Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy 9780674028593

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Finding a Replacement for the Soul

Finding a Replacement for the Soul Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy

BRETT BOURBON

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Copyright © 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourbon, Brett, 1963Finding a replacement for the soul: mind and meaning in literature and philosophy / Brett Bourbon. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-01297-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Literature-Philosophy. 2. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake. 4. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Philosophische Untersuchungen. 1. Title. PN56.M37B682004 801-dc22 2004040600

For my parents

Contents

Preface

lX

Note on Abbreviations Introduction: PART

I

What Are We When We Are Not?

XVl

1

THE SURFACE OF LANGUAGE AND THE ABSENCE OF MEANING

1

From Soul-Making to Person-Making

27

2

The Logical Form of Fiction

50

3

The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation

80

4

To Be But Not To Mean

101

5

How Do Oracles Mean?

121

PART

II

SENSES AND NONSENSES: JOYCE'S

FINNEGANS WAKE AND WITTGENSTEIN'S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

6

A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake

145

7

The Analogy between Persons and Words

168

8

"The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul"

192

Contents

Vll1

9 The Senses of Time 10

216

Being Something and Meaning Something

238

Bibliography

261

Acknowledgments

269

Index

271

Preface

How are things with you? The answer can be simple or endless. We respond with shrugs and intonations, with stories and jokes, with reticence and embellishment. We cry and we laugh. Fictions and poems formalize the means by which we answer how things are with us. They offer various examples of the kinds of answers we give. Our generic answers, like our most banal generic art, simplify to 'not bad,' 'so-so,' or 'OK.' These expressions, however, like our best generic art, can carry more significance than at first seems possible, depending on how the answers fit with further expressions and understandings. If we take the question seriously, view it with some wonder and puzzlement, we may need to decide what will count as an answer, especially if we ask it of ourselves. Asking how are things with ourselves and requiring that we decide what will count as an answer match the demands of modern art, where we have to decide what will count as art, which is to say what will count as meaningful. To judge our situation and ourselves is to give them a provisional meaning. Doubts and questions about the very means of providing and discovering this meaning are at least one motive for some modernist experiments in writing and thinking. This is a book about our ways of making and losing meaning. My targets for investigation include sentences, fictions, poems, actions, persons, and lives. These all are easily misseen; misseen because what

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Preface

they are is bound to how they mean, and how they mean is partly an expression of how we are involved with language. This involvement tells us more about ourselves and the world than we might imagine; it also offers the site for the justification of the study of literature. I take up both of these projects: I will discover what I can about what we are such that we are involved in language in the way we are, and I will attempt to justify literature. The study of literature must nurture the queries that would motivate its creation; we should not knot the knots that would tie literature and our reading into veiling vestments. Our queries about literature are all conceptual riddles; we invent ways of answering them. In what follows I delimit the senses and nonsenses of fictions and poems, and in so doing I both question and attempt to reestablish the fundamental ways we should think about literature. I would not be concerned with the essentials of literary studies, however, if they were not also the essentials of how we make sense of ourselves. We express ourselves and describe ourselves; we inhabit first person and third person stances; we can be targeted by 'you.' Our senses of our character, personality, capacities-our thoughts, beliefs, and desires and our means of expressing all of these as ours-as me-can be naturally manifest and disarranged in what we say and understand and by what we fail to say and misunderstand. The evolving conditions of society and the increasingly successful modes of the modern sciences just as naturally shape them. These latter sources of distension and stress may be harder for us to survive. They seem to attack our sense that persons and lives have meanings-just those kinds of meanings we strive to express and understand in literature. I do not know what to say about the powers of society; those powers, against my best efforts, sometimes invade this book. My concerns here, however, constellate around our natural fate with language and our evolving fate within the ontological and epistemological constraints cultivated by the sciences. We must strive to be equal to our scientifically desacralized world, even if its truths are melancholy. We must recognize the constraints and survive our dependencies on language and our situatedness in the world. Reading literature and our philosophical critique of this reading offer us the opportunity for this recognition and survival. There is no study of literature, therefore, that is not philosophical. Some demesnes of the literary world deny or have forgotten this truth. Various literary faiths label self-critical conceptual analysis not only heretical, but also unnecessary. These claims are, of course, philo-

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xi

sophical. 1 That the study of literature is philosophical does not mean that literary history should now become philosophy. Rather, if there is a question about what something means and if, as I will argue, it is not clear what kind of thing a literary text is, then we are stuck doing philosophical work whether we like it or not. We are acting and thinking well when we justify our assumptions and work out the implications of what we say and think. Philosophical study is not the study of doctrines. It is ruthless questioning, as much of ourselves as of what we read. Such ruthlessness when directed toward art and ordinary life can seem too brutal. Philosophy should not be paralyzing. We should be ruthless like lovers and parents and priests protecting and encouraging what we love. Should we not also be children, unspoiled by pretension and self-consciousness? And should we not also bear the wisdom of Silenus? If we could.

~ REGARDLESS OF THE DISCRIMINATIONS and judgments organizing a work of art, its insights and significance remain vague. We have to work out its precisions, and often we can achieve only hints and gestures. Let me offer a gesture. Modernist literature, in its difficulties, makes explicit what is implicit in most literature-that how sentences mean or do not mean is akin to how our lives and persons mean or do not mean. This is both true and misleading. The truth of this kinship among sentences, persons, and lives places a great burden on how we use our words. To define an aesthetic around this burden, as Conrad, Pound, and Joyce do, carries with it the further anxiety that if our aesthetic uses of words cannot carry the meanings of our human lives then nothing can. Recognizing that anxiety and bearing it ourselves is nothing more than attempting to justify our intimacy with words. If we cannot discover how we are akin to our ways of making sense and discovering meanings, then our ways of answering how things are with us will remain superficial guesses in the dark. We may have to accept that. It is certainly foolhardy to imagine that words could answer the tragedies of living. Being foolhardy, however, is one of the charms of making and studying literature. We might mitigate this foolhardiness by fitting our ambitions with words, those motivating literature in any form and those by which we

1. See, for example, S. Fish's very philosophical and incoherent argument "that philosophy doesn't matter" (Critical Inquiry, Spring 2003).

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express our character, our fate, and our situation, with our doubts about these ambitions. There is a restrained way of doing this. We can justify and redeem the confusions of literature and its study without denying that they are confusions. I attempt such a redemption. This book is about the underlying assumptions that confuse us in our thinking about fictions and poems, and, therefore, in our thinking about ourselves. These underlying assumptions are many. I will examine, however, just those assumptions we rely upon in making sense of the strangeness of fictions and poems. This will hardly seem to reduce the mass of possible topics. These include our assumptions about what it means to mean, about what a person is, about what a sentence is, about what a mind is and how it works and relates to our pictures of how things are, about how our sense of sentences and expressions matches up with our pictures ofwhat a mind is and does. This is a difficult list, but divides easily into problems concerning meaning, mind, and persons-all of which are mixed up with our ideas about the world given by science or by our ontological commitments (what we take to exist), which mayor may not be consistent with the fundamental notions and conclusions of science. We should be responsible to our assumptions about such things, especially if they have some essential role in whatever we say about fictions and poems. Such responsibility requires that we test our assumptions and their role in our reading. But we must also determine what our responsibility to these assumed conclusions and premises entails. We might not always need theories about these things, although we will always have to come to conclusions about them, with our descriptions and reasons in hand. These are puzzles enough to answer. But, again, I am also claiming that the confusions through which we try to manage the challenges of fictions and poems are related to our assumptions about how we think about ourselves. There is little reason to imagine that fictions and poems could matter to us at all, if we were not in some way like them. Words matter to us-they can give us targets for our thinking, and they can hold us enthralled. What we are and how we think are tangled or facilitated by words. We are in some sense-although in a very modest sense-constituted by phrases and meanings. But how constituted? In what way, with what effect? If we are intimate with words, how intimate? I describe this intimacy and redescribe how we make sense of anyone as anyone, including ourselves, by asking how we are manifest in what we say, understand, and read. To ask how we are with words is to ask how we could care about fictions and poems with something more than scholarship and self-projecting egotism.

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XUl

Any work of art is in some degree a made thing, even if only by being framed in some way. Works of art, certainly fictions and poems, are anomalous things, disjunct or generalized in specific ways from statements of fact and, as I will argue, from acts of communication. If religious, propagandistic, or educational uses and senses do not exhaust its purposes, then art's anomalous nature requires that we stipulate some special purpose or justify its value as purposeless. In either case, its relation to us and to the world has to be determined, not assumed. If we are to determine that relationship we must say what kind of thing art is, what kind of thing fictions and poems are. In other words, if we take seriously the description of literature as a kind of making, then we might want to know what kind of thing we make and read. These poems and fictions are not simply marks on the page independent from how those marks mean; thus they are not like material things. And if fiction and poetry are not reducible to the meaning of the sentences and phrases ofwhich they are made, then they are not something that can be located simply in what is said, written, or meant. This should mean that whatever a poem is it is not just the kind of thing a sentence is. If we think we can say more than that, we are liable to invent a special category of thing, or invent a metaphysical theory in order to describe that reality shown by fictional art. In the attempt to say what a fiction or poem is, especially if produced at the service of an experimental aesthetic, such metaphysical theories provide the putative ways in which poems and fictions can or should mean. Such theories are invariably incoherent, but it is by examining such theories, like the theory that poems are and do not mean, that we can see the importance of poetry and fiction. The value of what we say about literature lies in our confusions about it.

~ A PREFACE, HAUNTED BY ASSUMPTIONS and aspirations, is an epitaph and a pledge; it inscribes goals, conclusions, and constraints. The preface, however, is not meant to be the means of reaching conclusions. Arguments are only mentioned, sketched, and promised. All is preparation. Nietzsche imagines that such preparation is futile, but necessary since his thoughts, at least those he offers in the Gay Science, arise out of experiences-maybe these thoughts might be called insights. One has them. Writing, if it cannot replicate either these experiences or what produced them, might perhaps become a provocation, as Emerson calls it. If we are provoked, then at least our thinking might still take the form of an experience leading to insights. Experi-

XIV

Preface

ence and insight might be what is inscribed in poetry, what we might imagine motivates it, and what we might replicate in reading it. I am suspicious of this kind of thinking. I want to protect, however, one premise of this model. Experiences that lead to provocation and insight promise that the form of things can reveal or obscure. The insights derived by these means may remain promissory, but the form of things does reveal and obscure. There would be no art that mattered if this were not true. If the above is still called thinking, it is because insights are conclusions, conceptually formulated, interpreted, and applied. Experience, provocation, and insight are in competition with our reasoning by argument, with the Socratic elenchos, with Aquinas' dialectic, with rational analysis. My doubts about poetic thinking are almost converted into a faith about argument. Arguments matter; they will get you farther than you can go by other means. But arguing remains an art that is not bound to give you the truth, or lead you in the right direction, if the initial pictures out ofwhich you proceed are confused. Our reasoning is constrained by our descriptions, propositions, and assumptions. However we reason, our goals can be critical, theoretical, or explicative. Explication, if it is not simply scholarly and historical, relies on concepts the truth or legitimacy of which our explications themselves cannot establish. We explicate literature at the service of particular beliefs and goals, relying on a specific vocabulary and set of ideas. These beliefs, goals, vocabulary, and ideas should be justified and defended. We often attempt to defend them by appealing to theories of various kinds. Our assumptions about what is what and how things work have theoretical bases, even when these bases are pictures and metaphors. Theories are a means of explanation, and can be useful as such. Literature, however, need not be explained. It should be justified. Reading is a mode of practical reasoning, the form and claims of which we must continually justify; hence reading should be continually critical. Critical reading in this sense, however, is not a means of evaluating poems and fictions. Such evaluations express opinions and discriminations. They can be at times valuable. They too depend on philosophical concepts and conclusions. They are bound to models and metaphors. To legitimate these and to justify literature we do critical philosophy: "the general investigation of the possibilities and boundaries" of reason and judgment, as Kant explains in the 1790 preface to The Critique ofJudgement. The philosophy that literature requires is, therefore, critical in this sense. We attempt to establish the possibilities and boundaries of reason and judgment (and we might now

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xv

add of meaning and meaningfulness) according to our philosophical intuitions, modes of argument, and conceptual understanding. Wittgenstein, for example, attempts to describe the limits of sense by showing the various kinds of pictures, metaphoric knots, and misapplied distinctions we use in thinking about our psychology, language, and world. We should read literature through a similar articulation and testing of the limits of sense. We have abnegated our intelligence if we read only to find ourselves confirmed or affected. If reading is not a means of judging our faiths and doubts, then we might as well perform our confessions before we have committed our sins. Reading the limits of sense shown in and by fictions and poems describes our complex involvement with our words: how we are gripped and lost by them and why that would matter. The limits of sense lace our understanding and judgments of anything. These limits shift and reshift. There is no final critique. This book, therefore, is a study of the kinds of things sentences, fictions, nonfictions, and poems are, and how what these are shows what we are. What we are can only be made clear relative to how we are manifest to ourselves and how we are fitted and unfitted to the words we say, read, and understand. That is the task we should accept in our reading fictions and poems. Literature is philosophical if it provokes philosophy. How things are with us asks about the state of our soul. We may not want to respond to such a question. We may doubt we have a life with enough radiance or enough despair to collect what senses are left to 'soul.' My reply: our soul is left in our sentences, ifwe can find ourselves there. Will describing the shifting limits of sense we inhabit and justifying the value and content of literature allow us to account for how we are? There is no simple answer to that question, but I will try to answer it anyway.

Note on Abbreviations

All references to Finnegans l/f7ake (abbreviated FW) are identified parenthetically by page and line number. All references to Philosophical Investigations (abbreviated PI) are identified parenthetically by section number or where appropriate by page number. The complete bibliographic information for these and other text citations may be found in the bibliography.

~

Introduction:

What Are We When We Are Not? This is how philosophers should salute each other: "Take your time!" r--J

M

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Y SUBJECT IN THIS BOOK is our human involvement with words and the strange ways in which something can seem to mean and yet not. We human beings are manifest to ourselves in many ways, but most fully in our games with words. As much as we are displayed in what we say, understand, and do, we can also turn opaque to ourselves; our self-descriptions and expressions can become or can be discovered to be nonsensical. We are not so solid as not to be lost, at least in part, to our various nonsenses. This comedy or drama between sense and nonsense not only matches the play of seeming and revealing that is the concern of fictions and poems, but also shows itself in the logical form of fictions and the possibilities of poetry. Thus, deciding what fictions and poems are will tell us how we are revealed through the sentences we use. A sentence in some sense, and only in some sense, is a kind of thing in the way a fiction is, in the way a person might be. A sentence, a fiction, and a person are not just what they seem or what they are manifest as-not simply the story told, the marks on a page, a set of words, a physical shape, actions, or behavior. We do not understand a sentence, a fiction or a person separate from their particular manifestations, nor, however, are they simply equivalent to those manifestations. Sentences are primarily their meanings, the nuances of which we grasp and gesture toward in various ways. We also gesture toward persons as souls, minds, and thoughts as distinct from how they might be manifest. Literary analysis should be a study of such gestures.

2

Introduction

We can seem mysterious to ourselves and then transparent, simple, cliched. We can discover aspects of what we take ourselves to be-beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and concerns-and in this discovery alter who we take ourselves to be. Thoughts, ideas, beliefs, feelings and meanings are what they are and exist as that through our means of articulating them. The thought that has no form, the idea that cannot be articulated, the belief that is not in something, the feelings that are not expressed, and the meanings that are not manifest do not exist. To the degree that thoughts, ideas, beliefs, feelings, and meanings are decisive in our sense of ourselves, the more plastic we can seem, the more bound within language we are. But what sense can we give to the idea of being 'within language'? This book constitutes my attempt to give the proper sense to this phrase and idea. A recurrent question will be "How am I manifest in language as the kind of thing I am, in the kind of particularity I embody?" Such a question might be split into three parts: (1) How are we constituted by what we say and understand? (2) In what sense can we produce ourselves through language, through self-description? and (3) How can I describe my relation to words and sentences? Iris Murdoch claims that "[w]ords constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being, since they are the most refined and delicate and detailed, as well as the most universally used and understood, of the symbolisms whereby we express ourselves into existence" ("Salvation by Words," 241). There is a lot right about this, but I want to focus on only one seemingly exaggerated phrase. How seriously can we take this claim that "we express ourselves into existence"? We certainly express ourselves using language. Do we express ourselves into existence? This notion of existence may be too strong. We should rewrite the question with less elegance (a risk one should always take): How am I or anyone manifest in my sentences such that they can lose sense or that I can gain sense? Words can turn opaque, recall noises and grunts; we might panic at this. Words strung together, said or written, can seem to have a sense and then stop fitting and instead flopping, hat like and the or an instead now. The various ways sentences and phrases lose sense demonstrates our variable relation to our language. The study of literature can be understood, at least, partially as the study of the ways that we articulate or discover ourselves through and possibly as sentences and phrases and words. This last claim-that we might be sentences, phrases, and words-again, seems too strong: we are not the same kind of thing as a sentence, at least not wholly. An

Introduction

3

expansive sense of who we are, however, would include our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs-what kinds of things are these? We are akin, in some ways, to the kind of thing a sentence is. We are also a kind of thing quite unlike sentences. These two claims shadow two seemingly more simple truths. (1) Human beings are always involved in meaning, in making sense, and (2) meanings of whatever kind always involve human beings. We mean, and what we mean cannot float free from we who mean. These two principles, as simple as they can seem, guide everything I will describe and for which I will argue in this book. Language has great power, and yet the power is ours and has limits. One of those limits is that we are lined and marbled with our making and losing sense. We make and lose sense in our selfdescriptions and in our expressions, from our simple statements to our aesthetic confessions. The study of sentences, fiction, and persons I will pursue involves the complexities of sense and nonsense, saying, mentioning, acting and knowing, believing and doubting, self-reflection, and expression. I will be concerned in this book, however, with neither the psychology of our beliefs or of our mental states, nor with the logic of avowals and the problem of self-knowledge. My concern will be with the power and sense of our words, of our expressions and descriptions, or rather with our putative relation and involvement in as well as with these words and sentences. I am attempting to provide a nonpsychological description of our modes of self-reflection, to understand our talk about ourselves as particular ways of making sense.

~

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE should be primarily a mode of self-reflection, concerned with various kinds of meaning, from the meaning of a sentence to the meaning of a life. As such it is a rather poorly defined study, but no less important for this. It is, as I understand it, a study of the modes of meaning we use to make sense of ourselves and the world in and through language. This means that the study of literature, even in its exegetical projects, is entangled in philosophy, in conceptual problems and claims about meaning and self-reflection. Taking philosophical responsibility for the modes of meaning used and studied in literature is both difficult and, despite what is often claimed, uncommon. In giving a more adequate account of the various ways in which we mean and fail to mean I will not offer a theory of meaning. Philosophy need not be primed and primped into packages and sys-

4

Introduction

tems, although it can be described, argued, summarized, expanded, collected, and used. What I call philosophy should be understood, at a minimum, as a mode of self-reflection upon and criticism of the words we use and the claims we make. The disciplinary labels philosophy and literary studies would matter less if this book were not written under the auspices of a university, but also if the pleading for unquestioned belief in question-begging beliefs were not so encouraged and so believed. Philosophy is a test of beliefs, literature a disguise. The study of literature is, however, a form of philosophy. In what follows I attempt to reinstitute the study of literature as a complex form of the philosophy of language and of mind, of ethics and of aesthetics. Not, however, as a mere adjunct to these. Neither would this reinstitution be a new kind of critical theory, nor would it fit within any school of criticism. I am simply starting elsewhere, within the conceptual questions, confusions, and assumptions that would encourage us to imagine that our sentences mean more than what they say. Consequently, in this book I attempt to justify the value and content of literature and its study. I demonstrate the dependence of any literary theory or interpretation on a set of philosophical assumptions, metaphors, and theories of meaning and mind. These assumptions, metaphors, and theories are often confused and incoherent. Thus, the justification of literature and its study requires the redemption of these confusions, without denying that they are confusions. These confusions, as kinds of nonsense, are the means by which we can discover how we are entangled and lost in language: how we follow the sense, confuse the sense, discover the sense or the nonsense of what we say, hear, read, and imagine with sentences and words, in fictions and without. In order to understand how I stand amidst and toward my own words, how I am involved with sentences and phrases, I need displaced volumes of language to trip my thinking into a stumbling gait, into a precipitous fall with maybe a requisite bang on the head, distorting aspects of how anyone makes and loses sense, how anyone finds and loses who and what they are or take themselves to be. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations not only provide that displacement, they also mimic anyone's linguistic and philosophical stumbling and clutching. Investigations stalls in the sometimes discontinuous relation between remarks, in the difficulty of its strange metaphors, numerous examples, and restrained and incomplete arguments. The Wake's treacle is its semantic incoherence, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. Each chapter of what follows describes, analyzes, and argues about

Introduction

5

how we reflect upon ourselves by understanding how we are involved in language. My goal is to understand how what we are is shown through our involvement in language, the most complex pictures of which are offered by literature and philosophy, specifically by these two texts that may no longer be either: the Wake and Investigations. Wittgenstein's philosophy operates as a kind of basso continuo throughout the following chapters. I do not, however, apply his philosophy to literary texts or philosophical problems. I use his descriptions of confusions and his concomitant attempts to clarify and dissolve these confusions as ways of describing further philosophical "robulous rebus [es]" (Finnegans Wake, 12.34), knots and tori concerning how words and sentences claim and invest us. Finnegans Wake provides a kind of literary sky, in which the problems of fictions and poetry find a place. Or, rather, the Wakean "chaosmos" is the mother of all storms, blowing the clouds and breezes of its more stable literary relatives into a whirl. Reading the Wakean storm gives the weather of any fictional and poetic world. In Part I-"The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning"- I describe how our sense of person, soul, and human being have become nonsensical, and how this nonsense describes a problem about how to reflect upon ourselves that matches the confused things we say about fictions and poems. If we might be tempted to wonder how we might be fictional, we should also wonder what fictions are. I provide an account of the logical form of fiction, and in so doing begin to describe how we are invested with and disinvested from language and meaning. Out of this account of the logical form of fiction I describe the limits and emptiness of literary interpretation in order to clarify the various senses we give to 'meaning.' I then analyze and reject attempts to equate form and content. In so doing I account for the dependence of aesthetic theories (including interpretations) on theories of mind and meaning. As a consequence, I am able to redefine the projects of interpretation and aesthetics relative to the broader questions about what it means for language to mean. In the last chapter of this first part-"How Do Oracles Mean?"- I set myself the task of understanding what sense we can give to oracles if we deny that they speak with a god's authority, and if we refuse to appeal to special metaphysics or to a psychological account of belief and delusion. If oracles cannot mean in this way, then neither can fiction and poetry. Part II-"Senses and Nonsenses"-is explicitly framed by the literary and philosophical challenges provided by Joyce's extravagant Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's discomforting Philosophical Investigations. Part II plays counterpoint to Part I, beginning again in the difficulties

6

Introduction

of self-reflection, but now incorporating the possibilities of sense and the limits of nonsense and interpretation described earlier. From this beginning, I attempt to show how we participate in language, how it claims us, how it is expressive and how we are, how we fit in and against our self-descriptions, our expressions of mood and character, our investment in our names, our admissions of guilt, our statements of thought, our third person descriptions of our cognitive capacities, our biological form, and our senses of time. This long list charts a trajectory from the Wakean possibilities and losses to problems in and with Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In the final chapter, I demonstrate in what sense we are constituted by language and in what sense we are not, as the means of picturing our soul; I attempt to answer the question: Could one's humanity, in some sense yet to be determined, rest on how one writes or understands the relation between first person expressions of meaning and third person scientific descriptions of human beings and the world?

I. Justification The study of literature risks extravagance and discomfort, delusion and the false confirmation of beliefs: "Incantation or incontinence-the lyric cry?" (Hill, The Triumph of Love). Incantation and incontinence have their place in our reading, as does psychological identification with characters and situations. Literature may be nothing more than a prompt for confession or a means for consolation. In this book, I will attempt to justify the value and content of literature and its study as more than these. Fictions and poems, like other forms of art, may simply provide distraction. If this is the case, then one can enjoy them or study the psychology encouraging our desire for this kind of distraction. Fictions and poems might also offer various examples of complex ethical dilemmas, the psychology of character and behavior, actions and decisions. They can be used to suggest the feel of other lives, social worlds, and historical times. Fictions can be exemplary or instructive or cautionary or realistic. With this list, I am giving the fate and value of literature its traditional scope. Poetry recalls sage wisdom or vain posturing; it promises a moral education or encourages lying, shaping us by appearances and seductive pleasures. The quarrel between poetry and philosophy, however, no longer looks only like this. Poetry now quarrels with the sciences, even when the veneer of poetic study is varnished with scientific systems,

Introduction

7

research, and concepts. However we view science, even as a symptom of life, as Nietzsche encourages, we bear the responsibility and the demand to situate our beliefs, philosophical thinking, and art in relation to the body of knowledge the sciences have founded. What it means to situate our beliefs, ways of thinking, and poetic inventions in relation to the sciences, however, remains hazy. The modern study of literature distinguishes itself by its competition with and great hostility towards science and rationality. For over a century, with increasing eagerness during the last forty years, the traditional questions of aesthetics-What is art? and What is its value?-have been recurrently answered by a kind of special pleading: (1) language is fundamentally aesthetic or metaphorical and (2) science is nothing but a kind of discourse. These positions, I believe, are hardly coherent. If we reject such claims, as we should, then how can we justify the value and significance of literature? This question, instead, can only be answered by understanding that the one continual site of contention between literature and science over the last three hundred years has been over how to understand the mind. The study of literature, even when cast as a kind of politics, sociology, or history, produces and relies on partial, quasi-, and, for the most part, incoherent theories of mind in direct competition with philosophy and now with cognitive science. The redemption of literature will require the redemption of these theories despite or regardless of their coherence or incoherence. Since the study of literature relies on various kinds of claims, its value will partly depend on the sense and truth of these claims. Any claim we derive from literature about how things were or are in the world must be evaluated relative to the appropriate terms, concepts, and modes of reasoning. In the pursuit of such an evaluation we would be historians, psychologists, philosophers, and so on. We also can make specific claims about literature and its various forms, about its authors, its readership, its dissemination, and so on. If we go beyond these modest kinds of claims, however, the study of literature will be parasitic on other disciplinary modes, most importantly philosophical argument. Our initial engagement with literature is generally through persons and actions, and is, thus, ethical. How persons and actions are shown in fiction produces, however, a conceptual crux: How should we understand the relationship between what something is and how it is manifest? This relationship, I believe, should constitute the focal concern of literary interpretation. In addition, any interpretation of a text involves (1) the recognition and description of the relevant elements, (2) an assumption of how and what these elements mean in relation to each other, and (3)

8

Introduction

claims or assumptions about how the text fits with similar and other kinds of texts, as well as whatever one understands as the world. The consideration of what is manifest and how, relative to various descriptions of the fictional or poetic text, adds up to a theory of art. We should conclude that the interpretations of particular fictions and poems are themselves fundamentally theories of art. For the most part they are not coherent theories; they might better be described as implicit theories, built on metaphors and conceptual pictures. I call them theories because their descriptive power is understood as in some part explanatory of what we take these texts to mean. Theories of literary art will to a great degree be nothing more than theories of language and mind in disguise, and these theories will themselves rely on theories of reality in order to make their claims seem reasonable. The inevitability of these domains for literature and its study follows from something less than a truism-literature has to have some kind of content, even if that simplifies to noise for us. When Swift attempts the experiment of writing "upon nothing" in the Tale of the Tub, one thing he reproduces is a mock theory of metaphysics, mind, and person in which these are all described as various suits of clothes and vestments. Of course it is not his theory: parodies and ironies, like fictions, attract various projections and require specific judgments in order to determine how we are to understand what is said or written. Milan Kundera discovers a cognate set of philosophical concerns in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers. He suggests that for Broch "the word 'polyhistorical' means: marshalling all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate 'what the novel alone can discover': man's being" (64). The phrase "man's being," while portentous, refers to whatever we are and do as human beings, that which can be shown through the marshalling mythos and descriptive modes of the novel. Even in this case, however, implicit theories, pictures, and analogies that would justify the novel can only be justified through philosophical attention and argument. The discernment and evaluation of literary content, even if this simply involves "examining and scrutinizing," as Goethe suggests, is part of criticism and of philosophy (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 35). By itself, however, such discernment and evaluation need not produce as its result philosophical arguments, theses, or doctrines. What would count as the justification of fictions, novels, and poems has to be determined as well. Most literary criticism, if it is not scholarly commentary or a collection of observations, has as its central content some picture of the four philosophical domains of language, mind, aesthetics, and ethics.

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9

One can offer observations about style and content, about characters and actions, about patterns of usage and various rhetorical effects and ambiguities, but even here in order to say how these might mean or be significant requires that one appeal to some other register, often various forms of philosophy (concepts, ideas, and even theories). William Empson, a critic concerned with the words on the page, makes very apparent the kind of shift of register that is common. In an essay on Marvell's "Thoughts in a Garden," he briefly describes Christopher Smart's poem "Hymn to David." Empson claims that "the feeling (of the poem) is carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles the whole cumbrous complexity of the world" (Some Versions of Pastoral, 121). This sentence exemplifies the kind of initial interpretative description that one might define as literary. The general description establishes the register of meaningfulness or effect of the poem: that it conveys or reproduces in us a feeling by virtue of its music, where the sound patterns and relationships convey something like tone in ordinary conversation. He then offers a more detailed description of these sound patterns, explaining how the purported effect is achieved-by packing long Latin words into short lines and so on. He has not said what the feeling is or how these patterns of long and short produce a feeling. Instead he offers a descriptive metaphor for this patterning-"like dancing in heavy skirts." This is a spark of brilliance and is itself highly evocative-we can see the words as if they were dancing in these skirts. The sound conveyed is swishing, but the feeling remains nebulous. The feelings produced by the metaphor would be contingent on our associations with such dancing and heavy skirts and maybe with the sound of swishing. The significance of this metaphor and of the poetic effect is then established by allegorizing it so that the vagueness of feeling is matched by the wholeness of the world or of experience: "he juggles the whole cumbrous complexity of the world." The conceptual content of Empson's description remains, more or less, within a phenomenological register; nevertheless he assumes that his descriptions can justify the patterns of sound relative to an allegorized picture of the complexity of the world. This assumption disguises the associative structure of the description-of the meaning-by linking in an ordered way poetic effects and elements of the poetic line with a set of increasingly greater abstractions. This is a more or less philosophically neutral example, but it demonstrates how poems are used as

10

Introduction

evidence and how they are provided with content by conceptual means: unjustified conceptual means. Should we say about Empson what Stevens comments about Coleridge? "A man who may be said to have been defining poetry all his life in definitions that are valid enough but which no longer impress us primarily by their validity" (Collected Poetry and Prose, 667). And yet these definitions of poetry might still impress us; how? Does it depend on these theories being "valid enough"? The great literary critics all seem to me to be thoughtful, but philosophically naIve or philosophically audacious, but wrong in their conceptual presumptions or profound in their attention, but lost in their conclusions-and this holds true for great writers as well. These great critics who attend with great merit to literature, despite their philosophical foibles, might include Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, Empson, Georges Poulet, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom. The history of the study of literature, and in many ways of literature itself, is a history of mistakes, conceptual nonsense, and philosophical confusions. What else could it be? We are usually mistaken in most of our theoretical and assumed pictures of language, our minds, our lives, our world. These mistakes may be trivial relative to the swamp of truths by which we negotiate with others and the world; it may simply be that the pictures and stories of how things are, separate from what we always say and observe about what we all say, observe and do, do not do any essential work in our survival. Literature is certainly more than confusions, or at least it is no more confused than any other ordinary description or dramatization of our human lives. But I do not want to argue for this as if what were required would be a list of the guilty. We are all guilty. Fictions and poems, depending on the pretensions that they seem to serve, collect various grandiose interpretations. This is one source of their power. Plato was right, however, to see our attachment to such pretensions as dangerous. I understand that in claiming that literature and its study is mostly nonsense I will seem to be a philosophical vandal, slaughtering various precious literary animals. That fictions and poems are nonsensical does not mean that they are, as it were, a species of nonsense: a kind of nonsensical thing or that they have a sense that happens to be nonsense. Nonsense is not a positive claim, but a description of some aspect of sense, which is invoked, but fails. There is not one kind of nonsense. But that does not mean that various kinds of nonsense do not have a life together.

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11

I find much of the nonsense of fictions and poems necessary and valuable. I fear that too much of literary critical nonsense is nothing more than shiftings of tokens on some imaginary board, often with too much grandeur and not enough justification. And this presents me with a professional problem. This is not a polemical book-although it might be read that way given my critique of literary critical practice. My critique, however, has a different purpose than to join in a debate about various schools or -isms. I am not trying to argue in order to persuade any reader that something is the case; I am arguing in order to show that something is the case. Plato's mythic parables of the cave in the Republic and of the chariot soul in the Phaedrus are not more literary than Socrates' argument about knowledge in the Thaetetus. Myths can be used as part of an argument as well. Our reading of literature is like our reading of Plato's various myths, because in making sense of them we have also to give an argument for their role in the dialogue: we have to justify them. It is this continual requirement for the justification of its sense, of its form, of its claim on us, of its scope of relevance and truth, that I am using to distinguish literary problems from more traditional philosophical ones. This demand for justification arises because of a failure of transparency, a kind of lack of sense, for which we must compensate. If literature is going to be valuable as a means of reflecting upon ourselves, then it cannot be because it offers us theories or places to test our theories. What kind of test would that be since our interpretations can rig the results? Again, literature can always offer ideas or ethical examples, but to read in these ways is to use aspects of a story as part of our reasoning about something else. If we are to understand fiction and poetry to mean more than what they say, then their value will come out of their nonsense, out of how, in reading them, we confess ourselves in such a way as to learn about what we are such that we can be so exposed.

II. Justifications of Form and Justifications of Content If I understand the meaning of every sentence in Middlemarch, do I understand the meaning of Middlemarch? If not, what sense of meaning have I missed? How can I miss this meaning, since I understand every sentence of which the book consists? We understand what it means to understand a sentence (in a nontechnical sense), and while we can use 'meaning' to describe events and actions, if we are to use 'meaning' to describe a fiction, we have to stipulate what we mean by 'meaning.'

12

Introduction

Such stipulations are notoriously empty. That the meaning of a fiction is not the summation of the meaning of all of its sentences points to the obscurity of what it means for a fiction to mean, an obscurity a lot like the meaning of a life or of a person. Linking the obscurity of what it means for a book to mean with the obscurity of the meaning of a life or of a person, if there are such meanings, is a quick and dirty way of linking reasoning about sentences with ethical reasoning. Behind the claim that our self-interpretations of our actions, beliefs, desires, and goals might be akin to our interpretations of a fiction, however, lies the idea that literary fiction shows something about those problems of mind, meaning, and person that are fundamentally at stake in how we understand anything, including our lives and the world. The interpretation of fictions or poems or persons is not like understanding a sentence in conversation. Nor would the failure to understand a sentence in conversation lead to the same kinds of interpretative strategies that would allow a fiction or a poem to mean. Since they do not mean in the way that sentences do in conversation, one needs an account of what it means for fictions and poems to mean: the meaning of 'meaning' when talking about their words and phrases. Such an account cannot simply be a description of interpretive practices, because the problem itself is to justify those practices through an account of meaning. Thus, at some point the sense of 'meaning' will be stipulated. This stipulation, however, is itself open to further interpretations, justification, and refusal, and thus the problem has simply been displaced from the meaning and validity of 'meaning' to that of 'justification.' This relationship between fictional meaning and aesthetic justification is explicit when we read modernist, experimental fiction. What Finnegans lIVttke or any sentence in the lIVttke means, for example, must be determined by explaining how it means given its distortions of sense and form. We can explain how it might mean only relative to our justification of these distortions. The lIVttke will count as art only if we can read it as exemplifying the aesthetic under which it can be recognized. In this sense, aesthetics replaces genre as the means of establishing how a poem or fiction can or could be meaningful and taken as art. This argument does not lead to any metaphysical conclusion, but simply to the observation that interpretations mean at the service of particular purposes.

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13

III. The Problem of the Logical Form of Fiction Fictions require justification since they seem by definition false, deceptive, and oddly disjunct (although not ontologically autonomous) from uses of language in which in some sense someone speaks in his or her own voice. What does it mean for something to be fictional? The answer to this question would give the logical form of fictions: describing that which makes a fiction a fiction. The difficulty in knowing what a fiction means matches its seeming lack of a clear truth-value. Fictions and poems, like lives and wishes, need to be justified. What kind of thing a fiction or a poem is will determine to a large degree what we can say about it, what it can mean to us, and how we can stand in relation to it within our broader understandings and uses of language. Fictions and poems, to the degree that they are fictions, are anomalous kinds of things. A fiction is a fiction by virtue of our refusal or inability to make straightforward inferences from it to the world or its author. Consequently, fictions are not true or false in the way the sentence 'the window is open' might be true or false. In Chapter 2, I will give an account of the logical form of fictions. I will show that we do not need the distinctions between reality and the imaginary or the real and the unreal in explaining or describing fictions. The logical form of fictions, what I will call their quotational form, encourages the development of aesthetic justifications in order to erase these quotation marks, to situate the fiction relative to our ontological commitments. If fictions are misleadingly called illusions, then there are, in effect, no fictional objects. A fiction is in many ways not a thing or an object at all, but a characterization of how we stand toward sentences in such a way as to forgo certain logical connections (inferences) from those statements to the world. This is a very general description. Much of the real work lies in showing how fictions fit with our other uses of language, our sense of what is and how we know, and with whatever we are as persons who mean or fail to mean. Poems can be fictions, but they need not be. Fictions are like a game, such that if you change the rules, the logical form, of what counts as fictional, you, then, are playing some other game, maybe called myth. I will argue that what logically counts as a fiction does not vary within cultures (the name might, but this is another matter). Poetry, however, does not have anything like this strict logical form. It is not like a game in this sense. What counts as poetry-and what is called a poetic effect

14

Introduction

or a poetic function-varies according to complex factors. Modern poems, and much of Western poetry, however, mimic the logical form of fictions by being in various ways indeterminate or ambiguous, "description[s] without place," as Stevens calls them. Thus, fictions and, in a slightly different way, poems can be described relative to two logical disjunctions. (1) A fiction is by definition disjunct in some way from our nonfictional assertions about the world and thus we cannot infer from a fiction to what is the case for any person or for the world, however described. (2) In addition, it is not clear how they mean as wholes, since there is a disjunct relation between the meaning of any and all sentences in a fiction and the putative meaning of the whole. This putative meaning of a fiction is not given as simply the concatenation of all of its sentences. Neither disjunction implies that fictions are autonomous, however. If, at a minimum, we allow that a fiction is anomalous relative to how our sentences mean (my Middlemarch query) and in some sense fails to refer, then whatever we say about a particular fiction that has a relevance greater than transparent references to what happens in the fiction depends on our descriptions of that fiction. Our descriptions translate the fiction so that we understand it to have nonfictional import, allowing it to be about some aspect of what we take our world to be or be like. Otherwise, we can only make statements about the fictions whose truth-value is determined relative to what we understand to take place within that fiction. There might be questions about what happens in a fiction. To resolve these questions might require judgments that would rely on extrafictional assumptions, facts, ideas and so on. These judgments, however, can only be about the fictional world, unless we redescribe the fiction in such a way as to remove the fictional frame. However and whatever we understand fictions to mean will depend on what it means for something to be fictional. The anomalous nature of fictions prompts allegorical interpretive methods, and requires that we stipulate how and what they might mean. The very nature of fiction produces or is indicative of various senses of meaning not covered by the meaning of sentences. These various senses of meaning, interpretive techniques, methods and conclusions are nonsensical and incoherent. These are in effect theories of meaning determining particular methods of interpretation and particular roles and modes of interpretation. Their emptiness and incoherence follows from their philosophical failure. This is not, however, simply an esoteric concern, a problem

Introduction

15

for the classroom, since these theories of meaning and the significance of fictions goes far beyond the simple question of how to interpret or not to interpret some particular fiction. Fictions are important and gain their power of displaying aspects of our lives, character, feelings, and thoughts because they formalize the ways we stand within our own means of expression-our language. This way of describing our involvement in language shows how interpreting fictions can be philosophically significant relative to our various senses of language, the world, and ourselves as persons and human beings. In addition, it will allow me to suggest ways in which our interpretations of fictions need not be either subjective projections or determinate readings of inherent meaning. The characterization of this involvement in sentences and expressions, what I will picture sometimes obliquely and sometimes explicitly throughout this book, describes the domain of meanings (and failed meanings) that are offered by literature. One edge of this sense of meaning is described by Elizabeth Bishop in a letter to Ann Stevenson: "dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full face but that seems enormously important" (One Art, 119). If fictions and poems are one of the means by which we can understand how our lives mean or do not mean, then how fictions and poems mean or how we construe them to mean might be a kind of practice or an imitation of how we construe our lives to mean. How a life means, if it does or can, is a question that cannot be understood separate from asking what a life is. Fictions and poems (in a slightly different way) mean as what they are. What they are is unclear. A life is not a person, but persons have lives. There is no nontendentious way to extend this analogy between life and fiction along these lines. What it would mean for a person to mean is not clear, except to insist that whatever sense of 'meaning' is implied here is the same, in some sense, as saying what a person IS.

Iv. What Are We When We Are Nat? We are bound to how we seem to ourselves and to others. This is all-important, and a primary subject of this book. We are what we seem, but not only that. What it means for us to be persons, our

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Introduction

self-descriptions and conceptualizations of ourselves, is somehow the same as what a person is, but only in some sense. This seeming to ourselves, a way of taking ourselves to mean as something, can be lost or diminished. That our sense of ourselves can be lost or diminished prompts a strange riddle: What are we when we are not?-nothing, someone else, unconscious, dead, dreaming, confused, deluded, pretending, changed, afraid, reading, doubting, believing, shaped, denied, fictional, nonsensical. I am sometimes not myself, and that can be a way of indicating my mental state. I can be lost in anger, fear, and doubt. If I am lost in belief I might be a fanatic, and thus different than I was. If I lose my memory, then in some sense I am no longer me. That we are something at night asleep means we are not simply our body if we take our body as absent to ourselves in that state or in the retrospective memory of that state. We are a particular something, some single thing that includes not only our body and our brain states, but also our thoughts and beliefs, our losses and failures, our words and our stories. Does it make sense to say we exist in varying degrees? What are we and how do we understand ourselves if we exist within the midst of possibilities, what we might be tempted to call fictions? We can ask about how trees are bound to their descriptions, and maybe even ask what is a tree when it is not a tree, but the answers will be uninteresting: a bush. The riddle leads to a statement of fact or a resolution by classification. We can reask the riddle with special emphasis: What is a tree when it is not? The answer might be 'nothing.' If the riddle is about our modes of understanding or perception, then the answer would be a dream or an illusion. It might matter if a tree is not a tree but a bush. If there is sense to asking When am I not who or what I am? It is to register a real, but common loss. If we ask such a question of the tree, we have made a mistake or some magic is involved. For us, such a loss of ourselves is trivial, because it can happen so easily-when, for example, I am afraid or asleep. We are an odd kind of thing. Asking the riddle What are we when we are not? is an oblique way of asking What is a human being? This second more philosophical question, while not so riddling, is also inherently unclear, as Aristotle admits, being a question seemingly about what we would predicate of a thing we do not know what (Metaphysics, VII.I041a32-b2). We can give various descriptions, some of which would be quite definite, like those provided by evolutionary biology and genetics. What is being asked for by this 'what' remains something we have to stipulate. There is nothing

Introduction

17

special in having to sneak up on ourselves. How we answer what we are when we are not, however, will have to fit with our other senses of what we are, and those senses change, in varying degrees, as our knowledge of the world changes. A tree can be beautiful, oracular, a species of plant, a living thing, a shady spot. We can describe trees and pencils under various aspects, and we need not, in most cases, reduce or even fully relate one to another. If we imagine that a tree speaks for Zeus, however, we might find that this description conflicts with what we understand about living things and species. Some descriptions can be wrong, without implying there is one proper description. We also can invent new and true descriptions (for example, calling that bush a dead ringer for my new hairstyle). We are not, however, just something to describe but that which describes-and thus to describe ourselves as creatures with such a power requires that we link this ability with what it is we are describing when we describe ourselves. We need a coherent sense of how our self-descriptions fit together in a way that we do not for many, if not most, of our descriptions of other things. We lack this coherent sense of how our self-descriptions fit together. We are uncertain, therefore, what kind of thing we are, since we cannot give any clear sense to 'kind' here. This is the way we should describe our being unfit to the world now, unlike in the Platonic or Romantic sense of being alienated, as if we were once united with the world. This confusion about what kind of thing we are is one of the motives behind the increasing ambitions of literature beginning in the late eighteenth century, reaching a pitch of panic in high modernism, and then settling into various distractions and despair in much of the literature following the Second World War. Such a generalization is more parabolic than historical. Parables might be true in some sense, however. In what sense they might be is a concern not independent of this uncertainty about what kind of things we are. I am something and, therefore, I am a kind of thing. The kind of thing I am is expressed (to me and you) as a constraint: a human being is limited relative to its various capacities. Such constraints, however, are conceptualized relative to the various ways we divide up the world into kinds. The beliefs we have about kinds are bound to our general beliefs about the world, about how we understand waterfalls, automobiles, trees, tables, beliefs, fears, talk, and so on. My beliefs about myself are bound to my beliefs about what kind of thing I am, and then to beliefs about kinds of things in general. My beliefs and senses of myself, how-

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Introduction

ever, are not simply and only these. My actual understandings of cars and waterfalls, my thoughts and confusions, my beliefs and beliefs about beliefs can become easily unsettled from my general attitudes and commitments. I might feel the spirit in waterfalls and at times in my car, although I walk through the world as a scientific materialist of some general kind.

~ WHATEVER WE ARE, we are at least some kind of biological entity and some kind of thing that can describe itself through concepts. Such descriptions change over time and are marked by a complex vocabulary including 'human being,' 'soul,' 'person,' 'mind,' 'body,' 'I,' 'we,' 'our,' 'mine.' The first part of this list consists of concepts that link up to other ideas we have about the world and the things in it. The second part of the list describes not only how we can stand toward ourselves and others, but also how we stand toward what we say about ourselves and others, and by this I mean to myself and toward you, as well as toward things. We are creatures. We can ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate from inside the security of understanding ourselves to be animate creatures. What would it mean to ask about this distinction as if we could stand outside these distinctions? This is, in essence, how cognitive science begins. Its ultimate goal would be the replacement of the psychology we have developed from within our interpretations of our experience with a psychology built from the experimental data describing the causal structures of our brain. What it means to be animate or to have a mind, however, might simply be a trivial question: we are what it means to be animate and have a mind-our experiences, our descriptions, our expressions, our emotions, our thoughts and so on. Or, for the same reason, it is strange, unclear, and intractable: being what we are, as a unity and in behavior and experience and understanding, is to be something, and yet this something that we are is determinate but endlessly describable. Describing what kind of thing or creature a human being is will seem like a scientific problem if we imagine we are something like a natural kind. Since as a species, the limits of which can be defined in more than one way, and given the indifferent and also variable pressures of evolution (reproduction and selection), it is unlikely that we are, strictly speaking, such a natural kind. Although, a natural kind like water does have a history if we understand it within the history of the universe, its

Introduction

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constitutive form is not like the complexity and contingent history of organisms. Unless we are a natural kind, in the way that water is, then what we are is given through particular descriptions, contingent judgments about what we are relative to other contingent distinctions. These judgments are about real things and describe real aspects of what we are, but the form and meaning of the distinctions are ours. If the criteria of identity for being human are understood as contingent facts, a result of evolutionary selection, then the concept human being is circumscribed in arbitrary ways and is not defined by any essential (monothetic) element that all human beings share (Hull, Minds, Machines, and Evolution: Philosophical Studies). If this is true, then we normalize the kind human being relative to the complex ways in which we recognize and interact with such creatures: ourselves. We are, however, relative to ourselves like a natural kind, and there is little but propagandistic sense in claiming that we radically construct ourselves, our species being, as if our beliefs or our culture shaped some undifferentiated something (no matter how qualified) into the form human being. How we do describe our natures as human beings, however, is also dependent on various cultural factors. This dependence is variable to our interests, but is still constrained relative to various aspects of what we are, primarily the limits enacted by what we study in biology-from physiology to genetics-and physics, and other relevant sciences. Taking aspects of ourselves as subject to scientific study does not mean that it is essentialist or irrelevant to wonder about our nature, understood as both a generalization and as a description of our natural capacities. What we call our nature, of course, is tied to how we understand and describe ourselves, and one of the things we do is to understand and describe the world and ourselves. It is for this reason that Aristotle calls our rationality our function (ergon) as human beings-not because it is the only way we function (the Aristotelian human soul nests within itself vegetative and animal capacities as well), but because it is both the means by which we understand ourselves and that which characterizes us as distinct from plants and animals. The sense of the distinction 'human being,' while picking out a real something, us, is dependent on various distinctions, the form of which will partially be determined by our purposes in making them. Do we, however, rely on some general sense of ourselves whenever we understand ourselves-myself-in whatever way? My use of 'understand' here is meant to capture a broad range of claims and descriptions from ethics to language. Literature has been centrally concerned with

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Introduction

these thoughts and descriptions. The greater command we have of the facts of our world, the better and more comprehensive sense we have of how the physical world works and can be organized and manipulated, the more our self-descriptions have split into scientific ones and a hodgepodge of other kinds. We can re-collect these scientific self-descriptions and whatever others to which we still hold under another question: What does it mean to be human, to be a human person, with our capacities and ourfate? How could we answer such a question? Maybe with Dostoevesky's The Brothers Karamazov, the works of Aristotle, or Bach's Mass in B Minor. If this question can only be answered, however poorly, with representative representations, it is not a question at all, but a riddle, a riddle we might answer with our own lives as well. This riddle, however, is not like the riddle of the Sphinx, for example. To know the solution to the Sphinx riddle, you have to know how it is a solution. If you are simply told that man is the solution, but do not understand why this is the answer, you do not understand the riddle. Knowing the answer is to know how to apply the riddle as a description or a picture of human life. One must know what is relevant, what aspect of human life is being pictured by four, then two, then three legs. 1 The riddle 'What does it mean to be human?' is not like this. One could call it instead a riddle of the enveloping facts. If in asking this riddle I situate the meaning of 'human' by various comparisons with primates, fish, kinds of ivy, and protozoa, then I understand the riddle in a different way than if I frame 'human' by a list of angels or demigods. Which of these sets of descriptions are the relevant ones? A riddle of the enveloping facts is a riddle about such descriptions, if only we knew, however, what would count as the relevant facts in this case. So maybe it is also a riddle of fictions, not only of facts. Any fiction or set of facts with which we surround the riddle are themselves other riddles, since those facts or fictions would require further facts or fictions to justify them. Art itself is such an envelope. Every answer to 'What does it mean to be human?' is a restatement of another riddle. To answer the riddle with Bach's Mass in B Minor means that the riddle of our being human is the riddle of Bach's Mass. How this is an answer cannot be understood except as another riddle.

1. See Diamond, "Riddles and Anselm's Riddle," in The Realistic Spirit for a further discussion of riddles.

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We can never decide what is relevant as we can with the Sphinx's riddle. Wittgenstein argues that one might see some arbitrary cipher in any number of ways, "in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with" (PI, 210). Because this cipher is arbitrary, any interpretation I might offer would share in this arbitrariness. The answer to the riddle is as obscure as the riddle itself. Part of our confusion is that we do not know how to frame the riddle or the answer; we do not know what facts are relevant and thus the fictions with which we surround the riddle and its answer become another form of the riddle. Any fiction surrounding 'the meaning of being human' cannot reduce the riddle to anything like a word or sentence whose meaning does not require further and tendentious interpretation. The question 'What does it mean to be human?' becomes a riddle because of the lack of clarity about what sense we can give to the words 'mean' and 'human being.' Bach's Mass can answer the riddle because we can claim it means in the way a human being does and, therefore can count as a representative representation. Such a representation is itself a description of what will count as both meaningful and human. There is, of course, more to say about this, but what is important here is that any answer to this question as a riddle must link 'meaning' and 'human being.' The riddle becomes a problem of interpretation primarily of these two concepts. Thus, I can alter the question with the help of single quotation marks: "What does it 'mean' to be a 'human being'?" I could then answer this by adducing my uses of 'mean' and 'human being.' Whatever 'mean' means here depends on the particular description we give of ourselves as human beings, and whatever 'human being' means depends on the particular kind of meaning used to delimit or describe the concept of human being. In describing what a human being is we must decide on the appropriate vocabulary and conceptual domain. These domains might be described as psychological, linguistic, social, biological, and so on. Any particular domain, with its ontological assumptions, is already framed as a set of descriptions and ways of interpreting us. Even a description that includes a large set of such domains is based on decisions about what that description would include. There cannot be a definitive list, and in fact descriptions would overlap, have different historical relevance, and, of course, one could invent new descriptions. One way of seeing this variety is to list some of the words that have been used in English to describe the particularity of being human: 'subject,' 'self,' 'I,' 'identity,' 'person,' 'consciousness,' 'persona,' 'role,' 'psyche,' 'organ-

22

Introduction

ism,' and so on. While these words might be part of a meaningful description of my human particularity, their ontological status remains suspect and cannot be determined independently of our descriptions of and assumptions about our psychology and our sense of ourselves as particulars and as human beings, however defined. It is relative to the concern for the sense of these words that I would put the debates about humanism and antihumanism, for example. To use the phrase 'human being' and to attempt to understand what our humanity is does not commit us to any particular set of ideas, unfairly labeled, in condemnation, humanism. One kind of antihumanist argument assumes that to speak of human beings is to assert that there is some essential x constitutive of being human. But nothing can count as essentially x, because of the various ways any claim about this essential x involves cultural and tendentious assumptions about being human. Thus, there is no intelligible use of 'human being.' This argument works by setting up human being as a kind of platonic essence, something unlikely for anyone to do except in this inverted disappointed fashion: if human beings are not essentially something, they are nothing. This does not follow. I have nothing to say about other forms of antihumanism: attempts to redescribe whatever we are as nodes of power, discourse, or prejudice. These are all interpretations of what it means to be a human being. As interpretations they assume or imply an answer to the question 'what counts as human?' Interpretations or descriptions simplify. Types of persons, specific virtues, and ways of being human can be used to describe the kind human being. The criteria for being human might take the form of descriptions of ideal kinds of humans, characterized as a set of traits or properties, defined as specific functions or abilities (language), as rationality, or even as a sense of justice, as does Hesiod. Since abilities or capacities can be fulfilled in varying degrees, the designation of human being can be used as a measure of this fulfillment. The meaningfulness of being human is something we express and assume, as well as grant and recognize. What it means to be human must be understood in relation to the criteria or the processes determining the import of our ascriptions of meaning to being human. The stipulation that being human, in all relevant senses (this would be part of the definition), must be the result of natural, non-intentional, and therefore scientifically describable processes is an ontological stipulation. A lot rests in the stipulation 'in all

Introduction

23

the relevant senses,' since that constrains what kind of descriptions of human beings would be explained in this account. There are many relevant senses to what we might mean by 'human being.' In trying to say what a human being is, I am dependent on my descriptions of being human. This dependence is peculiar, since I am that which is describing, and thus I seem to be caught in a self-reflexive bind. This can be pushed too far. It does not imply that we have either a special introspective relation to ourselves, although our first person statements about our cognitive states carry with them greater authority than those given of us by others, nor need it imply that we are unknowable in principle to ourselves. Third person descriptions of ourselves capture important aspects of what we are, and first person descriptions and expressions are partially constitutive of ourselves as well. These descriptions carry with them varying authority and are dependent on our general sense of how things hang together. In what sense are we bound to ourselves-myself-as human, dependent on a sense that we are a kind of thing? In asking that question we are trying to describe what we are that is modified and pressured by science, technology, and modernization. We would not be discovering a new fact about ourselves, but rather we would be trying to make sense of our lives as bound to various potentials and possibilities. The limits described by science establish potentials and possibilities for us. Valery allows the hyperrational, inhuman, and impossible Monsieur Teste to comment on human beings: "Man is more general than his life and his acts. He is designed, as it were, for more eventualities than he can experience. Monsieur Teste says: My possibility never leaves me" (Monsieur Teste, 78). These possibilities, however, are given to us through the way we imagine we are constrained, and those constraints are often ontological derivations from our understandings and pictures of the world, and thus from science and from the mimicking myths of counterscience and religious fanaticism. It is my sense of being something that can be described as human or that can be described through words, to you and to myself, that determines how I am to understand the words 'mean' and 'human.' As a consequence every aspect of the riddle is a problem now. It seems silly to ask in what sense am I human; being human describes the kind of animal I am, but also the sense ofwhat it means to be that kind of animal when we have no sense of being any other kind of animal. The question What does it mean to be human, to be a human person, with our capacities and

24

Introduction

our fate? does not ask in what sense am I a category (human). I can be

described relative to certain distinctions, but I am not ontologically a category-except as a joke. The question here is rather in what sense am I what I seem and how is what I seem what I am: And what more am I? Wondering about ourselves, losing sense so that we lose ourselves is one subject for literature and thought.

"-'1 From Soul-Making to Person-Making Imagine dissonance assuming human form-and what else is man? r--J

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy

T H E PROVINCE OF HOPE is no longer Providence. Human beings only seem human to themselves. We understand ourselves through our own words and concepts. Without God's support or some sense of immanent spirit we are only, although not simply, natural. Nature is blind and indifferent, and, thus, inhuman. Nature's humanness is us. Our human purposes, however, will not make nature purposeful. Even Kant, attempting to make at least the mechanistic world fit with our teleological projections, assumes what he should not: that "the notion" that natural things "are organized things is itself impossible unless we associate with it the notion of a production by design" (Critique ofJudgement, 398). Kant is impressed with the functioning of organisms and with the necessity of relying on teleological explanations in describing them and their behavior. He has no warrant, however, to claim that our understanding necessarily requires "the notion of a production by design." Behind this claim is his sense that biological organisms cannot be explained or described through mere mechanistic means. Organisms, he believes, are intrinsically teleological: not only do they function toward ends, but the parts of which they are made do as well. Thus, he understands organisms as wholes that can cause their parts to function. The idea that organisms are intrinsically teleological is certainly not a necessary conclusion. The claim that in some way the whole causes its parts to function is fanciful. It may be true, however, that we require teleological explanations in order to

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understand a nonteleological natural world. There is little hope of resolving this conflict between our teleological understanding (intentional) and nonteleological (non-intentional) nature. This difference, however, leaves us with a question and a problem: How can we fit the challenge the indifference of nature poses to our fate and possibilities into a description of ourselves as human persons? This question can be split into two forms: (1) How are we souls in nature? And (2) how do our best theories of nature constrain the sense or description of ourselves as persons? The demise of the idea of Providence is cousin to the demise of the idea of the soul as an immaterial substance. Unless we lose our sense and our science, the soul's substance can only disguise itself in false beliefs. We can still, however, let the word carry ideas about anyone's particularity as a person and human being. We can understand the soul as that which is shown by our physiological and psychological functioning' construed as either constitutive or reflective of our being alive and intelligent. 'Soul' can still be used to identify moral character, feelings, and attitudes. The meaning of 'person,' while not so broad, attaches to and supplements many of the uses of 'soul.' Soul-talk and person-talk fit together, but they are not the same. We should also note that 'soul,' 'human being,' and 'person' do not simply designate or collect descriptions of us. They are the means by which we invest ourselves within the realms of our own normative distinctions such that we can so designate ourselves. They are part of how we picture ourselves to ourselves. The history of the concepts associated with the words 'soul' and 'person' entwines the history of modern science. The broad outlines of this history do not simply revolve around whether human beings are mechanisms or not, but around how to understand our possibilities and the status of our purposes relative to our ideas of nature. These ideas are various. The historical progression of ideas, while by no means simply linear, is one in which nature is increasingly understood as lacking guiding or constitutive purposes. The conceptual pictures of a soul, a person, and a human being range from pictures in which the intrinsic purposes of organisms or vital matter oppose the blind mechanism of much of nature to post-Darwinian pictures in which all senses of intentionality are epiphenomenal or illusory. We cannot recover Providence. I cannot speak to that loss. In this chapter, I will ask instead how we picture ourselves as souls or as persons within the condition of that loss. How much do we risk and promise when we picture ourselves as souls or as mere persons? I look at three attempts to provide a sense to 'soul' and 'person,' and

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in a modified way 'human being.' After analyzing John Keats' account of soul-making, I will examine Henry Adams' attempt to formulize himself within the precincts of science and, finally, the philosopher John Pollock's recent theory of person-making. The differences between soul-making and person-making look like the differences between a moral education and an engineering project. Adams, caught between these, writes a parody of a moral education, as if what could answer the failure of such an education would be discovering the proper scientific laws or using the appropriate engineering metaphors. All three attempt to imitate what we are as a means of discovering what we are. Each appeals to different modes of imitation: (1) illustration, (2) symbolization, and (3) mimicry. I will tell a story (a kind of history, although without any attempt at causal explanation) about this series of conceptual negotiations with the indifference of nature, where the weapons of resistance or accommodation are these various forms of imitation.

