Metaphysics in the Age of Scientific Hegemony: Essays and Models 1527529487, 9781527529489

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Metaphysics in the Age of Scientific Hegemony

For a list of other works by Jürgen Lawrenz in the Cambridge Scholars Philosophical Library, see the last pages of this book.

Metaphysics in the Age of Scientific Hegemony: Essays and Models By

Jürgen Lawrenz

Metaphysics in the Age of Scientific Hegemony: Essays and Models By Jürgen Lawrenz This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Jürgen Lawrenz All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-2948-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-2948-9

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Contents Acknowledgements; Note on Translations ........................vi Introduction ...................................................................1 I Hegel, Recognition and Rights: Anerkennung as a Gridline of the Philosophy of Rights ................20 II

Confucius, Aristotle and the Golden Mean ............43

III

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultra-determinism to the Philosophy of Freedom ..........................................78

IV V VI

In the Labyrinth of the Infinite: Three Studies Compossibility and the Adjacent Possible...............95 Metaphysics and Quantum Cosmology in Debate on Possible Worlds ...............................108 Leibniz’s Solution of the ‘Rota Algaselis’...............127

VII Being ‘en rapport’ with the World: Leibniz and Wittgenstein on the Cartesian Duality .................145 VIII Eavesdropping on Wittgenstein ............................174 IX

Danto and the Pale of Aesthetics ..........................207

X

Music and the Aesthetic Copernican Revolution of the 18th Century ...............................................235

XI

Music, Truth and Profundity .................................261

XII Deacon’s Guide to Mt. Improbable ......................286 Reference Matter ...........................................................309

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the editors of the journals ‘European Legacy’, ‘Cosmos and History’ and ‘Pathways to Philosophy’, as well as the editor of a Festschrift for Bozidar Kante, University of Maribor, Slovenija, for their courteous permission to reproduce my papers in this volume. The papers comprising Ch. 4-8 are here published for the first time. N O T E O N Q U O TAT I O N S

Short quotations embodied in the text are usually marked of by quotation marks. Longer direct quotes from the philosophers have been set in italics and indented from the main text. Other lengthy quotations are in normal type, but indented from the main text. Translations from German are in the main my own work, although quotations from standard editions of the major philosophers have been used and referenced.

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Die Metahysik besteht nivht wesentlich in festen dogmatischen Antworten, sondern eben in Fragen. ... [Sie steht] auf der einen Seite gegen die Theologie, ohne ihr gegenüber allerdings eine absolute Grenze zu haben. ... [Sie] ist die Gestalt des Bewußtseins, in der es versucht, das zu erkennen, was mehr als der Fall ist, oder was nicht bloß der Fall ist und doch gedacht werden muß weil das, was, wie man so sagt, der Fall ist, uns dazu nötigt. ADORNO, Philosophische Terminologie II, 331

1) Metaphysics does not essentially consist of dogmatic answers, but chiefly of questions. ... On one side it faces theology, although without an absolute borderline marking this vis-a-vis. ... It is the Gestalt of conscious awareness, seeking to bring matters to cognisance that are more than ‘the case’, or that are not merely ‘the case’, yet need to be thought out because, as we say, ‘that which is the case’ exerts such a compulsion on us.

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Introduction 1 INTRODUCTION

Metaphysics in the Age of Scientific Hegemony Daß der Geist des Menschen metaphysische Untersuchungen einmal gänzlich aufgeben werde, ist ebenso wenig zu erwarten, als daß wir, um nicht immer unreine Luft zu schöpfen, das Atemholen einmal lieber ganz und gar einstellen würden. Kant, Prolegomena, A193.1 I

“IT IS NOT EASY TO SAY what metaphysics is,” declare the contributors to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in their article on Metaphysics.2 Indeed the inventor of the genre, Aristotle, did not know the word; and it is surmised that his posthumous editor Andronicus of Rhodes devised the title Ta meta ta physica as a helpmate to students, because the book deals with issues belonging to, but left over from, the study of physics. Therefore the congenial rendering A Supplement to the Physics offered itself as a non-technical English-language substitute, although (strange to say) it did not occur to any translator to take up this option. Be that as it may, the topics of this research are enumerated in Aristotle’s ‘Philosophical Lexicon’ (Book Delta), where we find a discussion of terms such as origin, cause, being, substance, identity, potential and others. He was apt to refer to this kind of study as ‘First Philosophy’, because it concerns 1

) “It seems unlikely that the human spirit will eventually abandon metaphysical researches altogether, for it would be tantamount to the decision not to ingest unclean air by simply stopping, once and for all, to breathe.” 2 ) Entry of Oct 31, 2014.

2 Introduction

the study of fundamentals, such as the underlying conditions of existence. Our senses, he explains, “do not give reasons for anything, e.g. why fire is hot, but only that it is hot [981b].” In other words, studying physics is a kind of hit and miss approach to empirical facts that may well impart skills and a bucketful of ‘hard knowledge’; but it is always preferable to understand the ‘why’ as well, so as to delimit the errors of only knowing ‘that’ and ‘how’.1 When therefore we read in Th. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions2 that all experiments are ‘theory-laden’, we realise that modern science still honours this Aristotelian precept. Experiments proceed from an agreed paradigm and are expected to yield results that will either confirm or contradict it. But all paradigmata contain a smattering of metaphysical notions, which indeed we cannot dispense with so as to keep our theories watertight as long as possible. It stands to reason, therefore, that a paradigm is not easily dislodged by mere hiccups in empirical studies. We trust them no more than Aristotle did, unless they pollinate our theories and achieve comprehensive peer unanimity. But many of these theories evolve today in an environment of so-called ‘theoretical physics’, a name which anyone should feel free to assign to metaphysics, as it relies on the same species of speculatio and the framing of concepts of reason that bore the meaning of ‘pursuit of truth and knowledge by means of thinking’. Is this the source of the Stanford editors’ coyness? It seems to be the case, although an historically more pressing ambiguity may be found in the change of emphasis and perspective that occurred in the 13th century with the Christianisation of Aristotle in the hands of Thomas Aquinas. It was tantamount to the hijacking of the metaphysical itinerary for theological purposes, so that most of the terms of Aristotle’s Lexicon were now made to serve for the conceptualisation of God’s powers. 1 2

) Met. 981b10. ) University of Chicago Press 1962.

Introduction 3

The seven centuries since then irremediably infected Christian philosophy and science with presuppositions that became part and parcel of our mental furniture and therefore almost invisible. Over this stretch of time, it became common practice at universities to appoint theologians to a chair of philosophy and vice versa. It is due to the persistence of this integrated doctrinal relationship until well into the 20th century (William James, Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, Jaspers, Unamuno et al.) that the aforesaid uncertainty clings to metaphysics. Crucially it was Kant—himself a theoretical physicist by profession!1—who began to undermine the general belief in the fitness of metaphysics to scientific merit. He found himself combating wholly analogous problems, for example the stipulation of a Prize Essay to report on the “actual progress of metaphysics since the times of Leibniz and Wolf.”2 In his trenchant riposte to the Academy, we find him claiming pointblank that the Academy’s wish was bound to be disappointed. Metaphysics, he writes, “is a boundless sea wherein progress leaves not a trace, while its horizon does not point to any visible goal. . . . [In short] metaphysics is in its own nature as well as in its purposes a comprehensive unity: either nothing or everything; nor is it amenable (as in the case of mathematics or empirical science) to progressive and piecemeal augmentation.”3

This is Kant is telling his philosophical confraternity that the metaphysics they have been pursuing is not a living body of enquiry, but a corpse awaiting its burial.4 The point is, of course, 1

) Co-deviser of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the nebular origin of the solar system. 2 ) This was the topic set for a Prize Essay by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin for the year 1791. Kant’s riposte appears as “Über die Preisfrage” in W. Weischedel (ed.): Schriften zur Metaphysik und Logik. Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1975, p. 583ff. 3 ) Op. cit. 589. 4) This is worth quoting for its present-day relevance: “All false arts, all forms of bogus wisdom have their time; but at last they must destroy them-

4 Introduction

that this so-called metaphysics of the academies was the ‘Godbesotted species’. Pursuant to this I feel obliged to say the same thing, namely that we are still classifying metaphysics as a ‘God-besotted thing’—as a philosophy dressed in a monk’s robes, which can no longer deceive us as to its intrinsic doctrinal saturation.1 II

It cannot be my purpose to arbitrate on such vexations, taking for granted that the reader is fully cognisant of them. But the reminder is apt that metaphysics gloried for a long time in the overblown appellation “Queen of Sciences” which has throughout the centuries irked its enemies from William of Ockham via Hobbes, Hume and Feuerbach to Santayana, to say nothing of ‘post-modern’ thinkers. Instead, it will be more productive to examine a genuine situation of stand-off where it is not metaphysics, but strict science that is clearly seen to be out of its depth. It is only too familiar a picture nowadays for scientists to promulgate the message that quantitative and operational selves at the highest peak of their culture, which also marks the moment in time when its sun sets for them. That metaphysics has in fact fallen into such a state as we speak of is shown by its sorry neglect among all learned societies [where other sciences of all kinds are assiduously pursued].” Op. cit. 244. 1 ) Ortega y Gasset added a remarkable observation to this: “Yet there is perhaps another and deeper motivation for the Thomism of the Church, namely: That a Christian could hardly be interested in philosophy qua philosophy; it is useless to him. It is however of great interest to him to “speak of God”, theologein. But for the sake of speaking, he needs a language, a system of signs which is common to them all. This is what philosophy provides for him: a way of speaking, a modus dicendi, nothing else. Philosophy as a means of acquiring knowledge or the truth is an irrelevant criterion in this. Philosophy is merely a mediator and turned into a resource of terminology. Accordingly it transpired that philosophy was changed into a device that could vouchsafe a mutual understanding when speaking of God. Ortega y Gasset: Der Prinzipienbegriff bei Leibniz, Gotthold Müller, Munich 1966, p. 178.

Introduction 5

readings are so highly suggestive that it seems rational to accept them as facts, even as truths. And so, we hear many voices proclaiming that the theory of evolution is no longer merely a theory, but a fact.1 Call it hubris or what you will, but when its basic premises are inspected, we are (or should be) struck by an internal self-contradiction that has been rather thinly papered over and led to a plurality of mutually competing doctrines. In plain language: Evolution is not a neutral process like water tumbling down a mountain side and gouging out a river bed, but is concerned with the origin, adaptation and diversification of animate creatures by way of their intentional exploitation and modification of the environment so as to provide themselves with a habitat and survival resources. The environment reacts to this interference with the same passivity as water tumbling down a mountain side. Accordingly the drive motor of evolution is a quid pro quo that makes sense only as a development occurring inside the living partition of the planet that can moreover only be identified post factum. Lacking the objective testability (not to mention predictability) of genetic theories, evolutionary doctrines must contend with a tracery of zillions of intentional acts that might well tax even the allknowing God of the scholastics. In other words, evolution is an historical process; its theory comprising a dozen or more incommiscible canons (e.g. phylogeny, cladistics, genetics etc.) which add up to a very inexact and conflict ridden account of speciation and adaptation patterns over more than two billion years. Moreover it should not remain unmentioned that some of these theses (e.g. ‘RNA World’) require more miracles to occur spontaneously than even a hardened roulette player could sustain.2 1

) A trend put forth by Stephen Jay Gould: “Evolution as Fact and Theory”, Discover 2, 1981, pp. 34-7 and widely held to be authoritative ever since. 2 ) Cf. Christian de Duve, Vital Dust, New York, Harper Collins 1995, where the author piles up innumerable lucky accidents and fortuitous predispositions in the chemical ‘primal soup’, so that one begins to wonder long before the end why the whole show took as many millions/billions of

6 Introduction

Does this spell out as a need for resorting to metaphysics after all? The answer to this question is by no means clear-cut. Metaphysics cannot simply apply its principles and axioms to this congeries. It can only rely on the one dictum that is indubitably clear, namely that the personae dramatis of evolution are without exception entelechies.1 However, this is not yet enough to clinch the point. We cannot inspect intentional behaviour directly; and our expectations from it cannot factor-in the mutations of the environment which change the quantity and quality of survival resources. It leaves the original dilemma unresolved except for the curiosity and rational impulses of the human agent seeking to nail down objective phenomena for which non-objective phenomena are responsible. Which is to say that the sources and causes of these trends are intentional and wholly contingent acts which comprise an asymmetrical and monodirectional incision into mechano-chemical processes which in turn thrust those entelechies into a future that is not written into the neutral fabric of such events. The reader will be aware that this example can be multiplied a dozen-fold across all sciences which seek to dispense with the category of self-animation. For example, we might recall the embarrassing coinage ‘teleonomy’ (a kind of ‘as-if’ teleology) in Monod’s once celebrated account of biology to savour a locution that looks afraid of acknowledging the difference between life and non-life.2 Yet this stands in stark contrast with the enquiries of such high-standing cosmologists as Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler, who came to a startled recognition of their own role in the collapse of a wave front in quantum experiments—the latter coining the phrase ‘participatory anthropic years to settle down (e.g. to cite a startling instance on his p. 31, reporting how Theodor Wieland “simply threw a handful of [amino thioesters] in water . . . and peptides were formed, even though no catalyst was present.”). 1 ) This is said with emphasis on the seriously propagated belief, that genes can be held responsible for the creation of entelechies. 2 ) Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, New York, Alfred Knopf 1971.

Introduction 7

principle’ as an expression of his understanding that enquirers into quantum physics are persistently confronted with resolving binary solutions at their own sweet will, so that the human agent is effectively ‘deciding’ which of the two to actualise.1 None of this is said with the purpose of denigrating scientific approaches to the living realm. On the contrary, scientists retrieved respectable results and real knowledge in, e.g., the study of organic chemistry, neurophysiology, genetics, pathology and so on. But none of this lifts the lid on the fundamental issues—it does not divulge the mystery of self-animation, nor the qualia and private thoughts of a person’s experience, nor even the way our personal memories are laid down.2 However, yet another caveat is necessary. Most researchers in the neurophysiological field have sought to extract, or at least illuminate, the concept of a conscious ‘mind’, very sure of themselves that the relevant data will reveal affirmative information. But consider this: As the mutual traffic among neurons comprises nothing other than electrical signals, how can qualia such as the appreciation of the difference between a Mozart and Brahms symphony be ‘explained’ by its reduction to the functions of neurons? The latter (let us not forget) operate with an alphabet of three, ‘passing on’, ‘suppressing’ and ‘modifying’. Considering the sheer quantity of writing in this genre, this is simply bad form. Nearly 100 years ago, John Dewey formulated an idea that sounds much more plausible: “Mind is primarily a verb (he writes); “it denotes all the ways 1

) Origin of the ‘many worlds’, ‘multiple universes’ and ‘anthropic principle’ doctrines, the last-named a cousin of the ‘designer universe’ idea. Cf. Eugene Wigner: Symmetries and Reflections, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1967, pp. 171-84; John Archibald Wheeler: “It from Bit”, in Information, Physics, Quantum Mechanics: The Search for Links, Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo 1989, pp. 354-68. 2 ) Movie aficionados will recall Blade Runner (and its sequel), where it is taken for granted that memories are pictures and movies stored ‘somewhere’ in the neurophysiological system and therefore portable into another person’s mind. Metaphysical thinkers might tap their temples in response to this phantasmagorical proposition.

8 Introduction

in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situations in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers.”1

Extrapolating from neurophysiological ‘data’ upon human thinking and behaviour is therefore parlous, to say the least. We do not know and cannot ascertain that they are latent with information, for data are not information carriers: they must be ‘translated’ (decrypted, assessed, evaluated and indeed constructed) to emerge as information that makes sense to an enquirer. Moreover, the temptation is always at hand, and rarely admitted, that the use of words like ‘function’ in relation to neurons (as well as cells and organs) is tantamount to equating them with plastic parts. But two words serve to encapsulate the difference: material things function; organic things work. We cannot afford to ignore this crucial difference. In the last resort, we have to acknowledge that a ‘theory of everything’ is a pipe dream and that we are limited by the kind of organism we are, which impacts upon our capacity for acquiring knowledge. We do not have access to God’s mind, nor to the infinite reaches of ‘space’ and ‘time’, whatever those words may be held to denote. The best we can do, and need not be ashamed of, is the mythos eikos of which Plato speaks—the ‘likely story’. Nor are we bereft of resources in this department. The patterns of human and creature intentionality altogether are hardly so obscure that we couldn’t recognise most of them, although we must bear in mind that variety is intrinsic to them. The fact that intentionality in humans is overwhelmingly engendered tacitly should not pose an insurmountable barrier, for we understand these indirect behaviours well enough in our daily intercourse. For our purposes in the essays of this 1

) John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York, Perigee Books 1980, p. 263.

Introduction 9

book, this is the domain appropriate to metaphysics—things and events with sole relevance ad hominem that nature does not offer up in pre-packaged form. Moreover it does not look strange in the context of Aristotelian metaphysics; comprising as it were a new wing to the mansion of his principles. They become problematic only when we try to quantify and tabulate them, as if they were neutral data. In sum: the range of metaphysical thinking has shrunk in its scope from what it formerly encompassed, at the beginning of the Christian era; but this is not to say that it has become obsolete. As an author, I take the liberty of assuming that the reader is familiar with the scope of discussion on these issues in present day philosophy. The important remaining issue is, how to justify metaphysical speculation in the face of the scantiness of ‘hard knowledge’ emerging from its researches. III

One provisional answer would be, that although most of our metaphysical preoccupations do not touch on facts in the world, they embrace facts in the human world. And whatever pertains to these facts is ipso facto deeply entangled in the skeins of our intellectual, psychological and emotional grasp of this world. Accordingly it is mistaken to seek answers pertaining to questions we put to this world by scientific means—as if stepping outside of the human being and gazing at this phenomenon objectively could impart knowledge of how the parts confer knowledge about the whole. It is rather obvious that nothing of the kind pertains. Whence the other provisional answer, that philosophy is only incidentally concerned with facts of the kind that serve the acquisition of knowledge. After all, if that were the case, philosophy would sooner or later become starved of issues to resolve (which is precisely the situation that led to the pronouncement of ‘the death of philosophy’). For its emphasis lies with wis rather than ken, whence ‘wisdom’—in short, with tacit, implied, in-

10 Introduction

sinuated, intimated, alluded, indirect, ineffable clues and illumination by means of sensing, rapport, affinity, empathy, hunches and instinct. The dislodgement of gods, angels and spirits from metaphysics therefore cleared the way, on one side for ‘natural philosophy’ to mutate into science; on the other, for metaphysical philosophy to wave good-bye to the futile ontologies that had begun to cling to it like brambles to breeches.1 As Heribert Boeder writes on the presumption of lending existence to the Almighty by simply arguing the case: “If this is the first question, then it is also the last; and so we must not be surprised that this persistent and irremovable question kept metaphysics going and determined its entire history.”2 In short, the office of metaphysics may well include the provision of logically well-entailed evidence for the necessity of a kinoumenon kinei; but having done so, then to retire and refrain from prompting illicit figments of being to the stage.3 In any ultimate sense we can be sure of only one thing: that we desperately need to refocus our attention on the one instance of life in the cosmos that is definitely known to embody rational consciousness and awareness.4 This, accordingly, is presently to be taken as the demesne of metaphysics—a discipline shorn of its theocratic imperatives, its delusion of final answers; but returning to its authentic mis1

) Ontology served the mistaken and wholly superfluous notion that a ‘science of being’ ought to accompany the philosophy of being. But this is merely an attempt to smuggle a necessary being into the argument, which of necessity cannot be caught in the net of ontology without exhibiting predicates or qualities. 2 ) Boeder, Heribert: Topologie der Metaphysik, Karl Alber, Freiburg 1980, p. 40. 3 ) Substance embodied is the crux of the matter. Whether unembodied substance can be conceived was left unresolved by Aristotle. The difference is that Aristotle seems not to have been significantly perturbed; whereas an ontological doctrine has obligations! 4 ) Cf. Kant’s terminal rebuttal of ‘ontological proofs’ in CPR, Book II, Third Antinomy.

Introduction 11

sion of helping humans to understand what human beings are and holding fast to a fallible human creature that is already in possession of too much knowledge that cannot be comprehended because the agent of knowledge has been expunged from it.1 IV

It cannot be my purpose, however, to take responsibility for, or to take down, scholars whose ideas about metaphysical pursuits differ from mine. In fact, the real problem is that Aristotle and all thinkers walking in his footsteps stress the “desire to know”. This notion has been demolished with considerable ferocity for a long time now (even before Hume broke into print); and surely it was not without just cause that metaphysics has been described as the one philosophical discipline that holds no secured findings in its hands at all, once its pretensions and hand-me-downs from religious belief systems collapsed. Metaphysics simply does not add anything to anyone’s knowledge. It has on the contrary been the ‘speculative’ philosophy par excellence ever since Anaxagoras set the scene for it and found in Aristotle his most adept protege. Yet if we accept this, the questions we may put to metaphysics acquire a different complexion. For example, the entire intentional realm comprising the fauna and flora of earth remains terra incognita in terms of the ‘what is?’ question clinging to intentionality. In spite of thousands of scientific writings on the origin of life, the jury is still out on the preliminary question of what life actually is. But we talk about it incessantly, because 1

) Hence Adorno’s castigation of Heidegger as the chief culprit of this malaise: “Heidegger of course saw through the illusion that feeds the popular success of ontology: that a consciousness in which nominalism and subjectivism are sedimented ... offers a plain choice of intentio recta. He circumvents the alternative with his doctrine of the ‘Sein’ as the chief concept—yet whoever says ‘Sein’, does not speak of Sein, but only of the word.” [Subtext: Kein Sein ohne Seiendes: “No Being without beings”. The word ‘Sein’ is in effect an ontological cupola: “Es ist”; “Sie sind” (plural); “Es kann sein” (conditional). This is Adorno’s gripe. Ed.]. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M 1966, pp. 74-5.

12 Introduction

we wish to engage ourselves with this enigma; and once we begin, it soon becomes evident that metaphysics is the one field that has acquired enough ideas on that subject matter for all of us to simply keep talking. This in turn is highly suggestive of that side of its manifestation which, in Ortega y Gasset’s words, “exhibits a most dramatic and pathos-ridden character in its thought combinations . . . which closely resemble the nature of a game.”1 Carving out a special niche in philosophy for a metaphysics of life seems most appropriate for an era that bears the slogan ‘globalisation’ on its flag. It facilitates at least one supremely important recognition, that all living things share the same condition of existence. Moreover that the variety of survival equipment needs to be assessed in a much deeper way than we have done hitherto. For example, the term ‘value’ is ubiquitous in all our dealings, without much consensus on its meaning; yet this is an issue deserving of being revisited in its more stringent human context. It transpires that the term ‘human world’ requires a definition that specifies what we are conscious and aware of. It is after all a mere 200 years ago that scholastic fictions posing as onta were ousted in favour of experience as our sole access to what is going on in the world-as-such. Kant did not stress, however, that we actually live in five worlds, each corresponding to one of our sensory apparatus and its specific sensitivity. He was content to stipulate that a person is defined by the ‘unity of apperceptions’, i.e. the consortium of faculties that has charge of coordinating them so that a sense of seamless oneness as well as continuity prevails. Nonetheless, reality bears a five-fold relation to us, two of them primitive, three of them sophisticated enough to make that world rich in content and meaning. But we tend to forget that for most animal life on earth, other windows open up 1

) Ortega y Gasset, op. cit., p. 349. Philosophy is in essence a game of posing riddles drawn from life and nature and then seeking to solve them.

Introduction 13

which reveal a different world—think of bats and bees, fish and foxes. Our recent sciences and technologies have devised instruments to serve as deputies for us in the discernment of these perspectives; but this doesn’t mean that we can share the experience they convey to the creatures possessing those capacities as their native equipment. In other words, we can conceptualise and utilise such phenomena as sonar or ultraviolet light, but not experience them. Accordingly we take on board their existence as onta, even though they do not impinge on our sensorium. The importance of this quinquevalence turns our mind to the aforementioned criterion of ‘value added’. Humans (or perhaps only Homo sapiens—we cannot be sure of this) have acquired the knack of saturating the three ‘sophisticated’ senses of vision, hearing and touching with a considerable freight of connotations, from a simple arrow which indicates a direction, to the vestment of a building, statue, painting, poetic text, dance or musical score with layers of import and significance which do not inhere in them qua objects or acts. We subsume such artefacts under the heading of ‘cultic objects’ and see in them the ‘culture’ and ‘arts’ of that society. As several of our chapters in this volume concern themselves with the arts, I leave this hint standing as a pointer to the natural, indeed unequivocal competence of metaphysics to engage with them. It is worth at this moment, however, to look at music as a specimen, to illuminate the paradox. The idea that an ontology of music is possible; that it is an objective phenomenon amenable to comprehensive description without recourse to a human sensibility, is perhaps the most egregious of errors that a thinker could perpetrate. Yet there is an abundant scientific as well as philosophical literature testifying to this supposition; though once again the plaintiffs are out of court, since it is futile to speak of music without there being creatures to make and perceive it. Thus an oscilloscope reveals merely the vibrating molecular streams that we know to be audible as noise, because we apply our prior knowledge to the phenomenon. If

14 Introduction

we don’t know this beforehand, the stream could represent any vibratory entity whatever. In other words: Thinkers on nature and human nature cannot legitimately be constrained to work on the quantifiable aspects of their subject matters. We have done it; it is incomplete and remains ‘work in progress’ with very little chance of ‘ultimate secrets’ being unveiled. That this has repercussions on empirical philosophy is known, yet rarely acknowledged in its implications. For it raises the question of how much confidence we can repose in our belief that reality must, by and large, correspond to our comprehension of its features—an issue, indeed, fraught with huge ambiguities on account of the vexatious self-contradictions involved to which we have already alluded. Namely that existents to which our sensibility is blind (i.e. lacking a category of apperception) cannot be posited to exist. Accordingly our belief in such pseudo-onta has no leg to stand on. The world we experience does not constitute a parallel existence to ‘existence itself’; it is the same world! Meaning: that problems like these, as well as causation, potential, motion, space, time and many others of the items in Aristotle’s Book Delta all refer ultimately to the human world too—to their human observer who thinks about them and makes judgements that relate them to the human world. Let me note in passing that much heavy weather has been stirred up in this context over Kant’s Ding an sich, what it purports to be. First, what it is not: the object described as ‘such and such colour, weight, density, chemical constitution’ (it could in principle be pulverised); second, its concealed aspects (which can often be resolved by the pars pro toto rule). Then, what it is: the thing as it appears to us in our spontaneous grasp before we start thinking of accidents, attributes, predicates etc. It stands to reason then, that we can never account to the full for the haecceity and quiddity (i.e. all the predicates, attributes, properties and accidents) of an object other than what appears to us.

Introduction 15

A Ding an sich is not therefore ‘a thing’ cloaking itself in impenetrable vestments; it is not a thing at all. Rather it is a conception of instantiations of thinghood in a causal mesh that is partially but not absolutely penetrable, and certainly not amenable to any conception that seeks to close the causal mesh with definitions, delimitations, determinants or proofs. This limitation on our capacity for explaining the world in readily intuitive terms is rarely admitted (cf. the ‘quantum world’—what exactly are we to make of fundamental ‘particles’ like quarks, fermions, leptons, bosons et al., that are not particles of anything, but events). But the outcome is that in our fondness for epistemological and ontological certainty we fill our theories with abstruse denotations and nomenclatures that often seem to fit sci-fi entertainment better than strict science. V

More of this discussion seems unwarranted. Metaphysics remains what it was in Aristotle’s hands; what befell this discipline afterwards cannot be laid at his door. On the contrary, metaphysics today can only cover the things we all talk about, experts and novices alike, and with an untarnished sense of mystery clinging to it—namely, issues of the utmost human relevance which we have never truly mastered, even though every person ever born carries them in their baggage till the day they die. These are our instincts, sensibility, intuitions, inquisitiveness, feelings, urges, aptitudes, impulses, pre-dispositions, affections, sentiments, curiosity, knack, rapport, talent and genius. The list could easily be enlarged; but they all have in common their metaphysical predictability. As someone once said, “we know much more than we know,” pointing to how much our adaptability to the animate and inanimate environment over the millennia is an accumulation of real, yet unstateable knowledge. In a word: the ground covered by metaphysics is in part the same as it was for Aristotle before the church requisitioned his principles for its own purposes; in its other part it covers

16 Introduction

intentional being, with a self-evident emphasis on human intentionality. It is a thought I wish to leave with the reader. There are no ultimate solutions, final insights or eternal truths to be found down that line. We can only think and talk about those aspects and perspectives. But even mere talk, providing it is based on sound and deep thinking might eventually bring a really oldfashioned word back into circulation: ‘wisdom’. * A brief conspectus of the chapters may serve for orientation. Ch. I: “Hegel, Recognition and Rights”, brings up a capital metaphysical problem from Hegel’s political philosophy, the so-called Anerkennung (‘Recognition’) doctrine, which unaccountably escaped scholarly attention until Axel Honneth alighted on it in 1991. To the best of my knowledge, this paper, published in 2007, was the first exposure of Hegel’s ‘cat and mouse’ game with the recognition doctrine in his major political opus, the Grundlinien des Rechts. The point is, that Hegel concealed his use of Anerkennung by a proliferation of synonyms (presumably to evade being lumped in one basket with Fichte), so this paper, as it were, puts the signposts back in place which Hegel had assiduously obfuscated. Ch. II: “Confucius, Aristotle and the Golden Mean” is a close examination of the similarities (or better phrased: congruences) of the ethical philosophies of two of the most influential thinkers of all time. The tabulation of their key concepts at the head of this paper confers its agenda on it. In view of their temporal and cultural distance it is certainly astonishing to find these two overtly ‘practical’ doctrines fitting seamlessly into a metaphysics of personal and social relations. Chapters III to VI form a tetralogy of engagement with aspects of Leibniz’s metaphysics. Particular attention is paid to some of his pioneering ideas that are surprisingly fecund in the context of our own contemporary scientific and cosmological theories.

Introduction 17

Ch. III: “Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom” details the extraordinary volte face of the philosopher from his early thoroughly deterministic standpoint, which rested solidly on God’s omniscience (the doctrine of the ‘complete concept’) and the latter’s replacement by the dynamic ‘law of the series’. This turnabout culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine with far-reaching ramifications down to our own day. Ch. IV, “Compossibility and the Adjacent Possible” contrasts a fundamental Leibnizian principle with a number of supposedly logical potentials and their presumed inevitability of actualisation (Huxley, Boltzmann), culminating in a confrontation with the researches of Stuart Kauffman into biological chemistry—specifically the latter’s enquiry into the safeguards against unrestrained synthesis in the earth’s ecosphere. Here metaphysical principles and scientific studies in organic chemistry meet happily on the same ground. Ch. V, “Metaphysics and Quantum Cosmology in Debate on Possible Worlds” deals with an important issue in current cosmological theory, i.e. speculations on multiple universes. Writing 300 years ago before Einstein, Leibniz geometricised space as well as time, identifying them as relata of human perceptive sensibilities. His foray into dreams, ‘animalcules’ and intercommunications reveals further unexpected correlates to be considered in this context. Ch. VI, “The Problem of Time, Space and Motion: A Study of Leibniz’s Solution” brings up the ancient Arabic conundrum of the Rota Algaselis. Paradoxically it is revealed to be a metaphysical rather than mathematical problem, as it divulged a problem with our conceptions the relationship between finite parts and the infinite continuum. This paper examines how Leibniz grappled with these issues by unleashing a veritable tour de force of ingenuity on the solution. Ch. VII, “Being en rapport with the World”, exhibits an unexpected meeting of minds between Leibniz and Wittgenstein

18 Introduction

on the Cartesian res cogitans. Both these thinkers found themselves out of sorts with the claims for an “inner essence”, aka mind. Despite the lack of a related platform of presuppositions, these thinkers were united (each from his own point of view). in analysing a deeply flawed Cartesianism that governed intellectual debate over the 300 years that lay between them. It urges a propinquity on us, that has not previously been set in juxtaposition. Ch. VIII, “Eavesdropping on Wittgenstein” is not a rigorous examination, but a kind of ‘improvisations on a theme’ that runs through the Philosophical Investigations. It was tempting to adopt this free-flowing enquiry, in acknowledgement of the similarly non-doctrinaire sequence of Wittgenstein’s thought. Ch. IX, “Danto and the Pale of Aesthetics” turns the spotlight on the arts. Purportedly a ‘Theory of Art’, Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace succeeds in completely obfuscating the notion of art by his ultra-Hegelian confusion over the role of ideas in art. Not realising that his doctrine empowers the whim of any self-appointed judge to treat an object as ‘art’, he effectively nullifies connoisseurship and along with it his own authority to speak. Ch. X, “Music and the Aesthetic Copernican Revolution of the 18th Century”, deals with the new aesthetic criteria emerging in the age of Haydn and Beethoven that were predominantly oriented on the mystery of wordless affective communication. What the experience of music conveys to its subjects, is mutatis mutandis applicable to the other arts—a thought first forwarded by Pater’s notion of Andersstreben, which pollinated a whole range of new philosophical ideas in aesthetic literature. Ch. XI, “Music, Truth and Profundity”, carries the debate further by an enquiry into the issue of ‘profound experience’ communicated by the arts, though predominantly ‘absolute’ music. The late Peter Kivy wrote voluminously on this topic, seeking to separate music from discursive arts. But he seems never to have realised that his presuppositions on behalf of

Introduction 19

literature are not separable into different species of aesthetic experience from those pertaining to music. Ch. XII, “Deacon’s Map for Climbing Mt. Improbable” finds Deacon on a common trajectory with Richard Dawkins. However, in seeking to explain the “emergence of mind from matter”, Deacon remains throughout oblivious of the innate metaphysical texture of his discourse, subscribing instead to the pseudo- and proto-attributes of a plethora of mechanochemical devices. His aim was clearly to expunge entelechies and their intentionality from the enquiry. But in the outcome, explanatory closure on either mind or a living cell is never accomplished, leaving us in the lurch with the issue (unresolved since Descartes) of how a thing can become a thinker.

20 Chapter I

I Hegel, Recognition and Rights: ‘Anerkennung’ as a Gridline of the Philosophy of Rights 1

The man accustomed to the ways of society is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinions of others. And it is, as it were, from their judgement alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence. ROUSSEAU

1 The hidden ‘Agent Provocateur’

ALTHOUGH THE LOCUS CLASSICUS of the concept of recognition is the master/slave episode of the Phenomenology, it would seem readily portable into the Philosophy of Rights (PR).2 However, the fact that the term occurs only six times in the 370 pages of the PR seems to have obscured its structural role, and accordingly scholarly effort is scant on the concept as it might pertain to this work.3 Yet an argument could be put that, despite its invisibility it governs foreground proceedings as if from behind a curtain, for it cannot be gainsaid that the conceptual founda1

) Among several translation options for Grundlinien, ‘Gridlines’ is the most exact, whereas ‘elements’ is not even listed by Langenscheidt as an alternative. — Translations from German sources, whether Hegel, Fichte or scholarly, are generally my own. 2 ) In my opinion, this is the correct idiomatic rendering, as German ‘das Recht’ implies a plurality, as in English Bill of Rights. 3 ) The presence of Anerkennung as an underlying principle of the PR has been completely neglected in the enormous bulk of Hegel scholarship until very recently—and even at this moment of writing (2007) only Robert Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, and Paul Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, have touched on the recognition doctrine in the PR.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 21

tion of the Rights presupposes the principle of recognition. The plausibility of this suggestion is immediately apparent when, as early as the third paragraph of Part I, Abstract Right, we encounter the following passage: Das Rechtsgebot ist daher: sei eine Person und respektiere die anderen als Personen (PR § 36)1

It is neither difficult nor illegitimate to the context to see in ‘respektiere’ here a synonym for ‘anerkenne’. And this invites us to contemplate a dilemma: for on the one hand, one could quite readily trace out a recognitive structure in the PR— The role of recognition in its various forms in the constitution of knowing and acting subjects … [is] developed most fully in the Philosophy of Right[s]. There in his treatment of the social institutions of modern life, the family, civil society and the state, Hegel sketches the sorts of epistemic and ethical competences that are found within these realms.2

On the other hand the suspicion has been voiced that Hegel deliberately suppressed reminders of the presence of Anerkennung in this text: Hegel persists with making claims on the figure of Anerkennung which was fundamental to the practical philosophy of the JPG [Jena Philosophy of Spirit], while systematically pushing it into the background in the PR. In later portions of the PR we will encounter further intersubjective structures that give evidence of being incompletely derived in this manner.3

A plausible explanation for this state of affairs is offered by the fact that Hegel had long before writing the PR distanced himself from the liabilities of Fichte’s system, which was in many respects his intellectual paternity; and Anerkennung was 1

) “The commandment of rights is therefore: be a person and respect others as persons”. 2 ) Redding, p. 17. 3 ) Schnädelbach, p. 205.

22 Chapter I

of course a celebrated Fichtean coinage in the context of his work on Natural Rights.1 However, in Hegel’s PR the principle gained a lot of philosophical substance, as he took great care to ameliorate the deficiencies of argument in Fichte’s presentation (see infra). For reasons best known to himself, however, Hegel chose this way of declining all association and covering up the tracks leading back to his erstwhile mentor. 2 Starting from Fichte Yet the idea of Anerkennung is intrinsic to the concept of ‘rights’. The latter find their logical situation in the philosophy of agency in which they are embedded, e.g. ‘[the PR] is an agent-oriented or self-actualization theory, based on a conception of the human self to be exemplified or instantiated’.2 Moreover it makes little difference to this fundamental fact of human relations whether one’s orientation is legal or philosophical. A ‘right’ remains an empty concept unless it is allied with the recognition of a person as the bearer of that right. “The validity and legitimacy of right are fundamentally a matter of the ‘We’, that is, of objective spirit”.3 In other words, it is of some importance to be mindful of the master/slave juxtaposition and distinguish the narrow conception of rights that are its outcome there, from broad base on which Hegel pursues it in the PR. Seen from the opposite angle, one may deny Anerkennung to any one as a person or as a legal entity, but in Hegel’s context this is tantamount to a diminution of the human spirit. Thus in his introductory remark to the PR he says, Der Boden des Rechts ist überhaupt das Geistige (at the bottom of all rights we find the human spirit).

