I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s
–Blake, Jerusalem 10.20
1. What was all that about?
Anyone who makes a profession of writing about ideas needs to look back from time to time, and ask, “What was all that work in aid of? What have its results, if any, amounted to?”
In my case the question is made more pressing by the apparently arbitrary mishmash of topics on which I have chosen to write. Over the past half-century I have published, for instance (and among much else),work on the language of color, on the development of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, on morality and self-interest, on Derrida and deconstruction, on the book of Leviticus, on the shortcomings of Russell’s early Realism, on Orwell’s response to Swift’s depiction of the Houyhnhnms, on the Holocaust fiction of Aharon Appelfeld, and on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism as that presents itself at the turn of the twenty-first century.
One would hardly expect to find any strong unifying strand of thought and argument running through a body of work seemingly as bizarrely heterogeneous as this, let alone one capable of uniting it into a single enterprise. Nevertheless there has been one, and I will try, in this opening chapter, as briefly and baldly as I can, to say what it is. I will start by characterizing it in very general terms, to which, as the chapter continues, I shall try to add, by stages, more in the way of detail and sharpness of focus.
2. A pervasive alignment of contrasts
Among the things that define a civilization are, on the one hand, the fundamental conceptual contrasts in terms of which it chooses to understand its world, and on the other the ways in which these guiding contrasts are, at one time or another, generally understood to align with one another. We, for instance — meaning by “we” the civilization of the West – have, since the Greeks, understood our world and ourselves in terms, inter alia, of the contrast between what the Greeks called phusis and nomos, Nature and Culture. Culture, roughly speaking, covers all that responds to, or is the creation of, human will and desire. Nature, on the other hand, covers what is neither responsive to human desire, nor created at its behest.
A second contrast, as pervasive in Western thought as the first, and as protean in its transformations, is that between Appearance (or Illusion) and Reality. What is Real – or “Really There” – is what contributes to, augments, the description of the contents of the universe. What merely Appears, on the other hand – what is, or turns out to be, in the end, mere dream-work or illusion — in no way augments the tally of Really Existing Things.
Earlier ages saw these two contrasts as independent of one another. To the Greeks, Culture might deal in realities – the City, or Justice, or Friendship, say – as robustly as Nature, for its part, might trade in illusions or (mere) Appearances, in the shape of mirages, say, or dreams, or phantoms, or the rainbow.
As a result of the intellectual revolutions of the past four centuries, however, and for complex reasons, our culture has tended increasingly to see these two contrasts as strictly and systematically aligned, thus:
| Nature | Culture | ||
| Reality | Illusion | ||
| Objectivity | Subjectivity |
I’ll call this, for convenience of later reference, the Alignment of Culture with Subjectivity (or ACS for short). Insofar as we accept its fundamental justice, we move towards seeing Reality as exclusively the province of Nature, and Culture as exclusively a realm of Appearance, or Illusion, in which arbitrary convention, feeling, taste, subjective preference, occupy — or usurp — the thrones occupied, in all studies concerned with Nature, by computation, empirical verification and objective judgement.
All my work, for the past fifty-odd years, regardless of its apparent diversity of topic and argument, has been devoted to a single purpose: that of discovering arguments capable of contesting and, if possible, destabilizing the common perception of the above alignment as both rigorously exclusive and intellectually inescapable.
3. Culture, Illusion and the Meaning of Life
Why should that be considered an important, or even an interesting enterprise? One reason is that the putatively exclusive alignment of reality with Nature, and of Culture with illusion, works to promote certain kinds of peculiarly Western, and peculiarly Modern, kinds of pessimism about the possibility of finding, as people say, “meaning” in human life. One well-known locus classicus for pessimism of the kind I have in mind is Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1932 novel La Nausée. Anny, a former mistress of Sartre’s anti-hero Roquentin, has lost her belief in the existence of the ‘perfect moments’ which, for her, provided a reason for living, and she has lost it because such moments have come to seem to her, one and all, illusory, unreal; things in which one can continue to believe, if one does manage to believe, only by a continual, willed, suspension of disbelief.
“ ‘I . . . I am outliving myself,’ she repeats dully.
What can I say to her? Do I know any reasons for living?
. . . ‘Well, what about the theatre? . . . You used to say that you wanted to act because on the stage it must be possible to obtain perfect moments!’
. . . ‘A little, now and then: never very strongly. The main thing, for all of us, was the black hole in front of us, at the bottom of which there were people we couldn’t see; to them we were obviously presenting a perfect moment. But, they didn’t live it; it unfolded in front of them. And do you think that we, the actors, lived inside it? In the end it wasn’t anywhere, either on one side of the footlights or the other, it didn’t exist; and yet everyone was thinking about it. So you see, my dear,’ she says in a drawling, almost vulgar tone of voice, ‘I dropped the whole thing.’ (Sartre 1995, 216-217)
Weltschmerz of this general kind has become something of a cliché of modern French literature: Muriel Barbéry’s 2006 bestselling novel L’Élégance du Hérisson, for instance, contains a comic version of Sartre’s Anny in the shape of the frighteningly self-conscious twelve year old fille à Papa Paloma, for whom the Big Question, the one that must be answered, if she is not to conclude her life, on her thirteenth birthday, by setting her parents’ apartment on fire and committing suicide, is: “Vous croyez que la vie a un sens?” (Barbery 2006, 338)
But such feelings of emptiness, of unreality, of the viciously invented, or make-believe, character of everything we imagine makes a human life worth living, are peculiar neither to France nor to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: they have a philosophical history stretching back at least to the seventeenth. It is no accident, in other words, that Sartre was, just as Muriel Barbéry is among other things, a philosopher.
4. Reductionism and the felt absence of meaning
A powerful impetus is contributed to Anny’s way of looking at things, for instance, by the philosophical enterprise (originating in philosophy, that is, but widespread across the entire map of contemporary culture) of reductionism. Reductionism is, at the most basic level, the enterprise, or project, of purging human thought of any idea, or concept, not solidly based in sensory experience. It came into European thought originally by way of the anglicised Cartesianism of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), with its insistence that ‘complex ideas,’ if they are not to be dismissed as phantoms of the mind, must be capable of analysis into terms of ‘simple ideas’ originating in experience.
Locke calls ideas once traced, in this way, to their origins in experience, “determined.” His ideal is that “when any man uses a term he may have in his mind a determined idea which he makes it the sign of.” Where a man cannot do this, he says,
He in vain pretends to clear and distinct ideas; it is plain his are not so; and therefore there can be expected nothing but obscurity and confusion where such terms are made use of which have not such a precise determination. (Locke 1689, Epistle to the Reader)
This strand in Locke’s thought proved to have enormous staying power. It was taken up and impressively developed by Hume, Bentham, William James, C.S. Peirce and others in the Empiricist tradition in the two following centuries, received a further enormous boost in the last century from the Vienna Circle Positivism of Carnap, Schlick and others, was popularised in the English-speaking world in the 1930’s by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, and today furnishes the groundwork of a great many ongoing philosophical enterprises.
Nor is this influence surprising or undeserved. There is indeed nothing but “obscurity and confusion”, or worse, to be expected from taking seriously many ideas which have at times powerfully dominated this or that landscape of human culture: the ideas of witch, or demonic possession, or Aryan race, or law of history, for instance. And no doubt one way of seeing why they denote nothing real is to ask, with William James, for the “cash-value in experiential terms” (James 1907, lecture II) of alleged truths employing them.
5. The Real as the extra-human
The trouble with this otherwise unexceptionable proposition lies in what it seems to imply about the relationship of our ideas, or concepts, to reality. Sensory experience, when it is not erroneous or hallucinatory, is by definition free from any element of interpretation or wish-fulfilment on the part of the observer. It reveals to the observer what would continue to exist even if he himself or she herself were to cease to exist. In that sense, it reveals to her the content of extra-human Reality. The burden of the long tradition of empiricist reductionism summarized by James’ graphic metaphor of “cash value’ is thus that a content can be supposed to designate something real only if it designates some aspect of the extra-human.
The exclusiveness of the alignment, respectively, of Reality with extra-human Nature, and of Culture with mere Appearance, or Illusion, seems to follow as an immediate consequence. For to hold that Reality can only be encountered in the content of sensory experience, just is to hold that the activity of the mind in the invention and constitution of concepts can serve, in itself, to generate only the conceptual equivalent of smoke and mirrors: is impotent in itself to add a single item to the tally of real things.