I. Making a Soul How does one make a soul? Keats offers an answer to this question in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law. In his description of soul-making, he asserts that animals and plants are bound by and to Circumstance, what Kant would call Nature and what Keats calls "the World or Elemental space," that which is determined by invariant natural laws. This world is the realm of "proper action" in which the other two parts of the human soul, which Keats calls "Intelligence" and "the human heart," act. "The human heart" is, I assume, something like the emotions. Intelligences are "sparks of divinity . . . atoms of perception-they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God." As God they are also undifferentiated in character-they simply perceIve. The intelligence and the heart, by extension, lack an Identity. What identity means here is unclear. To achieve an identity would seem to mean, at a minimum and somewhat cryptically, for an intelligence to become "personally itself." An Intelligence and a human heart constitute a soul when they gain such an Identity, something formed through the intelligence's and the heart's interaction with Circumstance. How this happens is also rather vague, but the suggestion seems to be that particular circumstances deform a person in such a way as to make that person particular and thus identifiable. For a soul to be identifiable means that it can be recognized as a particular soul; the markings of

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circumstance give it a particular shape. Implicit in the idea of becoming "personally itself" is a sense of the particularity of a soul being mine. Keats only hints at this sense of first person particularity. Keats further allegorizes the process of soul-making. He calls the world "a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read." The heart becomes "the horn book used in that school." Then he ends with a question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and to make it a soul?" He does not, in asking this question, argue for particular lessons that these pains teach. Circumstance, which now affects the heart and not the intelligence, alters a man's nature-and such alterations of nature are a soul. There is a difference between how the intelligence becomes a soul and how the heart becomes a soul. When the intelligence is altered, the alteration makes what is perceived what I perceive. Once the heart is at issue, then, the concern is both to produce recognizable effects and to form a character. Thus, the soul's identity is also described by the statement "I am constituted by what I learn to value." There are, therefore, three aspects to Keats' concept of identity: (1) that which makes the soul identifiable and particular, its epistemological form; (2) a logical form in which my particularity is exclusively mine; and finally (3) an implicit moral sense that allows the soul to become identifiable and particular, to mean partly "what I learn about life through suffering." But what kind of making is this "soul-making"? To what degree should we read soul-making as theology, psychology, hyperbole, anachronistic, animistic, metaphoric? I don't think we can simply domesticate Keats' sense of making by calling it an education. We still have to ask how this education takes place, which, given that it is a way of making us human, is to ask what we are such that we can become ourselves. In Keats' argument, the answer to how this education can take place seems displaced into the question "What is nature or Circumstance such that it can produce the soul?" Keats addresses this question in the following way. He tells a story in which he gives a rose awareness and then tells of its crucifixion: For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun-it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances-they are as native to the world as itself-no more can man be happy than worldly elements will prey upon his nature. (326)

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This story can seem straightforward: happiness is contingent on and limited by the opposing forces of an indifferent nature. The rose too is part of nature, as are we, but since happiness is an emotion of the human heart it seems like a strained step to make the rose feel happiness and annoyance. Personifying the rose, however, makes clear that the drama here is between the indifference of nature-what we should call the non-intentional character of nature-and those states of mind that are broadly characterized as intentional. A "non-intentional account of nature" describes nature without appealing to a controlling agent. Nature, or the world so described, lacks those qualities of mind that we describe as propositional attitudes, or the property of intentionality, where states or events are understood to be directed toward or to be about some object, state, or event. Thus referring to the nonintentionality of nature is a way of saying the events and entities of the world are meaningless. The success of science can be characterized as the general extension and development of non-intentional descriptions and explanations of how nature works. What I am suggesting then is that this story about the rose is a drama not simply between nature and feeling, but between a non-intentional description of the world and an intentional one, between what science describes and what art imagines. This gets us close to Kant and his romantic interpreters. The making of the soul is a kind of making that is not the same as an effect generated from the causes understood to constitute what happens in nature. This partly explains the lacunae about the ontological status of mind, heart, and soul in Keats' account. Nevertheless, Keats is posing in broad terms and in a vague way the conflict between the intentional domain, to which he gives a specific moral cast, and the non-intentional, which he again casts as indifferent: between the normative and the natural (a causally determined realm). Keats seems close to Schiller here, in that the goal of education is to unite nature and norm, or, as Schiller says, to unite inclination and duty. The rose moves from the pure sensation of the world to an interpretation of the meaning of these sensations as "annoyances." Even to evaluate negative stimuli as annoyances implies a complex of responses that involves the possibilities of happiness and hope, a language of intention in which the rose's consciousness, desires, beliefs, or values determine or express its relation to the world. The fact that humans, through imaginative empathy, can let the rose stand for themselves is a kind of demonstration that humans are not completely indifferent to the rose as is the cold wind, since we can and do make such projections.

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Keats' extension of sensation and intention to the rose transforms the rose into a symbol and a representative of being human; I can stand in for the rose and the rose can stand in for me. This can become an odd argument for the special status of our intentional nature, for our difference from the nature that includes the cold wind: through our poetic imagination, which allows for this special recognition and figuration of the rose, we show ourselves as not indifferent to the fate of the rose in the way the cold wind is. Keats' descriptions of soul-making that follow this story have as their implicit final goal the separation of our humanity from the non-intentional, indifferent world of circumstance and nature. I am here highlighting two aspects of Keats' discussion of soulmaking: (1) the general equation of Identity with what counts as a soul and (2) an attempt to adjudicate the nature/norm distinction. Both of these aspects come together in an earlier letter in which Keats describes our moral education as a kind of illustration (proto-soul-making). His argument is partial but suggestive. Keats begins, as he does in his explicit discussion of soul-making, with the way the circumstances of nature limit our happiness. He then links our human condition with these natural circumstances by emphasizing the fact that for the most part human beings make their way through life "with the same instinctiveness ... the same animal eagerness as the Hawk." This natural condition, bound by instinct, is countered in human beings by our shared human nature, described as a tendency toward purification, understood as a form of disinterestedness and independence from instinct. Freedom is understood as a kind of grace or beauty, expressed in an ability to understand in a deep way the truths of poetry and thought. He then claims that "Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced-Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it." A proverb, for Keats, only becomes a proverb to you when you can use it to describe your life. "Life" and "proverb" would seem to articulate incommensurable and irreducible domains, as do picture and text. Therefore, the relation between a life and a proverb can be modeled, Keats assumes, on that between picture and text: lives are kinds of things that can illustrate proverbs. What exactly is being illustrated when my life illustrates a proverb? Henri Matisse was commissioned to illustrate Joyce's Ulysses. He produced a series of drawings illustrating Homer's Odyssey, not having bothered to read Joyce's book. If he had read the book, would he have then been able to illustrate it? Reading the book would be necessary given that illustration is at least derivative and dependent on what it is

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illustrating. What an illustration picks out in a text is like an interpretation, but its application to the text remains unclear or even tenuous. Is a movie an illustration of a book? Is it a translation of a word, a phrase, or a character into another medium? A particular shot in a movie might be used as an illustration; but the movie itself is an interpretation, an attempt to tell, not to illustrate. Asking "What does it mean?" leads to interpretation; asking "What is it like?" leads to illustration. Creating an illustration is like showing us the answer to a riddle. Again, what is to be illustrated is not our life, but the proverb. Keats' claim about proverbs is itself a proverb illustrating another proverb-"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced." But this cannot mean what it seems to. The relation between a proverb and life is not simply one of application: "apply this formula x (the proverb) across this domain." A proverb becomes a proverb when my life illustrates it. The proverb is a type, and our experience-our life-is a token of that type. Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves as one of its cases. Whatever is real is something we have experienced; in which case, everything we have experienced is real to us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb. It can only be a true statement about what is real when we recognize it as an accurate description of what we count as real. Experience cannot be real until it functions as an illustration of a proverb about experience, and thus both proverb and experience are dual criteria here for what will count as real. The dual criteria, (1) experiencing and (2) proverbs, where our life is natural relative to the normative proverb-type, seems to invert my earlier identification, following Kant, of the indifference of nature as causally determined (and thus natural) relative to the normative role of the imaginative empathy that links Keats to the rose. In fact, this inverse is the consequence of the dual criteria, and describes our dual human nature: part natural and bound to instinct and limited by death and part what we might call normative, which, at least, includes moral judgment, language, and personal identity. The battle between the nonintentional cold wind and the animate domain of the intentional rose and human soul dramatizes these two parts of us. Proverbs describe our fate and situation; they describe the fate of the rose. Proverbs, therefore, represent at least aspects of the indifferent natural world. At this point, however; the frame shifts. Proverbs, ostensibly about our fate in an indifferent world (and thus in some sense descriptive of that indifference), are cast in normative form (both in having content and in being generalized claims). At the same time, our life-threatened as

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well by the cold wind-is naturalized relative to proverbs, so that our life, something that just happens, plays the role of indifferent nature. Thus, our life illustrates the proverb, in the way that, in Kant's moral philosophy, we gain our freedom when we follow our duty (defined as rational and supersensible), and thus escape the causal determinism of our physiology, of nature, and of instinct. We understand our life under the aspect of the proverb, but in illustrating this proverb our life shows the proverb to be true and real (this is an odd use of "real"). The proverb is a type, and we are a token of that type when it becomes real. The proverb is meant to be true in all relevant cases. Our life means as an illustration of that proverb. We judge the proverb to be true by virtue of being able to illustrate it. Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves under its description. Keats appeals to dual criteria for what will count as real. The dual criteria for existence are (1) one's own life, in particular one's experience, and (2) the sense of the proverb. If our lives are to illustrate proverbs, we have to be able to recognize our lives as that. Keats uses "illustrate" as if our lives could do this without anyone seeing the illustration, as if an experience would express the truth of the proverb without any worry about how to recognize the proverb as so illustrated. This is a mistake. The dual criteria (experience and the sense of the proverb) point to that which holds them together-us and our ability to have experiences and understand proverbs. There is a trick in this. Keats appeals to our experience as a ground. Proverbs, not only as forms of language, but also as claims about the world, especially if they are moral claims, are normative. The ironic move here is that experience by itself does not guarantee reality. If it did, you would expect Keats to argue that proverbs illustrate our life, not that our life illustrates them. This use of "illustrate" undermines the appeal to our experience as a ground and makes it seem as if our life is derivative and dependent on the sense of these proverbs. Our experience becomes a guarantor of reality only when it can be understood as a token for the type expressed as the proverb. This is a moral appeal in which we can stand as examples for moral precepts. Reality is determined by experience, whose form and value are an expression of a moral proverb. Such proverbs are meant to be the means of guidance; they provide vectors for our understanding. If our lives illustrate them, then our lives are not meaningless. Illustration gives sense to that which is illustrated; it is not simply an example but a version. Thus, a life illustrating a proverb is in some sense that proverb; it can be identified as a version of it. Keats describes our

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identity-our souls made-in the face of circumstances and indifference. This identity is a way of resisting indifference by our very particularity and projective understanding. Our identity, however, is constituted through the normative means of proverbs, of ways of generalizing our condition. The particularization in this case is for us to illustrate. Keats' account of soul-making is a proverb about the indifference of nature and our human response: How would we know if we had made a soul, if our particularity had become "personally itself"? I am not sure that we could know, and if we could not, then we could not recognize ourselves as tokens of proverbs. Without this recognition, our experience cannot give reality to anything; it all could be delusion, and instinct could rule in our blindness. Keats provides two overlapping descriptions of soul-making. In his explicit description, our particularity is matched by the limits of our power: we can be no happier than Circumstance allows. Thus, we become and are educated into our Identity by the fact of this limitation and our recognition of it. Our ability to recognize ourselves illustrating proverbs and to identify ourselves as conscious particulars, in Keats' account, is just what we can do. We are only particularized, only souls, relative to our normative senses of things, through proverbs and in distinction to the indifference of nature. Nature's indifference is resisted; Keats' soul is not natural. We can be a token soul because we could only be that. We do not become a soul; we resist becoming soulless. This resistance is our unnaturalness. Even after Darwin and with the success of modern science and technology, we can still think this. But our education in the face of nature's indifference cannot be about intelligences or emotions. Through our soul-making we learn to assert ourselves as what we take ourselves to be. We seem naturally not like this natural indifference. Keats provides a picture of how we might take ourselves as persons who are somehow already souls, but he does not describe a real education (we are already what he describes), nor is this a soul that fits with nature. It is just our soul. This picture cannot withstand the cold wind it is meant to resist.

II. Making a Formula and Failing It is the relation between type and tokens, between experience and proverbs, as a means of describing our relation to ourselves, our words, and our world, that is lost in some precincts by the end of the nineteenth century. Things become increasingly naturalized so that the way

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we are something under particular descriptions, relative to specific norms, even if not moral proverbs, feels increasingly empty. An exemplary demonstration of the destabilization of Keats' concept of a soul is provided by Henry Adams, in his autobiography, by what he calls his education, or rather his failed education-his failed soul-making. Keats' "circumstances of Nature" have invaded Adams' understanding of himself. He describes his predicament in this way: Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. (Education, 471-472) Adams is calling for a more radical transformation than what Keats calls for with soul-making. The irony ofAdams' provocation to become a formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss of humanity is required in order for us to remain human. A formula is like a proverb. Adams' goal is to become a proverb, not an illustration of one: to become a type not a token. Adams can only become real if he refigures himself as what counts as real in what he already knows to be and what he cannot resist or deny as real: a mathematically describable, naturalized world. For Keats, experience stands as the criterion, in some vague sense, for what will count as real. This is not true for Adams. Since he grounds reality in himself, Keats cannot help being tempted by a certain subjectivism. The constraint on this subjectivism is the indifference of nature. Thus, Keats establishes his place within this indifference through normative means (proverbs) that gain a truthstatus relative to his experience. Adams is tempted by another kind of skepticism. The world is not only a constraint, but establishes the terms of what will count as real. Nature is real, and he is unreal; I am a projection, a fantasy, a dream: The world exists, but do I? Adams describes a human being "as the sum of all the forces that attract him" (Education, 131). Such a creature is bound to the world and its historical form by this attraction. If a person is a particularized set of attractions, then for Adams the mind of a culture describes the center of gravity of those forces that organize persons within it. For the twentieth century, this is the dynamo, which describes the non-intentional extreme opposed to an intentional world epitomized by the Virgin Mary in the fourteenth century. This is not a simple opposition between a mechanical universe and an organic, divinely infused one, but rather between different senses of mind expressed through a way of

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symbolizing the order of forces that would organize a life in relation to our possible fates delimited within an historical moment. The Virgin, for Adams, is a transducer of human forces, of human thought and desires, and the forces of the natural world, embodied in, for example, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The Virgin and the dynamo seem to exemplify what R. P. Blackmur calls "the force of symbol and the symbol of force" (131). What is the "force of symbol"? Battles for ideals, revenge for insults, and acts of sacrifice demonstrate this force. It is also demonstrated in thinking, understanding, writing, and reading. The force of symbol seems different in kind from that produced by the dynamo. While the force of symbols might be shown by the symbol of force, Adams' goal is to invert this and to understand how the force of symbols can be itself a force on par with the force symbolized by the dynamo. But this means to discover a way of showing physical force to mean something in the way that symbols do, not by discovering a new truth about force, but by realizing the sense of that force in its constitution of us. The Virgin exemplifies the idea that the force of symbols, how and what they mean, constitutes a fundamental force expressed in both the physical world and in our understanding and actions. The force of the Virgin can be the symbol of the Virgin only if all symbols, like the icons in the Eastern orthodox tradition, participate in the divinity of the Virgin as a kind of fact. 1 Divinity, in this case, becomes the means of characterizing the world as what Adams calls a Unity, within which a unit (the symbol of the Virgin) necessarily refers. He claims that we moderns have lost that kind of unity, and thus that kind of meaning. While mechanical force is expressive and symbolic of power, Adams believes that we lack the means of understanding our human lives as expressive of this in the ways made possible when the Virgin was the dynamo of the world and a symbol of humanity. The force represented by and enacted by the Virgin has degraded into art, on the one hand, and into mechanical force, on the other. To Adams the Virgin is "a channel of force "-while to his friend, the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens, with the aesthetic sensibility of the fourteenth century, but without the belief or understanding in her divine existence, she is just "a channel of taste" (Education, 387). St. Gaudens' taste allows him to recognize the dignity, unity, scale, lines, lights and shadow, and decorative sculpture of the "stately monument" of Notre 1. For a discussion of icons see Tamen, Friends ofInterpretable Objects.

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Dame ofAmiens (387). He is ignorant of and uninterested in "the force that created it all-the Virgin, the Woman." A force is a hypostatization of our belief in and commitment to a metaphysical entity, such that we can see ourselves under the aspect of her and not as a projection of our own. The Virgin, through our belief in her, produces human energy, manifested in the monuments to her. That Adams places the Virgin in this role is not just a historical claim about the rise of Mariolatry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but also a means of describing that energy, which is at least cognate with the biological forces of reproduction that drive natural selection in Darwin's theory. The Virgin "was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction-the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund" (384). One could describe the Virgin as part of our psychology, because her force seems an expression of our belief in her. And one could describe her as expressed in what we do to the world, because of our belief in her-the building of Notre Dame and Mont Saint Michel. Adams is fastidious, in his own strange way, about what to call our psychology, since it is in its unfolding in history that he finds his object of concern. The Mind is not an object with a history. Rather, it is something that is only manifest in history, in our actions and our productions. He is trying to discover that of which one could tell a history. He describes history as the vector of the Mind. Since the Mind is not something in our heads, but a matrix of interactions of our beliefs, capacities, and circumstances within the vast complexity of the human world, both natural and political, to follow this Mind is to follow the way it is manifest in the way it makes sense of its world. Consequently, Adams is not interested in the psychology of belief, except in relation to how it is manifest in actions, events, and ways of understanding. How can Adams enter into the proverb of dynamo force? "Adams never knew why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of will" (426). Adams admits that this "trick of seeing lines of force all about him" is metaphoric, an effect of his ignorance of mathematics' resulting in a countertendency "to leave the mind to imagine figures-images-phantoms" (427). But it is through these figures, images, and phantoms that the mind enters into the mechanical universe. Adams claims that "one's mind is a watery mirror at best; but, once conceived, the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force presented themselves as lines of attraction. By this path, the mind

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stepped into the mechanical theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new phase of education" (427). Adams' sense of education descends from the same tradition as Keats' sense of soul-making. The irony of Keatsian illustration has been replaced by an ironic situation: that we are all made from the forces that we ourselves do not understand, since these forces are not simply ideas, but the manifestation of the world, of nature, grasped in our scientific understanding. An education does not simply consist in surviving the assault by the indifference of nature, but requires that one understand one's understanding as part of that indifferent and mechanical nature. The modern sciences might describe that indifference, but they do not domesticate it, as Lucretius, for example, imagined ancient philosophy and science might. Adams seems to agree with Herbert Spencer when he claims that the hard problem Darwin had bequeathed to us was how to explain consciousness. Science, Adams claims, does not offer "any scheme of reconciliation between thought and mechanics" (429).2 These forces have vectors that the historian must learn to read. Living has become an education since those vectors are in some fundamental sense opposed to the teleological senses of our actions and lives. Adams' sense of psychology is symbolic. The universe "could be known only as motion of mind, and therefore as unity. One could know it only as one's self; it was psychology." The historian measures "thought-motion," which takes different forms, one of which is a relation between mind and unity expressed as Love: "'To me,' said St. Thomas, 'Christ and the Mother are one Force-Love-simple, single and sufficient for all human wants ... After the Virgin has redeemed by her personal Force as Love all that is redeemable in man, the Schools embrace the rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive'" (428). Adams opposes Love with the psychological force he calls ennui (cf. Schopenhauer, who opposes Will and Ennui). Ennui is a description of life-a life-a characterization of the moral trajectory or failure of human action, choice, and character. Appealing to Pascal, Adams claims that "mere restlessness forces action." Adams relates ennui, as a kind of state, to natural selection, another example of his odd pairing of moral conceptions with scientific ones. Adams complains, however, that in Pascal's account and in Darwin's there is no "account of the direction of change" (427). His complaint is misguided. Darwin retains residual forms of Lamarckianism, especially in his partial retention of theories of 2. He assumes erroneously that thought and consciousness are more or less the same.

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ontogenetic recapitulation, but the mechanism of natural selection is powerful precisely because it denies any role for such intentional forms or vectors, so that evolution can be described as blind. 3 Is Adams, then, simply bemoaning the fact that psychological and evolutionary explanations lack the intentionality that could be ascribed to God? These accounts lack "an attractive force ... a force from outside; a shaping influence." That is the point of the Darwinian account at least, which Adams recognizes, since he identifies his notion of an external, attractive force with that which Pascal calls God (an intentional agent). That force for Adams, however, is not manifest in personal belief, as it would be for Pascal, but in the theological unity between meaning and being, the unity of the "very beautiful and very true" in the Virgin at Chartres (Mont Saint Michel, 186). The Virgin as the intercessor between human beings and God incorporates symbols for ourselves as human beings with divinity, that which defines reality in Adams' account of the fourteenth-century Mind. Without this intercessor our sense of the world, the sense through which we live and history is made, falls into what Adams calls multiplicity. Science produces this fall of the world into multiplicity. Ifwe are to fit into this new world, Adams must find a way of using this multiplicity to unify our relation to that multiplicity: he must find a replacement for Keats' 'illustration.' He translates physics, specifically the kinetic theory of gases, into a metaphysical allegory describing the fundamental unit of the modern universe as Multiplicity, by which he means the movement and particularity of atoms (Education, 431). The Unity of Multiplicity, while fine for science, results in "chaos for man." While we might be creatures that evolved to live teleologically (for whom moral questions matter), the fact that our teleological descriptions and desires are not matched by our account of the universe constitutes, for Adams, a moral collapse. Adams links the organized sense of society and of human life with a sense of the unity of the universe: "Without thought in the unit, there could be no unity; without unity no orderly sequence or ordered society. Thought alone was Form. Mind and Unity flourished or perished together" (429). The form of the universe, of the relation between human beings and the universe as a whole, can only be a unity if it is organized by thought. The universe would then gain a teleological and intentional content, and would be, as 3. For discussion of this residual Lamarckianism and Darwin's partial appeal to recapitulation see R. J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution; for a description of the non-intentional nature of natural selection see Mayr, Dawkins, and Dennett.

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Adams describes history, a Mind. Adams characterizes the desacralization of the natural world as the loss of this mind and thus of unity: "Modern science guaranteed no unity" (429). This unity is not the unity of a grand unified theory, but rather the unity of a world in which the moral sense ofourselves and the content ofour thought is confirmed by what we do in the world, for example, by building a monument to the force of the Virgin. Adams translates our picture of the mind into an analogic language in which incommensurable and irreducible realms could be revalued. Mind in his complex allegory separates from materiality, but so does science, in that they both are mapped into the language of special objects, concepts, forces, energy, or mathematics; and in this he imagines that human values might be refigured with ontological force. Such force remains, however, only analogic. Adams fails to become a proverb to match the fact of blind force, Multiplicity. The desperateness of imagining that he could turn himself into a formula only exaggerates into clarity the fact that he recognizes no adequate description of himself as a human being, expect as a parody of force (the story of political power that he also tells) or as fragments and energies whirled by natural dispersion.

III. Building a Person Adams describes the world and human beings, exemplified by himself, in a symbolism that is meant to describe a psychology in which our mind and our culture are expressed. His education, his attempt to make himself into a form of force, fails. It is a response to a kind of panic expressed in the fear that while the world exists, he might not, at least as anything he could understand and value. Adams doubts that persons are persons anymore. He concludes that "modern science, with infinite effort, has discovered and announced that man is a bewildering complex of energies ..." (Mont Saint Michel, 345). Modern cognitive science tries to reconstitute persons using these formalized energies. In How to Build a Person, philosopher John Pollock understands that part of his task is "to construct (not just analyze) a ... precise concept [of person] " (111). This is in essence Adams' problem as well, although he did not conceive of it so clearly. Adams attempted to use scientific language symbolically, as a means of generating a concept of human person that would be recognizable and effective within the non-intentional world of nature described by science. What he produced, however, was

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a parody of himself as a person and of science, since that vocabulary in his hands lost its scientific significance and became mere floating metaphors and symbols empty of any real content. Pollock, however, begins from the other side, as it were; he attempts to generate a concept of a person not out of language, but through engineering a model of the mind. His assumption is that a successful concept of person would be actualized as an artificial intelligence. Pollock has what should be called a proto-concept of person. He describes this proto-concept in the following way: "something is a person iff it has states whose interactions appropriately mimic our rational architecture" (111). "Rational architecture" describes, at the very least, the means by which our thoughts are nonrandom, in the way language is a rational, normatively ordered system (17). Pollock's theory of rationality is more robust than this. Rationality is normative, characterized specifically by what he calls "a procedural ought." This notion of rationality comes down to the following model: given a specific goal or a specific action, if I want to achieve the first and continue the second, then I should do x or y. Pollock's goal is to develop more specifically a description of this kind of rationality and instantiate it in a formal computational system. One does not need a concept of person to describe our rational architecture, if it is understood as a set of rational capacities actualized relative to specific goals. The rationality exhibited in thinking and acting would be guided by one's goals and determined by one's capacities. Persons would not always seem to be rational. If a rational architecture constitutes a person, Pollock has to explain the common irrationality exhibited by persons. He explains: "in either epistemology or linguistics, what we have is a system that, left to its own devices, would result in our always following the rules, but in each case the system is embedded in a larger system that can override it and result in 'infractions' of the rules" (115). For Pollock the concept of a person that identifies other persons for us is one that delimits the system of our rational architecture. A larger system can override the rationality of an embedded system relative to its more global goals, a conclusion that follows from his description of rationality as utilizing a procedural ought. A procedural ought is a way of describing how something might function relative to some goal. The goal cannot be given syntactically (as if it were simply a series of states), but is understood as a normative concept. It is, however, not normative in the same way as is the idea of a person amidst other persons.

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The proper concept of person, as I would define it, is not functional in the way that internal psychological concepts would be or in the way that our rational architecture would be. The concept of person is meant to give content to the statement "I am that kind of thing." Rational architecture, in contradistinction, describes some entity that can reason. Pollock assumes that the description of a person as a kind of thing relative to other kinds of things can be reduced to a description of a person as an entity with the appropriate rational architecture. The normative rationality expressed by persons relative to each other is defined by the goals we pursue and the reasons we give. The normative rationality enacted through Pollock's rational architecture, on the other hand, is more like what we associate with physiological functions. More specifically, a rational architecture would be the means of instantiating a set of causally related internal states resulting in rational behavior. The pivot between the concept of a person relative to other persons and the concept of a person as the collection of subpersonal, internal states, in Pollock's account, rests on his use of 'mimic' in his protoconcept of person: "something is a person iff it has states whose interactions appropriately mimic our rational architecture." What does it mean to "mimic" here? The use of 'mimic' in this description is not very different from Keats' 'illustrate,' although their pictures of persons are opposed. There are, in the case of 'mimic' further problems. To use the mimicry of our rational structure as the criterion for the concept of person assumes that we know what our rational structure is, but that is, of course, what is to be explained by the concept of person, itself. If we use "mimic" in the way that Keats uses 'illustrate,' so that we would mimic the machine, we would require a candidate machine. We of course do not know how to build such a machine. Adams resolves the circularity of this concept of person by asserting, in essence, that we are already artificial intelligences. But that dissolves the distinction between 'artificial' and 'natural' and becomes a restatement of the problem-an assertion of the loss of the concept of person. What Pollock must attempt to do, in answer to the problem Adams articulates as the failure of education, the failure of soul-making, is to generate a concept of person not from within language, but from outside of it. If we characterize the non-intentionality of nature described by science as meaninglessness, then Pollock's problem is to generate meaning (the meaningfulness of personhood) from out of this meaninglessness. What Pollock must attempt, and what the shift from Keats to Adams suggests, is that it is not simply the concept of person that

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must be constructed, but the concept of the concept of person. And that is close to being senseless. Pollock's conditional definition of person would seem to articulate the means of identifying what would count as a person. It is thus a stipulation of what a person is relative to other persons. As such it describes, while appealing to the idea of an inner rational architecture, what it is to be identified as a person within the same normative domain that includes agents. Personhood is something attained relative to other persons, and thus fits broadly within the primary sense in which Keats uses 'soul.' The criterion for this identification of persons has two aspects. First, one would need a description of the internal states of the target entity and their interaction. This entity is a person if the interaction of these internal states mimics our rational architecture. Therefore, and this is the second aspect, we would need a means of identifying this rational architecture. If this architecture is given by nothing more than a theory of it, then it is tendentious to use it as that which is mimicked by an artificial mind or computational entity. Such a mind is itself an instantiated theory, and thus it would mimic the theory that describes its own internal states. That would be unsurprising. If the rational architecture is not to be given as a theory, then it needs to be manifest in a way that would be different from the way the internal states of the computational entity are. To be internal, those states would be programs, which would have a describable mathematical structure. No manifestation of our rational architecture could have such a describable structure. Pollock's use of subpersonal elements, and thus inaccessible relations, to identify and constitute a person relative to us, who are already persons, is thus confused. The problem Pollock faces is how to allow internal, subpersonal causal elements to constitute concepts that are only meaningful through our linguistic descriptions and our manifest behavior, specifically our personhood and our rationality. He develops his concept (or proto-concept) of person in order to identify when a computational entity would be a person. What is being identified is defined, even in its rationality, in a normative, intersubjective way. Within Pollock's theory, we would have to be constituted by this rational architecture not only in a manifest way, but also in a way that is computationally describable (otherwise there could be no way to determine if the one mimicked the other). This might not seem impossible. We might at some time be able to map brain states in such a way as to be able to compare them to

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machine states. But this would be to misunderstand what 'rational architecture' means. Pollock defines this architecture, as he should, as normative-relative to particular goals. Those goals, such as not falling off a bicycle, are things agents understand and toward which they act. An internal state, as part of any series of states, is neither rational nor irrational. The peculiar circularity of Pollock's description of the concept of person requires that he use 'person' in two ways: (1) as an empty name for a theory of rational architecture; and (2) as the manifestation of that architecture as a person, a kind of thing. He has no way of linking the theory of mind, no matter how good that is, with the manifestation of that architecture in actions, language, goals, and expressions of intentional stances (believing, desiring, thinking). His talk about internal states cannot fit his reliance on normative descriptions of rationality, and his talk about rationality is empty unless he can give criteria for the manifestation of rational norms. If he gives such criteria, however, he has no more need for talk about mimicking rational architecture. We can just, like Alan Turing, talk about mimicking rational behavior. Pollock's definition was meant to allow a machine to mimic our rational states and not simply our behavior. He cannot, however, define normative rationality separate from behavior. All one can do is correlate internal states with some manifest behavior; but that is hardly a concept of a person. It is a theory of mind masquerading as a theory of person.

Iv. Moral Panic How can we fit the challenge that the indifference of nature poses to our sense of our fate and possibilities into a description of ourselves as human beings? It remains troubling to describe ourselves as nonintentional machines blindly created and blindly functioning. How should we understand the image of 'human being' given by science, ourselves as non-intentional, causally defined creatures, relative to any normative description capturing the ethical sense of being a person? It is not enough to simply suggest that these are two different senses of 'person' and 'human being,' as functional and as moral. There is a relationship between both senses despite the fact that they are not the same. The sense of each, however, has become incoherent: human beings, souls, and persons are dissolved into effects, organisms, stipulated definitions, so that our self-descriptions mean something, but do not mean enough. It is this sense of our self-descriptions not being good

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enough that motivates the panic about the consequences of Darwinian natural selection for ethics in the nineteenth century. R.]. Richards is right that it does not follow that by virtue of being blindly selected (a position that even Darwin did not fully hold, although it is implied in the mechanism of natural selection) we are amoral creatures-that we have lost our moral foundation. 4 We might just be creatures who have evolved a sense of morality. But that is clearly not enough to counter the anxiety, because it is the meaning and status of ethical judgments that are threatened, not their origin or even their foundation, except to the degree that the latter establishes their meaning. Current morality seems superficial. We are constituted such that we make ethical judgments and value them, although their scope is defined by their purposes relative to our particular human goals and by the fact that we are the kind of animal that makes these judgments. Ethical judgments, if produced as an effect of our biology, have no force or relevant content that can describe, include, or account for the biology that defines the scope of their application and their source. This might seem trivial since describing our physiology is a different kind of exercise, with different purposes, constraints, and content, than our making judgments about what we should do in any particular situation. This is true enough. Nevertheless, our ethicaljudgments, and their particular intentional content and concern, lack a foundation that would include an intrinsic relation to their normative form. God or the soul, if they existed, would be teleologically

determined, non-causally-bound substances, relations, or entities. As such, even if they were, by nature, infinitely distant from our moral predicaments, they would be logically similar to the structure of our ethical judgments, when such judgments are not understood as simply instrumental. We might argue that we should accept that ethical judgments are simply instrumental and that we should give up our hankering for a way to connect these judgments with our ontological pictures. We might also observe that what we take as real is less like what is described in physics than what is described in our stories about our lives. Consequently, we need not judge our stories of and judgments about our lives in terms provided by the natural sciences. All of this might be true of some of our ethical judgments, maybe ones about murder and the like, but it seems not to be true of those concerning the kind of life we should live, about how we should act in relation to the mundane particulars of our lives. 4. In Richards' Darwin and the Emergence ofEvolutionary Theories ofMind and Behavior.

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The issue here is less about being bound to instinct or being free to make rational, ethical choices than of how to frame and understand our lives and our living as able to illustrate proverbs and to be, at the same time, an expression of the indifference of nature. We are the rose and the cold wind. An ethics that is accepted as simply a consequence of our evolution cannot account for this evolution and our biological ethical predicament in facing and being bound to natural indifference or nonintentionality. It is our biological predicament that frames our ethical sense of our inevitable loss, our being bound to our biology. It is the meaning of the fact that things do not mean that troubles Keats and Adams. The only meaning that would count here, that would fit the intentional into the non-intentional, would be an account of us that includes both domains. The sense of losing our humanity and becoming morally inhuman is different from losing the sense that humanity is humanity, the sense that we have no way of making ourselves intelligible to ourselves as human beings, as the kind of thing we are. Of course, what 'intelligible' means here is what Keats, Adams, and Pollock all attempt to explain-a judgment about that is already a judgment about what we are and what our needs as human creatures are.

~ My QUESTION HAS BEEN "How do we manifest ourselves to ourselves relative to the constraints our understanding of nature has on aspects of that manifestation?" The indifference of nature claims us: with what effect and how deeply is what Keats, Adams, and Pollock all describe in their various pictures and theories. In my descriptions of myself as human, what I am describing is neither given nor exhausted by any or all of my descriptions. That I am something that is not exhausted by my descriptions of myself or anybody else's descriptions of me tells us about the nature of description. This would always be true, regardless of our scientific understandings of nature. If I am not the sum of my descriptions, if these descriptions can fail in various ways, not simply by virtue of incoherence, then how do I describe the implied difference between what I am and these descriptions? I need not imagine that what I am is ontologically independent of these descriptions. I am not some thing-in-itself. I have a complex sense of myself as a human being, partially given in and by my various descriptions. But I exist as not just these. My descriptions say something and imply something about that which is being described. Not everything is language. I am, of course, something physical, with organs and senses and thoughts and emotions and so on.

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The descriptions that matter today are ones that explicitly figure what we are in relation to the natural world, relative to what is explicitly not-human, not-intentional, not-conscious. Our problem of selfdescription is, therefore, not a logical problem about descriptions and things described (we can describe much of our world and of our lives just fine). We do have to decide, however, what will count as a description of ourselves. This is what the non-intentional account of nature offers: a limit on what will count as an account ofwhat we are. My point is not that we need to describe ourselves as a collection of atoms, but that we have no way of describing ourselves in relation to the broad sense of the world as lacking purpose. Consequently, how we understand ourselves as having purposes does not fit us into that world. The appeals to illustration, symbolization, and mimicry all attempt to justify our self-descriptions relative to the constraints that we understand as determining our human possibilities. The failure of these accounts cannot be explained by the potential regress that might seem to follow because we would need to redescribe our relation to the description of our relation to a description. It is not that we get ourselves wrong, but that we do not exist as what we take ourselves to be within the natural world if we understand the world as purposeless. What kind of story could account for or express this natural indifference of nature as ours? What kind of story could set nature's lack of meaning in some relation to our need for meaning? Our sense of our lives as creatures of whatever sort is bound to this indifference and non-intentionality. The sense of distinction between our normative ways (our being souls or persons) and the non-intentional world shows itself in our attempts to describe ourselves using language. How this distinction is drawn shapes how we picture our fate, and thus our moral and human possibilities. The non-intentional indifference of nature, shown by science, sets us an ethical and representational challenge that we have to accommodate in our accounts of ourselves. The challenge is to situate how we understand and see ourselves as fated and bound to the purposelessness of nature in a way that does not diminish our attempts to shape and make sense of that fate as nothing more than wishful projection. We may have nothing to say about this fate; if we were forced to accept this kind of silence, which we might, then we would be accepting the diminishment of the meaning of our lives. 'Illustration,' 'symbolization,' and 'mimicry' characterize ways of attaching ourselves to our descriptions. Keats, Adams, and Pollock, in effect, attempt to produce a descriptive glue, borrowed from the dramatic conflict between the indifference of nature and our purposes

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and concerns, in which the terms of the description are meant to compel assent to the form of the description. They do not. But they describe us nevertheless-in their failure. We are somehow already glued to our descriptions. The glue is itself the problem: Are we glued to the various, and even conflicting, descriptions we give of ourselves by our beliefs, by the way we enter and exit fictions, by expedience, by truth? While none of these is irrelevant to our investment in particular descriptions of ourselves as persons and creatures, our attachment to these kinds of descriptions is best described as analogous to our logical relation to fictions. If we stand toward ourselves as if we were fictional, then in many ways how we describe ourselves does not matter (we can imagine whatever fictions we will). The content, the constraint, and the panic arise when we try to understand, as we must, how to fit this way of standing (and its emptiness) with our nonfictional senses of things. Our nonfictional accounts of the world and ourselves encourage us to take ourselves as fictions. This makes the problem of what we are fully a part of literature-in parallel with it and motivating it. To take ourselves as fictional is also nonsensical. What is nonfictional is not fictional. So we take ourselves as incoherently fictional and nonfictional. Adams at least has the sense to panic.

~2

The Logical Form ofFiction

T H E R E IS NO REALM OF THE IMAGINARY, no special fictional truth; language is not fictional; nonfictional statements are not disguised fictions. To think otherwise is to misdescribe the kind of thing that fiction is. It is, however, difficult to provide an adequate description of what fictions are. What does it mean for something to be fictional? The answer to that question will not only dictate the kinds of things we can say about fiction (it will limit our interpretative methods, for example), but it will also allow us to understand in what way we might be fictional, unreal, imaginary. I have a very specific problem to solve: What kind of thing are fictions and how do they mean or fail to mean? In other words, what is the logical form of fiction? If we understand a story or a poem as fictional, we accept that the truth-value of that story or poem is not to be evaluated in the same way as the claim that 'there is a horse in the room.' We accept that we cannot infer from a fiction the beliefs of the author in the way we might ifhe or she were speaking in his or her own voice. We naturally speak of characters and events in a fiction as distinct from persons and events outside the fiction. Fictions, unlike nonfictions, do not make specific claims about the world. To tell a fiction is in some way not to speak for oneself. Do we 'tell fictions'? The oddness of saying 'to tell a fiction' suggests that we do not have a clear sense of how we stand towards fictions: we say them,

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recount them, make them up. We can use fictions to express our feelings, to confess, to illustrate, to deceive, and to reveal. In none of these cases, however, do I say, relate, or use fiction such that I can logically mean what I say and at the same time mean what I say fictionally. While one might psychologically hold both of these ideas together, as long as fictions are not lies, which I will argue they are not, the logical relation I have with nonfictional sentences that I say and mean, even if they are not assertions, is different from the logical relation I have with fictional sentences. To mean something fictionally implies that I do not mean what I say. I might conclude that a fiction describes or expresses something I think is the case, but that is to interpret the fiction relative to my beliefs. To say something fictionally is to separate myself in saying the fiction from the fiction that I say. Consequently, the phrases 'to mean something fictionally' and 'to mean what I say in an ordinary sense' utilize two different senses of 'mean.' This difference can be represented ifwe describe fictions as, in effect, quoted, even by their authors. This is the theory for which I will argue. Our understandings and interpretations of fictional texts can be understood in relation to our other uses of language. Fictions rely on the ordinary senses of words and sentences. Yet, fictions as wholes and as fictional do not mean in the way sentences do. Consequently, we need to stipulate or determine how they can mean about anything. We have to decide how they mean in relation to whatever we take to exist. To articulate the disjunct relation between fictions and the world, we have to describe the unsettled ways fictions fail to fit with our nonfictional accounts of things and persons. Nonfictional sentences have propositional content. They can be asserted and evaluated as true or false. In order to understand what kind of thing fictional sentences are, we should describe them relative to these characteristics of nonfictional sentences. How can a sentence be fictional? A fictional sentence must be manifest as fictional in some explicit way. This fictionality must be manifest either (1) in the logical form of a sentence (or sentences) or (2) in how we take a collection of sentences as fictional. There is no other way in which something can be fictional. Any meaningful sentence can be fictional or nonfictional. Sentences are not manifestly fictional in their logic, syntax, or semantics. Sentences are fictional, therefore, by virtue of some way that we frame, use, mean, or understand them beyond whatever we take them to say. If fictions are fictions because we take them as that, then what they are is given by what it means for us to take

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them as that. Thus, what a fiction is describes some relation we have to a collection of sentences we understand as fictional. Can fictions be about anything such that we could evaluate them as true or false? The strangeness of what fictions are appears through trying to answer this question. The list of things we might take a fiction to be about or refer to, such that it could be true or false, is both large and complex, and would include other worlds, ideas, memories, quasientities such as the state, society, the spirit of the age, rainbows, unicorns, putative kings of France (bald or not), books, gods, physical functions, dots and dashes, scissors, and so on. Since a fiction can include much of what we might take as a world, a society, and a life, we face three kinds of metaphysical conundrums arising from the fact that we can use our sentences fictionally. The first concerns the ontological status of fictional names, objects, events, and so on: What kinds of things are these when they are fictional? If, like unicorns, they do not exist in the world how do they exist in a fiction? The false premise underlying this question is that a fiction means by virtue of referring to that which it names-or that the meaning of its fictionality is tied to how or if it refers. The second metaphysical conundrum arises from the fact that fictions, unlike ordinary sentences, do not just refer to things, existing or not, but seem to show a kind ofimaginary world. What sense can we give to the notion of 'a kind of imaginary world'? And finally, the third conundrum is: What kind of implications about language, the world, and our relation to both follow from the logical form of fiction? It is this last question, in the end, that will be the most important.

I. Fictional Truth Is there a kind of truth that can be marked out as a fictional truth? We can make true statements about fictions. We can make claims about what happens in fictions and about various aspects of what we take as the fictional world that can be evaluated as true or false. Leopold Bloom does live on Eccles Street-although he does not exist, nor did he ever, as a living human person. He is a character in a fiction called Ulysses. Also we can construe statements in fictions as true in some logical sense. We can imagine that "to be or not to be" can express a human truth by representing an aspect of our human predicament. If fictions express some kind of truth, one must be able to evaluate them as true or false. This means that they must be true or false about something, and thus if fictions are to be true or false about something

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they must be understood as kinds of assertion. I can legitimately assert that 'this fiction gives a true picture of how things are.' Neither the author nor the fiction, itself, however, need be understood to assert anything in this case. I assert this claim using the fiction. If I forget that I am making this claim, then I might imagine that fictions provide some special fictional truth. The meaning of 'truth' in the phrase 'fictional truth' is unclear. To give sense to the phrase, therefore, one has to give some special sense to 'truth.' This makes claims about fictional truth metaphysical. Often this metaphysical fictional truth is understood to be incommensurable with scientific claims, or more accurately with some assumed metaphysics of science ('scientific reality'). Scientific claims can be right or wrong, but the truth of fiction relies on no such distinction; we don't talk about, for example, fictional fallacy. If we claim some general isomorphism between a fiction and the world, we have to describe some aspect of fiction and match it with some description of some aspect of the world and then decide that so described the fiction expresses some truth. But the decision about this cannot legitimately rest on just taking the fiction as prima facie convincing. We can be convinced by some fiction that something is the case, but this would be a mistake or simply a psychological effect. Any picture of the world, states of affairs, persons, and so on must be evaluated independently of the role this picture plays in the fiction. Whatever claims we make using fiction will be true or false or will be meaningful or not relative to intellectual practices other than reading. Thus we might construe fictions and poems to offer truths, but there are no special fictional truths. Whatever we do with fiction is parasitic or enmeshed in other domains of thinking and evaluation.

II. Are Fictions Assertions? A fiction, by definition, cannot be a straightforward assertion by the author. Should we understand a fiction, then, as some special kind of assertion? If fictions are kinds of assertions, then they have to be asserted by someone and about something. Since a fiction as a fiction does not represent an actual state of affairs, it cannot be an assertion about what is the case. We might imagine that fictions are assertions of possible states of affairs. A sentence about some posited possible world could only mean about that fictional world. We might in this case

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wonder, as have David Lewis and Gregory Currie, about what implications and truth-claims we could draw about such a world. The logical form of fiction is not determined, however, by such concerns. The disjunct relation between fictional sentences and the actual world describes the logical peculiarity of fictions. Whatever we want to say about possible worlds only displaces this problem into how to understand the relation between any possible world and our actual world, however we define that. Part of the peculiarity of fictions is disguised if we assume that we simply imagine a fictional world through our understanding of fictional sentences. There is no strictly logical relation between my imagined fictional world and the actual world. I obviously use the resources of what I know and understand to imagine this fictional world. I am certainly constrained by the sentences themselves, but the information conveyed by any set of fictional sentences will radically underdetermine any imaginary fictional world I might picture. A fictional world is not really a world. How could one make a fictive assertion? 'I assert x, but not really'? In taking any fiction to be saying a, b, and c about the world have I not just turned the fiction into a nonfiction? If not, then a, b, and c are something like thematic redescriptions of aspects of the fiction and of what one might take as aspects of the 'world' that are asserted through this redescription. But to claim that the fiction is asserting something about the world by means of a redescription of that fiction (and the world) does not mean that the fiction does this: the redescription does. One can describe the options at this point as the following. If fictional sentences are asserted, then they must be (1) false, (2) failed assertions in some sense, or (3) special kinds of nonordinary assertions. A fiction could be made up of sentences, all of which in a particular situation would be true of the world, if the appropriate person asserted them at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way and situation. Would the fiction at that point cease to be fictional? In such a situation, the person speaking would be using the fiction, either quoting it explicitly or saying it, as if he or she were saying it nonfictionally. But this last case is just to implicitly quote the fiction. A fiction used as a set of assertions about some state of affairs is no longer a fiction. The original sentences were not false and then true. They are neither true nor false when understood as a fiction. They can be evaluated as true or false in the second case, when they are used to make an assertion. The second possibility, that fictional assertions are special non-truthbearing statements is hard to give any clear sense to, barring some

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elaborate metaphysical picture of language or the world that posits such fictional assertions. In what way would a fictional assertion be an assertion? If we take it to assert something about some state of affairs, then we are simply asserting it. If not that, then of what would we be asserting it?

III. Is Fiction a Kind of Lie? One obvious way in which an assertion can fail is in being a lie. Both John Searle and J. L. Austin equate fiction with pretense. Searle suggests that fictions would be a sophisicated form of lying (we would understand it as that), if there did not exist a "separate set of conventions" allowing for false but nondeceptive statements ("The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," 67). By attempting to place fiction within their broader arguments about speech acts, they (especially Searle) attempt to distinguish fiction from other speech acts through describing the authorial act as one that provides and determines the fictional or nonfictional status of the sentence. This authorial act constitutes a sentence as fictional. There are, of course, important similarities between lying and fiction. Certainly, to be able to do one is to be able to do the other. For the liar a lie is said, but not meant. If I believe the lie, then I take it as meant. If I protest that I didn't cut down the cherry tree, I am both misrepresenting a fact (I did cut it down) and do not mean what I say. I do not understand my lie as a true statement. If I believe my lie, then it is not a lie to me. A lie is false, but not all false statements are lies. A liar intends that someone will take his or her statement as true, even though he or she (the liar) knows it is false. If I lie, then I intend that you should take my false statement as true. That is what it means to lie or for a statement to be a lie. A lie is an asserted falsehood. What is asserted, however, is a fiction for the liar. Until I recognize a sentence as fictional, it is not fictional. The same is true for a lie. That x is a lie is true because x was asserted as true. One understands a lie as a lie because it has been asserted as a truth. Equating fiction with lying requires that one characterize how one says the fiction or the lie, since, in such an equation, how one says a statement is what determines it as either. A fiction is often characterized as a kind of failed assertion. Austin describes fictions as unserious statements, while Searle describes them as inauthentic. Searle argues that Iris Murdoch, for example, "is engaging in a non-deceptive pseudo-

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performance which constitutes pretending to recount to us a series of events. So my first conclusion is this: the author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts, normally of the representative type" (65). While the presence of generic clues helps us understand something as fiction, it is still difficult to understand how these intentions mark any sentence in such a way that it can be understood as fictional. If what is required is knowledge that Murdoch is a fiction writer, then I am taking her written words as fictional by virtue of this knowledge. But that's all I need to do; the claim that what she has done is to engage "in a non-deceptive pseudo-performance" is a further interpretation of what she did, but I need not know that to take her words as fictional. What matters is how I take these words. I might even, for example, confuse one of her philosophical essays for a fiction. Fictions can contain logically true statements. This simply follows from the fact that fictions can be, and usually are, made of meaningful sentences. Similarly, claims about states of affairs within the fiction can be true or false. If, however, we distinguish sentences that can be understood as true about actual states of affairs, even though they are part of a fiction, from fictional sentences that are not true, then we are separating the content of these sentences from how they are framed. This may mean that we are attaching illocutionary force to each sentence in such a way as to out-trump whatever marks sentences as fictional. If one accepts this distinction, then either the content of a sentence is true of the world separate from how it is said (a claim that contradicts the initial premise of speech act theorists that there is a principled relation between illocutionary force and the meaning of a sentence) or there are two different classes of illocutionary judgments: fictional and nonfictional. This last is also something Searle denies, but he in effect describes fictions as if this were true. If fictional pretense constitutes a special speech act, then the sense of what is said is the same as an assertion except for this authorial pretense. The fact of this pretense is not manifest in the sentences. The author intentionally acts to pretend, but not to say anything. The only difference between fictional language and our ordinary language in Searle's account is the pretense of the author and our understanding of that pretense. Since that pretense is not manifest to us in fictional sentences, the pretense has its effect through our recognition of the fact that these sentences are a fiction. So for us the pretense just means: 'this is a fiction.' For the author, the situation is the same, except that he or she is performing some kind ofintentional act. All of the fictionalizing work is done by understanding a statement as pretense, which now must be

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defined as a special intentional act not manifest in language. Since, again, this act is not manifest in the sentence as such, all this means is that 'pretense' means fiction. Thus, pretended speech is just fictional speech: nothing has been explained or described, except for the general fact that most authors of a fiction intended to write a fiction.

Iv. Could I Say and Mean a Fictional Statement? If a fiction is not asserted speech, is it a speech act at all? To mean what I say can only mean that I do not take what I say as fictional when I say it; otherwise, I am only pretending to mean it. I can tell a fictional story, maybe even a one-sentence story. My fictional story may have a further point: to convince you that rhetoric is dangerous, for example, but that point is not part of the fiction. It is rather a way of understanding or interpreting the fiction, a judgment about why I told the story. The puzzle that these examples pressure is whether one can mean something fictionally. I believe the answer is no. To say and mean a statement would mean that the statement would not then be fictional to me. I would take it as true if I said and meant it. Fiction describes our relation to a particular sentence or set of sentences. To describe something as fictional cannot mean simply that it is false, that it gets the world wrong. It is first and foremost a nonasserted statement, that could be true or false, but to be so would mean for it to be asserted by someone. When we speak to each other in our ordinary lives we can take up a first person position. By a 'first person position,' I mean simply we can use first person pronouns. I do not mean to expand this stance as if it could describe our consciousness or something called subjectivity. As a corollary to that availability, our speaking can be construed as a speech act to the degree that we assert, interrogate, order, or use various subjunctives. Our sentences have particular kinds of force that mark our relation to these words and our relation to whomever we are speaking. This force expresses our intentions, the assumed implications and consequences of what we say, and can, of course, lead to particular effects, events, and actions. In ordinary speech situations we do not ask "Are these words mine?" except when something has gone wrong. We might not know what we mean; we can be confused, we can forget the meaning of words, we can stumble and stutter with conflicting thoughts or get entangled in syntactical oddities. I can ask myself, "What did I mean by that?" I can stand toward my own words in the same way that I normally stand

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towards the words of others. That this is not normally the case shows the closeness we have to our sentences, intentions, and meanings. We usually do not make mistakes about what we mean and say. In my ordinary communications or assertions, if I cannot say what I mean or what I have asserted, then I mean nothing or have asserted nothing. If I ask "Is that a fictional statement?" what am I asking for? In most cases, I am not asking if that statement is expressing an imaginary picture of the world, but I am asking "Do you mean that?"; "Are you asserting that?" If the answer is "no," then I would take such a statement to be a pseudostatement. It would not be a speech act as it stands, although such a statement might be put to use as part of some extended language game-part of some form of deception, for example. But in such deception, the point would be to make the fiction look like what is the case, to disguise its fictional status. Since a fiction is not a lie, then to not mean a statement that one says is not to say it in one's own voice; it is to quote it. The loss of this first person position makes it impossible for conversational meaning to function as a paradigm for how these fictional words mean fictionally. Without this first person position, without a speaker, we have no recourse to intention or even communication as a way of understanding what a sentence means. This is not simply a way of arguing against the intentional fallacy, but a recognition that quoted words are free-floating, themselves without a controlling context unless we attach 'N said.' But this 'N said' must also be quoted, and thus we fall into a regress if we imagine that this 'N said' would establish how a fiction is a fiction. Searle argues that the pretense of fiction is a function of its failure to refer to things that exist. He assumes that sentences become fictional because they fail to refer. If the lack of existence of the object represented (I call it this just for convenience) makes that representation fictional, then the representation of someone who is dead (even if I do not know that he or she is dead) is also a fiction. The reply that the existence that matters here is never having existed, is simply to beg the point-and would require a very strange ontology to make the distinction never having been and no longer being matter to how we refer. If the distinction is simply in what we know, then the distinction between dead and nonexistent becomes a kind of tendentious stipulation. We include in fictions all the things we consider either real or imaginary in the world: unicorns, bald kings of France, swampmen, bell towers, animals, and so on. Consequently, we should understand the distinction between real and imaginary as a different distinction from

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that between fiction and nonfiction. What I understand when I realize unicorns are not real is something about the world, which then allows me to reinterpret a sentence or story that refers to or includes unicorns. What I understand about the world allows me to judge how a particular string of words is being used. This judgment might be that the story someone is telling me is a lie, or that they are confused, or that it is a fiction. When I realize that Robinson Crusoe did not really write his story, then I realize that stories by and about Crusoe are fictional. Unicorns and Crusoe are not fictional objects, except in the trivial sense that they can be included, mentioned, and used in fictions. These creatures are best described as nonexistent. A story with a unicorn includes something that does not exist, although the story may be a dream, and dreams happen in reality, so the story of the dream might still be nonfictional. The same is true of Crusoe; I could tell a nonfictional story that included beliefs and ideas about the fictional Crusoe. The presence of either of these elements does not make a fiction a fiction. Understanding a story or a poem as fictional marks them as distinct from other ways of understanding a story or a poem as nonfictional. This distinction is clear in what one might call written speech acts, reports of fact that scientists, for example, would assert or deny in their own voice. The role of depositions in trials is a way of formalizing this relationship between a person and a set of sentences. A deposition is meant to preserve the statement as a form of first person, present-tense discourse. Its status would change if it lost this backing by its author. Such statements would then become historical. Nonfictional statements are said and meant. Fictional statements are uttered, but are not said by anyone. You cannot mean what you do not say; or rather you can think you mean whatever you want, but if you do not say it, then what you utter does not mean what you think it does. One cannot say fictions.

V. Fictions Are Neither True nor False If fictions are not kinds of assertions, are they, therefore, neither true nor false? Peter Lamarque and S. H. Olsen argue against this claim, specifically criticizing]. O. Urmson's use of the argument. They deny that sentences that are not asserted have no truth-value. This is true only under one description of truth-value. More importantly, their criticism fails to focus on the relevant sense of truth distinctive of fictions. Lamarque and Olsen offer two examples. They first describe

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hypotheticals. If "we conjecture or surmise or hypothesize that p, in contrast to asserting that p, there is no doubt that the truth-value of p is at issue" (59). That the truth-value of p is at issue in these cases is certainly true, but a conjecture or surmise or hypothesis is neither true nor false about p until it is construed as an assertion. If I hypothesize that 'I think the ball will fall off the table,' as it stands the sentence has to be evaluated relative to whether I actually think this or if I am lying. P in a conjecture, surmise, or hypothesis can be extracted as a sentence, which if specified to be about a state of affairs, can be understood as true or false. The notion of truth and falsity here is directed to a state of affairs that has to be evaluated in some way. What is at issue is the evaluation of particular claims as true or false, not the possible truthvalues of a statement. What distinguishes fictions from nonfictions is not the logical syntax of fictional sentences and their possible truthvalues. Sentences remain sentences (and thus have logical structure), but fictions are not claims, and thus are not evaluatable relative to what is the case. Their second example relies even more strongly on a logical interpretation of truth-value. They correctly claim that "component sentences in disjunctions and conditionals are not asserted but still possess truth-values" (59). One evaluates disjunctions and conditionals relative to the truth-values of their components (this is how truth tables are used). The truth-values of the antecedent and consequent of a conditional, however, are the means of determining the truth-value of the conditional. One has to assign truth-values to these component parts, and in so doing one must take them as asserting something. One need not use the speech act sense of assertion in doing this. There is a difference in something being true by virtue of logical inference and being true because it describes a contingent state of affairs. Since we are speaking of sentences and not statements (logically construed propositions), and since anything we would be evaluating as asserted or not would be bound by logic, the sense of truth at stake or absent in fiction is again relative to states of affairs. Lamarque and Olsen then go on to argue that sentences as fictive utterances can have a truth-value. A fiction may very well contain sentences we would construe, if they were asserted in the appropriate way and context, as true or false. To construe sentences as true or false is not the same thing as to say they are true or false. Lamarque and Olsen examine an example sentence that Urmson considers as well: 'There was ... many years ago a little girl who lived with her grandmother on the edge of a large forest.' That such a sentence at some time

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would or could be true does not mean that we should understand that it has, as written, some truth-value (which we just might not know). It certainly has truth-conditions and under certain descriptions of logic (possible world semantics) it can be taken as true necessarily. Again, for fictions the sense of truth at issue is epistemological. As it stands the sentence is likely true. We evaluate it as probable given all we know about people, forests, grandmothers, houses, history, biology, and so on. To know that it is actually true of this world requires that we know of an example that would satisfy the truth-conditions of the sentence. With such an example in hand we can conclude that this sentence could be asserted and be true. If some author wrote a scene in which one of her characters says something perfectly true about the actual world ("grass is sometimes green" or "two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom make a molecule of water"), would those statements be nonfictional? These statements are meant to be statements of fact. Since we recognize the character who said these sentences within a fiction, the truth-value of these sentences is neither here nor there relative to our world. No person is asserting these sentences. We might say, these characters are not lying when they say this. They may exist in the fiction on a planet on which grass is never green and water is not constituted of molecules of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. These sentences are claims within the fiction, and thus they are part of the fiction. From this, we can conclude that the truth-value of a sentence within a fiction is independent of the truth-value of the fiction, even if the fiction is simply one sentence. Truth, like meaning, is normalized for sentences in a fiction. For characters, including the narrator, sentences can mean like they normally do. Sentences within a fiction, however, are only notionally within anything (within the fiction). We understand the sentences themselves as fictional and posit a fictional world relative to which they make sense and can be understood as true. Within the bounds of the fiction, therefore, sentences can mean and be true in all our ordinary ways. What anyone would understand as a fiction are sentences that are not a part of any kind ofspeech act; no one can speak or mean a fiction in his or her own voice. What we understand as a fiction we understand as framed by implicit quotation marks. This would be true even when a writer reads his or her own work. James Joyce, when reading Ulysses, cannot speak the fiction as a fiction in his own voice. He has no first person position from which to speak these words as his own, from within the framing quotation marks. His relation to what and how these

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words mean is more or less like ours, like other readers or listeners. Fictionality is a metaconceptual judgment or stance that is specifically descriptive not of some special relation between the world and the fiction, but of how we understand ourselves relative to these words.