This identifies the primary mode of recognition. For although Anerkennung represents, in common with many human traits, 1

) Fichte, 1945. ) Wood, p. 217. 3 ) Williams, p. 111. 2

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 23

simply a high development of analogous animal instincts, the crucial enhancement is not a mere amplification, but its Vergeistigung.1 For Fichte, as predecessor and trendsetter to Hegel in its conceptualization, it served the twofold function of establishing the domain of the will and the determination of the ‘I’ through its Anstoß (collision) with external objects, including other wills. The world which is the content of minds is formed by these interactions; but whereas objects merely resist, and in their resistance impose shape on the subjective world, other minds do this through complex intersubjective influences which demand on both sides the acknowledgement of innumerable social, intellectual, spiritual, emotional and material features in which humans in society are enveloped. Accordingly any proposed code of rights must begin with the acknowledgement that a rational creature cannot posit itself as such in full consciousness of itself, except by positing itself as an individual, as one among many rational creatures whose existence it accepts as much as it accepts its own.2

However, two aspects reverberate in the background to this statement. Individual freedom is, by natural and social circumstances, constrained; yet also, in this very constraint, enhanced and enriched, for this is the nature and outcome of interrelations with other minds— [though] only under the present presupposition that, if only one individual exists apart from myself, and only this one affects me, the initial condition—so to speak the root of my individuality—is not determined by my freedom, but by my 1

) A bird entrenched in a corner of its territory issuing warning calls to others of its species not to infringe, a dog urinating on objects to leave its mark on them: these are as it were the instinctual benchmarks from which human recognition climbs up into the spiritual realm. 2 ) Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, p. x. Quotations cited in accordance with the pagination of the original 1796 edition.

24 Chapter I

connection with another rational being.1

As Fichte remarks, this has repercussions for his whole theory of rights. What he calls the ‘external sphere’ of an individual— the penumbra of privacy which envelops the person in his public appearances—comprises the ‘space’ of decisions and choices; and now to remove this from the arbitrariness of individual relations, a public codification of rights suggests itself. Plainly the same applies to Hegel; and thus the following passus, although from Fichte’s pen, is not foreign to the latter: Limit your freedom by recourse to the concept of the freedom of all other persons with whom you come in contact … I cannot but think of myself as a man among men in a society with whom nature has joined me; but I can scarcely do this without acknowledging the constraints of my freedom by their freedom.2

Another rational agent, or non-I in Fichte’s terminology, therefore represents both challenge and invitation (Aufforderung) to the subject to exhibit its causality.3 The goal is engagement in mutual self-projection and self-determination on the basis of a mutually recognised freedom. Now the subject may resist or evade the challenge, but will ultimately have to declare his hand, for it emanates from and is addressed to a being capable of recognition, who must respond one way or another because both parties are rational beings.4 Accordingly, The relation between free agents in vis-a-vis is […] the relation of a mutuality of interaction based on intelligence and freedom. Neither can recognise the other, if they do not reciprocally recognise each other; and neither can treat the other as a free agent if both do not do the same.5 1

) ) 3 ) 4 ) 5 ) 2

Fichte, 1897, §18. Fichte, Naturrecht, p. xii. ibid p. 24. ibid p. 28. ibid p. 37.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 25

We find an echo of this in Hegel’s “Bei-sich-selbst-sein in einem Andern” (being with oneself in Another, PR § 23), which in Wood’s words “does not limit but expresses my self … it is not a hindrance on me, but is in fact the very actualisation of my freedom”.1 Philosophically, however, this is not as clear cut as these remarks make it appear. Echoes from Hobbes’ ‘brutish nature’ disturb Fichte’s endeavours; for although in accordance with his declared intention he derives natural rights from his Wissenschaftslehre, his account of recognition amounts in the end to nothing more than a rational commendation. In particular, ‘trust and faith’ (Treu und Glauben) are not enforceable; hence Fichte needs to resort to a ‘law of compulsion’ (Zwangsgesetz) together with ID cards and related shenanigans.2 This makes it apparent that his arguments suffer from an inner contradiction: if trust is a dubious quantity, where has mutual recognition gone? As Williams writes, Fichte’s account of mutual recognition subverts itself because individuals remain external to each other in spite of their relationship. Thus community is either impossible or not genuine … the coercion argument undermines the ethical life that the recognition argument is supposed to generate.3

This is where Hegel fills the gaps in the picture. His account brings with it the insight that full intersubjective recognition changes the nature of self-knowledge of the subjects engaged in this interaction and thereby rewrites the basic tenets of recognition itself. Thus Hegel’s account is not only richer philosophically, but a full appropriation of recognition. This is exemplified in the phrase which, though it pertains to exchanges of property or competencies, permits extrapolation upon the whole of the PR, viz., the moment of recognition is already 1

) Wood, p. 219. ) Naturrecht, p. 165. 3 ) Williams, p. 289. 2

26 Chapter I

contained in and presupposed by it. 3 Anti-Anerkennung Since it appears first in the PR, it is convenient to deal at once with the refusal of Anerkennung. In the PR this leaps out at the very beginning, where Hegel dilates on the difficulties in Roman law of defining a human being: it was not possible to succeed with such a definition since slaves could not be included in it (PR, Introduction §2).1 There is an apparent contradiction to §21 in this on which Ferrarin writes, “Slaves are not slaves because their humanity is not acknowledged, but because they do not think and know themselves as human”.2 One may easily refuse one’s consent to this interpretation, since it is not qualified by a political or legal edge, but takes Hegel’s phrases at prima facie value. Surely any slaves in Athens or Rome, the United States or Tsarist Russia, knew full well their humanness! The discrepancy can be resolved, however, by taking note of the fact that Hegel speaks of ‘the slave’ in the singular, as a universal. In any case, he finally confirms that slaves do possess an ‘absolute right’ to their freedom, even though the culture in which they live may not be conducive to its (legal) implementation (PR §66A). The heart of this matter can therefore to be found in the context of domination, which Hegel defines as extrinsic, i.e. without impairing the ontological freedom of the person: As a living thing a human being can certainly be subjugated, i.e. be brought under the power of another in his physical or otherwise extrinsic attributes; but the free will cannot per se be coerced (PR § 91). Accordingly, it is ‘slavehood’ which contradicts the principle: 1

) One of the few positive things with which Hegel credits Christianity is its disavowal of slavery, which was based on the preciousness of each individual soul to God. 2 ) Ferrarin, p. 327.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 27

not necessarily the person who feels comfortable with it as a way of life. Hegel saw a related danger coming to the surface in his own era, with the effusiveness of romantic Schwärmerei (sentimentality) and irony taking hold of belles lettres. His words, i.e. that “this manner of unmeditated consciousness and feeling promotes subjective, chancy and arbitrary knowledge to a principle”, were surely meant as a warning that thoughtless nature worship leads to the ruin of rights and recognition.1 Turning from slavery to criminality, non-recognition is a violation of humanness. As Wood aptly notes, in Hegel’s theory the commission of a crime entails the criminal’s consent to punishment: ‘When I commit a crime, my act revokes my own claim on the right that I violate, [for] by invading another’s sphere of freedom, I declare by my action that I no longer recognize that right as inviolable’.2 With this the criminal puts himself in partibus infidelium. A criminal act, like self-willed slavery, is self-subverting: “Committing an infringement of a right under rights may have a positive extrinsic existence, but it is null in itself”; cancelling out the infringement (PR §§97-8). But after the rights of the situation are redressed, the punishment remains as the redressing of the legal issue. For Hegel, a criminal act is not primarily damage to or alienation of extrinsics, but an offence against the fundamentals of ethics, tantamount to assault on the person who embodies them. And punishment is unavoidable to prevent the act from inadvertently acquiring Anerkanntsein, or social acceptability. 1

) It is surely significant that Hegel uses almost identical language in both paragraphs, viz. ‘ein gesteigertes Gefühl, die eigene Brust und die Begeisterung zur Quelle des Rechts [zu machen]’ (PR § 2) and ‘[die] das Denken ausschließen wollen und an das Gefühl, Herz und Brust, an die Begeisterung verweisen’ (PR § 21). Is this type of behaviour, which ‘rob[s] mankind of all truth, value and dignity’ not the consummate exhibition of self-willed slavery of spirit? 2 ) Wood, p. 114.

28 Chapter I

It follows from these criteria that disposing of one’s external possessions is unproblematic (PR §65-7);1 my body and/or freedom, however, are another matter. “There is no statute of limitations on those rights which concern the essential nature of my self-consciousness, as well as my intrinsic personality and in general my freedom of will, ethical condition, religion”, writes Hegel (PR § 66). Thus, although voluntary acts of disposal (Entäußerung) like bondship and legal incompetence, but also superstition and powers of attorney, are relatively common, yet no other party can ever have a positive claim on them. To end, an ironical aside from Hegel’s disquisitions on love and marriage. Anerkennung is the self-evident basis for this institution (cf. infra); its opposite is hidden between the lines of this passage: Modern dramas and other artistic productions, however, where sexual love is the main attraction, put us in touch with a pervasive frigidity factor which is infused into the heat of the passions being portrayed by the utter fortuitousness associated with all this; and the whole interest is thought to rest only on these—which may well be of infinite importance to them, but hardly in itself (PR §162).2

The point of bringing this up is that Anerkennung can play no role here: it is pure indulgence, a false relation between consciousnesses, a conflagration rather than a meeting of minds.

1

) Externals may include my labour, skills and even those mental qualities which I see fit to put at another’s service—but always and ever for a limited period of time and never to the point of completely surrendering what is constitutive of my spiritual integrity (§67). 2 ) Nisbet and Knox in their translations give us ‘these particular individuals’; but there are no individuals in Hegel’s text. It appears they were looking for a subject of the statement and missed Leidenschaft and Zufälligkeit as the two symptoms of modernity (i.e. the ‘these’ and ‘them’) which incur Hegel’s displeasure.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 29

4 Love and Marriage

Recognition forms the bedrock of the estate of marriage. Its substantiality is the unity imparted by love; the individual is subsumed as a member; and the overt unity of natural sexes transforms itself into a union of the spirit (PR §§158 & 161).1 Concomitantly the legal form this takes is characterised by treating the union as a kind of corporate entity: the individual is a legal person only where he/she must be detached (abgesondert) from the family unit.2 Given the temper of his times—as a contemporary of the romantic generation in the wake of Herder—it is not perhaps surprising that love was important to him in a way it could never be to, say, Descartes or Kant. “[It] is both a speculative ontological principle and an account of intersubjectivity”, Williams writes, adding that its effect is the diminution of distance, separation and alienation between self and other by way of “depriving the other of its foreign or alien character”.3 This is ‘recognition’ in both the biblical and Hegelian sense; even though the somewhat patronising biblical ‘companionship’ is here replaced by the ‘I’ becoming a ‘We’. However, Hegel’s position retains traces of patriarchalism in that he allows only ‘the reality of the species’ as constitutive of the ethical relationship of marriage. Today de facto marriage is legally acceptable; not for Hegel, whose ethical baseline of the ‘objective determination and therefore ethical duty’ entails 1

) I stress ‘natural’, for Hegel’s exclusive concern is with man/woman relationships. As §163 makes clear, he would hardly condone the relationship between a pubescent male and his mature mentor extolled in Plato (Symposion); for Hegel this and the monkish habits familiar to Christian culture are aberrations from the ‘natural vivacity’ of love. 2 ) Where that person does not act as a representative of the family, but selbstherrlich. This does not impair the competence of the male to enact administrative decisions and also covers situations of dissolution (divorce, majority of children) (PR §159). 3 ) Williams, p. 208.

30 Chapter I

a commitment of the partners to enter into a socially and legally formalized state of marriage (PR §§160-2). Natural drives are sated by being removed from the condition of chance encounters; but as the ‘Remark’ to this point adds (PR §§160-2), the principle which justifies marriage is the dissolution of singleness and its replacement by the ‘family as a person’ whose members are now its accidentiae.1 It is interesting, now, that Hegel is disinclined to consent to the mere external signs of such a union, whether sanctified by church or civil authorities, as truly constitutive. For example, chastity is valueless if imposed, for it does not then arise from a conscious acknowledgement of its ethical inevitability and Anerkennung has little chance for being realised in the relationship. But to be One is to occupy the geistige Boden (PR §166); and therefore the recognition which is basic to the partnership finds its natural complement in the acknowledgement by society that this union is sanctified by its laws and customs and therefore inviolate in principle.2 How this covers the 1

) Feminists are unlikely to concur with Hegel’s provisions of §166 and put them down to the prejudice of patriarchalism. And indeed the needs of which Hegel speaks are plainly male oriented on biological and anthropological criteria, which have in recent times been levelled out by technological advances, relieving women of many constraints on their biological natures. But technology cannot change their genetic profile; and in this respect some feminist commentators are inclined to concede to Hegel an important point, namely (as Wood notes in ‘Hegel’s Ethics’, p. 245) that ‘woman orders things according to her feelings and thus govern [the family] in a genuine sense, deriving what should happen from her individuality’. Further, as Williams point out, ‘contemporary views concerning women’s distinctive moral capacities [are shared by] Carol Gilligan and Sarah Ruddick (Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, p. 222 with references). The upshot is that Hegel’s insistence on the complementarity of men’s and women’s capacities may have philosophical virtues that are lost on certain mores of contemporary society. 2 ) Pursuant to § 167, such Anerkennung can only be validly enacted in monogamy. Polygamy and the ‘free’ love relationships that are nowadays endorsed cannot realize the appropriate ethical criteria. As Williams (loc cit) points out, ‘Polygamy remains on the pre-ethical level; it does not break with nature or natural determinations, but is an extension of natural in-

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 31

property and means of subsistence of the union is adumbrated in §§169-72. The upbringing of children brings an intriguing aspect of recognition to the fore. It is after all the desire of parents to give their children a good start in life; and this entails passingon the recognitive structure that governs relationships within society. It involves parents seeking recognition first for themselves as parents, then for their children by appropriate upbringing, and simultaneously by positioning themselves where social benefits are the declared ‘investment outcome’. Thereby the children, when they leave the nest, will find themselves embraced by the recognitive environment on the strength of efforts not their own, which they will seek to replicate (or improve) when their turn at parenting comes. As an appendix to the foregoing, it is to be noted that Hegel explicitly invokes Anerkennung in respect of the children when they attain majority (PR §177). Indeed, their right to this acknowledgement is laid into their cradle, since in conformity with Hegel’s overall philosophy, “Children are free per se … they belong neither to their parents nor to anyone else as property” (PR §175). Equally interesting are the recognitive criteria applicable to inheritance. Hegel stems himself against alienation of family property due to death: while the family (or extended family) persists, no property may be described as herrenlos (disposable). Moreover, wilful testamentary dispositions incur his censure, for in such cases Anerkennung of external services only succeeds in damaging the ethical basis of the family and encourage baseness (Niedertracht) by parties with self-serving

equality’. A more difficult issue, touched upon in §168, of love relations between partners in close consanguinity, is as not convincingly resolved and one fails to see the point where they leave the Boden des Geistigen. This issue cannot be further pursued here beyond quoting Jurist, who writes (p. 171) that ‘Hegel’s claim that the brother-sister relation is removed from natural desire … sounds dubious to post-Freudian ears’.

32 Chapter I

interests: it is therefore a false, irresponsible recognition.1 In sum, what is depicted in the love-and-family scenario of these sections is the three-fold aspect of recognition in the PR which reflects the division proposed by Honneth into Primärbeziehungen (love relations), Rechtsverhältnisse (rights) and Wertgemeinschaft (solidarity).2 Honneth’s remarks may be digested here for the light they throw on Anerkennung in each facet of its tripartite structure. He sees trust (Vertrauen) as central to love, whether between the sexes or grown-ups and children. Legal recognition, on the other hand, obviously excludes affectivity, for it represents the ‘purely cognitive capacity of understanding’; while finally solidarity, which exceeds mere ‘passive tolerance’ of the others ideally rises to Selbstschätzung, or the integrity of communal self-regard.3 We may take these few comments as providing a bridge to the consideration of other features of Anerkennung in Hegel’s philosophy of right. 5 Personal Interest and its Reflection in Others

The preceding discussion suggests a logical structure being built, a kind of scaffolding with three major arms on which the filial, civic and judicative ‘realisations’ of the objective will find their place as well as their cross linkages. If now we recall the Boden des Geistigen as the fundamental tenet, then Hegel’s remarks in the ‘Transition from Property to Contract’ reveal themselves as their complement: Dasein as determinate being is essentially being with purpose.4 1

) Hegel effectively says that no part of the family estate may be given away by a member of the family by a testamentary disposition. cf. PR §178-9. 2 ) Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, p. 154ff. 3 ) ibid, pp. 178 & 210. 4 ) Nisbet translates ‘being for another’. This is unfortunate, for the reader must wonder how it dovetails with the immediately ensuing Eigentum, and

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 33

Property, to the extent that Dasein is extrinsic to it, is for other externals and to the degree of their mutual connectedness, necessity and contingency. But as Dasein of the will, [property] exists as an intentional object only for the will of another person. This relation of will to will is the peculiar and bona fide ground on which freedom has its existence (PR § 71).1

Interestingly Hegel has no compunction in allowing self-interest being mediated by its absorption into the universal recognition on which the state must be reared. He calls it ‘convenience’, explaining, Owing to the fact that I must oblige others, the form of universality enters the picture. I acquire from others the means by which to satisfy my wants and must accordingly take note of their views. But at the same time I am obliged to provide the means for satisfaction of their wants. So, one hand washing the other, all are linked together; and to this extent particulars acquire a social character (PR §192 A).

Civil life relies on this mutuality of conveniences for its normativity. Recognition is here little more than an acknowledgement that mutuality is its cardinal feature, though Hegel identifies a flaw in this limited view. For normativity presumes on the automatic conferral of opportunity on everyone to enter the goods-and-services percolator. The fact is, that some individuals play this game better than others and so it could happen (as in fact it does) that the needs of some members are not satisfied. For Hegel this is an unacceptable state of affairs, which he blames to some extent on the social contract model. how it fits into the context of Hegel’s cross-reference to §48. The cause, one suspects, was mistaking anderes for andere; but the former does not normally refer to persons but to things, events, circumstances or, in this passage, to purposes. 1 ) Hegel’s diction here is pretty gnarled and has confused readers. The pronoun ‘dieser’ seems like a lost waif looking for its parents. Who are they? Solution: Eigentum and Äußerlichkeiten. Thus the skeleton of the sentence is ‘property is for externals their necessity and contingency’.

34 Chapter I

What is wrong with the latter is the choice of a deficient ethical standard: Ethical life is not abstract like the good life, but actual in the most intensive sense. … Accordingly only two points of view can possibly pertain to the ethical life, namely that we assume its substantiality and proceed from there, or else deal with it atomistically, building up from a base of particulars. The latter point of view is vapid, because it amounts to mere aggregation; but the spirit is not a particular. (PR §156 A). The ‘atom’ which finds his disfavour is the Cartesian cogito, whose self-sufficiency stands in the way of the desired transition to recognition; therefore, in Williams’ words, “they only reach the concept of the state as a social contract between autonomous individuals who remain independent”.1 The spirit is not essential to such a transaction and consequently remains unnoticed. But it is crucial for Hegel’s philosophy, as already noted, that not only should the ethical life facilitate the ‘I’ becoming a ‘We’, but that the singular will is overcome so as to fulfil itself in the process of a recognition which is at the same time a self-recognition. It is from this point of view that Hegel’s critique of Rousseau acquires its persuasive force:2 The misunderstanding of the general will begins when freedom is understood as the contingent arbitrary will of each individual. On the contrary, freedom must be taken in the sense of the rational will, the will in and for itself. The general will is not to be regarded as a collection of expressed individual wills, in which the latter remain absolute. As Williams very pertinently notes, the individual will remains as it was before amalgamation. Geist remains an unwanted stranger to this scenario; the particular will has no avenue towards transformation, whereas the ‘general will’ as vested in either an authority or a champion, supposedly a universal, re1 2

) Williams, p. 265. ) I quote here from Williams, p. 277.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 35

mains simply a transmogrified particular. Contractual relations, according to Hegel, suffer greatly from a misunderstanding of what transpires in their execution, namely that they are grounded in the notion of an absolute equivalence between property and contract: Contracts presuppose from the contracting parties the recognition of each other as persons and proprietors. Since it is a relationship of the objective spirit, the motive of recognition is already contained in it and presupposed (PR§ 71). The explicit naming of Anerkennung together with Hegel’s stress on the ‘will’ in §71 is clearly designed to show that, in contradistinction to the attitude of the Locke tradition, property is not a thing, but my will vested in the thing, in acknowledgement of which another party must be prepared to offer an appropriate inducement for me to surrender my interest. This interest in belongings is frequently indicated physically by a mark on them—a kind of personal signature impressed on it which represents my ‘spirit’ in the object (e.g. a trademark or even just a coat of paint) (PR §58). This is a practice as old as society itself and has sound reasoning behind it: Simply grasping and holding an object is not an adequate example of freedom, because it does not achieve its aim, which includes stability of holding (§45). Mere seizure of things doesn’t prohibit others from making off with one’s holdings. Possession is distinguished from mere holding by others’ recognition that one owns something (PR §51).1

So Hegel’s point in writing, “the concept of a mark is this, that the matter should not pass for what it is, but what it gives to understand” (PR § 51A), meaning that the mark identifies some person; it therefore has a content which points beyond itself to an intention. Accordingly the point of leaving a mark on property is to elicit from others the recognition of a person’s inter1

) Westphal, pp. 234-269, p. 248. cf. also PR §§71-4.

36 Chapter I

est vested therein. Nevertheless, the economic realities which pertain to society tend in recent times tend to obscure persons and frequently refer to corporations rather than owners. Even so their prevalence indicates a reluctance to let go of a convenient anthropomorphism. What is often called ‘brand loyalty’ would seem to Hegel an especially pernicious misuse of the idea of intentionality, for in innumerable cases such brands serve merely to disguise the complete anonymity of the owner. Hence today’s economic agent must learn to depersonalise ‘desire’, or, as Paul Redding puts it, ‘[to] see desire from a type of “third person” or quasi-naturalistic point of view’. This implies that ‘each producer … [confronts] the will of a generalised other, a will with no fixed characteristics but which is always subject to unpredictable fluctuation and change. We might say that here the market is master’.1 Of course ‘the market’ of this phrase indicates simply another anonymous feature of present-day society—a kind of ‘Ersatz’ recognition to cover up the suppression of Geist in favour of ‘the economy’. 6 Anerkennung institutionalised

The state itself has a recognitive structure: for in the same respect as ‘rights’ cannot exist in themselves, neither can states have existence in abstracto. The state can be said indeed to represent the apotheosis of recognition in both its negative and positive connotations. Institutions and authorities extend the domain of private and civil recognition to the whole of society. Indeed it is scarcely too much to say that their very existence in a state is predicated on the need to recognise the need for omnilateral recognition. When Hegel states in §188 that their office is ‘care for the particular interest as a common interest’, this reflects nothing more (nor less) than a recognition by the collective 1

) Redding, p. 201.

Hegel, Recognition and Rights 37

which empowers those authorities that innumerable private interests are the same across the board; and conversely it is recognition on the part of institutions of the rights of citizens to be acknowledged in their interests. As Hardimon correctly depicts it, those functions embrace legal recognition as a formal mechanism for the protection of individuality; the vouchsafing of social rights of individuals even against the power of institutions; and (not to be underestimated) the right to public welfare for those who are legitimately to be considered unable to fend for themselves.1 Hegel accepts from Locke the fundamental liberal recognition criterion of the right to ‘life, liberty and property’ and to unhampered economic activity.2 Another vital element of institutionalised recognition is the freedom of citizens to form guilds, clubs, unions and commercial, religious and political associations which are then to be treated as corporate bodies and recognized as a kind of ‘second family’ (PR §252). In an interesting passage, Hegel points out that individual membership implies the possession of a capability which on the strength of having been admitted need not thereafter be demonstrated— it is socially recognised on the strength of having already been institutionally recognised (PR §253). It entails that this individual is somebody; being in possession of a socially recognised persona he has acquired honour in his estate (Standesehre).3 An honourable social station is not in this context a question 1

) Cf. Hardimon, pp. 196-7. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, J. W. Gough (ed.), 3rd ed., Oxford, Blackwell, 1966, § 87. 3 ) Since constraints of space disallow the expansion of this discussion, I wish at this point merely to draw attention to the fact that honour is a prima facie instance of recognition, initially growing out of the master/slave situation but in the PR institutionalised in the manner above. The honour of being a person of competence in a socially useful profession means that the spread of recognition into lower strata of society draws these members into the larger net of societal recognition; it provides (as it were) a socially harmless and useful competitive basis for growth. 2

38 Chapter I

of ‘great’ or ‘small’, nor of hereditary honour, but of Anerkennung which will neither disparage nor seem overweening. In part this reflects the criterion of the Bildung that is so important to Hegel’s social theory. Its principal role is to cultivate the bases of recognition in facilitating the individual’s actuality by giving him entry into determinate particularity (PR §197 and 207); though evidently the acquisition of this ‘actuality’ also entails specific recognition by the community that Stände are integral to a society’s self-definition. This mutuality between private and common recognition is complemented by another feature. Since for Hegel all these criteria revolve around the central concept of a teleology of the Geist in society, it stands to reason that he will find in the commonality which characterizes corporate activity an exemplification of the same. So there is excellent point in Hardimon’s observation that corporations have another crucial function: that of expanding the ability of members of society to identify with others … one comes to see one’s fellow members as sharing one’s trade, outlook and way of life. And one’s sense of connection, loyalty and camaraderie is enhanced … Indeed, in Hegel’s view, one of the reasons that corporations assign this task to their members is precisely to help them recognise that they are pursuing a common end and share a common project.1

The poor and deprived, inconveniences for society and often disparaged, have their own claims for recognition. Although Hegel frequently employs the term Pöbel (rabble) for them, this is less a reflection of his disapproval in principle, than a recognition of the inevitable outcome of societal neglect. By the same token, he evinces a great deal of concern over their presence in his rational state. It is an issue to which Wood has devoted attention.2 Essen1 2

) Hardimon, p. 200. ) Wood, pp. 252-55.

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tially the nature of the problem is an inadvertently one-sided claim to recognition whose outcome is, paradoxically, a matching one-sided claim at the opposite extreme, the over-affluent class. But while the latter’s claims subvert recognition in a concentration of wealth that endangers the maintenance of society (PR §§245-6), the poor constitute a reminder that a state is to be reckoned a failure so long as this class is isolated from the fulfilment of the objective spirit. Two passages from Hegel are worth quoting in this context: The rabble is the greediest after its rights, always hammering away at civil society’s obligation to maintain it … The rabble is distinct from poverty; usually it is poor, but there are also rich rabble.1

In such a society ‘the recognition of universal freedom disappears’.2 Accordingly it devolves upon the civil institutions to restitute the damage, if necessary by guardianship (Vormundschaft, PR §§239-40)—but with such considerations we enter a wasps’ nest of conflicts between rights and ideology that seems to provide no settled basis for an objective solution. Wood’s critical remarks suggest that ‘if civil society systematically produces a class whose existence violates [the principle of equal rights], then that tends to undermine the rationality of the ethical order as a whole’.3 But although he makes a persuasive case, it does not issue in an unequivocal conclusion that this is where Hegel’s construction falls apart. 7 Function of the Head of State

Two further instances of recognitive structure where, perhaps, one might not expect them, may end this discussion. Hegel was much in favour of constitutional monarchy. 1

) VPR 4: 608-9, quoted by Wood, p. 252-5. ) Loc. cit. 3 ) Loc. cit. 2

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There is good reason for this from the tenets of his political philosophy. He had to face ‘the difficulty of finding a place for the recognition of each individual in his singularity’.1 He found it in the role of a monarch whose function is little more than to ‘sign his name’ on legislation submitted to him (PR §279A). This name is the crucial piece of data: The subjective position of the king is required for the very conceptual coherence of the state qua act of collective selfpositing … grasping this in terms of the purely affective dimension of its functioning is to see these recognitive relations on the model of the family and to assume as normative the patriarchal state … an act can only be recognised as an act of willing if it is enacted through a singular subject. The King’s ‘I will’ is a singular act within which citizens can recognize a human intention as such. It gives singular form to the universality of the content and provides an address within which each citizen can recognise himself as that singular being who is addressed.2

Similar arguments serve for the recognition of a judge’s pronouncements ex cathedra in conformity with the intentions of the law. The difference to the head of state who wears a crown to the judge who wears a gown might not weigh so heavily in terms of their respective responsibilities, but the accoutrement of the latter denotes that the law is embodied in a person drawn from within the texture of society who will return to it after his term of office expires. Therefore both plaintiff and accused bring into the courtroom the operative level on which society functions (which would not be the case were they invited to attend a royal audition). Accordingly, in the pronouncement of a judge I recognise myself as a particular bearer of rights on a par with all the others, but in the utterances of that person, the monarch, I recognise myself in 1 2

) Redding, p. 229. ) Ibid, p. 230.

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my peculiar determination as this person who I am alone.1 Conclusion

Recognition is pervasive in the PR—a fact not obscured by the concealment of the term in Hegel’s text. For its underlying premise in the question, ‘what is the source of rights?’ has only one answer, that rights are attributes of persons and that persons are individuations of Geist. On the positive side, this conception of rights in the PR is a genuine reorientation from the iteration throughout history of variations on the slogan ‘right is might’. It is not hard to agree to Hegel’s proposition that the latter has impeded the development of freedom across the political history of all mankind. Accordingly Hegel’s recognitive philosophy entails a conception of rights and law which emphasises their growth from the bottom up, from the rights of persons, instead of down from the top of the power echelon or where (as in the Locke tradition) the law is enshrined in isolated splendour and indifferent to persons altogether. In Hegel’s philosophy the state is the theatre where rights and recognition are compresent. It is arguable that its effect on the redefinition of personal and familial relations, business and trade, property, institutions and authorities is that of a humanisation of these traditional mechanisms of power. His nation state may be described as an educative project, designed to overcome the subjective concept of freedom by its conversion into objective Geist through the dialectical resolution of the ‘I’ and ‘You’ into the ‘We’. It is true that along the way, some blemishes make themselves manifest—but it may be conceded to Hegel that these are correctable details which do not impair the overall structure of Anerkennung. 1

) Ibid, p. 231. NB: Perhaps an indifferent point—but the term ‘monarch’ does not sit well with this head of state—he is not a sole ruler. ‘King’ on the other hand is unexceptional: after all, the German kings and emperors held their office for centuries as primus inter pares, as elective kings.

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The actualisation of the objective Geist and human freedom in the state represents the essential non-negotiable value he put forth. If we contrast Hegel’s state with those of, say, Plato or Hobbes, we note at once a crucial difference to which the concept of recognition offers the key. A sense of subjective freedom is native to all human beings; it serves Hegel as the lever for putting the rational-recognitive faculty at the centre of political philosophy. Therefore freedom as a fruit of the objective spirit, which is unattainable in both Plato’s and Hobbes’ state, is under Hegel’s criteria achievable. For the power to implement it, and the rational faculties required, are given. Moreover the philosophical power of the Anerkennung doctrine as embedded in the PR accounts with rare insight for the human condition altogether, so that one may, without exaggeration, look upon it one of the great challenges for mankind still to be worked through in practice.

Confucius and Aristotle 43

II Confucius, Aristotle, and the Golden Mean: A Diptych on Ethical Virtues

Mu Shu said, “The best course is to live in virtue, the next best is to gain achievement, and the best thereafter is to frame memorable words. When these are not abandoned with time, it may be called immortality. CONFUCIUS Spring and Autumn Annals 1 Preamble1

THE DOCTRINE OF THE (GOLDEN) MEAN is the heart of the ethical philosophies of Confucius and Aristotle. For both it represents the “reign of reason” in ethical behaviour, accommodating the notions of fairness, justice, honour, care, courage and the other qualities of human action that bestow value on life. It means “nothing to excess,” the cultivation of behaviour for the good of the soul and the good of society. There is a surprising concordance of views on these matters between Confucius and Aristotle, though it is inevitable, given the difference in their cultural and political environment, that their approach differs. This is most apparent in their methodology. Aristotle is a systematic thinker, working within a framework of explicit 1

) Translations of Confucius’s works are from Wing-Tsit Chan’s edition, although I have at times substituted a word or phrase from other sources. In quoting the Analects I have mostly given preference to the Waley translation. Quotations from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are from the translation of W. D. Ross.

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description. Confucius, true to the Chinese tradition of illustrating concepts by aperçu, epigram, impressionistic morsel, directions for conduct, and pithy dialogue, takes many things for granted that Aristotle teases out by way of analysis and definition. Nevertheless, these differences can be regarded, not as a constraint, but as a challenge to the researcher. Accordingly my endeavour will be to discuss and compare as many of these criteria as can reasonably be said to bear a family resemblance across the cultural divide. When all is said and done, we find in these ancient ethical systems an attempt to locate some of the deepest human concerns in the sphere of reason and thereby to suggest an answer to the perennial question, “what is the meaning of life?” 2 Key Concepts

The Table below is an attempt to correlate Confucian with Aristotelian concepts. However, this list is necessarily approximate and no one-to-one correspondence can be achieved. Moreover, the list is incomplete, omitting certain notions that may not figure as concepts in one or the other of these thinkers. Confucius

Aristotle

Chün tsu

Superior man, the man of jen

Megalopsychos Enkrates

The great soul, munificence, Self-possession, self-control

Chung

Self-development/perfection

Arete

Self-development/perfection

Chung chu

Conscientiousness, altruism

Eleutheriotes Altrouistikos

generosity, philanthropy Altruism

Confucius and Aristotle 45 Chung yung

The mean, moderation

Meson

The mean

Hsin

Soul

Psyche

Soul

Hsing

Form, body, actuality, Telos nature Physike

Hsü

Peace of mind, happiness, contentment

Euthymia Eudaimonia

Peace of mind Happiness, fullness of life

Hsü shu

Contemplation, study, teaching

Theoria, paideia

Contemplation, study, teaching

I

Righteousness, justice

Dikaion, -osyne Justice, morality

Jen

Humanity, benevolence The good in itself

Agathon

The good

Jihjih hsin

Habit, constant exercise of reason

Hexis, ethos

Habituation (to virtuous behaviour)

Li

The given order of things Propriety, correct ritual

Arche Ethos

Principle Ritualisation (habituation)

Liang chi

Oughtness, knowing what is right

Phronesis

Practical wisdom

Ta hsüeh

The pleasure of virtue

Sophrosyne

Reasoned pleasure, temperance

Tao

The way, cosmic order, moral law

Logos

Reason, rationality, form

Tien

Heaven

Cosmos

Divine order, universe

Form, function, goal of growth Nature

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3 An Humanist Curriculum

The first criterion to leap to attention is that both Confucius and Aristotle fit easily into the category of humanists. Although this term cannot be said to enjoy universal consent as to its meaning, it may be said to revolve around efforts of seeking solutions for human problems within the scope of reason and thereby to exclude doctrines which rely on coercion, especially in the social and ethical domains. In this regard, the most noteworthy characteristic of both philosophers is their freedom from dogma: They are more concerned with the idea of good citizenship than with obedient subjects, and altogether they emphasise rational means to rational ends. Key issues for both are the social virtues of moderation, avoidance of excess, courtesy, respect, generosity, benevolence, striving for excellence, and contentment; and they are content to offer guidelines, rather than imposing on the reader. Secondly, in any comparison between a Greek and a Chinese philosopher, one cannot avoid noting substantial variations in the curriculum. Classical Chinese thought excludes much that is considered mandatory to the western philosophical canon: religion, science, epistemology, ontology and metaphysics are all comparatively under-represented. Instead, the Chinese concentrate on the quadrivium of ethics, politics, social relations, and art, relegating the other topics to the status of interesting but non-essential studies. Accordingly, the term knowledge tends to mean something quite different to Confucius than to Aristotle: It might be characterised as “tacit” and “intuitive” to the former (without thereby being inconsistent with the rigorous application of reason), and focused and highly structured, to the latter. Thirdly, it is relatively plain sailing to organise Aristotle’s views on the subject, for nearly all his ethical disquisitions are

Confucius and Aristotle 47

collected in one book, the Nicomachean Ethics.1 It is otherwise with Confucius. Although his doctrine is also laid down in books, there is no scholarly consent on which of these were written by the master, his pupils, edited by him, or merely attributed to him since they were otherwise anonymous. For the sake of convenience, these distinctions will not be considered here, even though it means that some doctrines that must be discussed may be texts of Confucianism rather than specifically Confucian.2 Fourthly, an important agreement between Aristotle and Confucius is their refusal to be drawn into debating religious moral criteria. Neither of them spends time on debating whether the soul is immortal or not; there are no references to a divinely appointed standard of conduct; and it is not assumed, on either side, that the gods watch us, let alone interfere in human affairs. Finally, both of their philosophies grew out of ancient roots. Aristotle was very aware of his philosophical inheritance, from the ancient poets and the Presocratics to his immediate predecessor Plato, but put everything he found there through the mill of his own rationalistic approach and refashioned it in his own lights. Confucius said of himself, with unexampled modesty, “I do not invent, I transmit.” But although he evinced profound respect for tradition, he changed everything he touched. 1

) For my present purpose, I disregard Aristotle’s two other ethical treatises, Eudemian Ethics and Magna Moralia. All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are from McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle, and will be cited in the text. 2 ) The six books purportedly written or edited by Confucius are: I Ching, or The Book of Changes; Shih Ching, or The Book of Poetry; Yao, or The Book of Music; Shang Shu, or The Book of History; Li Shi, or The Book of Rites; and Chun Qui, or Autumn and Spring Annals. However, this collection needs to be distinguished from the Four Classics put together by Chu Hsi in the twelfth century, which were thereafter accepted as the canonical texts of Confucianism: The Analects; The Great Learning; The Doctrine of the Mean; and The Book of Mencius. Of these, the first three are attributed to Confucius, even though he figures in them as an actor, not author.