The creative impotence of the mind is of course, a main point of agreement between Locke and Sartre (which is no doubt one reason why Sartre, alone among twentieth century French and German authors in the tradition of existential phenomenology, succeeded in reaching a wide and sympathetic English-speaking readership in mainstream ‘Analytic’ academic philosophy.) For Locke the impotence of the mind consists in its inability to imagine for itself a new ‘simple idea’, its conceptual activity consisting solely in combining and recombining those derived from experience. For Sartre, the impotence of the mind, or better of Consciousness (or Dasein as he calls it, distorting for his own purposes a term of Heidegger’s), is a matter of Consciousness simply possessing no content (no Being, as he would put it), of its being no more than a vagrant, floating power of denial, of contrasting some arbitrarily selected this with some equally arbitrarily chosen that, to give, by means of these essentially factitious contrasts, essentially fictive, factitious kinds of structure and meaning to human life.
In the light of these thoughts I can perhaps now cross another bridge in the process of clarifying what I take myself to have been up to, philosophically, for the past half-century. I have been trying to disturb the commonplace alignments widely understood to hold between Reality and Nature, Culture and Illusion; but beyond that, attempting to do so in a in a specific way: by finding arguments capable of subverting the widespread belief in the impotence of human ingenuity, as expressed in the constitution of Culture, to create anything that can reasonably be regarded as ‘really existing’: to make, in other words, a contribution of its own to the roster of what Bertrand Russell liked to call the Constituents of Reality.
6. Descartes’ project and the privileging of the individual mind
It might be wondered why, in developing these initial distinctions, I have chosen to contrast Nature with Culture, rather than, as most post-Renaissance philosophy has tended to do, with Mind, or Consciousness, understanding by those terms not something along the exaltedly metaphysical lines of Hegelian Geist, but rather, more simply, the mind, or consciousness, of some — or any — individual human being.
The reason is that since — according to me — the conviction that the boundaries of the human essentially coincide with those of the individual mind contributes largely to the intractability of the problem I have been outlining, it is unlikely to contribute much to its solution.
That conviction is in the main a consequence of the determining rôle played by the philosophy of René Descartes in directing the future course of European philosophy. Descartes introduced into European philosophy two principles that continue to dominate it.
The first is that the central task of philosophy is the critical examination of the grounds and validity of claims to possess knowledge of the truth of propositions. I’ll label this the Principle of Grounding.
The second in effect encapsulates the displacement, in post-Renaissance European thought, of the power to validate from collective intellectual or religious authority to independent inquiry. It condenses that impulse into the thought that whatever it is that confers validity on claims to knowledge must be something in principle internal to the mind of the individual knower, in a sense that entails its independence from that individual’s relationships to others, and from any conventional or institutional arrangements or practices that such relationships might involve. Let’s call this the Principle of Internality. It says. In effect, that whatever processes can satisfy the Principle of Grounding must, in order to do so, proceed internally to the individual mind.
These two principles place rather narrow limits on the kinds of solace that could intelligibly be sought by someone in the position of Sartre’s Anna or Barbery’s Paloma: by someone, that is, tragically haunted by a sense of the factitious, the arbitrary, the ungrounded, the ‘merely conventional’ character of everything that sets off human life as human, and thus as, potentially at least, valuable in human terms, against the blankly inhuman flux of natural necessity presented by the extra-human world.
Take, for example, the consoling belief that there exists such a thing as Duty. In L’élégance du hérisson, the philosophically astute infant Paloma has this to say of her father:
[Papa] still believes that something exists called Duty, and although in my opinion his belief is chimerical, it protects him from the debility of cynicism. (Barbery 2006, 62)
The issue here is exactly the one that I have been attempting to focus upon: is Duty real? Do duties in some sense really exist, or is the notion as ‘chimerical,’ as much a fantasy of human self-delusion, as those of ‘Aryan race’ or ‘demonic possession’?
How are we to address this question? The Principle of Grounding tells us that the problem is one of validating a claim to knowledge: specifically, to knowledge of the real existence of duties. What is required to settle the matter, therefore, is some means of definitively establishing the truth, either of the statement S, that duties ‘really exist’, or the truth of some other statement ς whose truth entails the truth of S.
The Principle of Internality, however, imposes the further requirement that any process capable of grounding the truth of S or ς must proceed internally to the mind of the individual enquirer, in a sense of ‘internal’ that excludes any consideration rooted in the nature of the social order to which he or she belongs.
Finally, the general empiricist argument that a concept can only be held to designate something real if it can be shown to possess what James called a “cash-value in experiential terms”, places a further constraint upon enquiry.
These three requirements working together entail that a concept like ‘duty,’ which is evidently in some sense a creation of the human mind, can be held to designate something real only if it can be shown to possess a descriptive content capable of being encountered by the individual mind in its sensory experience: that is to say, in its experience of the extra-human.
This is not merely a difficult challenge to meet. It is, clearly, a challenge that cannot in principle be met, because the terms in which it is formulated are mutually contradictory. It is because the series of Cartesian and post-Cartesian requirements just canvassed broadly define what Western Culture understands by the term ‘critical reflection’ that Bernard Williams was no doubt right up to a point to argue, in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy –though I air elsewhere some serious doubts about the ultimate soundness of Williams’ argument (Harrison 2012, 37-40) — that the merely assumed moral certainties of ‘traditional societies’, such as Paloma’s Papa’s touching belief that “something exists called Duty”, cannot survive the corrosive power of philosophical criticism: that, as Williams puts it, “critical reflection can destroy knowledge.” (Williams 1985, 167)
To sum up, one of the main supports of the alignment of reality with Nature, and of Culture with mere appearance has long been the Cartesian doctrine that the central problems of philosophy concern the possibility of validating propositionally formulable claims to knowledge from a standpoint interior to the individual mind.
Among other things, that doctrine automatically serves to devalue the claim of any collective body, institution or collection of social practices to be either in itself a source of knowledge, or in itself creative of “realities” in any serious, literal sense of that term. It is this more than anything else, I think, which has made modern philosophy, as the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis believed, so profoundly anti-literary. Writing recently in the TLS, Stefan Collini has this to say about the influence exerted by Leavis’ ideas between the 1920’s and the end of the 60’s.
Ultimately, the measure of Leavis’ impact had less to do with whether Leavis’ pupils and readers shared his (emphatically positive) judgments about Shakespeare or George Eliot, or even his (relentlessly negative) judgments about the New Statesman and J.B. Priestley. Rather, it had to do with whether they thought that literary criticism mattered because it, uniquely, involved disciplined judgments about what makes for “life”, for a fully human existence. (Collini 2012, 4)
Leavis, in fact, was not only of the opinion that major literary work deals in something worth calling knowledge: that it has things to teach us about the nature of a fully human life. He argues also that it is one of the major forces operating to create “the human world”: to constitute, that is, a certain department of Reality itself: human reality. (Leavis 1975, passim.) The Cartesian doctrines that have occupied us for the past few paragraphs, of course, entail the absurdity of both these claims. If the reality of things can be encountered only through attention to the content of sensory experience, it follows that it can neither be encountered nor created through the elaboration of literary fictions, whose function, therefore, can only ever be to amuse, console or mislead.
It was Leavis’s powerful sense of the centrality of those doctrines to the English-speaking philosophy of his day that led him to regard the critic as necessarily an “anti-philosopher.” My own work has been in part devoted to disarming the pessimism of this judgment, by attempting to show that, and how, there can be a philosophy that, while maintaining the standards of rigor and clarity in argument which have distinguished the English-speaking intellectual tradition since Hume, nevertheless allows rational breathing-space to the convictions concerning the power of literary art both to illuminate human reality, and in part and at times actually to constitute human reality, so tenaciously defended by Leavis — whom in turn I defend, in the ways sketched in a subsequent essay here by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, in two chapters of a new book, (Harrison 2014, Chapters 4 and 5)
7. Why not the Continentals?
The Western philosophical tradition might be thought to offer, despite what I have just said concerning the pervasiveness of the Cartesian standpoint and its various glories and miseries, a number of ways of representing, on the one hand, the mind as a source of knowledge, and on the other, mental operations as capable in principle of constituting reality. They include, for instance, Platonism and many forms of post-renaissance Rationalism, including the German Transcendental Idealism that reaches its pinnacle in Hegel. In the twentieth century they have included the Transcendental Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, some types of existential phenomenology, including those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and even, in certain ways, such ‘post-Modernist’ writers as Derrida or Foucault. Some of these recent writers – Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, for instance – are profoundly anti-Cartesian in their thinking; others, such as Husserl, are, on the contrary, deeply committed to the Cartesian project.