VI. Does the Intent of the Author to Produce a Fiction Constitute a Fiction as a Fiction? If it is true that fictionality is a metaconceptual judgment, then there are no fictional entities or fictional content. In fact, there is no way of getting fictionality into the logic or semantics of sentences, and hence there is no necessary role for fictional utterance, although there is a role for a fictional stance, and this is to say that fictions are constituted as a specific logical relation we have with sentences. I will develop an argument for these claims through a more elaborate critique of Lamarque and Olsen's utterance theory of fiction. Lamarque and Olsen argue against the description of fiction as a form of lying and as a failed assertion, and instead attempt to describe how fictional sentences have Fregean senses without referents. They claim that "the fictive dimension of stories (or narratives) is explicable only in terms of a rule-governed practice" (32). This practice is constituted by a fictive utterance expressing a fictive intent, which produces a fiction. The recognition of this fictive intent prompts someone to take a fictive stance. As part of this fictive stance, a listener or reader can report a specific fictive content, framed by an intensional operator, which indicates that the statement is not referential, but has a sense. The primary intensional operator would be the phrase 'in the fiction' or 'within the fiction.' A fictive utterance is an act, "carried out with a purpose, under the conventions of a practice" (43). The act invokes these conventions, "thereby inviting an appropriate response to the sentences uttered," which is nothing more than recognizing and conforming to these conventions (43). As part of the fictive stance, the "reader is invited to entertain sense and make-believe truth and reference" (77). A fictive utterance and a fictive stance both have a role in what Lamarque and Olsen call the fictional mode of presentation and in the constitution of fictive content. Lamarque and Olsen define a fictive utterance as an utterance with an intension (a sense), but without an extension (a referent). To say that words as part of a sentence have sense without a reference is commonsensical, but to claim that sentences have a special intensional sense is

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empty. The 'intensional sense' of a set of sentences just means that those sentences are meaningful but fictional, that fictional stories and statements lack referents within the world. But that lack is what the appeal to intension is meant to explain. The emptiness of this description undermines the significance of Lamarque and Olsen's account of the fictive stance, where a reader can redescribe fictional content framed by the intensional operator 'in the fiction ...'. This intensional operator just marks the difference between our descriptions of what happens within a fiction and our claims about the world. It indicates that the speaker is referring to a particular fiction under a specific description. It still tells us nothing about how this fiction is constituted as a fiction. The phrase 'in the fiction' is understood to preface a report about a fiction. Such a report is meant to indicate the intensional form of fictions. A story or text, however, need not be meant as a fiction to be taken as a fiction. In addition, there do not seem to be any necessary ways in which the fictionality of an utterance is or would be manifest in a fiction. Finally, nothing about the logical form of a fiction requires that we take it as an utterance, as opposed to taking it as quoted. One may still insist, however, that a fictive intent is necessary to produce a fiction, such that fictions are constituted as fictions independently of how anyone takes something as fictional. Gregory Currie, for example, argues that "fiction requires a fictive utterance," constituted by "a fictive intent" (35). Kendall Walton, on the other hand, argues that no such fictive intent or utterance is required-rather we simply take things as fictional. In response, Currie distinguishes taking something as fiction and being fictional. If we take cracks in a rock as a story, then, Currie is right to resist Walton's claim that to take these as fictional is to make them a fictional story. If I take them as such a story, I am treating "the shapes on the face of the rock as if they were fiction" (36). We cannot simply take the shapes as meaningful in the way that sentences are since they are not sentences. Currie suggests that the problem is that these shapes are not "the product of any communicative act," since they are "not intentionally produced byanyone" (36). This last claim is not necessary and is really beside the point. I could easily mistake such marks for intentional carvings (given some particular aesthetic). The problem here is no different than taking the cracks in a turtle shell as clues from the Gods, as was done in at the time of the Shang Dynasty in China, or hearing Zeus as the wind in the trees. The turtle shell cracks and the tree sounds can be taken as meaningful and truth conveying. That these are fantasies might be established

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through various sciences. These signs might cease to be believed. That we take these as meaningful partially produces what these events or marks are (I will discuss such cases in more detail in Chapter 5). When we take shapes on a rock as a story, we produce the content of that story by allegorizing our perceptions and descriptions of those marks into shapes and then into a story we tell ourselves. It is through that story that we see the rock cracks as a story. We have learned to understand novels in a way that is different from random cloud shapes. In reading clouds, however, I would be more an author than a reader. If I mistake the clouds as telling a story, then I believe certain things about the world that most people today do not believe. That the belief that clouds tell stories is wrong only means that someone who holds such a belief understands the physics of the world differently from someone who does not hold that belief. Does the claim that the cloud shapes are not a fiction, but are instead something we take as a fiction, say any more than this? What it means for something to be a fiction is tied to our beliefs, not just about fictions but about many things. Thus, there is no principled distinction between taking something as a fiction or being fictional; fictions are not ontologically neat. Lamarque and Olsen also require this distinction between taking something as fiction and being fictional in their theory of utterance. Since in their theory it is this utterance that determines content as fictional, they need to argue against the existence of non-intentional fictions. Lamarque and Olsen agree that rock markings are not fictional, "until they are utilized in a certain way; but that use, grounded in the intention that the fictive stance be adopted, just is the creation of the work of fiction" (48). This cannot be true. If the fictive utterance is to have a determining role then one must adopt the fictive stance because one recognizes a fictive utterance and a fictive intent. What constitutes a fictive object for Lamarque and Olsen is the intentions that "made a representation out of" the material elements, as they describe Picasso's Bull's Head made from a bicycle seat and handlebars. This is a poorly chosen example, since it is not clear how any sculpture is fictional. Certainly, not all representations are fictional. Is the question about this bicycle bull's head whether it is real or fictional? Clearly not. Do we ask whether it is real or a representation? I doubt we would wonder about this. Is the issue, then, what kind of object it is, given that it is a representation-and maybe a fiction (although I can't give much sense to this)? We mayor may not be able to recognize it as anything, but we could be taught to see it as a bull and with a certain amount of coaxing as a work of art. What more is there for the object to be than these? But

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this recognition of what it looks like and why it might be considered a work of art (its aesthetic justification) is not the same as the intent with which it is made. The intention may have been to show the meaning of sitting on a bicycle for too long. Our sense of the aesthetic exemplified might be helped by understanding Picasso's intent, but the content of our understanding rests less on knowledge of his intentions than on whatever value we might ascribe to such artistic endeavors. We certainly do not need to know that Picasso thought he was making a bull to recognize it as a representation of a bull-or not to recognize it, and say it looks more like a deformed bicycle, or maybe a gazelle head.

~ By MAKING FICTIONALITY LOGICALLY dependent on a kind of utterance, Lamarque and Olsen put fiction on par with understanding the content of a sentence, so that the recognition of fictive intent or of an utterance as fictive-constitutes taking something as fiction and is a necessary part of taking a fictive stance. This, however, is simply not necessary. It is not clear that fictive intent can be manifest in a fiction separate from the conventions of storytelling. But those same conventions can be used to tell putatively nonfictional stories, so that would not be enough. In addition, there are numerous cases in which such intent might be absent (the author meant the text nonfictionally) and yet we might still take a story as a fiction. Lamarque and Olsen insist that in such cases the story is retold, but if there is no apparent difference in either version it is hard to see how this matters. (One might also answer that if a nonfictional text could be understood as fictional, then one just has two kinds of fictions-original and derivative). Whatever conventions we take as signaling that something is fictional (not real) they cannot constitute the fictionality of the story. If they did, the story would be true but for those conventions, which are at best formal devices for telling the story, not for constituting it as fictional. The conventions of this practice would serve to indicate the fictionality of a set of sentences. We need to distinguish how something is fictional from an indicator that it is. An indicator might be something like a sign: the author or performer might wink his or her left eye when reciting a fiction, or all fictions might be written in red ink. Unless the indicator has some logical relation to how the sentences mean or are true or false, then we can use any indicator we like. If such an indicator is replaceable in this way, then all it can do is tell us if something is fictional or not. If this is true, then it would be more reasonable to conclude that what a

66 THE SURFACE OF LANGUAGE AND THE ABSENCE OF MEANING fiction is is determined by how we understand it. The cues say nothing about what it means to take something as fictional (which is the question that needs to be answered). Lamarque and Olsen face head-on their difficulty in showing how fictive intent and a fictive utterance are manifest in a fiction, when they address how stories that were once understood as myth could later be taken as fiction. They explain the difference between an "original myth" (Walton's phrase) and that same myth as a fiction by suggesting that the fictional version is a translation of the content of the first myth into a new one, a separate work, "retold with the fictive intent" (49). One can imagine that this retelling (rewriting) was exactly the same as the original. If so, how would this intent be manifest? And couldn't we simply read the original, in the original, and understand it as a fiction? And if there is no difference between that and the original myth, then what work does fictive intent do here? Although they do not argue for this, the best Lamarque and Olsen could say would be that to take a fictive stance would be to take the story as if it were being fictively retold. Understanding it as that does not help us understand how the fiction means as a speech act or as a fictional utterance. This 'as if it were being fictively retold' is just another epicycle. If I understand the fictional intent of the author, I am reading that intent, not the story itself. Fictions can seem real, as real as history, as events I remember or imagine. How would we know the author's intent? We may not be sure if he or she meant it fictionally or not-would that matter? It doesn't change the object, it just alters the kinds of inferences we can make about the author, and through those inferences about the world. There is a further problem. We have no warrant to understand the relation between and among sentences as syntactically bound, and if they are not, then in what sense can the whole of a fiction be like a sentence that could be uttered with intent? (How would each fictionally uttered sentence relate to other fictionally uttered sentences?) I will explore this confusion in the following chapter.

............... THE FICTIVE STANCE IS DESCRIBED as a kind of makebelieve, imagining or pretending "that the standard speech act commitments associated with sentences are operative even while knowing that they are not." The distinction being made here is one between imagining and knowing: to imagine that sentences mean what they do, while knowing that they do not. I am wary of appealing to the psychology of

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make-believe to account for the fictive stance. The significance of imagining and knowing, however, is relative to what we understand of the fiction, and thus, the psychological terms could both be rendered as forms of understanding, their difference being a logical difference, not a psychological one. A real problem is exposed here, however, if we ask the simple question For whom do we imagine the standard speech act commitments are "operative"? The answer is obvious as well: the characters, including any narrator, assert, question, and hypothesize. These speech act commitments are not the author's. The only exception would be if, like Searle, we allow that the author pretends such commitments. This might be true about how an author writes. But that only means that in pretending to speak in the voice of Tristram Shandy, for example, Laurence Sterne speaks words as if they were framed by quotation marks. We know that we can take characters as performing normal speech acts, and we know that authors do not. We are not pretending one thing and knowing another. We know two things about two different things. Lamarque and Olsen claim that the fictive intent provokes a fictive stance, in which the fictive intent is recognized. They acknowledge the potential circularity of this. But if "the primary reason for an audience to adopt the fictive stance would be recognition of the storyteller's intentions to speak (or write) fictively" (45), and if that recognition is just a confirmation of the appropriateness of the fictive stance, then the content of fictive intentions is nothing more than the audience taking the story as fictive. Thus, the fictive intent of the storyteller does no work. Since, in a written text, and in a less significant way in oral stories as well, the cues that would encourage one to take a fictive stance are in no way constitutive of what it means to take something as a fiction, the intentions of the storyteller in determining a fiction as a fiction are more or less irrelevant. What this means is that the relation between the story and the storyteller, relative to its fictionality, not to whatever other content or meaning it might have, is the same as the audience's. The writer takes what she writes as a fiction by adopting a fictive stance, by taking it as a fiction. The writer does not make a first person utterance when she originally writes a fiction or when she reads it to an audience. Thus, the writer does not say the fiction as a fiction. What she says is logically an utterance without a speaker, hence quoted. If fiction is not determined by the special status of its utterance, or if a fictive utterance cannot be manifest determinately in the putative fiction, then it cannot constrain the fictive stance. The fictive stance need not be prompted by it. To take something as a fiction would be to

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determine it as a fiction, and one could do that to anything if the role of the fictive utterance is empty. The emptiness of the notion of a fictive utterance undermines the specific form Lamarque and Olsen give to fictive stances, since such stances are logically related to fictive utterances. Consequently, fictive stances fail to do the work Lamarque and Olsen posit for them. Unless one can specify a special kind of illocutionary force, any speech act theory of fiction does no more than find ways of describing either how the author winks or how we recognize the wink. If the wink is a special illocutionary force, then it is a second order force, riding on top of or framing the other kinds of illocutionary force, since assertions, questions, demands, and so on can all be fictional. A secondary or quasi-force does no more than simply assert in a different way that something is fictional-and sets up the same two options with which I began: either fictionality is manifest in the logical form of the sentence or it is how we take it. And what we need to explain, then, is not the wink or indicator, but what it means for us to take sentences as fictional. An explanation of fictionality can only be a description ofwhat it means for something to be fictional.

VII. Does There Exist a Class of Things Called Fictional Objects or Characters? We might imagine that fictions consist or refer to fictional objects or that they have fictional content. Lamarque and Olsen rightly assert that there is no specific kind of content per se that is fictional: "Content is fictional ... if it originates in a fictive utterance" (51). Fictional content is thus explained genetically, that is, relative to how it originated. Fictional content, however, does have a peculiar constitutive logical structure: "content is fictional just in case what is true of those objects, events, etc. is dependent on the fictive descriptions which characterize them in the first place," or again, "[fJictional content is such that how things are (in the fiction) is determined by how they are described to be in a fictive utterance" (51, italics added). Fictional objects and events are logically and ontologically dependent on fictive descriptions. From this, Lamarque and Olsen conclude that "the ontological dependence of the fictional on modes of presentation is crucial to the distinction between fiction and nonfiction" (51). This is a stronger claim than it looks, and is in this form incorrect.

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Lamarque and Olsen must explain how and to what degree objects and events in fictions are dependent on fictive descriptions. What are "fictive descriptions"? Fictive descriptions lack physical extensions in the world. They might exist as ideas or thoughts, and given this, they would be intensional objects. What is the difference between an intensional object understood as a thought about mathematics, for example, and a fictional idea or thought about Leopold Bloom? Lamarque and Olsen claim that fictional descriptions produce intensional objects: "what they are, and what is true of them, is determined by the way they are described in certain kinds of utterances" (51). By this description, mathematical objects such as hyperbolic space would be fictional. Maybe we would see such objects as fictional until physics uses them in some description of some aspect of the world. Even in this mathematical case, however, it is less the utterance that matters than the description and how it fits with other descriptions. Fictive descriptions, however, do not just have to fit with other fictive descriptions within a fiction. Since our ability to understand so much of what is described in a fiction depends on our understanding and knowledge of the world and ourselves, they have to fit in varying degrees with this understanding and knowledge. In asserting the logical dependence of fictional entities on their fictional descriptions, Lamarque and Olsen distinguish fictions from the way that "how things are (in the world) is not determined by any kind of utterance." This is certainly true for physical states of affairs. What an event or action is, however, may to a large degree depend on the various descriptions we give it (Did you close the door or wake up the baby?). But this qualification does not lead to any strong form of idealism or skepticism. The world is still a world, and our shaping powers are limited. Objects, events, and situations are in many cases ontologically distinct from how we understand them. In many cases, however, something exists in a way so dependent on how we understand or describe it that its existence is not logically separable from its descriptions. This is true of many of our putative psychological states, as well as our actions. Much of what we take as real, including feelings, ideas, and attitudes, are nonphysical things and are logically dependent in various ways on description or being manifest as something. In addition, what is the difference between fictive objects given in fictive descriptions and the descriptions of objects and persons that no longer exist? (I will return to this last point below.) A large class of things we take as existent and as previously existent are dependent on descriptions to a similar degree as fictional objects.

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There are more specific difficulties with the claim that fictional objects and characters are ontologically dependent on their fictional descriptions, which will allow me to show more clearly my quotational model of fiction. 'The chair is in Dave's room' could be a sentence in a fiction. In the fiction called Dave's Room 'how things are' seems dependent on fictional modes of presentation, since we have no other access to what the facts of the matter are in the fiction independent ofwhat the fiction says. This is a misleading description, however. To understand this sentence as true or false within the fiction and to claim that the existence of Dave's chair (in the fiction) is dependent on fictional modes of presentation requires that we posit a world in which such statements could be true or false. The notion of 'how things are in the fiction' is dependent on our positing this world. The idea of the chair is dependent on this posit, as well as on the sense of the sentences in which it is mentioned. There is no chair given by the fiction Daves Room, and thus no ontological dependence since there is nothing real to be dependent on anything. We have ideas about this chair; we remember what happened to it (it was thrown out accidentally) and so on. But there is no chair here. There is, of course, an ontological distinction between fictional objects and the rock column outside. What role does this difference have in either our understanding something as fictional or in showing what it means for some set of sentences to be fictional? We need to understand more clearly what kind of ontological dependence fictional statements have on their mode of presentation. We read about people in a way that is different from seeing them walk across the room. The difference in kind here is not enough to establish the fictionality of what we read. It seems reasonable to say that a character exists only within the fiction of which he or she is a part, but that is in many ways a stipulation about the meaning of 'existence.' Odysseus does not simply exist as the words describing him in the Illiad and the Odyssey, or in all of the ancient references and descriptions of him. Nor should we say that he exists in whatever written descriptions of him we might have. In what sense does he exist in and through these? What's the difference between one description and another? But Odysseus might as well be given whatever existence he has by virtue of our ideas about him as well. To restrain this explosion of Odysseus-persons we might remake the claim: Odysseus as a character in the Odyssey exists only as and through the way he is described, quoted, and so on (he is circumscribed by the resources of the fiction of which he is a part). And this comes down to the claim that Odysseus the

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character exists as Odysseus the character. True, but uninformative. We may have to interpret sentences and stories into various stages of clarity, but we will not know if Odysseus was a real person just by recognizing the dependence ofwhat we know about him on the descriptions of him. We understand whatever is included in fictions and nonfictions more or less the same way: by understanding the sentences that make up each. That some set of sentences might be a fiction is a further judgment we might make. If, however, the claim that a character is logically dependent on how he or she is described means that a character is dependent on the ways he or she is manifest, then we could say the same of a living person. A fictional character is only comparable to an actual person by courtesy; the more relevant comparison is between a fictional description of a character and a nonfictional description of an actual person. Nothing in the nature of the descriptions of each can mark the difference between being fictional or real. The distinction might be shown in what we say of each. A description of a character or of a living person is not the same kind of thing as a living person. There is no special logical dependence of fictional characters on these descriptions. Anything to be recognized as something must be manifest in some way. Our knowledge of a fictional character is unique to the fiction or fictions of which he or she is a part, as long as we know what those fictions are and which ones are authorized. There are more Sherlock Holmeses than he who was penned by Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact to individuate the different kinds of descriptions of living persons (biological, psychological, physical, and so on) we must already know what kind of ontological entity a person is. To make this comparison between living persons and characters we have to assume the distinction (not to disprove it, but to prove it). If a fictional text is lost and only the name of its main character Ooe) is remembered, then the only description we have is this memory and this name. Those are not descriptions that constitute it, but a label and a fact: there existed once a story in which Joe was the main character. Everything we can say ofJoe, except the bare fact of being fictional, we could say of a historical figure, about which all that is remembered is that his name was Joe. It is not how each is manifest that constitutes the one as fictional and the other as actual, but that we already know this. In any attempt to show how they are so constituted, we first have to assume that a character is fictional, and that is what is to be shown by their special logical form. If one pushes the logical dependence on description as Lamarque and

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Olsen describe it, then we could only count as characters those elements in a fiction that one has learned to call character elements, and this is to equate the cues indicating a person in a text with the representation of that person within the fiction and with the intelligibility of that character as a person. Lamarque and Olsen admit that we project a lot into fictions; in fact, it is one of the pleasures in reading. The problem here is that Lamarque and Olsen cannot get their logical description to do enough work to establish the ontological distinction between characters and persons. It is obvious that there is a difference, but so much of what we take ourselves to be as persons is tied to descriptions, interpretations, and projections that it is not difficult to see ourselves as fictionalized in the same way as their descriptions of characters. This does not undermine the common-sense distinction between characters and persons, but it does undermine the logical form of the relationship between fictions and the world and between character and person that Lamarque and Olsen offer. Given that we make assumptions about fictional characters and given what we understand and know about people and the world, it is not true that fictional characters have a strict logical and ontological dependence on how they are described. Fictional characters are not the sum of the descriptions given of them in the fiction. If we extend the sense of description to include how something is manifest (through the senses and so forth), then the distinction between character and person becomes further blurred. There is a real difference, of course. It is true that a character is logically dependent on his or her descriptions within and as a fiction. We should emphasize 'within' and 'as' here, since this logical dependence only follows ifwe already recognize the character as a fiction. Otherwise, we would be perfectly free to assume whatever we want about the character that we could also assume about persons. Ifwe have to assume fictionality to make sense of this description, then the putative logical dependence of the character on how he or she is described cannot determine the fictionality of the character; that has already been determined. Since a narrator or a character would be a part of the fiction, the descriptions they offer within the fiction are not fully constitutive of themselves or others. Persons within a fiction, in order to be understood as persons, relate to their descriptions of themselves and others in the same logical way as I do to my own descriptions. I am not fully constituted by my self-descriptions, although I may be partially. I am partly the things I say, and my descriptions of myself may form goals that I try to reach. Similarly, gossip and other forms of

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practical storytelling can in my ignorance of someone seem to constitute that person. We should add at this point that gossip constitutes the person for me. Fictional characters, however, are in all cases constituted for someone. That real people need not be seen by someone else to exist can only be stipulated; it cannot be established by describing our relation to our descriptions. We could decide that fictional characters really do exist somewhere, in some possible world. While we can say that some things we describe do not exist, we cannot say that some particular thing exists although we cannot describe it.

VIII. Are There Fictional, Nonexistent Entities? In what sense, then, are fictional characters nonexistent? How is a candle flame nonexistent after it is blown out? Answer: by being nonexistent. In the face of the emptiness of this, one wants to explain how the flame got nonexistent. Answer: by being blown out. So one might imagine that one should explain what a fiction is by how it got to be fiction. This is what Lamarque and Olsen attempt. Can some actual state of affairs be blown out into a fiction? That is not the right question, since a fictional event was never an actual event. One might be tempted to imagine all representations to be fictional, but this only follows if we imagine that we can somehow compare a fictional character with a real person without first describing the real person. A picture of a candle flame is not a nonexistent candle flame. Will we understand something about the candle flame if we study how it was painted? We might. We could learn the colors of candle flames. We would learn more, however, about painting than about candle flames. But in learning about painting we would not learn about the logical relation between what is painted and what the painting is. We might learn some words to describe that relation, but that is not the same thing. The relation between what is painted and what the painting is is a logical relation with ontological consequences. So what is a nonexistent thing? A nonexistent thing is always nonexistent because it is not a thing at all. This is true of blown out candle flames and of fictional characters. One can relight an actual candle. One cannot find an actual version of a fictional character. Even if I say my friend Joe is a Dickensian Mr. Chuzzlewit, he is not a token of him. He is like him; I can describe Chuzzlewit in such a way as to be a good description of my description ofJoe. There can be no token of a nonexistent thing. Fictional characters, objects, and events are more like

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types without any possible tokens. Is this the same as claiming that sentences have sense but no referents? Fictions by definition do not refer to things in the world. The distinction between sense and reference characterizes how sentences can be true or false of states of affairs. My use of type and token here is meant to describe in what sense fictional characters exist. Fictional candle flames do not refer to actual candle flames; factually true fictional sentences about candle flames do not by virtue of that refer to actual candle flames. Rather candle flames within a fiction are also types to which there can be no token. Actual candle flames can be construed as token candle flames. There are no token fictional candle flames. Within the fiction, however, there may be token candle flames burning constantly or being blown out. There are token nonexistent candle flames: representations of candle flames in paintings and fictions. Nonexistent candle flames are not tokens of fictional ones; nor could any candle flame token a fictional one. The nonexistent candle flame cannot be made existent. If, however, we imagine that fictional candle flames were ontologically dependent on their descriptions we would be using 'ontologically' in a peculiar sense. This can only mean that if they were not described within a fiction they would not be in that fiction. To be in a fiction is already to be nonexistent. In order to understand a particular instance of a fictional candle flame, to recognize the candle in the fiction, depends on what we know about candles. The idea and sense of a fictional candle flame and whatever we want to call its existence in a fiction is dependent on the idea, sense, and existence of candle flames in the actual world. The existence of fictional characters is dependent on their description relative to their impossibility of existing actually. They are not dependent on their descriptions for how they do exist. They are something, but it is not clear as what they exist. The character of Odysseus is not simply my thoughts about him and all that he is quoted as saying in the Homeric epics and so on.

IX. An Elaboration of the Quotational Theory Once the judgment that something is fictional is made, the logical relation of a fiction to the world and to those who read or hear it is indeterminate and quotational. What does it mean for a fiction to be 'quotational'? Fictions are logical entities, which are characterized by two distinctions:

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1. There exists a logical distinction between what we understand to be in a fiction and what we understand to be outside a fiction. It is this distinction that encourages our sense that fictions can be opposed to actual states of affairs. 2. Fictions are distinct from nonfictions in the implications and entailments that follow from what is said through each. But this is misleading. A nonfictional sentence can be used to refer or to make a claim about some state of affairs, including about fictions. In any characterization of the fiction these distinctions must be kept logically separate; characterizing fictions as quotational does this. These quotation marks indicate that fictions cannot be said. It is for this reason that we have to redescribe the content of a fiction in order to make the comparison with nonfictions; we have to remove the quotation marks. On the other hand, theories of fiction that give a constitutive role to a special kind of utterance or intent, as in the theory of Lamarque and Olsen, fold this second logical description (between fictions and nonfictions) into the first (between inside and outside a fiction). If fictions are uttered with a fictive intent that constitutes the fictive stance, then their distinction from nonfictions is determined by the fictionality of what is given as the fictive content. This assumes the distinction it is meant to describe, and thus fails as a characterization of fiction. For Lamarque and Olsen, a fictive utterance is an utterance in which the speaker does not mean what he or she says in an ordinary way, and in which "the standard commitments of assertive truth-telling discourse" are suspended. This seems almost right. What kind of utterance is it, however, if it is not ordinary? It is one, I have argued, in which one does not mean what one says, not like a lie, however, but as if it were not one's own words one were saying. That is what one does when one quotes someone. We can physically utter a fiction; in this utterance how I mean these words is irrelevant to how they mean as a fiction. To understand what I say as a fiction is to understand me as performing these words, but not because I can mean them as mine. Thus it is not the performance of a speech act for me or anyone. One can write or say a fiction and know it, of course. I can take my writing as fictive. We can physically utter a fiction; in this utterance I can write a fiction utilizing cues that are part of the practice of writing or telling fictions. The fiction does not mean as a fiction by virtue of these cues (it may lack them and yet be meant and taken as a fiction), but

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such cues can facilitate the recognition of the fiction. The recognition of a fiction, however, does not enable us to understand what it means for it to be fictional. So, if a fiction can be meant to be fictional by its author, it need not be meant in that way. The fictive stance, however, is necessary, since 'fiction' and even the intensional operator 'in the fiction' express a judgment by an auditor or by a reader. Can we take quotation marks, therefore, to just be forms of an intensional operator, such as 'in the fiction' in Lamarque and Olsen's account? Not quite. Lamarque and Olsen claim that "the intensional operator 'In the fiction ...' turns a person (internally speaking) into a character (externally speaking)" (87). This 'turns' is misleading. They assume here that talk about characters would naturally sound like talk about real persons, so that by attaching 'in the fiction' we distinguish persons in fictions from persons in the world. The default position is assumed to be nonfictional for the reader. 'In the fiction' indicates to someone else that I will not be talking about persons but characters. This is true. The next sentence in Lamarque and Olsen's account, which seems to characterize this same use of 'in the fiction,' actually reverses this transformation of person to character: "under the scope of the operator we can describe Esther Waters just as we would a normal human being." We needed the operator in the first case in order to indicate that Esther Waters was not a normal human being, not to allow us to take her as a normal human being. If this were the purpose of the operator, then both the reader and whoever hears the report would already have understood her as a character. The intensional operator tells us that Esther is a character in order to distinguish her from a real person, and it tells us that she is like a person and not simply an empty name. Thus, the intensional operator has contradictory roles here. This ambiguity cannot be explained away by assuming that one can take a fiction as either a fiction or as a nonfiction, so that 'in the fiction' establishes the fictionality of the text regardless of how someone takes the text. The intensional operator tells us both about how she is a character and how she is a person. She is, however, a character if we take her as a person within the fiction. She is a person only within the fiction, as part of our fictive imagination and as part of her fictional world. In both cases, we are describing her within the fiction, in the first case relative to actual persons and in the second case relative to her fellow characters. Thus, the intensional operator carries with it the idea of the fictional world. Even in the first case, when the operator tells us to take her as a character, we are deciding about what kind of thing she is-a person or

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a character. We are not characterizing the kind of linguistic practice in which we find her except secondarily. The status of the text as fiction is determined relative to the ontological status of the thing named. The second function of the operator is to tell me to take the character "as a normal human being." This is a strange message. I take Esther as a person within the fiction because I can apply my understanding of persons to the description of her in a way that is like how I would understand a nonfictional account of a person. But if the default position is taking descriptions as nonfictional, then this ascription of personhood is independent of taking her as a fiction. The intensional operator does not tell me that; it does not tell me to understand her "as a normal human being." Esther is a person in the fiction to "her fellows" only in our understanding and through our redescriptions. Thus, 'in the fiction' as an intensional operator already assumes the intelligibility of the fiction as a logically distinct realm, with persons and objects. She is, however, not a person to anyone but us. The intentional operator can only tell us what we already know. It is informative only when we are trying to distinguish between statements about actual people and about fictional characters. The intensional operator indicates that a statement is about a fictional character. Given this, it is a nonfictional statement about a fiction, and useful in this way. The problem with using an intensional operator to describe the logical form of fictions is that it cannot describe both the difference between fictions and nonfictions and fictional things and actual things without assuming the fictionality it is supposed to mark. The distinction between fictional things and actual things, however, can simply be reduced to the difference between fictions and nonfictions. Consequently, what has to be marked is the variable ways we mean each. The intensional operator, again, cannot do this because it requires that we assume a fictional world to make sense ofwhat it tells us. My use of single quotation marks to mark fictions describes how fictions are distinct from nonfictions by indicating not only the difference in how they relate to states of affairs, but also how we say and fail to mean what we say.

x. The Differences between the Concepts of Fiction, Poetry, and Literature We can use the logical form of fiction to clarify the way poetry and fiction nest within literature, and in this way indicate the interpretive

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opportunities offered by poems and fictions. 'Literature' marks out a general category of kinds ofwriting that matter in a variety ofways, and whose sense and bounds are different in different times, places, and cultures. One thing this implies is that if I study some novel understood as literature, I am not ipso facto studying some thing called literature. There is no thing called literature separate from what we take as examples of literature. Fiction, however, is a very different kind of concept. That someone, in another culture or not, might have different ideas about fiction, even ideas about what it is, does not mean that the sense ofwhat it means for something to be fictional is different, just that the word is used in different ways. Fiction, at least in this, is like a game. The game of badminton, if it is played in the same way, with the same rules, and so on can be called anything, but might as well be understood to be what we call the game of badminton (the significance of the game can, of course, be quite different); conversely, if the game is different, it is a different game. The concept of fiction depends on the fundamental logical and ontological categories of truth and falsity and existence and nonexistence. To grasp these categories relative to what we say is enough to understand the possibility of fictions. Altering the name or adding other concepts to the logical description of fiction might give fictions a special place in a society, but such additions do not alter fiction's logical form. Fictions define a logical possibility in our use and understanding of language. While we might argue about how to describe its conventions, it is constituted relative to a particular set of distinctions, such that if we deny these distinctions (its difference from ordinary assertions, the difference between being within the fiction and without, and so on), we end up describing something else besides fiction. No such logical and ontological categories are required, although they may be used, in distinguishing poetry. Poetry, as a concept or category, sits obliquely astride fiction. A poem can, of course, be fictitious. But this gets the logical order the wrong way round. Poems are in many ways like fictions, but what counts as poetry has to be stipulated and will vary from time to time and group to group and person to person. At least some of the collections of words and phrases I call poetry are similar to fiction because they have a similarly anomalous relation to ordinary language. Poems are generalized in variable and peculiar ways, and thus mimic the logical limit described by a fiction. That a poem can be written or performed, that it is repeatable, generalizes it out of a specific conversational context. This generalization can be further supported by a specificity of reference that is not ours, and

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thus that is to us blank. In addition, modern poems often use indeterminate pronoun references that allow phrases and at times the poem itself to be generalized as if it were itself such a pronoun that anyone could step into. There are of course many other ways of producing ambiguity and indeterminacy or generalizing poems (sentences and phrases) such that they cannot mean for the reader as straightforward speech acts (of whatever kind) with specific meanings. Fictions by virtue of their logical structure are in very particular ways nonsensical relative to ordinary sentences, not only our referential statements, but also our questions, commands, ruminations, and hypotheses. This is borne out by the way fictions are not anyone's speech acts. Interpretation in its many forms and relative to its variable place in our reasoning indicates and is a response to a failure of sense. Thus, to the degree that the study of literature is bound to interpretation, it is concerned with nonsense and its localized normalization. The anomalous nature of fiction means that whatever we say about a fiction depends on our redescriptions of that fiction. We are like fictions to the degree that what we are is similarly dependent on descriptions. Fiction is a limit case of how we can mean what we say, because it marks the logical possibility of sentences becoming impossible to say and mean. We impersonate ourselves when speaking fictions.

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The Emptiness ofLiterary Interpretation

READING CAN BE A PANTOMIME of self-description. Using the vestments of fictional phrases from King Lear I can describe myself, my expectations and beliefs, anxieties and goals, my memories and projected fate. The point of such descriptions, however, cannot be simply to produce a psychological confession: 'I am in some ways like King Lear. So beware.' How do I know if my descriptions are accurate, or if I have drawn the right conclusion from them? Interpreting a fiction or poem cannot be decisive in answering these questions; reason, knowledge, and judgment will be required. We do not need any theories of interpretation. Instead, we need to draw the limits of our literary interpretive practices in order to resituate our concerns with literature. All fictional texts by virtue of being fictional require us to decide how to apply the meanings of the sentences within the fiction to our understanding of the world and to our lives. The great problem with these applications is how to constrain them so that they are not circular and self-serving. The first question when reading any fictional work is not "What does it mean?" but "How can I decide what it does not mean?"

~ AT THE END OF Alices Adventures in Wonderland an innocent knave stands accused of stealing the Queen of Heart's tarts. The King of Hearts attempts to prove this indictment by interpreting some verses that, as Alice asserts, do not have "an atom of meaning in [them]" (Carroll, 159). The verses the King appeals to suffer from

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indeterminate and opaque pronoun reference and a general indeterminacy concerning what is seemingly referred to in any particular phrase. The knave clearly did not write them, nor do they have anything to do with the stolen tarts. The king arbitrarily extracts phrases from the verses and matches them with persons, events, actions, and thoughts, interpreting them so that they fit his assumption that the knave is guilty: "'We know it to be true-' that's the jury, of course- 'ifshe should push the matter on'-that must be the queen-'VVhat would become of you?' -What, indeed!- '1 gave her one, they gave him two-' why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know-" (Carroll, 159-160). The lack of clear meaning in these poetic lines facilitates the King's tendentious and self-serving allegorical interpretative method, and at the same time makes more apparent the emptiness of this method. If the poem were less indeterminate, the king's attempt to use it as evidence of the knave's guilt would require greater cleverness in reading away its more obvious senses, or the king would have to claim that the verses were some kind of code. Nevertheless, almost any poem could be interpreted to confirm the knave's guilt. Any ambiguity, lack of clarity, or indeterminacy in a sentence or in a verse can prompt various interpretative strategies. The eighteenthcentury philosopher of rhetoric George Campbell comments that "[I]t is reported of Lope de Vega, a famous Spanish poet, that the Bishop of Beller, being in Spain, asked him to explain one of his sonnets, which he said he had often read, but never understood. Lope took up the sonnet, and after reading it several times, frankly acknowledged that he did not understand it himself" (256). Given the logical form of fictions discussed in the last chapter (their quotational form and the fact that clear inferences are blocked from fiction to author and world) and given the fact that the meaning of the sentences of a fiction do not add up to the meaning of the fiction, if we are to interpret fictions, poetic or otherwise, we must decide what will count as an interpretation before we interpret them. This is true even if we just take a fiction as an example of something or as a collection of ideas. If we have to decide what will count as an interpretation, we are, de facto, placed in the situation of the king, where our interpretations are only as good as the assumptions, constraints, and allegories we use to justify the kinds of meaning we ascribe to a fiction or to fictions in general (and this would include any poems not understood as speech acts). Consequently, we should ask in what way are our literary interpretations of fictions and poems any different from the King's allegorical manipulations? In most cases, the answer is that they are not. If so, then

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what value can interpretations of texts have? I will answer these questions in two parts. In the first part, I will offer a more elaborate description of the form and limitation of our interpretations of fictions and poems. The point of such a precis about reading and its limitations will be to draw together my description of the logical form of fictions, which I provided in the previous chapter, with the indeterminacies of interpretation. In the second part, I will frame the problems attending our interpretations of fictions by the problems attending our interpretations of nonfictions, in order to show how our interpretative difficulties are more general than one might assume. The reason for these difficulties is not some putative indeterminacy within our language practices. Interpretations are part of a complex of shifting practices embedded in other practices, organized and motivated by a vast set of ideas, assumptions, prejudices, and commitments. The legitimacy of our ideas, assumptions, prejudices, and commitments cannot be established through interpretative practices, and thus interpretation or hermeneutics cannot have a foundational role in understanding or thinking.

I. Modes of Interpretation Interpretation is not one kind of activity. We should not assume that it is a cognitive mode. We have to look at specific cases in order to understand what cognitive role it might play. It is not a clearly defined, unitary practice. We interpret different kinds of things in different ways for different purposes: data from an experiment in order to demonstrate the existence of a subatomic particle, documentary evidence from contemporary accounts of Napoleon's Italian campaign in order to explain the order of battle, the sound of the washing machine to decide if it is broken, the clouds and humidity in order to decide if we should take an umbrella, the verbal intonation and demeanor of a lover, Schubert's impromptus. The pianist who interprets Schubert might be, as the pianist Alfred Brendel remarks, a "curator, executor, and obstetrician" (33). Given the variety in interpretive modes, purposes, and practices, we should not conclude that all modes of understanding are forms of interpretation. We interpret things in various ways for various reasons. Interpreting fits within the broader projects of our reasoning, and should not sit, as it were, on the same logical level.

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We at least interpret sentences, actions, and objects when there is something unclear about them, some problem we have in understanding what they are, what they mean, what they imply, why they happened or were said, and so on. I may understand your words but not understand why you said them. This might prompt me to interpret your statements relative to your possible motives, and from this offer an account or a guess about your actual motives. I would have to reason this out, and it is misleading to simply call such an analysis an interpretation. Ambiguity, indeterminacy, confusion, contradictions, lack of clarity, triviality, and shock prompt interpretation. Relative to whatever sense we make of sentences these prompts mark failures of sense. Interpretation is thus an attempt to normalize or explain various ways in which a particular set of sentences or phrases fail to make sense, relative to the various ways we imagine they could or should make sense. There are many unobjectionable ways of interpreting and using literary fictions. We can understand what happens within a fiction as exemplary of aspects of our own human situation. The success or failure of characters may rest on their ability to interpret situations, actions, events, and characters correctly. To use elements of a fictional story as examples or object lessons of various sorts or as descriptions of ethical or psychological problems can lead to further discussion about these problems. When for whatever reason we understand our interpretative problem to be how to construe what is shown in a fiction relative to how it is shown, then our interpretative problems remain tied to the meaning and form of sentences. We may still find that what we understand a living person to be is a kind of interpretation, not unlike how we interpret fictions, but that is a philosophical conclusion concerning both what a person is relative to how he or she is manifest and what a fiction is and how it means. Some interpretations claim to show what a fiction is about. We might reasonably say, for example, that Bleak House is about a law case. But it is not just about that. We can describe a novel relative to events, actions, characters, dialogue, and themes: novels about Waterloo, about betrayal, about a set of characters. We can redescribe a poem in the same way, maybe relative to the central narrative perspective, or relative to a certain set of words or phrases, and so on. Such redescriptions can capture aspects of the plot and, if conceptualized relative to a set of ideas or abstract distinctions, thematic concerns as well. We can also take sentences and arguments to have a specific content such that they are understood to make particular kinds of claims about various per-

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sons, events, themes, ideas, questions, and so on. Stories can have an explicit meaning when this content is understood as a kind of moral, such that we might infer from a story that given x, then y. But stories need not have this kind of meaning, and in any case such meanings are a function of our interpretations and descriptions. A narrative need not be so construed. If, however, we take 'about' to mean 'concerned with,' then the claim that 'a fiction is about x' is a judgment about the book that we make, often through redescription. Such a redescription can be quite simple; a recognition that the fiction seems concerned with or is focused on a particular fictional character (Odysseus, for example). Or the redescription can be an elaborate thematic redescription relative to a set of ideas and distinctions. I have argued in the last chapter that once we recognize a statement as a fiction it is no longer a statement; it is not about something or expressive of someone in the way spoken sentences might be. We can construe the fiction within our practices of recognition (the fictive stance) without any concern for whether it was uttered fictionally in some way. A fiction is not a speech act or an utterance, but quoted words whose possible role within an utterance remains open. If this is true, then the relation between a fiction and the world is logically indeterminate separate from our further redescriptions of it. Fictions are not and never were speech acts, and thus they do not mean in the straightforward sense of 'mean' and 'mean about' that we use to describe what we say to each other. A fiction as a whole has no clear meaning, at least separate from our stipulation of such a meaning. This follows from the fact that there is no principled way to generalize from the meaning of the sentences that constitute a fiction to the meaning of the fiction as a whole. This does not imply that there is some special organic whole called 'the fiction,' but rather that there is a circumscribed something, we know not what, that we do not know how to understand separate from some further stipulation. Such stipulations can be encoded in various practices (like listening to rhapsodes) and can be conventionalized as genres. We can say that a fiction has a formal unity (they generally have beginnings, middles, and ends, even if this is just a specific set of words in a specific order), but not a unity meaning some one thing. This is true of some nonfictions, but in a special sense (see below). Fictions and poems do not mean as if they were actually long, complicated sentences: the relation among sentences is certainly not syntactical. Thus, we cannot assume that a fiction means in the way a sentence does. Instead we give a sense to the meaning of these sentences through our interpretations

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and redescriptions, which, however, are relatively unconstrained and can only be evaluated relative to the claims we make and the theories and assumptions that underlie these claims. If a fictional text or poem is not an act of communication nor an expression of a thought, then any interpretation must provide or assume a theory of meaning in order to provide the sense of meaning that is lacking. Such a theory of meaning (or theory of interpretation) is almost invariably a species of allegory, in which the target text is mapped onto a theoretical structure that provides the terms and relations that are understood to be meaningful, where x, an element in a text, means y, when y is part of a predetermined system of meanings and relations. The significance of these interpretations or allegories lies less in their system of meaning, than in their justification. Consequently, any debate about interpretations should be primarily a debate about the forms and adequacy of these justifications. In order to provide fictions and poems with some constitutive meaning, one might be tempted, as was Mill, to recall the emotive effects of art. The production of such effects is a recurring value of art. That sentimentality or pathos matter beyond their immediate effects, however, is again tied to theories we have about emotions, life, and human beings. If we can extract an argument about such things from a fiction, the fiction is hardly just sentimental. Emotive effects are tied to the content of what is said, but only as a means to the emotive ends, at least if art is defined by those ends. The study of such emotive effects would be part of the study of rhetoric in Aristotle's sense, and a modest part of further psychological study (the study of emotive effects). The value of such a study, like the value of sentimental or emotive effects in general, rests again on independent philosophical justification. If the cognitive value of literature rests on independently established theories, conclusions, and premises, then the justifications of interpretations carry most of the content of our interpretations of texts. Consequently, that which we interpret-fictions and poems-carries little meaning separate from these justifications. If a text is understood as (1) making a claim, having cognitive content, or (2) producing emotive effects, the study or value of these rests on philosophical and scientific arguments. In the first case, the content or claim could only be evaluated in relation to the study about that kind of claim: whether it is psychological, sociological, and so on. In the second case, either literary value rests on a theory of emotions or the study of literature becomes a modest part of rhetoric and psychology. In both cases, literature is at best an excuse to think, and its study flirts with

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dilettantism. Those who study or produce it too often think like rhapsodes rather than philosophers. This is unfortunate, though often tempting.

~ LITERARY CRITICISM IS IN MANY WAYS decayed theology and glorified commentary. The current methods used to interpret literary texts (including cultural interpretations) derive in almost all cases from those methods of explication developed and used in the interpretation of sacra doctrina. Matching these theological explications were various traditions of allegorical interpretations of Homer, oracles, and dreams. These too were often supported by theological theories, or at the very least ontological and quasi-scientific theories that connected that which was interpreted with the means of interpretation and the world. The interpretations of holy writ and of secular literature in the ancient world assumed a vast network of internal relations among the elements of the texts interpreted relative to the internal network of relations describing the world. Such interpretations assumed an intentionality (an aboutness), and ultimately an intelligence, expressed by these texts, so that the techniques of interpretation in effect described that intentionality and intelligence. These interpretations produced theories of a divine or cosmic mind. When separated from the pursuit of God, the use of these interpretative devices still produce theories of mind, personified often as culture or as a person. In readings of the Bible, one traditionally recognizes literal meanings and various figurative meanings. These theologically sanctioned explications rest on the guarantee of divinity, construed in various ways. The ways of reading the Bible in relation to the world and as directed toward myself, even toward myself in my particular situation, fit within the broader theological understanding of the relation between divinity and the human world and our fate. God or our faith in Him establishes in the text something for us to discover. We can discover kinds of meanings in the Bible as we can discover the existence, as a fact, of an electron, a muon, or a quark. God does not guarantee our methods of exegesis, but he guarantees the point of these methods. Without God's warrant and our belief a text does not have meanings that can masquerade as facts, unless we can construe the text as a whole as a speech act. If the object of our interpretation cannot carry the burden of revelation and truth, then we try to shuffle it into our allegories. These allegories often take the form of theories of mind, ontology, history, society, and meaning. Any allegorical interpretation uses

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texts as (mere) examples of its own conceptual and relational form, so that what I produce when I use an interpretation is just a version of those elements and relations recognized in the allegory used. Interpretation of such texts proceeds through the mapping of aspects of a fiction or text into the order of relations that constitute the interpretative model. The elements mapped from the fictional texts are those aspects or elements deemed relevant given the interpreter's previously determined interpretative commitments, even if these are unconscious. The obvious, if caricatured, examples would be Freudian psychic structures and Marxian social structures. Such structures must be translated into a theory of meaning, so that, for example, class structures can be manifest as if spoken by those same structures in and as the fiction (this is the kind of personified theory of overdetermined meaning that it is at the heart ofJameson's The Political Unconscious). We can redescribe a fiction or poem relative to a set of conceptual distinctions whose meaning will parasitically provide the 'meaning' of the book. Such an allegorical interpretation uses the book as an example in a particular interpretative allegory or as an illustration of it. The value of any interpretation would be a function of the value or validity of the allegory used. The justifications of such allegories are a philosophical problem independent of the 'meaning' of the book. These allegories (interpretations) can be very complicated and subtle, but these are nothing more than epicycles within the basic allegorical structure. How such interpretations allow us to recognize the relevant aspects of a target text, however, is not simple and is something like an art. Thus, again the value of any interpretative schema is tied to its philosophical justification. Unfortunately, such justifications are too often simply a question of belief. Interpretations become confessions. The most stable and compelling schema would be one that rested on some ultimate divine guarantee. The more integrated that guarantee was with the actual methods of interpretation the more nuanced and powerful its interpretative strategies would be. The best case of such a total allegorical scheme would be one in which doubts about interpretation were internal to the scheme, but which did not lead to questions about the scheme itself. One version of such a best case, although not the only one, describes, with a lot of simplification, the doctrinal schema developed to read the Christian Bible, most particularly in the West. Even interpretations warranted by an elaborate theology and sanctioned by revelation, however, require justification. Augustine, for example, appeals to charity as the final arbiter in our allegorical reasoning about the Bible, suggesting that "We must meditate on what we

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read till an interpretation be found that tends to establish the reign of charity" (On Christian Doctrine, iii.xv, 23). This is opposed to the Alexandrian tradition of exegesis, for example, whose central figure is Origen, which places wisdom in the role of charity. In either case, the abstract and schematic character of rules, conventions, and doctrine and the specificity and brittleness of heuristics and habits means that the application of allegories cannot be fully justified and requires judgment. 'Charity' and 'wisdom' in these exegetical traditions characterize this judgment. One should remember, however, that there exist many different ways of interpreting and many different kinds of statements, texts, situations, persons, events, actions, and things to interpret. The method of literary interpretation as described above is distinct, for example, from the method of interpretation performed by Sherlock Holmes. The difference is telling. Significantly, Holmes proceeds through abduction relative to a large knowledge base and constrained by logical inference. Thus, he hypothesizes about a specific situation or person by heuristically drawing conclusions by inference, constrained association, and extrapolation. His recognition of the proper details is decisive, and is a skill he has learned. His deductions often rely on a radical simplification of the possible answers, given character, class, place, and so forth, which is why such deductions are guided heuristically as opposed to syllogistically; they remain inductions relative to his knowledge base and the logic of his heuristics. The most important constraint, however, is that his inferences are testable and subject to correction. While aspects of a fictional story might require similar abductions, inferences, and correction, the interpretation of the meaning of a fiction or of what it is about does not. There are an indeterminate number of interpretations possible, subject only to the cleverness of the interpreter in recognizing and performing the allegorical mapping required. Not only do such interpretations translate a text into an example of the interpretation, but the interpretation itself is also only as good as its justification. Like the more naIve reading of a fictional text as making a claim, this justification is a philosophical, conceptual project that succeeds or fails independently of anything one can say about a particular text. An allegorical reading of the Song of Songs as about the one true Church may have an obvious purpose and relevance in relation to certain theological commitments, but its value rests completely on our commitment to that theology and to a certain set of beliefs, which will include beliefs in how the Bible means. The justification of our reading the Song ofSongs as an allegory concerning the church rests on a com-

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mitment that our allegorical reading of a literary text might not. It is often the case, however, that allegories (Marxist, Freudian, and so forth) are applied to literary texts as part of a system of belief. Often that which is interpreted was not produced from within the same system of belief. Such interpretations often redescribe the texts interpreted as expressions of exactly the structures underpinning the allegories used to read them. I will not pursue the problems of interpretation into metaphysical theories about cultures and other supersensible and superpersonal entities that are understood to produce or express themselves through texts, such that we can infer something about them or see them whole through interpreting these texts. Nor will I investigate the particular applications of some of the interpretative strategies I discuss above when used to extract the historical context or meaning of texts. These two projects are logically related; I think the first project incoherent and the second problematic. To show this, however, would involve discussing various forms of illegitimate holism, in particular organicism-the contention that persons and, in this case, texts are abstractions out of some organic whole. Such a discussion would need to be understood in relation to the logic and complexity ofvarious kinds of explanatory and descriptive accounts we give in the social sciences and history. That is a subject beyond the scope of this chapter.

II. What Do We Interpret? My concern in this chapter is with the limits of interpretation as a means of showing how to understand the claim interpretations can have on us. Let me restate my argument so far with some further elaboration. The need for the interpretation of fiction is partly a consequence of the logical form of fiction. Similarly, the unspecified sense of fictions and poems as wholes (shown by the fact that the meaning of the sentences of a fiction do not constitute the meaning of the fiction) creates related problems about what will count as the meaning of a fiction or poem. The need to interpret any particular sentence can arise because various kinds of ambiguity and indeterminacy may require resolution. What we say can become disjunct from what we mean and from how anyone might understand what we say. This disjunction may require interpretation. A fiction in its very form and style may also produce a similar effect, so that even if we understand all of the sentences within the fiction, what any of these sentences mean might be impossible to decide. This is a more general version of the difficulty we might have in

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deciding how the sum of the sentences of a fiction resolve into anything we might call 'the meaning of the fiction.' This, in turn, is a special case of a more general confusion about how something is manifest in relation to what we take it to be. In the case of how we understand and interpret persons, this problem can be quite acute. I might interpret the meaning of what someone says in relation to who I understand him or her to be. What this 'who' picks out can be many things, some quite clear-certain facts about him or her-and others quite vague-my sense of his or her putative character. It can also be found, however, in how we understand fictions and poems: What are fictions and poems separate from their manifestations as what they are? It is unclear what kind of thing a fiction or a poem is such that it can be used as evidence, can be interpreted to mean something, or can be understood to express something separate from a stipulation of what it is from within a particular schema of interpretation. If we understand the meaning of all the sentences of a particular fiction, we do not by virtue of this understand the meaning of the fiction itself. This phrase 'the meaning of a fiction' is ill-defined relative to our sense of what sentences mean. As a consequence, any interpretation of a fiction (and one can include a lot of poetry in this) stipulates, or in effect provides, a sense of what will count as the meaning of that fiction. In so doing, such interpretations must provide a link between fictional meaning and sentence meaning. This link is usually based on undefended or implicit conceptual pictures or theories of meaning (commonly semiotic in nature-and thus I would say already deeply flawed). Thus we can say two things about interpretative claims:

1. The content of any such interpretation is just the allegory used to produce the interpretation. 2. As a consequence, interpretations exemplify the particular allegory used to determine the meaning or nonmeaning of the text; they are examples or illustrations of a particular way of interpreting a text. These allegories need not be coherent, or even explicit. A reading of a poem might take the form of a phenomenological tracing of one's response to the poem, line by line. To the degree that such a tracing is coherent, it will isolate certain aspects of the poem-voice, for example-and characterize this voice in relation to a set of parameters (sometimes quite complex) that explains what kind of significance a voice in a poem can have. But even to call a

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reading a phenomenological response to a poem is to understand the poem as a kind of cause whose effects one articulates as an interpretation. Theories that try to establish a specific correlation between forms and effects (those of Suzanne Langer, for example) either make this correlation too strong or too weak. Some theories make this correlation between form and effect too strong because one can think of easy counterexamples where the form of two poems, however described, is the same and yet the effect is quite different. Other theories make this correlation too weak by requiring that each particular work be its own form and thus have effects that are unique. 1 Arguments about the meaning of a fictional text are arguments about kinds of interpretations, and, therefore, are not about the text at all. Novels or poems are just not the kinds of things that have either determinate or indeterminate meaning. If we cannot say that fictions, stories, and poems mean (although we might be able to say what every sentence in a novel means), then such fictions are not indeterminate in meaning. The sentences of a fiction mean in the way they do, and fictions as a whole do not mean separate from our interpretations and redescriptions. We can, however, speak of the indeterminacy of interpretations. To adjudicate between interpretations, when they are in no nontendentious, noninterpretative sense about the purported textual targets, is simply to offer another interpretation. The indeterminate relation between a fiction and the world and between the fiction and its author allows and encourages us to use metaphysical theories as substitute agents by which the fiction can speak and mean as such an utterance. There are obviously consequences in choosing or in utilizing any particular way of interpreting. To the degree that one cannot decide among interpretations separate from what one decides about the interpretative frames and methods, these interpretations are logically interchangeable. Even if we can have general agreement about the form and content of a text ("these words in this order"), we can still discover various conflicting interpretations of those words in that order. Since the stuff of the text is not an expression of God nor of the author for that matter (this follows if one denies that a fiction is a speech act), then there is no sense to the claim that this text means x or y. Any particular 1. See G. Hagberg, Art as Language, for a more complete critique of Langer.

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fictional text is a kind of example, whose sense is stipulated within a particular interpretation to mean x or y. To say that it has a sense given by an interpretation, however, is a misstatement. The interpretation not only stipulates that the text means x or y, but it also stipulates what it means for the text to have a sense. It is not that there are as many texts as interpretations, as Stanley Fish claims, but that fictional texts do not mean, interpretations do. In claiming that a fiction and, in some cases, a poem, do not mean in the way a speech act does, I am assuming that authorial intention does not provide the meaning of these kinds of writing. I believe that it is important to make explicit the problems with equating authorial intentions with the meaning of a fiction or poem. Some old coins not only continually return, but one can discover that they are actually hatboxes anyway. Sometimes we put our hats in a box; sometimes we put them on our heads. As long as we have heads, we will have hats; thus the idea of a hatbox is not far away. There are many beliefs about the topic of authorial intention. There is also some argument, but many of these arguments are tied up with elaborate or problematic theories about language, the mind, or the world. I offer below a minimal description of what role authorial intention does and does not play in the determination of the putative meaning of fictions and poems. I organize my comments and arguments around two confusions: (1) the false equation of intentions and meanings and (2) the misconstrual of what fictions and poems are such that they could mean. I will number my arguments for the sake of clarity. Intentions are not equivalent to meanings. We can try to discover the intentions of authors. We can try to discover, at least, what they thought their intentions were and what readers took them to be. We can argue about how these intentions seem manifest in the fiction or poem. What an intention is, however, is not clear:

1. Authors have purposes and goals. We can describe a text relative to these. But this is hardly to say the text means by virtue of these purposes and goals. 2. Although the intentions of an author might be statable, they are not, in general, the same as meanings. I intend to say something, I say it, and I intend to mean something. A sentence does not mean by virtue of my intentions. It means by virtue of the meaning of the words in combination with each other and relative to how I am using the sentence and with what illocutionary force I state it. I can

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intend all of this, but I am not successful in communicating with you by virtue of my intentions, even if what you understand is what I intended. Sentences are intersubjectively open; we learn how to understand them. Anyone's intentions are not open in this way. Sentential content is not an intention but a meaning. 3. We often talk about speaker intentions when something is amiss. What I say might not match what I mean, so that retrospectively I can try to correct my statement by trying again. I indicate this failure by talking about what I intended to mean. I believe that when I said x I meant y, but I discover that I failed. Consequently, I find a new way to say y. You might ask in some befuddlement: "Did you intend to assert that life without roasted duck is a life without joy?" "No," I reply, "I intended to mislead you about my attitude toward roasted duck." In saying this, I am justifying my false statement. Why I lied about my love of duck, which I do love, has not yet been explained. I may have had some strange goal in saying this, or I might simply have felt silly. That I intended my statement to have a certain effect could be described as the meaning of my lie. In this case, the meaning of the statement is explained as why I said what I did. Similarly, the intentions of an author may explain why she wrote in the way she did, about what she did, and so on. These motives, goals, and intentions are not the same as the putative meanings of the fictions and poems. 4. Authorial intentions can be offered, however, as a justification of a poem or fiction, but they need not be accepted as justifying these. The justification and putative meanings of poems and fictions can be in conflict with authorial intentions. Thus, authorial intentions need not be given any role in what we say about fictions and poems (although they may be given a role by stipulation). 5. Fictions, as I argued in the last chapter, are not communicative acts. Poems may not be communicative acts. Consequently, it is inappropriate in most cases to assume that what fictions and poems mean could be an expression of intentions. In addition, if fictions are not speech acts, we have to stipulate how a fiction means as a fiction. Similarly, the indeterminacies of poems mean that how they mean must often be stipulated. Such stipulations are not restricted and cannot be determined by authorial intention. We should not assume that intentions have the same role in fictions and

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poems as they do in ordinary acts of communication. If fictions are not speech acts, then the authorial intention behind any sentence is no better than my intention in understanding the sentence in a certain way. Authorial intentions can be stipulated to constitute the meaning of a text, but they need not be. 6. That fictions are not speech acts means that we cannot assume that speaker (authorial) intention has the same role for fictions and poems as it does for acts of communication. How sentences mean together within narratives or fictions is often not reducible to a claim or a proposition or a set of claims or propositions. The meaning of a fiction or poem is not the summation of its sentences, and thus what we would call the meaning of a fiction or a poem as wholes requires a redescription of them. A poem and a fiction need not have any propositional content separate from these redescriptions. Such redescriptions (interpretations) would stipulate the meaning. The intentions of the author are irrelevant to this process. Thus, it is not clear how an author could have an intention that could make a fiction as a whole mean. 7. We can make a similar argument focusing on the indeterminate relation between fictions and poems and actual states of affairs that we could evaluate as true or false. In order to say anything about a fiction, we have to normalize the fictional form or the generalized indeterminacies and ambiguities of poetry. This normalization requires that we redescribe the fiction or the poem. Out of such redescriptions we get interpretations and statements of meaning. There are always many ways of redescribing any poem or fiction. Thus, I do not know what kind of meaning is the meaning of a fiction. While we might describe and interpret a fiction, any such interpretation is unlike the meaning of a sentence. Consequently, there is no single kind of meaning to be delineated or determined by an intention. 8. We cannot read off the intentions of an author from fictions and poems; the author can fail to accomplish those intentions; intentions can be multiple, incoherent, inconsistent, or absent in any intelligible sense. The author can forget his or her intentions, and thus misstate them in later comments. The relation between authorial intentions and a particular poem, for example, is such that we

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cannot read off the authorial intention from the poem, nor can any such intention determine the meaning of the poem. Authorial intentions do not have the power to provide fictions with meaning.