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“In this way,” Yu-Lan Fung writes, “Confucius was more than a mere transmitter, for in transmitting he originated something new.”1 In fact, he changed the course of a civilisation. It was truly a case of “Revolutionen die auf Taubenfüßen kommen” (lit., “revolutions as silent as the walk of a dove”) in Nietzsche’s felicitous phrase: a revolution so quiet and peacefully accomplished that hardly anyone noticed until it was a fait accompli. Behind both of these philosophies an idea loomed as an eminence grise. In East and West, this idea was presupposed without question: it infiltrated every fibre of thought, whether philosophical, artistic or political. And even though it was later to go through a number of historical refinements in meaning and application, beneath all these accretions its pristine meaning persevered and gave strength to the master-builders who reared up their ethical edifice on this foundation. This idea was the tao in China and the logos in Greece. 4 Tao and Logos

The tao is first of all “The Way” and the great principle of truth. It would not be incorrect to see in the ta pros alethein (“unvarnished truth”) of Parmenides a first cousin; but for the Greek philosophical realm a greater claim to actual kinship seems to lie in the notion of the logos. For tao and logos both stand for the cosmic order: and if we add that in China the reconciliation of opposites is included (as in the complementary facets called yin and yang, denoting respectively the male and female principle), in Hellas the idea of harmonia serves analogous purposes. Thus a conspicuous common striving enters the focus of attention: the idea of wholeness and intelligibility as the quintessential characteristic of the world. The difference may be seen in the Chinese emphasis on practical, pedagogic effort which seeks to blend the ideal and the achievable, whereas early Greek philosophy is more inclined to theoretical specu1

) Fung, Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 41.

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lation. Taoism is the great stream that was absorbed in Confucian didacticism; the Presocratic physiologoi on the other hand, represent just one of several equally important tributaries to the Aristotelian encyclopaedic.1 The ultimate question which threads its way through the whole Confucian canon is this: how much of the “natural disposition,” how much of nurture and education, is required to produce that mix of qualities deemed to be necessary for a life according to the ethical tenets which never changed radically in the whole course of that civilisation? Contemporaneously with Confucius a gospel of stoic obedience to the processes of nature was expressed by Lao-Tse: All things in nature work silently. They come into being, flourish for their season and return each to their root. They return fulfilled, in tranquillity, for it is the path of their destiny. This destined path is the eternal law of the Tao. To know that law is to have wisdom.2

Confucius could not disagree more. The tao is not a morally neutral condition, but the realm of reason inviting us to forge our destiny in its image: The ancients who wished to illustrate the highest virtue first ordered well their own states. … Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were rectified. Their hearts being rectified, they became cultivated. … States being rightly governed, the 1

) Taoism also continued to maintain itself as an autonomous doctrine and eventually entered into a separate alliance with Buddhism. Ionian nature philosophy likewise proceeded via Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus into the Roman and Renaissance Epicurean stream (Lucretius, Gassendi and on to modern science), while from Anaximenes, via Pythagoras and Socrates and on to the Stoics, a continuous line proceeds to Neoplatonism, Christian theology and scholasticism. 2 ) Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching, xvi. The reader might find it intriguing to compare this with the sentence of Anaximander, quoted in Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, 76.

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empire was tranquil and happy.1

It is possible therefore to draft a general statement on the meaning and purpose of Confucian philosophy. Its essence— the tao—sees “the world sustained by and structured around three ultimates, which are also termed the three powers of the universe: heaven, earth and humans. ... The three dimensions of the universe share the same nature, and their relationship is characterised by harmony rather than opposition.”2 It is up to the individual, or the state, to accommodate their thinking and practice to it, for “sustained” clearly implies that the tao is not a numinous entity and does not direct nature or human affairs. This puts the onus clearly on the inhabitants of the human dimension to perfect what is innately imperfect but amenable to perfection. This is seen as the principal task of the Confucian. Unlike Confucius, who inaugurated the classical Chinese “way of life,” Aristotle stands at the summit of a long line of culture and philosophy and therefore received his conception of logos from tradition. From all appearances it was Heraclitus who enhanced the term with a richer synonymity than its common variety of meanings.3 He extended it to include “natural law,” “cosmic order,” “general principle” and the general faculty of reason. “Listen not to me, but to the Logos,” is the beginning of his book, from which interpreters have gathered an abundant semantic range. Aristotle in his turn introduced the meaning of definition, formula and theory into his science and employed logos as the carrier of his meanings. The theory of a science is called its logos; and in giving a definition Aristotle uses the same term again. Similarly, the teleological “process” of growing into what a thing is going to be is (in the sense of a 1

) Confucius, The Great Learning, “Text.” This tract comprises a one-page text followed by 10 chapters of commentary. 2 ) Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 139 (emphasis added). 3 ) Word, speech, tale, news, proverb, description, explanation, account (incl. financial), reason, understanding, repute etc. Later additions include correspondence, proportion (used in the mathematical sense by Plato and Aristotle). Cf. Guthrie, op. cit., 420–21.

Confucius and Aristotle 51

formula) its logos. And finally, in biology, for example, “the essential nature of a thing” (the bonyness of a bone) is its logos.1 In spite of evident differences, then, the correspondences to the tao are impossible to overlook. Perhaps the Greek logos is not quite as pervasive as the tao. Reading Heraclitus one gets a sense that logos and tao are essentially akin. But in Aristotle the temperature is much lower. Despite the proliferation of the logos, he prefers a detached, almost matter of fact employment, and as a result some of the mystery clinging to the logos evaporates. But this is not said in derogation, for precisely the same sense of a predominantly human dimension is with us when Confucius speaks of the tao. 5 Teaching and Learning

The path to the tao is the right method of study. Learning is “The Way” to the balance of character, to the equanimity and harmony between head, heart and body. Moral virtue and strength are ends in themselves, methods of making oneself fit to live under the tao without any false promises. Hence, in the hands of the Confucian masters, learning becomes a primary tool to facilitate the process of transformation from what is realised to what should be realised, from the animallike to the fully human, from the uncivilised to the civilised ... it is neither prayer nor repentance, but learning that plays a central role. Thus “to learn” is synonymous with “to live”, “to improve”, “to be mature”.2

Confucius’s own words on prayer, repentance, fasting, meditation—on all these essentially inward searchings for peace and enlightenment—are dismissive, because one cannot find anything “in there” that one has not at some time in one’s life “put there”: “I have spent the whole day without food and the whole 1 2

) Barnes, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, 51, 121, 161, 174–75. ) Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 210.

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night without sleep in order to meditate. It was useless. It is better to learn.”1 From this one is at liberty to understand that learning is an essentially private pursuit and the individual’s path to fulfilment. This is true, but only to the degree that it carries an ultimately social meaning with the becoming-virtuous of society as a whole as the underlying desideratum. Confucius was inclined, no less than Aristotle, to prize the wisdom acquired through study higher than anything else: I have listened in silence and noted what was said. I have never grown tired of learning, nor wearied in teaching others what I have learnt. (7.1) To be a sage or a perfectly good man, how dare I claim such qualities? Still, I can claim that the practice of them has never been distasteful [to me]. (7.33)

But his practical and pedagogical leanings also taught him that teaching must take individuality into account, it must take cognisance of particulars. For it is one thing to earn an income, but if it does not bear fruit, then no justification can be found to carry on: I instruct only those who burst with eagerness; I enlighten only those who bubble with excitement. If I hold up one corner and a man cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not continue the lessons. (7.8.) What of Aristotle? “All men desire by nature to know,” he writes at the beginning of his Metaphysics. Given that this is the case, someone has to be there to teach them. Aristotle gladly accepts that charge. In the Ethics, as a practical subject, the pedagogical impulse is clearly discernible: “to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle, knowledge of such matters will be of great benefit” (1095a12). “But though our present account is of this nature, we must give what help we can” (1104b10). And at the end of the work: “But those of the 1

) Analects, 15.30; hereafter references are cited in the text.

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sophists who profess the art [of statesmanship] seem to be very far from teaching it” (1181a13). “It is perhaps best therefore, that we should ourselves study it” (1181b13). This little dig at the sophists is occasion for a reminder that Aristotle, for all his differences with Socrates and Plato, stood in the same lineage as their legitimate legatee. 6 Ethics and Politics: A seamless Continuity

For both Confucius and Aristotle ethics and politics represent one domain of enquiry. Although I am not concerned here with political matters qua politics, they furnish a background to all ethical criteria as the warrant that their relevance is firmly anchored in societal conditions. For, as Aristotle says of the purpose of this study, “The end aimed at is not knowledge but action” (1095a5–6), and “we are enquiring not in order to know, but in order to become good, since otherwise our enquiry would have been of no use” (1103b27–9). Accordingly ethics and politics are, for Aristotle, one science, the “master science” of human affairs (anthropeia philosophia) in which ethics is one of the two principal panels; and he concludes the Ethics with an explicit transition to his tract on Politics (1094b1–5 and Bk. 10, chapter. 9). Similarly, Confucius insists that ethics must filter downwards from government into the private domain, but conversely that good private ethics are constitutive of a healthy political atmosphere. Accordingly, his tuition is inextricably ethico-political in character. Throughout life Confucius sought to influence governments. He was at one time a minister for justice, but not notably successful from the point of view of his employers who questioned the efficacy of his methods, while the great man himself questioned their motives. His attitude may be derived from his answer to a question on whether it would not be better to withdraw from the world than to make a hopeless attempt to improve it. “We cannot associate with birds and

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beasts,” he responded, “with whom then should we associate if not with our fellow men?” (18). This and the ensuing quotation reflect as distant an attitude from that of the world-weary as may be conceived: To refuse service in the government is wrong. ... To strive solely for the maintenance of one’s own personal integrity leads one to neglect the greater relationships between men. The superior man therefore serves in the government because it is every man’s duty to serve. The fact that failure will inevitably ensue is no excuse, for he knows that before he starts. (14.41) In their express care for the citizen neither Aristotle nor Confucius means “socialist” welfare, and we cannot totally ignore that their virtue ethic targets the well-to-do. As we shall see “filtering down” and “rubbing off” is the best they expect for Mr and Mrs Everyman. Nonetheless Confucius, writes Herrlee Creel, “was on the side of the people. We never find him speaking disdainfully, like Cicero, of ‘the ignorant mob’. Even so Confucius did consider the people ignorant, as indeed they were.” With the result that he did not see how they could run a government: “The common people may be caused to follow the proper course of action, but not to understand it.” But he took his standard of values from them, for the people are the ultimate arbiters of the success of the government: “Where there is good government, those who are near are made happy and those who are distant come.”1 Aristotle would agree with that thesis, even though he might not approve of its lack of ‘definition’. For Confucius is content to judge of happiness by those criteria which lie on the surface of society: if it prospers, if men are content to pursue their daily tasks without suffering, and, in particular, if foreigners are seen to be keen to join them, then it would be clear proof that happiness is smiling on the people. 1

) Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 154, 155.

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In short, Confucius was of the view that happiness is a social product that should be foremost in the legislator’s and the educator’s mind: If one tries to guide people by means of rules and keep order by means of punishments, they will merely seek to avoid the penalties. But if one leads them with virtue (both by precept and example), and depends upon li to maintain order, the people will then feel their moral obligation and correct themselves. (2.3) On the whole, this passage would not look out of place in Aristotle. For it is one of the supreme capacities of the rational agent to be able to realise in himself the striving for “the good” (agathon); and part of this entails a perception, in the words of one scholar, that “we are made of the stuff of desires and cravings, designing and willing … which may be kindled by the lightning stroke of reason.”1 Aristotle was keenly conscious that empirical conditions, whether of one’s own dispositions or the political and physical habitat, are apt to defeat this striving. By the same token, it is futile to postulate a supreme good and not indicate some practical paths to its attainment: “We are not concerned with theory, but with practice,” he writes in the Ethics (1095a5–6). But what is practice in the Aristotelian context other than political practice? Self-evidently, then, at the foundation of a polis we should find the conceptions appropriate to the structuring of a community which provides the opportunity for actualising the “happiness potential” of its citizens; and it can do this only if the polis itself is a manifestation of reason. So here we find the rationale for a practical ethics: “Where it is a question of happiness, the subject can only be the individual, because neither man-in-general nor a state can ‘be’ happy, but always and necessarily only the particular person.”2 Nor can the state create this happiness: but it can (and should) promote a 1 2

) Ritter, “Das bürgerliche Leben,” 110 (my translation). ) Ibid., 124.

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social milieu where its pursuit is available to whosoever desires it and by their own means. That this should also facilitate the pursuit of what in Aristotle’s lights is the highest form of happiness, theoria (contemplation), goes almost without saying.1 For Confucius, happiness is also the highest good, although he does not analyse exactly what he means by it. One interpretation of jen, which may be his own enhancement of the term, relates to an inner serenity and equanimity which comes close to the notion of “living the way”—essentially the concept of balance and harmony. As Benjamin Schwartz writes, One may indeed say that jen relates to the happiness of its possessor, but that this happiness is based wholly on a “virtue ethic”. Virtue is happiness. … It comprehends all the outdirected virtues and dispositions of the soul (hsin) which enable men to have harmonious relations with others.2

Similarly, on the question of the legislature there is a slight though intriguing disparity between them, which is related to their different conceptions of a functioning society. Aristotle’s 1

) Ackrill in “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” 352–55, is somewhat exercised by Aristotle’s failure to legitimise the supremacy of a life of theoria. It does seem incompatible to praise a life of action as quintessentially conducive to eudaimonia and then extol a life of contemplation even higher. But in the end Ackrill finds his own rationale: “The suspicion remains that a man who really believed in the supreme importance of some absolute could not continue to live in much the same way as others.” Indeed; and this is not the first nor last time that this problem occupied a philosopher or even ordinary folk. Confucianism is rife with it; cf. this passage from Mencius: “Potentially the path to self-fulfilment is the path to greatness, to that elevated state where a man walks in virtue with the world—or alone. The ultimate achievement, however, is to transform this knowledge into sagacity, to become a sage. In principle this is attainable to any man with a true desire to become sage-like.” Christians at times choose to live as hermits in the greatest conceivable indigence to be closer to their God, but whatever their private feelings may be, it is hard to accept that they can be called ‘happy’ in Aristotle’s sense. So this must remain an irresolvable conflict between flesh and spirit. What is, perhaps, the highest desirable good, may stand as a beacon for us to aim, without ever being taken seriously as a genuine possibility. 2 ) Schwartz, World of Thought, 80.

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preference was for a democratic government, although he favoured the aristocracy within this structure. Confucius, on the other hand, was steeped in monarchy and accordingly saw in the royal personality a desideratum for “fatherly” rule: the concern for the happiness of his subjects should guide the king’s choice of ministers and, ideally, motivate him to see in the citizenry an extension of his own family. The two agree, again, in teaching that the relations between the government and citizenry should be one of mutual obligation. Although Confucius clearly does not cavil with the principle of royalty, he is adamant that the king’s primary responsibility is to his subjects. These brief remarks on the political aspects of Aristotle’s and Confucius’s teachings touch on central matters in ethics as well, including the concept of the golden mean. 7 Arete and the Golden Mean: Two Beacons in the ethical Landscape (a) The Superior Man

It is indicative of the very different social milieu in which Confucius and Aristotle worked that similarity of intentions can be illustrated from the portrayal each of them offers of “the perfect gentleman.” For Confucius this specimen of supreme virtue was originally born to his rank, whereas for Aristotle his virtues derived from an aristocratic station in life. But both saw these possibilities as inherent in men without regard to their circumstances. Not that we should discount circumstances entirely, but importantly they both insisted on these virtues being teachable. We are not inclined today, in our somewhat cynical political climate, to sympathise with the need that animated these philosophers to accoutre certain privileged men in such glowing colours. But who is to say that the loss is not ours? In a word: we are to encounter role models: men in whom the gold-

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en mean is incarnate. In ancient China such a man bore the title chün tsu (prince); Aristotle refers to him as megalopsychos, the “great souled” man. Confucius was very fond of invoking the long-lived Chou dynasty (founded 1122 BC). Most scholars hold that this reflects a certain amount of wishful thinking, but so be it. The great principle on which the Chou relied was called li, custom and propriety. What these are needs no explanation; but when Confucius appeared on the scene, one of the first things he did was to invest the concept with a completely new meaning. He repudiated the merely formal performance and the libations, entertainments and gifts associated with the public rituals. He wanted men to be aware of the meanings of their rituals, and being irreligious, he saw in their discharge a means by which they could vouchsafe connectedness with the harmony of the tao. Accordingly, he imparted to the li an ethical thrust and reformulated the concept of the chün tsu (the superior man). Notably he got rid of the semantic of hereditary nobility, allowing only the attribute of nobility to stand. Thus was born the idea of a morally superior man. For, although Confucius continued to look to the ruling powers to live up to the names of their offices, he admitted the same capabilities to any man. Part and parcel of his framing of the issue is that while he refers to the Sheng Jen, or “holy men” of antiquity as ideals of virtuous manhood, he also thoroughly secularised this term. They were to be regarded as models, but not role models: to be emulated, but not imitated.1 In the Book of Rites, Confucius clarifies exactly what he means: Li is the embodied expression of what is fitting. Any practice which stands the test of being judged by its fitness may be adopted on this ground, even though it may not have been amongst the practices of the former kings.2 1 2

) Cf. Smith, Confucius, 64. ) Cited in Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 84.

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Although noblesse oblige therefore remains a valid principle, nobility of mind and achievement do not form a prerogative of titled gentlemen, but are accessible to any man with the requisite disposition and willingness to be taught. This echoes the following passage from Aristotle’s Ethics: Happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, to be among the most god-like things. ... It will also on this view be very generally shared; for all who are not maimed as regards their potentiality for virtue may win it by a certain kind of study and care (1099b12–20).

I mentioned “the thread” (I-kuan) earlier, which binds Confucius’ manifold teachings together. He said: “Do you suppose that I am one who learns a great deal and remembers it? ... No, I have a thread that runs through it all” (15.2). This thread is identified by the great twelfth-century Confucian scholar Chu Hsi as the pair of concepts chung and shu—respectively, self-perfection and the projection of this character trait upon others.1 What it signifies is that the segregation of convenience by principles is a fiction: in Confucius none of the important concepts stands by itself, but each supports another, and most of the time they are presented in pairs and clusters. In the Confucius doctrine, “rite” is merely another word for the habits, customs, etiquettes and acknowledged social practices, which in other words is a fair equivalent to Aristotle’s ethos. Throughout most of imperial China’s history, with which the reign of Confucianism almost coincides, a young gentleman’s career offered basically the choice between public service, political office or the military. In all these, as Howard Smith writes, the credentials were the same and thoroughly Confucian: The chief aim of Confucius’ teaching being the perfection of 1

) As noted, Confucius sees self-perfection as something with the potential of rubbing off on others. Cf. Analects, 12.1.

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personality, he laid great emphasis on manners, on external deportment, on the restraint of propriety which are evidenced in one’s disposition and conduct as regards others and in one’s cultural standing.1

Thus the view of Chinese philosophy as the art of harmony, reconciliation and synthesis reflects precisely what Confucius aimed for. He made the li, as Creel writes, “a kind of balance wheel of conduct, tending to prevent either deficiency or excess, guiding towards the middle path of socially beneficial conduct”.2 As Confucius explains: “Courtesy, if not regulated by li, becomes a laboured effort; caution, if not regulated by li, becomes mere timidity; courage, if not regulated by li, becomes mere unruliness; frankness, if not regulated by li, becomes mere effrontery” (8.2.1). It is worthwhile to interject an Aristotelian point here. While remembering that a striving for exact correspondences is futile, this view of li bears comparison with the concept of phronesis in the following sense: A rational agent choosing something as good must weigh the benefits of different options on each occasion. But if he has no clear view of the preferable options from one occasion to another, he will become far less competent at deciding in particular cases too. For one relevant and important consideration is the effect of this choice on his future circumstances. If… he is ill equipped to make a sensible choice… he has no reason to take his present views seriously. Aristotle will correctly argue that a conception of a final good … will help to avoid these faults in practical reasoning and choice.3

At bottom, this reflects confidence in reason: that the teacher can appeal to it and compel the student to acknowledge good example. This is reason reinforced by persuasion, or in the 1

) Smith, 76. ) Creel, 86. 3 ) Irwin, “Metaphysical and Psychological Basis,” 47. 2

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words of Confucius: If a man’s natural qualities exceed his training he is uncultivated; if his training exceeds his natural qualities he is little more than an educated lackey. It is only when the natural qualities and the training harmoniously complement each other that we have a gentleman (6.16). Occasionally Confucius appeals to the “Decree of Heaven” (ming tien). We may exercise some discretion in our understanding of this, since it is the only reference in his writings to a transhuman force. Its context suggests that he is speaking metaphorically of the tao. Nature is the mother of reason, and she alone dictates that extremes are what ming tien implies: exceptional states. The pendulum must swing back. Accordingly, the ideograph of chung yung denotes moderation, balance and harmony, ergo the golden mean. “One of the chief aims of Confucius,” writes Smith, “had been to teach moderation in all things. The noble-minded man avoids going to extremes, and seeks moderation both as regards the expression of opinions and as regards the conduct of affairs. ... The Analects says, ‘to go too far is as bad as not going far enough’.”1 This doctrine relies, of course, on perfectly ordinary practices in social commerce. It is justifiable if we consider that “ordinary” here can only mean honed down from excesses in sundry directions to a general social acceptability. Thus Confucius makes league with common sense.2 But the profound problem is that common sense is not all that common! The worst one can do, according to the Doctrine of the Mean, is to immerse oneself in study, go on a retreat or practise asceticism, whereas on the contrary, the common relationships and ordinary activities in social life are the best school. This comes out in the little paradox of the nobleman who knows the ming tien, and the man of the golden mean who does not need 1

) Smith, 97. ) I think Aristotle’s point, once we get past the demonstrations and tabulations, is pretty much the same.

2

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to know it! (16.8). Or in this lovely little epigram: He who rules by moral force is like the pole star which remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it” (2.1). The pole star and the thread are fine images to conclude on. But what, should we say, is the final goal of living according to Confucius? Does he promise us eudaimonia, like Aristotle? Or, since he speaks so much about nobility of mind and station, power and influence? None of these, and here he meets Aristotle in an unexpected juxtaposition. These things are done for their own sake: Do not be concerned that you are not in office, but only about making yourself fit for one. Do not be concerned if you win no recognition; only seek to make yourself worthy of it (4.14). Altogether, the above conveys the impression of a downward trend in social ranking and a swelling of arete to embrace all strata of society. We began with a prince and seem to have ended up with Everyman! An unexpected democratic affinity—with Confucius to teach it!1 Need we enquire if Aristotle had much sympathy for this viewpoint? Well, he taught both Theophrastus and Alexander of Macedon; and surely he would have taught them much the same thing. At any rate, Aristotle’s paragon has more visible character traits. While in Confucius everything is discreet, mild-mannered and unobtrusive, the Aristotelian megalopsychos is aware of his splendour—Aristotle even seems to echo the last-cited quotation when he writes, “he thinks himself worthy of great things, because he is worthy of them.” We may think him extreme in his claims, yet, so says Aristotle, in respect of their rightness he occupies the mean (between conceit and false humility) (1123B1–15). On the other hand, Aristotle does not pass over the other 1

) Cf. the quotation linked to Note 31.

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essential attribute of greatness: an ample resource of worldly goods. Thereby the magnanimus will put others in his debt. We might agree that this is how it should be, but although Aristotle mentions some instances of spite and envy, he skates over them quickly as if they were of no account. I think he is a little over-optimistic here. It can be very tiresome for a fallible mortal to be confronted day in, day out with a man who is “good in the highest degree,” who embodies “the crown of virtues” in his person, whose courage (andreia) is without blemish and whose glory puts most others in the shade” (in the passage from 1124a–b35). There have been men in history with a semblance of this type of greatness, yet it seems that all-round perfection borders too closely on the impossible. The unshakeably upright Aristides, for example, was one of the best-hated men in Athens—perhaps the possession of so much virtue creates a hardening of the arteries of charity and brings on a lack of that warmth of personality that is also, indubitably, a virtue. But Aristotle may be striving for a best-case specimen—a man of action, politics and public munificence, while leaving us to infer that some virtues simply cannot be represented in such an assemblage. We must surely feel that humans, being as variable as Aristotle acknowledges, can scarcely encompass every possible virtue in one person; and the greatest of these, which is clearly lacking in this pride of glory, is contemplation. Can such a man have and cultivate true and equal friendships? Aristotle seems to negate the possibility himself and, in addition, he reserves the fullness of contentment for the philosopher. We therefore do not have his full picture of supreme arete before us until we have examined this other side as well. Aristotle makes a fine plaidoyer for contemplation as the virtue which leads to complete happiness. It is the one activity which most fully expresses the engagement of man’s supreme faculty without having to lean on an end beyond itself: indeed, it is the one activity which brings humans closest to the blessed estate (makarios) of the gods (1177a30ff). Only one base

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item from the world’s itinerary intrudes—the happy thinker still needs “the necessaries of life” and must be equipped sufficiently with those things which make a contemplative life possible. From what we have seen, Confucius would be well inclined to agree with these sentiments—and yet something is clearly missing. Can one conceive of Aristotle’s theoria having much appeal for Alexander the Great? Hardly. Confucius too would say: it is better to give up some of your happiness to stay with one foot on the ground of the rough and tumble of society’s needs. As J. L Ackrill explains: A life of theoria would certainly be the best of all lives. … But, as [Aristotle] himself allows, theoria by itself does not constitute a possible life for a man. A man is a sort of compound ... an animal who lives and moves in time but has the ability occasionally to engage in an activity that somehow escapes time and touches the eternal. So you do not give a man a complete rule or recipe for life by telling him to engage in theoria. Any human life must include action.1

Perhaps Aristotle’s clause “go on to spend his life in worthy occupations” (1180a15) and the subsequent transition to the role of legislation imply his own tacit consent. “Wanting to make men better by his care” (1180b25) brings out the same qualification and points in the same direction as Confucius. For in the end, both thinkers stress the supreme value of self-development to an achievable level of perfection, and both clearly stipulate that the possession of such virtue ought to be communicable—made contagious—to lay claim to true value. And so for Confucius the chüen tsu inspires his fellow men or, if he is a prince, legislates for them caringly; and Aristotle as it were follows suit in indicating that the lawgiver should be animated by a desire to bring out the best, and to provide the greatest range of opportunities, for the citizens to lead a virtu1

) Ackrill, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” 31.

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ous and prosperous life. In a word, eudaimonia is not a social privilege, but a condition towards which, ideally, every citizen of a state should be guided. The “golden mean” expressed in the Aristotelian portrait of the philosophos seems therefore designed to put before our eyes a schema of excellence which does not come to rest on a “monastic” plateau between excess and deficiency, but rather on a threesome of choices: Contemplation

Theoria

Teaching Legislating

Friendship

Perhaps his megalopsychos may be understood as a “practical” analogue. For although he does represent a mean between excess and deficiency, yet once again “magnanimity” is not a monomial expression, but manifests itself in: Magnanimity

Honour (Courage)

Public Trustworthiness Liberality Righteousness

Back to Confucius. In his interpretation of the divine, Confucius drove the last nail into the coffin of anthropomorphism by ignoring it: his Heaven is the simple, impersonal moral law that operates throughout the cosmos; and it is quite clear that to him

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the Way of Heaven is just another way of identifying the Principle of Nature. On the basis of this doctrine rests the other decisive break he made with the traditional interpretation of jen, meaning goodness, humaneness—that part of human nature (often translated by the awkward term “human-heartedness”) which in all cultures is taken to be the important characteristic that sets off man from beasts. But in contradistinction to the specific understanding of this virtue as benevolence, Confucius raised it to a general and indeed universal principle, making it the cornerstone of an embracing humanist philosophy. To him it was the effort required of every man in society, and ideally every man who espoused and practised it would thereby infect another with the same principle. “In these harmonised aspects of the self and society,” writes Chan, “jen is expressed in terms of shung and chu, or conscientiousness and altruism, which is the one thread running through Confucius’ teachings and which is in essence the golden mean and the golden rule.”1 The development of human potential, the refinement and dignity of individual personality and the maintenance of human values—these are the principal virtues of the soul. The ideograph of the concept jen communicates this clearly in depicting the characters “man” and “two”, thus stressing the essence of communality. As far as Confucius was concerned, jen was not merely a desirable virtue, but encompassed all virtues and set up the pillars for his political doctrine, which also embraced filial piety, fraternal affection, faithfulness and altruism. But can this jen be taught, can it be attained by all human beings? Confucius had no doubt that it could, and he would point to himself as the first to have learnt it by the study of the ancient traditions. It was for him, as one scholar wrote, “an existential goal which [he] attempts to achieve for himself through his own self-cultivation. It is the result of a self-effort 1

) Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 16–17.

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which he believes can be taught to others.”1 And this led him to recognise, as Smith writes, that [t]he partialities of one’s nature need to be corrected so as to reach an harmonious balance. This can only be done by selfcultivation, so as to attain mastery over self. But to practise this selfcultivation implies a standard, a measure of what is right. Such a measure is supplied by what is generally accepted as fitting, and that is li or the mores of polite society.2

Confucius’ own expression of this is found in the Analects: A man wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others; and wishing to be prominent himself, also helps others to be prominent. To be able to judge others by what is near to ourselves may be called the method of realising humanity. (6.28) To master oneself and to return to propriety is humanity. … Do not look at, listen to or speak of what is contrary to propriety, and do not make any movement that is contrary to propriety. (12.1) Let a man be stimulated by poetry, established by the rules of propriety, perfected by music. (8.8) In education there can be no class distinctions. (15.38)

According to Chai, “The principle of jen has become a mighty factor in the continuity and perpetuity of Chinese culture and national existence,” comments Chu Chai; “It has never encountered any system of ideas that could withstand its influence. Its lesson of justice and fairness, of a spirit of tolerance and mutual affection, is as pertinent today as ever.”3 Behind it stands the notion of the jen tao, “the way of man,” clearly alluding to the “The Way” as such. It is the way men ought to walk, because the tao “is” and only in following its path 1

) Schwartz, 77. ) Smith, 69. 3 ) Chai, Story of Chinese Philosophy, 26–27. 2

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can harmony with the given order be assured. This “ought” to have a multiplicity of applications, but the kernel within is “righteousness,” the course of justice. With regard to the chün tsu, a final comment is in order vis-à-vis his attainment of honours and worldly possessions. It is part of Confucius’s view of moderation that one can hardly object if men strive for honours and wealth, provided they adhere to the principle of the golden mean and keep their striving within decent bounds that are consonant with the harmony of the tao. Such striving must not degenerate into paying lip service to li and jen. A truly virtuous man, unable to satisfy his cravings (be it through adverse circumstances or other causes) will let them go: there is greater virtue in this than in clinging to an empty notion of it. It is more important to honour jen, for “the noble man who abandons jen does not deserve the title. The noble man does not go contrary to jen even for the space of a meal. He cleaves to it in times of harassment. He cleaves to it in times of utter confusion” (4.5). So much for a conspectus of Confucius’s notions of virtue and the golden mean. As before, Aristotle is more analytical in how he presents his case, but maintains essentially the same spirit in what he says about it. Ethical virtue, according to Aristotle, is “concerned with choice (prohairesis), lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us,1 this being determined by the rational principle (logos) and that principle by which the man of practical wisdom (phronimos) would determine it” (1106b36). He deflates the hasty conclusion that the “mean” signifies 50% with a few examples: regarding health, he notes 1

) Please note the plural, which I take to indicate the generic sense and not, as Plato would have us understand in his critique of Protagoras, each man as his own judge. The word “man” in “Man is the measure of all things” is surely denotative of “men in general” and in the normative sense of “what men in general are capable of sensing and understanding.” If I am colour blind or jaundiced, I am disqualified from judging certain colours and tastes, and so on with all (even piffling) idiosyncrasies. I refuse to believe that Protagoras could possibly have disregarded this.

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that “the nature of such things [is] to be destroyed by defect and excess” (1104a11), and even immortalises the name of an athlete in comparing his diet with yours and mine. The upshot is that the mean applies individually, while this specificity is not incompatible with the notion that nonetheless generality may be derived from the close similarity of all normal human organisms.1 Thus the arithmetic mean serves as a reminder of what to avoid, but not as a demand to insist on the perpendicularity of the pendulum’s swing as the default criterion.2 Ethical virtue therefore lies in the intermediate space between two excesses, whether in passion or action, but each of us must know where to find it relative to each of us. My stress here serves to underline that Aristotle clearly means ‘relative’ both in respect to my nature and to the network of social relations in which I am engaged. Virtuous action must be performed “at the right times, with reference to the right object and towards the right people” (1106b21). Phronesis enters the picture here, because if a man is to 1

) Cf. Jaeger, “Medizin als methodische,” in Mueller-Goldingen, Schriften zur aristotelischen Ethik, 143–44, which discusses the premise that “the problem of correct method is paramount to Aristotle . . . and thus we find that he refers persistently to medical examples as paradigmata for the right application of ethical criteria.” We recall that Aristotle’s father was a physician, and now the plausible assumption is that some of that knowledge must have rubbed off on the son. 2 ) Hutchinson, “Ethics,” in Barnes, p. 218, offers this specimen of the “lopsided” swing of the pendulum: “Virtue is normally closer to one of the vices than to the other. For example, many men tend to be excessively enthusiastic about pleasure, and ‘intemperance’ is naturally supposed to be the opposite of ‘temperance’. But there is another opposite, more unusual and more similar to temperance, the disposition to desire pleasures insufficiently. This is such an unusual state that it does not have a name of its own in common currency, and Aristotle coins the term ‘insensibility’. Human nature is more or less constant and tends towards one vice rather than another; [and] thus it is the vice to which we tend that we refer to as ‘the opposite’ of the virtue. This usage is strictly speaking incorrect because there are two opposites of every virtue, but it is nevertheless a comprehensible usage which expresses a truth of human nature.”

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conduct himself in accord with right reason (orthos logos), he must have access to it—he must understand its scope (“the mark” or skopos) so as to navigate adeptly (1138b22). The key is judgement. But good judgement can best be learnt by constant reference to the principle of the mean. Comment must be added, however, on the implication observed by Aristotle of the lack of innateness of moral virtues: None of the moral virtues comes to us by nature, for nothing that owes its being to nature can be changed through habit, e.g. the stone whose nature it is to fall cannot be trained by habit to rise. … Neither by nature then, nor contrary to nature, are the virtues implanted in us. Rather we are naturally adapted to acquire them, but what matures them in us is habit. (1103a19) Aristotle also devotes some space to altruism—one of Confucius’s most important principles. He sees it as the opposite of egoism, if eudaimonia may be considered as an ultimately private and self-centred pursuit. But philia in the general, and philesis in the particular sense, include the notion of self-sacrifice as an aspect of “complete virtue.” Unselfishness, charity, generosity, warm-heartedness (Confucius’ jen) and altruism are crucial dimensions of the workings of an active soul in quest of eudaimonia. For the achievement of a “great and noble action” which accrues honour, love and respect, may well have to be implemented at the cost of one’s life (1169a18). As Solon said in his interview with Croesus, one can be sure of happiness only if one dies in the consciousness of having lived a happy life.1 Lastly, I turn to the spirit of generosity, which is an important criterion in the ethics of both Aristotle and Confucius. Ideally, this spirit should animate all citizens of a state; and those who are better off than their fellow citizens should give evidence of it by acts of altruism. Here Aristotle and Confucius show 1

) Herodotus I, 33.

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an unequivocal meeting of minds. But it is fascinating to note how their approach nonetheless differs, due to their respective social temper. In Aristotle’s perspective, generosity presumes the possession of “goods” to encourage this spirit: it is hard if not impossible for a poor man to practise social benevolence. Therefore, Aristotle teaches that this is a desideratum for those who are better off; and the better off they are, the greater the moral obligation to munificence accrues to them. It is not appropriate for a wealthy man to be stingy: he should support communal projects such as religious festivals, games, dramas, public building projects and the military arsenal. Confucius goes further than this. He certainly expects munificence, and from the top down. But when he stressed that moral acts should be performed for their own sake, he did not mean merely for the development of a person’s arete, but rather because of the “oughtness” implied in the principle. Things that should and can be done while costing the doer nothing have this oughtness behind them. He then draws from this principle the conclusion that “doing for its own sake,” without expectation of reward or applause, is an ethical demand that applies to every citizen. And to the extent that this citizen is a member of his state, doing for its own sake in the social context translates as that kind of generosity which Confucius calls “doing for nothing.” Every citizen/person has to do something; moreover, the way the world is constituted, nearly every man has to live in or depend on a society, and thus there is something for every man to do. Accordingly, what a man does without external compulsion, merely because it is rightly done, is also done “for nothing,” as a gift and contribution to society which can only enhance the value of life itself. Circumspectly phrased, Confucius may be said to appreciate human worth as intrinsic, not reserved to the upper classes alone, even if he concedes that the latter are expected to rule. Therefore, the ends of a state must include the needs as well as the obligations of the common people, the more so as they form the bulk of the state. Moreover he believed that every

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citizen has not only the moral duty but the moral right to contribute to the well-being of his society. 8 Justice and Righteousness

Justice is what people do, says Aristotle, even if not always in the same way, as deliberation must take account of circumstances (e.g. whether they apply to medical treatment or money-making (1112b3). Accordingly, there are standards (e.g., the laws of heaven in Confucius and natural rights in Aristotle) of what ideally should be thought just and righteous as well as practical. The state of society, Confucius says, reflects very accurately whether there is justice in the land: When the Way prevails in your own state and you are poor and in a humble position, it is discreditable to yourself. When the Way does not prevail in your state and you are wealthy and in an honourable position, be ashamed of yourself. (8.13) Failure to learn what the virtue of righteousness entails will drag degeneracy in its wake: One who loves humanity but not learning will be obscured by ignorance. One who loves wisdom but not learning will be obscured by lack of principle. One who loves faithfulness but not learning will be obscured by violence. One who loves strength of character but not learning will be obscured by recklessness. (17.8) The superior man considers righteousness the most important. When the superior man has courage but no righteousness, he will cause disturbances. When a common man has courage but lacks righteousness, he becomes a thief. (17.23)

The last two quotations complement each other in clarifying that the “learning” of 17.8 means learning righteousness.