The relationship of this entire field of ‘Continental” philosophical debate to the English-speaking tradition on which my own mind cut its teeth — the tradition running from Descartes and Locke, by way of the classical British empiricists, to the ‘Analytic philosophy’ initiated by Russell, Frege, Moore and Wittgenstein, and today dominant in most philosophy departments in the English-speaking world – has historically been, with the possible exception of Platonism, an uneasy one. Despite attempts from time to time to domesticate, as it were, such ‘Continental’ writers into the English-speaking tradition, attempts visible, for instance in the influence of Kant on the work of Sir Peter Strawson, of Husserl on Professor Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, or of Hegel on the work of John McDowell or Robert Brandom, the suspicions of profoundly Empiricist minds with regard to the a priori in any of its forms, however ingenious, has, on the whole, sufficed to keep the gates closed.
The judgment implicit in that rejection is one with which, in broad outline at least, and despite many specific caveats and local indulgences, including admiration, unqualified for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and qualified for Jacques Derrida, I would not quarrel. I am to that extent a child of the English-speaking tradition. On the other hand I have found my main inspiration as a philosopher not in that tradition’s most characteristic recent representatives – Carnap, say, or W.V. Quine, or Nelson Goodman, or Donald Davidson, or Michael Dummett – but in the work of the one great Continental Outsider whom the English-speaking tradition has been compelled by the history of its twentieth century development to embrace as its own: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
8. Reading Wittgenstein for arguments
Wittgenstein’s work is, notoriously, aphoristic and arcane to an extent that encourages exegetical disagreement on a grand scale. Though Wittgenstein worried incessantly that his work was misunderstood, his cavalier disregard for the usual means of preventing misunderstanding is brandished with cheerful insouciance in the opening sentence of his Cambridge lectures for the Michaelmas Term of 1934:
What we say will be easy, but to know why we say it will be very difficult. (Wittgenstein (1979, 77)
At the moment the fashion in Wittgenstein exegesis, pioneered three decades ago by Richard Rorty’s celebration of Wittgenstein as an ‘edifying’ rather than a ‘systematic’ philosopher (Rorty 1980, 367-368 and passim.), and now represented by James Conant, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond and others of the “new Wittgensteinians,” (Crary, Read, 2000) is to read Wittgenstein as a principled opponent of anything in the nature of philosophical argument.
My impulse has been the contrary one which I share with some other recent interpreters, including Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (Moyal-Sharrock 2007), namely, to take it for granted that Wittgenstein’s work, like that of any other major philosopher, is rich in arguments, and to try to articulate them by a reading that, eschewing pleasing but premature generalities, stays obstinately close enough to the detail of Wittgenstein’s admittedly difficult texts to stand some chance of exposing their workings.
I learned this approach from a member of Wittgenstein’s original Cambridge circle, Peter Geach, whose student I was fortunate enough to be at Birmingham University in the mid-1950’s. I was attracted from the outset by Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesianism, which is of a profoundly original type, entirely distinct from any of the ‘Continental’ writers I mentioned earlier. But I was never tempted to suppose – an illusion popular at the time, though never shared by Wittgenstein himself – that Wittgenstein’s texts offer the final word on any philosophical issue. “My” Wittgenstein is the man who writes glumly in the Preface to those parts of the Investigations that issued whole from his hands, as distinct from being posthumously assembled,
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into . . . a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks . . .
And who adds,
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thought of his own (Wittgenstein 1958, ixe-xe)
I have tried in my work to remain faithful to this last request of Wittgenstein. That is to say, I have tried to arrive at some “thoughts of my own” that build on and extend the insights I take myself to have gained from his work. At the same time, wherever I take myself to have discovered in him an argument of serious moment neglected by the exegetical tradition, I have tried to make clear in print, by close textual exegesis, both where – and how — it is to be found in his work, and what role it plays there.
9. Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesianism
Quite early in reading Wittgenstein I was struck, like many others, by two aspects of his thought in the Philosophical Investigations that directly conflict with the two Cartesian principles, the Principle of Grounding and the Principle of Internality, identified in §6.
The first is its anti-reductionism. Descartes’ philosophy rests, in effect, on the idea that sentences expressing doubt, including skeptical, or ‘philosophical’ doubt, always express genuine propositions, and hence can be answered by appeal to equally genuine propositions, of contrary content which happen to be not merely true, but indubitably so. This sets in train the philosophical project, characteristic of the empiricist tradition, of determining what proportion of our everyday beliefs can be rescued from the corrosive operations of skeptical doubt by ‘reductively’ redefining them in terms of some class of putatively indubitable statements: characteristically those of sensory experience. And that in turn leads very rapidly to the conclusion that, since very little of what we ordinary take as ‘real’ in human terms can be reductively saved in this way, the bulk of it must be consigned to the category of smoke and mirrors: of consoling illusion.
Wittgenstein’s response to this entire project is to deny the fundamental claim on which it rests; namely, the claim that sentences expressing skeptical doubt express genuine propositions. This move is announced from the outset of Wittgenstein’s philosophical career, at Tractatus 6.51 –
Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (Wittgenstein 1961,149)
—and becomes a leitmotiv of his later work. Much argument in the later work is devoted to the precise identification the point at which further reductive debunking of this or that aspect of human life becomes otiose – at which, as Wittgenstein sometimes puts it, ‘the spade turns’ – because the doubts that supposedly motivate it concerning its interpersonal objectivity (its reality, that is to say); become, at that point, empty, vacuous (Harrison 1991b, Moyal-Sharrock 2007). At such points our attempts to describe the human condition reach bedrock. A range of fundamental beliefs, that is to say, turn out to be in principle unchallengeable, not because all challenges to them can be seen off by appeal to some chimerical deus ex machina of propositionally formulable certainty; but rather because all supposed challenges to them turn out to be internally incoherent in way which subvert intelligible propositional formulation on their part. And if the ‘bedrock’ beliefs which remain standing at this point include some, such as the belief in the reality of the conscious experiences of others, that the Cartesian tradition in philosophy tempts us to regard as ‘naïve’ or ‘uncritical’ –then so much the worse for the Cartesian tradition.
The second aspect of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that I found attractive is its attack on what philosophical shorthand calls ‘privacy’. Two doctrines central to the Cartesian tradition in Western philosophy are that the experienced content of the conscious life of the individual subject is ‘private’ in the sense of being directly cognitively accessible only to its possessor; and that access by the individual subject both to knowledge and to the resources of conceptual thought is logically independent of the actual existence either of the material world or of other persons. It follows that, for the Cartesian, knowledge and meaning themselves are ‘private’ possessions, in the sense that they originate in, and are creatures of, the timeless inner life of the knowing subject, rather than ‘public’ possessions of an historically developing human community.
Wittgenstein, in his later work, attacks this entire complex of ideas, in a way wholly unfamiliar to the Western philosophical tradition up to that point. He does so by arguing, in effect, that to form a concept – in effect, to bestow a meaning upon a general name in a language – is not a matter of using it to label a recurrent feature of experience, but rather of assigning it a role in some socially devised practice, or ‘language-game’ (Sprachspiele). If that is so, then, pace Descartes, access to conceptual thought, and hence to propositionally formulable knowledge, is not, after all, logically independent of membership of a human community. There can be no such thing as a ‘private language’, in the sense of ‘private’ introduced to philosophy by Descartes.
10. The basic structure of the enterprise (I): colour-qualia
The project of contesting the alignment of culture with subjectivity has, as I admitted at the outset, involved me in a degree of disrespect for the conventional boundaries of disciplines. This in no way pleases me, since I am only too well aware of the reason why such boundaries exist, and why they are commonly regarded as permeable only to charlatanry. My project, whatever one makes of it, divided from the outset, however, morel or less independently of my will, into a pair of projects, one in epistemology and philosophy, the other, this time interdisciplinary from the outset, bringing together literary studies and moral philosophy.