III. An Argument about Nonfiction The difficulty in describing what a fiction is arises not simply from its being a fiction, but is also a general problem with written and memorized fictions and nonfictions. Written or memorized texts make the relation between speaker (writer) and what is said (the text) somewhat ambiguous. The ambiguity comes from the way in which whenever we use language outside of specific speech situations our attention can shift from the meaning of sentences to the putative meaning of collections of sentences. It is not always clear how to move from sentences that express thoughts to collections of sentences that can have numerous logical, associative, and narrative relations with each other. Thus, I will conclude by framing the problem of how fictions can mean by looking at how nonfictions mean in relation to how we interpret them. There are various kinds of nonfictional texts. Such texts would be constrained usually by logical inference and implication; they would often make claims about states of affairs and be bound by evidence and logical coherence. 'States of affairs' should be understood very broadly and loosely in this case. One might construe the meaning of at least some nonfictional texts as primarily the propositional content of their sentences or as the thought(s) of the author. If one takes the meaning of a nonfictional text to reside primarily in its propositional content, then one construes these sentences as assertions. The sentences of a nonfiction need be taken as speech acts only to the degree that they are understood as assertions. The goal here would be to reduce the meaning of sentences to a single plane. Although they may be wrong, misleading, unclear, and miss their target, the relation of nonfictional sentences to what they purport to be about is not indeterminate. Even if we reduce the meaning of a sentence to its propositional content, however, we cannot understand the relation among and between sentences to be propositional. Therefore the content of a text is not straightforwardly the thoughts of the author. The description of the text as the thoughts of the author would rest on disguising the fact

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that the relation between sentences, even if inferential, is not propositional in the way the content of a sentence might be. The only partial exception would be to the degree this content can be reduced to a logical argument, in which case, the logical relations among the statements within the argument would determine the content of what is said. This would only be so in an ideal case, however. If a text cannot be so reduced, or if it is structured as a looser or less-formalizable argument, or if it is an evidentially bound narrative or description, then the relation among sentences is less determinate. Of course, one can understand a text as a representation or claim about what is the case regardless of its merits. The content of such a representation rests on understanding the sentences of which it is made as bound by some mode of evaluation relative to our sense of what is or was the case. A logical argument is not representative in this way, since the truth or falsity of the argument is determined by logical constraints, not factual ones. The text would just be the argument. In factual and historical texts, the relation between sentences and narratives and more general claims is less determinate than in logical arguments. The difference between the content of a collection of sentences as a whole and the content of a sentence raises a question about how to understand a text as meaning or expressing a determinate thought. We have to decide how to ratchet up, unify, and make explicit the meaning of sentences as specific thoughts relative to the thought or content of some larger linguistic or discursive unit. Nonfictions are bedeviled by some of the same interpretative problems as fictional texts. Consequently, we can ask of nonfictional texts two questions: (1) Do such texts mean one thing? and (2) Is the meaning of the text indeterminate? Does a nonfictional text mean one thing? It is not clear what 'mean' means in this question. The concatenation of sentences and the variety of interpretations possible create an ambiguity (not an indeterminacy) among possible and sometimes determinate interpretations. It may be that some author did not say what he or she meant. Since all we can go on is relative consistency, we would be generalizing over our sample, from a single text to the oeuvre. Such generalizing, at the very least, erases changes in the author's thinking over time, and disregards the fact that someone may not fully know what he or she means. In any case, the effect is to personify the text so that it can speak what it means as what it says. This at least suggests that the text does not mean one thing. We should not conclude from this that the meaning of a text is

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indeterminate. We can determine in various ways the content of sentences. We have to decide what these sentences add up to on a case-bycase basis. The relations between sentences are not bound syntactically in the way words are bound syntactically or logically within a sentence, and thus to say that these sentences together mean something remains an interpretative problem for a nonfictional as well as for a fictional text. We can understand sentences within arguments, descriptions, narratives and so on. We may need to make further judgments about these in order to decide on their import. But our statement about what these sentences mean, taken in relation to each other and as a whole, will, itself, be a redescription of those sentences. There is more than one way to describe these sentences, barring constraining syntax. Thus, these sentences as a text do not mean as a text separate from various stipulated formalizations. Nonfictional texts as wholes have neither a single meaning nor an indeterminate meaning: 'meaning' is too vague and unclear when used to describe texts, instead of sentences. We can stipulate or use it as a placeholder for the more complex ways we redescribe texts: 'an argument for x,' 'one can take this to imply that y,' 'this asserts z,' and so on. So far I have described nonfictional texts in the same way as I have described fictional texts, except that our redescriptions of fictional texts have an indeterminate relation to the texts described. It is not unreasonable to understand the content of a nonfictional text to be the thoughts of the author, in which case the conventions of how we interpret speech acts remain in place. We can use a nonfictional text as a means of claiming something about the author's thoughts and intentions. We should not, however, imagine that a text as a whole has a meaning. To say that a text consists of thoughts is just to say that it consists of sentences. How these sentences and thoughts relate to each other is variable and open to interpretation, even by the author. The notion of meaning is tied to coherence, so that to find the meaning of x is to find how x hangs together. What the author seems to offer is a coherent unity of purpose or of thought from which the text derives. We, thus, are tempted to imagine that the text can be understood as an expression of that coherence. If this coherence cannot be provided by the author, that is, if the text cannot derive its unity by virtue of that unity of authorial thought (an even greater problem with texts like the Odyssey or the Bible), then one either claims that the text has no meaning, because no intention is expressed, or one looks for some intrinsic unity within the text itself. But what 'intrinsic' means is exactly what is in question, and thus we return to the initial problem.

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Iv. One Value of Literary Interpretation To describe something as fictional is less to say something about a string of words or a story than to say something about how we understand these sentences. It is by virtue of our relation to fictional sentences that the relation between those sentences and the world becomes indeterminate. A nonfiction, in contrast, explicitly makes claims about the world and should be understood as expressing the thoughts of the author (at that time). Nonfictions, however, do not resolve into single thoughts or meanings, and thus how sentences make a whole remains a subject for interpretation The meaning of the fiction or fictional poem is not in the marks, words, sentences, or anywhere in a book or text. We don't know how a fiction means separate from interpretations because there is no good sense we can give to the meaning of a fiction as a whole. Again, it is not like the meaning of a sentence. We can stipulate what we mean by 'the meaning of the fiction,' which is to establish what it means by fiat (an expression of certain attitudes about fictions) or as part of some further theory about the world, language, human beings and so on. The indeterminacy of such interpretations follows from the logical structure of fiction and does not lead to the conclusion that everything is interpretation-and therefore relative. This indeterminacy has no significant ontological implications about the world at all. The indeterminacy of such interpretations does, however, show something of the way that we can be estranged and confused by sentences. We don't know what sense to give to the meaning of some fictive whole that is not already an interpretation. And thus we never read a fiction as a fiction; we read sentences and read interpretations often at the same time or through each other. We are always in a muddle when reading literary fictions-but the muddle is philosophical. I suggest that we can and should use our interpretative skills in order to provide descriptions of the various ways sentences, characters, phrases, and so on mean within a novel or poem (or any fictional text) as part of a further effort to justify these meanings and descriptions. We must understand what kind of claims interpretations generate, understand their scope, validity, form, and meaning in order to then evaluate them. The interpretation of fictions and poems should always lead to more work. In any case, interpretations do not give the meaning of the text or story. We use texts and stories in certain ways by interpreting them, so that the texts mean by stipulation relative to the supporting

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theories and assumptions justifying the interpretative allegorical schema. Our interpretations of fictions are linked to our general theories about the world, people, and what they say. A text without the backing of some divinity and without previously accepted and independently held interpretive frames and methodologies can have little consequence or importance. It might have effects. It might make us cry or feel pleasure or fantasize, but the explanation and study of those effects would be a subject for psychology. Fictions and poems can always provide useful examples of various psychological and ethical dilemmas and situations. They might even be taken to show how to resolve these, but that would be a psychological and ethical judgment on our part. Except for this last case, either interpreting books is self-serving and pointless, and one should stop, or arguments about what books mean are really arguments about ways of interpreting in relation to the constraints offered by the fiction, most importantly by what we take its sentences to say. We should be honest about this and attempt to justify the logic and sense of our interpretative allegories. In justifying our interpretation, we have to find the terms to describe what is at stake in our interpretative strategies relative to the kinds of claims such interpretations make about what we are, what the world is, how language means, and so on. Any justification of the putative propositional content of a fiction or poem (that x fiction is patriarchal or capitalist, for example, if such claims have any sense), can only follow from the justification of how the fiction or poem, itself, is an interpretation of the theory supporting the form and logic of the allegory. Consequently, the study of literature is best understood as a kind of philosophy, always in danger of becoming sophistry, and thus only able to resist that danger by conscious and continual self-criticism. The complexity of our engagement and involvement with even our own sentences is far greater than imagined. Consequently, the meaning of any collection of sentences is subject to redescription, hence interpretation. Fiction is not about anything except to the degree that I can interpret my world or myself within or through it. We could apply an allegory to ourselves, if we could recognize ourselves within it. This recognition, however, cannot be provided by the allegory; it requires, instead, justification. We enter into the allegories we use to interpret fiction and poetry through our recognition of ourselves, and such recognition is the expression of an implicit justification of the adequacy of an interpretation. Thus not the allegories themselves, but

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their justification is the site for self-reflection. But it makes no sense to talk of justification in itself as a form of reflection: self-justification is not self-reflection. Furthermore, there is no end to the kinds of justifications, and no final adjudication about the adequacy of justifications. The inconclusiveness of interpretations and their justifications means that they are the sites for a kind of self-reflection whose content is inconclusive as well. To pursue self-reflection through our interpretations means one must understand the significance of this indeterminacy.

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T H E MODERNIST CLAIM THAT 'a poem does not mean, but is' is a species of a much broader attempt to defend and justify the value of fiction and poetry as a special kind of thing. Can we take this claim seriously? Are fictions or poems linguistic constructs that can be and not mean? The sense of the motto 'a poem does not mean, but is' either drifts toward (1) a special sense of things, an idea expressed in William Carlos Williams' outburst "no ideas but in things," or (2) a special kind of meaning, often expressed by the sense that poetry is somehow about itself. Poetry written in pursuit of this aesthetic goal attempts to reduce the ordinary meanings of words and sentences to a kind of bare meaningfulness that describes some proto-condition of language or to some underlying mental mode of perception or understanding. In the most extreme case, this kind of talk is an attempt to displace meaning from something we do and produce to something the poem has, to allow the marks and what we understand as language to mean without us. The aesthetic goal is to get the source of poetic or artistic meaning to congeal in the object itself. The project of reducing meaning to being is in effect construed as reducing content to form, to equate what is with being meaningful. God could be characterized by such an equation. To attempt this in art mimics theology, with the god we want to know becoming the poetic surrogate we want to make. In what follows, I will analyze critically a number of related ways of claiming, sometimes in a disguised fashion, that poetic language is and

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does not mean or means in some special way. I begin with an analysis of the logical structure of the claim that form exemplifies content. I then critique Samuel Beckett's and]. M. Rabate's more elaborate attempts to show how the language of Finnegans Wake, as a model for poetic language and, in some ways, for language itself, means performatively and through self-reference. Beyond this critical analysis itself, I argue that any equation of form and content is tendentious, and that the motto in all its forms is nonsensical and false. There is, however, something both right and wrong about characterizing fiction and poetry this way. I will protect what is right by offering a modest redescription of the terms 'form' and 'content,' which will carry with it, however, important conceptual implications.

I. The Fallacy of 'Form Is Content' A. Exemplification Alexander Pope claims that form imitates content when a poetic line that mentions galloping horses sounds a galloping rhythm. In claiming this, he allegorizes the relationship between form and content. We describe or understand the galloping to have a particular rhythm. We also learn to hear certain rhythmic patterns associated with the pronunciation of words and phrases. We then notice or claim that these rhythms are the same. There is nothing objectionable in this. We are correlating the rhythm of our reading with a conventionalized sense of the rhythm of galloping. We can learn to correlate various aspects of our reading words to appropriate conventionalizations of effects or activities. There are many ways of talking about boredom that are boring-in which case, however, the imitation, while structured through the same kind of correlation, has become an exemplification. Pope's lines do not exemplify the horse, just the rhythm of galloping under a particular description. When we understand form to exemplify content, we might be tempted to say that form is content. Again, if all this means is that in some cases the form and the content, under particular descriptions or interpretations, can be used and understood such that one exemplifies the other, then there is no problem. The claim that 'form is content,' however, is seldom understood in this limited sense. First, it is often generalized into an aesthetic principle and is not tied to particular sentences. Second, not all ideas, events, states, and experiences can be exemplified by the form of a sentence. Is there a special form for

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sentences that describe beliefs as opposed to those that describe lawn mowers? We cannot exemplify most objects in sentences, even if we arrange the words into the relevant shapes. Most of what we would consider the ideational content of sentences, from ideas about the weather to philosophical ideas about the political state, cannot be exemplified by a poetic form, ofwhatever kind, except through a tendentious allegorization in which we translate the ideational content into some further picture that we can then match with a description of the form of a sentence. In this case, there is no way to recognize the exemplification separate from our descriptions of the idea. If we hide this allegorization in some expressive theory of meaning or art, then we might claim that the allegorization is justified because a particular political state, for example, is necessarily expressed in this form. Since it would be easy to find other things expressed in the poetic form under question, this is a rather unlikely claim. In cases where it is not only unclear what some literary work means, but also how it might mean, the form is content claim can seem unavoidable. Beckett makes such a claim about the nonsense of Finnegans lIVtlke in "Dante ... Bruno.. Vico. Joyce." He justifies the nonsense of the lIVtlke by claiming that it is not only to be read, but also "to be looked at and listened to," to be understood as an object, sounds, or a kind of music (14). By claiming this, Beckett means to describe FW as a kind of nonreferential art whose value and effect is not tied to understanding it as anything other than what it is with whatever attendant effects. Beckett, however, seems unhappy to leave it at that, since describing FWas something to look at or listen to fails to capture the apparent content of Wakean sentences. The putative nonreferentiality of the lIVtlke is thus redescribed as an equivalence between form and content, such that FW is "not about something, it is that something itself" (14). This famous distinction, popularized in an earlier form by MacLeish to describe modernist poetics, pretends to show that Modernist techniques create objects of a special status. Such an argument is at times generalized into a claim that language uses us or that meaning is somehow more like a thing than a thought. I think it safe to say that all such claims rely on questionable theories of meaning (some of which I will discuss below). What Beckett describes as a failure to be about something is a consequence of the fact that FW is a particular kind of something. We would not, however, mistake its words, sentences and putative mean-

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ings for rocks, fish, or a bit of wind. What kind of thing it is has to be discovered. But one cannot discover what this is by kicking it. What FW is can only be determined if one understands how it can be something beyond what any collection of sentences might be. This last is important here because Beckett does not claim that all literature is not about something, just the Wake. Beckett claims that the form of the Wake exemplifies its content. He claims, "When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep" (14). How do words go to sleep?-by losing sense. "When the sense is dancing, the words dance." How do words dance?-by losing sense so that the relation of word to word can be described as flowing or dancing. If one can redescribe aspects of these words or sentences as having a particular effect or quality that one already uses to characterize dancing, then one says 'the words dance.' But this is a metaphor, a restipulation of what it means to dance relative to a redescription of aspects of the text. The point of the claim, however, is that the words exemplify what they say such that meaning and saying are identical not only at the level of sense (what one understands), but also relative to what we would describe as the form. What counts as form is harder to give a nontendentious description of than one thinks. In the sleep claim, for example, the form would be those deformations of sense that approach opaqueness, where this opaqueness is understood as an analogy for our being unconscious in sleep. In claiming this analogy, one allegorizes the movement from sense to nonsense as like the 'movement' from consciousness to unconSCIousness. Beckett goes on to claim that Joyce has "desophisticated language." Sophisticated language, of which English is apparently an exemplar, is "abstracted," so that 'desophisticated' means nonabstract, metaphorically nominalist language: "We are presented with a statement of the particular" (17). This particularity is tied, apparently, to the meaning of the words. The meaning of the words is a redescription of the origin of language, where the origin would show how words mean through the extra something that shifts nonsemantic sounds into meaningful words. Theories of the origin of language are invariably theories of meaning and mind, couched in historical terms. Beckett appeals to Vico, Bruno, and, without stating it, to J ousse and his theory of the gestural origins of language. Beckett's attempt to describe the origin of language is an attempt to get at the primitive nexus of form (shape and sound) and meaning. This meaning, however, is more like what Kant in the Third Critique called purposiveness or finality (ZweckmiissigkeitJ-in this case, the meaningfulness of form as form. In recovering this meaningfulness

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of form, the l/f7ake would thus exhibit something like what Kant called the form of finality or in this case the form of meaningfulness. Beckett's argument is akin to the Cratylist theories of Fenollosa and Pound concerning Chinese and, for Pound, poetry. He claims that "[t]his writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old articulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics" (15). Pound made hieroglyphics a famous image for aesthetics, but Beckett asserts more or less the same thing: the idea that the form of words and sentences carry a primary and primitive meaning, that one can get intersubjective-like content from the shape of language itself. This is an empty claim. Bare signs cannot convey any content except their shape. To see them as signs is already to understand them as not bare signs, as not just marks. Whatever sense that is communicated by the form of a sign (whatever that is) we derive from the application of some convention about such forms or from some interpretation that we would produce about such forms. The form cannot convey content by itself. Beckett claims earlier in the essay that this putative primitive meaningfulness is a "sensuous suggestion." 'Doubt' fails to mimic its meaning in the form of its letters and syllables, while the German 'Zweifel' does mimic its meaning. In the l/f7ake, Beckett claims, Joyce replaces 'doubt' with "in twosome twiminds," which like the German 'Zweifel' contains a notion of doubleness or twoness that, by analogy, describes metaphorically what 'doubt' means: having two competing thoughts, decisions, desires, and so on. One need not have just "twiminds," of course. Nor is it clear why the word 'two' or 'zwei' carries more content about what it means to doubt than 'doubt' itself. The assumption seems to be that the idea of doubting is more precisely communicated by a word if one can extract this notion of 'two' from it. Words do not mean, however, as kinds of description. One could carry Beckett's argument further and claim that the ending diphthong in 'zwei,' marking as it does the completion of the word 'zwei,' grates against the following 'fel' in such a way as to exemplify twoness. Such an interpretation is something like reading the shapes of clouds as animals. This way of reading the sounds of the words as meaningful remains parasitic on the meaning of 'zwei.' One would be hard pressed to defend how the meaning of 'zwei' is sensual. I might be able to train myself to hear sounds as meaningful in a special way, but their meaning would then be normative, not sensual. I would have to be able to get the content right or wrong, if it were not to be simply the random correlation of sounds with particular meanings.

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Of course one need not be aware at all of the 'zwei' in 'Zweifel.' 'Zwei' has no necessary role in the basic meaning of 'Zweifel' or in our use of it in sentences. Beckett's theory cannot, therefore, have anything to do with how words mean. The recognition of 'zwei' in 'Zweifel' allows us to offer one interpretation of the content of the idea of doubt, by allowing us to characterize the putative psychological state of doubt as being of two minds. That this would seem to offer a psychological theory about what it means to be in doubt encourages Beckett to understand it as logically prior to our uses of 'doubt.' To be of two minds is one way, but only one way, of explaining what it means to be in doubt. Beckett's hieroglyphic aesthetic equates (1) the meaning of a sign with (2) the form of a sign. The form of the sign is simply the meaning of other signs (words), construed as the definition of the word of which they are a part. There are many uses of 'doubt' and of 'Zweifel' that would not be replaceable with the phrase "in twosome twiminds." In any case, the meaning of 'Zweifel' cannot be transparently read from the form of the word. And thus we are in the same situation when understanding uses of 'Zweifel' as we are when understanding uses of 'doubt.' It is clearly important in Beckett's account of Wakean aesthetics that we speak of signs and not words in sentences. The meaning of words used in sentences is usually transparent. The transparency of hieroglyphics, however, is supposed to be either exemplary or foundational, in the sense that the hieroglyphic is understood to mean by virtue of the way it mimics the concept expressed. By understanding the etymological elements ofwords as if they were hieroglyphic marks Beckett argues that the justification for the form of the word constitutes its meaning. He produces just-so stories to justify the form relative to the meaning, and then simply claims that the form can convey this meaning. Beckett also tries to show how these words can carry their content in their form by redescribing the words as if they were alive: "They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear" (16). The mythology here is that if FW does not mean, or does not just mean, and is something not reducible to the marks on the page or to however we interpret it as meaningful, then it is a kind of living thing. All Beckett can do is simply offer these metaphors, since such metaphors should mean by the same exemplification he is describing. Unfortunately, they do not.

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B. 'Peiformativeness': The Fallacy ofNecessary Self-Reference Rabate attempts to recoup and extend Beckett's metaphoric descriptions of FW into an argument about how language means. He claims that what allows Beckett's claim that FWis and does not mean to be true is the way that Wakean language is somehow performative: it does something. The l/f7ake exemplifies performative language, Rabate claims, because it, "itself realizes, what it transforms and what it produces." He must show how Wakean words work such that they do not mean but produce what they describe or instantiate. Rabate restates Beckett's claim: "Finnegans l/f7ake is not about something, but it is about the fact that it is this thing," which means that it "is ... about the fact that it is this thing which it is about"("Lapsus ex Machina," 88). The circularity of this last clause suggests either that the claim is empty or that Rabate is using 'about' in two radically different senses. If 'about' has two meanings here, then they are modeled on the difference between (1) saying something about someone else or about some thing and (2) saying something about myself. Most of the ways I talk about myself are no different from how I talk about others. I can predicate, at least, the same kinds of things of myself as I do of others. When there is a difference in kind between how or what I say about myself as opposed to others (such as when I express pain), then 'about' means 'express.' This would be how we would describe the meaning of intentional statements as well, where if I say 'I believe that x,' I am saying something about myself by expressing my belief. I am saying something about myself relative to what others learn about me by my expressions. This fact at least suggests what Rabate is in effect attempting. In order to give sense to his claim that FW speaks about itself, he construes FW as being like a person (which) expresses itself on the model of our avowals and intentional utterances. Rabate thinks that to be 'about the fact that it is this thing that it is about' means that Wakean sentences are, and the l/f7ake as a whole is, a performative act. To be about itself being about itself would mean, therefore, that the putative content of any Wakean sentence is about that act of self-reference. Being 'about the act,' which it itself is, is construed as just "the fact that it is this thing." The claim that a sentence is about the act it itself is, equates how a sentence means with what it means. Such an equation, for Rabate, defines a performative sentence: "the fact that it is this thing which it is about." But what kind of fact is this 'fact that is this thing which it is about"? Such a fact cannot have any content separate from the fact (1) that it is a fact, although this is

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true only by stipulation, and (2) that it is about itself by being a kind of act. The first option is empty and the second unjustified. The relation between 'act' and 'fact' is allegorical, not instrumental. Thus, Rabate is in effect allegorizing this act (how sentences mean) by describing it relative to his translation of a Wakean sentence (what a sentence means), and then reinterpreting that allegory as itself an act instantiating what is described. This is just an elaborate attempt to make the form equivalent to content through a question-begging allegory: he can redescribe the sentence as exemplifying itself only because he has redescribed the sentence in exactly that way. The critical linchpin in Rabate's set of claims is his casual and unjustified removal ofwhat he calls the psychological subject from any role in how sentences mean. He detaches speech acts from persons and personifies the text so that it can speak itself. This subtraction means that performatives and illocutionary force are not something that someone does, as an expression of particular intentions, but something the text does (or really at best seems to do). Such a removal might seem partially justified, since at least illocutionary force could in some cases be correlated with grammatical mood. But this is not true in all cases, and in any case deforms J. L. Austin's primary concern for how we use sentences or utterances. The locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary distinctions are partially ways of giving content to the claim that language means by virtue of our use. A speech act requires an actor or agent. That we perform actions with our sentences means that we do something with various consequences in particular situations relative to other people and things in the world. Rabate's attempt to talk about the text as speaking itself or as being about itself, therefore, simply misses the point of talking about speech acts. Rabate generalizes the performative aspect of sentences on the model of promising. He does not give performatives the more general sense of illocutionary force (which any sentence can have), as does Austin. Rabate does appeal to illocutionary force ("Lapsus ex Machina," 88), but he uses it as if it just meant that all sentences are performative. He does this because he construes a performative verb or sentence (the difference between these is not kept distinct) to mean by virtue of selfreference: "The performative verb (to ask, to promise, to order, to congratulate, to reprimand) is necessarily self-referential: it accomplishes something in speaking, and in speaking, it speaks of itself" (88). And again, "the act would be identified with its utterance in a perpetual self-reference in the present ... a perpetual presence of performative self-commentary." Rabate's construal of performatives as meaning by

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virtue of self-reference is a critical mistake, a mistake that is another form of the confused claim that 'form is content.' That our statements do something does not mean that what they do is like promising or christening. But even more importantly, explicit performatives, such as promising or christening, do not entail any self-reference. To describe some utterance as performative is to say that what is said is accomplished by saying it. Not every speech act is a performative of this kind. Although all statements may be performed, they do not all mean by virtue of this performance. Stating a fact has propositional content that is not exhausted in the act of stating that fact. This propositional content is in what is said, not in the fact that I am saying it. When I christen a ship, however, the content is in the act itself. Such a christening may mean more than what is said, by being part of propaganda, for example. We might call this the significance or the purpose of the christening. We should understand performatives, therefore, as distinct from other speech acts. To generalize the distinction in the way that Rabate does is to lose the peculiarity of these ways of speaking. Rabate generalizes what he understands as the self-reflexive nature of performatives to all speech acts. Performatives, however, are no more self-reflexive than any other act of saying. My saying 'I do' in a wedding ceremony is more like an expression of happiness, for example, than a description of myself or of the statement itself. By virtue of saying 'I do' I agree to a contract, but I am not referring to my saying it as I say it. In such a ceremony, I am answering the question 'Do you take this woman as your lawful wedded wife?' with an affirmative, conventionally expressed by the phrase 'I do.' That this 'I do' can look self-reflexive is the effect of some further description of these kinds of statements, and not a part of how they mean. They do not refer to themselves because they do not refer. That is the point of calling them performatives. Why does Rabate think that performatives are self-referential? When I say 'I christen this ship "Christine,'" it might appear that I am performing the act of christening by virtue of referring to what I am doing. A performative, however, counts as a performative because it does not mean by virtue of referring. When a christening is unsuccessful, it does not fail by virtue of a failure of reference (my failure to refer to what I am doing or saying). The christening might fail because the champagne bottle failed to break; I might not be authorized to christen the ship 'Christine' or to christen the ship at all; I might be standing in front of the wrong ship. (Such failures are even easier to see in the case of a wedding ceremony.) Other performative sentences seem not to have

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the appearance of self-reference, for example, I need not say 'I congratulate you,' but only 'Congratulations.' But the question here is whether the logical form of performatives should be necessarily described as self-referential. The need for necessity here follows from Rabate's claim that performatives would mean by virtue of selfreference. Austin explicitly denies that in performing a speech act I am describing myself. M. ]. Cresswell and Kent Bach and R. M. Hannish have questioned this denial, although not in order to assert that such speech acts would mean by virtue of self-reference. 1 They argue that, in addition to performing a speech act, I would also be describing myself performing a speech act. This description allows what I say to have a weak kind of truth-value, but the speech act is not performed by virtue of this description. I perform the speech act, performative or otherwise, by virtue of performing the speech act. By ascribing this dual meaning to such sentences, Cresswell and Bach and Hannish address a problem that]. Cohen has raised about the truth-value of performatives. If I say 'I state that I did not break the lamp,' then strictly speaking even if I did break the lamp I have made a true statement, since I am stating what I am stating. Such a sentence would seem to have two truth-values: one associated with the clause 'I did not break the lamp' and one associated with the entire sentence, which would always be true. In general, we evaluate these sentences relative to what is asserted in the main clause. Speech acts whose main clause would be bound by truth-conditions are all subject to this problem of dual truth-values. These would include sentences using the verbs 'judge,' 'report,' 'advise' and 'warn.' Not all performatives express truth-evaluatable clauses. For this reason, Austin describes most performatives as successful (felicitous) or unsuccessful (infelicitous) and not as true or false. Consequently, performatives can be described as having three possible senses: (1) a performative sense, which is neither true nor false; (2) a self-referential sense that is either a secondary meaning or in certain cases ('stating,' 'warning,' 'judging,' and 'advising') a sense that defines all such sentences as true; and (3) the ordinary interpretation of those cases adduced by]. Cohen in which we take the main clause as that which we evaluate as true or false. In this last case, the initial performative clause ('I state ...') is understood as simply indicating the performative force. 1. See also D. Lewis; his argument, however, is a special case. "General Semantics."

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One can preface performatives with even more elaborate clauses that have enough grammatical structure to resist their reduction to mere indicators of force. Cohen argues that this force is an aspect of the meaning of the sentence and cannot be logically separated out in the way that Austin does by calling it illocutionary force. For example, "if the utterance 'Your haystack is on fire' gives a warning that is rendered explicit by 'I warn you that your haystack is on fire,' and if the warning is part of the meaning of the latter utterance, it is hardly unreasonable to suppose that the warning is also part of the former utterance's meaning, though inexplictly so" (123). If illocutionary force is marked by the initial clause ('I warn ... ') or if illocutionary force is simply a part of the meaning of the sentence, or if a performative sentence has more than one kind of meaning, then, in all cases, the performative aspect does not mean by virtue ofanything like self-reference.

~ LET ME RETURN TO Rabate's version of 'content is form:' "The performative verb (to ask, to promise, to order, to congratulate, to reprimand) is necessarily self-referential: it accomplishes something in speaking, and in speaking, it speaks ofitself" ("Lapsus ex Machina," 88). I have already argued that performatives do not mean by virtue of self-reference. Even in a case like 'I reprimand you for that behavior' the meaning of the sentence as a performative could just as easily be accomplished with 'you are reprimanded' or 'you will be put on report.' Rabate claims that performative self-reference refers to the utterance not the utterer. Since a sentence like 'I am happy' refers to the utterer of this sentence, there remains a logical distinction between that which is referred to and the means of this reference. If one argues that the sentence also expresses something about me beyond what is predicated of me in this case, then that the sentence refers to me is assumed in the fact that it is expressive. In most cases, this means nothing more than the fact that I have uttered the sentence. This is what it would mean for me to speak of myself in speaking. Rabate wants performative sentences not to refer in this way. At the very least, this means that the sense of 'self-reference' he appeals to is not the same as that which would be used to describe the way that 'I am happy' refers to whoever utters the sentence. For Rabate a performative sentence refers to itself not to the utterer, since there is no utterer. The sentence speaks. This sense of self-reference cannot be a kind of predication like 'this sentence refers to itself.' His uses of "speaks of itself" would seem closer to the phrase 'expresses itself as the fact that it is the sentence that it is.' 'Speaks of

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itself' is, therefore, only a redescription of sentences as sentences; the putative speaking plays no role in how they mean. If Wakean sentences are to be performatives in any sense, this personification cannot be simply rhetorical, but must be a literal description of how the Wake means. Consequently, Rabate redescribes the Wake and its language as a kind of machine: "This machine has no other aim than that which it accomplishes itself in running" (80). The Wake "speaking of itself' is redescribed as if the content of this phrase means 'accomplish[ing] itself,' as a kind of a Rube Goldberg machine-with moving parts but with no point or function. FW is no more a mechanism than it is a person. To say its function is to have a function is just to describe it in that way. While the function of any machine is relative to our purposes and interpretations, machines produce further effects relative to the world surrounding their functioning (even if that only means using energy and displacing air as the parts move). While FW might be described as like a machine, it is not a machine in the way one's car is. And while we might quibble about how to describe a machine, we cannot give any non-question-begging sense to calling the text a machine. It does not mean or fail to mean by virtue of some causal set of relations internal to the text itself, and that is what one must show at a minimum if one is to call the text a machine. (Where is the inside of the text anyway? It is not the same as inside a fiction.) How is the Wakean machine supposed to work? Rabate claims that FW "plays more on the 'failures', the 'infelicities' which annul the performative." The Wake is, he believes, "the collection of vitiated acts, snags, self-sabotage, inappropriate uses of performatives which do not perform" (91). These failures foreground the self-referential engine of performatives, and thus the fact that no one speaks FW and that it supposedly consists of failed performatives is compensated for by this self-referentiality, such that in spite of these failures the Wake can still mean as what it is or does by virtue of being a kind of performative. If FW is a machine, then it is a machine that does not work on purpose, but in not working it works in some other way. The first 'work' in this sentence cannot mean the same as the second; and both are at best metaphors arising out of the machine metaphor, encouraged by the possible effects that reading FW might produce. The second use of 'work,' however, has no specified meaning except some vague sense of having effects, which is true of almost anything. Rabate attempts to buttress his argument by reading specific passages as performative and self-referential. He recognizes two kinds of Wakean sentences that are meant to show the performative nature of

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FW. The first kind includes all putative conversations between characters or narrative claims about characters that can be construed as performative in an ordinary sense. As such these sentences 'mean' within the terms of the fiction of the Wake. The second kind of sentence seems to refer to or can be taken as a description of the Wake or of the linguistic realm or condition shown by the Wakean fiction. In the first case, any argument about the self-reflexive nature of performatives would have to agree with what we would argue about ordinary conversational performatives. Consequently, he cannot use these cases to support his contention that FW means performatively by failing to mean performatively. If a sentence refers to itself as a sentence or if a sentence refers to the Wake as a whole, then the sentence "x ... n y" can at best be understood to refer to the mentioned sentence 'x n ... y.' This is true even if the sentence in question is not an assertion about itself, but is meant to refer to itself because it fails to perform any other linguistic function. I am not sure what 'refer' could possibly mean in this second case except something like 'express.' If the sentence fails "to perform," as Rabate puts it, then one would only be left with the marks of the letters and words. In other words, we would have two descriptions of any sentence: (1) as a sentence with putative meanings of some performative form (in the best case) and (2) as a sentence understood as simply the form without the content of a meaningful performative sentence (one should say utterance and not sentence, but without any speaker there is no utterance). The idea that the relation between these two descriptions should be referential rests on the assumption that the putative referential function could be left somewhere in the "mechanism" of the performative even if it fails, so that one could allegorize the relation between these two descriptions of the same putative sentence as self-referential. The form of this allegorized relation, however, remains the same as above: the sentence "x . . . n . . . y" would be understood to refer to the mentioned sentence 'x n y.' The mentioned sentence describes the actual sentence ("x n y") as a form relative to its putative or failed content. Thus, Rabate's attempt to describe Wakean sentences as performatives, failed or otherwise, is simply an attempt to equate content and form by allowing the form of a sentence to constitute its content. A failed performative would then be in the form of a performative, but without the content. Wakean sentences would all perform this failure. Failed performatives (forms) would refer to themselves, and fulfill what he takes as their chief characteristic, by being equivalent to themselves.

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In this, Rabate is simply equating use with mention: equating "x ... n ... y" with the mentioned sentence 'x ... n ... y.' Reference, even self-reference, if it is not mistakenly construed as a tautology, implies a logical difference between that which is used to refer and that which is referred to. Consequently, a sentence as a whole cannot refer to its content, but only to itself as quoted (mentioned). Parts of a sentence, of course, can be used to refer to or direct us to other parts of the same sentence. This is what it means for a sentence to have meaning: to predicate something of x or to say 'I believe that today is Wednesday.' Rabate's talk of self-reference reduces to this equation of use and mention. Such an equation is nonsensical; it has the effect of producing a mythic description of these sentences such that the notion of use becomes a hidden mind expressed in the mentioned sentence we read. Rabate's example of a sentence that refers to the Wake as a whole by being itself a failed performative is the following: "Are those their fata which we read in sibylline between the fas and the nefas?" (pW, 31.36). In order to read this as self-referential, we must take it as being about the Wake. We would then have to allegorize the book under some description using the words in this question, and in so doing provide a sense and an implied referent for the sentence-the Wake as that which is "between the fas and the nefas." The sentence cannot refer selfreferentially to the Wake except through such an allegorization and redescription. This sentence can only be taken as a performative if one assumes that illocutionary force is the same as an utterance being a performative. To say that any sentence could be understood as an intentional act with illocutionary force does not entail that its logical structure be the same as a performative clause such as 'I warn you.' (Notice again that if understood performatively this is not a self-referential statement in which I would be informing you that it was me who is warning you. As a performative, this sentence is a warning). Rabate construes the words 'fas' (L. divine word: licit) and 'nefas' (L. contrary to the divine law: illicit) as performative. He claims that "Fas ... [has] a performative role." This claim rests on three ideas:

1. These are both nouns and could be construed as performatives only within a theory of divinity in which God would speak (L. fatum) and in speaking act, and by so acting define what is licit or illicit. 2. The Wakean use of 'fata' invokes its Latin meaning and, since the word is used in the sentence in the way English 'fate' would be, we

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hear it as 'fate': the "fata" that we would read "in sibylline" would be our fates and the Fates (L. Fata). 3. We might imagine also that the word 'fata' has an etymological resonance that incorporates our fate and the Fates to be God's utterance: fatum. Even if we could give some conceptual sense to an idea that included all three of these ideas simultaneously (and we could), that God's utterances are ontologically significant does not mean that our use of 'fata' would be significant in that same way. The answer to the question "Are those the fata ... between the fas and the nefas?" should probably be 'who knows?' To give the sentence and these words any sense that could be performed requires that we stipulate what these words together mean. Such stipulation must logically precede whatever performative sense we might imagine the sentence could express. Claiming that 'fas' and 'nefas' mean as performatives is to claim that they mean as divine acts and not as descriptions of those acts. This is unlikely. Rabate provides only one example of sentences in the form of performatives: "Withdraw your member! Closure. This chamber stands abjourned" (585.26-585.27). This last 'abjournment' sounds metaphoric. "Withdraw your member," however, reads like a command. Although one can gather a rudimentary sense from these fictional utterances (what they mean as utterances, to whom they are said and why), if the first statement is a comment as opposed to a command (if the content here should be understood as 'you should withdraw your member' or 'why don't you' or 'do it') cannot be determined. But this does not mean that the first or last sentence above are failed performatives, since the conditions of their putative utterance are so indeterminate. And, of course, they are not self-referential in the sense of referring to the putative performative act in any significant way, nor is it selfreferential in the sense of referring to the sentence or to a putative utterance, let alone to FWas a whole. Rabate, in this last example, takes the sexual exclamations and comments to be spoken by FW("Lapsus ex Machina," 91). At this point, he both dispenses with the idea of a speaker of the text and with the idea of speakers within the fiction. This exclusion diminishes much of the point and meaningfulness of appealing to performatives and illocutionary force, since they would cease to be actions at all if they could be used to describe Wakean sentences (or fictional sentences in general). Without speakers it is impossible to have performatives. These sentences are

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not performed in the sense that an utterance is. In order to retain the sense of an act that defines performatives and illocutionary force, one might construe our reading the fiction as such an act. But that is hardly to retain the role of context and intentional sense so important in performatives and illocutionary force. As we have seen, neither performative sentences within the fiction, those between characters, nor putative descriptions of FW as a whole offer any support for Rabate's argument. His last option would be to allow a putative narrator the role of speaker for such sentences, such that they could be understood as uttered. A narrator, to whatever degree, remains a character within at least one frame of the fiction. Thus any narrator who refers to the book or to what he or she is writing is referring to a fictional book and to fictional sentences, not to FW, itself. The failures of performatives that Rabate describes are meant to be the means by which FW means as what it is and as a description of how Wakean language (and maybe language as a whole) means or acts. If the performative force is provided by anything like a narrator or even understood as a speech act such that we could infer a narrator, then the failures are internal to the fiction. What the narrator would narrate would not be equivalent to FW nor to how Wakean language would actually mean. Rabate concludes from his examples, quite unjustifiably, that "therefore the performative aspect of FW may perhaps stem less from strong, locatable subjects of enunciation than from the constant selfreferentiality of the book" ("Lapsus ex Machina," 92). Since a performative is an act, if no one acts no force is expressed. At this point Rabate believes that he can replace someone speaking ('locatable subjects of enunciation') with this self-referentiality of FW. This move is even more strained, since if performatives mean in ordinary usage by virtue of self-reference, as he claims, and if FW is characterized by "inappropriate uses of performatives which do not perform" (91), and if this failure allows the l/f7ake to be self-referential or to produce what he still calls "illocutory effects," then either his argument is simply nonsensical and contradictory or Wakean performatives and illocutory effects are of some unique kind. Still Rabate thinks he can construe Wakean sentences as failed performatives, because what is enounced through the "multiplicity of voices [that] replay each other on every page" only shows that the book "also glosses its own reading, refers to itself as the book of all books" (92). "[W]ithin performative language, self-referentiality repels and dislocates the act of enunciation, and works to create a citational

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network" and through some obscure "transforming mechanism" these "citations and self-citations reinject these fragments of culture or intertextuality into a series of moods and voices, rhythms or verbal modalities, which cannot be identified with any precise character" (92). At this point I can make explicit his assumed and implicit argument:

1. Performatives are self-referential. 2. Performatives mean by virtue of this self-reference. 3. Performatives do not mean what they seem to, however, SInce self-reference "repels and dislocates the act of enunciation." 4. Therefore, self-reference causes performatives to fail. 5. This failure, however, produces (somehow) a citational network (this seems to mimic the form of romantic symbols that by virtue of referring to themselves "point to everything else" as Goethe describes it). 6. This citational network, since it cannot be attached to a particular speaking person or character, personifies the text and seemingly language itself. 7. This personification just means that these failed performatives act independently of what they mean, since they fail to mean except within this kind of metadescription of their failure. I have shown, and I think one can see by inspection when the argument is made explicit, that every element in it is either false or question begging. For words or sentences to refer to themselves we have to first take them as persons or, rather, as embodying mental functions, and thus as persons. If expressiveness is a means to explain referentiality, however, we cannot use reference to explain expressiveness. Such a claim can seem reasonable to Rabate because he retains the idea of language as a structured system. Although one can describe our language practices as systematic and as normative, to understand that system as producing meaning is to either confuse structure with cause (as part of a transcendental argument) or to imagine the structure as either organic or machine-like so that its elements can be described as functioning. Giving an account of this functioning without a picture of our cognitive psychology is just to animate the marks and sounds of words and our descriptions of our practices as if they were not our practices, as if language existed somewhere else, but not as a genetic endowment or as an exten-

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sion of our ability to reason or symbolize. The attempt to construe texts as persons fails by denying our relation to these words.

II. Proper Aesthetics The content of art must be justified relative to its form, but this cannot be accomplished by equating content with form. The use of 'content' and 'form' in describing fictions and poems is already misleading. Form is assumed to be a clear or singular concept, but it is not. Similarly, content can range from the meaning of sentences to the fictional world we imagine. Consequently, I believe that form would be better called (1) modes ofpresentation. Content would be more accurately called (2) that which is presented. The vagueness of this last phrase better fits the varied and complex contents we actually derive from poems and fictions. The modes of presentation of a fiction or poem (1) would include diction, word order, various formal considerations, style, modes of sense, distortions of sense, indeterminacies, and ambiguities, whether something is a fiction or a poem, and so on. That which is presented (2) would include persons variously described, actions (muthoi), thoughts, emotions, various quasi-social entities (society, state, community), and so on. Our aesthetic engagement with fictions and poems would require the descriptions of these relative to our attempt (3) to justify (1) and (2) relative to each other. Any interpretation of a fiction would contain some de facto, if implicit version of (3), some kind of aesthetic justification. A decision about what is important to represent in a fiction or a poem rests often on claims about what exists, for example, 'persons are the unit of action in human life,' 'our experience is the ground,' 'our thoughts are,' and so on. Modes ofpresentation (1) and that which is presented (2) are rough categorical guides to how we focus on certain aspects of fictions and poems as opposed to others. They are not logical distinctions picking out kinds of things. The form of a sentence might just be its particular words in a particular order. Its content would be what it means, the thought expressed. If a sentence is nonsensical then it means nothing and expresses no thought. It may, however, fit within a fiction, in which case it would require a justification of its form relative to what we can derive from it (not strictly speaking its content). A mode of presentation has no meaning or justification unless we give it one. A mode of presentation does not express a thought. That which is presented through certain aesthetic modes is also not a thought if it is fitted within the context of

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a fiction and poem. Whatever content we discover is derived, inferred, and construed. The content then of a fiction and poem is not analogous with the content of a sentence. There are no modes of presentation nor something so presented separate from our descriptions of these. The equation of two descriptions lacks the ontological thrill of equating form and content. Thus, the relation between what is shown (2) and how it is shown (1) in a fiction or poem is not like that between a thought and a sentence. The complexities and even vagueness of modes ofpresentation and that which is presented prevents any easy reduction of one to the other. The relevant modes ofpresentation (1) and that which we take as presented (2) have to be described; there is no mode of presentation or fictional or poetic content that we do not describe. In attempting to equate form and content, one has to disguise the role of description here in order to get some ontological pay-off. The equation of form and content is similar to the claim that a character is ontologically and logically dependent on his or her fictional descriptions. Although there is something right about this, in general, as I argued in chapter 2, this is a misleading formulation. In its strong forms it is fallacious. Characters are not things, but kinds of things. They are logically dependent on their descriptions in the same way that most things are. When we read accounts of fictional persons, what we read is a particularized description of a kind of person in a particular kind of situation, and so on. Thus, again, the relationship between modes ofpresentation (1) and that which we take as presented (2) should be understood as between two kinds of descriptions. This makes the reduction of one to the other either impossible or tendentious, even with some supporting theory of language and mind. That which is presented through artistic modes of presentation is also generalized through its dependence on our various and innumerable ways of describing this content. Aristotle was right to say that poetry represents kinds of things not specific things. Poems are one of the few places we try to mimic things as if they were gods. To say that a poem is but doesn't mean or that words act like persons or mean with the grace of creatures is either metaphoric or meaningless. If it is a metaphor it is simply a redescription that relies on the ordinary meanings of words. Such claims are not useful ways of showing what poems are or how they matter, since they drown in idealist metaphysics or in confused theories of language. The intuition articulated through these misguided attempts to equate form and content or to show a poem as a thing and as not meaning is that there is

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some strong intimacy between things and meanings. They are intimate, but they are not reducible one to the other. The logical form of fiction does not tell us how a fiction means; it tells us how it cannot mean. Although poetry lacks such a specific form, it often mimics in its peculiar generality the logical form of fiction. The logical form of fiction, by limiting how it can be about something or what we can infer from it, prompts our interpretation and reasoning about it. From this, new content is derived. But fictions need not be art. The concept of art carries with it some sense of meaning. Meaning is a normative concept that cannot be reduced to thingness, however construed. The art of poetry and fiction is not a particular kind of thing. It is an unstable overlapping of relations and concepts that mimic the complex way in which the world is both a world and a world we see and understand. A teapot does not exist because we see it, but it is a meaningful something called a teapot through our seeing it as a teapot. Sentences mean something not by themselves but because we understand them; time appears because we measure it, but it will not cease if we stop measuring or if all our watches break.

How Do Oracles Mean? o sancti Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obsides. Unde superstitiosa primum saeva evasit vox ferae Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic words. r--J

I

Cicero, De Divinatione, ii.IIS

N THE DELIAN HYMN the infant Apollo shouts "may the harp and the bending bow be my delight, and I shall prophesy to men the unerring will of Zeus" ("Homeric Hymn to Apollo," In 131). Lucian comically thinks that this youthful commitment to prophecy fates Apollo to a harried existence, "almost plagued to death by the continual demand for oracles." Diotima, when questioned by Socrates, seems to have offered a solution to Lucian's satiric worry, when she describes a partially divine intermediary, "the very powerful spirit" Love, "half-way between god and man," who is an envoy and interpreter that plies "between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments ..." (Symposium, 202e). I think the existence of such spirits unlikely. In addition, I do not believe Apollo spoke through the mouth of the Delphic Pythia. Without that belief, or something like it, oracles would seem to become examples of religious delusion and psychological and sociological need: a subject for history. If an oracle is the mediated voice of a god, then to the degree that we understand what is said we can take it as meaning what it says (although understanding this might require interpretation). Without that divine guarantee, we might understand what the oracle says (oracular statements within the historic period were generally not nonsensical, but intelligible), but we would not take it as meaningful except as some kind of fraud or delusion. We would take it as a fiction, which we would explain psychologically, politically, or sociologically. Can oracles,

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however, have a claim on us, a kind of sense and significance that does not rest on either a god or on such dismissive reductions to their psychological causes and social purposes? I want to understand how they could mean despite not being the voice of a god. In other words, what kind of meaning and sense can we give to oracles if we do not take them as from the gods, if we do not simply dismiss them as wishful thinking, psychological derangement, or religious faith? Theories about how poems speak beyond what they say all stand to poetry in the same way as divinity or belief in divinity stands to oracles. All such theories attempt to describe how poetic phrases can express more than they communicate, express something of a person, a culture, the world, reality, life: "The knife there on the shelf-lit reeked of meaning, like a crucifix. It lived" (Elizabeth Bishop, "Crusoe in England"). Such theories try to give sense to how poems can "reek of meaning" like objects can. Objects with a smell of meaning seem alive; "it lived." But this is only seeming and description, projection and memory if the claim is about the knife. But it is not; it is alive because we grasp our lives under the aspects collected by the knife; the knife lives because we live always with other people and things, thoughts and fears, relative to which we describe and understand ourselves. This knife and Bishop's poem are oracles if we know how to take them as that. I will offer an account of the sense and truth of oracular-like statements and judgments. Such oracular statements are exemplary of kinds of sentences that say something but mean nothing (in the special sense of having no speaker who can actually speak the sentence as his or her own), but which still have some kind of claim, sense, or significance for us. So my question might be phrased as the following: If we understand oracular-like statements as fictions, without the guarantee of a god, then what sense or claim can they have on us?

I. Severed Heads Severed heads do not speak, but it is not unreasonable to think they might. Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker demonstrates the reasonableness of such speaking objects. The novel is a wonder. Its wonder lies not only in the decayed form of English in which it is written, but also in the way that within its postapocalyptic culture, people speak and reason through a mixture of fragments of science turned into cryptic puzzles and secret truths, of oracular visions, of a new mythic version of

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the Punch and Judy show. Riddley talks to the head of his companion, Ganser, immediately after Ganser rediscovered gunpowder with an unfortunate effect: I gone to where Gansers head wer on the poal. His eyes wer closd his mouf wer shut. I said, 'Ganser wil you tel?' Lissening him then words come to me: What if its you whats making all this happen? What if every thing you think of happens? I said, 'I never thot of my father getting kilt did i.' Words come: Dint you? Then I wernt sure. I said, 'I wont think no mor.' Words come: That don't make no diffrents. Ifyou don't think then some thing else wil think your thots theywl get thunk any how. I said, 'What can I do then aswl be my oan doing?' Words come: Whats the diffrents whos doing it? (195) This last question, what difference would it make ifwhat I did was my own doing or not?, is answered by the passage itself. Does it matter if this dialogue is nothing more than Riddley thinking to himself, as opposed to how he hears it: a telling from Ganser's head to Riddley, in which he says something and words come to him as if they were not his? Does it matter if Ganser's head is really speaking? Ganser's head asserts a Parmenidian worry: "Lissening him then words come to me: What if its you whats making all this happen? What if every thing you think of happens?" What Riddley thinks seems to happen, as if to think and to be, or to make happen, are the same. Riddley resists this argument, but sees that he might have thought of a lot that has happened to those around him. In despair, he says that he won't think "no mor" then. At this point the head seems to turn the argument around. If what is is a thought, what is will always have been thought. If that is so, then it does not matter who thinks what. The world would just be the totality of all we think. Since Ganser's head is not really speaking, we might think that this interchange is an example of this. Riddley wonders if he is responsible for what has happened, happens, and is happening. The counterthought, told by the head, suggests that responsibility for any action cannot be determined by determining who thought what. Thoughts produce actions, but since all actions would thus be thoughts, if it has happened it has been thought. Such a claim

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displaces responsibility for actions and consequences from agents and causes to a responsibility to respond to actions and thoughts as we would to fate or necessity. Life is responding to necessities that are binding in the way gravity is. Nothing of import in this passage rests on psychological concerns. There is little sense in imagining that if Riddley ever imagined his father dead, then he wished him dead. To understand such a thought as expressing such a wish is to interpret it in that way as part of a theory that says ifyou think it you wish it. But if this is the case it's hard to see that much sense is left to 'wish.' In fact, the argument of the passage, and the fact that such conversations with a head without a body make sense suggests that we can produce intelligible sentences (images, narratives, and so forth) that explicitly lack the propositional attitude that would allow us to claim they expressed a wish or a desire. Freudian-type psychology has as one of its central theoretical structures a de facto theory linking the content of such statements with a quasi-theory of propositional attitudes that stand in for a person. These propositional attitudes are reduced, in his later theory, to two forms of desire: the famous erotic and death drives. These are manifest through dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and so on, and mean as expressions of the unconscious. The unconscious is surrogate for a person: it is a severed head. What relation does Riddley have to sentences such that that same relation would describe how he stands to Ganser's severed head? Ganser's words have sense independent of who says them. This does not mean that the sentences have no force. Ganser's head asserts things. We take these words as coming from Riddley's head. If we understand these sentences as coming from Ganser's head and not from Riddley's own, then these statements are not understood as expressive of Riddley. They are not understood as psychologically meaningful and can be instead rationally evaluated. People and things speak riddles and mysteries. In Riddley's society, people work the world and their lives through these riddles. People are claimed first by the words, and then by their possible sense. The relevance of words, but not always their meaning, must always be discovered. Relevance is a kind of sense; but it is not determined by the meaning of the words within a sentence said in a particular situation. The meaning of Ganser's words is not determined by the words or by Ganser, who is dead anyway. Nor is the meaning reducible, in any way that would matter, to Riddley's psychology. If the sense is to be discov-

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ered, then it is the justification of the appropriate sense, of the appropriate claim these words have on Riddley that is their oracular meaning: justification is meaning. Should we believe, in the way that Riddley does, that we could say and understand something true and meaningful beyond our own understanding? The answer to this question is yes, if we can find a way for sentences and things to talk to us, to grip us, to pick us out despite an obscurity of meaning. The failure of sense can itself hold us by the way it makes the world we understand incomplete and thus makes our understanding incomplete. This is what Wallace Stevens calls "the motive for metaphor." Metaphor strikes us through "the obscure moon lighting an obscure world / ... / Where you yourself were never quite yourself." If I am gripped by the beauty of some line, "A woman drew her long black hair out tight," if I recognize myself or my world in borrowed language, given to me in what someone else says, then I recognize that I am not fully mine, nor the world simply a world-since it is given through these words. When we can see ourselves as things, we can see the world as halfalive: ifwe can imagine that we need to personify ourselves, recover our humanness in the face of the intransigence of silent forms, of dead things, and of the fear these engender, and thus when we can see ourselves as silent or decayed, then severed heads can tell of our life. Words are meaningful because we are, because we mean things by using them. Words are things like we are because at times we no longer understand ourselves. We can project propositional attitudes onto things, not in order to make what we hear an expression of those things (the head) so much as to make what we hear about ourselves. If our words are not only ours, then in hearing things speak, not only do we allow them into our worlds of meaning, but we also lure ourselves into language. How do we project such propositional attitudes? We can treat the content of a sentence as a quasi-thing, to which we can determine our relation by interpretation, reason, and judgment. 1 The ascription of propositional attitudes to a thing personifies it or animates it. Animation counts as at least a proto-rhetorical trope-a way of describing a thing as

1. My two-year-old daughter regularly made quasi-assertoric statements. She would make a statement and then agree or negate what she had seemingly just asserted. Saying something does not mean meaning something.

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meaningful in and of itself without explicitly saying what it means. The meaningfulness of language is often figured in this way, where meaningless language is described as dead.

II. Oracles Is one half-dead or more alive if a god inspires one? The human inspiration that allowed the god to speak was always held to be mysterious in the ancient world. Inspiration was associated with particular places, often next to a spring or some form of water, which if drunk would inspire. There were numerous theories concerning vapors or at least, as Strabo calls it (9.3.5) pneuma enthousiastikon. 2 Such inspirations would produce a trance (mania) in which, for example the Delphic Pythia, as Plutarch describes, "does not smile, speaks in inarticulate sounds, but she is in touch with the god." There is, however, some confusion about how to understand how a prophetes spoke when inspired. In Plutarch's dialogue on the Delphic Oracles ('On the Oracles of Delphi,' Moralia 394d-409d), Theon explains that in earlier times riddles and mysterious statements indicated divine inspiration, but this was followed by a greater suspicion of such obscurity, resulting in clearer oracular statements. Local oracles, especially, were, as Robin Lane Fox describes them, "a marriage bureau and a career service, a medical surgery and a farmer's bulletin" (214): vague or nonsensical answers would be of little use for such purposes. If an oracle just gives good or bad advice, or offers some general or philosophical statement about its shrine, the nature of the soul, or whatever, one could make sense of these just as if some person had said such things. The difference between Apollo's advice, whatever it is, and Themistocles' advice to the Athenians during the Persian War lies in the authority of the god. The god's power meant that he was not offering contingent opinions, but something more akin to facts, if one can take facts as given also through riddles. The significance of the god's meaning as a quasi-fact is not then unlike the fact of bird cries or thunder, which can also be read through one's theory about the relationship between all things. Inspiration, even if not frenzied, can hardly be called a rational state, and in this it is akin to the kinds of nonsense (things and events) that inspiration may allow one to read: wind, weather, animals, viscera, and 2. See Fontenrose; and Green's review of the book; also Parke and Fox, "The Language of the Gods."

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so on. The idea of prophecy rests on bringing together or reaching a limit between our ways of making sense and the things that resist this sense. Plato in the Timaeus claims that "[n]o man, when in his wits, attains prophetic truth and inspiration, but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep or he is demented by some distemper or possession" (71e). Anyone so enthralled is lost to themselves, in the grip of their vision, even if this vision can be communicated quite clearly: "But while he continues demented, he cannot judge of the visions which he sees or the words which he utters" (72a). My description of Riddley suggests that this is not always the case. That we can stand toward statements as if they were said by things allows us to reason about such statements without seeing them as expressive of us or of our psychology. Plato, against convention, also in the Timaeus (72a), insists that the word 'prophetes' should exclusively refer to the interpreters of the utterances of the mantis, she who speaks for the god. The mantis would then be nothing more than a means for the god's speaking. This would make the mantis more like chicken entrails or a flight of birds through which the prophetes could discover a truth. Regardless of how we understand the translation from what the god says to what we are told, the prophetes or mantis does not mean what they say; the god means it. In Greek 'prophetes'means "a person who speaks for someone else." As the representative of the god one is no longer oneself. A prophetes speaks by virtue of having the gift or power of divination, manteia. The mantis who speaks with this power is in ekstasis, a state of '[stepping] out of one's self.' There is good reason to think that manteia is etymologically related to mainomai and mania, respectively, 'to be mad' and 'madness' (Phaedrus, 244c). The effect of such an ecstasy and such a gift is not only to lose oneself, but also to lose specifically any intentional relation to one's words. And thus what a prophetes says is neither what she means nor what could be understood by her interpreters as expressive of her. If we lose control over ourselves we might still take what we say or do as expressive of us. Do we not imagine that slips of the tongue, dreams, unconscious actions and speech say something about our unconscious and hence ourselves? That we might not speak intentionally, but still expressively works in this case only because we assume some putative homunculus, called the unconsciousness, which speaks just like a person, that is, intentionally, but through special symbolic forms of which we are not fully aware. There are many problems with such a theory, but at the very least one would need to understand how this homuncu-

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Ius is us and is an agent. Why should we assume that the unconscious is an entity that can mean like we do? Or that speaks and can stand for us? We interpret such slips and speech as meaningfully about ourselves through theoretical commitments that are no more reasonable than that which would ascribe them to gods. For we who would ask the oracle the nonsense of the oracle is akin to the seeming random sortes thrown, the threads found in the entrails of fowl, the flight patterns of birds, or the sound of the wind. Nonsense can count as a thing because it resists us, marks the edge of our understanding and therefore offers a field on which the patterns of the gods could be seen as not ours. The nonsense the mantis speaks is not what she means. The mind that means that noise, even if it were meant, is elsewhere. The priests interpret the 'words' as the meanings of the absent god. The N eoplatonist Poseidonius (c. 135-50 B.C.) in order to justify the rather doubtful status of such interpretations developed a metaphysics of 'cosmic sympathy' that allowed things to speak. Poseidonius minimally personifies and animates the world in order that the significance or content of oracular signs and speech can be justified relative to the events of the world they are meant to predict (Cicero, De Divinatione, 1.64). If the world can be bound by such sympathy, then oracles simply make explicit the fact of this sympathy by expressing a putative fact available by virtue of that same sympathy. Human beings can read nonsense into sense, can make things speak and can imagine patterns and significance in the indifference of nature. Asking how language means might entail understanding how things could mean, since the sounds of words and letters on a page are things without any intrinsic meaning. I do not mean to imply that something called mental states have intrinsic meaning, just that what we count as physical things certainly do not have intrinsic meaning. Would explaining how a sentence means as distinct from a clap of thunder also be an explanation about how I could take that same clap of thunder as the voice of Jove? One would not think so. But because we do not know how to explain how sentences mean from outside language, this question cannot be answered. But we can approach the relation between things and language that this question points to by turning the question around. We can ask instead how do things not mean. Since oracles actually do not mean as the voice of a god, their sense cannot be an expression of divine thought. Cicero believed that the ancients, in sanctioning the use of oracles, were more influenced by what happened after the oracle spoke than convinced by reason; "veteres

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rerum magis eventis monztl quam ratione docti probaverunt" (De Divinatione, iii.5). Reasons would only serve to rationalize the authority that was given these oracles after the fact, judged by what happened. Similarly, we can only read the intentions of gods from the events that we imagine might have followed from these intentions. How such actions mean, the way they might be taken up as intentional, is a judgment about their consequences. Regardless of the interpretations attached to oracular frenzy, the sense of such utterances lies in what is said not in what is meant, since without the backing of the god nothing is meant but what is asserted in the interpretation. If we believed that the interpretation did give the meaning of the god, there would be no problem here. If, conversely, we believed that belief in oracles is a psychological weakness of the poorly educated and that they are nothing but noise, then there also would be no problem to explore; one would turn to sociology. I am trying to describe the sense oracles have regardless of whether one believes they speak for a god or not. Oracles are not senseless. This sense is not simply the literal or lexical meaning of the words that make up an oracular sentence, and anyway that would not help us understand the sense of chicken entrails or of thunder, as the Etrurians were famed to do (1.72). The interpretations of oracles, however, are, as Cicero claims, baseless and self-serving, and do not follow from the sense of the oracle itself. Oracles say something that we can take as sensible or reasonable, but that does not mean nor express what it purports to. To say something sensible, but without meaning, for the wind to repeat, as Stevens phrases it, "words without meaning," odd as that is, means that oracles speak "at the edge of conversations,"3 and thus show the limits of human meaning. Oracles would then be the means or the site where we personify both the world, as Poseidonius does through 'cosmic sympathy,' and ourselves. What it means for oracular talk to personify oneself rests on how one takes oneself as a thing, in need of such personification. The sense of this will be my concern for most of what follows in this chapter. For now, one can think of this self-personification as a way of seeing ourselves as both half-dead and half-divine (the fate of the Cumean Sibyl who failed to ask for eternal youth). As another way of seeing how our own personification is at issue before an oracle, you might ask, as you would when addressing an oracle, how is my fate not my own?