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Confucius is likely to have emended an old adage to read: “Justice begins at home.” An important dimension of his philosophy of righteousness is filial piety and fraternal love. We must not think of this as a form of nepotism; it serves him for his disquisitions on the state, which he was inclined to see as an extension of the family. Children who look after their parents and siblings gain economic and social skills en miniature; therefore family responsibility is a good training ground for public activity. It comprises at the same time the deference they owe to their parents, which is right and proper in this as well as the other context. “Aristotle and Confucius are both agreed that the family is inevitably based on hierarchy,” writes Schwartz, and continues that for Confucius it is precisely in the family that humans learn those virtues which redeem the society, for the family is precisely the domain within which authority comes to be accepted and exercised not through reliance on physical coercion but through the binding power of religious, moral sentiments based on kinship ties. It is within the family that we find the root of public virtue.1

Loyalty and consideration are further criteria to be entered here. In the Analects (15.23) as well as the Doctrine of the Mean (chap. 8), Confucius commented that one should “not do to others what one would not have them do to you”—surely one of the all-time old saws, but someone had to say it first. Aristotle’s discourse on the same issue strikes a wholesome note of departure from Plato’s somewhat febrile homo-erotic conception. Especially his words on companionship with wife and family members, who should be philoi because it is natural for them to be so, touch on much the same terrain as Confucius.2 Marriage (or bonding in love) between men and women is 1

) Schwartz, 69–70. ) Filial love, while very developed among humans, is comparatively rare among animals. Aristotle finds a few specimens in support of his conten-

2

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therefore one of the virtues of philia. A mother’s disinterested love for her children is singled out (1162a16, 1159a28). Several of these aspects are given further due in the Politics, where he writes that a state is a collective of families “established only among those who live in the same place and intermarry.”1 Communal worship is also a natural pretext for get-togethers of clans, guilds and clubs (1160a19–26). Of course, this context, as the others, has characteristic excesses to be watched out for—obsequiousness, flattery, quarrelling, “treading on toes,” etc. But these departures simply indicate a lack of the golden mean of affection: “Perfect friendship holds between men who are good and alike in virtue” (1156b7). Moreover it is a “noble” thing and works to mutual benefit in that “it is the same people that are good men [who] are friends” (1155a28). In the Aristotelian context, justice is a somewhat exceptional instance of the mean, depending on whether we think of it as a universal or a particular. In the former case, it can only refer to social circumstances such as the righting of pleonexia, the proportioning of rights and duties by the law and altogether “the common interest either of all or of the best or of those who hold power” (1129b14). As a particular, Aristotle finds that a man can hardly be unjust to himself: whether his action is grasping, adultery, revenge (etc.), it is others who suffer impairment. There is no mean to be established here; appeal must be to a judge who is answerable to the aforementioned “common interest” in rectifying damage. Aristotle distinguishes between legal justice, which is politically determined and based on conventions operative in the society where they apply (and accordingly they may allow certain unfair practices to prevail), and natural justice (physikon), “which everywhere has the same force and does not [depend on] people thinking this or that” (1134b19). tions at Ethics 1155A16, but he would be hard put to add many more to his list even with today’s extended knowledge of animal behaviour. 1 ) Aristotle, Pol. 1280B35.

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This point also carries over into domestic relations where the notion of justice between master and servant cannot be the same as between husband, wife and children. In the case of the former, it is not appropriate to invoke justice, since a slave is a master’s property; though as regards children, these are under the law till they reach a certain age and then change to an equal footing. A word on master-slave relations: there is no discussion in Confucius, since slavery, although not unknown in China, was not practised on a wide enough scale to be a real social issue. Rituals, however, as mentioned earlier, are of overriding importance to Confucius. Not only will they inculcate good habits if they are performed with proper attention, but they are essential for maintaining propriety as the punctuations in life which give us pause to reflect and assess and renew ourselves. The principle of the li is thus ubiquitous in the Analects. Ethically, it translates as decorum and a sense of propriety, which ought to become habituated by frequent reinforcement in ritual. Thus a person’s li is his public persona—which is almost exactly analogous to what Aristotle conceived as the habituation involved in forming one’s character. According to Confucius “If you do not learn the rituals, you will have no means of acquiring a stance” (16.13). Now consider this statement: “Let the prince be as a prince; let the minister be as a minister. Let the father be as a father and the son be as a son” (Analects 12.11). Confucius similarly considered the “rectification of names” as one of the most urgent desiderata. Names that identify a social role entail an obligation for those who bear them to live up to them—from the king down. When his pupil Tsu-lu asked him what he would do if called to the ministry of the ruler of Wei, he responded: Would it not be necessary to correct names? … If names are not correct then one’s words will not be in accord. If words are not in accord, then what is to be done cannot [properly] be implemented… punishments will not be ap-

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propriate… [and] the people will not know where to put their hands and feet. Therefore a noble man uses names only in their appropriate way, so that what he says can be appropriately put into effect. A noble man in his speech leaves nothing to chance. (13.3)

In other words, this is the idea of “the correspondence of words and action or, in its more philosophical aspect, the correspondence of name and actuality.”1 And it is quite simply another side of justice: the notion of social responsibility which reverberates in the names we might bear as family members, public servants, army personnel and so forth, which we should live up to. Accordingly, this aspect of Confucius’s ethics reveals a concern with keeping promises and of living up to one’s name in the double meaning of nomen and repute. In his view too many “name bearers” are in breach, creating confusion and at times outright criminal nuisance. A name is like a signature after all, and should not be treated lightly, as if it had no especial significance. Nothing resembling the “rectification of names” occurs in Aristotle’s pages, which may be a reflection of the different concerns of his society, yet one wonders if certain of Plato’s strictures on “one man, one job” might be read in this light. Conclusion

It is readily perceivable that Aristotle and Confucius are of one mind in respect of many ethical criteria, even if they express themselves in different and sometimes incompatible forms. One may also claim that for their respective cultural regions, they defined what ethics is and what kind of value it represents. And one may further assert, though with less hope of general assent, that they defined, in some measure, the nature of ethics sub specie aeternitatis. After the passage of twenty-four centuries both doctrines 1

) Confucius, in Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 15.

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remain profoundly tenacious presences amid present-day social structures that differ vastly from those in which they were first articulated. But when we inspect the liberal-democratic constitutions of modern western societies, it cannot escape us that they are suffused with Aristotelian principles. And if we contemplate dispassionately what Confucius contributed to ethical wisdom, we cannot but agree that his work must also be numbered among the few chapters in the autobiography of mankind that testify to a striving for excellence that humans can never truly do without.

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III Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom 1 Introductory Note1

LEIBNIZ ACQUIRED THE REPUTATION of an arch-metaphysician: not undeservedly so, since all ten of the fundamental metaphysical principles were formulated by him in the form in which they remain in current use—“which is not to deny that they have their prehistory in the philosophical past”.2 Like many other thinkers of his cast, past and present, Leibniz was strongly drawn to a deterministic interpretation of man’s presence in history; and it seemed to him that God, as the supreme power and all-encompassing intellect, must necessarily hold the totality of events in his mind, whether actual, past or merely possible. His coinage of the term ‘complete concept’ served him to denote this omniscience, while actualised history indicates of God’s ‘concession’ to his chosen possibles. Yet the word Kehre (turnabout) in my title line indicates the abandonment of this position when it revealed itself to Leibniz as a fruitless, indeed self-contradictory, avenue. In the famous Arnauld Correspondence of 1886, he was jolted by the Paris1

) For the purposes of this paper, I divide determinism into two broad classes: (a) those which are concerned with the free will of the human agent and include genetic and theological determinism as subclasses, and (b) those which constrain free will. It seems unnecessary to consider the second group, as it comprises factors and features which impose not on free will itself, but on its exercise—e.g. biological, environmental, economic, ideological and social constraints (the latter including religion, technology, psychology and social stratification). 2 ) Ortega y Gasset: The Idea of Principle in Leibniz, Norton 1971, §1.

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ian theologian’s charge that his propositions seemed to evince “a necessity worse than fatal” and “may possibly be heretical”.1 Leibniz roused himself to a detailed rebuttal; but the correspondence ended there, for with the ink barely dry on his paper, he embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance known as the ‘law of the series’. It resulted from his deep study of surds at this time, which insinuated to him the bizarre thought that even God needs not to resolve non-terminating fractions. In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as ‘tweaking’ the system to allow some self-assertion of free will; but as this chapter will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and to disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor empirical proof can be given. 2 The Need for Reorientation

Leibniz’s case is one of the few instances of a philosopher performing a volte face on his own hotly defended position on a capital metaphysical issue. In a sense, this is unsurprising, for three reasons: (a) Determinism in one form or another is a persistent ground bass throughout philosophical, theological and scientific history; (b) Leibniz’s only fully articulated statement occurs in the aforesaid Discourse on Metaphysics and the letters he wrote to Arnauld, which exhibit a strong commitment to ultradeterministic thinking. (c) Leibniz’s other writings in that genre—notably those 1

) Arnauld, LA/G 17.

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pertaining to the Kehre of my title—are scattered across sundry papers, including some that were victims of the deficient publications history of his works. Leibniz himself must bear some of the blame for this malaise, e.g. his Paris publication of the New System is couched in rigorously Cartesian diction and succeeds in completely obscuring the revolutionary implication of scuttling the dual substance doctrine. The posthumously edited Monadology, so long regarded as his chef d’oeuvre, is a severely watered-down rendering of his initial thoughts, as Leibniz must have thought it advisable not to discomfit the limited philosophical acumen of its recipient Rémond. Some clarifying reference to these problems will be made later in this paper. We are in a better position today to appreciate Leibniz’s forays into uncharted waters as the situation respecting his unpublished work has been significantly ameliorated in the last 60 years, with virtually all the newly edited and published alternative versions of these and other papers enriching, enhancing and clarifying doubtful aspects of his philosophy, including those concerned with determinism. We also have, as a result of these new findings, a better grasp today of Leibniz’s chameleon-like facility to write in a style suited to his audience, which has been a source of so much confusion in the past and likewise occasioned the revision of many long-standing positions.1 These points are relevant for the present context, as an examination of all the available evidence for and against Leibniz’s determinism leads to new insights and a drastic revaluation. It transpires that Leibniz, jolted by Arnauld’s rejoinder, embarked on a thorough revamping of his position just a few weeks after the conclusion of his dealings with Arnauld. At the 1

) E.g. early versions of the New System and the Monadology exist, whose effective contents differ in both detail and overall tenor from the canonic papers and represent significant ‘improvements’ in terms of clarity of exposition—indeed to such an extent that their authentic meaning could only be established after the recent publications of these drafts. Cf. the remarks pertaining to Note 23.

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bottom of it was his own clear recognition that his ultradeterministic framework left him stranded in a philosophical cul de sac with nothing more to say. His own pater peccavi puts it eloquently: I was not far from the view of those who think that all things are absolutely necessary; who think that security from compulsion is enough for freedom.1

It involved him a long and probably painful reorientation of his thinking, as the Kehre demanded no less than dismantling the ‘complete concept’ on which he had lavished so much care. All the same, this conception indicates the point at which our examination must begin. 3 The Complete Concept and God’s Omniscience

The notion stems ultimately from Aristotle and defines the union of a substance with the sum of its predicates.2 But as a substance is inconceivable without those predicates, the definition tells us nothing unless its scope is widened to embrace the entire career and all the affiliated accidents of the substance.3 In adding this specification to Aristotle’s definition, Leibniz set out on his foray into a fully-fledged determinism, for he had now defined God’s prerogative, as no human being could possibly enumerate the predicates they collect over a lifespan. Our only recourse, indicated by Wilfried Sellars, is to affix a name to this congeries, although this is not a solution since naming functions as a tautology.4 Similarly unavailing, though encouraged by Leibniz’s attempt to open a tiny crack for the assertion of free will—e.g. “nothing is necessary whose opposite 1

) ) 3 ) 4 ) 2

On Freedom, P 106. Aristotle, Cat. 2a 11-13. Arnauld, LA/G II 76. Sellars, pp. 105-17, §6.

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is possible”1—is Garber’s hope of isolating an abiding quality or form “that unites the corporeal substance to which the complete individual concept attaches”.2 Here Garber forgot that the complete concept is created ab initio with all its predicates and accidents. Accordingly our fashion of speaking in terms of substance, predicates, accidents and temporality can, in this context, serve only as a façon de parler. Nevertheless, it is also Leibniz’s manner of speaking in his Discourse on Metaphysics and the correspondence with Arnauld—wishing to have his cake and eat it too. In the outcome the sum of predicates must now be multiplied by every substance that ever saw the light, whereupon ramifications hurtle into an infinity of unique complete concepts, each affixing predicates to all others with which it came into contact. It suggests that the complete concept of the whole human collective can be seen as a chart in which every lifeline is in some way entangled with all other lifelines. Yet even this is not the end of the story, for as each substance is at every moment in life confronted by a choice among two or more acts which may involve others, the unactualised sum of predicates must equally be subjoined to the complete concept. Accordingly the sum total of all actual and potential predicates—i.e. the complete history and future of the human race, together with its past and future unactualised potentials—are lodged as a collective complete concept in God’s mind. God’s role in the creation of this vast network of bifurcations among actual and possible worlds is to ‘concede’ actuality to those strands that are actuals to his infinite foresight. The plain consequence of this thinking is total determinism. For if God has already ‘conceded’ actuality to (e.g.) Caesar crossing the Rubicon, then this concession must ipso facto range across that entire history; and then all talk of free will and making choices remains cosmetic quibbling. God’s concession 1 2

) Disc. Met., §13. ) Garber, p. 61.

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is a choice that pre-empts all other choices, which no amount of fudging with necessity and contingency can circumvent. It is worth pointing out that as an image in God’s mind, the complete concept is symmetrical and timeless; moreover its causality is the perfect example of reversibility, as all its causes are ultimately reducible to the uncaused cause who created all of them in one instant. Hence the complete concept exemplifies a complete explanatory closure that nullifies all further debate. If not a hair escapes God’s knowledge, then it becomes difficult if not impossible to separate God from his creation, to speak of God and the universe as two entities. But in the result, Leibniz’s doctrine of human freedom succumbed to a mere nominalism. 4 Edging out

In retrospect it is clear that Leibniz himself was conscious of having painted himself into a corner. Thus a few short weeks after despatching his last letter to Arnauld, he penned this revealing passage in a new paper: … necessary truths can be reduced to identical truths, just as commensurable quantities can be reduced to a common measure; but in the case of contingent truths, as in the case of surds, the reduction proceeds to infinity and is never terminated. So the certitude … of contingent truths is known only to God, who grasps the infinite with one intuition.1

God is still there with his omniscience; but this concession is beginning to sound like a scholastic afterthought to justify the mention of aspects which, to a human intellect, seem impossible per se. However, as Leibniz never produced a comprehensive doctrine, the next strand of thought could be anywhere among 1

) Spec. Disc., P 75.

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his papers. This is part of the difficulty entailed in putting his thoughts into an intelligible sequence. Like Leonardo da Vinci, the other disorganised l’uomo universale of recent centuries, he was just as likely to scribble thoughts and drawings from disparate topics on one scrap of paper that happened to be lying around—or else bring issues related to determinism into another kind of discussion, because the idea happens to fit that environment. However, here is a candidate qua note of confession from a very relevant context: I think I have disentangled a secret which had me perplexed for a long time; for I did not understand how a predicate could be in a subject and yet the proposition would not be a necessary one.1

This refers to propositions which are true in such large part, or nearly always, that their contradiction would infer miraculous intervention. Leibniz did not believe in miracles, as he could not conceive how God’s infinite foresight might be reconciled to the disruption of his perfect creation. Moreover, in the same paper, a new concept is announced that would occupy him, on and off, for the next several years: … the first essential laws of the series ... are inferred by others whose universality is still less; ... but never by any analysis can one arrive at the absolutely universal laws nor at the perfect reasons for individual things; … since the fact that the series itself exists is contingent ... its laws will also be contingent in the absolute sense; but they will be hypothetically necessary and will only be essential given the series.”2

What is this law of the series? At first blush the same sequence that produced the aforesaid predicates of the complete concept, but with the crucial difference that on Leibniz’s new insight, they are not visibly predetermined (hence his use of ‘hypothetical necessity’), for most of them taper off in an in1 2

) Nec. Cont. Truths, P 97. ) Ibid, P 99-100.

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finite regress when we wish to trace their causes down to a single ‘necessary’ cause. In short, Leibniz has in mind a condition of equipollence among sufficiently many of the subject’s potentials for action which may tilt choice this or that way on a whim—his word is ‘indifference’—rather than by deliberate decision. It recalls the metaphor of Buridan’s Ass, on which Leibniz correctly asserts that hunger is stronger than indecision, motivating the animal to break the symmetry spontaneously and eat indifferently from one or the other haystack. What is being announced here comprises a significant departure, involving the idea that spontaneous actions have no hard-and-fast cause, therefore they cannot be deduced from a minutely preceding ‘state’ that might serve as a predictable potential. Moreover an accessory to this train of thought is, that any decision implemented by a spontaneous act of will on equipollent conditions makes an asymmetrical incision into the seamless continuity of the complete concept, which cranks it into a randomly selected future and thereby eliminates from it the total of unactualised futures (although they remain as candidates for ‘alternative worlds’, cf. infra). A point has now been reached which enables Leibniz to pronounce extreme unction over the complete concept: In the case of contingent truths, even though the predicate is in the subject, this can never be demonstrated of it, nor can the proposition ever be reduced to an equation or identity. Instead the analysis proceeds to infinity, God alone seeing—not indeed the end of the analysis, since it has no end—but the connection of terms or the inclusion of the predicate in the subject ...1

It is easy to miss the import of these lines. What they imply is, that even God cannot (or more circumspectly phrased: has no need to) possess knowledge of the last term of an infinite series, as such a last term is absolutely incognisable.2 We should 1 2

) On Freedom, P 109. ) A very simple illustration may be appropriate: The sequential fractions

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take note here of the difference between knowledge and intuition, i.e. the discursive-analytical faculty and the instantaneous quasi-visual grasp which no thinker before Leibniz had the temerity to associate with God’s omniscience. 5 The Substance as a System

After deconstruction ensues reconstruction. A window opens to philosophical vista that have no past in either Leibniz’s nor any other philosophy. Free will has been reinstated through the ‘hypothetical necessity’ of the propositions associated with it. The fact that spontaneity is the equivalent of the complex future of a needle standing on its tip secures its autonomy. But thus far no metaphysical substructure has been provided, to secure the foundations of this anti-deterministic doctrine. The first step involves identification of the substance not as a sum, but a system of predicates.1 ‘System’ denotes a polygamy of autonomous, but interlocked processes, where each serves a particular purpose, while each depends on all others for its function in the ensemble and none is duplicated. This designates the substance as an energetic entity—an entelechy, later explicitly named ‘monad’—from which a crucial criterion emerges that is frequently overlooked, namely the impossibility of cutting an instantaneous cross-section through it.2 ½+¼+1/8+1/16+1/32+1/64 … have neither a first nor a last term, but are instantly recognisable as having ‘1’ as its result—not perfectly, but “as close as you wish”, as Leibniz says. 1 ) Gurwitsch, pp. 298-9. 2 ) This may be illustrated by way of a photograph of a horse race. Depending on how ‘fast’ the film is, the picture will either show a still of the spectators with horse and rider blurred, or else the horse and rider in sharp focus with the background audience blurred. In living bodies, this dichotomy becomes a ‘pantotomy’, as most processes will be in various states of incompleteness and would not appear on (e.g.) a total body scan suitable for reconstruction in another world, as in many of our sci-fi fairy tales.

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However, this new entity must be enabled to vouchsafe its identity from predicates that are necessarily associated with it. This need is first broached in a letter to de Volder, where he informs his interlocutor that predicates are not attached, but arise from some principle inherent in the substance itself.1 In other words: predicates do not rain on the substance and seep inside; rather the substance as its own source of agency engenders its own unique predicates. This stipulation encapsulates the precise meaning of Leibniz’s concept of the ‘law of the series’, as it simply denotes that the sequence of integration is fully commensurate, i.e. ‘in character’. Therefore in comparison with the ‘complete concept’, which is a static, once-andfor-all picture postcard, the ‘law of the series’ is a view of the substance as the generatrix of its predicates and accidents. Hence the law of the series is an evolving substance, an ‘unfolding’ in Leibniz’s terminology, as opposed to ‘infolding’, which is death. It should be noted that ontologically, the law of the series and the substance are identities. Further, that temporality enters the law of the series as an ordering principle, since in Leibniz’s metaphysics, time is not an independent ‘flow’, but the logical correlate of the substance’s succession of perceptions.2 This is easy to misconstrue, as e.g. Jalabert did, who surmised that time emerges from the activity of monads aka law of the series.3 But the existence of the substance ‘in itself’ is atemporal, as it is not determined by, but engenders its accidents. 6 The Mode of Self-predication

From here on, it is convenient to refer to substance as ‘monad’, 1

) Volder, G II 262-5, L 533ff. ) Rémond, G III 611-13. 3 ) Indeed Jalabert (p. 139ff) mistakenly proposed two views of the substance—first as the law of the series, second as the principle of inherence. But we already saw that this is incompatible with the identity of substance/ monad and the law of the series. 2

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in line with Leibniz’s own practice. We must also approach an issue only gingerly touched upon in the literature, as it seems to fly in the face of most scholarly effort over 300 years, as well as Leibniz’s own persistent asseverations down to his last years. It is a notion, which must nonetheless stare the reader in the face after digesting the last few paragraphs on the autonomy of the substance/law of the series/monad—namely that everything points to the monad as a self-predicating, hence selfevolving entelechy. It is (to put the idea into a basic capsule drawn from quotidian life) the same condition that pertains when a human being is observed to behave in some ways by rote or custom, in some ways on impulse or whim, but always in character; and now the difference relates to the way we might wish intellectualise this behaviour and make a choice between supposing that the behaviour is utterly determined by the nervous system moving from one instantaneous electrochemical state to another in accordance with the ‘sum of predicates’ conception, or else acknowledging that such a fixed sum of predicates is an untenable presupposition vulnerable to infinite regress, and turning to the more philosophically fruitful supposition that this individual collects predicates in tune with the patterns of his perceptions, predispositions, habits, moral fibre, desires etc. The first of these options is the superannuated complete concept; the second the law of the series; of which it must now be said that human spontaneity is also the source of human creativity, for which nothing in human history encourages the belief that momentous inventions such as the pocket watch were either predetermined or, after the event, reducible to a prior determinable feature of human life. What this suggests, however, is an absence of control by an omniscient God! Now Leibniz as a career diplomat had obviously a vested interest in being perceived as a good Christian. But vis-à-vis matematici, he dropped his guard every once in a while, committing thoughts to writing that would have scared the living

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daylight out of readers to whom he was the pious author of the Theodicy, e.g.: There are good grounds for doubting whether God made anything other than monads.1

This occurs in one of his letters to his mathematician friend Johann Bernoulli. Catherine Wilson hunted down passages of this ilk in quite number of his writings, although in most cases the articulation is less blatant and leaves it to the reader to infer what is being said—as e.g. in this passage from a letter written in 1712: The concourse of all the tendencies [of monads] to the good produces the best; but because some goods are incompatible … the results may entail the destruction of some good, and thus some evil.2

The word ‘God’ is missing and could hardly be included without insinuating what is in any case transparent enough—that God does not guide of these ‘tendencies’! C. Wilson adds the comment that “the doctrine that the world is self-creating was evidently not one Leibniz was eager to advertise,” so that when he came to write for akusmatici, such as the aforementioned royal counsellor Rémond (recipient of the Monadology), he suppressed these dangerous ideas. Wilson compared the several versions of the Monadology and discovered that in the published version “Leibniz systematically replaced phrases which suggested the self-actuating powers of the monads with phrases referring to God’s selective powers.”3 Yet in the end there is a ‘saving grace’. As the process of selfpredication is both random and asymmetrical, hence irreversible and monodirectional, it cannot dispense with a first term— which spells out as the monad being created.4 This brings God 1

) Philarete AG 265. ) Bourguet G III 558. 3 ) Wilson, pp. 279-80. 4 ) As a thorough discussion of the concept of randomness must be omitted due to space constraints, I am hopeful that this footnoted resumé conveys 2

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back into the picture—but it is scarcely the God of the Bible any more, rather an authentic ‘Philosopher’s God’! This Philosopher’s God has no need to encompass an infinity of complete concepts. On his behalf, Leibniz elaborates an elegant and stunningly simple algorithm which guarantees free will to his subjects: 1 All monads (an infinite number) are created at once. 2 Each monad is endowed with four attributes: entelechy or eigencausality; primitive passive power or eigenforce; perception; appetition. These vary in each monad from almost 0 to almost 100%, which is also an infinite range. 3 Each monad possesses a unique percentage-aggregate of attributes (which does not necessitate separate creation, as an infinitely long algorithm can take care of it). 4 God sets boundary conditions for their activity. 5 God lets them loose, to do what their nature bids them. A few glosses on these points: No. 1 defines the substance as being-in-activity, as the source of its own causal processes. No. 2 ensures that the corporeality of the monads ranges from the most ethereal to the most inert, so that Dasein from almost pure spirituality through to the utmost hardness is facilitated. No. 3 ranges from the simplest the gist of my Leibnizian interpretation. Randomness is generally associated with the unguided percolation of matter and energy through the universe; but this cannot hold, as ‘unguided’ serves merely as a substitute for ignotum per ignotius. Paraphrasing Laplace, “if only we knew the exact location and momentum of a single atom, we could reconstruct the history of the universe” … meaning: it is possible in principle. True randomness, however, is a result of the Leibnizian principle of indifference, mentioned in the text. As many intentional choices are rooted in equipollence, and broken by spontaneous acts, the accumulating asymmetry continually decreases all possibility of reduction to one final cause. Thus the second-bysecond spontaneous choices of the billion-fold multitude of living things on earth are the authentic cause of a truly random landscape. Add to this that adaptivity involves changes to the habitat which engender further spontaneous adaptive measures, ad infinitum—a consideration not without its implicit message to the contents of this paper!

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conceivable affection to apperception and ultimately gnoseological being-consciousness. No. 4 is self-explanatory, while No. 5 represents the degree of striving, the Daseinstreben of the monads. Leibniz’s core idea is, that these few principles suffice for the creation of the universe. Monads congregating and aggregating ad infinitum result in all possible (or rather: compossible) mixes of matter and energy, i.e. the material and immaterial constitutions of an infinitude of worlds, to some of which God may nod his assent to their actualisation. This, incidentally, might offer serious objection to his doctrine of “the best possible world”; for as Leibniz freely acknowledges multiple universes, we have every right to rebut him on this score, as improvements to ours are not hard to come by! It is easier to suggest that God may have liked our universe best. Be that as it may, Cover and O’Leary (as well as physicists Smolin and Barbour: see postscript) took up the challenge of this extraordinary conception.1 The gist of their effort is to treat the law of the series in an evolutionary sense, where randomly contiguous monads affect each other, while the monads themselves execute yes/no functions on the attributes which might be appropriate to their own state of being. Such an algorithm seems well fitted to the task of engendering the maximum variety from the least amount of coding—Leibniz’s so-called minimax principle. However, the authors spoil it somewhat by restricting God to a single function algorithm, which inadvertently slides back some way to the complete concept, whereas the mind of God would surely have no trouble setting up a plurality of logic gates to cope inter alia with the continuous shower of perceptions petites, which might elude capture. Let us note incidentally that this algorithm would also define the circumstances of ‘start-up’ and ‘terminate’ for each monad. Most intriguing are their thoughts concerning ‘miracles’. God might add an “auto-intervention” code for events which 1

) Cover and O’Leary-Hawthorne, p. 229.

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look like running out of kilter (e.g. infracting the boundary conditions).1 Which brings us to the most burning question of all: The degree of autonomy of the monads, which must have its corollary in the degree of human autonomy and expression of free will. The word Daseinstreben is Leibniz’s own, denoting the striving of the monads for existence in actuality, rather than merely idealiter as at the instant of their creation: Upon God’s decision to proceed to creation, all possibles came into combat with each other, since all strive for real existence; and in this conflict those disporting the highest degree of reality, perfection and rationality emerged triumphant.2

Leibniz concludes with an appeal to God’s perfectionism, that his concession of actuality would be for the “best” of all possible worlds, but we may reserve doubts, as aforesaid. Two worlds are richer than one! However, the main issue to come out of this passage is, that striving monads and predetermination contradict each other. In Leibniz’s description of monads, it is with this striving as its essence that a monad is born; therefore it requires a stronger opposing will or else its incompossibility with the environment to deny it. In a word: Autonomy and free will are not concessions by God, but the indispensable characteristic of a creation of the world that is founded on the principle of agency. A world contrary to these principles would not be honourable to God! Casting a glance back at Leibniz’s example of Caesar at the Rubicon, we see in the new scheme the conatus of the man in action, as it was known to every Roman and every Gaul; yet God’s concession did not induce this particular action, nor would it have been of particular ‘interest’ to the Deity, had Caesar decided to submit to the Senate. Both these decisions are compatible with the boundary lines set by God, both fit 1 2

) Ibid, pp. 238-9. ) Theod. II 201, G VI 236.

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the range of compossibles, both agree with the series profile, hence both decisions are derived from Caesar’s soul alone, though one inclining stronger than the other. Conclusion

Seventeenth century philosophy was still in large measure the handmaiden of theology. Therefore it was natural for Leibniz to choose the theologian Arnauld as his interlocutor on the issue of philosophical determinism, and equally natural for Arnauld to detect the whiff of heresy in the complete concept. In the same sense it is natural for us today to see in it a flowchart of gargantuan proportions which leaves not a single strand of its immensely ramified labyrinth dangling loose for a flicker of human agency to assert itself. Accordingly, Leibniz’s Kehre acknowledged that the complete concept is not a philosophical, but a theological doctrine; that therefore a properly philosophical enquiry into the freedom of will of the human agent had not been performed. That his renewed effort fell into his period of preoccupation with the calculus and the Labyrinth of the Continuum, accounts for his recognition that all doctrines of ‘hard determinism’ are committed to presuppositions that do not hang together, cannot be proved either logically or empirically, cannot be made to cohere and are therefore innately self-cancelling. Deterministic doctrines of this ilk explain human agency away. Whereas Leibniz’s law of the series is the perfect exemplification of a logical metaphysical structure in which all parts are dovetailed into each other and satisfy the ‘facts’ of human agency as well, i.e. its undeniable phenomenology. Appendix

To end, I would like to cite a computer simulation performed by physicists Lee Smolin and Julian Barbour.1 The experiment 1

) Barbour & Smolin 1992.

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comprised two programs written by the authors, of which the first was constructed from the principles of the standard cosmological paradigm, the other from Leibniz’s specifications of the monad and concepts drawn from the Clarke Correspondence. No hidden variables were added, but a non-background ‘space’ provided for the self-assembly of the two universes that were expected to emerge from running the programs. The outcome for the paradigmatic program was a universe with a strong drift towards symmetrical structuring and a concomitant increase of rigidity and dearth of features. The monadological cosmos showed the opposite trend, towards asymmetrical clustering and high variety of features. The authors name the latter ‘Leibniz Configuration’ and conclude that such a universe seems to bear a greater resemblance to ‘our’ universe (especially so, as a symmetrical universe is unlikely to facilitate the emergence of the complex chemical compounds of which living things are constituted). Apparently, this experiment has no connection to our subject; and yet, if we take on board that Leibniz’s monadic specifications were also instrumental in demolishing the symmetrical configuration of his early determinism, we may well wonder! The standard cosmological paradigm may be said to have clear deterministic lineaments and stands, moreover, in irresolvable conflict with quantum cosmology and its features of indeterminacy, asymmetry (non-reversibility) and thermodynamic indifference, which also enjoy some propinquity with Leibniz’s dicta of the law of the series. It not by accident, that both Smolin and Barbour have frequent recourse to Leibniz in their publications.1

1

) Barbour 1999; Smolin 1997.

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IV In the Labyrinth of the Infinite Part 1 Compossibility and the ‘Adjacent Possible’ 1

“It is written”

THE ORIGIN OF LEIBNIZ’S INTEREST in the compossibility principle is not clear, but seems to have been stimulated by his reading of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy and Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace. It is scarcely a coincidence, however, that the first mention occurs in his Paris Notes of 1676, shortly after the publication of Malebranche’s work, which deals in I, 13 with the notion that ours may be only one among many possible worlds created by God.1 But it is explicitly with (or rather, against) Descartes, and thereafter Spinoza, that Leibniz engaged himself with this issue. The assumption that certain things will happen ineluctably because “It is written” is a tradition hallowed by the Bible. But in Descartes this notion is amplified into the claim that whatever is possible will occur with necessity.2 Leibniz, the pioneer of modern modal logic, evolved the explanatory pattern —a proposition p is necessary if p is true in all possible worlds; —a proposition p is possible if p is true in some possible world showing that relations between modal concepts are reducible to the relations between ‘all’ and ‘some’ in predicate 1

) The influence of Malebranche on his thinking is inter alia demonstrated by Leibniz explicitly recalling his reading of this work in the title of his own Principles of Nature and Grace. 2 ) E.g. Descartes in his Principles of Philosophy, Part III, art. 47.

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logic. On that basis, Descartes’ claim will not stand up, viz.: This would be true if the universe were a collection of all possibles, but it is not, since all possibles are not compossible. Thus the universe is a collection of a certain order of compossibles only, and the actual universe is a collection of all possibles which exist … each collection of compossibles making up one of them.1

Descartes’ claim demands, as we saw, an acknowledgement that all logical possibilities must be actualised in a universe that contains them. The universe will play through every phase of existence that it is logically conceivable; for although the ratio of improbability may be contrary to any human intuition, time will take care. In other words: any the state-of-affairs x, if it possible, must occur, even if just once in an infinite carousel that is overwhelmingly biased to other states-of-affairs. The crux of this matter is then divulged to rest on conceivability. This is too large a claim for humans to presume that they can judge. Accordingly the notion is defective in its conception of logical possibility. Leibniz put this point with his usual precision in the following extract: It can be said that everything possible demands existence … but it does not follow from this that all possibles exist; though this would follow if all possibles were compossible. But since some things are incompatible with others, it follows that certain possibles do not arrive at existence; again, some things are incompatible with others not only with respect to the same time, but also universally, since future events are involved in present ones.2

And again: Not all possible species are compossible in the universe, great as it is; not only with regard to things existing at the same time, but also with regard to the whole succession of things … there 1 2

) Letters to Louis Bourguet, L 661-2. ) Resumé of Metaphysics, in P 145-6.

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must be species which never did and never will exist, since they are not compatible with that succession …1

Leibniz expressed himself in these and similar terms across many of his writings, especially to correspondents among whom the Cartesian view of things predominated. It needs to be specified, however, under what kind of conditions incompossibility may prevail. Rescher dealt with this is as follows: If a substance a enjoys as one of its properties a relationship R to a substance b, and if substance b does not include in its properties a reciprocal of R to substance a, then the simultaneous existence of a and b involves incompossibility on account of Rab and not-Rab being contradictory.2

An example of compossibility under those terms would be the father-and-son relationship of two individuals, say Adam and Cain. The complete concepts of these individuals complement each other. Yet it is readily conceivable that Cain’s complete concept might include a son-to-father relationship to Noah instead of Adam; as it is conceivable (to give a similar specimen) that the complete concept of Caesar includes the event of not crossing the Rubicon. But in this event a contradiction prevails: while concepts of Adam and Cain are incompossible, the concept of Caesar would be incompossible with those of every other person engaged in the events which historically led to the crossing of the Rubicon. Therefore the complete concepts of this Cain and this Caesar must belong to a different world.3 For clearly, the incompatibility also entails that the relationships between Adam, Cain and Noah affect all other relationships that are continuous with the individuals in question; and thus the entire history of this clan (at least until continuity breaks 1

) New Essays, RB 307. ) Rescher, p. 57ff. 3 ) Loc. cit. 2

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off due to childlessness), while in the case of Caesar the history of the Roman Empire would be different (it might not have come into being) and therefore a great deal if not all of the history of the world as well. This, incidentally, illuminates the meaning of one of Leibniz’s frequently cited passages: Every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror … of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way … [also expressing,] although confusedly, everything that happens in the universe, past, present and future, and this has some resemblance to infinite perception or knowledge.1

A summary observation of Donald Rutherford may relevantly be attached to this quotation: Given Leibniz’s explicit avowal that in every possible world “all is connected”, we have reason to believe that this connection must be accompanied by an agreement or correspondence among the perceptions of the individuals constituting a world. We have seen that on Leibniz’s theory of relations, it is only under this condition that we can even conceive of connections among the different substances that make up a world. Individuals that do not agree in their expressions of the universe offer no common ground for their relation.2 2 Logical possibilities

Let us now consider this issue from another angle. Although we can hardly be sure, Thomas Huxley was presumably in earnest when, back in the 1870s, he asserted that a horde of monkeys bashing away at a typewriter throughout eternity would eventually compile all the works of Shakespeare. In this somewhat exaggerated fashion, he was making a point that has lost little of its force. The idea is that in a universe being shaken up nonstop by the random collision of an infinity of elements, every fact that may possibly occur, must occur at some time, even if 1 2

) Discourse on Metaphysics, sect. 9, in P 19-20. ) Rutherford 1995, p. 188.

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the odds against it are stacked infinitely high. Huxley’s proposition is enlisted, for example, in biomolecular science to explain the origin of life. For many decades, research was primed on the belief that random chemical action with hardly a chance above zero of ever assembling a fullyfunctioning DNA or RNA nevertheless did so, for life on earth stands witness to the facts of it having occurred. Fred Hoyle once expressed this in the memorable simile of a tornado sweeping through a junk yard and assembling a fully functional Boeing 747.1 Needless to add, perhaps, that Hoyle did not subscribe to this belief. A simpler thermodynamic specimen may illuminate precisely what the bone of contention is in such arguments. We might imagine taking a flask of hot gas into a empty cathedral. The hot gas, we understand, is comprised of hundreds of millions of atoms ricocheting madly across their confined space in such order as would be mildly described as bedlam. Now as we stand in the middle of the nave, we open the flask and release the gas. At this point we would be very surprised and indeed suspect foul play immediately if the atoms were to cling together as a cloud, move just a few yards along and stay there, as if they were still confined in their bottle. We are quite certain, without argument, that hot gas does not behave this way. Yet it is an axiom of thermodynamics that the important criterion here is not the impossibility, but improbability of such an event occurring. Given all logical possibilities inherent in the situation, including an infinity of different environmental conditions and endless time available for repeating the experiment, the event is bound to occur at least once because it is logically possible. Let us suppose we accept the logical possibility entailed in all these thought experiments. Then we have no counter, it seems, to the monkey argument, the tornado argument, or the gas argument. Indeed, we are reminded of the notorious 1

) Hoyle et al., 1978. Cited and discussed in Kauffman 1995, pp. 44-5.