The first produced a book, Form and Content (Harrison 1973), with supplementary argument in a later essay, “Identity, Predication and Color” (Harrison1986). It concerns the vexed philosophical question of whether what are sometimes called color-qualia — the sensations of color that are actually experienced, as distinct from the physical properties of light, in terms of which physical optics accounts for them — possess objective reality as phenomena accessible in common to different observers (unlike, say, hallucinations or dreams). The importance of the issue lies in part in the fact that, since color-qualia appear on the face of it to be conscious states, the question of their place in an objective description of reality invokes the larger issue of the ultimate reality of consciousness itself.
Negative answers follow several well-trodden routes. It has been variously suggested that statements about color-qualia are reducible without loss of meaning to statements about wavelength; that such statements are topic neutral, in the sense that the only objectively verifiable statements we can make concerning qualitative colour concern, in fact, the relative similarities or dissimilarities of colour samples; or that the conscious experience of colour has roughly the same relationship to objective reality as do hallucinations, or other errors of sense.
Ordinary people, however, uninitiated into the complexities of philosophical doubt, tend, I take it, to assume that the reason why discussions about color qualia (over whether, for instance, the rather insipid pale blue of the curtains clashes with the peculiarly acid yellow of the carpet) can proceed on a more or less rational basis is that color-qualia are as objectively real as the curtains or the carpet: that is, real in the sense of being accessible in common to different observers.
One main object of Form and Content was to defend this un-philosophical belief by showing how, and why, it is possible for there to be objective judgments, not just about (the relative similarities and dissimilarities of) color samples: but about colors.
The argument hinges on two obvious facts about the functioning of basic color-names, such as ‘red’ or ’green.’ The first is that basic color names like “blue” or “red” plainly do not name single discriminable recurrent qualia, but an indefinitely large range of such qualia (specific colour-presentations, each exhibiting a different combination of hue, saturation and tonality) some of which may be unknown to any given competent user of the name. The second is that each speaker of a given language L somehow learns to apply each basic color name Nc of L in a way which matches the practice of other speakers even though he/she can only have been taught expressly to associate Nc with a given quale (color-presentation) P in the case of a very small proportion of the total number composing the extension of Nc, and even though the given presentation about which he is called upon to exercise this talent may, on occasion, be previously unfamiliar to him.
The problem is to account for these capacities. The answer the book proposes is of a new type, though in itself obvious enough once encountered. Learning to use color names must involve each speaker learning a practice that enables him to match color-presentations to color names without the need to consult other speakers. That will suffice to make available an explanation of the ability of different speakers to independently match one another’s assignments of color names, even in the case of new or unfamiliar color-presentations. The explanation will simply be that all speakers of a given language L make use of the same practice for matching presentations to basic color names. The book argues that such a practice can only work in one way: by selecting a range of sets of ‘focal’ color presentations, Sblue , Syellow , Sred, , Sgreen, each set correlated with a single basic color name, and applying the rule, “if presentation P is relatively more similar to the focal set associated with Nn than it is to any of the other names focal sets, then P takes the color name Nn.”
The possibility of operating such a practice implies, evidently, that color language is not “topic-neutral”, since a precondition for its operation is that color qualia exhibit properties of relative similarity and dissimilarity to one another, and hence are not, after all, devoid of properties. Hence, also, the fact that different speakers obtain comparable results from operating the practice, in terms of conformity of judgment in color naming, gives each speaker good reason to conclude that other speakers see the same colors he sees. Because the practice operates on the entire field of discriminable color-presentations, a field which turns out in practice to have a very complex internal geometry of relationships of relative similarity (as can be verified by inspecting a Munsell colour chart of surface colors displaying anything approaching the full range of hues in all their variations of saturation and tonality) the types of skeptical hypothesis normally supposed by philosophers to create problems for the everyday assumption that colors are objects of perception as publicly accessible as physical objects fail to yield the desired result. What the sceptic requires, to yield his preferred result where the operation of the color-naming practice is concerned, is a systematic reversal of all or some part of the total array of surface colors which would come out neutral with respect to the practice. But, the book argues, the actual geometry of the total color array makes that impossible. And if the geometry of the array did make that possible, since the possibility would be apparent to any observer, the consequence would be, not that our supposed ability to refer in common to colors would be illusory, but that, since the color-naming practice would in that case be inoperable, the language of color, and with it the possibility of reference to color, would never have arisen in the first place.
Let me now try to tie this argument back to the basic project, of contesting the plausibility of ACS, of which it constituted an initial phase. The thesis of the alignment of culture with subjectivity inclines us to think that objectivity and social construction are opposites. What the argument of Form and Content inclines one to think is that, on the contrary, objectivity is logically dependent on certain kinds of conceptual construction, in the sense of being unobtainable without it. The evidence that we actually employ to determine whether another person sees colors as we do is what he or she says, in determinate contexts, concerning the colors of objects present to us both. And what gives his or her remarks evidential status is the fact that our common language requires each of us to operate in common with the same set of procedures (as Wittgenstein would say, a common “language game”) for matching color presentations to color-names. And since those procedures work in terms of properties that can only belong to conscious states (the relative blueness of two shades of mauve, for instance), they also have the effect of precipitating into the common world of the objectively specifiable, as it were, phenomena that the Cartesian tradition in philosophy must, by its own logic, treat as ‘private’, that is to say as in principle cognitively inaccessible to any mind save that of their possessor. The threat the argument presents to the alignment of culture with subjectivity, that is to say, is that it makes so-called ‘mental states’, in the shape of color-qualia, as objectively accessible in common to different speakers as more obviously ‘physical’ entities, and does so through the operation of something – the practices underlying the part of our language that deals with color – that is quite obviously a ‘cultural construct.’ It rides roughshod, in short, over the Principle of Internality: the Cartesian principle that anything capable of conferring validity on a claim to knowledge on the part of an individual knower must be something in principle independent of that individual’s relationships to others, and independent also of any conventional or institutional arrangements or practices that such relationships might involve.
11. The basic structure of the enterprise (II): Duty and Interest
I found myself, at around the same period, exploring an exactly parallel case of interplay between interpersonal objectivity and its culturally constructed basis, in a study of the eighteenth century novelist Henry Fielding. This time the philosophical issue concerned the ontological status – “chimerical” (in Paloma’s words), or real, and if the latter, in what sense ‘real’? – of duties.
The modern conviction that duty is a chimerical notion originates with Hume. Famously, in the 1739 Treatise of Human Nature, he poses the question whether “Moral Distinctions are deriv’d from Reason”, and answers it in the negative. His argument is that the only way of showing moral distinctions to be rational in origin would be to demonstrate that they capture relationships that really exist in nature. If they did mark such differences, then they would apply wherever, in nature, such relationships recur. But with moral distinctions this is not the case. When an oak sapling overtops its parent tree and kills it “[there is] wanting”, as Hume puts it, “[no] relation, which is discoverable in parricide or ingratitude.” (Hume 1739/1978, 467). Yet no user of these moral terms would suppose that this set of circumstances constitutes a case either of parricide or ingratitude. It follows, Hume argues in effect, that such moral distinctions merely record the fact that a given set of relationships between human actors excites in us, for reasons connected, on the one hand with natural feelings of benevolence, and on the other with the schooling in the demands of society inflicted by our upbringing, sentiments of approval or disapproval.
Hume’s strategy here, it seems to me, both furthers and enshrines what I have called The Alignment of Culture with Subjectivity. He takes it for granted, in other words, that unless moral distinctions can be grounded in (extra-human) Nature, they can capture no more than a set of essentially subjective emotional commitments on the part of individual minds.
A further presupposition of Hume’s thought here is, of course, the Lockeian one that Culture – the realm of interpersonal interaction and conceptual constitution – can possess neither epistemic nor ontological significance: is impotent either to yield knowledge or to create realities. Hume, along with the rest of the post-Cartesian tradition in Western philosophy, up to and including Kant, in other words, treats an enquiry into the nature of moral concepts, in effect, as one component, or phase, of the Cartesian project of self-scrutiny. That project invites each of us, so far as we pretend to rational independence of mind, to examine not only our factual beliefs, but also our moral beliefs, to determine what, if anything, warrants the uncritical confidence we repose in them.