3. Charles Tomlinson, "The Insistence of Things."

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My implicit argument here is, of course, that poems are oracles. We might generalize the claim, so that any language whose sense seems greater than what is said can only mean in this greater sense in the way that oracles might. This greater sense is meant to gesture toward the way we often imagine that poems mean beyond their sense as putative or possible speech acts. Poems that are not such speech acts (if they are like fictions) and, similarly, oracles without the backing of god do not mean. We should accept, I think, that neither oracles nor poems mean, but we should not then think that they do not say anything. This is an odd way of making the distinction between saying and meaning. One should note that the way I am making the distinction here has an oblique relation to how it is made in the practice of ordinary language philosophy. In such philosophical practice, we can discover through what we say "the complex web of meaning this saying expresses" (Cavell, "Must We Mean What We Say," 11). We can discover what we mean as a set of implications that would follow from what we say. We might find that these implications (assumptions, suppositions, subsumptions) conflict with the implications of other things we say, and that this conflict leads to pictures of time or language or persons that are incoherent. Thus, we can be wrong about what we mean. In the case of poetry and oracles, we might not understand what they mean, but if we are to understand either as meaningful we must take them as speaking to or about us, as having consequences that we must discover. If, however, we conclude (as we should if we deny that gods speak through oracles) that oracles do not mean, at least in the way that our ordinary conversations do, this does not mean that oracles no longer say something. Oracles and poems are, in effect, half-dead, half-senseless. This means for most people that they must interpret them. Such interpretations, however, remain empty unless their scope and validity is somehow determined and justified. This is exactly what cannot be determined separate from some further interpretation (in the case of oracles, this is easy to see). By asking how we relate to what a poem or an oracle says, asking how these particular words highlight how we stand toward this kind of nonsense, we would outline how we stand at this moment within the world and toward ourselves. This 'toward ourselves' is where the philosophical matter lies. The sense of poems and oracles is tied to how the nonsense of what they mean grips us, when they matter to us despite their nonsense. Oracles are like poems to the degree that in reading them we hear what they say, regardless of what they mean, as an expression of our relation to their

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words, in the way Riddley sees himself and the world under the aspect of the words of Ganser's severed head.

III. How Oracles Mean How does the above description of how we might read or understand oracles as saying something that has a claim on us compare to being an oracle or speaking oracularly? Wittgenstein asks, in a remark collected in the first volume of Remarks on the Philosophy ofPsychology, "Why don't I make inferences from my own words to a condition from which words and actions take their rise? "(§814). If asked if I will do such and such, I do not make an inference from what I say to who I am such that I say these words. I would instead "consider grounds for and against" doing such and such. Wittgenstein notes a general symmetry that would suggest that since I "sometimes take someone else's word-so I would surely at least sometimes have to take my own word too, that I have such and such a conviction"(§816). If I respond automatically, without thought, what I say may not express any conviction of mine about what I will do. Or in other cases I might trust such responses as more me than me-so that I might say "'it's raining', and so it will presumably be true." Or: "The observer in me says 'it's raining', and I am inclined to believe him"(§816). This can seem odd ifwe think believing such things would allow us to disbelieve what we might also assert-'it is raining, but I don't believe it.' This is nonsense because the initial statement 'it is raining' also means 'I believe that it is raining.' It is only because we can stand toward what we say sometimes as if it were said in the third person that we might believe or disbelieve such statements. This kind of stance toward ourselves is "something like this-how it is, when a man says that God has spoken to him or through his mouth"(§816). If God spoke through my mouth, I would be standing toward myself as if toward another person, while at the same time accepting as true whatever I would say by virtue of such a stance. If one takes such statements as confessions or as false, then one might be a psychologist. We should not be so precipitous. Wittgenstein has described enthusiasm-being full of god, inspired-as an expression of how we lose ourselves to ourselves. He goes on: The important insight is that there is a language-game in which I produce information automatically, information which can be

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treated by other people quite as they treat non-automatic information-only here there will be no question of any 'lying'-information, which I myself may receive like that of a third person. The 'automatic' statement, report etc. might also be called an 'oracle'.-But of course that means that the oracle must not avail itself of the words "I believe ..." (§81 7) Oracular language is described as that which I say but which I do not say meaningfully. The point is not that the words are necessarily incomprehensible nonsense, but that they are words that I am not using to say anything and to which there attaches no 'I.' Such speech would be inspired and would seem to be like a fiction. I take fictions to be forms of language that cannot and do not count as speech acts, which thus cannot have any 'I' attached if they are to remain fictional. To call something 'oracular speech,' however, is less a description of a form of language than of a possible way we stand toward our words: as if they were not ours, as if it were a further question that we could not quite answer about whether they were expressive or not. To stand toward our words as if they were in need of interpretation, as if our relationship to our words could be determined through interpretation, would mean to take our words as kinds of things. Under this last description the expressiveness of an oracle has been reduced to the status of a natural sign (smoke for fire). That I can speak automatically, oracularly, means that what I say can be taken as a natural sign in this way. One cannot say that such a statement would be symptomatic of me-that it would be about or express me-because that would mean that we were taking such a statement as attached to an implicit 'I.' To speak oracularly is not to speak through such a personal pronoun. It is not only statements like 'I believe' that make no sense here, but also 'I think,' 'I want,' and so on. In both cases there is no possibility of doubt or, as Wittgenstein comments, of lying. My relation to these automatic words is no different from your relation to these words: I can interpret them into sense, but if that sense takes the form expressed in 'I believe x,' then I am using 'believe' in a way that would need justification. If such speaking cannot "avail itself of 'I believe'," then it cannot be expressive of any 'I' that says these words. To make such a statement expressive would mean to refigure that which says it as something at least akin to what we are when we express ourselves through such avowals. That we do speak oracularly, poetically, and take others also to speak oracularly means that speaking and making sense need not carry with them the particular relation with our words that 'I believe' repre-

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sents. We can speak without understanding and understand sentences like we follow the tracks of animals. To take oracular speech as semantically meaningful and, in addition, meaningfully expressive in the way of a natural sign (although without the clarity of knowing what objects or events are described in this way) shows an aspect of our relation to our language independent of both reference and how sentences are about anything. This does not describe what Frege meant by sense, the mode of designation, because there is nothing here designated. Oracular language shows language and us as kinds of things. This means that our relation to things can itself be figured as our relation to this oracular aspect or use of our language. Oracular statements are not expressive, since there is no intelligible 'I' to be expressed through such automatic, oracular-like statements. Oracular language, if not taken as God's words, is neither referential nor expressive in any of the ways that our ordinary language would be. But to describe oracular statements as showing our relation to things figured as our relation to oracular uses of our language simply gestures to some kind of symbolism. And such gesturing is in danger of becoming question begging. What we need is a more elaborate and less psychologically entangled example of how we might speak as oracles. At the same time, this example should not have any specific religious or theological content in order to avoid any plea for the specialness of the language. This example will then allow me to say more clearly how we might need to symbolize or personify ourselves in order to lure ourselves into language without seeming to do so. My example refers to events on the Western Front in the First World War. Lieutenant R. H. Tawney, later to become a distinguished economic historian, published in the Westminster Gazette a description of his experiences on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Tawney recounts how he was wounded. In the course of this account, he describes that muddy distinction between being a wounded soldier (of remaining a person despite being wounded) and becoming a wounded thing of some unspecified kind. On the parados lay a wounded man of another battalion, shot, to judge by the blood on his clothes, through the lungs or stomach. I went to him and he grunted, as if to say, 'I am in horrible pain, you must do something for me; you must do something for me.' I hate touching wounded men-moral cowardice, I suppose. One hurts them so much and there's so little to be done. I tried, without much success, to ease his equipment, and then thought of getting

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him into a trench. But it was crowded with men and there was no place to put him. So I left him. He grunted again angrily and looked at me with hatred as well as pain in his eyes. It was horrible. It was as though he cursed me for being alive and strong when he was in torture. I tried to forget him by taking a spade from one of the men and working fiercely on the parapet. ("Experiences of 1 July 1916") The wounded soldier 'grunted'-but this grunt can be understood by the still fully human, social Tawney as meaning something more than just 'pain': "he grunted, as if to say, 'I am in horrible pain, you must do something for me; you must do something for me.'" Although Tawney can still translate grunts into sentences, he feels an estrangement from wounded men-which he calls moral cowardice-a description that would be justified if he recoiled as if in horror from these men. But his explanation of why he feels this way is that he hates touching wounded men because "One hurts them so much and there's so little to be done." With this explanation he expresses a kind of helplessness that means, as his story about the wounded soldier illustrates, that he cannot answer or respond in a way that could match or satisfy the request manifest in the grunt of the wounded man. It is as if he can understand this foreign language of grunts, but cannot answer in kind, cannot himself speak that language. But this inability or failure can only be understood by the wounded man as a rejection and refusal of him, a mark of the fact that these two-the wounded man and Tawney-exist in more or less separate realms or through different modes of being human. Because Tawney could do nothing for this man, the 'speech' of the wounded man shifts from a grunt-meaning-request to a seeming curse: "It was as though he cursed me for being alive and strong when he was in torture." There is no more conversation or interaction possible in face of this curse and Tawney's helplessness: "I tried to forget him by taking a spade from one of the men and working fiercely on the parapet." Later, with his men pinned down by machine gun fire, Tawney waves to some men on his flank to reinforce his own. "When they didn't move, I knelt up and waved again. I don't know what most men feel like when they're wounded. What I felt was that I had been hit by a tremendous iron hammer and then twisted with a sickening sort ofwrench so that my back banged on the ground, and my feet struggled as though they didn't belong to me. For a second or two my breath wouldn't come. I thought, 'This is death,' and hoped it wouldn't take long." He

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did not die, but the pain stopped him dead. He lay helpless and wounded. "After a few minutes two men in my platoon crawled past at a few yards distance. They saw me and seemed to be laughing, but they didn't stop. Probably they were wounded. I could have cried at their being so cruel. It's being cut off from human beings that's as bad as anything when one's wounded, and when a lad wriggled up to me and asked what was up, I loved him. I said, 'Not dying, I think, but pretty bad,' and he wriggled on. What else could he do?" ("Experiences of 1 July 1916") The pain increased until all that Tawney wished to do was to finish 'the extra plunge' to death. Later he thought he would get his wish when he was covered by dirt from an exploding shell, but he lived on. He finally fell asleep. When he awoke in the evening he discovered someone standing beside him: "I caught him by the ankle in terror lest he should vanish." The man he had caught was a Royal Army Medical Corps corporal, who called over a doctor. After a quick examination, promising to return, they both left to attend to someone else. Tawney panicked-'that was the worst moment I had. I thought they were deceiving me-that they were leaving me for good. I did so want to be spoken kindly to, and I began to whimper, partly to myself, partly aloud." The doctor did return, however; at his return Tawney says that-"I knew he was one of the best of men I had ever met. He can't have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, but his face seemed to shine with love and comprehension. " The doctor listened "like an angel" as Tawney told him a confused and nonsensical account of being wounded by the nose cap of a shell. He had in fact been shot by a rifle bullet through his chest and abdomen. The doctor bandaged and injected him with morphia-"there were no stretchers available, so it was out of the question to get me in that night. But after I had felt that divine compassion flow over me, I didn't care." ("Experiences of 1 July 1916") One can offer an easy and obvious psychological account of Tawney's claim that he knew the doctor "was one of the best of men I had ever met. He can't have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, but his face seemed to shine with love and comprehension." He may very well have been a good man, but it is tempting to dismiss this as hyperbolic projection onto the well-meaning doctor. Because we can take Tawney's word that he understood the doctor in these terms, we might still want to understand what it would mean to understand this as true, and as not simply a psychological projection (or at least no more than any other judgment or claim). To understand Tawney's claim as true is to

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understand these words as oracular, in a way not dissimilar to Riddley Walker's oracular telling with Ganser's severed head. We could understand the doctor and his actions as exemplifying the meaning of 'love' and 'comprehension,' and being 'the best of men' for Tawney. Exemplification, however, leads in the wrong direction. We might use a red paint chip to exemplify what 'red' means. As Nelson Goodman comments, using a red sample to explain the meaning of ,red' means symmetrically: it tells us both what it means to be a sample of red as well as displaying the color red. Thus, the actions of the doctor would become an exemplary case of love and comprehension, of goodness-so that no other psychological account of the doctor's character (his goodness and comprehension as we might measure it in ordinary circumstances) means anything. We see the doctor as what he is to Tawney and what love, goodness, and comprehension are. In this kind of explanation, Tawney has become an extreme behaviorist so that just this act is love, comprehension, and goodness ("the best of men"). This act can carry this weight because it is the means of restitching other people (the social world in which love and caring can mean and have effect) to Tawney's wounded sense of things in a way that the wounded man Tawney had tried to help could not accomplish. This act, even under this redescription, should not be understood as a mutual acknowledgment of Tawney's and the doctor's common humanity. To know that would be to offer some moral psychological theory that takes into account the intentions of the doctor. The meaning of this act, ifwe do not resort to such psychological accounts, cannot consider the doctor separate from his actions. To allow this action of the doctor to just mean 'love' and 'comprehension' requires, however, that we stipulate 'to Tawney' and not 'to the doctor.' We might dismiss Tawney's claim because in offering a psychological explanation of why he made it we might reduce the content of what he says to the reasons why he made the claim. We would argue, in effect, that his claim is an unwarranted psychological projection. This, of course, assumes that our ordinary uses and understandings of language are not such projections. My goal here is not to give an objective or even an intersubjective account to counter the more obvious psychological and subjective accounts of Tawney's claim. There is no fact of the matter here that could be shown through an objective account of how language has content. I accept that Tawney does not know ifhis claim that the doctor is the best of men, full of love, is true. He may not be able to give any sense to this claim beyond explaining it as his projection onto the doctor. But this explanation does not exhaust the sense of his claim, nor

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does it affect the sense of truth that I am claiming it retains. The problem of giving a nonpsychological sense to Tawney's claim resembles our similar difficulties in reading poetry and oracles for two reasons: (1) The truth about what the doctor thought, his ordinary character, his private intentions, and so on, do not dictate the meaning of his actions, nor determine the truth or falsity of Tawney's interpretation of them. In this case, as with poetry and oracles, intentions are not fully relevant. (2) If Tawney's interpretation is understood as a subjective projection, then his relation to the doctor is as indeterminate and ambiguous as the meanings of a poem: subject to different and logically interchangeable interpretations. So, if I can establish a nonsubjective sense and truth-value for Tawney's claim, I can show that we can understand each other and ourselves in the way that Riddley understands Ganser's head. My behaviorist account above of how Tawney's claim can mean has a certain sense, but misses the ordinary sense of the words he uses to describe how he understood the doctor: in Tawney's description of the doctor, 'good,' 'love,' and 'comprehension' just mean what they ordinarily do. Tawney understands the same English as the doctorthe same English, more or less, that I do. If we reduce the meaning of what Tawney says to the fact that it expresses his appreciation of the doctor's acknowledgment of his humanness, we overstate the meaning of Tawney's isolation. In his own failure to help the wounded soldier, Tawney has described himself as one example, but only one, of what the doctor is not. Much of how he describes his own failure relies on his translation and understanding of the grunts and looks of the wounded soldier. Although it is clear how Tawney failed the wounded soldier, it is not clear that he could have done anything else. That does not absolve him, however. The story at least shows how the wounded and unwounded understand each other and how they condemn and misunderstand each other. Behaviorism represents an extreme form of ontological parsimony, denying that entities or states exist unless they can be empirically or behavioristically confirmed. It rules out much of what we take as psychology as well as other abstract structures through which we describe the world (Mach, for example, denied the existence of atoms on empirical grounds). The difficulties with this position are not at issue here. Behaviorism should also be understood, however, as resting on a kind of ontological symbolism: what or who you are is given by what you do. For Tawney to understand the doctor as what he does, is just to describe him in this way: to accept that actions can symbolize the personal

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identity of the doctor, but to do so in such a strong way that this symbolic manifestation is just ontologically what the doctor is. As an account of the meaning of Tawney's claim about the doctor this seems too strong. What is right about my behaviorist account of Tawney is that it acknowledges that if we are not to reduce the meaning of what Tawney says to why he says it (to what caused him to say it), we will need some kind of symbolic account of what his statement means. It is the nature of such a symbolic account that shows what Tawney says to be something akin to oracular statements. Tawney understood, we assume, the meaning of the wounded soldier's grunts, he just had no way to answer them, no adequate grunt to satisfy the other's grunting. He may have been projecting these senses onto the wounded man's grunts, but it is hard to deny that he understood what would satisfy what was being expressed by the grunts. This is enough to suggest that the projection theory misses something. We do not need the doctor's testimony to confirm that he understood something of what his actions meant to Tawney; if he didn't understand that, he would be less skilled in such understanding than Tawney shows that he himself was. And it is not simply that without the love and comprehension of the doctor Tawney would no longer be acknowledged as human. These words 'love,' 'comprehension,' and 'best' (meaning good) bear the weight of our common humanity and of the particularity of Tawney as a person-and hence the doctor's act is a form of love partly because the wounded Tawney understands the contingency of his connection with the unwounded. But again the point is not to describe the straightforward psychological meaning of this, as important as that is in explaining how and why Tawney might take the doctor's actions as expressions of love. How can his descriptions of the doctor be sensible and true in the way that any claim about the world might be? If this is a psychological story, then it is one of unrequited love, of a misinterpretation, expressing Tawney's need to be loved as opposed to his perception that he is. By describing what Tawney says here as a form of symbolism I am describing Tawney's relation to these words, to what he, himself, is claiming; I am trying to show what and who the doctor is relative to Tawney's claim. What he claims about the doctor is true as a way of correlating the actions of the doctor to what these actions mean, not just for Tawney, but for us and for the doctor independently from how he himself understands them. These words are not true because the doctor could take them as true as well: would we imagine that he would say-'yes, I am pure goodness'? His acting with and relative to Tawney's

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needs and grunts are not only intelligible to Tawney but also to the doctor as real acts of communication and comfort in the way that Tawney's response to the wounded soldier was not. The shared meaning here is not the specific psychological or religious meaning of these words, but the mutual and reciprocal understanding manifest in the actions of the doctor in response to whatever Tawney said and expressed. We assume that what Tawney says about the doctor remains a kind of speech act, and in this it is neither like how we understand fiction nor how Riddley understands Ganser's head. These words, in Tawney's use of them, retain their ordinary sense. Their import and significance, given what they mean, is what is at stake, the sense of how to apply them as descriptions of aspects of the world-of how Tawney applies 'love,' 'comprehension,' and 'best' to the doctor. One might save the sense of this application by arguing that these words do not mean what they ordinarily do, that they mean one thing for Tawney and another for the doctor and for us, or that this further sense I am trying to describe is empty, or that Tawney is using words in a different way (a nonordinary way to match his nonordinary situation; but is the situation really not ordinary?), or that Tawney and the doctor (and we) have different criteria governing the application of these words. In order for Tawney's claim to be true, we need not deny any of these distinctions as ways of describing the sense of words, but these distinctions must be shown to be meaningless relative to the meaning of Tawney's claim. If Tawney's claim has meaning, then he can get something wrong in his application of it. His description of the doctor cannot simply express how he feels, since it is about another person in a particular situation. In asking how it might have some further meaning beyond the ordinary meaning of the words, I am asking how it would be relevant to get it wrong. Since he is expressing a kind of certainty about the doctor, the sense of his sentences cannot rest on him getting the doctor wrong. The distinction he is making is between the doctor and other soldiers on the battlefield. If we say he could get the doctor wrong given what the doctor does, we are simply denying what Tawney says. Thus, to frame the sense of this statement in this way, so that Tawney is wrong in his certainty about the doctor, already decides the issue: it would translate his description into subjective projection. We could say that making some such claim about the doctor's goodness might be legitimate, but that Tawney has misdescribed the situation, used the wrong words. While this might be true, such a contention gives away too much. The sense of what he says about the doctor,

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regardless of the rightness of his particular description, is what we need to frame by a description of what it would mean for this statement to be misused and wrong. Tawney has already showed us what the failure of these words would mean: the distinction Tawney is making is between the doctor and the moral cowardice of which he accuses himself in his fear of the wounded, expressed in his failure to respond to the grunts of the wounded soldier he had met earlier on July 1. We do not balk, I think, at Tawney's judgment that his failure to help a wounded soldier is a kind of moral cowardice, but it seems somehow different to take his recognition of the doctor as a moral hero-the best person-seriously except as a psychological projection. If this later judgment of the doctor is empty, then so is the earlier judgment of himself. If this is the sense of Tawney's claim, what does it tell us about how it makes this kind of sense? His claim still may be explained away as mere psychological projection motivated by his extreme need. We will always be tempted to explain it this way. In fact, the sense of Tawney's description of the doctor and the claim this sense has on him, which is what is at issue, is something that has to be discovered by him as much as by us. Tawney has told his story well, but it may be nothing more than a retrospective interpretation of events and of his feelings. That the story is written after the fact does not falsify the meaning of those events and his responses to them. The sense of oracular meaning I am describing is not simply like the meaning of a sentence nor is it something that is given by its psychological causes. In order for Tawney to understand the doctor's action as a form of moral heroism, he has to understand the doctor's acts relative to his own earlier acts and in relation to everything he knows about the relations between the dying, the wounded, and the still alive. The relationship between the doctor and Tawney moves through symbolic possibilities by virtue of Tawney's ability and need to understand the doctor as a stand-in for himself in the place he occupied in relation to the wounded soldier. This standing-in can be turned around so that Tawney understands, if he can understand his own words, that he can stand in for the doctor, or rather that he had tried and failed to stand in such a position relative to a fallen soldier. The meaning of this scene, of the doctor's actions, does not happen in the way a gunshot happens; it emerges through the telling of it, the interpreting of it, the figuring of it at different times, in different degrees, and in different ways. That the doctor and Tawney can stand in and be exchanged for each other symbolically means again that their relationship is only partially determined by their mutual acknowledgement of each other. This

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acknowledgement is presupposed in order for the symbolic meanings to become apparent, but any such failure of acknowledgment, because we operate relative to each other as human beings, even in our refusal of each other, is a refusal to stand in for each other in this way. But, what I am calling 'standing in' can be exaggerated. It does not suggest that the meaning of what Tawney says is a recognition of the doctor's empathy. I am describing a way in which the doctor's actions mean exactly what Tawney says they mean. This is not a psychological explanation, which is what most theories of empathy and sympathy would be. What Tawney says can be meaningful because he symbolizes himself relative to the doctor and his own past actions. At some point, the pain and despair could have reached a point where this would not have been possible. In that case, Tawney would not have seen the doctor as a human being, let alone as an angel, his face shining. My original question was the following: What kind of meaning and sense can we give to oracles if we do not take them as from the gods, if we take them as more than wishful thinking, psychological derangement, or religious faith? This question cannot be answered by a theory about oracles or the language of the gods. Rather one has to look at particular cases and descriptions in which the sense of things speaking is articulated. I have described the way language can lose its sense, its connection to us, so that we can use it to symbolize ourselves-to lure ourselves into language. Riddley Walker and Tawney figure themselves under the aspect of sentences and words that have the same ontological claim on them as things. This much is what they do. But in order for language to have the same status as things, one cannot simply decide to take words that way, to decide that words can sometimes come from gods or stones or detached heads. One might dispute this last claim since Riddley talks to Ganser's head as if the head were a person (not really Ganser's anymore, however). But what kind of person is it? How does this person know about what Riddley thinks? Ganser's head is not any kind of person we could know as human. The relation between words and the person speaking has become disjunct in Riddley's world. That such a disjunction is possible indicates how we can see ourselves through language because it is within language that we are objective: we construe ourselves as objects through symbolic means from a point of view that we do not understand as ours. These objects, however, are objects that talk. This kind of symbolism is simply a way of seeing ourselves when we are in danger of losing ourselves to the nonsense of the world and our

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situation. The doctor really does have the love and perfect comprehension that Tawney finds in him. He has this love and perfect comprehension relative to Tawney's own moral cowardice, which is real cowardice relative to the doctor's moral heroism, which is real heroism. Tawney can understand that heroism perfectly in relation to his previous failure to answer the grunt of the wounded soldier. In order to make this claim about the doctor, Tawney cannot paint him with his own need and desire for succor; he has to understand what that succor means not only for himself, but also for the doctor. By framing the doctor's heroism relative to his own previous cowardice, and thus as descriptive of the difficulty of understanding and acting for the wounded when one is not, he has done that. Regardless of whether that framing happened on the Somme or in the hospital, it is what that event means. If one could read poetry in the way Tawney understands the doctor, it would mean something that might matter. If poetry is to mean, we must hear it speak as a severed head, see it as an angel shining and good.

A Twitterlitter ofNonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake

but a work of theology. By 'a work of theology' I mean that the Wake demands to be read as what Pierre Hadot calls, in describing ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, a spiritual exercise (askesis). In ancient philosophy, these spiritual exercises "have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being" (127). While Socrates remains the exemplar of such spiritual midwifery, as he calls it in the Theaetetus, Philo ofAlexandria gives a more formal description of what these exercises (askesis) entail: research (zetesis), investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), self-attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia) , and "indifference to indifferent things" (84).1 Hadot demonstrates that Christian askesis develops from this philosophical askesis, which, under the increasing authority of the Bible, takes the form of exegesis. Reading oneself in relation to the words of God became the primary way in which the self-attention (prosoche) prescribed by Philo could be expressed through the disciplines of sacra doctrina. Reading, as Augustine claims at the end of his discussion of Genesis in Confessions, becomes a form of prayer: "the exercise of that joyful charity which comes of at last finding God and seeks to find him in his works" (Confessions, XI.xxiii.32). Similarly, St. John Cassian, a RNNEGANS WAKE IS NOT A WORK OF ART,

1. While I follow Hadot's transcription of this list, I retranslate prosoche as self-attention to emphasize its meaning in askesis.

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contemporary of Augustine, in his Collationes, a collection of dialogues attributed to fifteen Egyptian Church Fathers, imagines that reading scripture, like loneliness, fasts, vigils, work, and nakedness, is part of a monastic combat striving for a purity of heart (puritas cordis}.2 The subsequent history of Christian exegesis retains this sense of reading as a form of self-reflection. It is easy to lose the sense of 'self-attention' expressed by prosoche, partly because there is a strong modern tendency to think of such attention as directed toward something called 'the self.' The translation of prosoche as 'self-attention' is meant to capture the sense of attention to how one lives and to the whole of one's life. Prosoche is part of the ethical work one does to answer the fundamental ethical question for the ancient world: how ought I to live? (Republic, 352d).3 A slightly different ethical sense is expressed by Aristotle's use of eudaimonia, commonly translated as 'human flourishing.' That which flourishes and the flourishing itself constitute a good life, and it is this life that would be the subject of prosoche. 4 In this chapter, however, I am restricting 'selfattention' even further. I mean the 'self' in 'self-reflection' or 'selfattention' to describe that toward which reflection or attention is directed, that which is picked out when I use the first person. I leave what is attended to in this case open and vague, partly because it is our difficulty in placing any thing or any non-thing in this position that constitutes the importance of prosoche for me. The centrality of self-attention in Christian theological reading of scripture, let alone in Protestant forms of self-reflection or in Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia, has been lost inJ. M. Rabate's claim that "[p]erhaps more than any writer of this century, Joyce has forced criticism to acknowledge its theological nature" (1). With some tension and hesitation, Rabate follows Derrida in defining this "theological nature" of criticism as consisting of our reading always behind the text, reading belatedly: "Joyce is always ahead of us" such that we read always "in memory of him."5 Rabate argues that this kind of theological reading

2. For a further discussion of St. ] ohn Cassian, see Chadwick, Western Asceticism. For a general discussion of exegesis see Beryl Smalley and Henri de Lubac. 3. See also Gorgias 487e, SOle, S27c. 4. Two classic discussions of ancient ethics that bring out these senses of self can be found in]ulia Annas' The Morality ofHappiness and]ohn Cooper's Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. S. Quoted in Rabate, 1.

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must become "a perverted theology" (185), replicating and undoing this memory through reading (through a kind of submissiveness to and overmastery of the text): "Finnegans Wake proposes an evolutionary book that has to be reshaped by every reader who will learn to master its idiolect, to inhabit its pages, to live with or within its universe" (James Joyce, Authorized Reader, 189). How a book "proposes" itself remains obscure, and betrays a tendency to animate and personify the Wake which, at the very least, would have to be explained in any theological reading of the book. I invoke Rabate (and Derrida) in order to distinguish between any theological reading that reads under the authority of or in order to "reshape" Finnegans Wake and what I mean by reading as a spiritual exercise. I will require a different kind of self-reflection (prosoche) and meditation (melete) than that pursued by either Rabate or Derrida. When one is reading the "nat language" of the Wake, the self-reflexive reading demanded by Christian exegesis takes the form of continually asking how to read it and why. It is through these questions, through investigating how these questions have a claim on us, that Finnegans Wake emerges as something for anyone to read. What I mean by spiritual exercises, therefore, is closer to what Robert Polhemus means when he speaks of the Wake as a comic gospel. Polhemus shows one way that one could find oneself through the Wake, ground one's life on a kind of comic stance toward the world exposed in the Wake. The Wake's night lessons are meant to alter one's fundamental stance toward oneself, others, and the world. What I mean by 'stance' here is akin both to what Aristotle calls ethos, the character that is the source of one's behavior, but also hexis, the state or disposition we take toward others and the world. One might also think of Heidegger's use of Verhaltung, what is normally translated as 'comportment.' I am using 'fundamental stance toward oneself, others, and the world,' however, not as a way of pointing to the particulars of character or comportment, but to the fact that we inhabit such stances. Describing what we are in this way is to point at how what we are (an ontological question) can be expressed meaningfully in our behavior, thoughts, and by using words such as 'ethos,' 'hexis,' 'Verhaltung, ' or 'stance.' Attempts to speak about the relation between what is and what is meaningful (especially attempts to equate being with meaning) I understand as theology. If we understand Finnegans Wake as having something theological to teach, then its night lessons teach us about the logical relation between how sentences are or are not meaningful and what we understand to exist or not to exist.

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The appeal to theology cannot help but sound anachronistic. The melodramatic cast to the phrase 'transformation of one's being' is more likely to be understood psychologically than spiritually. Certainly the spirit in 'spiritual exercises' has been under pressure from modern philosophy and science, such that it is not clear what 'spirit' can mean anymore. In addition, many of the rhetorical activities that constituted askesis for Hellenic philosophers, for many of the Church Fathers, and, in a different way, for Loyola have been formalized and distorted by that broad set of habits and practices developed and expressed through literary criticism, such that it is not clear anymore what reading as part of such 'exercises' can mean. The exemplar for Christian spiritual exercises remains Augustine. Augustine's rereading of himself in his Confessions works through a complicated interleaving of reading, attention, listening, and telling. This complicated stance allows Augustine to express and think through three narrative strands, which are already particular stances toward God and his own humanness: (1) he lives and has lived a life already embedded within the grace of God, as do we all; (2) through his living he falls from and strives toward a conscious commitment to God and His grace and Word; and (3) through his Confessions he reinterprets both of the preceding narrative stances as a way of further placing and understanding himself within a greater stability and grasping of his and our entanglement within human falleness and God's grace and being. These complicated strands all come together in two fundamental premises: (1) that God is "deeply hidden yet most intimately present" (I.iv.4), and thus any move toward God is caused by God's grace (for example, VIII.xi.2 S), that all that is is both near and far from God and (2) that we speak from out of our "dead condition ... a trough of corruption" (IX.i.l), such that the question "what are you [God] to me?" is tied to the question "What am I to you [God] ... ?" (I.v.S). The reading of his life, the world, and the holy text that Augustine pursues in Confessions is fundamentally a form of Christian selfattention. Reading in order "to ascend to a type of truth that lies beyond the reading process," as Brian Stock calls it, requires the organizing presence of God as the transcendent limit against which we see our falleness (191). Augustine writes in his Confessions: But while he is speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind, my own back where I had placed myself (Ps20.13) and you set me before my face (Ps49.2.1)

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so that I could see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered with sores and ulcers. (VIII.vii.16) Augustine's description of his self-reflection describes a theological education that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the linguistic forms within which we configure both this stance and the reality of ourselves in relation to the world and God. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. A fundamental distance remains between what he calls the inner word, the word of God, and human language, a distance that is partly breached by our interpretative practices. This distance, however, also establishes a kind of indeterminacy within human language that marks the incommensurability between the inner word and our ordinary language, but also their mutual relation where "the sound [of a word] is a body, but the significance is, so to speak, the soul of the sound" (De Quantitate Animae, 32.66). This is the distance between humanity and divinity (De Trinitate, 16.10.19). An important continuity exists between the Reformers, especially Luther, and Augustine. Augustine pictured human beings as radically dependent on God, highlighting the falleness and emptiness of human life that Luther would develop into justification by faith, the claim that God justifies human beings through His grace alone (an interpretation of Rom. 1.17). Self-reflection as a spiritual exercise in Philo's sense of askesis, however, cannot help but be transformed by Luther's understanding that we do not discover the Word of God, but the Word discovers us, and through this discovery and God's grace we are justified (redeemed). This transformation marks an important fracture in the history that leads to Finnegans Wake and its peculiar use of language. Once interpretation is simplified into a Christological expression of grace, God's word can be more fully present in human language. Consequently, the tension between God's inner word and human language dissolves such that, according to Luther, the divinity of Christ is disguised beneath the forms of language, as He is within the form of human flesh. 6 From this it follows that theology is, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, "nothing but grammar concerned with the words of the Holy Ghost."7

6. Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesammtausgabe. Tischreden, vol. 15. 7. Isaiah Berlin discusses how this idea resonated with ].G. Hamann's theories of language. See The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins ofModern Irrationalism.

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The diminishment of allegory in Protestant readings of the Bible was compensated for by the ascription of greater Christological significance to all language and, most especially, to holy language. While this ascription encouraged an increased literalism in reading holy writ, it also discouraged the presumption that biblical language means by virtue of allegorical reference. From this theological shift Hamann and Herder developed more or less secular theories of language that suggested that language bears the full possibilities of meaning in its very form. For Hamann this means that words bear an emotional content in themselves and that neither the world nor language has a privileged position relative to the other, that reason and intuition, or perception, are fully and inextricably confused with and through language. In other words, we cannot get underneath either language or the world to view the other, nor can we think except through the grammar of our language. What I have called Finnegans l/f7ake's theological lesson exposes this same kind of entanglement of world, reason, and language. The l/f7ake's theological lesson, unlike Luther's, shows how it is not Christ that we find in our language, but ourselves threatened by nonsense, sleep, and death. How do or can we see ourselves in Finnegans l/f7ake in this way? Or rather, how can either Augustine's kind of self-reflection or Luther's grammatical tracing of divinity in the words of the Holy Spirit be enacted without God? What kind of moral self-reflection can we construct or inhabit when the limits of the world are constructed as a conflicting set of fragments of science, technology, social prejudice, anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? I understand Finnegans l/f7ake as a response to the predicament motivating these questions, the predicament that would motivate writing such a text as a work of art and the predicament that would motivate our reading this text, now, as if it mattered. What has replaced God in the l/f7ake are particular kinds of nonsense, which may be, of course, no replacement at all. This nonsense, or rather the limit between nonsense and sense, like Luther's God, is described by language itself: it is against this limit that we are forced to reflect and see ourselves (if 'seeing' makes any sense in this context). If we enter into the l/f7ake through the indeterminacy that accompanies the words 'spiritual' and 'exercises,' then we are faced with two questions. The first question concerns 'exercises,' concerns how we can and should read: 'What kind of meaningfulness is left if one no longer knows or understands how the words in Finnegans l/f7ake are about something or anything?' This is a question concerning the aboutness or

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intentionality of language. The second question is a modern descendent of the question 'What is the soul?,' and follows from the previous question: Is reading FinnegansWake a human activity?

I. "Theoperil" The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's parted" is "Binomeans to be comprendered" (FW, 563.30; 285.27). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the question 'What is Finnegans Wake about?' James Atherton, in Books at the Wake, suggests that this question is the fundamental question for Wake criticism (15). In response to the demand to say what the book is about, critics often delineate some interpretative domain within which the Wake gains a subject matter, a quasi-object, which is understood to have an ontological claim on us. Thus, it is about language (Ronald Buckalew), about culture (Christine Froula), about our psychology (Margot Norris), or about the Mind (Sheldon Brivic), and so on. Such arguments, while producing interesting interpretations, cannot help but take the form of special pleading or even of an apologetics for a way of interpreting, sanctioned by the radical indeterminacy of the text. Such extravagant interpretive answers to the question 'What is the Wake about?' are encouraged because it is not clear how the language of the Wake could be about anything. Ordinary sentences have a specifiable content. While it is misleading to say that a sentence is about its content, it is from such content that we might then conclude that a sentence is about some topic or thing. What a sentence is about is expressed through redescription, and such descriptions are logically dependent on the content of the sentences redescribed. Wakean sentences lack ordinary content. They must be translated and interpreted, in most cases, in order to get any content at all. Its sentences do not represent anything, our translations do. What does it mean for language to be about something or anything? How language is about anything is linked to how thought is about anything. What we need in order to read the Wake, however, is a minimal description of aboutness as both an aspect of what language means and of our mental states in order that we can see the loss of intentionality within it. We do not need a theory of intentionality. Because FW is often understood in some ways to represent our mental

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states at night, however, we might wonder how Wakean sentences could correlate with or express these states. It is already strange to talk about our dreams as being about anything, since they too lack the coherence of ordinary experience. A dream is not a thought, and thus does not have propositional content. But then in what sense can it be about anything? At this point, one appeals to ideas of expression to give dreams content, but their content is not expressive in the way a scream might be. We have no way of knowing if what is expressed is random or meaningless, let alone an expression of me. Any sense of me is parasitic on my conscious sense of myself, and thus cannot be simply displaced into my unconscious states. Our mental acts require specific content: we think about something, wonder about something. A thought about nothing in particular is not a thought at all. This mental content is understood relative to the world under certain descriptions. I do not think of some object, such as a book, as if the object were really in my head. Instead, I understand the book as red and white, of a certain shape, as on the shelf next to other books variously understood. I may not know that it is a copy ofAquinas' Summa Theologica, but it is something I call 'a book.' We say, 'I believe that x' or 'I think that y,' where the propositional content is described by a that-clause and the propositional attitude by an intentional verb. Wittgenstein provides a minimal description of the linguistic resources by which we express and state propositional attitudes. He offers this description as a means of dismissing the need for either intentional objects or any special connection between (1) thought and the world or (2) sentences and states of affairs. Wittgenstein's response to the problem of intentionality is to dissolve Franz Brentano's psychological and phenomenological account of intentional objects into a deflationary account of how the sense of this aboutness is parasitic on language. Intentional statements ('I wish that x'; 'I expect y'; 'I have a suspicion about z') are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, and so forth (see PI §§ 136, 429, 458). Intentional statements do not need intentional states or objects to make them meaningful; Wittgenstein's account has the effect of denying the need for a special kind of object to which our propositional attitudes would refer. He shows that our mental states are not primitive events of some kind within our mind that need to connect somehow with the world or with intentional objects in order to have content. What we understand when we understand intentional statements is part of a complex set of linguistic and social practices. Thus, what Wittgenstein

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offers here is a way of at least showing what kind of sense we would need in order to state or show the complex pattern characterized as intentional (not simply what I intend, but the aboutness of what we say and think). Since our intentional vocabulary is meant to individuate something about our mental states, it seems unobjectionable to assume the identity (or close correlation) between meaningful sentences and intentional states. Wittgenstein's focus on intentional agreement within language is meant to resist this identity. He shows that what we mean by believing, for example, that Joe will come today is given by linguistic criteria and not by mental state criteria. What we understand as our intentional mental states cannot be separated from all the other ways we understand ourselves. If our intentional predicates describe a way we use language (a characteristic of how we talk about ourselves), then they offer a means of representing our minds as something that means. To claim this is not to claim that intentionality is given by language as if it were independent of our mental states. Rather, it is to claim that we need certain linguistic resources to talk about ourselves as having such intentional states. The way Finnegans Wake loses sense shows that whatever we are is mixed with and given through what we can say and understand. I think that we can conclude that what an utterance is about (its intentional targets) is formulated through language, such that language is about something not by virtue of an agreement between language and a thing in the world, but by virtue of an agreement within language between two related statements. We cannot talk about aboutness if we jettison our means of articulating this aboutness. The intentional targets exist within language, which is why, by confusing language into nonsense, we can lose the way the world becomes visible to us as something to talk about. Once a language cannot be used to articulate agreement between, for example, an expectation and its fulfillment, it cannot be about anything anymore. In FW the resources of English have been distorted and diminished in such a way that it lacks the resources to express the kind of intentionality that allows us to say that 'I believe x' or the kind of aboutness that allows language to be used to make assertions about the world even for the characters of the Wake. Wakean language does not have any recognizable criteria of application. FW is a text in which the vocabulary through which we would express our intentional states or articulate what we mean by intention is no longer sensible, usable, or meaningful. This is true both within the

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fiction for the putative characters and for us in our descriptions and understandings of what happens in the fiction and of the language of the Wake itself. Are the sentences within the fiction of the Wake about anything? Within the fiction, we do not understand how characters in the Wake can be persons in any ordinary sense, so barring an elaborate theory about this, we cannot ascribe mental states or intentional stances to these characters. This is doubly true since the distortions of sense are pervasively semantic, making it feel as if the Wake shows us some alternate world, so that we have no way of understanding any Wakean sentence as expressive of anything like our thoughts. If the content of Wakean sentences and the Wakean fiction is not provided by our retelling of elements of that language such that it is given a sense, then what it is about must rely on the way that the sentences can be and are about something. Given the semantic experiments and distortions, any claim about what the Wake as a fiction is about requires that we establish that the sentences can and do have content as they stand. Although some sentences might, since some still do consist of English words in some legitimate syntactical pattern, this may not be enough for us to give any but the most tentative description of their content. The putative content of most Wakean sentences requires elaborate translation. A nonsensical sentence is not about anything. If we cannot determine its content or if we cannot take any sentence as expressing a legitimate thought, and if we do not understand the state of affairs about which any sentence would be making a claim separate from the sense of these sentences (we do not have our sense of the world to appeal to), then such a nonsensical sentence can provide few reasons to justify claiming that it is about anything or that it can express propositional attitudes. This suggests that all interpretations of Finnegans Wake are not about the Wake at all: There is nothing for them to be about which the Wake could itselfbe about. They are simply about themselves as interpretations. ~ ALTHOUGH Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, I have been arguing that it cannot be read as being about anything. The nonsense of the Wake separates reading from interpretation. If we refuse to equate our interpretations with reading, with claims about what the book means, then we have to learn to ask questions different from 'what does this sentence, passage, book mean?' If Finnegans Wake enacts the world of an absent sleeper, as John

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Bishop argues, then our failure to read backward into his or her life or consciousness, into a mind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our mind, our life, as the intentional target of the text. But this would mean that we do not understand ourselves. How could Finnegans Wake be our nightlife, our dreams, our absence? If we resist asking this, then why read the text? Before you answer that you will not, consider that in tempting us to stop reading so continually, Joyce forces to the surface of every sentence Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it must justify itself in every line. 8 What any sentence means collapses into how we justify the particularity of the sentence, that is, how we justify the nonsense of any particular sentence. Such justification means that we reflect upon ourselves (prosoche), our reading, our making sense and not making sense of the Wake, through the very nonsense of the text. How can one do this? The divine threat in Finnegans Wake, the 'theoperil,' emerges as the threat that its nonsense really does describe us. So, now my question begins to get shrill: 'Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?' The answer to this question need not be a description of what constitutes a human being, but might, instead, consist of a continual self-reflective account (prosoche) of how I mean as a human being when faced with the kind of nonsense that maps my place within any language. I do not think that "how I mean as a human being ..." has, itself, any clear meaning in our ordinary language, nor do I think that any philosophical account of meaning could provide it with a sense adequate to what would motivate appealing to it. We can only wonder how we mean as human beings when meaning itself is at stake in the kind of reading that I have been arguing the Wake demands and requires. In forcing the question 'Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?' the Wake makes our humanness an issue tied to nonsense. If we take ourselves as the intentional targets of FW, then to read the Wake would be to read our loss of understanding as ourselves losing sense. It is not that Wakean language is no longer ordinary, but that it is not fully language. Instead we treat it as if it were language from inside our own linguistic uses and understandings. The effect of this is that we read FW by inventing theories of language, sometimes as part of a theory of mind. But to follow the nonsense is to trace the loss of sense, and thus reading nonsense is reading the sense in order to trace or see the

8. Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, 11.

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negative space it delimits, and this negative space can be all we know about ourselves, our expectations, assumptions, understandings, and ideas. An interpretation of the Wake is not about the Wake, but about itself as an interpretation, which is to say about ourselves interpreting it. But what does the Wake say about ourselves, which would mean in the context of my discussion of intentionality, what kind of thing are we that can be talked about through nonsense? 'Ourselves,' in this case, means 'we human beings.' Maybe we should call this a test whereby only someone who asks if reading the Wake is a human activity is a human being. I remain agnostic about the answer to this. A question remains, however: 'What are we that we can be that which the Wake could be about?' or 'What are we that we can be targeted by the need for the kind of justification the Wake demands?'

II. Who Is What, "Dimm It All"? We subsist as bodies and as something else, and we change physically and relative to whatever else we are. Both this subsistence and change can occur at different rates and in different ways. If I exist as something else besides my body, and if what this something else is is given by my modes of perception and understanding, then the distortions, diminishments, and loss of these threatens my sense of myself. What are we, then, when we are not? or "what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?" (FW, 43.27-28). When we are discarnate souls at night we exist, but not fully as what or who we were when awake. As such discarnate souls, we might then travel through that dark underworld, "the Unterwealth, seam by seam, sheol om sheoI" (FW, 78.10), in pursuit of being something fully again: to be the one thing we are when we are something, to be existent as that. Within the fiction of FW there are at least two putative persons missing in exactly this way: (1) the male character HCE-the image of the sleeper-is missing, and, if the Wake is at least some kind of representation of being asleep at night, then (2) this sleeper is also the continual missing frame of what the Wake is and shows. The missing HCE easily acts as the correlate for the missing dreamer. The putative substance or person replacing the missing HCE, and thus that which describes the limit to this missing substance, is the ur-female character ALP. ALP describes what HCE is not-flux to his substance, plurality to his numerical identity, becoming to his being-and thus in replacing him,

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she enacts the limit to him. This replacement, however, is a way of turning him inside out and setting up various negative correlations between being something (HCE) and becoming something (ALP). He is described as her and she as him when he is lost: "that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy." The sheer greatness that might be his tragedy is punned into her greatness (the great she-figure), which is also her ubiquitousness, so that not only is his greatness hers (or her), but it is also that which effects his fall (his twadgedy). What kind of something they each are is hard to say. What the Wake offers beyond its N eoplatonic vocabulary of being and becoming is a problem about how to read something that is not clearly anything. One direct consequence of this is that the complex set of correlations between sense and nonsense, change and being, sleep and deadness, sleeping and being awake come to describe whatever this something is. Reading FW requires that we negotiate from outside the fiction between the complexity of whatever we take as within the fiction and what the Wake is as a fiction. This breaking of the fictional status of the text arises centrally from our inability to understand what kind of language Wakean words are. We do not understand how the Wake is meaningful. Nor do we understand what kind of persons, places, events, actions, thoughts, and so on are shown and represented by this language. What kind of creatures, within the fiction, are HCE or ALP? They are not simply aliens living on another kind of planet or in another universe with different laws of physics. They are whatever they are in whatever we think we can call their world. But this last is a puzzle because we have to decide what will count as a world at all relative to whatever sense of a world we still feel tempted to ascribe to the fiction of the Wake. We have to try to understand our possible relations to the Wake and in effect describe our various relations to the aspects of the world and ourselves that are deformed and lost in what we read. Because FW breaks its own fictional frame, we could read it in two ways. (1) We could read it as, in effect, nonfiction, a kind of philosophical description of aspects of our condition as human beings (akin to cosmographic myths if those were about our minds), or (2) we could read it such that in our attempt to make sense of Wakean persons in relation to our ordinary sense of a person the Wakean fiction would invade our world, since in trying to read the Wake we have to ask what counts as a person tout court. When one reads the Wake there is little immediate sense of being in a fictional world like when we read Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

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Both the nonfictional l/f7ake and the fictional l/f7ake prevent this absorption; instead, that which we read and evaluate is our relation to the l/f7ake, not anything that the l/f7ake says or means. Even if the l/f7ake is a nonfictional description, it is nonfictional only in the way that the Timaeus is, not on its surface but relative to what we can construe it as describing. If it is fictional, it is fictional in the way that the Bible might be-as a set of stories, beliefs, characters, and ideas that we hold in the light of what we believe (for those who believe), which allows these stories and lives to be somehow or in some sense true. Thus, ifwe are to read the characters in the l/f7ake as anything, either we must believe them to be like us (something that is very difficult to do since they are not the kinds of things we are) or we must fictionalize ourselves, something we may always do in our speaking and understanding of sentences. Given the distortion of sense in Wakean fictions, how do we believe that these words mean something or anything? To answer that we need to understand how we enter into sentences. If we fictionalize ourselves, it need not be by posing some theory about the ordinariness of fictions (let alone the self-refuting claim that everything is fictional). We might simply ask, "In what sense is any person like what a sentence is?" The answer to this question, however, lies primarily in the very form of the analogy being queried: What kind of thing is a person such that it could be analogized with the kind of thing a sentence is? What kind of thing is a person? In asking this question, I am not asking for a definition of a person. Rather, I am asking, "As what does a person exist?" What sense can we give to 'exist' in this question? Such a sense will require further analogies-and we might speculate that 'soul' in certain cases means 'what a person exists as.' Far from displacing the problem from 'person' to 'soul,' this gives us a place to begin. Asleep, the physical world and our bodies are absent to us as what they are (we are not conscious of them, obviously), although we might translate aspects of the physical world into our dreams. But translate what into what? The sound of our blood in our ears into a river of time, of life, into Anna Livia Plurabella? Why would we translate that into such a character? Because I, the I I am no longer, fears the losses precipitated by sleep, as if sleep were death? And I appeal to this notion of fear as somehow still available in spite of my loss of sense and person when asleep? I fear nightmares and take myself as afraid in my memory of these-in my reaction to them. But it is always an important fact to remember about FW that while it is somehow an attempt to correlate our sleep life with sentences and words, it is not a representation of how

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it feels to be asleep or to dream (dreams are far more coherent and vivid than anything described or shown in the Wake). The content of the Wake, its sentences and words, its stories and characters, its patterns and allusions, at best point to the physical world or describe it by allegory. FW by negating the vocabulary, references, and descriptions of the physical world and by negating the language we use to talk about our ordinary conscious sense of things, produces a kind of language that seems to fill up the empty space of our being no-body: it is a language of the soul, if that is understood as whatever is left when the bodily, physical world is negated (as it is at night).

III. What Are We When We Are Nat? We can begin to describe how we, ourselves, might be fictional by asking again a question I asked earlier: 'What are we when we are not?' A N eoplatonist would answer 'we are what we were, but not what we seem.' Such metaphysical answers are fine if you can find the world of which they are true. As a riddle "What are we when we are not?" relies on a complex dual sense of 'we' and 'are'-whereby we are who we are, and when we lose that sense of ourselves, we are in some sense not anything anymore and in another sense we are still something, just not what we were. I can describe retrospectively my loss of myself at night as having three aspects: (1) 'I am not me, rather I'm someone else, but who?' This describes Alice's panic in Wonderland that she may have become one of her two friends Ada or Mabel. (2) 'I am not anyone, but still something. I must be something else (some other kind of thing), but what? Lion, tree, stone?' My ability to identify myself, not just as some particular person, but as anyone (not who I am but that I am) can also occur at night, and is a loss of self-consciousness that threatens my status as a human person. These two options are framed by a more extreme third-(3) 'I cease to exist at night-if my body remains, do I?-am I nothing? Am I replaced by some spirit? Have I decayed into formlessness?' These last two options are judgments I cannot make about myself in good faith, but they are fears I might have about what I am and will become. They are in fact the kinds of fears and concerns we have about ourselves when we imagine ourselves dead. Within the Wake, we can find numerous versions of the riddle "What are we when we are not?" and its possible answers. The Prankqueen's riddle, for example,-"why do I am alook alike a poss of porter-pease?" (FW, 21.18-19)-has two primary meanings: (a) Why do I look like

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others? and (b) Can I have more porter, please? Both concern our sense of our personal identity (the latter an expression of a desire to lose desire) that fit it with the first option above: 'I am not me, but someone else, but who?' The general negation and absence of HCE, if he is understood as an exemplar, raises the fear (3) that we might be nothing. The possibility of being something, but not myself (2) is threatened in versions of what is called "the first riddle of the universe," the first version ofwhich is asked of Shem and the last version ofwhich could be a motto for the Wake as a whole:

1. The first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man? ...-all give up?; when he is a ... Sham (170.3-24). 2. The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607.10-12) These riddles, like the one posed by the Sphinx to Oedipus, demand that we describe ourselves in a certain way. 'When is a man not a man?' 'When he is not' is an answer (I take this as a question about a human person, so that 'when she is not' would be an answer too. I will retain Joyce's form of the question, however). The riddle seems to require that we decide how to understand 'man'-as a biological designation, as a male or human, as a person, and thus a partial moral and legal designation, or as a full moral designation of a good, noble, worthy person, creature, human being. The riddle would then seem to be asking us to describe in what situation, condition, or state a man is not a man. Shaun, however, rejects these kinds of answers offered by the children to which it is addressed, and instead answers 'when he is ... a Sham.' When he is a Sham or Shem?-Shaun offers this pun at his brother Shem's expense. This answer also shows that he understands the riddle to be asking "What does it mean for someone to not be what he or she is?" A man can seem a man but not be, or a man can not even seem a man when he is a sham. The last form of the riddle, the "rittlerattle of the anniverse," tells us more about the meaning of the words 'sham,' 'man,' and 'is': "The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch!" (607.10-12). A "nam" is an inverted man and a name; a "nought," a negated ought (and thus a normative claim) and a knot and not. "[A]nniverse ... a nam nought a nam" casts this inverted man as 'anam,' a mother (ana is Turkish for 'mother'), the anniverse. "[W]henas it is a." teases the secret into an absent noun that is answered by 'Watch!' The immediate sense of this command is as an intransitive

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verb, however, a command to see. The sense would seem to be that ifwe watch we would understand the answer to the riddle, but there is nothing much to see beyond the riddle (what follows the riddle in the text is no help). We can further the sense by trying to synthesize this command 'to pay attention and watch' with the meaning of a watch as a timepiece, so that the attention demanded might be like that modeled by the hands of a watch measuring and showing time. We might rewrite the riddle in the following rather obscure and comical way: 'When is a man [or rather a negated and inverted man] or a name not a man or a name [or a nothing], whenas it (nested in the world of objects) is a-(blank); but not a thing at all but that which is shown by us reading Finnegans Wake, or maybe the words we are reading can be this negated man, or when whoever he is is nothing but a watch, timing the world, which is to clock human language against both the world and our fantasies?' "Whenas," not whereas, this "nam," an inverted man, a name, an "I am not" in archaic English, "a sin" in Cornish, "time" ('an am') and "life" or "soul" ('anam') in Irish, is a watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of the "anniverse." The soul and time are not only a watch, both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but also the negation and fragmentation of our being human into ourselves as shams (originally a fraudulent trick, and later an imposter, cognate with shame, both related to the Gothic 'ga-hamon,, to dress, to cover oneself). The nam in the whenas describes a whim, ('whim': from Old Norse "to let one's eyes wander," in this case, from oneself). These etymological echoes resonate 'sham' and 'whim' into cognates, or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" between two points: (1) One becomes a whim as part of a whole, as if from the perspective of God, as one becomes one's own writing, read as if without depth, or (2) one becomes a sham in the interactions with others and with oneself, one's other shams (493.16-18). This interpretation is not a conclusion about what we are, but a means of discovering if we can find ourselves described by these words, an oracle, which we try on, this sham, this whim. 'I assume that at night my body still exists, but do I?' 'My dreams are part of me'-but if these dreams were somehow summed, even over my life, they would not equal me. Even an image of myself in my dream is not me, since it would at best be a representation. When we take our dreams and dream-figures as somehow expressive of us, and if we do not take them as sent by a god, then we understand them as immanent with us. But since these dreams and especially these dream-figures are at best

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representations, their relation to me is logically indeterminate in such a way that again none of them nor all of them are me-I stand at an infinite distance from them. In my dreams I am always absent since they are my dreams. My dreams and even my nondreaming states have no external limit for me, no intersubjective life beyond what I offer by retelling what I think I experienced. To measure my sleep states says nothing about the content of those states to the degree that those states are what I experience or are in some sense me. Within those states I can identify nothing that is me, without contradicting myself, since I would also be the 'me' making the identification. I am not a unity by virtue of unifying all my various elements, whatever those would be, but by standing toward the content of my dreams and toward myself such that I cannot say what I am relative to those. I am the unity that is not sayable but nevertheless is. Such asymmetries show as blank limits against and as which we figure and picture ourselves as human. FW shows both death and sleep to be such limits, and in so doing deforms language into a similar kind of limit in which we see ourselves by asking what we are when we are not.

Iv. What Is a Sentence? Can I take myself as existing like a sentence? Or if I partially exist as my thoughts, if I can see part of myself when I lose sense, then how do I exist in sentences? These questions are akin to asking how God might be found in the grammar of holy writ. Investigating sentences can be a way of investigating ourselves. What, then, is a sentence? This sentence both is something and means something, although what 'is' means in this case is unclear and what 'means' means is variable. The previous sentence is a sentence; it is also a string ofwords and of letters, marks on a page, something to read or vocalize, meaningful, self-referential, part of English, something I wrote, and so on. Some of what this sentence is is tied to how one understands it relative to particular aspects and descriptions of it-highlighting that it is English, that I wrote it and so on. That a sentence might just mean the thought it expresses, as Frege argued, would suggest that what the sentence is is just the thought it expresses. A sentence would be what it means. For Frege this means that nonsensical sentences are not sentences at all, since they do not express any coherent thought. 9 Even if one rejects Frege's theory of 9. See Diamond, "Frege and Nonsense" and "What Nonsense Might Be."

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meaning, that there is some relation between the thought a sentence expresses and the logical form of the sentence suggests that the attempt to separate what a sentence is from what it means, under some description, is a species of wishful thinking. Sentences do not exist separate from how they are manifest as sentences, that is, to individuate a sentence is in many ways to say what it means. A sentence, however, is not individuated simply by being a certain set of marks. We might think that some nonsensical string of words is a sentence-syntactically-and yet still not count it as a meaningful sentence; but then it is hardly a sentence. If we attempt to individuate a sentence qua sentence as that which is meaningful in some way, we have simply displaced the problem of what a sentence is to the question "What does it mean 'to be meaningful'?" The meaning is not some thing that is in the sentence, nor is it the sentence itself-these marks formed as letters and words and organized as and through English syntax. Nor should we confuse meaning with what some sentence might refer to. 10 A poem or fiction is constituted by whatever sentences are and whatever meanings are, and as a consequence it is unclear what sense we can give to what a poem or a fiction is. For ordinary sentences in ordinary conversations, we might at least appeal to what Joe and Mary meant when they said x and y . At least in one of the more common senses of 'mean,' sentences do not mean, but we, human persons, mean things with and through them. 11 We use words in sentences, and we use sentences to accomplish numerous effects, and such effects constitute much of what we understand when we understand words and sentences. That the sounds and marks of sentences and words do not mean in and of themselves, whatever that would mean, casts theories of meaning as theories of mind, even when this leads to the refusal to acknowledge such a thing as a mind. The relation between sentences as marks on the page or sounds in the air and what we say, read, hear, and understand these marks and sounds to mean is often described through metaphors that allow sentences both to be extensions of our understanding and to be somehow not ours, but like us-that is, we human beings-we animate humans. A meaningful sentence is described as if it were alive. I can casually displace my own intentions into sentences so that the words seem to act and not me ('the sentence says ...')-a displacement that is less acceptable, although not impossible, when referring to 10. Quine, "The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics." 11. Stampe, 295.