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instance where none other than the patron saint of modern thermodynamics, Ludwig Boltzmann, felt himself driven to propose that our very universe is just one such exemplification of improbable chance aggregation having occurred, since the conditions of its existence are utterly unintelligible within the laws of his science. This is what he wrote: We have the choice of two kinds of pictures. Either we assume that the whole universe is at the present moment in a very improbable state. Or else we assume that the eons during which this improbable state lasts, and the distance from here to Sirius, are minute if compared with the age and size of the whole universe. In such a universe, which is in thermal equilibrium as a whole and therefore dead, relatively small regions of the size of our galaxy will be found here and there; regions (which we may call ‘worlds’) which deviate significantly from thermal equilibrium for relatively short stretches of those ‘eons’ of time. Among these worlds the probability of their state (i.e. the entropy) will increase as often as they decrease. In the universe as a whole the two directions of time are indistinguishable, just as in space there is no up or down. However, just as at a certain place on the earth’s surface we call ‘down’ the direction towards the centre of the earth, so a living organism that finds itself in such a world at a certain period of time can define the ‘direction’ of time as going from the less probable state to the more probable one (the former will be the ‘past’ and the latter the ‘future’), and by virtue of this definition he will find that in his own small region, isolated from the rest of the universe, is ‘initially’ always in an improbable state. It seems to me that this way of looking at things is the only one which allows us to understand the validity of the second law [of thermodynamics], and the heat death of each individual world, without invoking a unidirectional change of the entire universe from a definite initial state to a final state.1

Leibniz would certainly question the understanding of the log1

) Boltzmann 1964, p. 446.

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ic behind such propositions. Without guessing what he might have said, we can approach this subject in a roundabout way. We might suggest that productions such as Shakespeare’s works are not driven by chance alone—there is purpose in evidence. Moreover, this is already a stage of purpose of a high degree of pre-selection, namely the evolution of certain culture-specific conditions arising from very advanced human social circumstances. As productions their purpose is intelligible to their immediate context, which is in turn a product of innumerable hierarchies (language development, social evolution, belief systems, technological evolution etc.), all of which depend on what might be called ‘human caprice’. The sheer number of biases required to make all this come together puts a complexion on the issue of ‘possibility’ which is certainly at variance with the notion of unguided randomness. What is therefore fundamentally wrongheaded about Huxley’s proposition is disregard of the asymmetry in the concepts ‘data’ and ‘information’. The plays of Shakespeare are not data. Indeed, neither are genes. It would be a completely erroneous view of the aforesaid asymmetry to look on genes as assemblies of chemical units in a (so to speak) neutral pattern. Clearly and indisputably, they have form; they are bearers of an information content. But it is a distinguishing mark of information visa-vis data that the former includes a disposition for structure and privilege. The two underlying factors of the Huxley assertion, ‘unlimited time’ and ‘pure randomness’ are thereby compromised. Once data have become information, curtailment on both becomes effective. An ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ appears in the random landscape, which entails that the ‘inner’ cannot be willy-nilly decomposed into the ‘outer’. It comprises a contraction from neutral event sequences. The inner is a different species from the outer, and its laws of congregation reflect this incompatibility. This is a point to which we must return. On it hinges the issue of how life on earth may have resulted from molecular structures that simply collectivised out of the buffeting

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of chemicals in the prebiotic soup—whether this is a tenable point of view. For when we look closely at genes, we are struck at once by the asymmetry of the physical deployment of their constitutive elements. To decompose this structure is to unravel a very long and complex history of hierarchical compaction: it is (so to speak) to peel off one layer after another of privileged, directional, information-saturated coiling in which every stage represents an adaptive response. To put this into its proper light: evolution does not ‘encourage’ such assemblies. A molecule bearing information as a result of pure random chance has no advantage over a molecule bearing formed nonsense. It is nothing but human bias to propose such an evolutionary pattern. Some other factor must come into play: The genes found today cannot have arisen randomly, as it were by throw of the dice. There must exist a process of optimisation that works towards functional efficiency. Even if there are several routes to optimal efficiency, mere trial and error cannot be one of them.1

Thus the circumstances of influence which are imperatively necessary for life-bearing molecules to assemble in a certain way are not answerable to the criterion of logical possibility alone. The ‘space of the possible’ contains an infinite arsenal of combinatory possibilities and, as mentioned, it is probability rather than possibility that governs selection. But if we focus on probability, then we are forced to admit that the emergence of life from random chemical action has been calculated statistically to a factor of probability negligibly above zero—which means that statistics are against it and that our sole remaining option is to forego explanation and accept life as an improbable and utterly unpredictable event, in line with the surmise of Boltzmann, quoted above. This means that we must shift this remote and singular oc1

) Eigen 1996, p. 11.

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currence arbitrarily along the temporal axis of chance events in the universe. But in doing so, we are conceding a contradiction. For now, we are required to accommodate two extremely improbable chances working in our favour; and once this has been admitted (as it must be) something is beginning to stare us in the face that is hard to get around, namely the apparent presence of a bias in at least our corner of the universe. 3.

Adjacent possibles

It is appropriate at this point to usher in a relatively new concept with a strong bearing on the question of logical possibility. One way of approach would be to contemplate the likelihood of an immense reservoir of possibilities as yet unactualised in the universe. Where do we start? It seems advisable to limit ourselves to apprehensible features, to the phenomenal fabric of molecular species (i.e. chemical entities) and consider this untapped resource in the light of their possible and actual combinations. It is a fact, not mere conceivability, that the universe harbours untold possibilities for molecular combinations that have never been seen, in spite of the 15 billion years in which our universe is surmised to have been evolving. Indeed, when the permutational possibilities of the 92 naturally occurring atoms are contrasted to the substances actually produced while this immensity of time unfolded, we are surprised (to say no more) at the spartan complement—less than 400 substances—of which material reality is actually comprised. Especially intriguing in this context are those missing molecular species that are just one reaction step away from actually existing substrates. Kauffman applied the term ‘adjacent possibles’ to the ‘space’ of these hitherto unrealised combinations: The adjacent possible consists of all those molecular species that are not members of the actual . . . but can be synthesised from the actual molecular species in a single reaction step from

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substrates in the actual to products in the adjacent possible. Note that the adjacent possible is infinitely expandable. Once members have been realised in the current adjacent possible, a new adjacent possible, accessible from the enlarged actual that includes the novel molecules from the former adjacent possible, become available.1

As this passage makes clear, the ‘adjacent possible’ is a realm whose boundaries we cannot guess; but it is, without doubt, enormously larger than the realm of actuals. This impression is strengthened with further acquaintance: If we are now a standing diversity of 100 million species and each had 100,000 genes and genes in each species were at least slightly different from genes in all other species, then, not counting molecular diversity within species, the number of genes is 10 trillion. Given RNA, protein, polysaccharides, lipids and other organic molecular species, the diversity is likely to be hundreds of trillions or more.2

But this being the case, we ought surely to ask why nature and cosmos are seen to be so parsimonious in exploiting these possibles, rather than, as we might expect, invading the space of adjacent possibles? Yet once we reflect on this evident disparity, the suspicion of bias will inevitably resurface. We are plainly confronted with some prevailing condition that offers protection to existing structures and secures them against competition—as if to say: from the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable, the incalculable—in other words, from the consequences of unrestricted reactivity. Now this issue is not as simple as these few remarks may suggest. There are ramifications we need to touch on: for example, that we have no way of knowing whether any such ‘invasion’ would increase the volume of the universe or extend its age. Or that we can make guesses (though no more than this) 1 2

) Kauffman 2000, p. 142. ) Ibid, p. 143.

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on the outcome of a continuous and unlimited reaction front edging into the terrain of proto-existents. Thus, a further limitation is in order to curtail our speculations: we must stay on Earth and restrict our investigation of a no-holds-barred ‘invasion’ scenario as might be conceivable on just this one planet. Kaufmann communicates one such thought experiment, which he calls the “Noah’s Vessel Experiment”.1 Conceive of every cellular species from elephants to microbes being churned up in a huge blender and all structure obliterated, so that a homogenised soup results: what outcome? We would have an instantaneous compossibility problem on our hands, for the unlimited reactivity would explode in an all-encompassing catastrophe of poisoning of the biosphere. In the prevailing actuality, which is ‘subcritical’ in this respect, such a chain reaction is prevented by the hierarchical integration of existent molecular species. Now terms like ‘protection’, ‘criticality’ and ‘optimisation’ are not part of the standard logical armoury. What is revealed here is the operation of a different kind of logic. Accordingly, we find at the heart of the possibility/compossibility conjunction a dependence not on criteria of neutrality or even statistical probability, but on the propensity for stable structure that is ‘inbuilt’ wherever chemical elements are seen to aggregate. The scientific problem is that this bias apparently needs explaining, inasmuch as it offends against the principles of logical equivalence and non-preferential objectivity in random processes. Yet it is arguable, at least, whether these supposedly ‘objective’ criteria are not simply exhibits of our human, alltoo-human preference for apprehending phenomena in stark isolation and imposing on the interstitial unknown and unseen features such terms and conditions as are reducible to logical entailment, because logical entailment is a feature of the mind’s analytical aptitude. 1

) Ibid, p. 245ff.

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4 Boundaries

One preliminary outcome of these considerations is the strong suspicion of a structural bias at work in the universe on whose basis molecular species acquire, in their collectivisation, an information content that puts up boundaries against unrestricted randomisation. In a word, random collectivisation appears to be a most improbable condition of the universe’s evolution. It argues that the universe itself is a complex entity in process of self-organisation, which necessarily entails self-protection by way of harnessing the emergent information that is a spin-off of complex processes. Such a universe is technically referred to as a nonergodic structure: hierarchically organised, with all subsidiary entities co-constructing and utilising the flow of information to facilitate the selective exploration of the adjacent possible. Information vouchsafes that incompossibles cannot establish stable relationships within existing hierarchies. This principle now enables us to apprehend the necessary difference between randomness and optimisation to which the passage from Manfred Eigen (supra) alludes. The viability of any molecular species is not merely a function of its survival capability. Rather, an information content serves as a differentiation mechanism by which the hierarchical class of the species can be determined. Initially, this information may be nothing more than a ‘1’ rather than a ‘0’; in other words, some feature by which a species is distinguishable as ‘real’ rather than merely potential. A potential is something that can be, but is not. It lacks the essential criterion, feature, which constitutes asymmetrical difference, which in turn constitutes information, which in turn constitutes disposition, and which is the ineluctably necessary mark of existence. It goes without saying, however, that the very notion of an hierarchy already involves a complexification of both information and co-constructive processes within the self-organising entity. This has an evident bearing on the Eigen quote as well,

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for I wish not to be understood as having proposed that a molecule lacking the information content that leads to organic assembly therefore lacks information altogether. Its information content is simply not suited to the type of assembly there discussed, for example into the immensely complex structure we call a ‘gene’. The important criterion to be derived on behalf of this example is, however, that the formerly acceptable notion of genes having originated by ‘pure chance’ and undirected ‘random’ chemical action, can no longer be seriously maintained. And what applies to this instance, applies in equal measure to every other structure of the universe. Stuart Kauffman expresses the hope for the discovery of laws by which this nonergodicity may become intelligible to us. The suggestion cannot be far from our minds that Leibniz’s notion of compossibility is an obvious candidate for such a role.

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V In the Labyrinth of the Infinite Part 2 Metaphysics and Quantum Cosmology in Debate on Possible Worlds Preliminary Note

AN IMPORTANT ISSUE in current cosmological theory, the possibility of multiple worlds, concerns their spatial arrangement and the possibility of communication between them. Particularly contentious (bearing on the meaning of the word ‘universe’) is the question of a ‘superspace’ which might embrace these multiverses. Writing 300 years ago, Leibniz pre-empted the logic of such propositions, which rest on the assumption that space is a container and time a linear constant. But Leibniz’s doctrine geometricised space as well as time and identified them as relata of human perceptive sensibilities. As Leibniz did not present his concept in a single comprehensive theoretical statement, this paper seeks to extract his solution from the scatter of his writings on the subject. It is proposed that the concept of monadic perspective provides an unexpected answer consistent both with Leibniz’s as well as current quantum theoretical schemata. 1 Infinite Worlds and Spaces

The assumption that the universe is a spatially extended arena is by no means incontestable. It appeals to our empirical perceptions; but to take this seriously implies the enthronement of

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our earth-bound sensibilities as arbiters of merely conjectural states-of-affairs. Nevertheless the numerous theses on ‘many worlds’ in current debate all rely on it, as all these multiple universes must ipso facto extend into spaces beyond ‘our’ universe. But apart from being mere speculation, the issue remains unresolved of how we might conceive of any forms of life in any such other universe, or, for that matter, what kind of temporal contiguity may be ascribed to the multiverse ensemble. It transpires that Leibniz answered these problems in his time, long before they were articulated in our time! He proposed that ‘the’ universe already is a multiverse, although in form of an integrated conglomerate, as described in the opuscule De veritabitus, de mente, de Deo, de universo: There could exist an infinity of other spaces and worlds entirely different [from ours]. They would have no distance from us if the minds inhabiting them had sensations not related to ours. Exactly as the world of space and dreams differ from our waking world, there could even be in such a world quite dif1 ferent laws of motions.

An intriguing conception is embodied in this paragraph which deserves careful analysis. We note at once that Leibniz differentiates between space and distance. Moreover, various metaphysical principles hover over this passage that are far from passé in present-day theoretical physics, where experimental knowledge is frequently extrapolated upon untestable, though conceivable scenarios, for which it is mandatory to account precisely for their degree of possibility, probability, compossibility or incompossibility. Accordingly, we cannot cavil with Leibniz’s idea of many 1

) Quoted from Rescher (1996), p. 140, translated by N. Rescher from A VI, 3, 511, with acknowledgements to Castaneda, H. N.: “Leibniz’s Meditation on April 15, 1676 about Existence, Dream and Space”, Studiana Leibnitiana, Supplementa XVIII, Wiesbaden 1978, pp. 91-130. Title of the opuscule identified by Rescher, p. 142.—The italics in the quotation are mine.

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universes, as they are both conceivable and compossible. However, they would not be spatially segregated, which is contrary to the focus of current research into basically discrete kinds of world. His idea therefore pits itself against the thesis of a ‘superspace’, or extended multiplex, embracing all possible spatially extended universes. Where this becomes important is in the possibility that spatial extension may not be the sine qua non of this or any universe. Notwithstanding its empirical appeal, such a notion of universes comprising an aggregate founders on the question of communication between them. Nicholas Rescher, in the aforementioned paper, abjures this possibility: Different Leibnizian world spaces cannot form parts of a unifying superspace because they will be fundamentally disjointed—not only in a physical but even in a cognitive sense. They are simply disconnected: there is no way to envision (let alone 1 execute) a motion that can carry one from one to another.

In so doing he relies on another passage by Leibniz from the same fragment: Space [. . . ] makes many perceptions cohere with each other at the same time . . . The idea of space is, therefore, that through which, as is recognised, we obviously separate the place, and even the world, of dreams, from ours . . . Straightaway, as the world and space of dreams differ from ours, they can have other laws of motion . . . Whoever asks whether another world, or another space, can exist is asking to this extent whether 2 there are minds that communicate nothing to us.

Although I am not contesting Rescher’s reading, the passage permits other points of view—in particular the recognition that Leibniz’s notion of perspective, which plays such a prominent role in his later metaphysics, implies an even more radical proposition. Leibniz’s arguments, in my reading, do not sup1 2

) Rescher, op. cit., p. 142. ) Ibid (A VI, 3, 511-2); Castaneda pp. 95-6.

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port the idea of any multiple, segregated universes, but rather conceive of a single universe in which all possible worlds are comprehended simultaneously, while their plurality and simultaneity are determined by the congruent perspectives of minds and concomitant restrictions on intercommunicability. In a word, a distinction has to be maintained between ‘universe(s)’ and ‘world(s)’, such that there may be many worlds, but only one universe. Thus current theses of the co-existence of multiple universes seek to posit their actual existence as spatially autonomous entities, whereas Leibniz regards each world as a domain within the universe that is ruled by those perspectives and perceptions which assure its internal coherence. It is this concept which I endeavour to illuminate in the ensuing. 2 Dreams, Spatial Relations and the Laws of Nature

It will be noted that Leibniz speaks twice in the same brief text about dreams exemplifying the idea of (spatial as well as cognitive) separation. Now it may be argued that Leibniz is seeking to explain how dream experiences differ from live consciousness. But the argument can be turned around without qualms; it can be looked at from the opposite perspective. And this mirror orientation yields an altogether different aspect. In a word: there is nothing in the passage to prohibit entry into the question from the opposite end—that the relation of live consciousness to dream consciousness is disjointed, whereas the other relation is continuous. This seems to offer insights into the very scenario sketched here by Leibniz, which is of the greatest relevance to the ‘Many Worlds’ argument and the dispute about ‘space’ and ‘spaces’. For it is common experience that in dreams, spatial relations and the ‘laws of nature’ are frequently upset. In dreams I can sometimes fly; or I find myself in one place and later, without intervening transport, in another. This ‘irregularity’ is

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what Leibniz captured in the above passages. Accordingly dreams may be understood as a qualified parallel world. In Leibniz’s concept of an intracontexture of spatial domains—his theory of the geometrisation of space—space is not a container, as in Newton’s doctrine, but the geometrical relations of objects and events to one another; while on the other hand the ‘reality’ of objects is validated by their perspective to a cognitive apprehension. Furthermore, space is not a separate creation, but an aspect of phaenomena bene fundatum. Therefore agents of cognisance in a waking state and inhabiting a domain stocked with well-founded phenomena occupy their own distinctive closed realm, which is unlike the dream world in many important respects. It follows that in this scenario it is indeed illicit to conceive of a superspace embracing a multitude of discrete integral spaces. The dream world entails open access at one end; and thus in the relationship which prevails between dream consciousness and waking consciousness, both domains are spatially integrated and temporally simultaneous in one direction, namely from the analytical perspective of the waking state. A curious analogy may be noted here (to be followed up in due course) to the material world. The parallelity under discussion permits ‘peering’ from one world into another—almost a form of slipping through a worm hole (which also comprises communication of a sort). But the issue relates more directly and intimately to the ‘reality’ of parallelity, to which I will now turn. 3 Dreams and Compossibility

For Leibniz, the dream world comprises a kind of ‘parallel existence’; one mind is capable of occupying two states, ergo two different kinds of universe, each of which is endowed with its own spatial arrangements and divergent laws of nature. Moreover, the dreaming mind cannot communicate with an-

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other mind. This is because many minds occupying a closed spatiotemporal domain share in their perception of its specific reality; whereas an individual mind descends via sleep into a dream world where it occupies effectively another, privately closed realm. Importantly, though, a mind in such a state may communicate its experiences to its waking state, in the manner of reporting1. Now this is evidently due to the fact that it is the same mind which is capable of two divergent states of being and that both states draw from a common reservoir of memories. Accordingly, in its waking state this mind shares most of its perceptions with other minds, whereas dream perceptions are solipsistic. This raises at least the difficulty that the dream world is not a coherent domain; it is not a world-as-such, accessible to and shared by many minds. It is a parallel world on an individual basis; a world therefore, in Leibniz’s terms, that is incompossible with any actual world, despite its logical possibility. As Leibniz in fact never tires of stressing, possibility does not necessarily entail compossibility.2 It is the latter criterion that arbitrates on what kind of a world may acquire actuality. On that account it would seem to be asking too much to argue for the possibility of explaining the real, waking world by its analogy to the dream state. However, compossibility is a fundamental concept in Leibnizian cosmology and, in its application to present deliberations, capable of sealing the pro and con debate on actual parallelity. Thus having now convinced 1) I leave to one side that this would be, in any case, a very ineffective means of communication. 2 ) E.g.: “If all possibles existed, no reason for existing would be needed, and possibility alone would suffice.” (Two Notations for Discussion with Spinoza, L 169); or, responding to Bourguet’s claim that the universe can comprise an infinitude of possible worlds only if they are ended and determined, “This would be true if the universe were a collection of all possibles, but it is not, since all possibles are not compossible. Thus the universe is a collection of a certain order of compossibles only, and the actual universe is a collection of all possibles which exist … each collection of compossibles making up one of them.” (Letters to Louis Bourguet, L 661-2.).

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ourselves that the parallelity of the dream world and the waking state, although real to some extent, is limited in its compossibility by the criteria examined above, we may turn to another example which offers more cogent criteria for its candidature. Let us cast a brief glance at life under the microscope. 4 Life in the Small

The first thing we notice in approaching “life in the small”1 is that our animal bodies are not inconceivably bigger than our body cells. The gap in magnitude is quite modest, compared to some others we bridge scientifically. Yet this is strictly an anthropocentric viewpoint: we have the technological means of descending, via the microscope, into the cytohabitat and studying the minutiae of goings-on ‘down there’. We know enough about cells and nerves to understand that this is unquestionably a ‘parallel world’ to ours, in the sense that it is populated with living things enjoying their own perspective of the world. But unlike us, they do not have the facility of ascending by technological means into the macroscopic world we inhabit. Even under the unlikely (though possible) condition of nerves and cells having conscious awareness of their own world, the upward dimensional chasm is too great for them to have knowledge that they themselves form parts of entities with independent life and consciousness—that the structures they build, the work they perform, the trade they ply comprise the structures, work and internal and external processes of creatures which are themselves unaware (except by means of the aforesaid technological apparatus) of the parallelity and simultaneity of these two worlds. If one thinks about it, this is a chastening thought. Even in reading these lines, the physiological as well as cognitive labour of my body’s organs are simultaneously the labour of millions of organisms, all working at two completely unrelated 1

) A coinage of Charles Sherrington from his book Man on his Nature.

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tasks which yet comprise one total and coherent symbiosis. It extends even to the life, sickness and death patterns amid cellular colonies which affect the same conditions in my existence, as conversely my free decisions to think and act, and especially to ingest certain substances and do things like mountain climbing or fighting with murderous weapons will influence living conditions in the cytohabitat. Yet with all this interdependence no mind-like interaction occurs. We are, in a word, precisely in the situation to which Leibniz’s sentenzia applies: “Whoever asks whether another world, or another space, can exist is asking to this extent whether there are minds that communicate nothing to us.” The paradox, in sum, is this: That our cells and nerves handle information; yet they do not convey this information to us, as our cognitive organs (which they comprise) handle the same information in a different way, in a different dimension and without communication up or down these disparate dimensions. Indeed the Leibnizian connection goes further. On another occasion Leibniz wrote down some thoughts which belong similarly into the ‘many worlds’ category; and these again make their contribution to the scenario at hand: . . . body is not a substance, but substances or an aggregate of substances. Therefore either there is no substance, and therefore there are no substances, or there is something other than body. Further, although the aggregate of these substances constitutes body, they do not constitute it as parts, just as points are not parts of lines, since a part is always of the same sort as the whole. . . . So in a fish pond there are many fishes and the liquid in each fish is, in turn, a certain kind of fish pond which contains, as it were, other fishes or animals of their own kinds, 1 and so on to infinity.

Substances, Leibniz tells us, do not make body by sequential 1

) Comments on Michel Angelo Fardella, AG 105.

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addition, but all at once. Somewhat in the sense that x = body if x denotes a specific aggregate of substances. More or fewer or different kinds do not make body. Which is to say, x does possess a certain specificity which we call ‘body’. 5 Leibniz’s ‘Atoms of Energy’

This is significant in another related context. For Leibniz it was self-evident that “true atoms” were not the material entities of Democritus, Gassendi et al.—which are necessarily compounds despite the name—but atoms of agency, a.k.a. monads. His critique of Cartesian and Newtonian materialism, as is well-known, revolved around the impotence of those doctrines when called upon to explain motive power. In that respect, almost nothing has changed (although it is a dilemma more frequently addressed in theoretical physics today than even just a generation ago). Now the main issue for the ‘realist’ in this Leibnizian conception is the problem of explaining how monads—non-extended substances—can possibly ‘precipitate’ into extended material structures, i.e. the furniture of this world. This objection ought not in fact to exist. Hardly anyone engaged in physics research today is going to insist that even relatively large objects such as electrons are particles. Aside from the convenience of the façon de parler, the pretence has long ago been put aside that the event called an electron is even remotely comparable to an actual billiard ball. And likewise with a considerable bevy of the particles exhibited in quantum physics, where zero mass, momentum, charge etc., are common enough.1 But—the crucial criterion—there are nonetheless 1

) Cf. Davies, Paul: God and the New Physics. Penguin, London 1984, pp. 161-2: “… when the physicist says a proton is made up of quarks he does not mean that these enigmatic constituents can be individually exhibited. Rather, he is referring merely to a level of description which is somehow more fundamental than that of the proton. . . . Even more severe difficulties emerge when account is taken of the quantum factor, [for] none of the

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physical consequences. They are events that record changes in the structures of the material elements within the subatomic realm; events that may therefore be acknowledged as connoting just such a ‘precipitation’ as is needed to explain the rise of phenomena from monads. How this may eventuate is illustrated by Ilya Prigogine, one of the century’s leading explorers of thermodynamic dissipative systems. In Minkowski spacetime, Prigogine writes, a ‘conformal’ spacetime interval (conserved in the cone of light even at ds2 = 0) “relates to a field in the same way as do other fields such as the electromagnetic field”.1 It has been shown that this corresponds to negative energy; on the other hand, matter fields are positive: As a result, the gravitational field described by the conformal factor may play the role of a reservoir of negative energy from which the energy to create matter is extracted.2

Nothing in the description of monads in Leibniz’s texts precludes us from interpreting their nature as ‘events’ in the above context; indeed, Leibniz insists throughout his writings on their radical difference to res extensa and their qualitative ‘being’ (identified in the attributes of conatus, appetition, agency etc.) by which they are prime candidates for representation as energetic phases between material entities in their interactions. These considerations impinge again on the ‘many worlds’ proposition. They leave us with changed views on the concepts of time and space. It has almost become a tradition in quantum physics to embrace in the idea of a ‘state vector collapse’ a scenario for the selective actualisation of events. The idea is 3 that the researcher is a “participating observer”; in the act of subatomic particles, quarks or otherwise, are really particles in the common meaning of the word. Indeed, they may not even be ‘things’ at all …” 1 ) Prigogine, Ilya: The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos and the new Laws of Nature. Free Press, New York 1997, p. 175. 2 ) Ibid, p. 179. 3 ) Wheeler, John Archibald: At Home in the Universe. Springer-Verlag, New York 1992, p. 300.

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recording the outcome of an experiment, the observer actualises the event being recorded. This might seem at first blush just a sophisticated replay of the old notion that the tree falling in the forest makes no noise unless a consciousness is present to witness it. But there is a qualitative difference. With the tree in the forest, the observer merely ‘actualises’ an event in his/her own consciousness, simultaneously with any or all other organisms that may happen to be affected by that event. Whereas in a quantum experiment the state vector collapse constitutes an event as ‘real’ and all other possible simultaneous events as merely ‘potential’. In one sense, therefore, the observer brings about what is being recorded, selecting from a range of potentials and possibilities the one that is being actualised. The others don’t exist, nor can they possibly come into existence in the course of any future experiment, because the choice is from billions of potentials at that moment which comprise one unique configuration in spacetime. One could conveniently imagine this configuration as a deck of cards, where the state vector collapse is the equivalent of pulling out just one card, because the rules of the game give the experimenter just one choice. The rest of the deck disappears, or rather is revealed not to have had actual existence in the first place. Now the question arises, why should this be the case? Why just one choice? If two researchers participated in the same experiment, could their reports disagree? A famous (or notorious) article by physicist Eugene Wigner does in fact suggest 1 that this is the case. Another researcher, Hugh Everett, drew the consequence from this, that these ‘discarded’ potentials are not in fact discarded. Instead, they represent aspects of reality to which we are2 not privy in virtue of the limitations of our native equipment. We are creatures endowed with binary 1

) Eugene Wigner: “Remarks on the mind/body question”, in Good, I. J.: The Scientist speculates. London, Heinemann 1961, pp. 288-9. 2 ) “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics” (1957), quoted

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faculties; and accordingly most of our thinking runs along such lines. For example, we say something is dead or alive and do not readily acknowledge that there may be one or more intermediate states of being, depending on the kind of body we are dealing with. The hologram is an excellent specimen of binary perception: what we see from one angle or perspective commands our exclusive attention; but we need only change our angle of vision to see something else, which is likewise an exclusive perspective. This invites a side glance at the evident chirality in the construction of the universe. According to the title of a well-known book, it gives evidence of a preferred direction of processes— of a Left Hand of Creation. The idea of antiparticles sprang from this realisation. Are antiparticles another, holographic, perspective on the universe? Do they comprise in fact a parallel universe to ours? 6 Lessons from the Cytohabitat

These issues, to the extent that they transcend an experimental approach, are clearly philosophical; thus, the opinion frequently expressed in scientific circles that philosophy deals in the main with intrinsically insoluble problems has a point. But ‘intrinsic solvability’ is merely a materialistic presupposition, or prejudice, in the first place. The philosophical question does not revolve around ‘solving’ this or any other problems, but examining their intrinsic possibility. Scientists frequently forget that the agenda of their research—the things they look for, the knowledge we wish to acquire—arise from prior philosophical conceptions. And thus, the issues of the parallelity of possible worlds, of compossibility, of the geometrisation of space and time, were ideas hatched in a philosophical mind before there and discussed in Torretti, Roberto: The Philosophy of Physics. Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 391.

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ever was a science that could write up a methodology for investigating them. Now the threshold at which we are poised is (so to speak) a threshold through several doors simultaneously. In respect of the comparison of our world with the cytohabitat, the argument may hold that the denizens of each of these ‘universes’ are, in fact, denizens of the same and occupants of the identical spatial domain, notwithstanding their inability to communicate with each other. Yet this argument must remain tentative, if only for the reason that those structures which ‘we’ and ‘they’ recognise as the furniture of the world are evidently incompatible with each other. To certain types of cells, for example, an atom may belong among their ‘household gadgets’, a ready-to-hand source of energy in a sense that could not apply to us. In another way, our dream and waking worlds can be said to have a connection with each other, a kind of umbilical cord on the spatiotemporal platform which we occupy, for both ‘worlds’ share in the same source of sensory and perceptive information—albeit unequally. This is where our situation vis-à-vis quantum states differs markedly and in several crucial respects. In this realm we are dealing with a world of infinite potential in which the collapse of wave functions is understood as the moment-by-moment choice we make at bifurcations in the event landscape. Individually and collectively our choices carve out a path into the future; our choices converting the amorphous bundle of possible trajectories into an actual collective trajectory that effectively comprises the history of our species. But if we now enquire where the unactualised potentials may be hiding—that is, those possibilities which according to Everett are parallel actuals—then our only choice is to admit, with Leibniz, that they remain incognisant because no mind communicates with us from any of those possible worlds, notwithstanding that they are (like the cellular habitat and our dream habitat) literally under our noses—having no distance

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from us, as Leibniz put it. Each of these discarded worlds is a perspective on reality to which we have no access, because each of them lights up for an instant in our consciousness as a choice to be made—but whatever choice we do make establishes our perspective at the same instant. Leibniz speaks of this in the context of a complete concept. Every one of these possible bifurcations in an individual’s lifeline represents part of the overall shape of a complete concept; but the unrealised potentials do not belong to anyone’s unique individual profile which is fixed and ‘readable’ only on conclusion of their temporal traversal. The millions of unpursued paths and their billion-fold ramifications (i.e. their influence on the history of the human collective) are perceivable, according to Leibniz, only to God. We ourselves, by the way we are constituted, perceive just that one lifetime curve that is actualised, that we create for each other by our choices—an aggregate and coherent perspective which then becomes our history in virtue of the influence wrought by every single choice enacted on the shape of the collective trajectory. 7 Questions to Reality

Strangely enough, however, these shadowy worlds impinge occasionally on the dream world evoked by Leibniz. Although we choose from moment to moment, not all the moments we discard are thereby expelled from our memories. Many of us have passed across critical junctions in life whose alternatives remain tenaciously alive—faint glimpses across the boundaries of our reality. Cases are known in neurological and psychological literature where ‘fictions’—e.g. unrealised possibilities intensely desired—eventually settle down as memories of ‘real’ events for such persons. Moreover, those same discarded possibilities may be frequently sought to be recalled in dreams. Or else it may be the case that an imaginative mind draws sustenance from them and projects their imagery upon the canvas

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of that other ‘dream world’, where art and music, romance and poetry are at home. Yet even here it is the case that no mind speaks to us from those realms; no mind can cross the borderline into our human reality. We can, however, allow ourselves to be confronted by those images and compare them to our lived reality. In other words, an extreme paradox clamours for attention even as we contemplate the exclusiveness, even finality, of our ‘observer-created reality’. This reality, our reality, seems to resemble more closely a scattergram than a diagram populated with discrete paths; for our paths are surrounded as by a halo of fleeting moments with neither beginnings nor ends—choices never made, state vectors never absolutely collapsed: in short, the ghosts of our existence which accompany our pilgrimage in large or small numbers at the fringes of our final perspective. Like images seen out of focus, because they enter the retina obliquely, these half-or-less realised possibilities remain with us blurred and indistinct—but they remain with us as reminders of a world of the ‘might have been’. 8 Daseinstreben

Ultimately this Leibnizian idea suggests the following extraordinary scenario. As each monad mirrors the entire history of the world in virtue of its unique perspective, so the perspective adumbrated in our observer-dependent quantum world mirrors the whole universe of our cognisance.1 It leaves us free to 1

) Leibniz explains this idea in terms of many views of the same town, e.g. “Every substance is like an entire world, and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe … as the same city is represented differently depending on the different positions from which it is regarded.” (Discourse on Metaphysics §9, L 308.). It is not common knowledge, and therefore interesting on its own accord, to show how this idea is the only logical path to indicating to any intelligence in the universe the whereabouts of the solar system. Since the universe does not stand still, but is ever in process of evolution, our ‘window’ on it is a succession of unique points of view. None of these viewpoints belong to any other inhabitant of the universe, except for visitors to Earth, who might take snapshots of our night sky with them. Any

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speculate that all other choices may co-exist with ours as valid perspectives in their own right, and that conscious agents like ourselves may be living right by our side whose perspective, equally exclusive, debars them from cognisance of us, and vice versa. Though it seems a bizarre notion, we need only remind ourselves of Leibniz’s metaphor of the “fishes in the pond” or of the cellular colonies whose home and landscape we are, to acknowledge that such things are not merely possible, but facts already impinging in some way on our awareness of the interconnectedness of these worlds. Further, there can be no question but that the cell’s life is as indubitable a reality as our own; and that neither of us could possibly and presently understand what life is ‘like’ in the other of these dimensions. To Leibniz this spells out as a literal infinity of possible worlds and an infinity of monadic perspectives. In this view, his claim that monads are the “true atoms”, because they are non-extended 1 but characterised by appetite, conatus and Daseinstreben, acquires more than just plausibility. For it means that the monads, which mirror the world in its totality, which are endowed with a unique perspective and yet remain “windowless”, are thereby compatible with every conceivable dimension and every possible form of actualisation consistent with the criterion of compossibility. This last term acquires a new meaning thereby. For compossibility relates not only to compatibility as substance, but as perspective. It is the singular aspect of a monad which determines compossibility within one or another of the infinisuch snapshot therefore uniquely identifies when in the evolution of the universe it was taken, and thereby also identifies our unique location in relation to any of the stars, galaxies, nebulae etc. that are visible from Earth. In this precise sense we may understand what Leibniz means by the unique perspective of each monad and how this perspective would enable a mind sufficiently capacious for this exercise to unravel the whole monadic cosmos from its knowledge of this one perspective. 1 ) Daseinstreben: exigence to exist, striving for the perfection of actual existence.

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tude of ‘observer-created realities’. And this in turn explains how Leibniz’s God, to whom all aspects and perspectives in this infinitude are as the pieces of a single kaleidoscope, would comprehend from the contemplation of a single monad not only the entirety of its particular world, but also which world it belongs to. To God, all perspectives are one, and necessarily so: for if the world in which we live is ‘observer-created’, as quantum science suggests, then this world plainly pre-exists as a potential to be actualised through the Daseinstreben of created monads. And this argues forcibly for an ‘ultimate observer’ in whose summary perspective all infinite realities are co-cognised. Perplexingly, however—and one wonders what Leibniz might have made of it!—it also means that this ultimate observer would actualise the whole cosmos not at its beginning, but at the end. For the actualisable cosmos is, at first, merely a potential—a kind of ‘residual electric potential’—into which monads are introduced so as to extract from this potential the actuality-to-be. And the final act in this drama would be the state vector collapse of the whole cosmos by that observer to whom all its preceding history is a single perspective.1 1

) I consider it unlikely that N. Rescher would support this idea; nonetheless, a related conception is conveyed by a passage in his paper: “In relation to the manifold of possible worlds, God plays no creative role: he—or rather, his imagination—apprehends them, but nowise ‘makes’ or ‘creates’ them. (Creation as a divinely operated process is limited to the transition from possibility to actually of one salient ideal manifold).” Rescher, op. cit., p. 132. This, however, leaves unarticulated the atemporality of creation, which is admittedly an almost unintelligible concept for us temporallybound human beings. For me to write, above, that God’s creation entails the state vector collapse of the entire universe at the end of a (temporal?) process of more or less sequential becoming would seem indeed to contradict the principle of atemporality; yet if Rescher’s notion of ‘imaginative apprehension’ is acceptable, I can see no impediment to accepting that the aforesaid ‘final act’ is exactly equivalent to the actualisation of a salient manifold which thereupon undergoes translation into a temporal configuration, the latter still understood in Leibnizian terms as a quasi-geometrical manifold of succession and simultaneity.