Once one takes up such a stance, its possible outcomes appear to be restricted to two, and two only. Either our beliefs, and the conceptual distinctions in terms of which we frame them, are forced upon us by the content of experience, or else they are instilled in us, without the experiential warrant that they plainly lack, by essentially social processes of education and acculturation. Hume’s argument is that all moral beliefs and distinctions – all those, at least going beyond such “natural virtues” as the instinctive tendency to feel discomfort in the presence of pain suffered by others — fall into the latter category.
We are thus confronted with a further refinement of the contrast between Nature and Culture that, because of the apparent impossibility of grounding the latter in the former, causes Sartre’s Anna such existential anguish. Morality tout court, it seems, has no basis in natural reality; is merely an artifact of training and acculturation, a trick of the cultural light: a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. Academic philosophers, being for the most part respectable family men, have shown themselves, on the whole, reluctant to draw these shocking conclusions from the Humean arguments whose apparent force they demonstrate to their students every day of the teaching year. But another, darker tradition of European letters, including Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Sade and Nietzsche, among others, has not been averse to doing so.
Hobbes and Mandeville, indeed, originated a further variation on the skepticism about the reality of moral distinctions that continues to dominate academic discourse on the subject. Both Leviathan and The Fable of the Bees inculcate the idea that interest, per se is, intrinsically and necessarily, opposed to morality per se. Some such contrast seems to follow indeed, from the obvious fact that morality per se involves restraint; whereas it is surely conceptually broken-backed – so the argument goes –- to imagine that an individual agent could conceivably be constrained by his or her interests. For the notion of interest is, surely, we tell ourselves, as conceptually tied to the notion of freedom as that of morality is conceptually tied to the notion of constraint. The notion of interest is, after all, simply the notion of what an individual agent would prefer to have or to do, and would have or do if were not for the range of constraints – of intelligence, charm, money, social position – under which he or she labours; constraints that include, among others, those imposed by morality.
Another way of framing the same supposed insight would be to say that interests seek, as a matter of conceptual necessary, solely the advantage of the agent whose interests they are; whereas morality seeks to advance, not the interests of this or that particular agent, but those of ‘society’, or of individuals in general.
That in turn promotes the idea, which rose to dominance among secular intellectuals in the Enlightenment and remains largely dominant today, that morality, or sometimes ‘the highest morality’, involves relationships, not between individual persons, but between each individual person taken singly and some supra-personal entity: the (Kantian) community of all Rational Wills, the totality of beings capable of experiencing pleasure or pain, society in general, the Human Race, the Aryan Race, the Nation, the Proletariat, the Party, and so on.
What I found in Fielding was a mind of contrary purpose to this entire complex of views, and a body of work articulating a coherent alternative to it. Nowadays, recollecting Wittgenstein’s description of the job of philosophy, as he saw it, as “assembling reminders” of how our conceptual system actually works, I would describe Fielding as articulating, within the terms of a fiction, cogent reminders of why the tradition of abstract moral philosophy coming to birth in his day, and dominant in the universities of English-speaking countries down to the present, fails to describe the moral life as it is actually lived and experienced by real people.
In Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones, for example the free play of interest, far from being conceptually opposed to the constraints of duty, is liable to mutate, at this or that turn of what Coleridge called “one of the three most perfect plots ever planned” into the source of those very constraints. A good instance of this unavoidable duality of freedom and moral constraint, one among many in Tom Jones, is provided by the central crisis that precipitates the eventual gathering up of the various strands of the plot. Tom has been expelled from Paradise Hall, and faces the question of whether to take Sophia with him and marry her in defiance of Squire Western. There is no question that Sophia will go with him if he asks her. A man un-plagued by a Good Heart, as Fielding calls the propensity to attach a non–instrumental value to the needs of others, would doubtless take the chance offered him. Tom, however, asks the obvious questions: “Could he support her? No”, “Would the experience of being dragged through muddy roads and bare lodgings by a penniless lover destroy her? Very likely”: – and makes the obvious decision: to leave on his own, without her.
To minds impressed by the Enlightenment partitioning-off of interest with freedom, and morality with constraint, the obvious question to put to Fielding is: “But what could conceivably make it believable, outside the charmed circle of an invented literary fiction, that a rational agent should, or could, attach a non-instrumental value of that kind to the needs of another, when doing so must run flatly against the claims of his own interests and desires?”
Fielding’s answer to that question, I argued, is to be found in his early novel (or perhaps better, moral fable), Jonathan Wild.(Fielding, 1743/1997) Wild was a real person, a famous ‘thief-taker’ of the previous century, who was able, for a fee, to ‘recover’ stolen goods only because they had been stolen in the first place by the gang he headed; a gang whose members, when they became troublesome, he got rid of by turning them over to the justices and the hangman. In Wild, in other words, Fielding has provided himself with a character for whom no other human being possesses non-instrumental value; is anything more than a tool, to be used while it serves, and when it no longer serves, to be destroyed for whatever further convenience its destruction may provide. The character of Wild sites him, of course, in a philosophical controversy as old as Plato’s Republic, concerning the relationship, if any, between self-interest and moral virtue. One side of this dispute, Wild’s side, is represented in the Republic by Thrasymachus, who argues that virtue is merely a web of artificial restraints devised by the majority of weaklings in society to prevent the strong man doing as he pleases; restraints to be kicked aside with just contempt by anyone strong enough to ignore them. Morality and self-interest, that is, are opposed so radically as to make compromise impossible.
Philosophers in Fielding’s day, notably Bishop Butler, were apt to argue, against this Thrasymachean deliverance, that self-interest is not merely compatible with, but actually advanced by, the practice of moral virtue. Fielding makes short shrift of moral complacency of this type:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and conformable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. (Fielding 1749, Bk.XV, Ch.1)
But this is by no means the piece of febrile cynicism that some critics have wished to make of it. Jonathan Wild has provided Fielding with a very much sharper and more damaging answer to Thrasymachus than Butler’s. Fielding’s treatment of Wild in the novel focuses, among other things on the gains and losses intrinsic to Wild’s Thrasymachean stance.
Ex hypothesi, no human being can have any non-instrumental significance for Wild. This certainly allows him the radical Thrasymachean freedom – which Fielding sardonically describes as GREATNESS — to pursue his interests, but leaves him, equally necessarily, with a strikingly reduced range of interests to pursue. Not only are all the interests of family life, domestic and paternal affection necessarily closed to Wild, but also all those wider interests in community affairs, ranging all the way from patriotic or political solidarity to passionate involvement in stamp collecting, the local gardening club, or the discussion of philosophical puzzles, which cannot be enjoyed except at the cost of allowing others and their affairs to take on, for one, a more than merely instrumental significance. Wild’s reduction of all others to the status of mere tools, that is to say, reduces the ends to which these tools are to be employed to the very small set which belong intrinsically to the individual in abstraction from the human world: gluttony, lust and the exercise of power.
The problem Fielding sees, for the Thrasymacheans among us, is that any attempt to acquire a less parsimonious array of interests, and with them access to a less parsimonious array of potential rewards in life, must necessarily involve one in relationships to others which, because they require one, as a conceptual condition of enjoying the potential rewards of the relationship, not merely to admit intellectually the non-instrumental value, in principle, of the abstract Other, but actually to experience entirely concrete and specific Others as non-instrumentally valuable: a state of mind that, equally necessarily, exposes one to the discomforts of finding oneself no longer able to avoid taking seriously certain correlative and equally specific moral demands.
The difference between Bishop Butler’s answer to Thrasymachus and Fielding’s should now be evident. Where Butler holds, comfortably enough, that moral virtue is a means to the satisfaction of interest, Fielding takes the very much bleaker line that the discomfort of feeling ourselves open to moral demands is the price we must pay, not for any increased likelihood that we shall succeed in satisfying our interests, but merely for having all but a very small subset of them.