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the hammer I might be using as I put up my rafters ('the hammer hammers ...'). The fact that we can so easily ascribe intentionality to what we say, or rather to the content of what we say, also shows how words can seem to mean independently of our speaking them. That we can so easily make our words our surrogates does not undo the incoherence of theories or even descriptions of poems as speaking their sense, but allows one to further describe the complexity of our involvement with nonsense-sometimes called poetry. What a sentence is would seem to be a complex activity or set of relations actualized through speaking and understanding. A sentence on the page would be a formal structure that if understood manifests a meaning. That words and sentences have to be understood, and need not be, allows us to divide the manifest form of the sentence from its meaning. We can use a sentence (a set of organized sounds) to say something, and we can mention those same sounds in such a way as to identify them as particular kinds of sounds-what we call words. The difficulty of understanding Wakean sentences is seldom separate from the difficulty of understanding who is who and what any of these putative characters are relative to the sense of persons we ordinarily understand. Similarly, how to understand any fictional sentence as about anything, about any fact of the matter, any aspect of the world, things, persons, psychology, hopes, desires, and so on requires that we decide how the fiction and its mode of language relates to the ordinary world we understand. This requires some kind of theory, and any such theory will be question begging. It is not simply a case of recognizing that certain laws of physics or kinds of creatures are different in this fiction than in our sense of the world. Such conceptual differences can describe the difference between our scientific picture of things and a mystical picture of things. In order to understand the Wakean fictional domain and the relation of its sentences to anything, we have to understand how it is or could be construed as a world at all. However we understand what happens when we are unconscious, our situation is at least similar to aspects of how we find ourselves in and through language. Our relation to the world when asleep is attenuated and disconnected in such a way as to prevent confirmation or disconfirmation of our statements relative to the world. The external constraints of the physical world remain in place (gravity holds us to the bed, and so on), but physical events, both external to our body and internal to it, are expressed in various ways in our dream world. Sounds, for example, are converted into speech or interpreted within our

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dreams. Consequently, what we imagine and understand ourselves and others to be within our heads lacks substance (again, we don't know what sense to give to 'we,' 'understand,' 'others,' or 'to be,' let alone to 'within our head,' in this unconscious state). This can allow our conceptualizations of this dream state to mimic how we understand our loss of our bodies in death. To find ourselves in dreams is logically similar to finding ourselves in language (partially given to ourselves as our words, descriptions, names, expressions, and so on). This is not simply because we describe ourselves with words, but because we find ourselves claimed in various ways by words and by the way we claim words as expressive of our thoughts and thinking, beliefs, cares, and so on. Asleep, and given whatever dreams I have, I can take everything and anything as somehow expressive of me-or as irrelevant and meaningless-or as trivially caused by noises, the sound of my blood, indigestion, the feel of wind through the window-all of these options may be true in varying degrees. Dreams can be of me, for me, representative of me, or anyone-or not. We are lost to ourselves at night. The nonsense of the Wake is an analogy for the way we can be something else besides our bodies. The Wake is a ghost of the sense we lose in reading it, and hence of ourselves awake. In this it pictures ourselves as what we are when we are asleep and it pictures our fantasies of ourselves when we are dead. Much of the Wake is taken up with the description of this loss of ourselves, the consequences of this loss, and the pursuit of what is left analogized as particular characters, most importantly HCE. The trace of the soul is the soul. We dream ghosts, even when we dream of ourselves and the person sleeping beside us, or when we dream of the person we were or the person who has disappeared.

V. Wakean Nonsense So Far The only critical question that matters about FW is why is it written in the way it is. The only sense of the Wake that can matter is the justifications we can give for how it loses sense. Justifications, however, hang in the air as much as interpretations. There is no adequate answer to the question of what would be an adequate justification. FW, therefore, prompts claims that it means nothing or that it means anything and everything.

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To understand any putative conversations between putative characters within the Wake as about anything (in other words, as conversations at all) requires a radical simplification of the form of these sentences and is thus a translation of those sentences into our ordinary terms. Such a translation loses the complexity of form that makes reading the Wake so difficult, and in this simplification loses the dream-like displacements, transubstantiations, and equivocality that constitute Joyce's aesthetic experiment. Who and what says anything to whom or what and for whatever reason can only be understood relative to these displacements, transubstantiations, and equivocality. We do not understand how to understand Wakean names and descriptions of characters as persons, both relative to our world and within the fiction itself. It is enough to say, here, that characters reamalgamerge and metamorphose in such a way as to allow only thematic kinds of descriptions of putative characters. We can take a name as marking a person or some set of sentences as spoken by a character (in what context is always obscure), but in so doing we are not only interpreting the linguistic and narrative cues in this way, but also translating these sentences and that which they show and express into the terms of our ordinary lives. In which case, the sense of person is borrowed and ascribed to, not discovered in the Wake. Similarly, any sense of aboutness as either the sense of what is 'said' or of what the Wake as a whole means is provided by the language into which the Wakean sentences are translated. Even if it were construed as some kind of speech act, we do not understand, separate from some metaphysical theory, what the Wake could be about. FinnegansWake does not mean anything. The Wake expands the quotational form of fiction (the blocked inferences from fiction to world and to author and its failure to be intelligible as any kind of speech act) into a continual demand that we try to answer what kind of thing it is. In ordinary fictions, the specific relation between a fictional statement and the author or the world is indeterminate, although we imagine, more or less in keeping with Aristotle, that what we are offered in fiction is similar in kind to what happens in the world. The form and nonsense of the Wake blocks even this inference. When reading FW, we have to ask what any particular word is, what any particular sentence is, what any particular character is, and what any particular event or action is. We have no way of answering these questions if we do not ask what these are in our world. And thus it is the very notion of kinds and concepts, in general, and in relation to the basic conceptual furniture of our understanding of anything, that is at stake in our reading. This, in

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effect, universalizes, to an even greater degree than in Aristotle's account of poetry, the domain of knowledge (if we can call it that) at issue in the Wakean fiction. Nonsense cannot be about anything. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that we should read against our own interpretations of the Wake, in order to reexpose the limits between sense and nonsense that our interpretations hide. We should read FWas a way of negating ourselves as whatever we take ourselves to be, individually and as human beings. The loss of intentionality, the aboutness of our language, in Finnegans Wake precipitates a version of the same crisis that the theologian Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, as our standing "before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, of time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii.21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis threatens less the world or our language, than our status within both. The vanishing of any intentional target for Wakean language picks us out as its target (exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours), which means that what we are shown to be in reading the Wake is ourselves the shifting limit between sense and nonsense. Finnegans Wake, itself, is a description of the human mind enacting this vanishing intentionality. The book is about us because it cannot be about anything else. The failure of intentionality is true within the fiction as well. There exists neither an intelligible sense of mind nor of person within the Wake, except ours reading. We must either read the Wake as a work of nonfiction, on the model of the Timaeus, or we must take ourselves as fictional. The loss of sense in the Wake can matter because this loss is correlated with our loss of ourselves at night, not simply because any kind of nonsense would imitate a state of unconsciousness or of divinity, but rather because the kind of thing we are is actually correlated with the kind of thing sentences are. How we could be so correlated, how we might take ourselves as existing like a sentence will be my central concern in the next chapter. Is reading Finnegans Wake, then, a human activity? It is certainly a question humans are prone to ask.

r--J7 The Analogy between Persons and Words

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POINT OF CRACKING the "knutshedell" of Finnegans Wake has to be greater than the desire to find a new picture of its meaning or significance (FW, 276 L2). I implied in the previous chapter that the Wake shows us as akin to the kinds of things sentences are. An adequate description of this analogy between persons and words will require the articulation of how we are expressed by language, of what it means for language to express us. This is what I attempt in this chapter. Kant offers an inadvertent and partial account of how our language expresses us in the Third Critique. He claims that "A poem may be very pretty and elegant, but ... soulless" (49). He extends this observation to include soulless narratives, speeches, conversations, and even women. This last example might seem odd, since one would assume that women are of a different kind than the various ways of writing and talking he mentions. That a woman, especially for some men, might lack a soul in the way a story might suggests that such stories would seem to be contrived artifice, failed imitations of thought, lacking in some relation to that which has a soul. Women, of course, would have whatever counts as a soul if such a thing were what made human beings animate. A woman might seem soulless by being fake, unexpressive, automaton-like. That a woman, for Kant (or an Albanian for a Greek), might seem to lack a soul, however, does not imply that in those cases when such a judgment is made that they are actually automata. 'Soul' ('Seele') has two meanings here-the first describing a quality of expressiveness and the second describing the animateness of organic creatures. The first sense of soul

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as a quality of expressiveness means, it would seem, by virtue of an analogic relation to the second: the quality of having a soul is like the expressiveness of that which is alive. Is this relation between meaning and animateness contingent? Is it simply a question of a likeness produced by the proper descriptions of soul and the experience or meaningfulness of a poem, a story, a speech, a conversation-or a woman? This last example remains grating, but in itself it undermines the role of contingent likeness as the justification of the metaphor. Women, even for Kant, would really be alive. The justification, and hence the meaning, of the metaphoric use of 'soul' to describe the power and meaningfulness of poetry, stories, speeches, and conversations can take two forms. (1) We can mean this use of 'soul' to describe words-as in conversation-as living extensions of a person: to take a poem as expressive of a human mind and form, in the way that a hand is an extension of a person and a gesture can be expressive of someone. (2) We can mean the use of 'soul' to describe how a text is itself like a person, having analogically all of the parts of a human being, as Plato describes it in the Phaedrus. As yet there is no way to decide between these. Thus, I am not yet entitled to the claim I made above that the soullessness of a poem or a woman results from a failure of these to have "some relation to that which has a soul, " because in that description I am assuming something more than a contingent relation between the metaphor and our being human relative to our descriptions of souls and poems, et ale We should be careful with the metaphors we use to describe how we use and understand our words. If we appeal to an Aristotelian or Thomist hylomorphism and argue that any extension of ourselves is just us, then we are overstating the idea of the soul in words. Would we want to say that soulful words are just the person, while soulless words are instruments? We can make further distinctions. Conversation might be an extension of myself in the way that my hand is, but a speech is more like my countenance, and 'I love you' is more like my eyes. We might suggest that it is only poems and fictions, since they are not said so clearly in our voice, which can be taken transparently as persons in lieu of any person meaning them. Maybe we would want to understand these various linguistic surrogates as themselves metaphors for our use of the first person 'I.' Again, the oddness of including women in this list resists such an explanation: can a woman, even for Kant, be a metaphor for 'I'? How can we explain what would make a woman soulless? Would a soulless woman be a woman who is less her unique self and more a cliche, or would she fail to offer herself and her actions as symbols for

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other women? Do we project the soul we think we recognize in a sentence or poem (or in a woman or in a conversation) onto it? The words chosen, their order, their meaning and appropriateness, our gestures and expressions, our rhythm of speaking, our intensity of belief in what we say (or hear), and numerous other aspects of speech and disposition contribute to the feeling that a soul is expressed in a string of words. I guess the same might be true of women for Kant. The absence of this soul, however, does not mean that the sentence, poem, or conversation is meaningless or that the woman is not a human woman. Instead, they all lack some further quality of expressiveness. If I recognize that Leah is not Rachel, or if I do not, I do not doubt that Leah and Rachel are human or have souls. Recognizing a woman as a woman does not mean seeing her with a soul. Kant is not imagining that some women might be automata. There is no doubt about a soulless woman being a human being. Our recognition of her as a human is not a decision. We might conclude, therefore, that soullessness is just a kind of description. If having a soul entailed only that we be recognized as human beings and as the persons we are, then there would be nothing to Kant's distinction between soulful and soulless sentences and women. We can surely recognize women as human beings and as persons. Being soulful is not a mere metaphor. There is something about soulless things that goes beyond what we could recognize in the form of a word or a sentence or a woman. Although Kant denies that matter is animate and rejects the idea that the soul is an immaterial substance, he is not simply describing failed poetry, narratives, speeches, conversations, and women as metaphorically soulless. The metaphor is justified, however, not simply by virtue of a more or less arbitrary description of the grip, effect, or meaningfulness of a poem as like a living being. Although this is how Kant understands how metaphors work (their sense is purely contingent), there is a countermovement within the Third Critique that shows a further aspect of how to understand linguistic expressions. In his discussion of symbols in §59, Kant claims that although there is no necessary relation between a despotic state and a handmill, there is a "likeness between the rules of reflection of both and their causality" (223). Both the state and a handmill are (a) bound to the causal logic of phenomenal reality; and (b) we grasp both by means of the same "rules of reflection." The likeness of the state and the handmill is an expression of both (a) and (b). Similarly, women, narratives, poems, and the like can be understood (1) as expressive of human beings or (2) as analogically like human

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beings. That a bad poem is cliched and mechanical, however, does not mean that we suspect a precocious plant and not a person wrote it. Such a poem would seem not to be expressive of some fundamental quality that would make the words live. Kant's appeal to the soulfulness, the animateness of a poem would seem to be itself a way of describing the claim a poem might have on us and the attention we would give it. Ifwe assume the human origin of a poem, then it would be odd to see some poems as not expressive of a human being. A bad poem, however, would be read as failing as a surrogate for that person or for persons in general, and thus rattling into hollow tin.

~ DESCRIPTIONS, WHILE THEY MAY NOT be enough to animate us, can threaten if not our animate soul, then at least our particularity. I return to Alice's plight in Wonderland. She fears, given all the changes she has been subject to, that she might have turned into her friend Ada or Mabel. She decides that she will trust anyone from the human world to tell her if she has become either (and if she has she will remain in the rabbit hole). Her puzzle about who she is and the possibility that she might be someone else rests on taking descriptions of herself as determining who she is. Because she can describe herself in the same way that she can describe Ada or Mabel, Alice thinks that she might be either. This is not true. Her mistake rests on her ability to take such descriptions as surrogates for herself. This mistake might lead to psychological attachment to such surrogates, fetishizing something in the way we might argue Samson does his hair. The anthropological explanation for the meaning of his hair, however, would fit it with ancient biological theories about hair and horns, in which these indicate excessive vitality in their continuous and rapid growth, in addition to their special location on the head (or for hair near the genitals) (Onians, 93-122; 231-234). This symbolization of ourselves, the way in which aspects of our bodies can stand for us, shows Alice's fears to be not simply psychological, but quasi-logical: a sense that who she is is no more stable than the qualities and attributes by which she might be described. Change can produce, therefore, a particular kind of anxiety correlated with and manifest in the loss of sense. Such a loss can produce anxiety; we might repeat our name (as does Rudyard Kipling's Kim when on his way from his home on the streets of Calcutta to a new English life) and in that repetition feel ourselves named and then ourselves lost. That we find Alice's concern funny, but intelligible, means

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that we refuse and fear the collapse of who we are into the criteria for anyone's recognition of us (a list of predicates, various descriptions). If we refuse Alice's mistake, then what more of ourselves need we express in our words and what more must a woman show if those words and that woman are to be taken as having a soul? No more, I would think. The sense of our words, like the shape of a woman, would be all that could be shown and all we could see or understand, even ifwe were all women. What more, then, are we that can be shown in sentences, in our actions and appearances that might be taken as a soul or expressive of a soul? I am not asking for a definition of a soul or a person, but rather about how the forms through which we are manifest show us, about how we read the meaning of what we say as qualitatively expressive of life. But this question cannot be answered by offering some theory about persons or meaning: it will be more useful to describe how we lose ourselves and how meaning is threatened by the ways in which words can lose their expressive connection with human beings. To decide if we should understand a poem as a hand, even of an invisible or imaginary person, or as a person, we cannot search for a soul in various examples of good poetry, nor can we dissect soulful women (whoever they might be). Nor can we compare bad poems with good and derive anything but obvious or trivial observations about the differences. Our answers would be necessarily circular in these cases. The questions we need to answer instead are the following:

1. What does it mean that persons are manifest in sentences when those sentences are understood as not simply having some specifiable content? 2. What aspect of being meaningful is described as being animate or as having a soul? These questions can only be answered obliquely and almost by parody. They are not scientific questions, nor philosophical questions that could be answered by analysis or through theories about persons or language. What we need in order to respond to these questions would be descriptions of what we might take as persons and meanings in sentences. We cannot see these unless meanings fail and persons flutter out of their transparency. Finnegans Wake mimics these dual losses of sense. Words, phrases, and sentences in the Wake lose sense generally because we can no longer identify what any particular string of letters might be. Similarly, the identity and nature of characters (the idea of persons) have no sense

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without a largesse of redescription. In order to understand a word I have to be able to identify it as the word it is. In the Wake we often cannot do that. Instead we read word-like strings of letters, seeming multilingual palimpsest puns: "when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a"; "circumconversioning"; "domnatory of Defmut" (607.10-11; 512.16; 593.21). Similarly, within the fiction of the Wake we don't know who is who-in "this nightly quisquisquock" (L. qui, quae, quod: who, which; quiz quiz quack). Characters are so shifting, changing, and unclear in form that they "reamalgamerge" into each other. Names, particular strings of letters, signs, descriptions, and references seem to merge or dissolve into one another, or always and ultimately into either or both the feminine Anna Livia Plurabella, that which is marked by the letters A-L-P and the siglum Ll, and Humphrey Clinker Earwicker, that which is marked by the letters H-C-E and the siglum wand these two are lost as well in or are expressive of the absent dreamer-or of history-or of time-or of whatever frame one invents. This second aspect of the Wake has the further consequence of preventing our understanding these characters in the way we understand human persons in general. Deciding who is who would mean to write some further mythic fiction using Wakean resources, while pretending that one is not doing this. I can make no sense of any of these characters, in any of their guises, having anything like what we would credit as a mental life. This is another consequence, or rather a symptom, of the failure of the intentional resources of the Wakean aesthetic and language I discussed in the last chapter. In FW there is no 'I' stable enough to count as having responsibility for any sentence, and consequently no stable propositional attitudes (for example, 'I believe') to ascribe to any framing 'I,' any author, narrator, or character. There are, of course, statements that include the vocabulary of propositional attitudes. If, however, we do not understand what kind of thing anyone is and if we cannot ascribe any sense of person to whatever any name names, then we can hardly take such intentional vocabulary seriously. Similarly, there are no clearly individuatable mental states described or shown within FW; whose would they be? Without a who to be in some mental state, what sense can we give to 'a mental state'? Even HCE's notorious but not clearly delimited guilt does not provide him with a psychological state or disposition. His guilt is relative to an action about which others speak and to which he seemingly responds, except that the lack of clarity about what this he is, when he is often marked or referred to simply by

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words in which one can find the letters H -C-E, does not allow the ascription of psychological or intentional states to those letters or to whatever they might name. An attribution of guilt to HCE requires first the construction of an HCE that could have a mental life. In normal critical practice this means the collecting of a set of phrases that could be attached to such a guilty person. There is nothing wrong with this, except that the construction of such a character must be justified in relation to everything that resists such a stable somebody being in the fiction and somehow in the orthography of the text. If the text as a whole is someone's nightlife, as John Bishop insists, then we either must say we do not understand how this could be anyone's mind, or we do not understand how this mind could be someone's who is missing from the text. This nightlife is not something spoken: there is no person here in the words and phrases to whom we could attach these words as expressing propositional content. Who or what someone or something is within a fiction can only be established through our ways of identifying them. What is the relationship between how one might fail to recognize a word and how one might fail to recognize a person-in the world, in a description, in a story, as given in words? In what way is the identity of persons like the identity of words? I want to keep the question vague for a moment. We identify persons, and they identify themselves (by saying things like 'I am Hume'). Any person is a particular person, and this particularity can be described as that which we identify. If who or what a person is is given through descriptions, then the senselessness of these descriptions results in the loss of any clear sense of person. This does not mean that persons are nothing more than language, but rather that relative to our understanding of persons as given by descriptions, the very sense of person is normative (relative to our understandings and our modes of making these understandings manifest). If the situation of persons within fictions has a claim on us, it is because the kind of anxiety that Alice evinces about whether who she is can be determined by how she is described is something we recognize as well. Maybe we should ask, then, "How is the identification ofa person like the identification of words?" We might see faces in the way we see or hear words, recognizing, as Wittgenstein calls it, their physiognomy. But we do not learn to recognize human faces-we are born with the skill-and what we recognize may be meaningfully something and something we can call a 'face' or a 'person', but that is not the same as grasping the meaning (or various meanings) of the word 'face' or 'person' when we

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read or hear them in sentences or singly. We learn to recognize words as words and as the words they are, with the meanings they have, within the syntax of the languages we know. We learn to recognize the linguistic representation of persons in stories, poems, and texts. What centrally constitutes a person is tied to the particular and partially contingent theories we have about persons, whether they are marked simply by names and pronouns, by quoted speech, by descriptions of thoughts or awareness, and so on. In FW there are various signs that are taken to mark persons or quasi-persons. We want to take these as identifications of something, at least within the partial narratives we can read, but also within the form and aesthetic of the l/f7ake itself. This last requires that we have a theory about that form and aesthetic, since we are not identifying anything like the crane outside my window or the person referred to in someone's conversation. We have to learn to recognize HCE, but we also have to learn what it is we are identifying. With these problems in hand, the question we can pursue in reading FW is no longer "How is the identification of a person like the identification of words?" The question now more centrally concerns that which is identified, and would be better rendered "How is that which a person is (who he or she is in particular) like the particular meanings andform of a word?" We can take words as symbols of persons, so that our inability to identify words can symbolize our inability to symbolize persons in FW. The motive for the question, however, lies in the close relation between language and whatever I take as myself in my particularity-specifically how I am manifest as myself, as something to others and myself. This question can have a compelling sense and claim on us under two conditions: (1) when it is no longer clear what word a word is within a particular sentence and (2) when it is no longer clear not only who persons are, but also what they are. This last happens generally in our wakeful life as a form of psychosis, sleepiness, or willful silliness, or through some derangement of the world or sentences, conversation, stories (moments of nonsense, confusion, and misunderstanding). It can happen quite easily in fictions and in dreams. FW would seem to exemplify all of these ways of falling into confusion, all of the ways words, sentences, and persons slip into obscurity.

I. Finding a Woman with a Soul We can become unfitted to the world. Such moments of unfitting are common. One of the most important kinds of unfitting are the

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moments of estrangement that take place not only with others, but also with the idea we have of others. Although such estrangements can have psychological import, those moments of unfitting that are analogically like the falling into Kantian soullessness show us how we are manifest to ourselves and others. If I could not see the shape of you, I would lose the content marked out by my recognition of you; I can mistake a person reading in the shade for a bush that needs some water. I can lose your linguistic shape as well. I receive a letter addressed to me from someone to whom I have recently written. I read and understand the letter. I then receive another letter from the same person, whom I now realize is not my friend (although he has the same name). I discover that I had accidentally sent a letter to this unknown person, who responded to me with this mock letter. This person in the first mock letter imitated my friend, using only the resources of my letter. I believed this mocking for a real letter from my friend. The second letter gave the mocking away: I had not been corresponding with someone I knew, but with a stranger. The immediate effect of this realization is a kind of intense disorientation and exposure, like becoming self-conscious suddenly when calling someone a pet name in public. I understood the letter, but I was wrong to understand it in the way I did. The pronouns and names, let alone the sentences themselves, did not mean fully in the way that I initially took them. I mistook the way the letter fit into my sense of the world. I could still understand the English sentences to mean whatever they did, but my frame of reference was wrong. If the letter was just mistakenly directed to me, then I failed to understand who was being talked about and what it meant. Retrospectively, one might conclude 'Of course, that didn't sound like her'-but why didn't one see that in the first place? There are no clear and definitive criteria for deciding if a sentence or a letter sounds like Joe or like Alison. 1 When reading a fiction what one would really want to know is what the fiction means, portends, implies, and exposes. Fiction is just the case where there is no fact of the matter about to whom the pronouns refer or designate. Is a fiction, then, a kind of writing in which we are unable to recognize a particular name as a particular name ofsomeone? When I think a letter is written by x, but it is not, even though it sounds like x to me and has an 'x' at the end of it, then should I conclude that this is a fictional 'x'? 1. See Strawson, "Entity and Identity."

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I have good reason to take some string of letters as a name (maybe it's a standard name), but I don't know whom these letters designate, x or y or n. I know what is said but not what is meant by these letters. This string of letters (a name), therefore, fails to designate anything. Not only can I not say whom this string names, but I also don't know what is designated by it. But in this letter I thought the name named someone I knew; in fact, I thought I recognized the style. I am tempted to say simply that I was mistaken. Or I might be tempted to reinvoke Bertrand Russell's famous example of the bald king of France who doesn't exist, so that there is nothing for a sentence referring to the current king of France to be about. In fact, the problem here is not either about the ontological status of what is referred to or about the meaning of a sentence relative to what the sentence refers to, whether it exists or not, or about whether a name designates Joe and not some stranger. The mock letter highlights how hard it is to understand what it means that we take some set of words as someone's, so much so that when we discover we were mistaken our sense of language, that person, and ourselves is threatened. How could we be so wrong about the manifestations of a person we know well that a stranger could impersonate him? We know each other precariously. How can that mistake have the consequence of threatening my grip on things? If the letter were fictional, then its references and allusions would have to fit within its fictional world; it would simply be a funny coincidence that I could mistake fictional references for references to my friends. With a letter from someone I thought was Joe, but is not, what I take as real is being casually and effortlessly imitated in such a way that I believe that the letter is from my friend. Because my initial hypothesis about this letter rested on my understanding of a real person, my mistake suggests, at the very least, that my grip on my world is as tenuous as my judgment about the letter from Joe. It was my mistake that let me take the letter as fully connected to the actual person I know. The problem, therefore, is not about an ambiguity between who and what is meant by the name 'Joe' in a letter I mistakenly understand to be from my friend Joe. The effect of discovering this letter to be fictional, as much as it seemed to make sense and not be fictional when I first read it, would be like knowing that there is a difference between me and you, but not being able to say what it is because I could not-we could not-recognize each other. It is not that there are objects hidden under a blanket Ooe or some stranger), but that I cannot tell the difference between my hand touching the blanket and the blanket. The difference

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between object and blanket is relative to my perception (my touch). If, however, I cannot tell the difference between my touch, and that which I touch, then there is no fact of the matter about an object under the blanket that will help me decide what it is. The situation is such that there could be any number of objects hidden, and anyway one of the objects (my friend Joe) is not even there. The shock I feel when I discover that the letter is not from Joe but from a stranger can have a number of results:

1. I can take the letter as part of an ongoing conversation and thus as part and expressive of my past history and of my understandings and feelings about my relation with the person who wrote the letter. Mistaking this letter from a stranger as being from Joe can suggest that my understanding ofJoe rests on my projections and guesses about Joe. 2. This might even suggest an odd form of personification, whereby we shape what we understand of someone as expressive of that person into a surrogate for him or her. It might seem odd to call this a form of personification, since even if we are wrong that the letter is fromJ oe, we know the letter is from someone. But if I realize that the 'I' in the letter is not the Joe I know, or if the letter is not a purposeful fraud but just something I mistake as being from my Joe, then, in both cases, I am shocked into seeing my frame of reference, my world of friends, acquaintances, circumstances, and memories, in contrast with the one within which the stranger writes. But how is this background expressed or manifest such that I understand it or see what I do not understand? In this case, this background is not unlike what Hans-Georg Gadamer understands as tradition (although I would suggest that this background is more local). Gadamer suggests that our mutual understanding is "not a mysterious communion of souls, but rather a participation in a shared meaning" (Truth and Method, 376). This shared meaning is similar to what Wittgenstein calls our agreement in judgment. In the case of this fictitious or misdirected letter, what is ultimately shocking is that not only can we mistake a fake or wrong Joe for our Joe, but we can also mistake these shared meanings. To experience the shock of knowing that this is not our Joe is to lose just these shared meanings. What we might call the background

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shown by the mock or missent letter is a generalized picture of specific referents, shared knowledge, opinions, and assumptions. If I entered a fiction in the same way as I read this mocking letter, I would lose myself. But what a fantasy! Now extend this ambiguity about names Ooe or 'Joe') to words themselves, so that words do not fail to mean because of an ambiguity of usage but of form, I do not just not know who they refer to, I do not know what they refer to, because I cannot decide what word is what word, what any word means in relation to other words. If I cannot recognize what word a string of letters is, should I not conclude that it is not a word at all? When we can't recognize a particular word as a particular word, then what are we reading? Finnegans Wake, of course! One reads of the Gripes, a descendent of the grapes Aesop's fox attempts to grab, and an avatar of Shem the penman and the elm and one bank of the rivery ALP, described with a "palpruy head" (FW, 154.15), which sounds true enough if grapes were to have heads. 'Palpruy' puns 'paltry,' 'pulp-like,' some form of 'palp,' and thus is a cognate of 'palpable' or even the obscure meaning of 'palp,' teat-and then possibly 'peppery head,' and other less likely combinations of 'pal' and 'pruy' or 'prey' or the quite likely 'pray' (cf. "pulpably" 187.02). What word is 'palpury' then? It is not a new word with some particular meaning (even the synthesis of all of these possible meanings). It is a collection of possible meanings that we can recognize and use in our interpretations of its form; and this might be how we interpret persons relative to their words and actions. Reading FWas a kind of fiction is at best like reading a fictional letter, in which we are unsure not only who wrote it but also if it is addressed to us. It is not that there is something hidden underneath the blanket of Wakean nonsense, but that I cannot tell the difference between these descriptions and what they seem to point to. This suggests two ways of reading the Wake. (1) In reading it my interpretations (my hand touching the blanket) constitute what I interpret, or (2) I have to learn how to understand Wakean descriptions, especially of the Wake itself, to be somehow similar to some aspect or description of my life, ofwhat I take myself to be. The first option is always a temptation. We can interpret the Wake in any way we want, since there would seem to be no difference between anyone's interpretation and the thing interpreted. But let us return to the example of the impersonated letter. The discovery of the fictional letter sends us into a panic. We recognize that the Wake is a particular kind of nonsense. We are only reading FW when we feel the same panic we might feel with the letter. Since there are no persons in the Wake for us to be mistaken about, and certainly the historical links

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with living people are beside the point in understanding any Wakean sentence, our confusion is rather over what we take these words and names to be relative to our partial understanding of them. What corresponds to our mistaken understanding of the letter is our partial understanding of any Wakean sentence or identification of any Wakean character. When we read the lIVtlke we have to make explicit our misunderstandings relative to how we are held by the words, which may just mean how we make sense of clauses and words and how we identify and recognize characters, references, and allusions. In our ordinary lives do we ever find it difficult to distinguish the blanket from our hand touching the blanket? It happens whenever I hear whatever you say to me and when I take those words as drawing me toward you, that is, it happens when we understand each other; whenever I take your words as somehow giving me aspects of you, and not just as a claim about what is the case. But what is my understanding in these cases? When I take your words as your words about something? That too is like you manifesting yourself in your words. Similarly, I manifest how I understand you in how I understand you. My understanding you as you and your understanding me as me not only involves our understanding a lot of background information, but also requires that we situate ourselves in relation to each other within that background network of referents, assumptions, understandings, and so on (what should be included in this list is in some ways always up for grabs). I can see you in your words. I can be fooled to see mock versions of you as real. What I see is often the shape of you made by my assumptions and my recognitions, sometimes faulty, of a shared background in which you have a place. If I lose this background, I can lose my sense of you. If I lose you, in whatever way, I can lose this background: the world can turn mysterious or threatening. My dependence on the relationship between these is what we call the expressiveness of each. The expressiveness of gestures, persons, smells, and appearances is an expression of my knowledge, of my cognitive dependence on these for my identification of anyone.

II. Names Proper names do not mean; they designate. Although a proper name might have some meaning as a word (or phrase), it need not have such a meaning in order to function as a name. A name picks out something

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relative to other named somethings. ALP, that designated by the siglum L1, goes by many names, or rather we infer that a number of names and codes indicate what we take as ALP within the fiction of FW. Her multifarious identity is not simply an effect of these many names. How she is manifest and as what is mysterious and unclear. As with all fictional characters we can only identify her through the descriptions given us within and in the terms of the fiction. This encourages us to imagine that who she is is exhausted by such descriptions. I have argued earlier that this is not the case, since how we take her (or any character) relies on a vast number of things we understand about persons and the world. And this is at least similar to how we understand any living human person. But there is no sense to a question about what characters are outside of a fiction or a fictional world ofwhich they are a part. That is clearly not the case with human persons. Within a fiction, the answer to what a person is seems less constrained than it is by our human condition within the physically defined world. The possibility of allowing rocks, cupboards, and clouds to talk in a fictional world seems to playoff of the possibility that we might in a state of delusion or psychosis think such things of real rocks, cupboards, and clouds. Or one might simply imagine a fictional world to be like a dream; if one does, then a question about what kind of thing a lamp is in a fiction and in a dream is impossible to answer separate from saying 'they are nothing like this baseball bat,' which I might happen to be waving about. FWexacerbates these difficulties. Within the fiction what any putative character is is not clear, even less clear than in a dream. In my dream, the persons or objects I remember seeing were something to me, although I may never have understood them (as I remember them) as real. Dream images do have a special status: I can share them with others only as memories. FW is not like that since we all share the text and can adduce evidence for our claims about who and what some putative character is as manifest in a sentence. We can do this about dreams only relative to our descriptions of our dreams as memories, and these descriptions can be shared, but their claim on anyone is mitigated by the fact that they describe my dream. If we did not recognize this difference between my dream and your dreams, then our dreams would be as from God. What we would interpret or say or understand about such dreams would be open to anyone, at least as open to us as is FW. The strangeness of the fictional world and the question about what kind of things these characters are has the effect of tightening the connection between a name or designation and the descriptions in

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which these have a part or place. Names are more meaningful in the Wake because what they name is unclear. Descriptions of ALP seem equivalent to any of her names because we do not know what kind of thing she is. Descriptions can name because they fail to describe. But all we know about what kind of thing ALP is is given to us through these descriptions. Since we do not know what kind of thing she is or if she even is anything, the relation between her name and what and who she is for us is like the relation between God and His names. He cannot be named but analogically. These names would then name everything she is and nothing that she is.

III. A Negated Cratylus The strange status of characters in FWand the effect of its nonsense on our sense of what we are doing when reading it has the effect of breaking the fictional frame of the Wake. This frame is not broken because the text is somehow self-referential, or because the characters express, within the fiction, an awareness of themselves as fictional characters (these strategies would simply add another fictional frame; they do not make apparent the framing function of fictions at all). In reading FWwe are forced to decide what kind of thing a person tout court is if we are to understand or not understand the putative characters as like persons or not like persons. If we are to actually read the Wake, as opposed to just using it as an example of our interpretative method, we must ask how any particular character is a person in relation to the way we are persons. The very difficulty of the Wake, its tempting us to stop reading, encourages us to ask why we should read it and how. The answers to these questions will involve deciding what kind of thing we are such that we would read this kind of nonsense, and that will require that we ask what kind of things are Wakean characters. What is characteristic about ALP and HCE, for example, is that the various ways in which they are named, in which the primary constant is simply the letters a-I-p and h-c-e, are descriptions of who they are. We learn about them by knowing the meaning of their names. Thus, Anna Livia Plurabella names the river Liffey, and she is thus often described as a river, "the languo of flows" and is manifest in her names and as her names: "allaniuvia pluchrabelled" (FW, 627), "Amnis Limina Permanent" (153.02), "anny livving plusquebelle" (327.06), "annamation ... livlianess ... plurity of bells" (568.04-05),

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"annaone" (10.26), "leaves of the living annals" (13.30-31), "Allalivial, allalluvial" (213.32), "livvylong ... lyffing-in-waiting" (7.01-02; 35), and so on (see Glasheen). The complicated palimpsest of these kind of portmanteau words, as I have argued, has the immediate effect of making the identity of any particular word indeterminate or ambiguous. If the meaning of the elements of the portmanteau word constitute what we know ofwhat the word means and picks out, then the word is meaningless as a word. Such words are like names. The word itself stands for what it might mean because there is nothing in existence that we know that can be picked out by its multiple meanings. This congruence between the possible meanings of these portmanteau words and the thing they name mimics the Cratylan theory of names, in which there exists an essential and necessary relation between the name and that which is named. Cratylus asserts that "anyone who knows a thing's name also knows the thing" (435d). Thus, knowing a language (properly formed of names) would provide a way of discovering the essence of things in the world. In the Cratylus, Socrates tries to split the difference between Hermogenes' argument that names (onoma) are correct or incorrect depending on convention and Cratylus' argument that they are correct or incorrect "by nature." Such a question presumes that names have a meaning that is relevant to their referential use. Cratylus asserts a necessary connection between a name and that which is named. This connection would describe a similarity (mimesis) at the most basic semantic level. As Bernard Williams points out, similarity is generally a function of degrees. A necessary connection, however, requires an all-or-nothing relation, and thus a relation in which the name and the thing are indistinguishable. If a representation of x is indistinguishable from x, then it is not a representation of x but it is another x: a representation of x is not the same as x. Williams concludes that "[t]he very notion of one thing's being an eikon, a representation, of another, involves this point; for the only absolute notion of resemblance that could be used is that of indistinguishability, but an item indistinguishable from Cratylus would not be a representation of Cratylus, but 'another Cratylus'" (34). If anything is close to identical to the ways in which it is manifest, and if these forms of manifestation can be construed as representations, then what that thing is is given by or can be altered by its manifestations or representations. If a name gives what x is, then x is nothing but a name. To others we might just be a name correlated with some basic

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description or fact: if, for example, we are known by rumor or reputation, or if we are listed in the phone book. This name, however, is only necessary to what the knower knows of me, because it is all the knower knows of me. There is no necessary relation in this case between the name and that which is named (me). A name in this case is not a logical or an ontological simple, rather, its meaning for the knower is minimally exhausted by the name and the attached description. To represent x requires that the representation of x not be x. A fictional name does not pick out any particular person in the world. The representation of fictional y becomes the means for us to take and elaborate this representation as an idea of a particular person-and a particular kind of person, that is, a fictional y. Still, in this case, the means of representation are not identical to what is represented. A fictional name, however, if it is to be taken as a kind of person or to be understandable as something like a person, must also be a kind of representation of the kind of thing picked out by the word 'person.' The characters in FW partly fail as such representations. Thus we have to ask what are they since they are not persons or characters. We cannot say what these putative things and words we take as characters are from within the fiction. But we still attempt to understand these putative characters as somehow representations of some aspect of the world or of us. We can only determine what aspect, however, (1) by taking certain claims within the l/f7ake as true about the l/f7ake (because it says it is flux does not mean that it is, however), (2) by inventing allegorical frames, or (3) by characterizing what we read relative to the means of representation and meaning retained in the l/f7ake and used by us in our reading. In the Cratylus, the debate about the correctness or incorrectness of a name is only partially a debate about how words mean. Names do mean, and we do not need to determine their intrinsic correctness in order to understand them. Part of the motive for the concern with the correctness of names lies in the way language might or might not help one learn about what is true or false. Socrates explicitly denies that the origins of names or words help us in this regard, since the original namers might have been mistaken in their understanding of the true nature of what is named. The origin of these meanings might say something about the beliefs and attitudes of the society out of which these names were born, as Vico argues, or it might count as an ontological ground if that naming is either God's or guaranteed by God. Or if one fits these names within a broader understanding of language, then that our language means at all might be a function of a logical

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isomorphism between language and the world (partially the picture behind Leibniz' universal characteristic and Wittgenstein's Tractarian project, although in both cases there are numerous complications). But there is something more at stake in this question of correctness. What does this correctness describe for Cratylus? Separate from any appeals to some magical expressiveness, the correctness describes the adequacy of the original meaning of the word to the nature of the thing picked out by that word. By virtue of that original naming, my relation to words becomes a relation to the essences of things, and thus a correct name describes the way meanings and things claim me, by describing what is real and true. Ifwe, Adam-like, had first named the things in the world we would be fitting ourselves into the world by capturing the essence of things in words, but that fitting would also mean that our understanding of the world would fit the world to our words. No such primal act of naming ever took place: its importance as a description of naming concerns how we describe ourselves. How do we fit ourselves to our ways of naming ourselves with words like 'mind,' 'heart,' 'soul,' and 'person'? If we deny, as we should, the sense of Cratylus' theory, we should not deny that any failure of words might precipitate a situation in which the need to fit ourselves into things and words becomes paramount. The etymological punning of FW does not get us closer to things, but closer to this need for fitting together. We have to construct the meaning ofwords in a way we do not have to when we speak and understand. Etymology does not constitute the meaning of words and it is a poor indicator of word meaning (Hughes). In reading the l/f7ake, however, we do have to rely on etymological possibilities; we make partial sense of any clause by trying to synthesize possible senses from the possible meanings of the parts of words. The l/f7ake consists of lexicographic and semantic elements that are parasitic on other languages. We can only read these words if we fit these parts together in order to situate ourselves and the world in relation to it. The effect of Wakean nonsense is to induce partial suggestions and descriptions, which, since they are partial, read like ruins, mosaic pieces shuffled into repeating but incomplete senses and pictures. Names do not pick out characters in FW in any clear or stable way. This means that it is not clear what any name in the l/f7ake is a mimesis for, nor if it refers to anything. This is true not because the putative entity does not exist, but because it is not clear in what sense a name is a name within this fiction. Do the letters HCE, especially when we extract them from some Latin tag, name him whomever that is?

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Does the presence of these three letters indicate that a sentence concerns HCE or that within the fiction this is HCE? To appeal to the night-world of dreams to help explain these names does not help because we can ask the same question of our descriptions of what we take as our experience of our dream world. Person x in our dreams need not be person x in the world, and, in fact, need not be anyone or anything. Socrates claims that we use language to teach "one another and [to] divide things as they are" (Craty/us, 425d-426a). Given that the puns of the Wake have no determinate meaning we can understand, unless we give or assume a meaning for them, there is nothing for us to teach one another about these words. We can teach possible ways of interpreting one word relative to another, but that assumes that we have learned ordinary linguistic ways of understanding. Since we also do not understand what kind of world or what kind of persons or what kinds of things are shown to us by and through this language, we can hardly use Wakean nonsense as a way of "dividing things as they are." We cannot take Wakean language as referring to us. This is why there is a general tendency to read the Wake in relation to some theory about what it is about and what it is (an elaborate metaphor, dreams, time, and so on). But this is simply to provide a way for it to be about something. Wakean words and clauses do not convey any specific concept about anything that we would not have to predetermine ourselves. Instead, their putative sense and their deformations of sense are something we recognize in relation to ordinary language and phrases. We understand the possible sense of any nontransparent Wakean word or phrase and the form of its nonsense by recognizing and interpreting its likeness (as a pun) to some other word or by deriving possible meanings from the constituent parts of the word or sentence. The possible meanings of Wakean sentences offer us possible ways to rewrite any particular clause. These possibilities form the context in relation to which we read the variables ofword, clause, character, world, and the meaning of all of these relative to our ordinary ways of understanding these. FW consists of a context of possible meanings and variables. In the Wake there is no ground of sense, no literal level within the fiction that would not be literal only by stipulation. If part of what we are to read is that FWhas no clear relation to the world and us, then I think, if it is to be relevant to us, we have to ask how are we like words, both ordinary words and Wakean words. This is mysterious. If the thing named is nothing and the name is nonsensical, then there exists at least the semblance of a necessary relation between name and

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thing named. If a sentence is understood as expressive of me, then that sentence is taken as surrogate or representative of me and in this it is partially personified.

Iv. The Soul of Words Can anyone, male or female, see himself or herself as Kant's soulless woman? To see oneself as that would be to see oneself as like sentences. 'You are as soulless as that sentence'; this would not be a simple analogy, but a comment on how the soul is like our being held by sentences. But how would I see myself in this way? There are obvious ways in which I, or anyone, might find myself to be (like) a soulless woman: for example, if I became excessively self-conscious or psychotically silent, or retrospectively when I imagine myself asleep. The first two cases are psychological states or conditions, and as such are determined by their causes (there is little one can say of them separate from an investigation of the relevant states and etiology). The last can be a simple picture of me dead to the world or it could take the more elaborate form of FW, in which I would have to read myself as the we asleep (humanity asleep). Losing the soul of my own words might seem a kind of blindness to myself, the same kind of blindness that might require that we name parts of ourselves to stand for ourselves: my heart, your eyes, our gestures. I can now return to two of my earlier questions. (1) What does it mean that persons are manifest in sentences when those sentences are understood as not simply having some specifiable content? and (2) What aspect of being meaningful is described as being animate, or as having a soul? Again, these are not quite real questions, but riddles about what we are in relation to how we describe ourselves, where no description can be wrong unless it makes claims about substances or mental states. One can say in answer to (2) that we describe sentences as animate when they seem to express emotion, or seem spontaneous and not cliched, or are revealing and not stymied, and so on. But the point of the question was really to ask again the first question: How is it that we can take sentences as like persons? I take such a question as a riddle, the significance of which we have to discover. That significance is what is offered by FW, both in its ways of showing us unfit and lost to ourselves in our dreams, confusions, theories, nonsense, and fantasies and in the way it stands as something for us to reject and not read. The Wake describes the ways in which sentences and persons can lose sense as a way of showing that one or the other is in some degree

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already lost to sense. And thus one can read the Wake by asking what is the relationship between how one might fail to recognize a word and how one might fail to recognize a person, in the world, in a description, in a story, as given in words. How is that which a person is as who they are in particular like the particular meanings and form of a word? One can answer these questions relative to the problems of recognizing or misrecognizing persons and names within the ways they are manifest in language (the case of the mocking or missent letter). Our names, like our person, collect associations, but that is only a secondary sense both to us and to words. We-our person and our names-can be taken as symbols of what we say and do; we do this ourselves through our investment in our own names. Robert Musil offers an example of this investment in a name in The Man Without Qualities. Ulrich, as he is processed after his arrest for fighting in the street, feels himself "sucked into a machine that was dismembering him into impersonal, general components." He fits as a blank token in the police station. Thus Ulrich fails to fit in "the cosmos of the police" as that which is expressed for him in his name: "His name, the most intellectually meaningless yet most emotionally charged word in the language for him, meant nothing here"(168). The only responses that would matter to the questions above, that would not depend on a psychological or philosophical theory, would be descriptions of the way in which the sense of words and persons are lost together. This is the concern of fiction and of my study of it. We often describe fictions and poems as expressive, as allied more to feelings and less to facts, as like the expressiveness of a face or the way we say something as opposed to what we say. We say something with feeling and this feeling is communicated in a way reminiscent of the way a musical phrase might produce a feeling in us. Is the feeling produced by a musical phrase the same as or simply a response to the feeling with which it is played? When we say something with a certain feeling, as Wittgenstein asks, "can this feeling be separated from the phrase? And yet it is not the phrase itself, for that can be heard without feeling" (PI, 182). We understand the feelings expressed in a phrase to be feelings expressed by someone. 'Express' is used in a general way to describe the special status of many of our first person statements. We use such first person statements to make avowals (I am in pain) and to articulate our intentional states. In making such avowals I would not simply be specifying a particular intentional state ('believing x,' 'wanting y,' and so

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forth), I would express the fact that I am in such a state, that I believe x or want y. Such statements are usually incorrigible. I have a special status in determining the validity and meaning of my first person statements. This does not mean, however, that these statements express private states to which I have special access. That we can take sentences as expressive of more than their cognitive content encourages us to proliferate senses of 'sense,' as Austin does with perlocutionary and illocutionary sense. We also talk about sentences being expressive-full of significance, emotion, feeling, and particularity. This expressiveness marks a kind of quality. We understand sentences as having various connotations and implications. These are not carried so much by the sentence as understood as part of the broader speech or language situation, about which we can draw inferences and to which we respond in complex ways given our understanding of the parameters and variables involved. Fictions are not expressive in this way unless we can understand them as speech acts. We can read any written work as expressive of the person who wrote it or of various aspects of the culture, society, and community in which it was written. Doing so requires that we dissolve the fictions and poems into nonfictions and into speech acts. If we do this we are reading and interpreting sentences in a particular way, but we are no longer reading the fiction and poem as a fiction or poem. A fiction is expressive despite not being a speech act. It has a sense that we are hard pressed to define, but that we can describe in various ways, one ofwhich is to say that the fiction or poem is somehow alive, that, as Swift says, it speaks to us. What does it mean for a fiction or poem to speak to us, and how can or does a fictional-poetic text like Finnegans lIVtlke, of which it is difficult to say what its content means be understood as even metaphorically alive? The sense of the soulfulness of literature, conversation, and persons would seem to be akin to the sense of being held by language and the world. That a woman for Kant would be an exemplar of an object that can hold a man (he need not express it in this way) exhibits the closeness of how we see people and how we hear conversations, read poems, and speak. It also suggests that one sense of being animate is the power to hold someone in the way conversations, poems, and people do. Things can hold us in this way as well, but that is just to stand toward those things as people or at least as having a soul. From our ability to speak and read in this way we might conclude that the soul is something we manifest by explicating our relation to language. But explicate how? As in the confusion that attends discovering

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that a letter we imagined was from a friend is not, sentences and words lose and gain a sense as a function of our attachment to them and their hold on us. To read FW is to explicate it in this way: to read it wondering if these words are ours and not knowing how to answer that question, to find ourselves the author of the letter we write to ourselves, but then not knowing if we are actually that author or that reader. We have to discover how Wakean sentences could claim us in this way. The soul is something we share and to lose it would be to lose that sharing, as well as what is shared. In that loss we have the impetus to find both again. FW does not represent us in any way we can casually recognize. Nor can we take the Wake's sentences as descriptions or representations of the world. We can translate them into such sentences, but that only means our translated sentences mean this. Since any such translation would not be a translation of a speech act nor would it show what is manifested as a thing, description, claim, or experience through the Wakean form of that sentence, nothing can be inferred from the meaning of the translation back to the original sentence. Instead, we should imagine how we could take the many possible meanings of words, phrases, and sentences as being true and meaningfully about us. We would discover senses, theories, ideas, and pictures of everything, all implied in the ways we would make sense of the nonsense in relation to the ways it lacks sense. These discoveries would be more like discovering mistakes, or archaic and half-incomprehensible theories of world, mind, and person. We cannot read the Wake if we cannot read the possible meanings of its words relative to our assumptions and premises about language, the world, this book and so on. And thus reading the Wake could be a means of self-critical reflection on these assumptions and premises, through having to construct its ideas as ours. We should try to read the Wake as a kind of linguistic striptease, in which we might try to find out how much of what we think, believe, cherish about language, others, and the world can be transported into this world in which 'someone' writes, reads, or says "Let us pry. We thought, would and did" (FW, 188.08). Reading the Wake would mean putting on these quotation marks surrounding 'someone,' trying to be that someone. We might frame ourselves with single quotation marks if we read the Wake as really our loss of sense. We might double the quotation marks ifwe imagine we can see what we are or what we say as someone else speaking, as if the "we cumfused" of the Wake were actually said and meant as the truth we didn't quite know (FW, 156.31). In other words, the difference between (1) single quotation

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marks and (2) double quotation marks is that in the second case one allows the Wake to speak as God and in the first we discover that we wrote the letter we thought was from Joe to ourselves thinking we wereJoe. This is no easier to make sense of than it is to do. If one thinks that the Wake can prove or demonstrate anything sayable as a propositional claim, one is taking it as guaranteed by God. I am encouraging the other case. In some situations I am willing to take or to accept that what I express-my faith or my love or my fear or my doubts-names me. Whatever theory might be right about how names refer, such theories say nothing about how, when we are named or when we name ourselves, these names can do further work, be more than a means of referring. This is not a failure of these theories, but a consequence of their different concerns. Language does not sit still, however, nor do we confine our uses of it to saying what we mean, informing others of what we think or of what is the case, referring to persons, places, and things. Any description of how we understand ourselves that relies on understanding a representation as the same as that which is represented falls into the emptiness ofCratylan-like theories of language. We are not the same as our expressions; but we are manifest through them and can be mistaken for them, even by ourselves. Thus, our expressions, what we say and do, how we gesture and appear can be taken as surrogates for us. We can recognize ourselves as these gestures, as well as in them. I am left with somewhat cryptic conclusions. The deformation of sense in FW does not unfit sentences (let alone words) to the world, but requires of us a fitting that expresses the adequacy of ourselves to this language. Our relation to language is, therefore, strangely plastic. We make our names correct. Words can be taken as names and can manifest what they mean only if they are senseless. Instead of being empty this senselessness allows us to read FW in the way we make our names correct, the way we can understand anything as a symbol or as expressive of us. Reading FW, therefore, if we can put on its words, can allow us to describe the way we invest ourselves in words as analogous to the way we invest ourselves in our names. Kant's descriptions of poetry as soulful or soulless, as animate or inanimate, are not metaphors, but describe an aspect of what we should take as our soul. We are not in our words, but we are as much our words as we are our memories.

"The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul"

W o R D S AND PHRASES CAN at times be full of soul because we are. Words and phrases can clank into cliche and confusion because we can as well. What about us: How are we soulful? 'We lose or gain a soul (our soul) by how we are held or missed by what we say or hear or read;' sometimes. The soul, however, is not the meaningfulness of sentences. The soul of sentences can show our words like faces, as if their meaning were their soul. 1 Words "look at us," as Wittgenstein remarks (PI, p. 155). I would ask how we are soulful, however, in order to ask also how faces can resist being like sentences. There are many ways of understanding questions about our soulfulness that I want to avoid. I will not attempt to discover the soul through faith nor reduce it to psychological descriptions and explanations. Without faith and without psychology, we ask about our soul when we ask as what do we exist. The spirit of this chapter is deflationary, its procedures and concern a minimalist theology, a cousin to philosophy and a subject for art. As what do we exist? Wittgenstein claims something that might seem addressed to such a question: "The human body is the best picture of the human soul" (PI, p. 152). This implies that a human soul cannot be pictured as a human soul. Not at all surprising one would think, if there is no such thing. Wittgenstein, however, is not making a metaphysical claim about an entity or substance. Nothing could be soulful, including

1. They need not look at us in that way, however; see Remarks on the Philosophy ofPsychology §323, §324.

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our sentences and art, if we were not; it is this soulfulness that should be labeled the human soul. In order to understand Wittgenstein's aphorism, we need to answer a number of questions: (1) What does it mean to use 'human soul' in the way that Wittgenstein does? (2) Is Wittgenstein's claim a theological claim? Why, if the human soul cannot be pictured as a human soul, can the human body picture it? If the body best pictures the soul, then can other things, including what we say or do, picture it badly? Thus, we also have to ask (3) What kind of thing is this human soul? and (4) What kind of relationship does it have with the body such that the body can picture it? This last question is odd, since one could answer that the relationship it has with the body is one of something pictured. The question should be understood to be about this picturing. The human body qua human body is not a picture of anything. Do we want to say that 'picture' is just a metaphor? But what kind of metaphor? How can we see the human body as a picture of the soul? The metaphor seems to do too much work, to carry with it everything the human soul could be or mean to us.

I. Theological Possibilities I will first address (1) and (2): Is Wittgenstein's claim theological, and what sense can we give to 'human soul'? Iltham Dilman successfully argues, I think, that Wittgenstein's use of 'soul' is "not a hypothesis that human beings have souls and that a human being's soul is not something he possesses in the way he may possess a liver" (191). He cites Wittgenstein's remark "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul" (PI, p. 152). To have an opinion is to believe something that one could possibly doubt ('I thought you had a soul, but now I see I was wrong'). Wittgenstein uses 'soul' to suggest that we recognize human beings from within our commonality as human beings. This means that we see each other as examples of each other, and thus we, as human beings, (even in our evil) express our species-being in our particularity. We understand animals as examples of life in a similar way. The soul, for Wittgenstein, therefore, is a mark and expression of the same distinction between the animate and inanimate: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same" (PI, §284). Dilman, however, also argues that the grammar of our (human) use of 'soul' "makes sense only in the framework of certain moral values and that a spiritual life is one that bears a relation to these values" (191).

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While he argues that Wittgenstein in his early work thought about ethics as spiritual in this way, he does not connect this spiritual sense of the soul with his initial description of the soul as our human frame of reference, within which we appear to each other as human. He assumes that the relation between a framework of certain moral values requires (by logical necessity) some kind of spiritual life. What does 'spiritual life' mean here? 'A spiritual life' is understood as morally different from a material life. 'A material life' means, therefore, a materialistic life. Does 'a spiritual life' mean a spiritualistic life? That would be a kind of life that recognized the value of things like love, caring, and thinking. But one can be a fully committed materialist about most things and still value such attitudes. In any case, such attitudes are better described as emotional and cognitive, their justification moral or ethical. In order for 'spirit' to mean something in Dilman's claim, however, a material life must describe a life in which an ontological commitment to materialism does not allow for a commitment to values that could not be reduced to this materialism; he has to show how a commitment to materialism entails a commitment to a materialistic life. Any generic form of materialism (the doctrine that the underlying reality of everything is some form of matter) would deny the specific claim Wittgenstein makes-that "the human body is the best picture of the human soul." The human body would not be the best picture of the human soul, because there would be no soul. But that would be a pointless denial, because Wittgenstein is claiming that having a human body is the criterion for having a human soul. 'Body' and 'soul' in this description are two ways of describing being human. This just means, however, that materialism and spiritual life are beside the point. How we stand toward others and ourselves as human is what is at stake in Wittgenstein's remark. The threat Dilman imagines Wittgenstein responding to, it seems, is something like social Darwinism. Moral values need not be spiritual in order not to be reducible to some physiological description of the human body. The meanings of sentences are not material. In any case 'spiritual' invokes a kind of life, that is, a set of values. It is not an ontological distinction between values and matter, but between kinds of values. If that is the case, then the notion of spirit has no ontological force, and it could be replaced simply with a description of the kind of values that are commended by the label 'spiritual.' Thus, Dilman has failed to show that anything theological follows from Wittgenstein's claim.

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II. What Kind of Thing Is the Soul? Question (3), What kind ofthing is the soul?, does not need a full answer if we are to make sense ofWittgenstein's aphorism. We need only show that whatever we take soul or mind to be, it is not equivalent to the body, that in using 'body' to refer to our physical person we do not mean 'the soul.' Wittgenstein is not suggesting anything about the soul understood as a synonym for the mind, as descriptive of mental capacities or faculties. In analyzing his comment we will not learn about some special substance, essence, or function. The soul, if pictured by a living body, is not the secret vital source of life. Wittgenstein's description of the body as a picture of the soul, however, can look similar to the Aristotelian idea of the soul as the form of the body. Since Wittgenstein is not interested here in the functioning of the soul or mind, however, we need not consider Aquinas' or Aristotle's account of how the soul knows what it is. Spinoza's metaphysical derivation of the soul or mind from the relation between ideas and their ideata moves us slightly closer to Wittgenstein's picture. Spinoza translates the Aristotelian idea of the soul as a kind of form (eidos) into an idea of the soul, or mind, as the idea of the body: "the human mind perceives not only the modifications of the body, but also the ideas of these modifications" (Ethics, prop.xxii). George Henry Lewes, in the nineteenth century, psychologized Spinoza's theory. In his theory, the body in acting produces feelings that constitute the soul as the idea of the cause of these feelings. The mind would be an image of the body, an image derived from our proprioceptive experiences. For both Spinoza and Lewes, the soul pictures the body; the body is not a picture ofthe soul.

In order for the body to picture the soul, it must be distinct from it. But any sense of soul would seem to include some relation to the body. This is especially true if we understand the claim that the body is the best picture of the soul to appeal to the way the body might be taken to express the soul. But if the soul somehow already includes the body (and the point here seems not to simply argue for a radically dualist picture, for then it would be hard to see the body as a picture, let alone the best picture of the soul), then how can it picture the soul? Wittgenstein seems to be relying on an odd and undefined sense of 'picture' here: the body and soul are distinct and yet expressively related. Am I something that I can express? Is my humanness something expressed that can be or is understood as expressible? Wittgenstein would seem to answer yes to this strange question: the human body is a

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picture of the soul. If I want to examine the soul, do I examine its best picture? Is the body the best picture of the soul because we, humans, all necessarily share it, so that we see others as versions of ourselves? But (1) how is the body a picture and (2) of what exactly is it a picture? We can't get any further than we have in answering this second question without answering the first. The soul here cannot be different for all of us, since what is pictured by the human body is that we stand in relation to each other as human beings. But if that's the case, this is a rather odd way to be using 'picture.' Why not say the body is the best manifestation of the soul? If the soul were manifest as the body, then the body would give the soul its form in order that it might be expressed-but this sense of 'expressed' can only mean that human beings are just those kinds of creatures other human beings recognize as human beings. This is true enough. No human being can express more humanness as such than they do: Do we imagine that the quality of someone's body, according to any rubric, would express more or better humanness? How can our bodies be pictures, let alone the best pictures, of anything, especially of our souls, whatever they are? The soul must be manifest in some way; it is not an essence, an entity, or substance. It is expressed in our stance towards others and is recognized in that which we can stand towards in this way. Could we take Wittgenstein's claim to mean that if there were a human soul it could only be pictured by the human body? Such a claim might seem more reasonable. What else could it be pictured as? If one answers, 'a little cloud,' one has lost the connection with other human beings that would motivate the assumption that we have a soul. I might reinterpret the human soul into a little cloud, but that would only beg the question about how this little cloud relates to us, human beings with bodies. I could give a theory of that, but it would be a bad theory. In every case I would simply have to assert some essential connection between human beings and little clouds. I can take you as having a human soul because I take you as being human. The best, but not the only picture of our being human is the human body. When I see you, I see a human body, not a walking dolphin. It is reasonable to say that if there were a human soul, it could only be pictured by the human body. Is it also reasonable to say 'if there were a human body, it could only be a picture of a soul'? How could we doubt whether or not we had bodies? I might say 'bodies are figments of our minds, of our souls, produced by evil demons.' If I claim that we really do not have bodies, and since we do seem to have them, I am assuming

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that we are really something like a soul, and our bodies are epiphenomenal effects produced by that soul. Whatever we would take as ourselves would be the best picture of what we are; there would be no other picture. The 'soul' means that which we take ourselves to be if or when we deny that we are simply our body. Often in Wittgenstein's writings the soul describes some broadly understood sense of what is within us, of something inner: "the picture of thought in the head can force itself upon us, then why not much more that of thought in the soul" (PI, p. 152). He gives a more extended description of this relation between external criteria and our projection of these as marks of an inner domain in some preliminary remarks to Investigations: "And if the play of expression develops, then indeed I can say that a soul, something inner is developing. But now the inner is no longer the cause of the expression" (Last Writings, §947). I discover the soul from external criteria; the play of expressions marks the development of a child's engagement with the world, with others, with language, with her sense of herself. Our body can bear our thoughts; it bares our soul. Wittgenstein asks, "Where do you feel your grief?" In my mind-Only what does that mean?-What kind of consequences do we infer from this place assignment? One is, that we do not speak of a physical place of grief. But all the same we do point to our body, as if the grief were in it. Is that because we feel a physical discomfort? I do not know the cause. But why should I assume it is a bodily discomfort? (Remarks on the Philosophy ofPsychology, §439). I manifest my grief to myselfwhen I point to my head. But one should be cautious in trying to explain this. "I should almost like to say: One no more feels sorrow in one's body than one feels seeing in one's eyes" (Zettel, §495). That I might be tempted to feel my sorrow in my bones and feel the seeing in my eyes testifies to a disquiet about letting my sorrow and my sight be nothing more than what I do: sorrowing and seeIng. The sense of asking where is my depression is like the use of the phrase 'I see' when I say 'I see the world as grey' (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §441). If I see the world as gray, I need not actually see a gray world. I use 'gray' as I might use a storm, a tree, or a person: as a symbol for the way I feel. I am describing my disposition. Someone says, 'here, put on these red-tinged glasses so that you can see the world as red instead'; that probably would be a joke. "'Where do you feel grief?'-in my mind.-And if I had to give a place here, I

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should point to the region of the stomach. For love, to the breast and for a flash of thought, to the head" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §438). I probably would not respond by saying I feel grief a little more toward my left ear than toward my right eye, although I could. We can build up all sorts of correlations between what we take as our feelings and our descriptions and symbolizations of these. The difference between finding the proper or the inevitable analogy for our feelings and getting entangled in dualisms can be slight. In his commentary on his own essay on Leonardo (an essay concerning the relationship between science and art), Paul Valery remarks on the relationship between introspection and our metaphoric description ofwhat we introspect, that "psychic world' (11). He makes an initial distinction between our perception of the external world and the "process of observation-precarious and often untrustworthy as it may be-ofwhat takes place within us." This observation "induces us to believe that the variations in the two worlds are comparable." This distinction seems to perpetuate a dualism between mind and world. Such a dualism is undercut by the requirement that we describe this world "in terms of metaphors taken from the perceptible world, and particularly from acts and operations that we can effectuate." The activity of the mind shown by introspection is described in terms of what we can do as persons in relation to the external physical world. Metaphors picture the mind: Thus, note the relation of "thinking" and "weighing" (penser and peser), of "grasping" and "comprehending," of "hypothesis" and "synthesis," etc. "Duration" comes from the same root as dur, "hard." All this amounts to giving certain visual, tactile, and motor images-or their combinations-a double value. (Mallarme, 11-12) It remains an open question in Valery's description how to understand the ontological status of this psychic world. Nor can we decide in what sense the metaphors constitute, at least for us in our introspection, that which is being described. Our folk psychology and much of our descriptions of our thinking and thought represent a special case of picturing ourselves: in utilizing our bodies and our actions, we picture aspects of our soul with aspects of what is (physically), intersubjectively available. To picture thinking as weighing is not the same as picturing the soul as our body. Is every weight scale for a French speaker a picture of French thinking? We can construe a scale as that, but we need not. The specific metaphors and pictures from which we have derived our spe-

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cific psychological vocabulary, just like the theories and pictures within which these terms now are used, lack the inevitability the body has as a picture for the soul. My subject is not, however, the status of our folk psychology, nor is it to dispense with dualistic pictures of the mind and body. I am trying to understand what is pictured by the body that it should be called the soul. What we picture ourselves as can only be a picture if we find it so; to find ourselves pictured should seem a stranger kind of recognition than it usually does. 'It is me; but do I look like that?' I might be puzzled that I fill up that form. I might even think that a picture of Joe is a picture of my younger self. I see my form through eyes different from those you see when you see me. The soul with which I see, regardless of how my brain and my eyes actually work, is a soul that is not what you see when you see me. But I still have no choice but to take the form you see when you see me as a picture of the soul that sees you. The particularity of this, however, is not expressed in the fact that the body is a picture in this way. Soul pictures are of us as human beings; for example, folk psychology as such a picture describes our minds as human beings. Pictures of our humanness are pictures that hold us together with others. It is not the psychological terms that will seem inevitable, although they sometimes can, but that we have such pictures, that we give the world two senses so we can describe our mind or soul.

