At some point, the doctor might ask: “Are you sure about that?” To which the patient might reply: “Yes, I know it started last week, and I still feel it.”[17]

The reason why Wittgenstein’s view is wrong, is because of course we experience pain as a phenomenon, even though we might not know what to call it. To continue with the doctor example, the patient isn’t concerned with “naming” what the sensation is, or establishing criteria for the correct application (use) of that identifier. Rather, the patient simply is participating in a process to enable the doctor to evaluate the patient’s condition. The doctor may, but need not, disclose a diagnosis to the patient. The doctor may not arrive at a diagnosis immediately; a variety of observations first might have to be accumulated, the doctor ventures a hypothesis, looks to refute it, confirms it, etc. That is, a word or phrase – a descriptor – probably isn’t assigned to this collection of observations, until some point in the diagnostic process, subsequent to its onset.

Non-conclusionary patient self-reports (i.e., “Where does it hurt?” “It hurts here.”) are an important element the doctor considers, in addition to the doctor’s own clinical observations.[18] It would not be possible for the patient to make these reports, unless the patient in fact was experiencing an underlying symptom. In fact, come to think of it, the entire medical discipline of psychiatry relies almost completely upon patient self-reports.[19]

In summary, to assess Wittgenstein’s position, I think we need to distinguish between the following, which he has a tendency to mix up:

(1) Functional behavior, that is, the ability to use language, follow rules, manipulate equipment, and the like. These are important to Wittgenstein, because of his theory that actual sensations simply collapse into sensation-experiencing behavior (the type of behavior exhibited by someone experiencing a sensation).

(2) Cognitive mechanisms, such as:

(a) Attention – vigilance: the ability to focus awareness to a specific stimulus in the environment, and to respond to that stimulus.

(b) Speed of processing: the amount of time needed to complete a simple cognitive task, which often includes encoding information, making a decision, then formulating and executing a response (functional behavior).

(c) Working memory: short-term maintenance and manipulation of information, such as in the opthamologist example.

(d) Executive functioning: scheduling processes or task management.

(e) Declarative memory: the explicit recall of previously-learned information; the ability to encode, store and retrieve information from long-term memory.

(f) Reasoning: higher-level cognitive processes which involve complex strategic planning and information-processing skills.[20]

Wittgenstein has nothing to say about any of these phenomena, except to deny they exist. We do not “know” we are having a sensation, we simply have it.

(3) Sensations, which often may be comorbid with cognitive processes. These run the gamut from sublime feelings of happiness or contentment to extremes such as auditory or visual hallucinations. Like I said earlier, Wittgenstein seems to deny these exist. Or, if and to the extent they exist, basically they are irrelevant, because they are manifested in behavior, and there’s nothing more that can be said about them.

(4) Actual brain activity. For example, functional MRI can detect when the dorsal-lateral pre-frontal cortex becomes saturated with oxygenated hemoglobin. This in turn sets up a pattern of activity across the entire brain. Dorsal-lateral hyper-frontality (the hemoglobin is or becomes too deoxygenated, therefore the brain circuits abnormalize) may be caused by asynchronous firing of neurons; which in turn may be caused by low levels of dopamine or norepenephrin. This condition often correlates with the behavioral symptoms to which we have assigned the word “schizophrenia.” It can be moderated with psychotropic medications such as modafinil, which tend to reverse the entire cycle I just have described. Wittgenstein has nothing at all to say about the brain.

Parsing these distinctions through Wittgenstein interestingly illuminates where he’s onto something and where he’s barking up the wrong tree, figuratively speaking.

ENDNOTES

[1] Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 151 (1961).

[2] Govier, T., “Variations on Force and Vivacity in Hume,” The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (Jan. 1972); Landy, D., “Humes Impression/Idea Distinction,” 32 Hume Studies 119 (Apr. 2006).

[3] Temkin, J., “Wittgenstein on Epistemic Privacy,” 31 The Philosophical Quarterly 97 (Apr. 1981).

[4] Fogelin, R., Wittgenstein 170 (2^nd ed. 1987).

[5] Kripke, S., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language 115 (1982).

[6] Pears, D., Ludwig Wittgenstein 151 (1986 ed.).

[7] Pears, D., Ludwig Wittgenstein 154 (1970 ed.).

[8] Brenner, W., Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations 43 (1999).

[9] Ibid. 96.

[10] Ayer, A., Wittgenstein 77 (1985).

[11] Kenny, A., Wittgenstein 182 (1973).

[12] McGinn, M., Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations 121 (1997). Ayer calls it a “private ostensive definition,” Ayer, A., Wittgenstein 80 (1985).

[13] Pears, D., Ludwig Wittgenstein 150 (1970 ed.). Might we not, with Quine, simply state that such propositions are referentially opaque? Quine, W., Word & Object 141 (1960).

[14] I read §296 as originating with Wittgenstein’s sarcastic interlocutor, so it doesn’t count. Also – why does he use an exclamation point here? It comes off as though he’s some kind of a child making an exciting discovery.

[15] A. J. Ayer (of all people) comes to Wittgenstein’s defense. “Wittgenstein did not deny that we have sense-experiences, including sensations of pain and feelings of movement, or that these experiences are private in at least one reputable sense of the term. He may have imagined situations in which one would have a ground for saying that different persons shared their thoughts or sensations, but in the normal way he allowed each of us to have his own. Neither did he advance the view that a man’s sensations and feelings, let alone his thoughts and images, are identical with physical events. He did not maintain that it is only if they are interpreted in physical terms, whether as referring to physiological states, or to dispositions to overt behavior, that statements about one person’s experiences can be made intelligible to another.” Ayer, A., Wittgenstein 74 (1985).

[16] Ayer, A., Wittgenstein 109 (1985).

[17] Although complicated by considerations of his mortality vis-à-vis his divinity, we also have the case of Jesus, who is reported to have “cried with a loud voice” at about the ninth hour of his crucifixion, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), Matthew 27:46. In other words, he was stating, “I am engaging in a cognitive process. I know I am in pain.”

[18] E.g., if the patient is unconscious and a bone is sticking out of the patient’s arm, then the doctor confidently might diagnose the patient has a broken arm, without soliciting patient input. Or, the patient might have no idea of what’s going on, due to lack of specialized knowledge, cognitive impairment, absence of insight, or for any number of other reasons.

[19] The use of this kind of introspective evidence in cognitive science is the subject of considerable academic debate, as it should be; see, e.g., Jack, A. & Roepstorff, A. (eds.), Trusting the Subject? (2003). One volume wasn’t enough, so they put out another one with more essays, in 2004.

[20] This taxonomy is not original with me; see, e.g., Green, M., “Cognitive Impairment and Functional Outcome in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder,” 67 J. Clin. Psychiatry 3 (2006).