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This paradoxical thought puts a finger on the problem with which the medieval scholars wrestled, no less than Leibniz. But only Leibniz drew its full consequence, namely that time is not an actual feature of reality, but an order of succession among phenomena. Events, history, temporal unfolding, processes, all possess their unique place in the geometry of creation. By the same token, space is also revealed to be a mode of existence transcribable into geometric form: it is the order of the contiguity, or simultaneity, of objects. From these, mind is apparently excluded; but the resumé to be adumbrated hereunder has precisely its inclusion as its target. 9 Minds that communicate nothing to us

Returning to the statement with which we began, the conclusion for present purposes seems to point to an exclusivity of our world vis-à-vis all other possible worlds, except as qualified, of which the crucial moment is perspective; this latter term now identifiable in different words and by different concepts, which all amount to the same criterion. Thus: If space is understood, with Leibniz, as the geometrical configuration which defines the physical relationship of res extensa among each other; if time is understood, with Leibniz, as the geometrical configuration which defines the order of succession of objects, occasions and events; and if time-and-space are understood, with Leibniz, as the dynamics of change prevailing within this temporal and spatial configuration, then we will also understand, with Leibniz, that the boundaries of these configurations apply to minds as well. In like degree as an object cannot be removed from our spatial universe, or an event transferred to another temporal occasion, without corrupting the integrity of this spatiotemporal domain, so likewise it is impossible for a mind to communicate with a mind external to the spatiotemporal moment which is its own. Thus a third definitory prong is added to space and time as a factor which

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delimits the universe we live in. Einsteinian spacetime may be a necessary, but not, under Leibnizian criteria, a sufficient condition for our universe: its definition does not include the component ‘mind’. But this, it transpires, is an omission fatal to the coherence of many cosmological theories. The mind is the instrument whose perspectives mirror the closed-world compossibilities of its own spacetime configuration and which bears within itself the unique pointers to that dimension in which its Daseinstreben found actuality. This, precisely, is the implication of Leibniz’s phrase, “there [may be] minds that communicate nothing to us.” What the arguments assembled in this paper seek to illuminate is therefore the proposition of Leibniz which is his contribution to the many worlds debate. It is a concept of possible worlds which comprise one configuration, but it is a configuration of many (even an infinitude of) co-existent universes which are not spatially segregated, but comprise an ensemble with so many perspectives, each internally coherent and dictating the perceptions accessible to minds that have evolved to discern that internal coherence as ‘a world’. Logically, a mind so endowed cannot, under the rules of compossibility, discern disjointed perspectives on this configuration. Indeed, it leaves ambiguous how far the concepts of time and space are meaningful at all and in how far the universe described and/or defined exclusively by those criteria can be said to have actual existence. In this context it is surely remarkable that Everett’s theory, heavily criticised in some quarters, will not go away. It pervades discussion in theoretical physics and permeates thought space like a guilty conscience. But it joins hands with Leibniz across the bridge of 300 years of predominant reductive materialism, to posit that mind is in more than one sense constitutive of the universe.

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VI In the Labyrinth of the Infinite Part 3 The Problem of Time, Space and Motion: Leibniz’s Solution of the Rota Algaselis 1 Stating the problem

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM in the title line may be encountered in many texts from many different sources. The gist of it is roughly as follows: An object in motion moves from point to point (in space) and simultaneously from instant to instant (in time). The points and instants may be correlated; thus, motion becomes phenomenally apparent in the conjunction of passing time and shifting location. One presupposition stands out clearly in this description, namely that time is flowing with unchanging constancy, while location represents a unique coincidence of directional coordinates within a surrounding volume. Both time and space are ‘objective’ features of the world in which this description is at home, meaning that time ‘flows’ and space ‘exists’ independently of anything pertaining to human perceptions. It may be noted in passing that such kinds of explanation are not unique to the 17th century, but rather ubiquitous in natural philosophy. However, they moved to the metaphysical forefront in that era and Leibniz himself wrote on the issue in those terms. Yet in due course doubts made themselves felt in his mind on their soundness. All discussions on the matter seem indebted to a generous input of tacit notions and to contain unstated,

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even unexamined criteria. Perhaps the influence of common experience plays into it, which facilitates the extrapolation of empirical macroscopic schemata upon conditions belonging authentically to the arsenal of the metaphysics (infinity and continuity). In a word: it is easy enough to construct theoretical models based on empirical models in which (as one might paraphrase) “a wheel in motion rolls from point a to a1 on a surface, touching concurrently the corresponding points b to b1 on its own circumference while transpiring in simultaneity with the passing of the temporal instants x to x1.” It may be admitted at once that the increments a/a1 and b/ b1 allow the insertion of another point—indeed of any arbitrary number of points—and correspondingly with x/x1. With the appearance of this complexification it seems appropriate now to bring an early model to attention which happens to be one of the topoi of medieval and early modern thinking. It was known originally as the Rota Algazelis due to its derivation from Islamic philosophy;1 but we shall examine it in the form employed by Galileo in his work The Two Sciences. The graphic shows the core of the problem by illustrating it in the form of two wheels hinged on a common axle (or e.g. the hub and tyre of a motor car wheel) and rolling on parallel surfaces, thereby producing a latent conflict of point-to-point correspondence: 2

1

) The Scholastics renamed it Rota Aristotelis on the strength of its discussion in the 24th book of the so-called pseudo-Aristotle’s Quaestiones mechanicae—cf. Palmerino 382-3. 2 ) Galilei, p. 19.

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The question is obviously how the different lengths of their paths can be reconciled with each other, seeing that in empirical fact they are the same length. For evidently the smaller wheel is simply rotating faster; but now this gives rise to the conundrum of how we can be sure that the points on their respective circumferences are exact multiples of each other. Galileo attempted a solution by defining the circles as infinitangular concentric polygons. The geometrical demonstration involves showing that the sides and interstices reduce to infinitely small quantities. “And just so”, Galileo explains, in the circles … the line passes over the infinitely many sides of the large circle, arranged continuously [in a straight line], is equal in length to the line passed over by the infinitely many sides of the smaller, but in the latter case with the interpositions of as many voids between them.1

But in a sense, this is sidestepping rather than solving the problem—tantamount to borrowing from the imprecision which characterises empirical facts to declare that when they taper off into infinity, our notions of discreteness become irrelevant. Which may very well be the case from the phenomenal perspective; but when Galileo concluded that the effort of comparing magnitudes is a lost cause, he is in effect comparing apples with oranges, albeit inadvertently. But this is not intended as an ad hominem criticism. Gassendi, writing half a generation later, drew substantially the same conclusion, even though he set out from different initial criteria, i.e. Epicurean atomism. Like Galileo, he expressed irritation with supposedly insensible parts and insisted on treating them as useful mathematical fictions which nothing can compel us to accept as real divisibles: It has already been declared before that neither this infinity of parts in the continuum nor mathematical indivisibility exist in nature, but are merely a hypothesis of the mathematicians, 1

) Ibid, p. 33.

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and that therefore in physics one should not argue on the basis of things that are not known to nature.1

Perhaps the point is this, that although ‘fictions’, they are nonetheless necessary fictions, indispensable to the effort of unravelling the very conundrums on which they are expended, for else it would be very surprising to see men of the calibre of Galileo and Gassendi wasting their time on them. The other point, however, and the more important one, is that in due course Leibniz would succeed in showing that the problem of comparable magnitudes can not be wiped off the board, because the ratios involved in them persist in the infinite continuum. Apropos Galileo, Gassendi and Descartes, one further consideration enters the picture. The mathematisation of physics which they all strove for and enthusiastically promoted could not be accomplished with the methods at their disposal. Thus, their failures had nothing to do with sagging imagination, but the lack of an appropriate conceptual tool. For what is quintessentially implicated in these researches goes by the winged phrase “to tame the fleeting instant”—in other words, a conception of infinitesimal series converging upon their extrema without actual consummation. But the instrument through which this became possible was the calculus, which did not come on the scene until these men had laid down their pens. 2 Leibniz’s first foray

Since Leibniz thought of himself as the inventor of the calculus, it is fitting to let him speak on its efficacy in this role: It has been realised that the rules of the finite work in the infinite as if there were some atoms (i.e. some assignable elements in nature), even though there are none since matter is in fact infinitely subdivided; vice versa the rules of the infinite work 1

) Gassendi, p. 406.

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in the finite as if there were some infinitely little metaphysical entities, even though there is no need of them and even though the matter can never be reduced into infinitely little particles: however, since everything is ruled by reason, that is how things are.1

The document in which he engaged himself with the Rota Algazelis and related matters is in fact one of his largest papers, taking up 47 pages in English print.2 It is fundamental in many respects, for Leibniz immediately grasped an important aspect which eluded his predecessors—incidentally including the Archimedes of the Sand Reckoner: Whenever it is said that a certain infinite series of numbers has a sum, I am of the opinion that all that is being said is that any finite series with the same rule has a sum, and that the error always diminishes as the series increases, so that it becomes as small as we would like.3 For numbers do not in themselves go absolutely to infinity, since then there would be a greatest number. But they do go to infinity when applied to a certain space or unbounded line divided into parts. … Suppose to the point of division we ascribe a number always greater by unity than the preceding one, then of course the number of terms will be the last number of the series. But in fact there is no last number of the series, since it is unbounded; especially if the series is unbounded at both ends. Therefore we conclude finally that there is no infinite multiplicity, from which it will follow that there is not an infinity of things either. Or it must be said that an infinity of things is not one whole, i.e. that there is no aggregate of them.4

The diagram below represents the same problem that exercised Galileo and Gassendi—continuous motion interspersed 1

) Varignon, GM IV, pp. 93-4. ) Pacidius, in LoC 127-221. 3 ) Editor Richard Arthur comments: “This is a close anticipation of the modern definition of the sum of a converging infinite series as the limit of its partial sums Sn as n ® ¥.” LoC 398. 4 ) Inf. Num., in LoC 99-101. 2

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with rests. It proposes a body a being carried by continuous movement from d to e; which entails a concomitant movement of the radius cfd to cge. Accordingly, the movement of the radius through the arc dhe will be faster than at flg.1

We can see that Leibniz identifies three ingredients: the moving agent, distance and time. Now this is precisely the problem on which Galileo and Gassendi cracked their teeth in vain, for they felt compelled to posit that each of them must be commensurate in their minima. Hence the paradox: the agent of motion has to leave one point and ‘jump’ to the next or else it must touch two points simultaneously; failing either of these two possibilities, it cannot be said to move. In addition (as already noted) the solution is clearly vulnerable to the objection that further minima can and must be inserted as the agent hovers between the points, or the idea of an infinity of points must be abandoned. Yet the paradox can and will be tackled. To accomplish this we must, however, recognise before everything else that the grid of points to which we have riveted our solution is nothing but an offspring of our unconscious prejudices. To speak of 1

) Pacidius, in LoC p. 163.

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‘points’ is, in the first instance, to introduce the human mind and the predilections of our thinking into a problem in which infinity is the backcloth. To approach this with any hope of success, it is therefore incumbent on us to surmount this impediment and to begin with the acknowledgement that time and space do not form an anterior grid of points. Having taken that step, Leibniz writes, we will then see that “there are no points before they are designated”.1 Thus, he identifies the flaw in all prior discussions of the subject. Points do not pre-exist, as our intuitions suggest. Real points must be assignable, which requires the provision of an arbitrary compartment within the infinite. Accordingly, points are, so to speak, created—they come into being when e.g. a sphere touches a line or a body intersects another. “Then the locus of intersection is a surface or a line, respectively … and in general the only extrema are those made by an act of dividing,” Leibniz adds. But the number of divisions that could conceivably be made are never made, for it is plainly an illicit assumption that we can do so—not to mention the problem of whose inhibitory effect is removed by this new principle.2 Accordingly, we are now in a position to state that motion, distance and time are correlated punctiform continua, none having priority before the others since they form an integrated mesh. A most revealing corollary is that on these criteria motion can never cease—all existents are in constantly in motion. For if it could be claimed that an existent is in a state of ‘rest’, it would be tantamount to a claim that time stands still and distance has shrunk to zero. Further, motion is not under these conditions adequately described by ‘change of place’, since this term would suggest a minimum (whereas every two ‘places’ of necessity leave a wedge for an infinity of other places between them). Change of place inevitably assumes a leap; but when we ask from where to where and between which temporal points, 1 2

) Ibid, p. 181. Emphasis added. ) Loc. cit.

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the question stands revealed as absurd. It is in fact tantamount to claiming the simultaneous existence and non-existence of the object.1 It might seem, all the same, that in solving the problem we have so to speak taken away the world. For if neither the leap, nor simultaneous occupation of two adjacent points, nor motion with rests intercalated, nor rest are possible criteria, what is left to us? In a sense the world not as it appears to us, but as it really is: At any moment which is actually assigned, we will say that the moving thing is at a new point. And although the moments and points that are assigned are indeed infinite, there are never more than two immediately next to each other in the same line, since indivisibles are nothing but bounds.2

Not so strange after all: we need merely place locus and time on the Cartesian crosshatch to discover that they are two correlated points functioning as the bounds of two infinite series meeting in that intersection. As one shifts, so does the other. Accordingly, assignation of any (arbitrary) ‘point’ on the scale of time would be matched by a point on the scale of loci. So, these ‘points’ engender each other in the sense that the progression of time ‘creates’ the points which permit us to define the thing as being ‘in motion’, while conversely the thing in motion engenders the ‘moments’ of time, so that we can speak of a thing in a ‘state’ of motion when it passes from one ‘momentaneous’ state to another. Although a splendid and surprising solution, it is not to us, who have been brought up on this methodology, in any way counterintuitive. Rather all very familiar in a way that was not accessible to a pre-calculus generation. Intuitions, too, grow in the soul in which they are nurtured. As Schneider wrote: The points of the continuum are, according to Leibniz, logi1 2

) Ibid, p. 199. ) Ibid, p. 209.

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cally (or better put: mathematically) more complex than the continuum: they are, under the presupposition of a continuum, explained as sites of possible division. They cannot therefore be constitutive of the continuum, because it must be understood prior to their conceptual definition and assignation what the terms ‘continuum’, ‘possible division’ and ‘site’ are intended to denote.1

One defect apparently remaining is this. How can the correlation of points be prevented from resulting in a concatenated structure so that all motion would be at the same velocity? But Leibniz has an adequate answer: There is no part of time in which some change or motion does not occur to any part or point of a body. And so no motion stays the same through any space or time however small. Thus both space and time will be actually subdivided to infinity, just as body is. Nor is there any moment of time that is not actually assigned, or at which change does not occur—that is, which is not the end of an old or beginning of a new state in some body. … [Hence] there is no moment of change common to each of two states, and thus no change of state either, but only an aggregate of two states.2 3 The final missing link

For all the splendours of the Pacidius, however, the final missing link in this chain of arguments is still left in the hands of God. Although this was a recourse commonly resorted to by philosophers in this era, it is conspicuously absent from Leibniz’s mature philosophy, whose primary impulse was always to seek an explanation of how God would have set things up ex novo and with such perfection that it never required interference.3 Yet he has thus far failed to resolve the issue of the 1

) Schneider, p. 91. ) Pacidius, pp. 209-11 [italics added]. 3 ) We know that this issue stood at the centre of his dispute with Newton/ 2

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source of energy for the motions of objects. His answer, for the time being, is transcreation—for all its persuasiveness in the piece a suggestion with a certain amount of guilty conscience discernible between the lines. But having come this far, it did not take him long to wrest the conception of a ‘frame of reference’ from his speculations, so that the quasioccasionalistic intrusion of the Almighty is eventually replaced by the newly derived laws of motion (1678). “Absolute motion,” he now writes, “we imagine to ourselves”; it is nothing but an epistemological convenience for us to consider some facts (mostly ourselves) to be immobile with respect to moving objects.1 And thus, to the final conclusion, which is that object, motion, time and space form an unique aggregate in their mutual interdependence. With this insight in our hands, we may now proceed to draw out some important consequences. Leibniz’s speculations on the ‘Labyrinth of the Continuum’ were not primarily geared towards the elaboration of mathematical principles, but rather to the refinement of a concept of substance that had been taking shape in his mind for a long time. The papers from the Summa rerum, which preceded the Pacidius by several years and spawned many another note belonging into the same context, are full of intimations of things to come by their groping towards laws applicable to the continuum. They all contain important contributions to the understanding of such basic elements as matter, space, time, things and motion which (as he soon recognised) figure in this arsenal of fundamental metaphysical concepts. As Richard Arthur pertinently notes, “insofar as anything is continuous, its parts are indiscernible from one another and thus indefinite”—and thus part of the complex web of figures of the Labyrinth.2 The discussion immediately above points to an aspect of Clarke because of Newton’s claim that God might from time to time adjust the mechanism of his creation. Cf. the Leibniz-Newton Correspondence. 1 ) Motion is Something Relative, LoC 229. 2 ) Richard Arthur, p. 111.

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these studies which is inter alia of fundamental virtue to the final elaboration of the monadological theory. Namely: that any stretch of time, no matter how small, involves some change in the world. Time cannot be considered independently of events—an event ‘is’ the time it takes to unfold. Nor can space be considered independently of objects; for again objects ‘are’ the space which contains them. In Arthur’s words, “change [...] can only be understood in bodies as an aggregate of two opposed states at two contiguous or ‘indistant’ moments”, which is correct so far as it goes, although we cannot ignore the thing/ event which is changing. Accordingly three rather than just two reference elements are involved in this aggregate, so that the full implication of Leibniz’s theory is: That change is an ensemble of three interdependent elements—thing, time and place, while none of these can claim existence without the other existing. This is not incompatible with Leibniz’s insistence on the merely ideal reality of space and time, for it makes no difference to the principle. Whether ideal or not, space and time are integrated with motion; and since objects are ceaselessly in motion, objects exist ‘in’ time and space as our intuition assures us, even though time and space exist merely by courtesy of the objects for whose being they comprise the referential coordinates.1 1

) This may be compared with the analysis and solution of the problem by Alfred North Whitehead. Consider an act of becoming in one second, he suggests: “The act is divisible into two acts, one during the earlier half of the second, the other during the later half of the second. Thus … that which becomes during the first half second presupposes that which becomes during the first quarter second, and so on indefinitely. Thus if we consider the process of becoming up to the beginning of the second in question, and ask what then becomes, no answer can be given. … The difficulty is not evaded by assuming that something becomes at each non-extensive instant of time. … The conclusion is that in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming.” Whitehead, pp. 68-9 [italics added].

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At the risk of untoward repetition, the ultimate conclusion from all this can only be the principle on which all existence is grounded, on which Part II turned: that force is the irreducible element, and indeed the only element which is entirely beyond all possibility of reduction, on penalty of reducing existence itself to nothing. Richard Arthur draws an excellent summary: … Instantaneous actions or tendencies to change state must exist, or … all phenomena would cease, since whatever cannot be sensed and whatever is in principle imperceptible does not exist.1 But it is substance … that consists in … activity that is resolvable into instantaneous changes of state or endeavours (what Leibniz later calls ‘appetitions’). … When he relocates activity in bodies, it is an inferred activity, not the observable one, that he has in mind. The endeavours are no longer those of bodies; they cannot be conceived in mass by itself. Rather they belong to the substances presupposed in body. For there must be subjects of change and activity, even if they cannot be discerned from the phenomena of motion. Thus, continued motion presupposes beings which by acting do not change, and whose actions consist in their changing relations to all other such beings, and the continuity of whose actions requires an endeavour or appetition at each instant.2

This ties in of course with our observations in Part 2 on the law of the series; but its specific point is that motion, on account of its nature, cannot be associated with matter phenomena, but only with beings which possess and exhibit ‘endeavour’ (conatus, appetition). What has been defined above as a threesome aggregate—thing-in-motion, space and time—is thus nothing other than a complicated description of a moment in the law of series of a substance in which the substance abides while en1

) Principle of differentiation: cf. Part II, Sect. D §2, “Differentiation is the generatrix of information”, and Sect. E §4, “The question of existence is bound up with differentiation.” 2 ) Arthur, op. cit., p. 132.

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gendering accidents that are perceivable as phenomenal states. This bears incidentally on the footnoted observation made in Part 2 on the question of instantaneous states, that “each ‘state’ of a monad expresses a point of view on the universe; in this the monad takes itself to be ‘at rest’, relative to all other motion” or states of monads.1 Even now we have not quite reached the end of this story, however. Recurring once more to the Archimedean specimen,2 Leibniz examines the consequences of contemplating a regular polygon of n sides each of length s inscribed in a circle. Its length ns can in principle be increased by adding further increments, so as to reduce the error of quadrature successively. Now Leibniz shows that this error (Length—ns) decreases as n approaches infinity and becomes an infinitely reducing differential. But this brings about a conflict between infinitely small sides and an even more infinitely small differential; thus, to Leibniz “it follows not only that the error is not infinitely small, but that it is nothing at all.”3 But if this is the case, asks Arthur, “if the differential is ‘nothing’, how can any of the results obtained by the calculus be either true or meaningful?”4 He finds that Leibniz’s answer is “forthright, clear and profound”: The circle—as a polygon greater than any assignable, as if that were possible—is a fictive entity, and so are other things of that kind. So when something is said about the circle we understand it to be true of any polygon such that there is some polygon in which the error is less than any assignable amount a, and another polygon in which the error is less than any other definite assigned amount b. However there will not be a polygon in which this error is less than all assignable amounts a and b at once, even if it can be said that polygons somehow approach such an entity in order.5 1

) ) 3 ) 4 ) 5 ) 2

Part II, Note 147. On the Infinitely Small, A iii 52, LoC 65. Loc. cit. Arthur, LoC p. LV. Inf. Num., A iii 498, LoC 89.

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Thus (adds Arthur) “a circle is a kind of ideal limit to a sequence of polygons, giving point to Leibniz’s conclusion that a point, having no parts, is nothing, an extremum.”1 4. Minima, Extrema

This example leads logically to a consideration of minima, which became the next victims of these new insights. It is not readily apparent that infinite divisibility yields no minimum unless one has already prejudged the issue by an assumption of the existence of smallest real parts (whether corpuscular, spatial or temporal). Accordingly, a difference between minima and extrema must be preserved; and hence there is no final particle, no last point on a line, no final world in the Russian Doll cosmos: all these are surrogates imposed by human understanding on unassignable extrema, such as e.g. the end point of a line: If the continuum (if there are minima in it) is other than the sum of the assumed minima, it follows that there is a part which remains when the sum of the minima has been taken away; therefore that part is greater than a minimum; for it is not less than nor equal to a minimum; therefore there are minima in it. But this is absurd, for we have already taken away all the minima.2

The clear message in this is that beginnings and ends are arbitrary concepts (fictions) as well. Continuous things like space, time, motion and all matter structures cannot have either determinable magnitudes nor fixed instants at which they suddenly exist or become countable, whereas before they were not. Only comparison can reveal what we wish to know. For example, it is an illicit assumption in this context to define a whole as the composition of its parts: “A whole is not what has parts, just what can have parts,” and the clue to its 1 2

) Arthur, loc. cit. ) On Matter, Motion and the Continuum, DSR A 58, 470.

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oneness is that “something must remain which pertains to it rather than to the other thing … [and this] can be mind itself, understanding a certain relation.”1 Conversely then, a continuous whole is not necessarily divided into parts, but can be. To regard them as phenomena entails therefore that “in actuals there is nothing indefinite … [and] the parts are in the actual, not in the ideal whole.” Which effectively brings us back to the observations on phenomena from which we began.2 What has thus been revealed is this: minima belong to the world of real things, yet it is impossible to assign such a minimum. But in the continuum, there are no minima, only extrema, which neither can nor need be assigned. And with this crucial distinction before us, we are now in a position to see why Leibniz insists that it is permissible to retain ratios, but impermissible to retain the notion of a descent down to an infinitesimal minimum. With a ratio there is no objection to it becoming a fictive thing. We know when it does and can draw conclusions. It is a different matter, however, to assign a limit or a minimum or a point: for the expectation of having assigned a real thing can only land us back in that inextricable labyrinth from which the above analyses have sought to preserve us. And thus to summarise where Leibniz’s solution lies, where and how he extricated himself from the labyrinth and, equally important, in what kind of relation this achievement stands to the ontology of agency which is our underlying agenda. The continuum, we saw, has been revealed as an imaginary construction, though this should not conduce to the false be1

) Inf. Num., 503, LoC 99. ) The important distinction made here between ‘is’ and ‘can be’ brings to mind Dedekind’s discovery (Continuity and Irrational Numbers, 1872) that one can split a line into two portions at any point and thereby divide the set of points into two collections; from which he derived the principle that every number is an instance of what is now termed the ‘Dedekind cut’. This cut is the precise analogue of Leibniz’s assertion in the text that a metaphysical point is so to speak ‘created’ in being assigned and this point carries the notion of limit. (Significantly the point in question need not be a rational number). Kline, pp. 985-6.

2

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lief that therefore it does not ‘exist’ in some form or other. The whole point, rather, was to show that continuity acquires its distinctive meaning in the consideration of those indeterminate parts in which the existence of determinate existents is grounded. The latter, be they parts of matter, motion or time, retain the potential for division to infinity; but this again does not mean they are actually so divisible. This would conflict with the doctrine of extrema, which dictates that no part of matter exists as such for longer than an instant, it cannot therefore have ‘states’ or shapes, but only motion. It is as motion that they configure existents; yet one of the things we learnt earlier is that in motion there is no force. However, we already know the answer to this paradox, which is only a seeming paradox: for plainly the perduring element in matter cannot be matter, in time cannot be time, in space cannot be space and so on. For none of these are unities as such: they are unities by courtesy of the activity of substances. And so, all this boils down to the very criteria on which Leibniz’s whole ontology rests. Let us recall that substances cannot influence one another; that each reflects the whole of the universe in its being and from its own perspective. Each substance (monad) is moreover part of a plenum in which all changes agree in sustaining the principle of conservation. Further the most important criterion which was highlighted in Part 2, that no monad leads the life of a hermit, but all are engaged in coconstructing the universe. Finally, that this process is based on the release of information, as well as the monodirectionality and asymmetry of its evaluation in the continuous law of changes to monads. It is this directionality of activity which ‘creates’ time, and thus explains why time, motion and space were identified as an aggregate earlier in this section. And finally, it scarcely needs repeating, in this world, the world of monads, there are no parts; but there are extrema, and these in turn comprise the foundations of phenomena. Rombach sums it up as follows:

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In the domain of phenomena we only ever pass from object to object; never reaching the absolute beginning or end. The end points lie outside of the series; therefore the series is infinite. The infinity of the world series of all phenomena is equivalent to the absolute continuity of all its events … a seamless continuity in the process of the world is possible only if there are no absolute givens nor ultimate beginnings. The boundless sequence of phenomena, which point to an origin that is not a beginning, and a termination that is not an end, is the underlying condition of continuity. Such a world series is possible only if the absolute beginning, God, is posited as lying beyond the being of things and above being altogether. The concept of the absolute manifests itself as the precondition for the idea of an absolute continuity of events. Accordingly, it is fair to say that the idea of God as the Absolute lies at the roots of Leibniz’s thinking.1

And now in retrospect we have the key in our hands that ties the loop back to our beginnings: For Leibniz the world is a system of systems, a structure. Only in this light can we understand the burden of the problems with which he saddled himself, namely to uphold the principle of the thorough connectedness across all the manifest qualitative leaps which cut into our experience of the whole of nature. But Leibniz managed to evolve a method to resolve qualitative differentia into quantitative forms, i.e. into quantitative proportions which enabled him to find a complex but articulate form of mathesis for them. … Thereby he achieved the possibility of postulating a gradation within the totality of nature and establish a law of continuity without loss of the basic criteria of quality.”2

This entails treating rest as a special case of motion, similarity as special instances of difference, rays as special species of curves, and so on. In the perspective of infinity, these inequali1 2

) Rombach, p. 375. ) Ibid, p. 319.

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ties are eroded. All magnitudes tend towards a limit. Importantly the conception does not propose that ‘all things hang together’, as in our naivety we often put it, but rather that all things are founded on this connectedness. Moreover, there is an edge against materialism in this of which we have already heard much, but here is a further context. The continuum is apt to reveal that atoms are not only incoherent as a concept because matter is intrinsically compounded of parts and no ultimate part is conceivable, but especially that such an assumption proposes in the first instance a fineness, an evanescence of matter such that the very term matter becomes meaningless. Matter reduced to such finality leaves matter behind: it leaves as its ultimate residue the pointillist force with which we began.

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VII Being ‘en rapport’ with the World: Leibniz and Wittgenstein on the Mind-Body Duality Prefatory Remarks

CLAIMS HAVE BEEN MADE that the Philosophical Investigations amount to a fatal critique of the Cartesian premise of an “inner essence” (the mind) where thinking and perceiving occurs. Wittgenstein did not of course rely on neurophysiological research, but on language as ‘a form of life’. He also shows little familiarity with Leibniz’s writings. Yet from this source, he might have drawn powerful support for his anti-Cartesian thinking. This struggle of two major figures in western philosophy to overcome what each regard as a flawed conception of human agency has not previously been set in juxtaposition. It reveals, however, an unexpected meeting of minds on an issue of the deepest significance to metaphysics. 1 The Cartesian Predicament: Mind and Matter, Inner and Outer

Since 1637, the date of Descartes’ Discourse on Method, a major effort of western philosophy and science has been devoted to an entity—the mind—for whose ontology he provided an entirely new script. The deeply problematical issue resulting from his doctrine of two substances is, however, that they are incommunicado with each other. This led to serious efforts of remedying this discrepancy—exertions that have not ceased and proliferate in a continuing stream of literature down to the present day. Leibniz, the last in the line of those Cartesians whose life

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span partially overlapped with Descartes himself, addressed these issues in many incidental writings, but also in a sustained book-length debate with the philosophy of Locke.1 He was a beneficiary of other earlier critics as well (Spinoza, Malebranche), but countered their doctrines with a new conception of substance which came to be known as ‘monadology’. In this theory res extensa and res cogitans are fused into one existent with a dual-aspect ontology. It implies that spirit and matter are aspects of perceptive relations and conditions among monads. The latter, as bearers of conational and perceptive impulses, collectivise into different species of aggregates, which reveal themselves as either a spirit or matter collectives, depending on the phase context of the percipient monadic system. To formulate this in one brief statement and using the human agent as a specimen of principal relevance to the doctrine: the mind of man perceives other minds as spiritual existents, but their bodies as matter, owing to the activity of mindlike monads and the passivity of non-mindlike monads. The phase context of the percipient is crucial to this differentiation inasmuch as non-mindlike monadic aggregates ‘express’ themselves in varying degrees of energetic projection, from preponderantly inert to preponderantly dynamic. To a human mind accordingly the former appear as matter, whereas to smaller aggregates (or single monads), perception would reveal differently structured aspects of the activity-passivity ratio.2 This conception enabled Leibniz to evolve a theory of mind which differs in crucial respects from the Cartesian model— chiefly that the res cogitans is no longer an ‘encapsulated’ animating principle of the animal body, nor the body merely a response system impinged upon by external sources of stimula1

) New Essays on Human Understanding. ) Crudely put: perceptions attainable to ants and microbes reveal matter to be considerably more ‘porous’ than to humans, again relative to their respective phase context. This theory of a double-aspect ontology is extensively described in my PhD Thesis, Leibniz: Double-aspect Ontology and the Labyrinth of the Continuum, University of Sydney 2007.

2

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tion. Both of these suppositions are entangled in the problematic issue of a communicative ‘interface’. Rather the Leibnizian model proposes seamless continuity between mind and body on the one hand, and body and external world on the other. It therefore eliminates the sequestration of mind in relation to its body and, similarly, the insulation of body from the external world. The dividing line between them is fluid in each model. The ‘density’ of body is not absolute, but reduces to different quantitative concentrations of monads in these aggregates as well as qualitatively different species of monads (i.e. active/ passive). Accordingly there is no dividing line between body and the external space; space itself is comprised of monads. This outcome of Leibniz’s metaphysical principles has received surprisingly little attention in those departments of scholarship which concern themselves with the nature and ontology of mind. It is on the contrary a noteworthy defect of many discussions in this arena of debate for Leibniz to be called to the bar as a witness to Cartesian principles which in fact he repudiated. And thus it seems altogether likely that Wittgenstein, from a combination of disinclination to engage with this falsely interpreted Leibnizian doctrine and deficient personal acquaintance with the work of the philosopher, remained incognisant of the actual import of this philosophy and its propinquity in certain respects to his own. The Cartesian dilemma itself—of the mind as a separate entity variously designated homunculus, inner space, Cartesian Theatre, ghost in the machine or glassy essence—persists in an extensive literature which also includes the written output of the cognitive sciences.1 Wittgenstein in his late philosophy 1

) Typical book-length studies from a wide variety of philosophical, scientific and medical disciplines include Graeme Cairns-Smith: Evolving the Mind (Cambridge UP 1996); Paul Churchland: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (MIT Press 1996); Rodney Cotterill: Enchanted Looms (Cambridge UP 1998); Antonio Damasio: The Feeling of What Happens (Heinemann 2000), Merlin Donald: Origins of the Modern Mind (Harvard 1991) and A Mind so Rare (Norton 2001), John Eccles: Evolution of

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catechised the notion of an ontologically independent mind, appealing to proper inferences from the verbal concepts which generate and perpetuate them.1 Since Wittgenstein is also disinterested in the concept of substance, there seems to be no meeting ground for his and Leibniz’s philosophy. But the point pursued in the present study is that in spite of the disparity in their respective starting points, Wittgenstein and Leibniz arrive eventually at compatible philosophical positions in respect of the meaning that may legitimately be associated with the concept of mind. But before we engage ourselves with Leibniz, Wittgenstein and their repudiation of the homunculus doctrine, it is necessary to cast a glance of the current state of play in cognitive science, where it remains an essential tool of research in pursuit of criteria that may eventually nail down the mind to a recognisable entity—where (in other words) the homunculus cannot be dispensed with if the assumption of a future ‘conscious’ cognitive artefact is to hold. It is in this environment that Leibniz is commonly misquoted, which therefore enables us, so to speak by inadvertent reflection, to link up his thinking with that of Wittgenstein.

the Brain, Creation of the Self (Routledge 1991); Gerald Edelman: Neural Darwinism, Topobiology and The Remembered Present (Basic Books 1987-9); Walter Freeman: How Brains make up their Mind (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999); Ian Glynn: An Anatomy of Thought: Origin and Machinery of the Mind (Phoenix 1999); Nicholas Humphrey: A History of the Mind (Vintage 1993); Michael Lockwood: Mind, Brain and the Quantum (Blackwell 1989); Marvin Minsky: The Society of Mind (Simon & Schuster 1985); Steven Mithen: The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames and Hudson 1996); Roger Penrose: Shadows of the Mind (Oxford UP 1995); Karl Popper & John Eccles: The Self and its Brain (Springer 1977); Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden (Hodder & Stoughton 1977); John Searle: The Rediscovery of the Mind (MIT Press 1994); Zoltan Torey: The Crucible of Consciousness (Oxford UP 1999); John Z. Young: Programs of the Brain (Gifford Lectures 1975-7; Oxford 1978). 1 ) In his Philosophical Investigations, which serves us here as the principal text.

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2 Black boxology:1 (a) Windmills of the Mind

We make take as a default position on the thinking of scientific philosophers the work of Paul Churchland, exhibited in his book The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, subtitled A Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Churchland’s views are a sophisticated variant of those which Mr and Mrs Everyman are likely to hold when they refer to the mind as “the little man in the box”. Together with many of his confreres he thinks of the brain as a computer and of the computer as a potential soul.2 The notion on which his thesis rests is that the brain is in receipt of sensory impressions relayed to it from the surface of the body in which it is encased. Responsibility for transduction rests with an array of nerve bundles with appropriate sensory calibration. Pride of place is given to a theory of the vector analysis of stimuli which, as it happens, fits perfectly into a general framework of mechanoelectrical signal processing.3 Given this background, we would expect Churchland to be thoroughly at odds with philosophers who do not subscribe to his notions.4 Leibniz, whose ‘mill metaphor’ is a frequently quoted passage, is represented in Churchland’s pages for the purpose of rebutting a doctrine which meets with his disapproval. Leibniz wrote: We are moreover obliged to confess that perception and that which depends on it cannot be explained mechanically, that is to 1

) I borrow this conceit from Rodney Cotterill, Enchanted Looms, one of whose chapters bears the heading ‘Elements of Black Boxology’. 2 ) Strictly speaking: of the CPU of a computer as a brain. Appropriately the first chapter of Churchland’s book describes the brain as “The little computer that could”. 3 ) Churchland (1996), pp. 21-34. 4 ) His chapters 8 and 9 include (wholly negative) criticisms of several rivalling accounts of the brain and consciousness, including those of Nagel, Jackson, Dennett and Searle.

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say by figures and motions. Suppose that there were a machine so constructed as to produce thought, feeling and perception, we could imagine it increased in size while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter as one might a mill. On going inside we should only see the parts impinging upon one another; we should not see anything which would explain a perception. The explanation of perception must therefore be sought in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine. Moreover, there is nothing else whatever to be found in the simple substance except just this, viz. perceptions and their changes. It is in this alone that all the internal actions of a simple substance must subsist.1

It is instructive to see what Churchland makes of its: This recognitional failure would be just as likely even if thoughts and sensations were identical with some vast configuration of the brain’s physical elements. . . . [Leibniz] simply assumes, without question, that the expected failures of perception will reflect the absence of the target phenomena rather than the absence of the ability [of observers] to recognise them. . . . This does not mean that Leibniz’s anti-materialist position is wrong, or that materialism has triumphed. It means only that this particular argument against materialism is unsuccessful. In other words, it remains possible, even granting Leibniz’s story, that the taste sensation of a peach is identical with a four-element activation vector in the gustatory pathways. And it remains possible that, should you and I happen to know … where and how to look for those activation vectors, then we might recognise those sensations, from our mitelike perspective, as they go bye. … We can be sure that a thought experiment such as Leibniz’s teaches us nothing . . . It exploits our current ignorance rather than our understanding. And it covertly assumes what it is trying to prove.2 1

) Mon. 17. ) Churchland (1996), pp. 192-3. Editor’s note: This and the next quotation serve as capital instances of scholars barging in on a philosophy with which they are only superficially acquainted and offering criticism that misses the

2

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A harsh dismissal, to be sure. Yet Churchland’s problem is that his criticism does not deal with the views of Leibniz, but those of a straw man who is mistakenly so identified. Let us call this figure ‘Churchniz’ and reconstruct the position this philosopher might be defending. He would be speaking of a system, a brain, made of mechanical bits and pieces; of a further system of detectors at the surface of the body shell that are pummelled by goings-on outside, whose responsibility is to transmit these to the brain across five modalities for manipulation by push and shove from the neural apparatures which inhabit the cranial chamber. Churchland is not the only philosopher to take Churchniz to task in this way. In Richard Rorty’s major opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the same ‘mill metaphor’ receives a grilling in these words: Why should we be troubled by [Churchniz’s] point that if the brain were blown up to the size of a factory, so that we could stroll through it, we should not see thoughts? If we know enough neural correlations, we shall indeed see thoughts—in the sense that our vision will reveal to us what thoughts the possessor of the brain is having. If we do not, we shall not, but then if we stroll through any factory, without first having learnt about its parts and their relations to one another, we shall not see what is going on.1

Of the greatest interest in this truculent riposte is the phrase, “if we knew enough neural correlations we shall indeed see thoughts” which indeed links up with Churchland’s expectation that “we might recognise those sensations, from our mitelike perspective, as they go bye.” Astonishing confidence! However, it is not our purpose to delve into these disputes, which have been flaring hotly for several decades now, but rather to disentangle Leibniz from Churchniz. The point of this exercise actual context of the debate by a country mile! 1 ) Rorty (1979), p. 6.