III. Body and Soul What kind of relationship, therefore, does the soul have with the body such that the body can picture it? If a body is a picture of the soul, does this mean that the soul looks like the body? It is more reasonable to claim that our human being is a picture of the soul, since what a human being looks like is as obscure as what a soul looks like. A representation requires that the means of representation, and thus the representation itself, be distinct from that which is represented. If the body is the best picture not because it resembles the soul in the most veridical sense, but instead because it is most essentially expressive of or, in a coeval sense, is always associated with whatever we could take as the soul, then the body's picturing is an unusual kind of picturing. The closeness of body and soul in this case works against the necessary difference between body as representer and soul as represented. The body is not the soul, and yet there is no sense we could give to the idea that it resembles the soul, except as the most full unambiguous marker of the soul.

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I am not more human in my hand than in my head-and, if we accept that someone might not be fully a person, but still be human, then I am always human until I do not exist. If we imagine that a substance manifests itself as the kind of thing we are as human beings, then we would all share that substance. But the kind of thing we are is something we all instantiate as human beings. It need not exist as anything else besides that. Because we do instantiate the kind human being, we might be tempted to talk of our humanness as something greater that we all participate in, some metawhole, in the way that Averroes argued we all share a single soul. If this were true, then my relation to that whole would be both immanent (I instantiate it) and infinitely distant (since it is in no part of me). To avoid these confusions we have to reject the idea that the soul could be a kind of substance. One can understand the relationship between any particular human and the kind human to be one of exemplification, defined by internal relations. The use of internal relations in this case is not terribly helpful. If by internal relations one means that any definition of a human being would hold for all human beings, and any creature not defined as that would not be a human being, then by internal relations one is describing the relationship between a particular definition and a particular case under particular descriptions. This is true enough, but as human beings we are distinct from other kinds of things. Definitions will not help us understand this difference. Descriptions might. If the human body is the best picture of the soul, then a machine might be a bad picture of the soul. If I say that a human being is a machine I am redescribing being human as being a kind of machine. What kind of machine? Describing human beings in this way highlights particular aspects of both machines and human beings, while diminishing others. Such descriptions can be unobjectionable (if we want to rule out spiritual or magical explanations of our inner workings) or confusing. Wittgenstein concentrates on the confusions that follow from describing human beings as machines. He writes in the Blue Book, 'Is it possible for a machine to think?' (whether the action of this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics or possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behavior of organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that we don't know a machine which could do the job. The question is not analogous to that which someone might have asked a hundred years ago: 'Can a machine liquefy gas?' the trouble is rather that the sentence, 'A machine thinks (perceives,

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wishes)' seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked 'Has the number 3 a color?'. Describing ourselves as machines is nonsensical unless we restipulate what we mean by 'machine,' since the behavior that distinguishes us from machines is exactly what we are describing by asking if machines can think. We will either have to redefine what we mean by 'think' or redefine what we mean by 'machine.'

Is it possible for a piece of wood to be a person? We have no reason to give an answer to that question. Might I decide sometime to become a stone sculpture? No. We can paint, however, "a soulful expression" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §267). Such an expression is manifest in a look that we recognize as soulful. The expression need not be of an actual human person; it could be painted onto a board as the semblance of a human face. We would have to learn to respond to such a painted face, however, as if it carried that expression of us-of ours. Is the soul only a picture, painted, put on, discovered? Do we see other people as half-dead in the way we can see objects as half-alive? A wave hewn stump cast on the shore, seen in the distance at dusk, looks like a downcast person, the marbled wood appearing like a half-turned face. Seeing this stump as a person is not the same as seeing persons as automata. Are we objects with souls attached; are we animals masked as human beings? Answering these questions is no longer a part of natural philosophy; they can lead to more conceptually defined problems in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, particularly concerning other mind skepticism. That is not my route, nor are these the necessary contexts within which to place Wittgenstein's aphorism. I am really asking what relation does the body have with the soul as a way of describing as what do we exist; this last query-as what do we exist-is a minimalist way of asking what is the soul. Wittgenstein describes the limit between being human and being an object. Such a limit denies the purported symmetry between objects and us. We may be animals but we are not masked. In one thought experiment, Wittgenstein challenges anyone to see other human beings as only masked automata. Imagining people as automata, "alone in my room," as if alone in my head, is like making a r----....J PINOCCHIO MIGHT ASK:

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fiction. If you stand in front of another person and imagine "this seeming-person is a machine," you might either laugh and find these words meaningless or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort . . . Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example. (PI, §420) There is nothing arbitrary about this example; Wittgenstein might have used the example ofseeing magical symbols in clouds or the course of human life in the stars. An analogy can generate a poem, but if I imagine that this course of stars causes my character or determines the course of my life, I am speaking nonsense. How did I move from interpreting shapes or movements as like myself to a theory of causation without the limits of experiment that justify the use of the vocabulary of causal description? Someone who sees swastikas in the crosspieces of a window might be aJew or a Nazi, or it might be sometime after 1933. But if I see a human being as a machine, how do I see myself? We are on the edge of a moral abyss, an abyss that Wittgenstein marks by his example. The issue is not whether we are a machine or not (to be that is just to define 'machine' in a particular way), but what it means for us to picture human beings as machines. Wittgenstein challenges the reader to imagine a group of children as "mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism." If I imagine that those who look like persons are actually mere automata, then I doubt that they are human. I also might doubt if I am human; wonder if I am a mere automaton. In such cases, I deny how things seem. To take the world or things in it as pictures (as mere appearances) I have to repicture things in distinction from how I see them. We can picture ourselves as almost anything, as human beings or machines. We can take our pictures of others as what they are, and yet, as Wittgenstein suggests, such confusions are often difficult and, in extreme forms, pathological. This picturing, however, also describes the complex ways in which we understand each other and ourselves as having hearts, souls, and minds. Mistaking a letter from Dave as from Joe relies on mistaking a picture, a sense ofJoe, as given by Dave's letter. Any sense of expressiveness would seem to be akin to this picturing, the end of which would be to see the body as the best picture of the soul. "Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing

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one figure as a limiting case or variant of another." To see the duck in a duck-rabbit picture is also to see one figure "as a limiting case or variant of another."2 How could we see humans as automata? We might imagine them as more awkward and robot like, but that would be to miss the problem. We would have to see what we know as human beings as human automata. How would seeing that be like seeing "the crosspieces of a window as a swastika"? In this case we see a particular shape, and thus this is just like the duck-rabbit aspect shift. We fit the elements together into a different shape. We see either the cross-pieces in their ordinary relation or we see the swastika. We do not see both. If we see human automata as somehow a different shape or form than human beings, we are not seeing them at all. But if these human figures do not alter, then we are not actually seeing them in a different way, but understanding them in a different way. Wittgenstein's analogy, therefore, is misleading. We might understand or feel differently about the world-a feeling of uncanniness he calls it. But to describe seeing other human beings as automata, as limit cases to our own humanness, is an analogy twice removed. Seeing a human being in this way would be like seeing as if the aspect of the world had changed, not that it had. We stand toward ourselves in a way we can never stand toward ducks, rabbits, and duck-rabbit pictures. This sense of uncanniness expresses the awkwardness of trying to understand how if everything looks and is the same, my different understanding implies that the world is somehow different than I thought. The aspect shift, if we call it that, is, therefore, relative to my thoughts, pictures, and assumptions. I can see different shapes made out of the same configuration of lines. If I understand another human being as not human in the way that I am, if I see her as an automaton as distinct from however I see myself, then everything would have changed, not simply the aspect of some one thing. What has changed is what I can only gesture to: I say, 'everything has changed,' and sweep my arm from one side to another. But the difference in these human persons is in how their biology no longer adds up to hoping, wishing, believing, consciousness, justice. How bodies would mean to me would be changed. We can try to see humans as automata and this would be a moral failure and an impossible task. To talk about seeing humans as machines, if by machine we mean as automata and thus as not human in the way that I am, or as machines in 2. For a discussion of how aspect switching is related to skepticism, see Part IV of Cavell, The Claim ofReason.

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the same way that clocks and computers are, is not to see humans under some aspect or description. It is to understand human beings as not human. Human beings could cease to be human only if the world were not our world. The aspect of the world as a whole cannot change; my sense of the world as god infused or as inanimate will have numerous repercussions, but this is not to see the world under a different description. The world is not that which is described by Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmology. An aspect defines a point of view and is true of something in the midst of other things (even if only a blank background). The world is that on which we have no point of view. It is the background and everything else.

Iv. Finding a World for a Soul In Wittgenstein's notebooks one finds the following variant on this aphorism: "The human being (Der Mensch) is the best picture of the human soul (menschlichen Seele)" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §281). How is a human being manifest as a picture? At least with the human body we know how to picture it. Both aphorisms concern our humanness in general. Certain aspects of Christian psychology, specifically the immortality of an individual soul, are not invoked. Replacing 'the human being' with 'the human body,' as Wittgenstein does in Investigations, makes more acute the question about what is recognized as the human soul. If one says "the human being is the best picture of the human soul," one is assuming that one recognizes out of hand and simpliciter the human being-that which is human-and thus the claim is either trivial, if the human soul just means 'humanness,' or obscure, since, if we reject the trivial interpretation, we do not have anything to replace it with. The content of the claim hangs, however, on the meaning of 'picture'-and thus even in this earlier phrase the concern would be to suggest that we can stand as examples of our humanness since we are human beings. If the human being is the best picture, then this might simply mean that we are the best pictures of our own souls. This is too much like 'we are us' to be very enlightening. Calling our body the best picture of the soul should not be taken as simply obvious. Did we, then, need to be informed about the fitness of the body as a picture of the soul? Or maybe we needed to be reminded about the soul. Wittgenstein's aphorism has two aspects: (1) How am I something that can be pictured? To be pictured is in some sense to

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self-reflect such that I take myself as having a soul that can be so pictured. (2) How am I also a we? How is my soul a human soul? Under both aspects, but more so under the second than the first, we need to ask how there can be a best picture of the soul, since it is not a picture by virtue of any clear sense of resemblance. That the body is the best picture implies there are other pictures, that the body can be understood as a picture, and that there is a reason for it being the best picture. If we say that it is the best indicator of our humanness, it would seem empty to argue that we use the body as a picture of a soul in order to facilitate our recognition of other human beings. Do we need to recognize other human beings-or wouldn't the body be enough: Why would the idea of the soul be required? In the claim that the body pictures the soul, 'pictures' has two possible senses: (1) Picturing might have the role of indicating or offering a criterion for recognizing our human soul, or (2) picturing might show or inform us of something about that soul through its picturing. If picturing is the means of indicating a human soul, the claim might seem straightforward. Given our current biological form of life and given all other indicators, the human body is the best indicator of anyone being human. Why would we need such an indicator? While we can imagine how a doubt about this might arise, translating the phrase in this way is misleading. We would have to say that the human body is the best indicator of our human soul as distinct from animal souls, vegetable souls, and things without souls. In this way, 'soul' can just mean 'that which some creature or some thing is.' Still, picturing, as an indicator understood in this way, fails to address the central claim of Wittgenstein's statement. He says that the body pictures the soul. Picturing as an indicator of the fact or presence of a soul is parasitic on the idea that the body pictures a soul. Thus, (1) the picturing account fails as an account of the statement. But how can (2), the idea that the body informs us of something about the soul, mean anything separate from a belief in the soul? We can only pretend to answer this question if we imagine a human person without a soul and, thus, with only a facsimile of a body. Wittgenstein has a joke that describes the difficulty of this: "In what circumstances shall I say that a tribe has a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness!" (PI, §419). This is one of the best jokes in Investigations. I sometimes find it very funny. To take seriously the possibility that a chief of some tribe lacks consciousness would require that one see the chief as not a human being. It is nonsensical for us to understand chiefs as lacking in consciousness. If

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we want to remove this nonsense, we would have to somehow invert our world. In such an inverted world, when someone says 'surely we cannot have a chief with consciousness, how absurd!' he is not saying 'the statement "the chief has consciousness" is false.' He is taking the statement 'the chief has consciousness' as nonsensical. To seriously doubt if the chiefhas consciousness would require that someone have a different sense of 'consciousness,' 'person,' 'human being,' and 'chief' and a very different sense of who anyone was relative to other human persons. To understand Wittgenstein's comment as a joke, therefore, requires not only that we understand these words in the way we do, but also that we recognize aspects of our fundamental beliefs, understandings, and assumptions about ourselves and the world. To think or say seriously the statement that the chief does not have consciousness (to take as nonsensical the statement 'the chief has consciousness') would mean that I was psychotic, that the world had changed, or that I had become some different kind of creature. To stand toward chiefs as if they were automata (as if they as a group did not have consciousness) and remain sane is impossible; to invert the sense of our human world so that the statement 'the chief has consciousness' would be nonsensical is impossible. We cannot accomplish the inhuman inversion of our existence that would make this statement meaningful. If it could be accomplished, we would be some other kind of creature that were just shaped like persons. It would probably prove very frightening. The pursuit of an inversion of the fundamental sense of things would show us as free to choose between mutual impossibilities. A chief without consciousness would be a pretend person. We might imagine a person is pretend if he systematically spoke nonsense, either gibberish or oracularly, as if with the voice of god. We can attempt to produce a facsimile of this nonsense, as if it were a body without a soul. We can mimic noise. 'Dog a the see they how sentence sleep,' I gurgle. This is nonsense. But it might strike one, if in the right mood, pronounced with a certain sage-like tone, as a kind of poem: 'they how sentence sleep.' I think one can reasonably have two opposing intuitions about this kind of 'Dog a the see ...' nonsense: (1) The first intuition is that the words are not combined in conformity with semantic norms, syntactical constraints, and logical relations. Consequently, they do not mean or constitute a thought. Such sentences are not truth preserving in themselves and from one to another; at best particular associations might organize the seemingly intelligible combinations of words. Such

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pseudo-sentences might be expressive in the wayan expletive might be or as any set of sounds might be. I will call this the no-thought intuition. (2) The second and competing intuition is that while there is no linguistic sense to such sentences, they express a specific kind of thought or sense of the world tied to and dependent on the person who says or writes them: a unique thought. I will call this the nothing-but-thought intuition. This last possibility is in many ways a desperate hope. Any such sentence, expressing such a unique thought, does not mean like ordinary, transparent sentences. Such a sentence must articulate some special code known to the person speaking-something like Humpty Dumpty's 'glory,' by which he means 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you.' If they could be given sense, however, the sentence could be translated and understood in the way any sentence could. The putative unique, oracular sense would be factitious. This talk would then seem to be no thought at all. If I could speak this way, however, I might mimic the chiefs that would lack a consciousness. I could only mimic them since I would have no way to commit myself to this nonsense as me. I would be mimicking the empty gestures and the factitious thought. My statements would really be thoughtless, but they would not really be mine. I would imagine and think, whatever I would. The effect would be to displace the site of sense from what I say to how I am producing it, since I would not be a chief without a consciousness, only a person consciously acting silly. Since my thoughts are not normatively linked to these strings of words, these no-thought sentences can more easily serve as prompts to memory than expressions of thought. This is not how sentences mean. We can attempt another kind of inversion, if not with greater success, with at least a greater pay-off. We can attempt to divest ourselves conceptually of our body in order to show our soul as a facsimile of this lost body. This too is attempted in literature. Thoreau, while without the conceptual vertigo induced by thinking about those automaton chiefs, imagines altering ourselves fundamentally, and in so doing changing the possibilities the universe would present to our changed selves. He describes a transformed world as if it were a disguised attempt to justify art, half promise, half resignation: The stars are the apexes ofwhat wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall

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say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!-I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. (Walden, 6) If the justification of art, its ideal value, tends toward a deluded version of this seeing through another's eyes, then an artwork of sufficient complexity to generate and justify its own particular aesthetic strive toward an ideal of metaphysical identity with others. Such a self-justifying aesthetic represents an attempt to animate language, to become, through language, someone else without losing oneself, and, thus, to exist as a transpersonal identity that sees with the eyes of our species as a whole. The transparency of meaning and reference attempted in seventeenth century Universal Languages has been transposed here into seeing, into an aisthesis that gives this same transparency and clarity of reference as "the worlds of the ages." This transparency is a version of a vision of God, of seeing "face to face" (1 Cor. 13: 12), that God would not grant until after this life. We see ourselves under the aspect of what we see-the objects of the world are what we have in common. If we see through another's eyes what do we see? Not ourselves anymore. If we are as various as our several constitutions and if these constitutions determine our possible fates, then if we saw as another we would be another. The promise, however, (and its delusion) would be that we would still see what we see now, but as someone else-extending what is seen by seeing or experiencing the variety of "our several constitutions." In "Ithaca," the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Deadalus both hear bells, but the one hears a fragmented version of the layman's missal for the dying that he has refused to say with his dying mother and the other hears a nonsense verse that ended an earlier chapter ("Hades") in which he had visited the dead. The expression of this difference is described in answer to the question "what echoes of that sound (the bells in the church of Saint George) were by both and each heard?" The possibility Thoreau describes would be one in which each would hear what the other hears from within the associations that have gathered around the sounds of the bells. The temptation to want to see through another's eyes is not like what motivates someone to say, "While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going on in his head"(PI, §427). In saying this, as

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Wittgenstein remarks, "one is not thinking of brain-processes, but of thought processes." Thoreau does not want to simply know what someone else is thinking. His picture is not part of an interpretive game directed at a particular person or in relation to a specific ignorance. If such a picture offers an interpretation, it is rather of what it means or might mean or what we desire it to mean when we say 'our.' Our ordinary understanding of our involvement in the world is limited to the domain defined by our quiet desperation. Thoreau is not picturing seeing something new about someone. Thoreau is not after what someone sees, but how we see, how we inhabit the pronouns we use. Seeing not 'as if' but through another's eyes as they also see through ours is to become a more complex form of life that has at least four eyes, a network of brains, nerves, and limbs. This creature would not be us anymore. Thoreau's parable describes a limit that is like that shown when we try to imagine seeing others as automata. What do we confuse when we confuse what we might take as a mind for a world, in dreaming, in consciousness, in language, in prophecy, in art and in God? The answer seems too easy: ourselves. And to say what that is is to be obvious or tendentious. What is wanted is not an answer but a description. What are we that is shown in such confusion? If I ask that question, I can only offer myself as an answer. But that is an empty offer if I cannot give myself content, a place in that confusion that you could recognIze. In Thoreau's parable when seeing through another's eyes we are transformed into God, collapsing all time, all worlds (whose worlds?) into our being: "We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages." This might be a justification for or a mad description of art. This fantasy is almost like taking language too seriously or at least offering up the strangeness of language as so powerful as to undo itself into absurdity, as evidence of both our extreme alienation and as the means to survive it. In this parabolic fantasy we would seem to find Descartes' certainty not in himself but in others, to allow perception or, within the context of Thoreau's allegory, language to dissolve our ontological limitations into what sounds like divine power. But why does Thoreau jump from seeing through another's eyes to seeing through God's eyes ("all ages of the world in an hour, ay, in all the worlds of the ages")? Is this the ontological justification for loving thy neighbor? In seeing through your eyes I would already be seeing what I was, seeing as I could or would be. Another is our possibility. This could be true if we were already always each other, and the rec-

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ognition of our identity would be how god would always see us. Do we believe this fantasy? Ifwe do, then Wittgenstein could tease us back into sense by correcting our language. And yet this would be a "miracle." The ambiguity of language, the need for Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy, protects the distance between us. Thoreau's piece of science fiction here is a version of the quest for certainty, to confirm the existence of other minds by entering into one, or even as in artificial intelligence by making one. Thoreau assumes that an answer to skepticism (the temptation to solipsism) would reconstruct the fundamental ontology of all that defines our lives and our world. If we admit that such a reconstruction is impossible, that such certainty is illusory, then what would the construction of another mind amount to? Is this question the same as asking, 'What do I know when I know another person?' I can articulate what I know about someone, facts about that person or feelings I have about that person. I can describe what he or she has done-and why I think he or she did those things. From this I might even be able to characterize his or her character, which might simply be shorthand for saying 'if in this situation, x will probably do the following ...' I might say that this is so because x is good, but that might mean nothing more than that when x does the above, those things are what count as good. None of these facts about someone will answer the doubt I might have about whether x exists, since all that I know about x remains about x, but says nothing about if this is a real x or an ersatz x. The parallax formed between someone and me on another planet is both a way to be this other creature and a way to see myself from the outside, but not a way of standing beside myself in a sane sense, since I would not be myself. What would be constructed if we could remake ourselves into this creature, therefore, would not simply be a mind; we might learn nothing more than we already know about what our mind is, about the functioning and ground of our cognitive capacities. We would instead be constructing another soul-the vague totality of me as part of a world and with others. Still, if we admit that such a reconstruction is impossible, that such certainty is illusory, then what would the construction ofanother soul amount to? Wittgenstein answers: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (PI, p. 190). Wittgenstein's claim is a bit of nonsense: if the claim is true then it would mean that what we mean by 'talk' is not what 'talk' means in this sentence. If it is not true, then the lion is hardly a lion. If I convert a lion into a human being, I have not only remade the lion, but have also remade what Wittgenstein calls my form of life: what counts

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as human biology, our species-being, history, culture, society, language, desires, values, commitments. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for being human? At what point would a lion cease to be a lion and become human? Little is at stake in the first question, since the distinction is either conceptual relative to empirical evidence or used at the service of some tendentious moral distinction that relies on a stipulated definition of human being. In either case there is no role for necessity. The second question (At what point would a lion cease to be a lion and become human?) is primarily answered by stipulation, and that is not very interesting. There should be another reason, then, for asking what the construction of another soul would amount to. To see through another's eyes only looks like a remaking of us; as that, it is impossible. Instead it could be a discovery. The soul, unlike the mind, is not something that can be made or unmade; it can be discovered or lost. We do not need to pick up a book in our gardens to find it. I can be surprised that my children have voices, voices through which they travel and are there or here to me as music is. And I might then say with awe: 'they each have a voice!' It should not be surprising, but it is. And this surprise prompts a description of what travels with these sentences and phrases and words and sounds. So I begin again. Sentences do not mean something. We mean something with them or by understanding what is meant or could be meant by them. It is always us, we human beings, that take sentences as sentences and hence as meaningful. We can mistake sentences as things that mean, however, since they are the means by which we mean. We learn how to speak and understand, and thus, sentences are understood intersubjectively, even though this is possible by means of our innate linguistic capacities. We understand sentences and things in the world; we understand what sentences mean and that the world is meaningful. We stand toward sentences as if they were meaningful, even if they prove not to be: we hear words not as sounds that we infer somehow are words and not falling rocks. We might sometimes be wrong about this. But a person is not the same as his or her understandings, although we seem to be situated as what we are in this understanding. What I think can seem to be me, just as what I feel and perceive and imagine can seem to be me, or very like me. It is strange that we can identify with our thinking, feeling, perceiving, and imagining as if we were just these and then find that these things are only close to us-and even redescribe this thinking, feeling, perceiving, and imagining as happening to us. This final description has to be seen as startling. It might seem a modest point, possibly a starting point for the analytic investigation of

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these psychological terms or their correlation with our cognitive faculties. That would hardly be startling though. I use this description, instead, as a means of pointing to the us that is dispersed and collected in this precise although parallactical way. This description of our closeness to our psychological vocabulary, like our closeness to our children, shifts about as we close one eye or the other.

V. Our Picture of Picturing Would we lose our souls if we saw in the way Thoreau recommends? Would we see our souls by seeing our bodies? My body through these additional eyes would be more like an arm to the new mind that would be the composite of the old me and the old someone else. To see ourselves might be to take ourselves as pictures, just as art could be a picture. We can take each other as symbols of persons and human beings; how can one be a symbol by virtue, however, of being the kind of thing symbolized? We can take anything-my pencil for example-as a representation of pencils in general. A picture of a pencil will do as well as an actual pencil, if, for example, I want to show you which kind of writing implement I want you to use on a test. But a picture of a pencil will not do if I want to write something down. For the body to be a picture of the soul is to understand the body as picturing and, since the soul is not the body, the soul would be shown in the picturing. The act of picturing is closer to the picture of us than any idea or image. The lines on my face might be a picture of my life. My body is a picture of my life. I am a picture of my life; what am I, then? I am picturing, as are the lines in my face. I am both picturing and that which is pictured. It is this special relation between picturing and pictured that describes us, allowing the body to have a relation to what we call the soul. This soul need not exist as anything particular in order to be pictured by the body. Its existing is the picturing too. The soul is what is manifest, but it is also taken as the means of manifesting the humanness of the body, animating it, and allowing us to sense and understand. But the soul that is pictured does not animate us or think and sense and understand. The soul would be the manifestation of these-and they too, as far as we know, require a body. Picturing is the same as how one is manifest; the body is the best picture not because it is a picture but because it is the minimal and necessary means of manifesting ourselves to ourselves and each other. So the soul and body are the means of

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manifesting each other: we are nothing that is manifest that is not itself a manifestation. Are we, then, manifestations all the way down? We are not just that, just as we are not only that which we can know or represent or describe. This difference between manifestation and that which we are that is being manifest might be the ground for what we call the soul. But how do we know we are not just what we are manifest as? Manifesting is not a manifestation; representing is not a representation; describing is not a description. This difference is enough to give us the idea that we have manifesting, representing, and describing capacities and powers. There is, however, no manifestation or representation or description that is not an example and a result of manifesting, representing, and describing. We are both these powers of expression and articulation and what is expressed and articulated. This is what it means to be expressible. What we are that is manifest is not all that we are, but that does not mean that what we are is not manifest, not shown. This describes our oddness and the oddness of the body being the best picture of the soul. I am not just this body; I am not simply my thoughts; my emotions happen to me; I do not always know what I believe; I do not always know the source of my feelings. To the degree that I am bound to the normative modes of language and cognition, I can get a lot wrong about myself. We are a kind of thing that to be must be alive. And we must be alive in a certain way-as conscious or rational or free or just. I am not simply the type human so defined, however, but a particular human person. Who I am, my identity, constitutes my existence. If my personality changes, someone might say, I might say myself, that I am a different person. But it is less relevant to worry about what happened to that earlier person, than to simply notice that what I was before is understood not to be the same as me now, so that whatever I was I no longer exist as that. If it is simply a change in some behavior or belief, we might doubt the scope and depth of this change. If the change follows the onset of epilepsy, however, we might very well take that loss to be a real loss. It is not just that my personality has changed, but the capacities determined by various physiological processes have been altered so that what I can possibly be is no longer the same. What I am that is lost as a result of epilepsy is not the same as what might be lost if the atoms of my body were redistributed throughout the universe. That something is lost in both cases and that what is lost is what others and I would take as me suggests the range of what we take to exist when we take someone to exist. What I am, what substance I am, how I am constituted, and who I am

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are all aspects of my existence. Thus, I do not exist as some kind of ontological simple. That we make these judgments separates what we are from pencils. The existence of other things for us is tied to our perception of those things: for something to be counted as existing, it must be understood to be a particular kind of thing. The intimacy between being something (what I am) and existing (that I am) allows that in some sense whatever is manifest as something (whatever we human beings understand as that) exists as something. When we extend our ontology to include actions or events, then already how these exist can seem equivalent to that they exist. For actions and events it is difficult to separate what they are from that they are. We might infer such a separation by noticing that we can offer various descriptions of such actions and events, some of which might even be contradictory and none of which would be exhaustive. The variety and incompleteness of these descriptions allows that what an event or action is, given how it is manifest, is logically distinct from the existence of that event or action. In making such a distinction I am not, however, differentiating two kinds of things, but giving two different descriptions that have different logical entailments. We partially constitute events and actions by virtue of our descriptions and understandings. We also partially constitute what we are, what we exist as, by how we describe and understand ourselves. And this makes us different from the wind, pebbles, and explosions. We are that kind of thing that to say or show that we exist is to say or show as what we exist; to say or show what we exist as is to say what kind of thing we are. To be a something that one cannot say what it is is to ask if it is something at all, and we are also this. In describing the various ways we exist, I am also, of course, articulating some of the senses of 'exist.' All of these ways of existing are surrounded by ways of not existing. Are these ways of not existing articulated by the sense of 'nothing'? Do the senses of 'nonexistent' match those of 'exist'? Of course, we can assert that something does not exist. And we can make distinctions: 'my personality does not exist in the same way as a paper cup.' Wittgenstein comments in the Tractatus that the idea of existence is independent of logic, which concerns what exists and not existence as such. The claims we make about states of affairs can be mistaken, but we cannot show nonexistence. We can claim that something does not exist or we can say that a particular kind ofthing does not exist. In making such a claim ('the soul does not exist'; 'the ether does not exist') I am circumscribing legitimate concepts and claims from illegitimate concepts and claims. We do not then say that 'souls are examples of nothingness'; to do so would be to understand

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'nothingness' as if it were like a thing. Nothing is not a special kind of something, just as nonsense is not a special kind of sense. Thus, existence is presupposed in the distinctions we make, but this presupposition simply marks the limit of what we can sensibly mean and understand. The body is only the best picture because there can be no soul visible but through pictures. We cannot get our words to be hyperexpressive of us, to be nothing but us, nor can we get anything else to merge into being nothing but us. This is the form of materialism that Wittgenstein resists: the idea that we are nothing but matter, which means that matter could express us in the way that a wheel rolling is a wheel rolling, that uranium, no matter with what name, expresses its radiation. We are not just like that. We are very close and forever distant from our bodies as from our sentences. And yet the one is the best picture of our souls, and the other is as close to our minds as anything can be. This is the teetering plane on which philosophy and art roll down and get levered up.

"-'9 The Senses of Time

W E CAN ATTACH OURSELVES to what we say, to our names, to what we hear; we can project ourselves into sense. What makes sense envelops us; what does not make sense is not us. The changes between enveloping sense and alienating nonsense alter the world by a rate we can only measure against our attention and understanding. Such alterations we call time. Our descriptions of time picture our involvement with words. This is my first claim. We can use these descriptions of time to understand how our involvement with words is pictured by such descriptions. Philosophical errors in our descriptions, in their theoretical form, can help show peculiarities in this involvement, especially when these errors are themselves tied to the effects of language. In the first part of this chapter (sections I and II) I argue for my first claim-our descriptions of time picture our involvement with words-through an analysis of Wittgenstein's critique of the metaphorical description of time as flowing. In the second half of the chapter (sections III and IV), Ire-explicate my conclusions from the previous sections in order to argue that our descriptions of our involvement with words can, although they need not, picture time. My concern throughout this chapter will be with how we are invested in and disinvested from our senses of things and the senses of sentences. Our sense of time is one way we grasp this investment and disinvestment. To show this will require a detailed analysis of our talk about time in relation to what it means for such talk and for our ordinary uses of language to make and lose sense.

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~ MucH OF MODERN POETRY might be understood as different versions of what Helen Vendler identifies in Wallace Stevens' poetry as the "transformation of a spatial object into a temporal event ... The temporal unfolding of the moment becomes in its turn itself an aesthetic object" (7). Poetry in this picture is a drama between static things and flowing time, mediated by our flowing minds and our static representations. Objects in the world are cast as noumenal, things-inthemselves, and thus as atemporal. The poet temporalizes these spatial, atemporal objects by representing them, since what he would show by that representation would be his attention and understanding of these objects. John Ashbery offers another version of this kind of poetic attention and temporal unfolding. In what looks like a moment of self-description, he praises the poems of Elizabeth Bishop for describing "our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers of the life that is always on the point of coming into being" (94). Life would always be coming into being; it would never quite be. If we know ourselves as the inaccurate transcribers of this coming to be, then we know that we fail to transcribe our life, because this life never is. This life that never is is what we are; what we know is not what we are (we are not, we are becoming), and so we actually do not and cannot know either our life or the world that is always coming to be. The content that disappears here is that which gave us what we are in the passing of the moment-the disappearing now. The justification for these philosophical infelicities rests on two intuitions. (1) The first and primary intuition is that time flows, or that there are temporal flowing things and static spatial things (Vendler). (2) The second intuition, made explicit by Ashbery, is that our descriptions of the world and of ourselves, especially if all is flux, fail or are incomplete. This failure or incompleteness temporalizes our writing: time flows into the putative gap between what we are describing and our descriptions. When we write our life, display our person and mind, then what we fail to grasp or what we turn into flux is ourselves. Our descriptions are what we know, so that we fall simultaneously into this incompleteness of writing and becoming. I think the first intuition is factitious and the second wrong. Nevertheless, these intuitions are so recurrent and intimate with our sense of our human predicament that simply producing another philosophical argument against them would seem pointless. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein argues that describing time as "flowing" is a confused metaphor, a disanalogy between things flowing and time passing, which we literalize into a metaphysical picture that we then investigate

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as if it were a raw datum. We might conclude from this that our sublimed, and therefore empty theories of time result from taking poetry too seriously. If we believe Bertrand Russell that differential equations are the best description of time (or the change we call time), what value can poetry or literature have in its description of time? Or if our descriptions of time do something else, such as express our bafflement and despair at the losses precipitated by the ontological force of time, what value besides as a distracting consolation can poetry have? I think these questions come down to the following, more general question: Does time have a sense that is not metaphysical, but is still a sense or meaning in the way that a mathematical description of it would not be? If I ask about the sense of time, by that question I am not asking for the meaning of time qua time. Rather, I am asking about how time as change, or time manifested through understanding, expectation, perception, hope, memory, and confusion has a sense for us. But the sense of time is not just the sense of the language we use to describe the complex ways in which time is manifest to us and means for us. If this were all there were to the sense of time, this sense would be exhausted by our descriptions of these, of how we take time to be manifest and to effect us. The claim and the confusion of speaking about time at all, however, lies in the fact that what we call time acts as a fundamental constraint on not only how we live (how we move through the world) but also on our existing, that we exist. We can describe this constraint as time ('we only have so much time on this earth'), but whatever we might think the word 'time' refers to in this phrase, it is not a thing or object. We know time as a function of what we understand as effects and changes, which we ascribe to the general causal structure of that which exists. Time need not be understood as a personification here, but simply as the generalized description of these changes relative to our understanding of them and relative to what we take to exist. This allows us to describe different kinds of time by describing different kinds of changes. The most general descriptive difference is between physical time, that which is measured by physical means, and phenomenological time, the sense we have of passing moments. We can use elements of the universe to measure physical time. We rely on a minimal phenomenological frame in order to understand the measurement of less organized change correlated with more ordered and regular change (the decay of radioactive atoms, for example). Our understanding, however, has no role in defining what is measured. The nature of physical time constrains our other notions of time, but they need not be reduced to it. We can measure our lives, manifested physi-

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cally or through the awareness of change, through a timeline on which we can mark before and after. We can project our sense of the now onto such a timeline, but only by translating such a sense retrospectively to some previous or prospectively to some future now. The now, as such, cannot fit into such timeline descriptions, since it would be always now. One might claim all is flux as a means of describing our sense of the present constantly escaping our grasp, of describing our relation to what we perceive or putatively experience as continual loss. It seems intuitively reasonable to claim that we experience time. This use of 'experience,' however, is misleading. We say 'we experience events'; 'we experience loss and flux'; our sense of time is tied to the fact that events and changes expressed as aspects of the world happen to us. Our putative intuitions of time seem unassailable, as]. L. Mackie comments, "our concept of time is based on a pretty simple, immediate experience of one event following straight after another . . . Our experience of earlier and later on which our concept of time direction is based, itself remains primitive, even if it has some unknown causal source" (quoted in Sklar, 218). A phenomenological description of temporality pretends to offer this experience as a particular kind of metaphysical something. As such it is descended from Kant's assumptions about time and space as a priori structures for our understanding and intuition of the world. We could take this sense of the present constantly escaping as a problem to be addressed through cognitive psychological research, examining the timing and integration of sensory inputs in our awareness of what happens (see Dennett and Kinsbourne). We could take the specious present as a hermeneutic problem arising from our specific human stances toward the possibility of the future and our attending anxiety (see Heidegger, especially Being and Time). Or we could describe time as a conceptual expression of physically determined constraints within and through which we live and thus as a problem of physics. These various descriptions arise partly because it is not clear what kind of thing time is or even if it exists. Our ability to doubt the reality of time in the face of our continuing possible and imminent deaths rests on the forms that our understanding or perception of time takes. We assume that it exists by virtue of what we take as its effects: changes of various sorts. This is a strange use of 'effect,' since we do not mean that it causes change in the way that one billiard ball is the proximate cause of the movement of another. Simply calling time a condition for such changes, however, fails to capture the sense we have that time, temporal change, happens and is happening. That time might just be this sense of happening is one possibility, and

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would be a reason to separate our sense of time from the concept of time as a fact or non-fact about the universe. We ordinarily understand time to describe changes relative to which we exist. So understood, time becomes variable and relative, since what it is can only be expressed through such changes. Since change is a relational description or recognition of a difference along some line of continuity, its sense and reality are dependent on recognizing these differences, and thus it naturally takes a phenomenological form relative to various kinds of understood continuity. This complexity, involving as it does fundamental conceptual distinctions, means that arguments about time are arguments about knowledge and metaphysics. In this chapter, I am interested in only a particular aspect of these debates about time. I focus on the sense of time so that I can discuss how our involvement with our self-descriptions and with what we say and understand can be described as a sense of time-an ordinary sense of time. The sense of time (its kind of meaning, separate from its physical form and its existential significance) is articulated in confused theories about time. It is these confusions that show what kind of meanings are at stake and are projected onto the sense of loss and change by which time is manifest.

I. Where Does the Present Go? Does time flow? Prompted by a picture of time as a river, we are tempted to ask, as Wittgenstein phrases it, "Where does the present go when it becomes past, and where is the past?" (The Blue and Brown Books, 108). If this question describes a philosophical (ontological) conundrum, then one has mistaken the present for a thing that can go someplace, somewhen. The misleading analogy, as Wittgenstein describes it, is between saying "the present event passes by" and saying "a log [on a river] passes by." While there may be a reason for comparing a passing event with a passing log, it would be a mistake to understand the event as having the same ontological form as a moving object. Many of the philosophical problems associated with time rest on taking this comparison or analogy as expressive of what time is and thus of what has to be explained. Wittgenstein works against the metaphysical role in which we use such analogies, by, in effect, showing that there is no metaphysical answer to the question asking what kind of thing time is. He offers the following grammatical description of the vocabulary we use to describe

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the tensed aspects of time (the sense of its passing) relative to the vocabulary we use to describe the tenseless representation of time (time described as a timeline, as past, present, and future): We are inclined to say that both 'now' and 'six o'clock' refer to points in time. This use of words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the question: 'What is the "now"? '-for it is a moment of time and yet it can't be said to be either the 'moment at which I speak' or 'the moment at which the clock strikes', etc., etc. Our answer is: the function of the word 'now' is entirely different from that of a specification of time. This can easily be seen if we look at the role this word really plays in our usage of language, but it is obscured when instead of looking at the whole language game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases of language in which the word is used." (The Blue and Brown Books, 108) 'Now' has many ordinary uses, and hence senses: someone says, 'I need to go now,' looking at his watch; 'Now what shall we do?'; 'For now, let's just leave that wall standing'; 'Now and then I forget where I park my car.' These uses of 'now' are somewhat vague, but perfectly understandable. The senses of 'now' in these statements concern what I will do, my situation relative to where I am and what I am doing, and what I will want to or should be doing. In none of these sentences does 'now' mean the really real something that is described by the delta t parameter in Einstein's equations or in Hegel's description of the dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Zeno-like, if I ask about what the 'now' in 'shall I go now?' refers to, I might be tempted to say 'a durationless moment or point.' Such attention to 'now' as a freestanding concept ignores the perfectly intelligible sense of the word within the practice in which this sentence could be meaningfully said. Since we can only know time as an effect, we describe what we take as aspects of time-past, present, and future-through various metaphors, most derived from spatial relations. Out of such spatial metaphors, we develop theories explaining both the nature and reality of time. What McTaggart called the B-series describes how we correlate change with a scale of dates: a timeline. Theories of time that attempt to reduce time to the B-series, often justified by appeals to Einstein's theory of relativity, spatialize time (see Mellor). The universe becomes a complex spatial-timeline with all times present. Such a tenseless theory might deny, for example, that events have the properties of past, present, or future. The A-series, or tensed description of time, retains our phe-

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nomenological sense of the present as ontologically special relative to the past and future. Events are earlier or later than the present, in the future, or in the past, and so on. If, however, one tries to say what that present is, to even delimit it as some when, one falls into confusion. One cannot delimit the present as some what except by analogy with how we delimit points in space. Six-o-clock is a B-series designation. 'Now' is a tensed designation. The question 'what is the now?' is given sense by taking the tensed designation as equivalent to the non-tensed designation. One need not insist that the sense of'six-o-clock' depends on theories of spatialization of time, nor on the general validity of the theory of relativity as a partial description of the universe. 'Six-o-clock' is itself already a spatial metaphor, whose relation to what we take it to measure is defined by correlation. This is not the case for 'now,' which is descriptive of a putative ontological simple or at least a condition that we take as apodictic. We probably should not so easily assume the transparency of the idea of now, since there is a difference between our perception of now, involving cognitive events and various sensory perceptions, and any sense of now as framing whatever we are and do. The tension here is partially between (1) our understanding of now, through perception and in relation to the succession of events, thoughts, and actions and (2) our sense that the now includes, as Godel called it, "the existing." This is the same tension that encourages Kant in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" to describe time as a fundamental concept, along with space, in relation to which we understand everything we understand, while at the same time insisting that time is phenomenal and thus ideal (Critique ofPure Reason). Our common uses of 'now' generally do not specify a particular time in the way that "five o'clock," "midday," and "the time when the sun sets" do. (The Blue and Brown Books, 108). The meaning of 'today' would seem to have a mediate sense between our use of 'now' and a date. 'Today' is like 'now' in being specific relative to when it is used. It delineates a specific temporal duration-one day-and thus lacks the seeming unmediated, extensionless sense of 'now.' If you are standing next to me, then my today had better be yours as well. If I say that "today marks the beginning of ..." I can replace 'today' with a date and retain the content of what is asserted. But if I do that I lose my specific relation to what is being asserted. 'Today' is commonly used like the label of the frame within which we describe various nows. The use of 'today' situates the present more broadly relative to other events, a characteristic of B-series designations ('after event y' or 'a and b hap-

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pened simultaneously'), and thus its sense is correlative with and not simply expressive of an 'I' as are A-series designations such as 'now.' In the Brown Book Wittgenstein specifies the difference between 'now' and 'today' by analogy: the relation between today and the date is like that between "a hammer and a nail," and not like that between "a hammer and a mallet" (108). The initial point of the analogy is relatively clear: using 'today' to refer to today has a different sense than using the date to refer to today. The analogy suggests that 'today' has a logical priority over the date (see below). I cannot say 'today' of today tomorrow. I would have to say 'yesterday.' I can, however, specify the date regardless of when I do that. I can point to a date, which is just a number (and thus a kind of representation), but not to the day so numbered, just as I cannot point to today, yesterday or tomorrow. The initial point of Wittgenstein's analogy would then be to suggest how 'date' and 'today' have different kinds of sense relative to each other and relative to that to which they refer. If the relative sense of 'today' and 'date' were analogous to the ordinary uses of a hammer and a mallet, they would seem to perform similar jobs. How is the relationship between the use of 'today' and the date, instead, like that between a hammer and a nail? A hammer can do more than nail things, but a nail needs a hammer to be a nail: it has to be hammered, driven. Thus, the metaphor describes the different logical priority of one to the other. One can easily understand the idea of today without the idea of a date. The idea of a date and a calendar, however, depends on something like the idea of today, tomorrow and yesterday, not just on the idea of now, or even of now and then, since we need an order of days relative to a now that we can count (date). But what is the nail nailing? If the date refers to today, then shouldn't it tag it? At best, we can infer the existence of a hammer from that of a nail, since there is no nailing without hammering (even if this is just with a rock). In interpreting Wittgenstein's metaphor, I am not abstracting its terms into ontological categories about which we would make theories or experiments. We have to test the metaphor by using its distinctions and implications by comparing it to our descriptions of aspects of time. The claim that our uses of 'today' and 'date' differ in the way a hammer and a nail do bangs both ways: it tempts us into a mistake and suggests even in describing that mistake what we have done wrong. To make sense of the analogy, we can say "we use the hammer to . . ." or even "the hammer hits ..." In the second case, we have shamelessly personified the hammer and thus, by analogy, our idea of today. In fact,

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this is what we do when we talk about 'today' as a force, as something that happens, such as when we say "today went by quickly." It would be odd to say "March 11 went by quickly" and not simply mean 'the day of March 11 went by quickly.' In so doing we would not be using March 11 as only a date. The sense of going by is expressed through our participation in what we call today. This sense of participation encourages us to describe the notions of now and today as primary modes of time, as frames within which we live. If our notion of today is understood as such a frame, however, it means as part of a timeline on which yesterday and tomorrow are situated as well. We can use it to talk about the succession of large-scale events relative to our measurements of time that utilize movement and change, regardless of whatever physics we rely upon to give time an ontological sense. Wittgenstein's analogy is well made, therefore, to the degree that it captures this sense of something happening and the tendency to personify our time-talk, to make our descriptions into ontological modes. At the same time, the obvious fact that we use hammers to do things checks this tendency by reminding us that we use 'today' and 'date' to make temporal distinctions. The word 'time' can be used to describe things changing. But the sense that we are contained within time describes time as a limit to our world and us. If you ask me, "What time is it?" I cannot say "no time" (except as a joke). I might say "3 o'clock," and I might be wrong. I can communicate the time, but can I communicate time qua time? Any act of communication is constrained by what we call physical time and is expressive of a particular form of what we might also call time, an ordered description of a process of change marked by changes in understanding or shifts in intention, attention, and articulation. This is not to say that time is expressed always in whatever we say, as Aquinas claims God is. To claim that is to simply redescribe time or God relative to some metaphysical idea, as an ultimate limit or constraint within which whatever we say is, under some description, meaningful. The communication of time through a sentence (or through a language game) is always self-reflexive in that this communication manifests anyone's containment within this temporal order expressed through saying, understanding, or not understanding what is said. Such containment, however, is not expressed as the flux of the present or as something passing, but is itself a kind of ordered limit, like a syntax, expressed in our understanding. Thus, the question "What time is it?" has as its target a specific time (or date). As part of a particular speech situation (a language game) it organizes, through my understanding of it, a temporal order in which I am participating. Not being able to respond

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with the proper time can feel like confusion. If I cannot respond to the request for the time and I have taken the request seriously (I have not just responded blindly 'I don't know'), then I am paused in the exchange, at least for the moment of my initial confusion. My sense of time has paused because I have slipped out of the temporal ordering enacted in my participation within a language practice in which I understood what was said and what was sensible. In this case, Wittgenstein's game analogy is useful: I can't play the game instigated by the question "What time is it?". We do not exist, however, within any single ordering of time and understanding. Other temporal orders can at anytime emerge as dominant: my heartbeat, memories, hopes, expectations, the second hand of my watch. Any representation of ourselves is never exhausted in any particular linguistic act or understanding, but is generally the locus of a complex of implications, associations, beliefs, and reflections. Consequently, we take ourselves in relation to our descriptions as symbols of a whole we imagine but cannot articulate. The personification of time is an extension of this self-symbolization: when we say, for example, that time acts and contains us. It is not simply the present that is objectified, therefore, in "Where does the present go?" but also our awareness of the present as constitutive of ourselves in some sense, which forms the limit within which this statement does its work. All representations that we make bear some relation to we who make them; any word, phrase, or sentence can be taken as a form of our investment in the world as an 'I.' It is therefore not innocuous even to ask where a log has gone. Wittgenstein's point is that using descriptions of movement-what we know about movement-as descriptions of time, in which we conceptualize the present as an object, is misleading since the present is not like an object. A legitimate answer to the question "where does that log go?" might be "to the sea." The sea is the same kind of thing as a log, and we understand or can learn to tell and understand the story of the log floating down the river to the sea. If we ask the question "Where does the log go?" and are sensitive to the knowledge of time we have that is expressed or implied in this question, we might be encouraged to draw the analogy between the log and the present. The question implies a temporal frame that specifically includes we who ask or answer the question. The questions "Where does the present go?" and "Where does the log go?" as part of their ordinary sense can both represent our consciousness of the present and of logs.

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To answer the question "Where does the log go?" with "to the sea" requires that we have knowledge of geography and basic physics. To make sense of the question might require that we imagine an abstract (map-like) representation of the world. This sense of the world as a pattern of spatial relations may be explicit or implicit. The sense here is ordinary, but dependent on particular kinds of abstractions. There is nothing misleading or wrong about that dependence. These abstractions are meaningful because we situate both logs and ourselves within time. Any sense of a successful statement requires that the necessary aspects enabling that understanding be defined by what is said within the conversational situation invoked by our usages. The sense or nonsense of the question "where has the present gone?" is not a linguistic problem, but one in which what one says means relative to a set of philosophical questions, premises, entailments, and assumptions. The sensible question of "where has the log gone?" (asked when overlooking a river) has the sense it does relative to the meaning of the words and the point of the question: a request for information. The question also makes sense relative to how the speaker and listener understand themselves in relation to the meaning of the words used to ask the question, specifically seeing the log on the river and understanding what it means for things to go and be gone. The metaphysically confused question "Where has the present gone?" despite (or maybe because of) its nonsense translates these relations between speaker and hearer and the senses of 'where,' 'log,' and, 'gone' into a question about the change organizing and structuring the sense of "Where has the log gone?" That time is manifest in change encourages us to describe it relative to the means by which it is manifest (movement being the most obvious way in which change is evident). Wittgenstein's language game talk becomes increasingly misleading at this point. The sense of this question about the log, its ordinary sense, is not exhausted by what is said or meant. It is not that it has some additional meaning or force. If I say "now, I need to ...", 'now' marks the temporal position of what I am saying relative to the sentences before and possibly after, and it marks the temporal position of the need articulated in the sentence relative to the world. We can measure closely what we are, literally what we are, with our uses of 'now,' and these uses are quite ordinary: 'I feel sad now' is a measure that might mean 'I didn't feel sad before [then] and hopefully will not tomorrow [then].' I cannot say what kind of thing the present is, or even if it exists as such, but the kind of loss that I understand as the passing of time is

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clear enough to allow the present to stand for my relation to this passing: to stand for me as now, as bound by time, and for my perception of this. I need not be in a philosophical mood to take seriously the question about where the present goes. It follows, albeit in a confused way, from my attention to the implications of my using 'now' as a frame for what I do and as a stand-in for me (any now is my now; one does not need a metaphysical theory to say that). Logs are not like what we mean by 'now.' But I am like a log in some ways and like now in some ways. Wittgenstein rightly criticizes what we assume would be an answer to such questions: as if the answer to the question 'Where does the present go?' would be something like 'to the sea' but with metaphysical content. Asking where I go-where the old me of a moment before goes-may be childish, but to understand why I would ask it and why I cannot have an answer like "over there" requires that I articulate a sense ofwho I am such that I can mistake myself for a log, for 'now,' and for a now. If we understand our inclusion in time, we may have to understand ourselves as like all of these: an object, a word, and whatever is now and present.

II. Where Does a Person Go? The nagging problem here is that the sense of time as containing us, of the change that dissolves our lives and the change expressed as what exists, is fully metaphysical. The implied force of the hammering that describes the relation between hammer and nail in Wittgenstein's analogy captures part of that sense. Generally, our ordinary uses of 'today' mix the A-series tensed sense of 'now' with the measured form derived from 'today' as a temporal marker relative to the sun and thus as part of a cycle that describes a B-series. One might want to argue that regardless of our theories of time, our sense ofwhat and if time is is fully a part of our awareness of change. One does not want to say that today is to the date like a second is to now, since we give the concept now a special ontological sense: that it cannot be measured. I can say "I have to do this now, today" as a way of emphasizing that I cannot stall any longer. It is not the same to say "I have to do this now, the 15 th ofApril." The point is less about what these mean than about how I invest myself in each, in the sense that I can use 'today' as a closer measure of my life than I can the date. It is this closeness that allows us to imagine that today could be a hammer to bang in the date. When I say "I have to do this now, this second" I am using 'second' here to mean now, immedi-

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ately. A second is too short to be a meaningful measure in our ordinary interactions. So, I can easily use the phrase 'this second' as a synonym for 'now.' In contrast, I can use 'today' as a way of describing my life as a life. I can fit today into the number of my days, as part of a narrative of my life. These uses of 'this second' and 'today' suggest how a changing scale of measurement alters how we take these measurements as being about ourselves. And this is completely ordinary, in the same way that it is ordinary to understand time as not just something we perceive, but something that happens to us. The measure and idea of one second fits our sense of consciousness better than does a minute or a day: it matches the scale of our thoughts and feelings in a way that is more appropriate than the larger units. It is less appropriate, however, as a measure or form with which to describe our lives. These temporal measures, terms, phrases, and words can and do serve as targets for expressing our senses of loss. What is the justification behind our confused use of "now"? We understand the present as an object like a log. We also can represent ourselves as or attach ourselves to objects or nominalized relations, states, identities, and stances. Our representation of ourselves never functions within what Wittgenstein would in his later writings call a single language game, but always as the locus of a complex system of relations and reflections. It is not simply the present that is objectified in "Where does the present go?" but also an aspect of ourselves (allegorized as subjectivity, soul, self, identity, and so on), which forms the limit within which this question does its work. ~ THE NOW, LIKE OUR BEING CONSCIOUS, can simultaneously seem to exist and to have changed (vanished in time, to be replaced by another now). This loss can by symbolized by a log moving on a river. Since the log is also subject to change from moment to moment, the log moving also exemplifies this shifting now. The log as an object, however, cannot model the temporality of the moment. For us, the word 'log' also offers a target onto which our sense of loss can be used to describe our relation to the world as if that world were also us. We invest ourselves in a chain of analogies: (a) continuity of moment to moment is like (b) the river, and (c) a log on the river is (d) the present moving relative to that continuity, and (e) that continuity is also the specious present, always a now but never what it was. I will show what it means to invest ourselves in this way, in analogies and descriptions, in words and things, in the final chapter of this book. The philosophical confusion, which models the present on something like a log that can go someplace, as opposed to a candle flame,

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which disappears, shows how we can invest ourselves in two kinds of self-descriptions. The first kind of description centers on the sense of now as an experience of passing and loss. 'The present' and 'now' are surrogate markers for our consciousness understood as an existential subject. The second kind of description centers on the present as a surrogate for ourselves as a kind of object bound to objects and limited by them. Both senses are unavoidable if we are to speak, but when we confuse one for the other we might be tempted to picture the present as a log on a river. Many of our ordinary uses of our temporal designations are unavoidably, although modestly metaphysical: in describing and referring to things changing, we point to what anyone is such that they can point to things and notice change. We might claim that we experience and know temporal successive change, however, in relation to our particularity as something. Our relative particularity allows us to distinguish between our perceptions and what happens in the world (even if our perceptions are constitutive of aspects of this happening). This particularity hides two aspects: (1) our particularity as a person shows change relative to our sense of ourselves and the world, and (2) such particularity must be an accomplishment of a process by which we synthesize our sensory inputs and introspective states. This second aspect should be described using primarily neuropsychological and cognitive psychological means. Our sense of being a particular person is certainly dependent on our cognitive psychological capacities and functioning. The complex senses of time are a secondary aspect relative to these neurobiological capacities and processes, which count as a limit on us and our sense of time. These processes allow for our perception of change and provide the constraining form for our senses of timing, as opposed to time. Time, however, is manifest not simply through our sensations and perceptions, but through our various descriptions and understandings of things, including ourselves. Without grasping our particularity it would be impossible for us to give time a meaning that would include us. A creature that did not participate in such descriptions could have a sense of succession, of change, of various timings, which would include aspects of its own actions, but it would not have thoughts about time. The experience of time is a thought not an event. What we are becomes the relating of our particularity to this condition of change, which expresses how we understand things. To deny this is simply to deny that things exist to which I relate. Thus the log is not simply the misleading embodiment of the present. It manifests one criterion (the standard defining what qualifies as real) determining the

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form of what we are to ourselves. The language used to describe this kind of self-reflection might be 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness,' but the philosophical grammar of these words binds this self-reflection into theories about how anything means. The use of time in order to expose ourselves as anything or to figure the real and our particularity as modes ('subjectivity' and 'consciousness') in which we mean and can act implies that we understand our ordinary perception of time as organized as a fundamental system ofmeaning. We describe what can be lost by giving a sense to what manifests this loss, the passing log, which is, therefore, a surrogate for us.