That thought, a thought that, so far as I am aware, has escaped the notice of the philosophical moralists, not only of Fielding’s day, but our own, nevertheless seems to me a profound one. What Fielding has noticed is that in real life the bulk of our interests are rooted in relationships with others. Such relationships must be maintained, irrespective of our success in satisfying the correlative interests arising from them, if we are to go on merely possessing those interests. It is the maintenance of relationships implied by the mere continued possession of the bulk of our interests, in other words, rather than, as Butler and others have supposed, some notional increase in the likelihood of satisfying them, that renders us subject to moral constraints.
Hume bequeathed to modern philosophy the idea that a moral concept is formed by attaching to a factually descriptive notion a certain emotional tone, or response – of approval or disapproval, as the case may be, and that no rational ground can be found merely in the brute factual nature of a thing for choosing approval over disapproval or vice versa. There is nothing, for instance, in the brute factual nature of mass extermination (by an earthquake, say) that makes it any more rational to deplore it for the pain it causes than to applaud it for reducing the excess population.
It ought to follow that there is nothing in the brute nature of Tom’s Sophia that could make it any more rational for him to bridle his desire for her than to use her sexually and discard her. The answer to this suggested by Fielding’s narrative is that what motivates the former choice for Tom is not Sophia’s nature, but the nature of the relationship between them – that it is one of love rather than lust — given that he wishes to preserve that relationship: naturally enough, since it, and not bare lust, is the source of the rewards he finds in her company.
In looking to “natural relationships”, then, as the sole means of providing a rational basis for moral notions such as ‘parricide’, Hume, pursuing the logic of the empiricist version of Cartesianism he has imbibed from Locke and Berkeley, is simply looking in the wrong direction. (This is a thought I later found I shared with the late Julius Kovesi, though he seems to have arrived at it by sheer force of native intelligence, rather than by theft from a great novelist.) For insight into the logical character of moral notions Hume should be looking not to natural relations but to moral ones: that is to say, not out and away from the human towards non-human Reality, but rather towards the possibilities created, through the structures and conventions current in specific societies, for human individuals to acquire interests whose possession depends on the maintenance of relationships, and towards the specific requirements of moral restraint rendered necessary to the maintenance of this or that relationship by its specific nature. The peculiar horror of parricide as a crime derives, after all, not from the natural, genetic relation between parent and child, but from the annihilation – the anéantissement, to use the more expressive French term that Sartre employs in a different context – that it visits upon the moral relationship between parent and child: its destruction, at one blow, of all the possibilities of human personal growth and exchange of goods implicit in that relationship.
It takes a good deal of formal philosophical training before people begin to find the so-called Fact-Value Distinction too obvious to be seriously questioned. Less apt pupils continue to feel, obscurely, that something in Hume’s argument must be wrong, even if they can’t quite see what it could be. Such notions as duty, trust, betrayal, mendacity, responsibility, or to take examples from Fielding, prudence, love, meanness or Goodness of Heart, they feel, bind together description and evaluation more closely than Hume can allow. Bernard Williams, in a book cited earlier, calls them, for this reason, thick moral concepts (Williams 1985,129). The suggestion I found myself encountering in Fielding suggests a way of accounting for the mysterious ‘thickness’ of such notions. They are ‘thick’ because they capture what must, in the nature of things, be done, or avoided, if relationships, and the patterns of interest and possibilities of satisfaction bound up with them, are to be maintained.
But what the phrase ‘in the nature of things’ gestures towards, in this way of putting things, is not brute, inhuman Nature, but rather the ‘second nature’ that collective human ingenuity operating over long historical periods has brought into being through the devising of complicatedly interlocking systems of collective practice, which in turn form the foundation of still more complex arrays of interests and courses of life that, once possessed and pursued, their possessors wish to go on possessing and pursuing.
These ideas raise doubts over the plausibility of ACS that exactly parallel those raised by the arguments of Form and Content. If what it is to be an objective reality, rather than a subjective fantasy, is to be a matter of common, interpersonal experience, something capable of being discussed and examined in a common, interpersonally understandable language, then the phenomena captured by such terms as ‘duty’, ‘trust’, ‘betrayal’, ‘mendacity’, ‘prudence’, ‘love’, ‘mean-spiritedness’, are objective realities. But their status as objective realities is a function, not solely of the inhuman, extra-cultural Realities studied by the natural sciences, but rather of the interaction between, on the one hand, human potentialities that are indeed ‘natural’ in that sense, including physical and emotional needs and proclivities shared with other primate species and indeed with other animals, and, on the other hand, the interpersonally devised practices and institutional structures which constitute the world of Culture. Culture, in short, contrary to what Locke argued and most subsequent empiricists have supposed, is not ontically passive, any more than it is epistemically passive. It operates upon the materials of brute Nature in ways that introduce new types of entity into the world.
12. Securing the Foundations
Those two books (Harrison 1973, 1975), bizarrely different in ostensible topic as they must seem, given the underlying identity of their philosophical concerns, laid down the foundations upon which all my subsequent work has been built. They provide a foundation traversed, however, by two very substantial cracks, or fissures.
The first concerns the relationship between literature and philosophy, or more generally, “ideas.” Academic philosophers are apt to assume that their conclusions face no threat from the work even of major literary figures, since in philosophy, or ‘theory’, positions in general stand or fall by argument, and — as a young British colleague once put it to me, more in pity than in anger, with somewhat the air of a Victorian evangelical clergyman reasoning with a hopeless but perhaps not altogether unredeemable reprobate — “there are no arguments in a novel.” And even in literary studies, the term ‘novel of ideas’ is held fairly generally to connote a novel that employs, ironically or otherwise, ideas gleaned from this or that strand of the European intellectual tradition, rather than one which actually intervenes in that tradition to the point of offering serious grounds for disputing the solidity of any of its characteristic contentions.
Such assumptions mark one of those disciplinary boundaries that, in academic life, one transgresses at one’s peril. And it can hardly be denied that the early work of mine on Fielding that I have just summarized transgresses it: it would be truer to say that it goes galloping across it whooping and waving its hat. But, as I noted earlier, such boundaries do not erect themselves for no good reason, and successful transgressions come at a price.
In the present case, my disregard for the proprieties commits me to saying, in effect, “It may be true – or largely true — that there are “no arguments in literature” in the sense of formally presented structures linking premises to conclusions; but that does not entail that there is nothing in literature having effectively the force of an argument.” But, that move, of course, leaves my opponent with a counter-move. “All very well”, he will say, “but what in general is it in literature, that, according to you, allows a writer to contest arguments without actually arguing? And I mean in general: don’t just give me another bunch of examples, however persuasive. (Remember Johnson’s verdict on Bishop Berkeley: “Sir, he perswades without convincing.”)
The first fissure that I felt to traverse the foundations of my work in the late 70s consisted, of course, in my lack, at that point, of a convincing answer to this style of attack.
The second, similar in some ways, concerned the point, and the potential explanatory power, of Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game (Sprachspiele). Form and Content sets that notion to work, in an unexpected and possibly fruitful way, in the context of a specific philosophical problem involving a specific segment of our conceptual vocabulary. But why should it be supposed, necessarily, to have a role in connections with other segments of that vocabulary. Even if is true that a basic color term like ‘red’ could not be given a meaning “by ostensive definition” – that is to say, simply by pointing at red samples and uttering the name – that, surely, gives us no reason to suppose that there are not many – perhaps indefinitely many – terms in our language that could, and no doubt do, acquire their meaning in that way? But then, surely, in their case, the alignment of culture with subjectivity would retain its force undiminished, since in that case, over a vast tract of our conceptual scheme, “Culture” would serve neither to add to the roster of realities nor to establish the possibility of objective reference to those provided by extra-human Nature. And while Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations certainly contains a well-known and much discussed argument, running roughly from paragraph I.28 to paragraph I.33, purporting – or, at any rate, generally supposed to purport – to show that ostensive definition could not suffice to establish the meaning of any term whatsoever, there has never been philosophical agreement over the intended structure of that argument, let alone over its validity.
During the 80’s, I continued to pursue the relationships between philosophy and literary studies opened up by my work on Fielding, on the one hand investigating new cases of similarly interesting interaction, and on the other making what seemed to me at least marginal progress in clearing up some of the theoretical puzzles and difficulties attending it; the latter particularly in connection with the late Jacques Derrida, a vastly better-known figure than myself, in whose work I have found both pleasure and stimulus, and whose project seemed to me to be, in rather interesting ways, both deeply opposed to, and deeply complicit with, my own. The bulk of this new work appeared between covers in Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Harrison 1991a).