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will then be seen in the fact that Leibniz overcame the very homuncular hypothesis 300 years ago for which these writers criticise Churchniz, while their own efforts are to a large extent still trapped in the presumption of a ‘glassy essence’ (Rorty’s coinage) from which they seek an escape. (b) The ‘En Rapport’ Axiom1

Let us return now to Leibniz’s text and take note that his wording claims, unambiguously, that “perception must therefore be sought in a simple substance”. It is strange that neither Rorty nor Churchland noticed that this immediately disqualifies the idea of either a system or a mechanism. It remains a simple question, then, whether or not the mind is an ‘inner’ unit responsible for receiving and processing input from the ‘outer’ world. Leibniz repeated on many an occasion that — Nothing enters the mind naturally from outside, and our habit of thinking as if our soul received couriers and messages and as if it had doors and windows is a bad one.2

It seems impossible to misunderstand this. Plainly it is incompatible with a glassy essence, cranial theatre, homunculus or other entity segregated from the world in an inner bowl of privacy. Rather, Leibniz reasons that mind is open to and in immediate contact—en rapport—with the world, so that the pistons and levers, rollers and sliders of the mill metaphor are inappropriate because nothing of this kind could conceivably represent an ‘understander’. His own statement of the en rapport axiom reads: 1

) I am indebted for the expression ‘en rapport axiom’ to Johannes Hachmöller (1996), who devoted a book-length critique to the ‘glassy essence’ in opposition to Rorty, showing in particular that an adequate acquaintance with Leibniz’s axiom and its elaboration might have produced better than what he perceives as Rorty’s clever, but ultimately abortive effort. 2 ) Disc. Met. 26.

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I believe that anyone who will meditate on the nature of substance … will find that the entire nature of body does not consist in extension alone, [but] that it is necessary to recognise in it something which has some relation to souls and which is commonly called a substantial form. … It can even be demonstrated that the notion of size, shape and motion is not as distinct as imagined, and that it contains something that is imaginary and relative to our perceptions …1

The gist of this passage lies in its assertion that the dilemma of Cartesian dualism results from the splitting-up of the world into two substances of which only one has a surface capable of receiving an impact. For Leibniz, as noted, mind in perceiving matter apprehends something of its own kind. Thus both of the Cartesian discrepancies disappear, and with them the miracles needed to explain the inexplicable. Leibniz insists, moreover, that to be en rapport entails being part of an all-inclusive web. Leibniz’s dissolution of the mind-body duality involves the demonstration that the conception is flawed in its initial premise. Mind and body are not two substances, but represent two phases of one fundamental substance.2 The implications of this reorientation we shall trace through this paper as we seek to provide a link between them and Wittgenstein’s thinking. Wittgenstein was in fact as concerned as Leibniz with the 1

) Disc. Met. 12. ) Since this is not an occasion for enlarging on Leibniz’s physics, I refer to Parkinson’s paper in Hooker (1982), where on pp. 4-5 the author captures well the distinction to be observed in Leibniz’s thought to phenomenalism proper, writing inter alia: “His theory has in effect two levels, the scientific and the metaphysical. He would say that on the scientific level it is correct to assert that for an observer O to have a sense perception of a physical object X is for there to be in O’s mind phenomena that are caused by X. But he would add that such language is not strictly accurate; for accuracy we must move to the metaphysical level where it is untrue to say that any created substance acts on any other. What was stated inaccurately in terms of causation must be restated in terms of the concept of expression … [that] phenomena in one’s mind express X in a certain way.”

2

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metaphysical traps involved in supposing the existence of a kind of ‘nature reserve’ inside the head where creatures of thought tend their business amidst inboxes and outboxes. Thus it is inviting to subjoin the following passage to the debate on the ‘mill metaphor’: One would like to ask: “What is it like—what happens—when one does a sum in one’s head?”—And in a particular case the answer may be ‘First I add 17 and 18, then I subtract 39. … But that is not the answer to our question. What is called doing sums in one’s head is not explained by such an answer.1

In this oblique way Wittgenstein invites us to ponder what might be happening on the ‘inside’ during this performance, Wittgenstein sets the scene for his own metaphor—that of the untenanted ‘visual room’: The visual room is the one that has no owner. I can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it or point to it. ... The description of [the room in which I sit] need not mention an owner, in fact it need not have any owner. But then the visual room cannot have an owner. “For”—one might say—“it has no master, outside or in.”2

Here Wittgenstein comes as close as anywhere to suggesting a thought that might have issued from the pen of Leibniz. “Surely the owner of the visual room would have to be the same kind of thing”, he says, from which we infer that since we are not mental beings, neither can the room be; and thus, it seems outlandish to propose that a ‘mental’ chamber could exist inside our head. For the room has “no outside”, therefore it cannot be a room.3 The notions of an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ simply fall away, just as they do in Leibniz’s en rapport axiom. The best that could be said for this idea, suggests Wittgenstein, is this:

1

) Phil. Inv. 369. Another variant on the same theme is Phil. Inv. 427. ) Phil. Inv. 398. 3 ) Phil. Inv. 399. 2

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What the man who seems (as it were) to have discovered the ‘visual room’—had actually found, was a new diction, a new correspondence; and, one might even say, a new sentiment.1

The other difficulty, the messages received by “the man in the box”, is attacked in forthright fashion: Might I not ask: in what sense have you got what you are talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do not even see it … And this too is clear: if as a matter of logic you exclude other people’s having something, it loses its sense to say that you have it.2

In other words, the visual room is not a stage on which ‘seeing something’ is enacted. The temptation to be resisted is to conceive of the brain or cortex as a kind of resonating chamber for sensory influxes, which confers on its owner a unique relationship with external objects such that one could say “I have” rather than “I am experiencing”. In undermining the possessiveness which resonates in the words “I have”, Wittgenstein conspicuously disregards the possibility of the subject as a substance. Although Leibniz’s doctrine differs in this, he made the same endeavour to undermine the unhappy premise of two kinds of substance in its metaphysical foundation. But if we now turn our attention to the goings-on inside the ‘Cartesian Gallery’, the same and more difficulties will be seen to prevail. 3 Inside the Cartesian Gallery (a) Projection

Taking the above metaphors of an ‘internal chamber’ seriously 1

) Phil. Inv. 400.—I have retranslated this passage to bring out an important point which somehow escaped translator Anscombe, namely Wittgenstein’s twice-repeated use of the definite article “der”, which constitutes a distinct reference to a “he”—who can scarcely be anyone other but Descartes. 2 ) Phil. Inv. 398.

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gives rise to the notion of internal projection. Leibniz entertained a dim view of it; so did Wittgenstein. The latter wonders if we actually form a picture when we seek to visualise figures such as cubes?1 Perhaps; but then we have to countenance another possibility, which comes at us with the force of an uppercut: Suppose however, that not merely the picture of the cube, but also the method of projection comes before our mind? . . .2

One would be hard put to suppress a sense of absurdity in the face of this supposition. And here is an amusing contretemps from Locke v Leibniz to match. On the inner chamber, Locke wrote that “The understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances ...”3 Leibniz, tongue in cheek, proceeded to examine how this could be ‘realistically’ facilitated: To increase the resemblance we should have to postulate that there is a screen in this dark room to receive the sensible species (espèces), and that it is not uniform but is diversified by folds representing the items of innate knowledge; and, what is more, that this screen or membrane, being under tension, has a kind of elastic or active force, and indeed that it acts (or reacts) in ways which are adapted both to past folds and to new ones coming from impressions of the species. This action would consist in certain vibrations or oscillations, like those we see when a cord under tension is plucked and gives off something of a musical sound. ...4

He went on to allow this possibility as a brain function, but not of course as an ‘explanation’ of perception. Of greater philosophical interest, however, is his coinage ‘blind apprehension’, 1

) Phil. Inv. 139. ) Ibid, 141. 3 ) Essay, II, xi, 17. 4 ) New Essays 145. 2

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which denotes the vague idea we form of complex figures we cannot precisely visualise, for example a chiliagon.1 More on this under §4 infra. At a minimum the above disquisitions must lead to an acknowledgement that ‘to have’, ‘to project’ and similar conceptions place an intolerable burden of precision on ordinary semantics which they are not designed to sustain. ‘Inner rules’ are not a movie house but templates for the purpose of social interaction.2 In conflating them as in the above scenario we mix up physical and psychological predicates in one language game.3 Take as a brilliant example the question, “can I have pain without being conscious of it?” This is surely an oxymoron, yet legitimate in a context of projection!4 (b) Perceiving and Willing

Before we proceed it is necessary to pre-empt ambiguities that may result from Leibniz’s terminology. He refers to perception as the inner state of a monad, which need not involve consciousness; whereas the reflective knowledge (conscious awareness) of that inner state is apperception.5 This makes a great deal of sense and seems preferable to the diffuse terminology in use today. Above all, he stresses the role of memory, correctly insisting that no apperception could grow into conscious selfawareness without its assistance.6 We have already noted that Leibniz repudiated the Cartesian conception of the mind as a res cogitans. Mind is agency, not a thing. Wittgenstein opposes it on the same grounds7 and 1

) De Veritate et ideis [in Holz (1965)]. ) Phil. Inv. 272. 3 ) Phil. Inv. 273, 275. 4 ) In this connection John Searle wrote that consciousness is not an expression capable of standing on its own: an inevitable adjunct is that one must be conscious of something. (Searle (1994), p. 84.) It is worth drawing attention to Leibniz’s exactly equivalent assertion—cf. Note 36! 5 ) Princ. Grace 4. 6 ) New Essays 141. 7 ) Phil. Inv. 611-632. 2

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brings the edge against Cartesianism to the fore right at the beginning: And this is the region in which we say significantly that something doesn’t simply happen to us, but that we do it.1

Indeed, Wittgenstein notes that we never express astonishment at doing many things purposely without (apparently) thinking about it and/or being in any way conscious of having made the decision. Considering further the ease with which Cartesianism has lent itself to a plethora of deterministic models (notably Skinnerism), the following is an especially profound observation: When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own arbitrary movements.2

And this could be matched to the comment made by Leibniz on the ‘absolutist’ notion of thinking: It is impossible that we should always reflect explicitly on all our thoughts; for if we did the mind would reflect on each reflection ad infinitum, without ever being able to move on to a new thought. For example, in being aware of some present feeling, I should always have to think about that feeling, and further to think that I think ... It must be that I stop reflecting on all these reflections, and that eventually some thought is allowed to occur without being thought about; otherwise I would dwell forever on the same thing.3 The common denominator seems to be: thinking is not a passive state; it is doing something. It does not have to be physical activity; but obviously relates to volitional performance. Big question marks hang over this which some theorists have all too readily subjoined to an instrumentalist conception. Nei1

) Phil. Inv. 612. ) Phil. Inv. 629. 3 ) New Essays 118. 2

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ther Leibniz nor Wittgenstein could ever be in agreement with this. Consciousness is too delicate and complex a state to answer without ado to a mechanical interpretation; and thus, we move on to: (c) Innateness, Rules and Rule Following

Many of Wittgenstein’s epigrams are concerned with rule following as a completely spontaneous performance. He is especially astonished that children, when they have to learn the rules, understand the instructions perfectly well, although (as he demonstrates case after case) the instructions themselves rely on rules for understanding them.1 There is a case to be made for their innateness—but the moment we bring up this term, we need to confront Locke, who was considerably exercised to deny innate principles. However, Leibniz showed all the back in 1704 that many of Locke’s objections to innateness are insubstantial. It does not, for example, signify immediate accessibility: Because something is innate it does not follow that it can be known clearly and distinctly straight away; one must often be very attentive and orderly to become aware of it, which ‘studious men’ do not always achieve, still less ‘every human creature’.2

And he is especially scathing about the tabula rasa. Once again the principal worry is that under Locke’s criteria a soul or mind cannot express itself in action: 1

) Compare this: “The altercation over two ways [of taking the Augustine passage] may sound as follows: One observes, ‘what could be less remarkable than Augustine’s remark about his elders moving around and uttering sounds?’ Another retorts [intensely, let us now add], ‘Less remarkable— when we are in a maze of unanswered questions about what naming is, what it is to call a thing or a person, what constitutes an object, how we (with certainty) grasp one idea or image or concept rather than another, what makes a pointer point, a talker mean!’ Nothing is wrong; everything is wrong. It is the philosophical moment.” Cavell, Phil. Pass., p. 137. 2 ) New Essays 96.

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It may be said that this ‘blank page’ of the philosophers means that all the soul possesses, naturally and inherently, are bare faculties. But … where will one ever find in the world a faculty consisting in sheer power without performing any act? There is always a particular disposition to action, and towards one action rather than another … and these endeavours are never without some effect.1

Wittgenstein has no concerns with innateness as such; but ‘following a rule’ is a performance based on it, being both tacit and intuitive: What do I call ‘the rule by which he proceeds’? — The hypothesis that satisfactorily describes his use of words, which we observe; or the rule which he looks up when he uses signs; or the one which he gives us in reply if we ask him what his rule is?—But what if observation does not enable us to see any clear rule, and the question brings none to light? … So how am I to determine the rule according to which he is playing? He does not know it himself …2

This culminates in a beautifully ironic double entendre: A rule stands there like a sign-post. … But where is it said which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one.—And if there were not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground—is there only one way of interpreting them?3

Evidently the answer is that many kinds of indicators appeal to one’s tacit understanding;4 and, by the same token, that many indicators give rules which rely on the prior understanding of the rule by which they are to be followed.5 In any case, Witt1

) New Essays 110. ) Phil. Inv. 82. 3 ) Phil. Inv. 85. 4 ) From Phil. Inv. 1 onwards a repetitive refrain is that even the first act of ostensive definition already relies on the pupil’s comprehension of pointing. 5 ) The diagrammatic specimens in Phil. Inv. 86 furnish another case in 2

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genstein confirms this in his own words: [I have] indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only insofar as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom. … Is what we call ‘obeying a rule’ something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do it only once in his life?1

The ‘rule following’ argument has another side on which Leibniz re-enters the picture. We might contemplate the compelling force of logic in deductive demonstrations and ask ourselves: why are we so strongly persuaded of their inevitability? We cannot account for the effect on us of logical entailment without invoking that same entailment in proof of it! 2 This argues compellingly for innate disposition as part of the principles of rationality, for the latter could only be proved consistent by stepping outside of ourselves—which is clearly impossible. And this is indeed Leibniz’s response to Locke’s denial of innateness. He writes: If the soul were like [Locke’s] blank tablet then truths would be in us as the shape of Hercules in a piece of marble when the marble is entirely neutral as to whether it assumes this shape or some other. However, if there were veins in the block which marked out the shape of Hercules rather than other shapes, then that block would be more determined ... even though labour would be required to expose the veins and to polish them into clarity, removing everything that prevents their being seen. This is how ideas and truths are innate in us—as inclipoint, where the rules depend on being explained by the way the game is played. Clearly in the first of the two schemata, reading left to right must be learnt; it is not self-understood! But the schema is indeed more likely to have been drawn up in line with an existing convention, so that instruction is unnecessary and the schema superfluous. In the other specimen, the rules are clearly needed for navigation, but they will not exhaust the game unless we are satisfied that no other ‘instructions’ are ever going to be needed for playing this game. 1 ) Phil. Inv. 198-9. 2 ) Cf. New Essays 91: “Everyone may use of the rules of inference through a natural logic, without being aware of them.”

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nations, dispositions, tendencies or natural potentialities, and not as actualities; although these potentialities are always accompanied by certain actualities, often insensible ones, which correspond to them.1

Both Wittgenstein and Leibniz agree that awareness of such ‘dispositions’ is far from compulsory, even when long-standing practice renders them accessible to conscious reflection. And how often, Leibniz writes, do they come to us when we don’t need them, as intrusions on our idle moments! 2 (d) Awareness

Leibniz deals extensively with ‘minute perceptions’ (perceptions petites), which are crucial to any account of what we are aware of at any time in our waking state: At every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection ... because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own. But when they are combined with others they do nevertheless have their effect and make themselves felt, at least confusedly, within the whole. This is how we become so accustomed to the motion of a mill or a waterfall, after living beside it for a while, that we pay no heed to it. Not that this motion ceases to strike on our sense organs ... [but it is] not forceful enough to attract our attention and our memory, which are applied only to more compelling objects.3

Nevertheless, we find ourselves acting on them; for although they remain sub-surface impressions, our subconscious may react if there is sufficient cause—in Leibniz’s words, “these tendencies come into being gradually, and so without these minute perceptions we would not have acquired [our] notice1

) New Essays 52. ) Loc. cit. 3 ) New Essays 54. 2

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able dispositions.”1 We cannot miss the ‘family resemblance’ of these passages to the following by Wittgenstein: Am I aware of the spatial character, the depth of an object (of this cupboard for instance), the whole time I am seeing it? Do I, so to speak, feel it the whole time? ... When would you say of someone that he was aware of it the whole time, and when the opposite? ... If he now says he is continuously aware of the depth, do I believe him? And if he says he’s aware of it only occasionally (when talking about it, perhaps)—do I believe that? These answers will strike me as resting on a false foundation.2 Someone tells me: “I looked at the flower, but was thinking of something else and didn’t consciously take note of its colour.” Do I understand this?—I can relate to it in a meaningful context, e.g. if he were to continue: “Then suddenly I saw it ...”3 I suddenly see the solution of a picture puzzle. Before there were branches there; now there is a human shape. My visual impression has changed and now I recognise that it has not only shape and colour but also a quite particular ‘organisation’. My visual impression has changed—what was it like before and what is it like now?—If I represent it by means of an exact copy ... no change is shown.4

What is changing, in this as well as in the Leibniz specimens, is the quality of one’s awareness and understanding. Here is a clear rebuttal (on both parts) of the delusion that the state of neurons can give us access to the thoughts we have—cf. Rorty! If one could interrogate the neural system on its instantaneous state before and after, there would be no difference!5 1

) New Essays 116. ) Phil. Inv. II xi, p. 211. 3 ) Loc. cit. [My translation: the Anscombe version unaccountably ignores the adverb “dazu”]. 4 ) Loc cit, p. 196. 5 ) Phil. Inv. 401. 2

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Who speaks it? Evidently (if the term is to make sense) a person to and in his inner self. But isn’t this covered by the ordinary word ‘monologue’? Well, not quite, because the latter, although withdrawn from public expression, still uses the means and forms of public expression. Accordingly a ‘private language’ user must employ a vocabulary related only to private perceptions and feelings.1 But if this putative language excludes objects and expressions belonging to public language, if it is reserved for that individual’s ‘psychic objects’ and must be formalised by a sort of ‘inner’ ostensive definition, then who is communicating with whom? Suppose I devised a system of phonemes as alternatives for the words in my normal language and managed somehow to use them rigorously in my private ruminations?—It would not serve. It is tantamount to the habits of bilingual people who persevere with their native language in private use. Equally, cryptic signs as indicators of private experiences are disqualified by reason of their imprecise meaning even to the subject: Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign ‘S’ and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.—I will remark first of all thata definition of the sign cannot be formulated.—But I can still give myself a kind of ostensive definition.—How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.—But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign. ... But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’.2 1 2

) Ibid and Phil. Inv. 256. ) Phil. Inv. 258.

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This thing ‘S’ is useless because it does not persist as a sample and therefore does not provide a comparative standard. Accordingly ‘correctness’ cannot be established, and memory lacks the precise notion of ‘sameness’ that could enable reidentification of ‘S’. The experiences themselves cannot in any case be kept withdrawn from ordinary language, for even if I just kept thinking about my ‘inner’ processes, my sensations require some form of language or they fail as self-communication. This last point, I think, clinches the matter. Effectively the idea of non-lingual self-communication ends up being collapsed into the sensations and perceptions themselves—they are that ‘language’. The nerve strings sing their song, and what they sing is for this one person’s (metaphorical) ears only. But with this we are at length back in the realm of unmediated experiences.1 And these considerations urge on us that the notion of a private language is incapable of accounting for selfcommunication in the form of rapport with ‘my’ sensations. So the question really amounts to this: do I need to explain or report to myself in a tortuously devised vocabulary what I am experiencing? Do not my senses do just this in the greatest possible immediacy without any language whatever?2 In a word: is this a possible, even conceivable scenario? The ‘ceremony’ associated with Phil Inv. 258 rules it out; plainly the ‘speaker’ herself cannot be sure to understand this language properly. For the connection between an inner fact and its denotation is even more tenuous than in the Augustinian specimen of Phil. Inv. 1—the mere assumption of ‘pointing’ (in whatever way) to one’s inner objects absurdly insinuates segregation of the self from itself; and memories as contents of consciousness lack the basic criterion of normativity that per1

) In Phil. Inv. 354-6 Wittgenstein seems to convey a hint that this is what he understands by it, especially 355: “The point here is not that our sense impressions can lie, but that we understand their language’. 2 ) Phil. Inv. 245.

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mits appeal to them to verify similar or identical events: Let us imagine a table (something like a dictionary) that exists only in our imagination. A dictionary can be used to justify the translation of a word X by a word Y. But are we also to call it a justification if such a table is to be looked up only in imagination?—“Well, yes; then it is a subjective justification.”—But justification consists in appealing to something independent.—“But surely I can appeal from one memory to another. For example I don’t know if I have remembered the time of departure of a train right and to check it I call to mind how a page of the time-table looked. Isn’t it the same here?”—No, for this process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory?1

We might as well have asked if I can check the time by updating the clock image in my memory.2 Leibniz made an analogous observation from his experience of auditing: no matter how good a person’s memory, “rigour consists in a rule, obedience of which at each step would provide an assurance regarding the whole.” Using one’s fingers to count off the steps is immeasurably superior to trying to remember them. In a word, some physical correlate is indispensable!3 Clearly this is a far cry from trying to compose the whole thing in memory as a picture. But we can remember a structure comprised of links, just as we can often rely on certain remembered triggers to bring out the next link spontaneously. Even so, these things must also be on paper somewhere, as a safety net. For, as Wittgenstein says, 1

) Phil. Inv. 265. ) Phil. Inv. 266. 3 ) New Essays 360. On the preceding page, a very penetrating comment occurs on the integratedness of memory, belief and knowledge: “All belief consists in the memory of one’s past grasp of proofs and reasons, [and therefore] it is not in our power or our free will to believe or not believe, since memory is not something which depends on our will.” 2

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The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable— that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.1

‘Private language’, then, is not a possibility at all, but a surrogate or metaphor for a condition which would be better termed the ‘qualia argument’, which under the Cartesian premise must seem as if we were dealing with a private language comprehensible only to one person. (f) My Inner Life and ‘our’ Epistemic Relations

The qualia argument assumes for us an epistemic relation to our inner life. As it stands one has to ask what meaning we should affix to the clause.2 Let us try to graph the proposition and see what might be required to clarify it: 1 I

2 N

N

sensations

E

R

3 L

I

F

E

perceptions

desires “I” understandering volitional interface? feelings hedonic conduit kinaesthetics

EPISTEMIC FACILITATORS memory interface epistemic conduit

4

5

OUTPUT code generator?

assembler?

If I am to have an epistemic relation, this chart implies, then evidently “I” am not any of the things in column 1, although I ‘have’ them. But since they arise outside of my mind (in the world or the body), they cannot come ‘naked’ into it: they need 1 2

) Phil. Inv. 272. ) Cf. Phil. Inv. 273.

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to establish their credentials first with my memory, which entails each having its appropriate conduit.1 Further a process of decryption is required so that “I” may distinguish between hedonic and sensory, and thus I need an ‘assembler’ and ‘understander’ as well as a language generator so that “I” can talk to myself about the influxes. And then “I” may wish to act on my inner life in the outer world, therefore an output interface is also required. It is perfectly plain, surely, that we could march on infinitely by interposing further modules between ‘my’ inner life and the entity called “I” to vouchsafe that every loophole on the path to ‘understanding’ is papered over. But this does not seem a very practical proposition. Leibniz’s philosophy did not dwell on language issues to the same extent as Wittgenstein’s. But his arguments relating to perceptions petites bring forward a critical attitude on the possibility of ‘epistemic relations’. What is subconscious cannot be a party to these relations—indeed the notion of ‘privileged access’ becomes altogether untenable. Both are realised in the full consciousness of apprehended sensations; therefore awareness must be complete for this argument to make sense. But if, as Leibniz (correctly) maintains, apprehended sensations amount to a tiny minority of those which actually impinge on the nervous system, then the soul can actively attend only on those whose cumulative impact brings them to full conscious awareness. And this seems to rule out the kind of inner dialectic (or epistemic state) postulated in the privacy argument, which is now revealed as a mere machine analogy and therefore illusory. Several quotations in this topic appear above under another head. Here I wish to bring in a thought related to the ‘forms of immediacy’ to which Leibniz devoted much attention: I will deny that matter can produce pleasure, pain or sensations 1

) Cf. Phil. Inv. 356.

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in us. It is the soul that produces these in itself, in conformity with what happens in matter. … It is thoroughly reasonable that the effect should correspond to the cause … [e.g.] It is true that pain does not resemble the movement of a pin; but it might thoroughly resemble the motions which the pin causes in our body, and might represent them in the soul; and I have not the least doubt that it does. That is why we say that the pain is in our body and not in the pin …1

The notion of epistemic or privileged access assumes the existence of sensory calibrations in exact conformity with models such as Churchland’s vector analysis, where electrochemical interactions (stimuli and responses) do not allow for ‘loss of data’ nor for ‘attentiveness’ as an essential criterion to the apprehension of sensory data. Many Wittgensteinian passages also fit into this context, cf. the quotations attached to Notes 47-9. But calibration is an either/or mechanism and requires object/subject separation. This rules it out of court of the Leibniz-Wittgenstein world. The final question then boils down to this: Does our world, where we live, play, work and undergo experiences resemble more closely that of Leibniz-Wittgenstein or of ChurchlandRorty (and their ancestor Descartes)? Part, if not all of the answer is going to be provided by our conclusions on self-knowledge, epistemic privilege and first-person authority. Wittgenstein insists that we are indeed entitled to them, but not at the cost of removing them from our inner life. This illicit reification is the problem child: for plainly having a sensation is an unmediated experience. It is on account of this fact that a pain sufferer giving sincere expression to his predicament can be said to have unquestionable authority—for there is in any normal situation no room for misidentification as to ‘who suffers’ and ‘where’ or the nature of the pain. It needs to be added, however, that these authoritative 1

) New Essays 382 & 132.

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avowals are present tense dependent—a view corroborated by Leibniz: A present or immediate memory, the memory of what is taking place immediately before—or in other words, the consciousness or reflection which accompanies inner activity—cannot naturally deceive us. If it could, we not even be certain that we are thinking about such and a such a thing; for [“I think” or “I remember”] is silently said only about past actions, not about the very action of saying it. But if immediate inner experience is not certain, we cannot be sure of anything.1

Recollection tends to diminish their reliability; and before long it must revert to third-person ascription, unless external validation (e.g. a diary) serves to reinforce memory. Thus ‘epistemic relations’ are revealed as a simple grammatical faux pas; for while the knower is indubitably in an epistemic state, this is because the knower is his inner life.2 Conclusion: The Two Languages

Scientific concepts do not refer in the same way as ordinary spoken language. In particular science exhibits a striving for the reduction of complex phenomena, which common language mostly finds itself unable to accommodate. As Leibniz pointed out: The physicist can explain his experiments by the use of simpler experiments he has already made, or by demonstrations in geometry or mechanics, without the need of general considerations which belong to a different sphere. But if he uses the concord of God, or some soul, archaeus or other thing of that nature, he is straying outside his proper limits, just as much as a man who, in the case of an important deliberation about what to do, tried to go into the great arguments about 1 2

) New Essays 238. ) Cf. Phil. Inv. 246, 288.

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the nature of destiny and our freedom.1

Natural philosophy (science), by reason of its criteria and objects of research, is bound to evolve a language characterised by a striving for objectivity in which the rational agent has no place. The objects of study are all ‘external’ and the language— although by its nature unable to repress terms redolent of volitional implications—employs these terms in a context of interaction among mechanical, chemical and electrical forces. This goes hand in hand with a high level of abstraction (logical inference, mathematisation) and an impersonal grammar. The aim is to render the results of research and experimentation accessible and repeatable, and coherent within its scientific doctrines. Psychological and anthropological philosophy, on the other hand, deal with animal agency, behaviour, instincts, intentionality; with perceptions, cognitions, creativity and socialisation. All these features being by their nature idiosyncratic, the vocabulary bears the imprint of intuitive and tacit understanding and highly personal (and anthropomorphised) conceptualities. Ordinary language and philosophical language, which are both fundamentally concerned with human values, accordingly share a large range of common concepts. But the temptations of philosophy to push them beyond the limits of natural discourse was always strong. Wittgenstein in one of his few explicit criticisms calls these “irreführende Parallelen”: Misleading parallel: psychology treats of processes in the psychical sphere, as does physics in the physical. / Seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, willing are not the subject of psychology in the same sense as that in which the movements of bodies, the phenomena of electricity etc., are the subject of physics. You can see this from the fact that the physicist sees, thinks and hears about, and informs us of these phenomena, and the psychologist observes the external reactions (the 1

) Disc. Met. 10.

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behaviour) of the subject.1

Self-evidently, then, attempts to treat of the objects of one theory in the vocabulary and syntax of the other is bound to distort their intrinsic features and qualities. For Leibniz the problem boils down to it being inconceivable that some portion of this universe could be incommunicado with the rest. Wittgenstein in his turn emphasised that “I see”, “you hear”, “they feel” is not a reference to sensory organs but to human beings. It is “I”, however anyone might wish to define it, who feels and suffers, thinks and plays. In a word the dialectic of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ does not sit well with the manifest arrangements of nature which provided for a unity between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ before men presumed to rend them asunder. But to say ‘rend them asunder’ already presumes upon unity; and thus, the question we asked earlier answers itself. Leibniz and Wittgenstein perceived a world where agents of cognisance communicate and enact a ‘form of life’, while their confreres working within the dualistic fold propose mechanochemical apparatus must have recourse to emergent properties. The attack of Leibniz arose from his recognition that the premise of duality impaired the understanding of the essential continuity of the whole axis of existence; while Wittgenstein impugned the use of pseudo-scientific language for mental, social and anthropological objects which results in radical mesalliances of meaning. Both were concerned to provide therapeutic remedies—Leibniz by warning us not to play “with thought processes …. [too] remote not only from our present experience but also, far more important, from the general order of things”, and Wittgenstein in a characteristically succinct picture: “I want to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”2 Undoubtedly this conjunction of the thought of two great 1 2

) Phil. Inv. 571. Cf. also Part II, v, 3. ) New Essays 212; Phil. Inv. 309.

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philosophers is deserving of further and deeper probing than has been possible in this essay. The benefits to philosophy of linking Leibniz and Wittgenstein on this issue, which goes to the heart of what it means to be human, would seem to be selfrecommending.

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VIII Eavesdropping on Wittgenstein Doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. . . . We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

WITTGENSTEIN Tractatus

1 Denotation as a Camera obscura: The Hidden Presumptions behind Ostensive Tuition

EVEN BEFORE WITTGENSTEIN SETS ABOUT testing Augustinus’ ‘primitive’ notion of language acquisition in PI:1, one feels the proximity of the above epigrams from the close of his Tractatus. For what Augustinus is giving us is not a picture (let alone the essence) of language, but a plain mechanism of indoctrination into object denotation. When seen through the goggles of metaphysics, comparison with the practice of Socrates is suggestive, whose habit was to buttonhole interlocutors with ‘self-evident’ problems such as the question “What is knowledge/beauty/virtue?” etc. The Socratic dialektike was always designed to reveal something taken for granted, by unravelling the concepts, and not infrequently by means of pulverising his interlocutor’s fond belief in simple referents and correspondences. Suddenly ‘self-evidence’, the quiddity of things went up in smoke. This is an incomparably more sophisticated view of ‘words’ than that of Augustinus; and it may safely be said that the Socratic impulse comes alive again in Wittgenstein, albeit in his

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own unique fashion. He loses no time in bringing out the poverty of the Augustinian specimen, especially its disregard of all other than denoting words as “something that will take care of itself”. As McGinn points out, Wittgenstein’s primary targets are the “temptations rooted in the form of our language” that are expressed in the passage.1 They exhibit a flaw of the verbal perspective on its own nature and drag the acolyte of theory down a path of no return. For it transpires in the ensuing that theoretical models of the language faculty drawn from such material possess neither explanatory power nor descriptive verisimilitude. To resume: A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk. Here the teaching of language is not explanation, but training (Abrichten).2

A subtlety of Wittgenstein’s text gets lost hereabouts. He differentiates between abrichten and Unterricht, which is not observed by the translator who renders both by the same word ‘training’. But abrichten is not ‘training’: it denotes drill, ingraining, indoctrination, and is a form of expression more commonly employed with slaves and animals, whereas Unterricht has connotations of a formal teacher/pupil relationship.3 So, we should note, in the middle of the lapidary account of the grocer, the ludicrous suggestion that he would use a colour chart to identify the right apples; and ‘abrichten’ is of a piece with this. Surely this resonates with a somewhat scornful humour that is muffled by the harmless word ‘training’!? Interestingly enough, McGinn does not react to ‘the chart’ either4—as if it were perfectly in order. Nor does she remark on 1

) McGinn, p. 37. ) PI:5. 3 ) E.g., ein Pferd abrichten denotes the breaking-in of a horse; einen Sklaven abrichten means to drill the slave to perform tasks by rote without questioning the master’s authority. 4 ) McGinn, pp. 39-40. 2

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the grocer’s instant grasp of the class of the words ‘apples’ (objects), ‘red’ (attribute) and ‘five’ (numeral) which at this stage in the proceedings (straight after Augustine) seems to require some explanation! But this is precisely Wittgenstein’s point: that there is more to languages than object denotation; and that learning a language includes the acquisition of an understanding that apples are countable objects, that ‘5’ is a quantitative denominator and that ‘red’ relies on his eyesight to select items with the specified feature. Finally that the scrap of paper is a request for him to act in a certain way which acknowledges that it represents a tacit form of interaction (=form of life) between the several parties (one of whom remains mute). Compare this: “The altercation over two ways [of taking the Augustine passage] may sound as follows: One observes, ‘what could be less remarkable than Augustine’s remark about his elders moving around and uttering sounds?’ Another retorts [intensely, let us now add], ‘Less remarkable—when we are in a maze of unanswered questions about what naming is, what it is to call a thing or a person, what constitutes an object, how we (with certainty) grasp one idea or image or concept rather than another, what makes a pointer point, a talker mean!’ Nothing is wrong; everything is wrong. It is the philosophical moment.”1

Wittgenstein’s equally bizarre invitation in PI:6 to accept the four-word vocabulary of the builders as a complete language in fact foreshadows his later cues on something drastically awry with language-learning so understood. There is only one way it could make sense, namely: that we are watching a “form of life” being enacted, where those few vocables suffice.2 1

) Cavell, Phil. Pass., p. 137. ) … which implies, I think necessarily, that after their shift the builders will revert to the “form of life” (and vocabulary) that is common to them in society. In a more recondite sense it implies also that a language comprising just four words cannot be conceived without an extensive semantic field in which they are embedded, i.e. that the words must have multiple mean-

2

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What this ‘form of life’ entails is “that they are jointly committed to [an] activity where there are established interlocking behaviours, which altogether have what we would call a meaningful character, and the whole thing is carried on by speech.”1 This permits of generalisation qualified by the term ‘interlocking’, which in Wittgenstein intimates not merely the social component but prior underlying, tacit rules of which the actors have some kind of “mastery”.2 Yet if all this were cut and dried, then we could now go home and be happy in our wisdom. But now we confront a problem—the philosophical problem—which lights up in McGinn’s depiction of the background assumption, or presuppositions, of Augustinus’ conception: We can see Augustinus’ tendency to think of a human subject in terms of a private essence or mind—in which there are wishes, thoughts, desires etc.—and a physical interface with the outside world. The private essence is conceived as somehow already fully human but as lacking the capacity to communicate with others.3

But then she goes on to say, that “ … the physical world is seen as articulated into particular objects that the names of language unproblematically latch on to.” ings embedded in other contexts and possess rich synonymity. Compare again: “The sense of the builders’ lack of freedom is confirmed ... by Wittgenstein’s description (in section 6) of this language as the whole language of a tribe. ... Surely it is easy to feel here: This group would have to exert great efforts to suppress certain natural responses of the children.” Cavell, ibid p. 164. 1 ) Finch, p. 79. 2 ) ‘Underlying’ and ‘tacit’ here indicate that certain skills (e.g. recognition of entailment) seem to be innate and do not have to be articulated. For example, the compulsive force of logic is evidently due to an innate sense of logical entailment, which theorists would be hard pressed to account for without relying on it in their demonstrations! This is the same as when Finch writes, loc. cit.: “is it the possibilities of meaning which establish both the ontological and epistemological, and not … the other way around.” 3 ) McGinn, p. 38.