III. Time Sense I am arguing, therefore, that we cannot describe our ordinary sense of time separate from describing how our speech acts and understandings are, what I called, "the locus of a complex of implications, associations, beliefs, and reflections." It is by virtue of our complex investment in what we say and understand that time is meaningful, although it does not have any specific meanings. What counts as a meaning is as various as our involvement within language. What counts as meaningful is as various as our understandings of the world and ourselves. The confusions, indeterminacies, or obscurities of our lives, our sense of the world, and our modes of speaking and understanding continually demand new descriptions of how their sense or nonsense shapes this involvement. We participate in and are, in some sense, absorbed in what we say and understand; this is a common enough experience of saying and understanding. This participation and absorption needs no ontological backing. It foregrounds the fact that we speak and mean; we understand and fail to understand. Time describes a kind of sense because any expression of time describes this kind of involvement and participation. Wittgenstein's use of 'form of life' and 'language game' might both be understood as ways to describe this involvement and participation. On one hand, the phrase 'language game' is a metaphor that suggests how the content of our understanding each other is itself meaningful within a particular, socially sanctioned practice. 'Form of life,' on the other hand, describes the limits of that understanding by gesturing toward the context of agreement shown by our understanding each other in whatever ways we do. I call this a limit because when we are in agreement it is simply a fact that enables us to understand each other. Specific

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agreements would enable us to understand specific statements in specific situations. Our form of life does not do anything in this, since it is just a characterization of our agreement. We understand the collection of assumptions, agreements, knowledge, and so on as a collection (even if we cannot specify what is included in this collection) when we fail to understand each other. Such failures can be minor or catastrophic. Any particular form of life can only have a form relative to what it is not. What is gestured toward as a form of life can have no role in our understanding language. Specific agreements, assumptions, and background knowledge, however, would have specific and identifiable roles in our mutual understanding. 'Form of life' is only a name for these broadly and collectively understood. A language game has a more immediate connection with how words mean, although even this is misleading (see below). It can be understood as a particular manifestation of a form of life within which, at least during a particular linguistic interchange or practice, we participate. Wittgenstein's terms, therefore, offer a very limited means of describing our participation in language. This is all to the good. It means that we cannot explain much about how we understand by appealing to them. The seeming explanatory power of 'language game' tempts us to use it beyond its scope. Wittgenstein does not link, in any clear way, his talk of language games with his talk about the meaning of a sentence. It is not clear how calling a particular linguistic interchange a game describes how it is meaningful such that it produces specific meanings. Calling some kind of speech act a language game helps characterize what it means for persons to speak and understand each other in a particular situation in a particular way. The meaning of a move in a game is complicated and various. A move has a meaning, but it is not itself a meaning. It is, instead, meaningful. Wittgenstein usefully does not offer a theory about how language means. He offers, instead, descriptions of what we mean by 'meaning.' What we mean and how we mean are dependent on the manifestation of the meaning of a sentence such that it can be grasped. Wittgenstein's account of how the meaning of sentences are manifest and how our understanding of them is manifest is meant to show that meaning need not be and usually is not some correlation between words and things. Words mean by virtue of not being senseless (PI, §512, §513). This claim is not as senseless as it sounds. The concept of meaning marks the limits of our particular practices with words. Such limits, although they might be described by rules, most importantly describe our inclusion within and competence with these linguistic practices. One way that

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this competence is expressed is as understanding. Understanding is manifested by our ability to go on within a language game (§ 151-§ 155). Understanding in this sense, however, is not a mental (psychological) or brain state, but an indication ("I understand") of competence, a kind of self-description or a recognition of sense, like our recognition of a musical theme (§154; §527). We might ask of what does meaning consist (§541), and find that our explanation will vary relative to the reasons we ask this and in relation to the kinds of sentences and senses at issue in the way and situation in which they are used. Understanding is manifested by my being able to go on, and thus something is meaningful if the language game continues-if I am able to function, as it were, from within a language game. If I say, "I don't understand what you mean" our conversation stops, or you might attempt to clarify or explain what you meant. I might still stare blankly at you, unable to make sense of your words or apply them to the relevant situation. Not understanding, finding words in some way nonsensical, configures whatever sense of myself participates in a particular conversation as excluded from that conversation, even if only momentarily. I finally make sense of what you are saying: "Now I understand." By saying "I understand" I express my reinvolvement in our mutual sense making (the language game); it is one way of indicating a shift in the nature of my engagement in the speech situation at hand. It re-marks a change in my relation to others and the world. What has happened to the words I do not understand? My failure to understand turns aspects of language opaque, "a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation," from the language practices I find sensible (PI, §500).1 This is a minimal description of the nonsense of these words; it is not an explanation of how words fail to mean relative to how they ordinarily mean. Thus, this description can be used without deciding among theories of meaning. If I fail to understand what you mean, I can ask for clarification. I can also reinterpret your particular use of words relative to background factors I first ignored (facts about you or the context). When I understand what you say and mean, I am to some degree absorbed in the conversation. I understand by being able to go on with it. This is another case in which comparing a particular kind of linguistic interaction to games is clarifying. If understanding is like playing some game well (tennis would be a good example), then understanding sentences can be like participating in an actual game. I am absorbed in differing degrees in this participa1. See Diamond and Goldfarb.

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tion, so that my sense of myself is expressed in my attention to the ball, the court, and my opponent. The phrase "my sense of myself" is a gesture, but it is adequate to what I am describing. It simply means that my relation to the game I am playing is expressed in my playing and that that is a fact about me when I am playing that game. The remarks "I don't understand" and "I understand" articulate, even if only to myself, a shift in the degree of participation in making sense of things and a shift in my attention. These shifts describe for me a loss or gain in the scope of my sense of the world. Understanding means to identify persons, motives, and claims; to articulate imports and consequences; to notice distinctions and to draw implications. My understanding has a rhythm and a rate. If I understand the sounds of play from the playground around the corner, I extend my attention by understanding so as to include what I understand. If as I walk around another corner, those sounds shift into a baffled roar, my attention shifts, I am excluded from the ordered sense that constituted my distant involvement with the events on the playground. The scope of my involvement in things has diminished with this loss of sense. Myattention and understanding shift and change rhythm and rate. The changes in understanding and sense, since they are tied to the dynamics of my understanding, are intimate and yet still public, still a part of my interactions with things and with others. We lose the sense of things in small and large ways all the time. I can lose the sense of things just by closing my eyes, by remembering an idea from yesterday, by being startled, and so on. When this happens amidst events and actions, when engaged in speech and reading, I often understand that I do not understand. My sense of failure in such situations shows my exclusion from what I take as intelligible: states of affairs, events, actions, talk, and texts, as well as my sense of having some relation with and to these, what I understand as describing kinds of continuity. My sense of exclusion, therefore, describes a change relative to these continuities. A change, however, is relative to how I understand myself through or as these continuities. It is thus a fundamental, if continually recurring change, marked by my figuration of these continuities and myself as sensible or nonsensical.

Iv. Is Time an Experience? Do we experience time? If I say that I am experiencing grief, I mean that I am grieving. Calling this an experience adds little. After the fact, I

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might characterize it as a kind of experience relative to other experiences. 'Experiences' in this case would mean simply 'other things that have happened.' Still, to say I experienced grief or happiness is just to say I have grieved and been happy. Changes happen, and I am aware of and subject to these changes. Calling time, so described, an experience, however, seems an empty gesture, a kind of smudging into a single phenomenological happening various events, understood and perceived in various ways and affecting us in our bodies and in our various senses of ourselves and the world. We use 'experience' to describe our immediate awareness of the spatial relations our visual percepts have with one another. The putative immediacy of experience implies that we do not theorize about these visual percepts in order to know what they are. We would just see in the way we do. We understand the experience of this awareness as something happening to us. What happens to us, however, will be understood relative to our understanding of objects and events (see Sklar, 224). Nor can we use appeals to experience to give us the ontological simpleness of now. We cannot have any access to the experience of a putatively ontologically simple and fundamental now separate from the functioning of our physiology. Cognitive and neuropsychological processes would synthesize sensory inputs to produce whatever sense we might have of the unity of experience. Our sense of experience, as distinct from experiences, happens as an effect of these processes and syntheses. Thus, we need not call time an experience or we should, at least, conclude that 'time' and 'experience' are often close to synonyms, both used in rather vague and gestural ways. ~ THERE IS NO MEANING TO TIME if we imagine that time could mean like a sentence, an event, our redemption or damnation. We might take the meaning of an event to be its causes, its effects, and the significance of these effects and causes relative to some rubric (my life, for example). But the change itself, the fact of ordered moments through which or as which events happen, has no meaning, unless we take it to be the clock of our lives or of the universe's. Some questions about the nature and form of time (e.g., whether it is symmetrical or asymmetrical, its relation to space) should be ceded to physics. Our perception of time and its conceptual roles in our cognition should be explored as part of our cognitive psychology. Philosophers can produce theories about the ontological nature of time relative to the analysis of the logical form of sentences and tense and our ideas of the nature of time described by physics and psychology. But I think there is a mundane sense in which we can and should say

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that time has a sense. This sense is not phenomenological nor does it rest on theories or pictures of mind, consciousness, or awareness. We have a sense of time relative to how we make and lose sense. Our involvement in the way change is manifest as time has sense. We understand change in many ways. This variety means that time is not a simple or single concept. Specifically, there is no unitary sense to time for us, but rather a variety of temporal orders, themselves shifting in such a way that our sense of time changes and flies and crawls. Physical time would be a limit on what legitimate understandings we can have. The concept of time in physics may not be bound to change. Our ordinary sense of time may not be fully congruent with that studied and used in physics (see Shoemaker). Time dependent on measurement and on our awareness of change, however, involves us. Although I do not think that time flows, I find incomplete Wittgenstein's critique in the Brown Book of the role of that image in our metaphysical assumptions about time. I have used Wittgenstein's deflationary descriptions of sense and nonsense, however, as a way to chart the mutual correlation between time and our making sense. The therapeutic goal determining much ofWittgenstein's later philosophy seems to dissolve our temporal awareness in the transparency of our ordinary language use; our participation in such speech situations has a rhythm of its own. Our ordinary senses of time and the differences expressing them are embedded not simply in our phenomenological attention, but in our understanding or failure to understand, marked most obviously by what we understand as sense or nonsense. One aspect of our time sense describes the pattern of our own involvement and engagement in, our understanding of, and failure to make sense of things. This sense of things is parasitic on the senses of sentences. At least one use and sense of 'time' and its cognate expressions is a description of our involvement and participation in the sense and the loss of sense of what happens and of what we say or hear. That we are not self-conscious in particular activities (i.e., when 'time flies') means that time is experienced as a function of our activity and not as a function of our self-reflection. 'Crawling time' is more the condition of being aware of the disjunction between this self-reflection and our actions. But in each case time remains a function of our involvement in what we say and understand. How we understand our visual percepts relative to our making sense of language and the situations of which it is a part remains an open question. We can lose the senses of things. We understand that loss relative to our expectation of sense. The sounds and sights of words bring expec-

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tations of sense, but not necessarily any sense. A failure of sense changes the patterns of relation we have with speakers, states of affairs, words, phrases, and sentences; these changes alter our expectations, plans, and beliefs. If a sentence loses sense, it is not just the sentence that turns opaque, but relative to those words, I am lost. Our understanding in various ways and with various senses and our not understanding in various ways and with various non-senses provides in itself a sense of time beat out by this shift between sense and nonsense. It is a complicated time because it measures us against ourselves (our successes and failures of understanding). The sense of time that I am describing is produced by the displacement of our attention and the shift in degrees of participation in understanding marked by the terms 'sense' and 'nonsense.' We can make patterns out of anything and all differences and changes that we understand or perceive show temporal changes. Our participation in the sense we make or discover is of such a kind that changes in kinds and degrees of sense shift our world in the way that time seems to shift "the existing" of everything. Our sense of things defines a kind of continuity expressed in our distention and investment in our understanding. This kind of distention and investment is akin to our investment in and estrangement from our names, which I analyzed in Chapter 7. What for me is nonsense is also not me, regardless of what I might say. For me to conclude that what I am is nonsensical is for me to lose myself. Understanding and the sense of what we hear or read is itself an investment in those marks or sounds whose sense is our attention. Our awareness of change measures changes relative to our own sense of continuity, at least that continuity expressed as our localized attention. We need nothing more metaphysical than that. We are not in our sense of time in the way we are in physical time. The sense of time I am describing expresses our intimacy with things and with the meaningfulness of language. We are never fully outside of sense, but the alterations in that sense redirect the scope and target of our attention. My world waxes through my acting and being present in my understanding and wanes through the breakdown of this understanding. Our making and losing sense provides a way of measuring ourselves against ourselves using this waxing and waning-a measure that is the sense that time has to us. Our absorption and distention in our understanding, in our sense of the world and others, means that a loss of sense configures us as excluded. One sense we retain in the face of such exclusions is the sense of the

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shifting attention produced by these changes in understanding. If time is a mode of understanding of our involvement in sense and nonsense, then it is misleading to describe time for us as primarily an experience. Time has sense in the way musical notes do, which is a sense lined with silence and the expectation of noise. But our sense of time is also like our slipping from music into noise and then into some other tune. Every turn of our own attention shifts among music, quiet, sound, and noise. Whether the continuity and order, like understanding music as music, a melody as that melody, is always local or if there exist underlying patterns moving us could only be postulated in some theory of psychology or physics. Our descriptions of ourselves, poetic or otherwise, show the complexity of this waxing and waning of world and sense; they are our attempts to give a further description to the fundamental sense of time we cannot get beneath without stopping altogether.

~10

Being Something and Meaning Something

T H A T WE ARE INVOLUTED WITH LANGUAGE and separate from it is suggested by the way we lose sense. The differential between the meaning of sentences and the putative meanings of fictions or poems makes literature a special case of this failing sense and of our variable relation within and to our linguistic understanding. How we enter and exit, how we inhabit and are exiled from sentences, paragraphs, poems, novels, fantasies, fictions, and our lives correlates with the ways these mean or do not mean. To make sense of such a claim, we would need an account of the different senses of 'meaning,' from how sentences mean or do not mean, through how fictions mean or do not mean, to how our lives mean or do not mean. Such an account is extremely difficult to provide. It cannot be provided, for example, by a theory of reading or interpretation. Interpretations of fictions and poems are, at a minimum, allegories, where x, an element in a text, means y, when y is part of a predetermined system of meanings and relations. The difficulties in interpretation proceed from the difficulties in determining the legitimacy of the application of an adequate allegory. The legitimacy of allegories and the appropriateness of their application always require justification. Any debate about interpretations, if it is not to be confused, is primarily a debate about the forms and adequacy of these justifications. Consequently, the significance of these interpretations or allegories lies less in the system of meaning described by the allegory than in this justification.

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Fictions and poems as such are not objects of study except in their production or proliferation; but beyond the material conditions for their production and distribution (and the sociology that attends these) what matters about these is already something besides the marks on the page, probably best marked in all of its vagueness and ambiguity as 'meaning' or 'meaningfulness.' And this something is, of course, as important in any history or political allegory that might use fictions or poems, as it is for new critical or deconstructionist interpretations. This, at the very least, makes the justification of reading and of serious literature a continuing responsibility for those who would continue to read and create it, but it also means that any such justification must be accompanied by an attempt to find and make explicit how we imagine a fiction or poem means in relation to how sentences mean. Fictions and poems have a complex disjunctive relation to our ordinary statements: they are not simply things we say, although we can use them to say something. While in themselves fictions and, in many cases, poems do not mean, we do enter and exit them through our various expectations, ideas, and beliefs about meaning and meaningfulness. Our involvement with language can be transparent or not, and this just means that we stand in some variable relation to what others and we say, mean, and understand. This differential shows that we stand in relation to language in a particular way, but it does not help us understand what this 'we,' 'language,' or 'relation to' means. Asking the question 'How do I stand in relation to my words or to the sentences I say, understand, and read?' is close to nonsensical. Our failure to understand what meaning to give a text, the lack of clarity about the relation between what Davidson calls the first meaning (dictionary meaning) of words combined into a sentence and the putative meaning of the text of which it is a part, describes a particular absence of sense about kinds of sense. What I am calling a variable relation is expressed through the distinction between 'sense' and 'nonsense.' Wittgenstein suggests that what we call nonsense are those linguistic forms and usages that we have excluded from our language. This is a minimal description of nonsense that is meant to defuse metaphysical pictures of language that assume that words carry their meaning with them and, therefore, can come into conflict with other words. Such metaphysical pictures lead to explanations of nonsense as category errors. Rudolf Carnap argues for such a linguistic metaphysics. Regardless of the theory of meaning we assume, Wittgenstein's minimalist description of nonsense-that is, the exclusion of particular usages and

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combinations of words-would have to be explained by any such theory. I am using it here only as a description. This exclusion of "a combination of words" is, I believe, matched by our own, as it were, partial exclusion from our language (PI, §500). This subjunctive, 'as it were,' however, is meant to show that such exclusions of words do not mean we are something outside of our means for self-reflection, outside of the ways we are meaningful as something to ourselves. Even if we do not begin against language, at any time we can find language against us. We participate in the sense of what we say and understand so that when we lose that sense we lose some sense of ourselves or find the possibilities of sense concerning the world and ourselves diminished.

I. Self-Reflection If we discover that we are mistaken about ourselves, then that previous belief becomes a fiction; mistakes when recognized are akin to fictions. Conversely, the problem of how to understand what fictions are and how they mean is, itself, a problem concerning how we reflect upon ourselves. This problem of self-reflection should be understood not as a question of viewing something called the self or subject or ego or person, but as a question of how it is that we can stand toward ourselves such that we understand ourselves as something, our words as ours, our thinking as ours, and so on. What I mean by 'self' describes a mode of looking at whatever we are. It has no extension and, thus, does not pick out some substance or entity. I use it to express a particular kind of attention and its first person vector. It is not what I am but the mark that I am that which I am. This 'I' describes neither a form nor a content, but rather marks the limit against which or in relation to which the world is a world and I am an 'I'-or anything. My problem is not unnative to what St. Anselm describes in chapter 67 of the Monologion: "Most appropriately, therefore, the mind can be said to be its own mirror, in which it contemplates, so to speak, the image of its highest essence which it cannot see face to face." I am construing what Anselm calls 'mind' as the means and modes of making sense and of understanding. Literature offers one of the most complex forms of this kind of self-reflection. If the modern form of this problem could be illustrated and exemplified by a picture, I would have attached Klee's Twittering Machine as a frontispiece to this book and then described how such a Rube Goldberg

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device could be a description of what it means to be a human being. I say "I would have" done this if such an illustration and allegory were to the point; if it could describe how we mean as human beings, persons, souls, pronouns, or as anything at all to ourselves. If Klee's machine could allegorize us, it would mock us, make us a machine without a point, a machine that is not a machine at all, half levers and rods and half strange birds, as if as featherless bipeds we might be pictured as feathered bipeds with some mechanical additions. The generality and even grandiosity of this phrase "how we mean as human beings, persons, souls, pronouns, or as anything at all to ourselves" I find unavoidable. If we deny its sense, which we just might, what would we be denying?-the relevance of 'human being,' 'person,' and 'soul' as descriptions of ourselves?-the philosophical significance of pronouns-as if it were clear how they meant me, you, us?-the assumption that we should mean anything? Need we be concerned about our being human? If I were to study human beings as if I were not a human being, it would not make me any less human, just psychotic. One of the first things I might notice about myself and my objects of study would be our mutual use of the first person. I could not study them unless I understood that it would be me studying them and that I would learn something about them. This mutual use of the first person would be as essential to my understanding of what I would be studying, as it would be to human beings in expressing what they mean about themselves and others. The phrase "how we mean as human beings, persons, pronouns, or as anything at all to ourselves" is my way of asking about the soul. In what sense, however, can we mean as human beings, persons, souls, and pronouns? My being a human being means that I am not a hedgehog or a fox, except metaphorically. And that distinction sometimes matters. My being human also means that I am an existent something, not nothing, and that I am an animate creature. These distinctions and relations are ours, from within our being human. My question, however, asks what our describing ourselves with a soul, as human, as persons under first person and third person descriptions can mean. If these descriptions do not mean from the outside, sub specie aeternitatis, with a modern as well as theological sense to 'species,' it at least means at the furthest limit of what we are. Maybe the question should be How do I mean as something that can take itselfas human? My temptation to attach Klee's Twittering Machine to this book as a figure for both its contents and concerns illustrates my very human temptation to illustrate being human with a picture, with a machine, or

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with allegories, even nonsensical allegories. My own attachment to this picture illustrates, in addition, the countervailing temptation to imagine that I, whatever I am, can illustrate a picture, a machine, a sentence, or a poem. When in the grip of these dual temptations I imagine that what I am as a human being can be (1) represented as something that can be known or (2) allegorized into visibility as part of an interpretation of what I do, make, or read. These dual temptations, to be illustrated by some picture or string of words and to illustrate a picture or some string of words with myself, both betray a conceptual confusion that allows self-reflection to collapse into self-knowledge, on the one hand, or self-interpretation, on the other. One might understand the first temptation, toward selfknowledge, as toward science, understanding what I am as what I (can) know or represent. One might understand the second temptation, toward self-interpretation, as toward literature or psychoanalysis, where what I am is given by how I mean, or rather who I interpret myself to be. I think it is a mistake to understand self-reflection as nothing more than a species of self-knowledge, making what we are an object of knowledge. Conversely, I think it is a mistake to understand self-reflection as a species of self-interpretation, whereby we translate ourselves into an allegory. Both self-knowledge and self-interpretation are inadequate as ways of describing how we mean to ourselves. This sense of meaning is of the complex sort that links how we understand fictions with how we understand persons. But there is a difference between how anyone understands themselves and how anyone understands what is not them. Our lives are ours. Wittgenstein describes this well: "When people have died we see their life in a conciliatory light. His life looks well-rounded through a haze. For him it was not wellrounded however, but jagged & incomplete. For him there was not conciliation; his life is naked and wretched" (Culture and Value, 53e). It is logical nonsense for me to talk about being inside my life as opposed to others who are outside it: I cannot be outside my life in the way that others are, so what this distinction comes down to is that I am me and others are not. The difference that matters here is not that between living my life or not, but between my descriptions and understandings of my life and how others might describe it. I stand in a different relation to my self-descriptions than I stand to my descriptions of other lives. And this difference expresses a different sense of meaning-my life as naked or wretched or as well rounded. This difference is constitutive of all of us. We might as well call it our soul. Thus, what it means to be human involves questions of meaning

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that are neither (strictly) epistemological nor interpretative. Our humanness is not something that we can describe by distinguishing ourselves from animals and God nor by defining our internal constitution as a set of physical states and conditions. Another kind of argument against the adequacy of knowing, as a way of describing our stance toward ourselves, might be the following: self-knowledge is parasitic on my being something to know or represent. The something that I know as myself, however, is not just a thing, but it is first and foremost that which is meaningfully me, that is, something to represent, within a world that is meaningfully a world. This is to describe what I am as a limit to the world and, thus, as not something that can be known or represented. Of course, this argument pivots around the distinction between an object to know and the meaning ofsomething as something to know. This is close to the distinction between what something is and that it is. The meaningfulness of what we are, however, is a richer claim than the claim that we exist. Self-knowledge should be understood at least as a species of first person reflection. Representations of ourselves can be further interpreted and used to mark our identity (as with a name), to offer pictures of the content of our mind (as in psychology), or to suggest the meaning of our lives (as with theology). The interpretation that would have attached the Twittering Machine to this book or to myself would have been an allegory, a way of mapping elements of the picture into an a priori pattern of meaningful relations. So at this point we might ask ourselves if self-reflection could proceed through interpretation. Does it even make sense to speak of self-interpretation? Our particularity is not something that can be allegorized without this particularity being lost within the intersubjective system of meanings defining the allegory or in the very process of allegorizing. Interpretations or allegories cannot register the difference between a first person stance and a third person description. How we recognize ourselves in fictions should be as remarkable as misrecognizing each other in a letter. At the very least, the inappropriateness of figuring ourselves through a Twittering Machine-like allegorical frontispiece is meant to suggest that we do not understand how to think toward ourselves nor how to talk about our machines, pictures, and self-representations. These failures are related. Our interpretations of texts, the world, language, and ourselves are riddles in which we do not understand of what we speak; this is, of course, what makes them riddles. So again, the peculiar nonsense that I am pursuing might be called what is left of the soul, whatever is left, produced or made visible by the pressure exerted by

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scientific descriptions of the world and of our humanity. The failure of Klee's painting as a frontispiece is more significant than any allegory one could generate from it. In fact, I can use my inability to use Klee's Twittering Machine as an allegorical frontispiece, as a kind of counterfactual picture, twittering another kind of nonsense, a subjunctive impossibility. It can do in its absence what it could never do if it were visible.

II. Persons and Words I concluded earlier, in Chapter 7, "The Analogy between Persons and Words," that we are as much our sentences and words as we are our memories. The question about our relation to language can only be formulated and approached through our shifting relations with how we mean, understand, utilize, and fail to understand our words and sentences. We use sentences from the outside, as if they were tools, and also from the inside, as if they were as close to us and as useful as our skin. If I ask how we are inside language, I am asking how we are exposed to ourselves as ourselves through language. To the degree that what we are can be articulated, what is being articulated and how? We must keep these two questions distinct: (1) How are we articulated or exposed to ourselves? and (2) What is being articulated or exposed? We can speak about ourselves and use language, along with other symbolic means (gestures, pictures, sighs, expressions), to describe ourselves. But we are also expressed as that language. Language becomes one of the primary means through which we become something to ourselves. Again, this does not imply that we are nothing but language nor really that we are language in any strong sense of 'are.' We certainly are not language in the sense that under certain physical descriptions a tree is matter. Our various perceptions and means of perception can show us ourselves (when we look at our hands and say, as G. E. Moore did, "these are my hands"). Through our seeing or our experiencing we sense ourselves as that which is sensing. Or at least we can describe ourselves in this way. There is a similar dual form to thought, where (1) that I can think about myself and (2) what it is I think about myself are, themselves, expressive of myself, even to myself. This last 'even to myself' is, of course, the strange part. What kind of thing would we be if we were constituted by words, so that we would be equivalent to our descriptions? Either we are not constituted by words, and hence the belief that we are so constituted is

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some strange fantasy, or we are so constituted, but we are then just what we are-and how could we not know that? Of course, it might be how we are so constituted by words that is at issue. The sense of this 'how,' however, is modeled after something like 'How does a steam engine work?' and that just assumes too much about what we are trying to describe to be anything but tendentious. How we might be constituted in some sense by language is a question that we can answer by looking at how we value words, one of the most intensive and systematic modes of such valuing being literature. We can modify the question above, making it less magical and idealist: What kind of thing would anyone be if they were partially manifest as what they are through language-self-description, linguistic statement, expressions, and so on? This question remains, however, only partially coherent. If human beings were made out of words, then life would, as Stevens writes, "consist of propositions about life" ("Men Made of Words"). If 'consist' in this phrase is understood to mean 'is constituted by,' then this is false-life is not constituted by propositions. If 'consist' means 'manifest through,' then it seems half-true-we do understand much of what we are and do through our talk about ourselves. A life is not a person, although persons have lives. Propositions about life would be about what it means to live as a human being and thus as a person. Part of the difficulty here is that our sense ofwhat life is seems somewhat disjunct from our sense of what it means to have a life-to be a person. But it is just this relation between being something and how it means to be something that encourages the idea that life might consist of propositions about life. If what something is is constituted by its descriptions, for example, then to change these descriptions is to change what it is. One can be tempted to see fictions and poetry in this way. So if a fiction is constituted by its sentences or by our descriptions of it (the difference between these comes down to the same thing in this case), then to change a sentence or the description changes what it is. But it would also change what it means. What it means is logically dependent on what it is-and this is true of our internal states, our actions, and events, as well as fictions. But if what a fiction is is constituted in some radical way by its descriptions, then it is nothing else but these. This goes too far. It can seem reasonable to ask about how words relate to the world or about how the world relates to words. It can seem intelligible to ask, as Wittgenstein phrases it, how we get the world into our language. Wittgenstein's corrective to our temptation to ask such questions is to

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show that whatever we understand is so entangled with our means of understanding that it makes no sense to imagine the world as something onto which we hook language. It may seem less intelligible to ask how we, whatever we are, get ourselves or find ourselves in language. This query is not asking about how I can talk about or refer to human beings, but how I as a human being and language user can talk about myself, me, this I. Such a question might at first seem odd because this talk of 'we,' 'me,' and 'I' is rather vague and clearly relies on grammatical categories to make sense, so that the question is self-defeating right away. One might insist on translating the question into two more traditional philosophical questions. I might ask about the relation between my body and myself as a soul, as something given by my use of first person that corresponds to whatever Descartes meant by 'sum' and 'Cogito' in "Cogito ergo sum." Or I might ask about the relation between language and internal impressions, as when Locke asks: 'what is the relation between a word and the putative idea, derived from impressions or not, to which it corresponds?' Both these Cartesian and Lockean configurations of 'I' and language retain the same conceptual divide between the world and language that is the target of Wittgenstein's criticism. It is a mistake, however, to imagine that asking how I find myself in language, no matter how misleading, is simply a form of a question about how we get the world into language. And if the latter is confused or misleading, we still need to understand what the former question is asking. Asking how I am involved and invested in language does not assume any principled difference between the world and language that needs to be explained. Instead, the question highlights the fact that we have an odd relation to ourselves and that the content of what we say about ourselves is not exhausted by the content of our claims.

III. Picturing Two Pictures My argument has been that to take Klee's painting as emblematic of a first person reflexive stance is nonsensical and that such a stance is necessarily part of any description of ourselves as human beings. Whatever we might imagine Klee's painting to mean it cannot be what we are. So I began by invoking a picture that I then refused to show, claiming that my refusal shows more than the painting could.

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A painting of a pot is not a pot. The Mona Lisa is a painting, not a person. We can get, as Wittgenstein describes it, "lost in the gaze" of other human beings. But we do not only get lost in the faces of others, as if a human object were required in order that one could look at a face "with astonishment and delight." We can respond this way to paintings. Wittgenstein comments: "One needs to remember that a face with a soulful expression can be painted, in order to believe that it is merely shapes and colours that make this impression" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §267). Such paintings can become targets for projection and interpretation. We understand painted pots relative to a dual limit. The painting of the pot is not a pot, but it might look like a pot. A picture of a pot will remain forever not a pot. If it becomes a pot, it would cease to be a representation. The relation between a painted pot and a pot, the relation between a representation and that which it represents, describes a limit relation, an asymptotic limit: one cannot become the other without ceasing to be what it is. Yet we can take these marks, shapes, and colors for a pot, which we can even humanize, idealize and worship as "an unravished bride of quietness." This aspect of our relation to painted pots, our tendency to be held by them and to project onto them, construes them as targets for recognition and projection. The failure of the Twittering Machine as a frontispiece, a failure of representations and interpretations of ourselves to make explicit how we mean as human beings, can be taken as a case of a painted pot not being a pot. Klee's painting is nothing like us. In this sense, its failure for me marks an asymptotic limit. One stands silent before it. The emblematic force of this failure can be generalized and thus can be expressed as a series: I am not this a, not this b, ... not this n. As an innumerable set of representations and interpretations, this emblematic 'not this' would enumerate the world, which is analogous to saying I am never that which I see, only that which sees. Such an enumeration would show me as that which is not given by this series of negations, and in this it looks like a self-directed negative theology. (One might discover a similar structure of negation in the "nat language" of Finnegans Wake). This generalized 'not this' emblematizes what it means that we can stand toward the world as ours and towards ourselves as something. The Twittering Machine as a failed emblem is both an asymptotic limit ('I am what is not the rest of the world') and a limit of interpretation (I can interpret myself in many ways and project myself into various pictures). The absent Twittering Machine as a mark of both of these limits shows us as that which is not represented and as that which attempts to represent.

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It is because we can imagine ourselves in this dual way that my rejection of Klee's painting as an emblem for this book can itself become an emblem for this book. That any representation or interpretation would fail to capture how we mean as human beings, described as an 'I' or 'we,' as a person, a human being, a soul, a mind, a metaphor, a fiction, a set of descriptions, suggests that I or we do not understand what it would mean to see myself or ourselves as that which can see itself. The oddness of speaking of myself, as I do in this sentence, both as 'myself' and as 'itself' suggests the problem. Whatever we are that we can understand can be seen only as it were from within and through our ways of understanding. This describes the dual form of this limit. There are a number of interesting philosophical ways of construing our strange way of standing toward ourselves. One resolution of this dual limit might be provided by attempting to give an explanatory account of our mental states and our self-awareness by using second and third order descriptions. I want to forestall this solution briefly. Second order descriptions when used, for example, to describe what it means to be conscious, characterize my consciousness as a way of seeing myself: that I am conscious of being conscious. Consciousness is not like a machine registering its internal state, but a way of taking such a state as a kind of state and as its own. The force of the second order description, however, is not just to describe the special form of consciousness, which it does rather well, but to describe our relation to ourselves as it is expressed through something like consciousness, which it does rather vaguely. The content of this second order stance is displaced into the 'as if' in the idea that I am conscious of myself as ifseeing another, in which case any second order stance would require mediating symbols through which we figure ourselves. But to displace the problem of consciousness in this way only alters the target of the question-now we need to understand what it means to figure myself as a symbol. This is no easier than explaining how I see myself as if I were another. One can see the problem here; without a special organ, whose content we have no way of describing without using the language of our other senses, we cannot describe our consciousness as second order without begging the question about who is doing the second order viewing. What, for example, does the first use of 'conscious' mean in the claim that 'consciousness is to be (1) conscious of being (2) conscious?'. Explanations using dimensional orders of representation or awareness cannot respond to the question asking how such self-reflections are mine. That 'mine' can be used in this way would seem to suggest that I can or do stand at some distance from myself. But how can I do that? What

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sense can I give to standing toward myself? There is no need to configure 'mine' as meaning self-possession, as does Locke, since it is not clear what sense we could give to our dispossession. We might speak of self-dispossession as a result of some neurological disaster. Such a disaster, however, would make the talk of possession and dispossession irrelevant for the person suffering (they could say nothing). Only ifwe could understand our own dispossession as ours, could it be a dispossession for us, and that is exactly what we could not understand if we were so dispossessed. No one else can own my thoughts, even if others remember what I cannot. This self-relation should not be understood, therefore, as self-possession. The relation of mineness that picks out the meaningfulness of whatever I am is not captured by any description of this relation as analogous with objects in the world. Our relation to ourselves through language is not normative in the same way that our relations to objects are. This relation of mineness has meaning and that meaning has an indeterminate form, expressed partially by interpretation, confession, psychology, making sense, associations, and experience. This meaning would be given by the form through which my stance toward my reflections would be shown to be mine.

Iv. Am I an Allegory? Thus, I return to my question: what is my relationship to my words? Stanley Cavell suggests that my relation to my words is allegorical, which can mean only that my words are targets toward which I project myself. Such an allegorical relation to my words would require a distinction between these words and myself, which the allegory is meant to bridge. In other words, I am intelligible as some this, some particular that can be represented as an 'A,' while some set of words can be represented as some 'B.' One cannot describe a general relation between myself and my language as a whole without appealing to specific statements B. If I could not be so represented, as some A, then we could not give any sense to the allegory. Allegory at a minimum requires that one set of distinctions be mapped onto another. There can be no such allegorical mapping independent of two sets of distinctions. An allegorical relation to my words means that A has some allegorically specified relation to B. But this A, if it is intelligible, means the same way these other words do. I cannot read myself into my words without

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already being somehow given within language. But this givenness is exactly what the appeal to allegory is meant to explain, and thus the argument is circular. The problem is even worse if we try to give content to this 'I,' in which A consists of particular beliefs, thoughts, feelings, interests, fears, understandings. To define myself (A) in this way is to assume that these words straightforwardly individuate a mental state whose content or meaning is the same as what we would mean when we use this vocabulary, and that such states are mine in a way more intimate than my expression of them. Since I might not believe what I think I do, I am not identical to my beliefs, so I have not gained much. The content of this vocabulary as descriptive of me assumes the very relation to language that I would be trying to explain. I am at the same level as these words when I understand my relation to them allegorically. I can posit some non-intentional, mental processes that would cause words to mean, but how does this explain or show what my relation to my words is? Can I say simply 'I take them as meaningful'? This is the point of beginning as I have done with the problem of self-reflection. The meaningfulness of words can say nothing about how they are meaningfully about me if what they can express about me is just that these words are meaningful. To understand our relation to our words as allegorical begs the question it was meant to answer, if that question is: "How am I, as a not fully-linguistic something, figured, found, or expressed in my language?" Under one kind of interpretation, this question could be understood as a variant of questions about indexicality and self-reference. If we understood my question in this way, however, we would miss its import. We cannot give any sense to the phrase 'our relation to our words' separate from how and what we understand through language. Thus trying to show how a non-linguistic something has a relation to these words, as opposed to a relation to things, a relation that need only be described through language, would seem hopeless. Allegorical explanations, however, can describe neither how we are within nor how we are without language. At this point, we might be tempted to abandon the entire question about our relation to language as perverse. If, however, we ask what the relationship between our propositional attitudes (to believe, hope, wish, regret, and so on) and our language is, we have asked a rather standard question within cognitive philosophy, albeit a difficult one to answer adequately. Propositional attitudes would at least be a constituent of us, of our thinking and speaking. We might then imagine that we could replace the vagueness of the personal pronoun in 'What is my relation

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to my words?' with these propositional attitudes. Such a replacement foregrounds the sense that questions about language are questions about our mental faculties. This is a reasonable assumption if one imagines that the problem is nothing more than discovering the functional or computational structure and role of propositional attitudes such that they would produce the meaning of our words. But that is not the question. In the question 'What is the relation between our propositional attitudes and our language?' what is the meaning of the phrase 'the relation between ...'? Excising the 'our' from 'propositional attitudes' and 'language' only puts more pressure on 'relation' to carry the weight and vagueness of my earlier use of 'my relation to my language.' The presupposed sense of this phrase must be something like the following: however we understand our mental faculties, we, whatever we are, speak as it were both through and within our linguistic expression of these attitudes or within language, broadly speaking. How to make sense of this 'within' is my puzzle and I think a concern that is as fully Iiterary as it is philosophical.

V. Science and Art I have been describing our dispersal in language and the beguiling inadequacy of language as a means of capturing whatever we are that can take ourselves in certain ways and be mistaken about ourselves in certain ways. Such a description should not be understood as claiming that the self lacks form or is somehow elusive or mysterious, but only that we do not know how to ask questions about what or who we are. I have suggested that questions about what we are as human beings (as entities or creatures that can make claims about ourselves and yet in these claims get ourselves wrong and at the same time be creatures that stand to ourselves in such a way as to define ourselves by our particularity) can be reasked as questions about how we stand towards and within language. Whatever I am, even to myself, must be manifest in some way, and that manifestation is both me and not just me. The complexity of what we are relative to how we are manifest to ourselves is also a general problem for us, for giving meaning to 'we, human beings.' Human beings have produced various and conflicting theories of the soul, mind, and person. Relative to whatever these theories are trying to describe we are not transparent to ourselves. This dispersal within language is partly shown through the peculiarity of the first person reflexive stances we take toward ourselves through

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language. We are manifest through our linguistic resources, but also through how the content ofwhat we say is constrained and expressive of the third person descriptions we understand as legitimate. These constraints and possibilities are dictated increasingly by the nonintentional vocabulary of science (through which intentional descriptions of nature are replaced with non-intentional ones). Thus, the nonsense described by the confused and unstable set of words we use to picture ourselves ('human being,' 'soul,' 'mind') can also be organized around a question about the relation between literature and SCIence. Robert Musil describes this predicament when he concludes in a 1914 essay on Walther Rathenau's Zur Mechanik des Geistes that "[w]ith us artistic and scientific thinking do not yet come in contact with each other. The problems of a middle zone between them remain unsolved" ("Commentary on a Metaphysics," 58). Musil is not, as is C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures, describing a rift in our cultural topography. And before one dismisses this middle zone as a geometrical illusion that can be dispersed if one realizes that art and science are simply (if such things could be simple) two different kinds of discourses that need not have any relation, one should ask 'What would count as contact between art and science?' Most de facto responses (but not answers) to this question fall between two extreme alternatives: claims by scientists that art is an irrelevant fantasy and claims by literary theorists that science is nothing more than a form of discourse or of interpretation. Such attempts at leveling or dismissal refuse Musil's challenge by erasing either science or art, removing the need for any 'contact.' The contact between science and art, or between ways of knowing organizing science and ways of meaning (and not meaning) organizing art, is not effected by the reduction of one to the other, nor by their mutual subsumption within some meta-narrative. The question 'What would count as contact between art and science?' remains unanswered because unasked, not so much because we have an incorrect or superficial understanding of art or science, but because we do not know what sense to make of 'contact.' We should not assume, for example, that to ask about this contact means to ask how we can synthesize or reunify these domains. I am tempted to say simply that we are this point of contact. While this is trivially true, I feel I must add "we, human beings." But what is the meaning or content of this distinction, this phrase 'human being'? The disjunction between our artistic and scientific thinking is that between the two different kinds of descriptions each produces of the world and of us. The lack of contact between artistic and scientific

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thinking means, therefore, not simply that our descriptions of the world are fragmentary, but that we do not have a description of ourselves that includes the descriptions of our being human that each kind of thinking produces. This lack of contact, therefore, describes a particular way in which we are blind to ourselves, an effect of the replacement of our intentional descriptions by scientific, non-intentional explanations. We have diminished the symbolic resources we can use to show ourselves to ourselves. Consequently, although the phrase 'human beings' can still define the scope of a particular use of 'we' ('we' as opposed to animals or 'we, human beings' not 'we, Americans'), 'human being' does not justify this difference or add, as the phrase once did, any specifiable content independent of the definitions stipulated in the biological sciences. This last proviso is the all-important one, since it means that the senses of these words are arbitrary relative to what they purport to describe, that is, us, while what sense they have is delimited by the physicalist theories offered by biology and cognitive psychology. I say 'as the phrase once did' since at one time the content of this phrase expressed our distinction from animals, angels, and God and our specific nature and capacities defined by descriptions of these putative capacities relative to our behavior. We can now only make sense of these words 'human being,' 'soul,' and 'mind' in two ways: (1) in relation to physicalist theories of biology and mind and (2) in our ordinary language not so constrained. I will examine both ways. Physicalism primarily describes how the capacities we associate with the mind are embodied in and manifest through physical means. There are two fundamental theoretical problems constrained by physicalism: what Colin McGinn calls the problem of embodiment (how, for example, our consciousness is caused by our brain states) and the problem of intentionality (how we come to have meaningful intentional states that are about anything). Together these describe for McGinn the vertical and horizontal axes of the problem of consciousness. I invoke McGinn's dual axes of 'embodiment' and 'intentionality' as useful descriptions of how the meaning of the words under contention would mean in a non-physicalist account of 'human being,' 'mind,' and 'soul' (all terms we use to describe ourselves). In such an account 'human being' would mean by virtue of the qualities we use to differentiate that kind of thing from things like other animals and angels. Having a 'soul' or a 'mind' might then be distinguishing properties of our being human. Their existence and nature is as unclear as 'human being.' Since it is the harder case, let me simply focus on the meaning of

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'mind.' I am using the word 'mind' to differentiate a putatively unified functional entity distinct from the brain, which functions such that our descriptions of our mental states pick out those mental states simply by virtue of being descriptive of them. Thus, 'mind' is really a code word meaning every putative faculty or capacity that we consider mental. One consequence of a physicalist account of mind, therefore, might be to deny that the word 'mind' has any referent. Within a non-physicalist and ordinary usage the meaning of 'mind' as descriptive of something that is me or is in me can only follow from the assumption that my descriptions of my mental states pick out actual mental states. This is an unreasonable assumption. The obvious effect of making this unreasonable assumption is the proliferation of kinds of substances described by particular qualities or properties: the soul as the quality of being alive or the mind as a psychic substance, and human being as the quality of being human. These kinds of substances can be either quasi-physical substances as was the aether in eighteenth-century theories of mind or distinct from matter as in Cartesian dualism. Consequently, in a nonphysicalist account of ourselves, the embodiment relation is constrained by the intentional axis, not the other way around. The effect of this is that the meaning of these words and concepts determine their extension. If this kind of non-physicalist account is denied, then these words have no content independent of our theories of embodiment. Since I take any good theory of embodiment to be physicalist, this means that our scientific theories, constrained by experiment, are the means of providing the content of these distinctions. But these words still have senses independent of this embodiment relation. 'Human being,' like 'person,' for example, can carry a moral content. Even more importantly our relation to these words remains intimate; they still pick us out. But it is not their content that picks us out. Rationality, consciousness, and our intentional vocabulary can no longer straightforwardly define 'human being,' 'soul,' and 'mind.' 'Soul' and 'mind,' for example, since they lack any clear ontological instantiation that is not questionbegging can be denied any real existence. 'Human being,' while it has a clearer sense, becomes an arbitrary distinction. In effect, the only ordinary sense the words 'human being,' 'mind,' and 'soul' have is more similar to first person pronouns than to substantives. Thus, they function as grammatical distinctions in a way at odds with what is at stake in the distinctions they make. While I might still be able to use the word 'soul' without believing in an immaterial essence, soul has no ontological claim on me outside of that belief. And without that claim

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or content my use of 'soul' no longer works as a definition, an explanation, or an interpretation of being human, but as an empty mark declaring 'I recognize this as human.' Thus, the ordinary senses of 'human being,' 'mind,' and 'soul' have been reduced to the content of something like the pronouns 'I,' 'we,' 'mine,' and 'our.' If we, human beings-souls and minds-are the contact point between science and art, then our becoming nonsense to ourselves from within our self-descriptions shows this contact to be nonsense. From within literature, therefore, to study this contact is to study the nonsense we are, the nonsense we might discover ourselves to be within and through the modes of meaning exemplified in language and fiction.

VI. What We Are with Words The question about our relation to language can be described by how we mean, understand, utilize, and fail to understand our words, by our sense of time, our sense of our name, by the way we describe our condition using various analogies. My concern throughout this book has been with two aspects of our involvement with language: (1) the ways our words lose their sense and (2) the way we enter and exit various units of coherence-sentences, paragraphs, stories, fictions, texts. Calling these 'units of coherence' is somewhat awkward and misleading. This is not meant to suggest that they are coherent, that is, meaningful, independent of our making sense of them. What counts as coherent is just what we understand. As a description of the units that we take as making sense, they are akin to what Wittgenstein calls language games. Units of coherence are themselves markers of our relation to them: they can be produced as a way of expressing how we might be described as entering or exiting sense. This coherence is simply a way of describing how we participate in particular practices and forms when we make sense and how when the sense fails a limit is shown that marks a relation between us and these words. While units of coherence would remain stable within a particular language and at a particular time, the meaning of our introjection, projection, or exile from these units would not. The logical form of our use of the first person, if difficult to articulate, would remain relatively stable within a particular language. The meaning of this first person would not. This is an odd use of 'meaning.' It certainly is not synonymous with what we call semantics. The meaning of 'first person meaning' is partly exposed by our relation to our words as that relation is

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shaped by the content and sense of our third person self-descriptions. A sentence could be a story, it could count as a text, and it could certainly be a fiction. Our complex relation to such a sentence would be a function of what the words mean within the context of that sentence. Such a meaning would be largely normative relative to how we understand the language we understand. The significance of our use of first person is not exhausted by its logical role in determining what we mean or understand (this is also true of third person modes). The first person is the primary means by which we attach to ourselves those mental predicates that would constitute what we would take ourselves to think and be: 'I think,' 'I believe,' 'I want,' 'I love.' These meanings can be normatively tied to how we think about ourselves as human beings, souls, persons, and so on, what I am calling self-descriptions. And the meaning of these self-descriptions can be further modified and informed by the existential expressiveness of the first person. The complex relations of these forms of meaning has been one of my concerns in this book; they describe where literature and philosophy dissolve into each other. I have described two ways we might find ourselves manifest as kinds of nonsense: (1) through first person self-reflections understood through our or my unstable relation to and with language, with an attending lack of clarity about what 'our' or 'my' means here, and (2) the third person failures of our species descriptions to carry any substantive sense, outside of their stipulated meaning within physicalist, scientific theories. Our situation is such that while we can ask what we are through our scientific thinking, we cannot discover through any science who we are. While we can ask who we are through our artistic thinking, we cannot discover through any art what we are. Through my discussion of first person stances as modes of selfreflection, I have suggested that first person pronouns form a kind of baseline for organizing our stances through language toward claims we make about ourselves. Most importantly, these are stances toward language through language and not toward the world as such, since the 'I,' 'you,' and so on through which such stances would be expressed mean only in relation to what we say about the world or take someone or some text to say-and not in relation to the world itself (not to the world outside of such meanings); it is the fact that pronouns would mark ways of meaning that binds them to statements. As non-intentional, scientific explanations replace intentional explanations of ourselves, the vocabulary we use to express these intentional explanations as descriptive of what we are (with ontological content), words like 'soul,' 'mind,' 'human being,' devolves into pronominal question-begging tags to

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which we attach ourselves. The loss of sense of our self-descriptions alters the resources available for articulating the content of that which stands in this way (ourselves), while proliferating pronoun-like operators in our ordinary language. The more of this kind of nonsense there is, the greater the difficulty in self-description, the more language will seem to fail the world, as it might in relation to science, or overwhelm the world, as it would seem to in various forms of linguistic (aesthetic) idealism. Language would either seem to fail as a means of selfdescription or to determine all that we are. The kinds of doubts one can have about what or if a mind is, whether we can with any confidence talk about those mental modes that Descartes took as transparently clear-the faculties of judgment, understanding, belief, and the expression of thought-if pursued within cognitive philosophy, can lead to various forms of behaviorism or eliminativism. Eliminativist theories claim that our folk psychology fails to pick out anything real, and, therefore, should be replaced by a new scientifically justified vocabulary. According to such theories, we do not know ourselves in the way we think we do. I too am accepting that one can doubt the existence of such mental modes or states, but I am generating that doubt through a different, although related set of problems. I ask: how do we manifest what we take ourselves to be in and through language in such a way as to not understand the nonsense of such manifestations? Thus I am construing self-reflection less as an attempt to know ourselves than as a description of how we take ourselves or do not take ourselves as nonsensical. Literature would be one history of this nonsense, of the loss of the sense of our self-representations and self-interpretations. Reading this failure, however, would not require or lead to the development of some better picture of we, human beings. Musil's challenge is not a challenge for science, but a challenge to our way of reading. We should ask how we read our involvement with and participation in language in relation to the first and third person nonsense that constitutes reading literature as representations or interpretations of the world and ourselves. One value the nonsense of literature would have then would be not unlike the value of false and outmoded theories of mind or other related theories of what I am in relation to who I am, which might be called theories of soul or person. Since we stand towards and within language, we partially lose ourselves when we lose the sense of our words. If the sense of a set of words is not transparent, as with the differential between a fiction and the sentences of which it consists, then this problem of meaning, this

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demand for interpretation, appears as a deformation of our relation to language. We read our being within language by reading this differential, by offering or refusing the sense of words as pictures of the world and ourselves. The vocabulary we use to describe this loss and these pictures includes the words 'human being,' 'mind,' and 'soul,' the pronouns 'I,' 'we,' 'our,' 'mine,' and, in addition, the traditional vocabulary through which we describe what and who we are: 'animate,' 'inanimate,' 'rational,' and so on. One implication of my argument, then, is that any sense we might make of literature is parasitic on our taking ourselves as within or inhabiting language, such that theories of literature or interpretations of texts rely on implicit theories of this inhabitation, construed as theories of mind, person, or animation in relation to some theory of meaning. If this is true, then we would neither write nor read literature if we were not blind to ourselves in this way, that is, if we did not find ourselves lacking the kind of sense that any claim about the meaning of a fiction might lack, since any interpretation of that would be question-begging and empty, just as any description of our relation to language as allegorical is question-begging. Finnegans Wake blinds us; reading Investigations can show us how blind we sometimes are. Whatever we understand about ourselves through literature follows from how we understand ourselves within literature, often articulated through our reliance on confused and implicit theories of mind, person, and soul. Such theories give content to this strange use of 'within' in the phrase 'within literature.' 'Human being,' 'mind,' and 'soul' tempt us to understand them as we would Klee's painting when we view it as if it were an allegorical emblem or a representation of whatever we are; we should understand these words instead as versions of my refusal to use Klee's painting in this way. They show us not through their content, but through the failure of their sense relative to the constraining demands of interpretation and scientific knowing. In this way, these words are not only analogues for literature, but they are also the means through which literature and our interpretations are intelligible such that we can find ourselves through them and find ourselves against them. The various failures of our third person and of our first person descriptions show us simultaneously under the aspects of both science and art. Thus, the ways we find ourselves nonsensical, which is just to find ourselves within and in relation to language, constitute Musil's middle zone. We cannot describe our participation in and involvement with language separate from how things make and lose sense. We cannot understand the claim language has on us separate from the strange way that

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what sentences are is akin to what we are, what time is, what fictions and poems are, and what the soul remains for us. The deformations of our variable relation to and participation in language are the only legitimate things we can read through literature. If literature is a painting of us, of anyone, then it is also a mirror, and we should read it with the recognition that we understand and express ourselves with words as if paintings and mirrors were interchangeable-as if there were no difference between mirrored glass and canvas. If we could do this we would see that we are the means of showing ourselves to ourselves.

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Acknowledgments

I have less faith in the efficacy of conversation than I should and too great a faith in reading and argument. The intellectual history of this book, therefore, should be a story of the arguments I have had with what I have read. Such a history would better situate what I have written than any list of professional affiliations. If I wrote such a history, however, I would concentrate on what I have left out. That history is not forthcoming. I do want to avow a few of my intellectual affiliations as a way of justifying the mixture of traditions confessed in this book. A long time ago I realized the relation between mathematics and physics did not satisfy my sense of strict logical agreement. This was the crisis that finally displaced my philosophical concerns away from science toward language and literature. My intellectual commitments rest in the line of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson. I should include Kant in that list, but I find that as with Plato, to say much of anything about him is to already start an argument. Literary affinities sometimes strike me as too personal to admit to anyone but one's friends. I did not imagine that the study of literature could be a serious study until I read Joyce's Finnegans l/f7ake, a book that may very well be a joke. If it is not always as funny as I would like, I at least find it more useful than Plato's Timaeus. I have had five teachers, although all very different in philosophy and belief, who have exemplified the highest level of intellectual integrity.

270

Acknowledgments

They are John Bishop, Alan Williamson, my dissertation advisors Barbara Johnson and Stanley Cavell, and David Perkins. I honor their examples. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published in the James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to use that material in this book. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues at Stanford, especially Robert Polhemus, Robert Harrison, Pat Parker, Seth Lerer, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Lindsay Waters, of Harvard University Press, has been wonderfully supportive over the years. I have also benefited from the thoughtfulness of the anonymous readers for the press. I little expected that teaching would be the means of increasing my trust in conversation. I have been privileged to teach a remarkable set of students at Stanford. I thank them all. People give well beyond single conversations and acts. Gabrielle Moyer was an excellent proofreader. Rebecca Starks has been an inestimable interlocutor and reader. Hilary Edwards has tirelessly and with great intelligence read and helped edit the manuscript. I thank them all. I also owe a great personal debt to Derrick and Francesca Te Paske; their children, Daniel and Joelle; my sister, Melissa Ramirez; and my brother, Matthew Bourbon. I do not know how to measure the debt lowe to Miguel Tamen. I can only state it. This is also true for what lowe my wife Pauline; our daughters, Paskalina and Georgina; my mother-in-law, Angela Paskali; and my parents, Bruce and Marilyn Bourbon. About such things one can only gesture.

Index

Adams, Henry, 29, 36-49 Aesthetics (literary), 6, 8, 118-120, 207-212 Annas, Julia, 146n Anselm, St., 240 Aristotle, 16, 19,20,119,146,147,167, 195 Ashbery, John, 21 7 Assertions, 53-55, 59 Augustine, St. 87, 88,145-150 Austin,]. L., 55, 108, 110, Ill, 189 Authorial intention. 92-95. See also Interpretation Averroes, 200 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 20, 21 Bach, Kent, 110 Barth, Karl, 167 Beckett, Samuel, 102-107 Berlin, Isaiah, 149n Bishop, Elizabeth, 15, 122 Bishop, John, 154-155, 174 Blackmur, R. P., 37 Bloom, Harold, 10 Brendel, Alfred, 82 Brentano, Franz, 152 Brivic, Sheldon, 151 Broch, Hermann, 8 Buckalew, Ronald, 151 Campbell, George, 81

Carroll, Lewis, 80, 81 Carnap, Rudolf, 239 Cavell, Stanley, 130, 203n, 249 Cicero, 121, 128, 129 Cognitive science, 18,41-45,200, 253-255,257 Cohen,]., 110, 111 Conrad, Joseph, 155 Cooper, John, 146n Cresswell, M. J., 110 Currie, Gregory, 54, 63 Darwin, Charles, 35, 39 Davidson, Donald, 239 Dawkins, Richard, 40 De Man, Paul, 10 Dennett, Daniel, 40, 219 Derrida, Jacques, 146, 147 Descartes, Rene, 246, 257 Diamond, Cora, 162n, 23 2n Dilman, Iltham, 193, 194 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 20 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 71 Dreams, 81, 182, 186. See also Unconscious Einstein, Albert, 221 Eliot, George, 11 Eliot, T. S., 10 Empson, William, 9, 10 Ethics, 45-49 Experience, 233-237

272 Express (expressions), 2, 168-191 Faraday, Michael, 38 Fenollosa, Ernest, 105 Fiction, 1,8, 12,13-15,50-79,82-85, 189, 239 Fictional intent, 62-68 Fictional 0 bjects, 68-74 Fictional truth, 52, 53, 59-62 Fictional utterance, 66-68 Finnegans Wake, 12, 103-117, 145-167, 168-191 Fish, Stanley, 92 Fontenrose,]., 126 Form and content, 101-120 Fox, Robin Lane, 126, 126n Frege, Gottlob, 133, 162 Froula, Christine, 151 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 178 Glasheen, Adaline, 183 G6del, Kurt, 222 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8 Goldfarb, Warren, 23 2n Goodman, Nelson, 136 Green, Peter, 126 Hadot, Pierre, 145 Hagberg, Garry, 91n Hamann, Johann Georg, 149n, 150 Hannish, R. M., 110 Heidegger, Martin, 147, 21 9 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 150 Hesiod,22 Hill, Geoffrey, 6 Hoban, Russell, 122 Homer, 32, 86 Hughes, G., 185 Hull, D., 19 Human being, 17-19,22,23,47, 155, 156, 241,251-259. See also Mind; Soul Illustration, 32-34 Intention (intentionality), 30-32, 131, 152-154 Interpretation, 12, 14,80-100,145-151, 154, 249-259. See also Oracles Jameson, Fredric, 87 John Cassian, St. 145, 146n Johnson, Samuel, 10 Joyce, James, 4, 5, 32,61, 103-105, 155, 160, 166. See also Finnegans Wake

Index Kant, Immanuel, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 104, 105, 168, 169, 170, 171, 187, 189, 191, 219,222 Keats, John, 29, 30-40,43,44,47,48 Kinsbourne, Marcel, 219 Klee, Paul, 240-248, 258 Kundera, Milan, 8 Lamarque, Peter, 59-69, 72, 73, 75, 76 Langer, Susanne , 91 Lewes, George Henry, 195 Lewis, David, 54, 110 Lies, 55-57 Literary studies and criticism, 4, 10, 98-100,251-259. See also Interpretation Locke,John,246,249 Lope de Vega, Felix, 81 Loyola, Ignacio de, St., 146, 148 Lubac, Henri de, 146n Luther, Martin, 149, 149n, 150 Mach, Ernst, 137 Mackie,]. C., 219 MacLeish, Archibald, 103 Marvell, Andrew, 9 Matisse, Henri, 32 Mayr, Ernst, 40 McGinn, Colin, 253 McTaggart,]. E., 221 Meaning, 84, 90, 101, 105, 139, 162-164, 182-191,231,235,238-240. See also Nonsense; Sense Mellor, D. H., 221 Mill, John Stuart, 85 Mind, 7, 38,41-45,209,251,253,254, 256-258. See also Soul Moore, George Edward, 244 Murdoch, Iris, 2, 55, 56 Musil, Robert, 188,252,257,258 Names, 180-191,236,244-246 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7,27 Nonfiction, 71, 82, 95-97 Non-intentional, 30-32,45-49,251-259 Nonsense, 1, 3,4, 11, 153-167, 176-180, 216, 225, 230-233, 239, 258. Seeaho Sense Norris, Margot, 151 Olsen, S. H., 59-69, 72, 73, 75, 76 Onians, R. B., 171 Oracles,S, 17, 121-144

273

Index Parke, H. M., 126 Pascal, Blaise, 39, 40 Person, 16,27-49,83,168-191,213,244 Philo of Alexandria, 145 Picasso, Pablo, 64, 65 Picturing, 212-215, 246-249 Plato, 11, 127, 169 Plutarch, 126 Poetry, 77-79, 164, 239 Polhemus, Robert, 147 Pollock, John, 29, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48 Pope, Alexander, 102 Poseidonius, 128 Poulet, Georges, 10 Proverb, 32-34 Quine, W

v. 0., 163n

Snow, C. P., 252 Soul, 27-49,168-172,192-215,242-244, 253-257 Speech acts (performatives), 107-11 7 Spencer, Herbert, 39 Spinoza, Baruch, 195 Spiritual Exercise (askesis), 145-151 Stampe, Dennis, 163n Statements, 57-59 Sterne, Laurence, 67 Stevens, Wallace, 10, 14, 125,217,245 St. Gaudens, Augustus, 37 Stock, Brian, 148 Strabo, 126 Strawson, Peter, 176n Swift, 8, 189 Symbol, 37-41,202,227-230

Rabate, Jean Michel, 102, 106, 108-117, 146, 146n Rathenau, Walther, 252 Richards, R. J., 40n, 46n Riddles, 20-24, 246-249 Riddley Walker, 122-126, 141 Russell, Bertrand, 177, 218

Tamen, Miguel, 37n Tawney, R. H., 133-142 Thomas Aquinas, St., 152, 224 Thoreau, Henry David, 207-210, 212 Time, 120,216-237 Tomlinson, Charles, 129n Turing, Alan, 45

Schiller, Friedrich, 31 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39 Schubert, Franz, 82 Science and literature, 7,251-259 Searle, John, 55, 56, 67 Self-description, 16, 17,47-49,72, 80, 171-175,220,256 Self-reflection, 3, 27-49, 240-259 Sense, 1,3,4,176-180,216,224-227, 230-233,236,239,255-259. See also Nonsense Sentences, 1, 96, 162-164, 207 Shoemaker, Sydney, 235 Sklar, Lawrence, 219, 234 Smalley, Beryl, 146n Smart, Christopher, 9

Unconscious, 164, 165 Urmson, J. 0.,59,60 Valery, Paul, 23, 198 Vendler, Helen, 21 7 Vico, Giambattista, 104, 184 Walton, Kendall, 63, 66 Williams, Bernard, 183 Williams, W C., 101 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1,4,5,6,21, 131,132,152,153,178,185,188, 192-215,216-237,239,240,242,245, 246,247,255