At the same time, in Harrison 1986 (1)/1987 I extended the arguments of Form and Content about color a little further; while in Harrison 1979, 1981, 1984 and 1989, I tried to develop further, in terms of current philosophical debate, the ideas on the nature of moral restraint and moral commitment that I had discovered in Fielding.
It was really not until the 90’s of the last century, however, when I had left Sussex for the University of Utah, that I finally found a way of removing, rather than papering over, the two cracks, or fissures, I mentioned a paragraph or two ago, in the foundations of my work. The breakthrough as, rightly or wrongly, I have ever since supposed it to be, once again concerned Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein’s work had two phases, the first culminating in the publication in 1921 of the first, German-language version of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the second, beginning in around 1929, culminating in the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations (1953) and the immense nachlass which has since followed it into print. The two phases are, notoriously, very different in their philosophical content. One, textually quite persuasive and still widely accepted, attempt to capture what is fundamental about this shift, has held that whereas, in the early work, Wittgenstein accepts Frege’s doctrine, still dominant in Analytic philosophy today, that the concept of meaning is to be understood in terms of that of the truth-conditions of a statement, in his later, post-1929 work, he abandoned this Fregean suggestion, in favour of a new and darkly obscure doctrine of his own, to the effect that meaning is to be understood in terms of the notion of “use”; whatever – and the question has not proved at all an easy one for interpreters sailing on this tack to settle textually – “use” in this context may be taken to mean.
I had long suspected this to be a badly mistaken account of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development. In the early 1990s, through re-reading such traditional manuscripts as the Philosophical Remarks and the Philosophical Grammar, I thought I could begin to see why. The later Wittgenstein who came into view in the course of these re-readings has not by any means given up the commitment to the thought of Gottlob Frege that led him, in his preface to the Tractatus, to record his debt to “Frege’s great works” (den groβartigen Werken Freges). He continues in the later work to hold that the primary locus of meaning in language is the statement, and that the meaning of a sentence is to be identified with the truth-conditions of the statement or statements it expresses.
The role of the notion of ‘use’ in his later work, I had begun to see, is not at all to dislodge and replace these Fregean commitments, but the better to serve and articulate them. Following out the genesis, in earlier manuscripts, of the supposed argument against ostensive definition that begins at Investigations I.28, and which also introduces, at I.30-31, the notion of ‘use’, it began to seem to me that these passages are not really about ‘ostensive definition’ at all, at least, not in the sense in which that term is ordinarily understood by philosophers. We are really talking here about the conditions which have to be met in order that the truth-conditions of a statement be effectively specified; and the underlying assumption of 28-31 – typically, for Wittgenstein, unstated here, but easily derivable from other passages, is that the problem of defining a general name, such as ‘red’, comes essentially to the same thing as that of specifying truth-conditions for a certain class of English statements: namely, statements of the form “x is called N in English.”
Wittgenstein’s point in 28 is that the truth-conditions for such a statement S cannot be specified simply by gesturing towards a sample, ∑, of which S happens to be true, because such gesturing is incapable of singling out which aspects of ∑ are truth-relevant to S. Those aspects would, of course be singled out if we knew what was relevant to the falsity of S, but once again, and for the same reason, we cannot specify that simply by indicating a sample, ∑’. We need access to something that will serve to specify simultaneously both the truth-conditions and the falsity-conditions of S, and that something can only be the use of S: the role we have specified for it in the operation of some socially devised and maintained practice: such as, for instance, linear measurement, or the practice of matching and comparing colour-presentations relative to a chosen set of focal colours for each given basic colour name suggested in Form and Content.
Thus, if we know, in virtue of understanding the role assigned to it in one or other practice, that S is a statement of color, or length, say, then we know, and know automatically, because we can generate, through the operation of the practice, both its truth-conditions and its falsity conditions. We know, for example, for ‘x is red’, that it is true just in case x the operation of the colour-naming practice (or Sprachspiele) results in the ascription of the name ‘red’ to x, and false if it results in the ascription of any other colour name. For ‘x is 3 inches long’ we know that it is true just in case the careful operation of the practice of linear measurement ascribes that length to x, and false if it ascribes any other length.
I explore the exegetical grounds for holding such an argument to be Wittgenstein’s in Harrison 1996 and 1999. In addition, in the late 1990’s, I and my Utah colleague Professor Patricia Hanna, whose ideas concerning the meaning-scepticism of writers such as Quine and Kripke turned out to chime in very well with mine on Wittgenstein, produced a jointly authored book, published by Cambridge University Press (Harrison 2004) that explored the numerous implications of the argument, considered, for these purposes, independently of its Wittgensteinian provenance, for twentieth century philosophy,
Taken together, this body of new work had, it seemed to me, advanced the project of questioning the intellectual credentials of the Alignment of Culture and Subjectivity, at least to the extent of effectively closing the second of the two fissures, mentioned above, in my earlier work.
If Wittgenstein’s argument concerning the threefold interdependence of truth, meaning and practice goes through, that is to say, then Culture, in the shape of the web of practical and institutional arrangements on which any human society is built, is by no means to be regarded as a dust-haze, or a maze of distorting mirrors, obstructing the clear view of Reality to be had — as a long philosophical tradition has imagined — by setting aside the culture-soaked language of everyday life in favour of an ‘Ideal’ or “Logically Perfect” language whose basic terms are defined, not by way of the devices and sleights of Culture, but by direct reference to the structure of Reality itself.
On the contrary, if Wittgenstein is right, there is – could be – no such language. As the argument of Word and World demonstrates, far from Culture being a realm of vicious subjectivity, in contrast to the austere objectivity of a logically perfect language, our access to the very concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, and beyond that, to the concepts of truth and falsity themselves, along with the possibility of distinguishing between them in practical contexts of language-use, is secured only through the role played by the devices of Culture in the interpersonal establishment of the truth- and falsity-conditions of statements.
13. Extending the Building: Literature and Human Worlds
When its implications are still further explored, however, Wittgenstein’s argument turns out also to offer a way of closing the first of the two fissures in the foundations of my thinking mentioned in the preceding section.
It does that, however, in a way that goes beyond that modest goal, by suggesting answers of a new kind to two additional questions whose supposed intractability has been central to the rise of postmodernist forms of ‘theory’ in literary studies, and to a lesser extent in the humanities and social studies in general, and with it the consequent and corresponding collapse in critical humanism in academic literary studies that has taken place over the past half-century,
My own, more limited problem, to begin with that, was, as we saw, that of giving a general answer to the question “How can a work of literature confute conclusions established by argument without itself (at least in any ordinary sense) arguing? Certainly I had wanted to say in 1973 that something in Fielding’s writing had allowed him to do something of that general sort. The revised reading of Wittgenstein to which I found myself being led in the mid-90s offered, if I was correct, the key to seeing what that something might be.
Philosophy has always taken one of its more central tasks to be that of examining the nature and credentials of the concepts in which we attempt to understand the world. From Plato onwards, a leading mode of philosophical enquiry has been to ask “What do we mean by ‘N’?” or “What does ‘N’ really mean?” One of the major themes of Wittgenstein’s thought is that the “analyses” that result from such enquiries are invariably tendentious, because fundamentally theory-driven; and for that reason, interminably disputatious.
Wittgenstein suggests that what accounts for the intractable character of philosophical disagreement – a diagnosis shared, though developed in very different ways, by his Oxford contemporary J.L.Austin – is a general human tendency, one which professional philosophers share with ordinary men and women, to understand complex concepts in terms of over-simple models: ‘pictures’ as he called them. Thus, at Investigations I.115 he says,
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
It would not be wrong to see my own prolonged attempt to “get outside” what I have been calling the Alignment of Culture and Subjectivity, as in essence a Wittgensteinian enterprise of precisely the kind gestured towards in I.115: an attempt to break the power of “a picture” over the mind.
In short, the frustrating inconclusiveness of much philosophical debate has its roots, Wittgenstein thinks, in the gulf between the actual logic of concepts and that projected upon them by this or that philosophical ideal of clarity. Because the “ideal” picture of how our language works is so remote from its actual mode of engagement with reality, discourse conducted in terms of its assumptions becomes weightless: or as Wittgenstein puts it, frictionless.
The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! (Wittgenstein 1953, 46e)
Wittgenstein’s route “back to the rough ground” is bound up with his argument to the effect that giving a meaning to a statement or other expression, setting it up as a working element of language, is always a matter of stipulating a role for it in some practice (Sprachspiele) which in turn engages in concrete ways with extra-linguistic reality. The main task of philosophy as Wittgenstein understands it – of a philosophy characterized by determination to fight its way back to the rough ground, is to “assemble reminders” of the concrete roles played by words in our everyday lives.
But that, of course, is something that writers also do. A novel, or a poem is a thing made, not only of imagined events and persons, but also, and far more fundamentally, of words. And where Wittgenstein tells us, by means of argument concerning complex examples, what the difference is between using words with some sense of their concrete functions in our lives, and just spinning a line of theoretically-buttressed talk, a writer does something similar, to use another Wittgensteinian turn of phrase, by showing it: by creating an scene so well and concretely imagined that the difference between words used with some sense of their concrete weight and measure, and words tossed about in the service of a theory, or of wishful thinking, becomes palpable.
Thus, at a crucial turn of the plot in Tom Jones, Sophia must defend her right to ‘hate’ Mr Blifil against her aunt’s politic reply, conned out of Bailey’s Dictionary, that “it is impossible you should hate a man from whom you have received no injury”, and that her niece is simply confusing hatred with dislike, “which” as he aunt observes,
is no sufficient objection against marrying him. I have known many couples, who have entirely disliked each other, lead very comfortable, genteel lives.
Fielding has no argument (no passage from premises to conclusion) to offer against Mrs. Western’s plainly tendentious reconstruction of the concept of hatred, quasi-philosophical and buttressed by the authority of a lexicographer though it is: — except what we have learned of the hatefulness of Mr. Blifil’s ingrained egotism, hypocrisy and pleasure in others’ suffering, from observing him in preceding chapters of the novel. But that is surely enough, not only to ‘show’ — to ‘remind’ us — of how the terms ‘hate’ and ‘hateful’ actually function in the concrete circumstances of our lives; but to show it us in a way that shows up (as we say) the ‘politic’ metropolitan sophistication of Mrs Western as the shabby thing it is.
These thoughts seem to be driving us towards a conclusion that, on the face of it, it might seem, we ought to be doing our best to avoid: that the business of a work of literature lies not with the examination of any reality external to the work, but rather with the examination of language. “Doesn’t the move you’re making now,” my former opponent might protest, “reveal not only the bankruptcy of your whole project of contesting the Alignment of Culture with Subjectivity, but the basic solidity of that Alignment itself? For what could be more emblematic of the essential subjectivity of Culture, of Culture as essentially hermetic, as essentially cut off from Reality (from real Reality, at least), than a cultural enterprise – and a major one, at that – essentially – as you now seem to want to say — occupied not with things but only with words?”
If we are to accept the assumption that to be occupied with words is a fortiori not to be occupied with (real) things, then the objector clearly has a point. For clearly, if that assumption goes through, then the only way in which language can be connected with reality is though the correct description of what actually exists or takes place.
And since literature –even literature of supposedly high cultural value – makes no pretence of describing what exists in the real world, as distinct from the ‘world’ of the fiction, that seems to entail, definitively, that literature can have nothing to teach us about Reality. And (as my objector would doubtless wish to continue) to say that, all the same, it may have something to teach us about language, is surely merely to trifle impudently with a question that the trifling itself demonstrates to be effectively unanswerable.
That question (“What can literature have to do with Reality, given that, having abandoned the scientific and commonsense goal of simply describing the world as it is, its resources can amount to no more than the shuffling of words?”), along with the belief that it is indeed effectively unanswerable, is the first of the two mentioned at the start of this section as having played a major part in enthroning postmodernism and displacing humanism in literary studies.
The line of reasoning that leads to it, however, relies for its plausibility on the assumption – present in the marketplace of ideas, and increasingly dominant within it, since the mid-seventeenth century– that a language is no more than a large set of spoken or written tokens, each of whose function, so far as meaning goes, is merely to represent, or ‘go proxy for’, the aspect or item of extra-linguistic reality with which it has been conventionally ‘associated’. It is this ‘picture’, as Wittgenstein would say, of how words acquire meaning, that in turn justifies the assumption that to be ‘occupied with words’ is a fortiori not to be ‘occupied with Reality’.
As we have seen, it is one of the main thrusts of Wittgenstein’s later work, not merely to question that familiar post-Renaissance model, or ‘picture’, of how meaning is specified in language, but to offer an alternative model. According to the latter, giving meaning to the sentences of a language is a matter of assigning roles to linguistic expressions in the operations of practices that are what — rather than the linguistic expressions themselves — engage in turn with the concrete detail of extra-linguistic Reality. We move in short from explaining meaning in terms of two basic interacting elements (words/things), to an account in terms of three basic elements (wors/practices/things).
Pat Hanna and I draw out the consequences of this shift for philosophy – and they are considerable – in Hanna & Harrison 2004. Its consequences for literary studies are, however, no less considerable. Meaning, Wittgenstein tells us, comes into being when words are assigned roles in socially devised and maintained practices. But it is equally true that a human culture, with all the possibilities of character, personality and moral choice which it offers to its participants, comes into being when people – individual men and women, begin to shape their lives around a specific set of such practices. One need only think of the changes produced, both in the structure of society and in the options and responses of its individual members, by the development of such institutions as the joint-stock company, monogamous marriage, parliamentary democracy or monastic life, to see that what one might term Human Reality, the ‘realities of life’ which a given age or culture regards as natural and inevitable, are neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of the existence of a specific structure of institutions and practices that, because they belong to Culture rather than Nature, might be otherwise.
Such practices can be seen as possessing two poles. At one pole they form the armature upon which the meanings of words are defined, the concepts making up a certain conceptual vocabulary formulated. At the other pole, they form the armature upon which a certain human world — a certain version of human reality — forms and constitutes itself. Human reality is a reality internal to Culture, but it is a reality nonetheless: its contents a contribution to Being, to the roster of to on, of what is.
The connection between language and human reality, as distinct from the connection between language and natural reality is not mediated, then, solely by true factual descriptions. Since the meanings of words in certain conceptual vocabularies and the structure of a given human world are linked by the systems of practices and institutions in terms of which both are constituted, reflection concerning the praxial basis of meaning is, necessarily, also reflection concerning the nature of a given system of human reality. Hence it is not, after all, true that to be ‘occupied with words’ is a fortiori not to be ‘occupied with Reality’. And hence literature is saved from that particular charge, even if we grant that its aim is not factual description of the kind offered by the natural and social sciences.
Now for the second anti-literary charge that has assisted the rise of what Paul Ricoeur called “the hermeneutics of suspicion’. It is that a work of literature is ‘subjective’ in the sense of reflecting only arbitrary choices of an author. The surprising answer suggested by the late Wittgenstein’s reflections on the relationship between meaning and practice is that what saves a writer from subjectivity is not his knowledge of the world, but, on the contrary, his sensitivity to the connotations and possible meanings of words. The fictional, virtual ‘world’ he invents, with all its ‘characters’ and events, may indeed be just that: an invention. But the language in which he does it, which is also the language his characters must speak, is not an invention of his, but a public possession, whose history long preceded his brief life, and will long outlast it. It links him to reality –the reality of whatever human world or worlds it offers access to – not by way of true description but by way of meaning. So it is of no consequence that all the descriptions in his fiction are true only of an invented reality. The chiming of meaning, in the public language he must use if he is to write at all, against the walls and furniture of his private, invented world, may still reveal, as the invented Sophia’s resistance to the sophistical blandishments of the equally invented Mrs Western do, much of value concerning the real – the entirely non-fictional– world that he and his readers actually inhabit, and in which that language was forged.
These ideas form the basis of all the work in philosophy of literature I have published since 1991, and receive a much fuller and more elaborated treatment in my, What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored. Bloomington: Indiana University Press(2015)
That brings to an end this brief attempt to say — how my work over the past half-century hangs together, despite appearances, as a single, developing enterprise.
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