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This is indeed a common misconception in today’s world as much as Augustinus’, informing (inter alia) a vast scientific research agenda into mind and cognition. It might have furnished McGinn with an occasion to expose the philosophical faux pas at once; but the opportunity came and passed, unused. I wish therefore to put forward four propositions which, I think, put a useful slant on Wittgenstein’s embattled position and explain his patient manoeuvring to extricate himself and us from it: (a) none of the objects and events in our living environment come with labels affixed to them; it is the human subject that is obliged to evolve those labels in accordance with its understanding of what kind of objects we are dealing with; (b) the notion of a private essence independent of its cocoon of language is a mystification caused by the inaccessibility of an object that is also the subject; (c) the proposition that an object language (whether one is a child or a foreigner) gives us the means by which to grasp particular objects remains oblivious to the fact that this acquisition is already governed by ‘unseen’ entailments; (d) accordingly verbal communication from mind to mind is a process rooted in several types of evolutionary acquisitions, e.g. (i) a matrix of phonemes (suitable for shaping into verbal signs for the conveyance of information),1 (ii) an hierarchical template for organising verbal signs (e.g. classes of words; declensions, conjugations, cases; syntactical articulation; and so on: As research revealed, none of the roughly 5000 languages spoken on earth are ‘simple’, i.e. without a fairly complex grammatical and syntactical resource in actual operation);2 1

) The speech function is not correlated to the brain/mind in form of oneto-one correspondence with words to be uttered. Indeed thinking is much too fast to rely on words, so that the results being piped to the vocal organs come in the form of triggers for appropriate phonemes—a process (as we know only too well!) fraught with transmission errors. 2 ) This argues that language, as a faculty of verbal commerce, must match

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(iii) the conventions within a society concerning matters that are communicable.1

These are insights which can help us with an approach to Wittgenstein, whose method was rather more circumlocutionary. But the fact that the research I have mentioned has not (even today, fifty years post-Wittgenstein) acknowledged the fundamental task envisaged by the philosopher, is in itself a reminder that philosophies can’t influence those who don’t read them with insight. This is admitting that Wittgenstein doesn’t make it easy for his readers, never giving his them more than a hint of the direction in which he expected them to look. *

Before we proceed, it is necessary to confront the puzzling absence of doctrine in the Philosophical Investigations. Instead of building up a theory, as one might have expected from a philosopher steeped in contemporary theoretical practices, Wittgenstein constructs a kaleidoscope of suggestive interrogations—taking the etymological meaning of vestigare, ‘tracking down’, as his cue, much as Socrates used to do. This kaleidoscopic approach facilitates presupposition-free enquiry. As the quotation from Tractatus urges, and the Philosophical Investigations implies throughout, arguments presume solutions. Yet Wittgenstein’s intention is, on the contrary, to put the question on the agenda: “do we understand the question?” The metaphysical impulse stirs in the background, even where it is explicitly abrogated. And so, the Philosophical Investigations presents itself as a ‘quasi monologue’ on which the reader has been invited to in complexity the habits on which the society is structured; and here again, there is no society known to us which we would describe as ‘simple’ in the sense that it might do (apropos Wittgenstein) with a 4-word vocabulary and a 2-rule grammar. 1 ) I have in mind Humboldt’s dictum that “language is the organ of thought”—the resources of language dictate to a large extent what can be thought in the society where one grows up.

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eavesdrop. But concealed within it lies a deeper challenge: namely, to invest one’s own thinking in the scrutiny of the text and to enrich it with one’s active participation. Wittgenstein’s ‘monologue’ turns often enough into a dialogue: he expects us to co-compose his canvas—as the impressionist painter relies on the eye to synthesise the contexture of flecks: “I should not like ... to spare other people the trouble of thinking” (from the Preface). Returning therefore to the initial group of paragraphs, one soon detects a diagnostic, even forensic, edge to the enquiry. Language is a ‘body’; it is afflicted with some ailment; but its pathology may be due to internal or external causes—or both. This is why we begin with the “Abrichten” of Augustinus’ robot. This type of learning is grounded in narrow practical concerns, and its ‘metaphysic’ is a desire for permanence which can be satisfied with a few cobbled-together (usually religious) solutions. The “problems of life” are reduced to pencil lines, without depth or perspective. What comes to the surface in the critique of Augustinus is that we are in the shallows of life, where the careless ‘ontological predicate’ is serves for comfort rather than meaning. PI:558 exemplifies the predicament: What does it mean to say that the ‘is’ in ‘The rose is red’ has a different meaning from the ‘is’ in ‘twice two is four’? The answer is that the latter has an instrumental rather than a semantic function1—it may be replaced by the sign ‘=’. But then, how can I decide what is an essential, and what an inessential, accidental, feature of the notation? Is there some reality behind the notation, which shapes its grammar?2

Aptly, this is compared to the case for holding a chess piece in one’s closed fist to decide who plays white: it is not the function 1 2

) Bedeutungskörper. ) PI:562.

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of chess pieces to play God, yet it transpires that such a function is (as it were) apprehended as a quirk of semantics.1 It is not part of the rules, and completely arbitrary. So nothing can be said here to be positively, either essential or inessential, although one may incline to the latter. The ‘quirk’ may be acceptable as an advanced (perhaps ‘creative’) handling of the ‘game’, far beyond Augustinus’ ostensive tuition and parrot learning. For learning by rote suffers intrinsically from indifferentiation. No reason can be given why one word denotes this, another that. Words are, so to speak, the ‘handles’ of language, and as such resemble the handles in a train driver’s cabin. Other arrangements of vocables are possible;2 and thus Wittgenstein insinuates a modus of usage where we must question whether any logic, any necessity guides the learning of a language. And en passant it is worth emphasising that Wittgenstein does not anywhere in this work assert that meaning and understanding are identical with language itself. This is brought out by PI:19-22 where the question is addressed how we understand single-word sentences. Are we dealing with elliptical construction? Is there a hidden template behind them? Neither, for in the first instance the imputed template is a post-factum logical construction;3 and Wittgenstein adds that language in any case “contains these possibilities”. A foreigner to our language would soon discover that he has not “mastered [this] form of life”. Secondly, recurring to Frege’s assertion and interrogative signs, they do not clarify the discrepancies; for even in ordinary parlance, imperative or interrogative are not always emphasised formally.4 1

) This is not Wittgenstein’s text, but my way of illustrating what I think is implied here. Tossing a coin is another obvious example. 2 ) Cf. PI:26-8. 3 ) E.g. a sentence contains at least a subject and a predicate. 4 ) I have italicised ‘formally’ here to indicate that I understand Wittgenstein to make that distinction between writing and speaking. In speaking, assertives/interrogatives may be used rhetorically or ironically by a deliber-

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Indeed, the discrepancy between language used formaliter and as a ludus lingualis is just this: that as a form of life it should be familiarly playful, second nature, spontaneous; the rules may be known to a few, but are in any case extracted from the game. So that (e.g.) when Wittgenstein asserts that ostensive definition already presupposes knowledge of the rules of the game,1 idiosyncrasies like the term ‘king’ in chess have to be countenanced. It is pure convention: only someone who already knows how to do something with [chess pieces] can significantly ask a name.2

The point is: a button or a bread crumb would do equally well to embody the chess king’s function. Ostensive tuition fails us, then, in obvious instances like “look at that marvellous blue”, when the vase being pointed to also has a shape commanding attention. What do we attend to if we don’t know the rules of demonstration? And how is this intuited? Clearly one must know what reference is, and how it works—or else nothing works. Therefore Cavell seems somewhat over-exercised on the efficacy of ostensive learning. He disagrees that ‘grasping a universal’ is what happens here; but I think the matter is overstressed with his prolixity of counter examples.3 Surely it is irreducibly ambiguous, whichever way one seeks to legitimise the procedure. If I point to a dog and say, “full of fleas”, my foreigner friend might plausibly take it that I refer (a) to the dog’s name, (b) to the genus dog, (c) to the breed of dog, (d) to the fur, ears, snout or tail, (e) to whatever the dog happens to be doing at that moment, and even, if I’m lucky, (f) to the fleas. ate modulation of voice which can be ‘false’ when measured against syntax and/or context. The auditor is expected to get the point under the rules of the game. In writing, this ‘point’ may be difficult to achieve and more easily misunderstood. 1 ) PI:30-1. 2 ) PI:31. 3 ) Cavell, Claim pp. 168-180.

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Although there is no doctrine in Wittgenstein, one may draw one’s conclusions. He did not wrestle with Augustine (and implicitly Frege) for this length of time without purpose aforethought. And this can only be the insufficiency of the model, no matter how far we trace it down the line or what accretions to the method we may think of: Any sense that the account of language acquisition that Augustine presents somehow explains how we learn language is thus shown to be an illusion. For the picture actually presupposes what it purports to explain, by assuming that the child possesses a mastery of the techniques that provide the necessary background to its understanding what is meant when an adult points and utters a sound. … We don’t see that it is the very skills which our account takes for granted that are really in need of attentive, careful description … [and so] we have an oversimple picture of what is involved in pointing to something. We don’t see, for example, the complexity involved in the distinction between pointing to an object, pointing to its shape, pointing to its colour, and so on.1

With this we are closing in on one crucial aspect: namely, where our language suggests a body, and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.2

This is not waving the flag of metaphysics, because ironically it is another instance of ambiguity, as this Geist is actually a ‘ghost’, and therefore it is wholly legitimate to suppose that Wittgenstein is pulling our leg.3 To the extent that the ‘rules’ are not written, but intrinsic, their logic remains opaque. But with this we are closing in on the efficacy of description, in contrast to the thwarting of explanation. 1

) McGinn, pp. 65-6. ) PI:36. 3 ) This turns on an admittedly subtle grammatical point, namely the unexpected (hence easily overlooked) attachment of the indefinite article ein to the word Geist: It excludes mentality, spirituality and so on, while aiming the syntactical focus at “a nonphysical entity” which can only be a ghost. 2

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2 Meaner and Understander, Eye to Eye

What do we ‘project’ on hearing the word ‘God’? If I may, for a moment, speak pro domo, I think of it as a word that has thousands of meanings. Therefore many people will project to their ‘inner theatre’ any one denotation from this thousandfold choice. But the idea of projection is altogether unsound: even in Wittgenstein’s own example, the case suggests recognition rather than projection;1 and surely it is grotesque to demand that a flow of ordinary conversation is populated staccato fashion by projections of the words being uttered.2 But Wittgenstein himself has the best rebuttal in any case: What is essential is to see that the same thing can come before our minds when we hear the word and the application still be different. Has it the same meaning both times? I think we shall say not.3

In due course these considerations will reveal their edge against Cartesianism, solipsism and the private language argument. McGinn puts forth the issue in exemplary terms: When we look carefully at the grammar of this concept—at how we use the words ‘I understand’, ‘He understands’ and so on—we find that it simply doesn’t function in the way we are inclined to suppose, namely as a name of a process occurring inside the speaker … we see that the concept of understanding does not describe a determinate state of an internal 1

) I mean: if I hear a word and see an object of the required specification about me, why would I project? In the natural course of perception, recognition precedes projection; if the latter occurs, it would be because the object being sought is not present. 2 ) I would assert, on the contrary, reading (and therefore conversation) is always of chunks of words in one gulp. This lends point, incidentally, to Wittgenstein’s query on ellipsis vs expansion (cf. Note 17): a foreigner might have heard a sentence of four words as a single word (a single utterance). I would respond: not just foreigners, but everyone who has mastered a language hears words this way. 3 ) PI:140.

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mechanism, but depends for its sense upon the background of the distinctive form of life within which it is used … with the structure of the life into which the speaker has been accultured and which gives his current actions their particular significance. … The view of our ordinary language game which emerges, far from endorsing logical behaviourism, aims to reveal that our intuition of a distinction between the inner and the outer is grounded in the grammatical differences between concepts belonging to different regions of our language.1

We may nonetheless doubt that she meets the whole situation with her suggestion. For many (especially for theorists), it does indeed suggest (if not actually describe) a “determinate state”, and the last thing to enter their mind would be “the background of the distinctive form of life”. It seems difficult to extract from this whole passage a content that meets the desiderata of defining ‘understanding’; and it is not wholly beside the point to ask what a dog understands in terms of a momentary mental state when the master calls out, “heel!” In contrast, Cartesian-type arguments presume upon the independence of the thinker from thinking, from the meaner of meaning and of understanding from the understander—in short, on there being a discriminable gap between subject and activity. A clear signal of Wittgenstein’s new orientation is the realisation that thinking, meaning and understanding are not ‘processes’ to be objectively lined up and dissected, nor tools or functions of the mind ‘employed’ by the subject: They are the subject. This re-orientation is encapsulated in: Isn’t it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here of course belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless series of words.)2

From this and similar passages, Finch infers that, 1 2

) McGinn, pp. 114-6 (italics added). ) PI: 358.

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What gives exact sense to propositions, no matter how complex the things referred to may be, is that these things are meant as … simple objects when a thought projects them as the referent of names figuring in the sense of a proposition. This special kind of activity, the unique act of “thinking the sense” enables language to function, because it treats all things, no matter how complex, as simple by naming them (which is to say, meaning them) in a specific sense required by a particular proposition.1

This is well put, even if it leaves the crucial element to one side, which is the aforesaid merging of the subject with understanding as one identity in the specific configuration of the subject being invited to understand. Hence the subject is understanding, just as much as the subject does not have a soul, but is a soul, and does not have a personality, but is a personality. We see that the grammatical function of the accusative case lies at the root of much mischief. Can we say that Wittgenstein arrived at the same insight when he stipulated that meaning, understanding and thinking are not activities discharged independently by a homunculus in the darkness of the soul, nor subjects of an independent ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ shell of reality engaged in a perceptual dialectic? I think the aye’s have it. For such a conception of language depends, as Finch correctly asserts, “upon absolutely simple objects and the allied conception of thinking as a hidden activity by which language acquired this exactness.”2 Let me, however, divert attention momentarily to other truly momentous implications of what this change in focus entails. Wittgenstein asserts, in various places, that meaning cannot be a ‘mental activity’; that a proposition effectively defines the meaning of the meaner; and if this is vague, then the meaner must have meant it to be vague (or couldn’t help himself). The vis-à-vis of meaner is understander. The same strictures apply 1 2

) Finch, pp. 12-3. ) Finch, p. 18.

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to the latter: understanding is either successful or not. What I propose to do now, is draw a parallel to meaning and understanding as they pertain to our perceptive faculties, and this should reveal that they are all cut from the same cloth— that in a broad interpretation the faculties of verbal meaning and understanding are extensions of perceptive cognition. All animals enact their discourse with nature in the mediate fashion of ‘reading and interpreting (understanding) signals detected from the environment. Sensation cannot establish unmitigated contact with the object world. We rely in the main on chemical and electromagnetic signals; and it is one of the functions of perception to ‘reduce’ these to an order that is comprehensible to the organism. This reduction may (a typical instance) produce an impression of colour in the receptive organism, as it analyses the ‘heat’ differentials emitted by material surfaces.1 Or it may conduce to the impression of solidity of an object whose atomic constitution is denser than that of the organism perceiving it. We assign the term ‘phenomena’ to these impressions, although in our propositions we ‘act verbally’ as if these phenomena were external to us and independently existent. Bringing these considerations back into the orbit of Wittgenstein’s Investigations¸ we may say that it is the function of the faculties of perceptual cognition (a) to understand (pertinent to the organism’s survival and reproductive necessities) those signals as indicating the presence of objects and forces with which it has to cope, (b) to make propositions (testing, foraging etc.) in order to acquire the know-how necessary for a successful symbiosis with the environment and its inhabitants; and to acquire a repository (memory) of all those meanings. 1

) I should stress that colour understanding is a perceptive function, not a sensation. The impulses (frequencies) received by optical nerves are not coloured.

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Necessarily these functions operate largely by analogy and templating: in other words, by reducing the chaos of the world to ‘simple labels’. As we know, the origin and history of philosophy is to a substantial extent devoted to a precisely analogous reduction of complex states of affairs to plain ‘archai’, ‘substances’ and ‘essences’. So this is nothing we would find difficult to associate with. And now, apropos Wittgenstein, the ‘language game’—this vis-à-vis between meaner and understander—demonstrates the same kind of symbiosis. The terms of discourse suggest that, although perhaps immensely enriched with subtlety and finesse, the language faculty has the same basic structure, and belongs into (or emerged from) the same basket as the faculty of perceptive cognition. It must leave it at that; although as a parting shot, I’m inclined to cite PI:246, It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean—except perhaps that I am in pain? Is it legitimate to collapse “I know [I am in pain]” to “I am”? I think the ayes have it again. Wittgenstein himself writes elsewhere, … the main point is: I did not say that such and such a person was in pain, but “I am …”. Now in saying this I don’t name a person. (loc. cit.) Neither did Descartes in saying “therefore I am” name the “I” of that sentence. It is up to us to infer the personal identity, while yet no contribution to knowledge is made by completing the identification. I think it is precisely the hinge of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that knowledge is not a state of mind, but a resource and a skill, and therefore also entangled in the language game as the channel in which to attend to its own morphosis.

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This points to a related metaphysical aspect, to which Wittgenstein draws attention by asking why his right hand cannot make a gift to the left?1 Plainly because it has no practical consequences: the giver and receiver are the same person. And so, to the ‘essence’ of communicability:2 … you take it altogether too much for granted that we can convey anything to another. Which means: we are so accustomed to communicating by speech, in conversation, that it must seem to us as if the whole point of addressing another is for him to apprehend the meaning—i.e. the spirit—of my words, and (so to speak) absorb it into his own mind. … [So] “telling him has the effect of making him know that I am in pain; it produces this mental phenomenon.” … [But] as to the nature of this peculiar phenomenon of knowing—this we put on ice.3

Does this have practical consequences? Well, it will have repercussions on the form of life in which speakers are engaged, viz.: We have to attend to the fact that false claims are still communication; they do not comprise an offence against the language rules. … in the case of the gift, the precondition must prevail that the speaker is actually the present owner of the gift for the act to have a practical outcome, so in this example the speaker does not merely vouchsafe his claim, but is expected to know what he is talking about.4

And what applies to gifts, applies by extension to all forms of verbal commerce. This is capable of the generalisation that every meaningful communication is embedded in a social milieu where ‘consequences’ are part and parcel of the expecta1

) I:268. ) I regret finding the translation of this passage irksome and have replaced it with my own. 3 ) I:363. 4 ) Savigny (1996), p. 56 [my translation]. 2

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tions we associate with speaking.1 These practicalities do not involve examination of their ‘metaphysical possibility’; like all true metaphysical presuppositions, they are lived—and examined only when they break down.2 3 Glamour and Futility of Logic

The paragraph which introduces a number of observations on the dilemma of philosophy—its marriage to that tyrannical spouse Logic and how it suffers from some imprecision in translation. Specifically, it is not clear from the English text that Wittgenstein is speaking of a place or juncture, yet it is important, as the following will show. First, an accurate rendering of the text: 89. With these considerations we are poised (i.e. have stopped, ‘stehen’) at the juncture where the problem is situated (stands, ‘steht’): to what extent is logic something sublime? One thing that should be better visible in this rendering is the referral back to prior considerations which leave us situated at PI:89, face to face with a problem. This referral can only be to the sequence starting at PI:81, which must therefore be regarded as an overture to the problem; and having arrived at a point where we can’t ignore it, we need now to pause and confront it. The word ‘sublime’ is the first to jolt us. Wittgenstein does not write words like this casually; yet we are hardly accustomed to the idea of sublimity attaching to logic! However, there it stands and beckons us to a response. Well, we might choose to understand it as ‘exalted’ or ‘aweinspiring’ in its intellectual calibre; though preferably, perhaps, 1

) op. cit., p. 57. ) Or when a thinker of the calibre of Wittgenstein is driven by a desperate need to account for them.

2

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as ‘chemically pure’, which seems to fit the context rather better.1 Yet the expression may be simply be Wittgenstein’s ironic slant on the widespread philosophical practice of expecting logic to solve all our problems—a temptation to which the author of the Tractacus succumbed very readily! This being my view, I can hardly go along with writers who try to solve this bafflement by proposing that ‘logic’ represents Wittgenstein’s new conception of grammar. This is a trap for those who want to emend Wittgenstein’s text because it seems to them that the philosopher had such an intention. Thus, Nelson Garver decides point blank on logic=grammar and proceeds in his comments to assume that both words mean the same thing.2 What might Wittgenstein have thought about this hijack, seeing that he was altogether capable of making the substitution himself—had he wanted to? On the contrary, I hold to the view that Wittgenstein is insinuating the replacement of logic by grammar; that grammar is the set of rules which guides the use of language implicitly and that, unlike logical constructions, grammatical ones are distinguished by being flexible, pliable and open-ended. Indeed, I’m inclined to understand that Wittgenstein was looking at logic and logical constructions as the very thing which explanatory (theoretical) language brings forth via the ‘bewitchment’ that leads us astray. He has no compunction about reversing the notorious apophthegm of Marx about the office of philosophy: we must not think of changing the world; it is sufficient to describe it, which will leave it as it is. And to our expression of perplexity on how explanation could possibly change the world, he might say: by imposing logical conceptions on it which make us see things contrary to the way they are, and then inviting us to act on this false perception. 1

) Cf. PI:38, which functions as a kind of pre-echo of PI:94. In both of these, the idea of a chemical sublimate is invoked. 2 ) Garver, pp. 218ff.

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Augustine once again furnishes a contrapost in his troubles with time. I take it that the celebrated analysis of the logs floating down a river is familiar.1 I propose to add another illustration, with equally spectacular results. When Galileo, lacking a watch, experimented with balls rolling down an inclined surface to ascertain certain facts about acceleration, he hit upon the expedient of opening and closing a tap on an urn of water to fill a glass simultaneously with the starting and finishing point. In a word, time was correlated with a material quantity. Now here is a form of perception that does not change what time ‘is’, but simply offers the result that one description is its use as a geometrical correlation between a distance and a volume. Galileo discovered a form of mastery. His experimental method in this instance confirmed Wittgenstein’s injunction to refrain from researching ‘essences’ and simply look at phenomena (which are then apt to reveal themselve as resources). The source of (Augustine and everyone’s) confusion with time is the reification of prepositional terms, i.e. ‘before’ and ‘after’, seducing us into assuming for time an independent ontologically reality; that accordingly the creation of time (whether by God or in the big bang) is an event like the bubbling of a spring out of a rocky cleft. But time is nothing of the kind; Kant called it an intuition and Leibniz an order of correlation among facts and events that is amenable to geometrisation: so that Wittgenstein’s question “has before been created?” highlights the absurdity of reification. Returning from these harsh lessons to the text, we should now cast a glance back to PI:81, where the aforesaid ‘overture’ commences: … in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. 1

) The Brown Book, pp. 107-9.

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Wittgenstein inaugurates here the consideration of ‘ideal’ language, in response to Ramsey’s remarks. The upshot is that something misleads us in such construals: they make it appear that we have in our possession a conception of language better than the one we speak. As if there were some Platonic form of language to which we aspire without ever getting it quite right, so that we need a logician to show us a sentence bien fait. But what in fact happens is that we “make up the rules as we go along”.1 Just as in a game, where (e.g.) the way I kick a ball is not prescribed, only that I must kick it if I wish to keep playing. But in any case, the desideratum for rules which the logician would foist on us is based on the false assumption that we can accurately delimit the reach of language, determining as it were for all time all its possibilities. The tabular specimen in PI:86 is a case in point, where the rules depend on being explained by the way the game is played. Clearly in the first of the two schemata, reading left to right must be learnt; it is not self-understood! But the schema is indeed more likely to have been drawn up in line with an existing convention, so that instruction is unnecessary and the schema is superfluous. In the other, the rules are clearly needed for navigation, but they will not exhaust the game unless we are satisfied that no other ‘instructions’ are ever going to be needed for playing this game. The repercussions of this exercise on our understanding of the language game are this: Verbal communication is not a scientific project; in all situations where the language game is used, that manner and form of transmission is adequate which conveys the intentions and/or satisfies the criterion of initiating purported actions. In this game it is perfectly in order to issue an instruction “stand roughly here!” Although inexact, Wittgenstein replies to those who feel that this “is really a reproach”, that ultimately “we do not know what we should be 1

) PI:83, written in English by Wittgenstein.

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supposed to imagine” by lingual exactitude.1 Accordingly he exhorts us to “see through” (durchschauen) these appearances and grasp their “possibilities”: Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words … 2

“Our problem” means: the imputed sublimity of logic. But if “essence is hidden from us”, then “this is the form our problem now assumes.” It lures us down the path of ogling language as if it were something queer, erratic and—‘chemically’ impure. We fall for the seduction of accoutring thinking with a ‘nimbus’,3 positing as it were the logical conception of an order in which cosmos and thought are a priori intelligible reciprocally while no speck of dirt impairs this crystalline lucency—a supervening order stocked with supervening concepts in which it is hard to concede that ‘world’ is merely a word like ‘lamp’ or ‘door’.4 Instead of which, as Wittgenstein never tires of hammering home, language is the most natural thing conceivable. Even vagueness reflects the logic of its order. Therefore (to reiterate) the logic of grammar is not the logic of the grammarians—in it inheres the logic of those possibilities that are in the world. The question lurking in the background must meanwhile be brought up and put into the spotlight: If giving meaning to sentences is a matter of combining components and of applying principles, then it seems quite strange that … [we] fail completely and systematically to do the same 1

) PI:87-8. ) PI:90. 3 ) I wish the translator had retained Wittgenstein’s formulation, “Das Denken ist mit einem Nimbus umgeben”—after all, nimbus is in the dictionary! “A bright (or golden) cloud investing a deity”. The word ‘halo’ lacks the connotation of a haze obscuring something about language, but this is exactly Wittgenstein’s point. Mistranslations inevitably produce fruitless debates among readers who lack unfiltered access to the original. 4 ) PI:97. 2

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thing in philosophy. This looks as if we had a very reliable linguistic tool which worked wonderfully in most cases, while suddenly failing in only one case: philosophical problems. But [these] do not seem to be so different, so unusual, so wild as to generate such a total failure of language, they sometimes seem to be very near to other (scientific, moral social and even daily) problems and topics, so that this huge gap appears to be hardly understandable. How could philosophical questions, which are similar and even connected to other meaningful questions, still fail to be meaningful?1

The point here—not spelled out by the writer—is surely that linguistic mastery presumes inventiveness in the use of language: languages do grow and decay, and change readily when they collide with other languages. This means that verbal performance is not measurable by algorithmic procedures; moreover, all such changes, and especially inventive (creative) changes are fallible, prone to excess (novel metaphors, analogies, idioms, but also reifications, neologisms and so on); and it could be said that philosophical speech is especially prone to this kind of error on account of the questions which it seeks to unravel. Many of these questions are in error themselves, positing things that are not things and suggesting conceptions by changing aspects of grammatical use. Recurring to the “crystalline logic” of PI:107-8 may give us access to the source of these problems. To have a philosophical problem is a discomfiting experience, as exemplified by none more than Wittgenstein himself: but to most thinkers it is a problem of language seeming to evade the issue—and perhaps this is primarily perceived as a defect in its organisation, its lacking reach, precision and grammatical definiteness. Yet our inability to express ourselves, even in daily speech, is often blamed on missing words—“I can’t find the word to say what I mean”. Philosophers, however, are committed to verbal precision and, especially, to the ‘chemical purity’ that is appro1

) Iliescu, p. 41.

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priate to dealing with substance, essence and similarly pristine conceptions. But philosophers are scarcely the only offenders! On the contrary, they constantly see the methods of scientists before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.1

So here we have identification of a precedent! It is imitation of the scientific method (which is necessarily embedded in “crystalline logic”) that leads to ‘physics envy’ and the unsound endeavours to refashion language for philosophical purposes.2 But by ignoring the conventions in which language is embedded—from which languages get their ability to mean—philosophers may fly off on a tangent into a semantic domain that is completely artificial, maybe even their own brainchild: and accordingly they have no way of testing if their writings actually mean what they purport to express.3 Wittgenstein: But to what purpose may such words be put? There is no language game that would vouchsafe a manner of usage.4

Ineluctably we are driven to the understanding that Wittgenstein wants us to embrace: that new facts and inventions do not change philosophical issues—except in the misunderstood sense of spawning new concepts which encourage philosophers to new logical constructs in metaphysics, ontology and epistemology that are misguided if they depart from tenets of 1

) BBB, p. 18. ) ‘Physics envy’ is a pejorative often used to put down researchers in ‘inexact’ sciences such as biology, economics etc. who show an untoward eagerness to imitating the style, methods and manners of physics papers. 3 ) And now it transpires that one of the favoured devices of philosophers is to assume that every verb or adjective is a latent noun, and every noun an entity. 4 ) PI:96, my translation. 2

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the language game in which they are played out. Thus: Before Wittgenstein, philosophical systems assumed that ordinary language, or ordinary expression, was ordinary in the sense that it was too crude to deal with the rarified, subtle and complex questions of philosophy. Philosophical systems then impose a supposedly clarified structure on ordinary language, coining a new language in the process, as though language could be circumvented and the structure of reality be observed directly. Wittgenstein notes that all such projects remain within language and must be communicated in language ... all language use, including philosophical and scientific usage, is merely an exploitation of the potentialities that are already inherent within ordinary language.1

But scientific novelties change nothing about human nature; let them remain as the prerogatives of science. Theories about empirical features of the world can be tested and confirmed or falsified; thereby they add to the store of knowledge. But philosophical theories are not so testable. Accordingly, their concern should be with the perspectives we may adopt on life, world and our relations to them and each other. This limited ambition, Wittgenstein urges, entails that philosophy is about arranging and re-arranging facts already known; it is a purely descriptive metier. As Hacker writes: It is part of Wittgenstein’s therapy for philosophical illusion that we be brought to our senses by examining intermediate 1

) Ackermann, pp. 9-10.—However, this claim is vulnerable to the objection (as Wittgenstein readily concedes) that languages proliferate into dialects, and that all of them carry a tacit metaphysical freight in their baggage in form of sediments of indefinable notions derived from religion and folklore (unicorns, witches, Santa Claus etc.). Therefore Wittgenstein might be held to claim that, if it is part of the office of philosophy to rid languages of these types of weeds, the task is not accomplished by the substitution with equally obscure notions. However, some ambiguity remains, for just as young humans need teddy bears for emotional comfort, so most languages (i.e. forms of life) find it hard to dispense with these icons of folk beliefs even when they are redundant—as a matter of cultural psychology.

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cases in order that we grasp connections. Revealing conceptual connections, which were not hitherto articulated in a perspicious surview even though they are an integral part of our linguistic practice, is as legitimate a sense of ‘explain’ as any. Moreover, not only does Wittgenstein explain, in this loose sense, in order to rid us of illusion. He also explains, in great detail and profundity, the multifarious sources and processes which generate philosophical illusion. Since there are no hypotheses to be confirmed or falsified, no new information is needed. We are concerned with examining the concepts we have, not those we do not have.1

The first campaign in this invasion of age-old certainties must be to lay siege to the fortress of Begriffsschriften of the Frege type: the repudiation of logical syntax as an inexpungable theoretical desideratum of syntax per se. What we really need is a well-arranged synoptic depiction of what there is; until we have it in our hands, the confession, “I don’t know my way about” is the proper philosophical attitude. Thus, for Wittgenstein the task of philosophy is clarification. Concepts, relations, modes of expression, meanings—and ultimately the description of its own weighty and lengthy legacy in the grammar of language, not of theory. 4 ‘Sole ipso?’

Necessarily such an agenda would have serious repercussions on the pursuit of many of philosophy’s most deeply ingrained concerns and values—its ‘sacred cows’; and foremostly ideas connected with mind, ‘I’ and the sanctity of ‘my’ inner space. One prerequisite for an advanced organism of the collective-cellular type is the possession of a nervous system capable of affective-volitional responsiveness to stimuli. This has been read in humans as an invitation to posit the privacy of such experiences. Hence paradigmatic for all these issues is the ques1

) Hacker, p. 158.

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tion: How private is a toothache? Now physical discomfort occasioned by an ache cannot be lightened by being shared around or passed on—it is, rather, a matter of ‘exclusive intimacy’ with particular hues of experiential ‘qualia’. Yet in several pertinent senses this privacy is illusory: it is no more individual than one’s experience of present weather conditions. Moreover, if this ‘privacy’ were to be a meaningful expression it would need to exhibit a cognitive component. Unless this is granted, the whole thing collapses in a heap, for otherwise we are dealing with a biological phenomenon that is identical throughout a vast range of animal species. Toothaches together with most such types of sensation are amenable to exhaustive correlation in a comprehensive pool of knowledge. Without it, medicine would not have universally applicable remedies. The whole of this science is predicated on the sameness (over a known causal ‘bandwidth’) of these supposedly individual sensations. PI:258-62 pursue a direction towards the same conclusion: I cannot have knowledge of my own qualia, because – there is no way of defining the exact ‘shade of experience’, – because of this, the next experience cannot accurately be compared with the former, – therefore no knowledge is involved. Accordingly, these so-called qualia of mine are as vague as can be, and so I am bereft of all good reason for insisting on my pain being in any way different from anyone else’s. Nor does introspecting reveal anything, so that the best option we have is to bring our woes to public attention (doctor, family, workmates), where there will be empathy and help, because everyone understands the ‘state’ I am in. Wittgenstein’s numerous utterances on solipsism, privacy and dualism reflect his awareness not only of these, but also the lingual-conceptual aspects. For example:

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Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to be able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.1

Given this application, McGinn comments, We can no longer connect pain and the human body. In assigning the human body to a category of physical things which lack any conceptual connection with sensation concepts, we have put it entirely beyond the reach of the concept of pain.2

This comment need not have restricted itself to the human body, for the fly’s wriggling certainly indicates a form of life; and although it can’t speak, we can speak on its behalf. We recognise the same signs of protest against discomfiture which elicit our verbal expressions, the moans and wriggles we perform. However, a more ambiguous case is that of withholding language, for example when we think without communicating our thoughts. This is surely the locus classicus of inner/outer beliefs on mentality and physicality: that thinking takes place inside an inner space that is absolutely inaccessible to others, yet indicative of activity. Unlike feelings and perceptions, these may be recalled exactly (one can memorise them). We feel this puzzling circumstance is not allayed by noting the identity of meaning between intention and doing (e.g. in stalking and pouncing on a prey). And although Wittgenstein may well be correct in his remark that an “inner process stands in need of outward criteria”,3 this seems still compatible with the idea of a cloistered ‘realm of thought’ somehow equipped with an interface to the physical apparature. ‘Turning inward’ 1

) PI:284. ) McGinn, p. 153. 3 ) PI:580. 2

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is not, after all, an uncommon reaction to external events, e.g. stress, criticism (cf. ‘poker face’). Wittgenstein may well respond that withdrawing and withholding are just other forms of public expression, “only whom are we informing of this?”1 Which may be read as: I behave this way because I have learnt the meaning of privacy of thought and am now applying it (cf. the boiling kettle, infra). But it is this presentation of a ‘closed front’, McGinn writes, that makes the picture of the inner so apt. In a case where a doubt arises, it is natural for us to express this as a question about ‘what is really going on inside him’ … But really this is no more than a vivid picture. … [and] these pictures are just another way of saying that he isn’t telling us what he feels. Confusion arises only when we are led by a mistaken analogy with things that are physically hidden, or physically kept locked up in a bottle, into making an inappropriate application of the picture.2

Indeed, the difficulty of Wittgenstein’s approach is that he does not tackle the issue by a frontal assault, but by undermining our conceptions of its genesis. He has no compunction admitting “what greater difference could there be?” between pain and its expression (or non-expression).3 Deception, withholding, obscuring—these are all part of the language game, and to some extent crucial aspects in learning it.4 And now it is easy to see how we might be tempted to postulate on the strength of these characteristics an inner and outer, whereas the point is that we are dealing with psychological concepts whose adequate grammatical description differentiates between objects 1

) PI:296. ) McGinn, pp. 169-70. 3 ) PI:304. 4 ) In emphasising ‘crucial’, my purpose is to convey that e.g. cunning is not just a human, but a general animal trait. We (reluctantly!) admit it as a sign of intelligence, and it was plausibly surmised (by William James) that the higher brain’s principal function is to handle surprises and utilise surprise to gain an advantage. 2

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which can, or cannot, play out a form of life. The remaining difficulty, “the man in the box” or homunculus, which is a ubiquitous presence in western thinking and writing about ‘the mind’, is attacked in more direct fashion. Wittgenstein brings forth the idea of a ‘visual room’—the conscious ‘receptacle’ of visual impressions. But: Might I not ask: in what sense have you got what you are talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do not even see it … And this too is clear: if as a matter of logic you exclude other people’s having something, it loses its sense to say that you have it.1

Readers of Schopenhauer will be aware that Wittgenstein had frequent recourse in his writings to one of the former’s most striking similes, viz.: [The self] is the eye which sees everything except itself.2

In a word, visual impressions are not a stage forward from ‘seeing something’; there is no separate module which sees and another which holds what I see in abeyance for me to contemplate it. The temptation to be resisted here is to conceive of the skull (brain, cortex) as a kind of resonating chamber for visual impressions, which confers on its owner a unique relationship with external objects such that one could say “I have” rather than “I am experiencing” a visual perception.It is simply an absurd way of talking about visual phenomenalism. The analogy with pain is obvious; as is the problem of modelling the ‘identity’ of the experience for future reference. Thus, The visual room seemed like a discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of speaking, a new comparison.3

One of Magritte’s paintings features a smoking pipe and the title, “This is not a pipe”. Of course. It is so to speak a ‘report’ 1

) PI:398. ) Cf. Hacker, pp. 87-91. 3 ) PI:400. 2

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of a pipe; it cannot give you the pleasure of smoking, nor convey an olfactory or tactile impression. Neither can the boiling kettle of Wittgenstein’s PI:297, which is contrasted with the report of a pained ejaculation. Worse, in this case the report may be false: the witness who reports it may have misunderstood, communicating a completely erroneous interpretation, because a cry is a signal without a clear denotation attached. So the report is non-informative: subjective states are not communicable (one must be present to rouse oneself to empathy, if that is called for). Thus Wittgenstein has engagingly used the picture pot metaphor as a way of bringing out what we may call the flip-flop character of certain propositions, which sound as if they told us something about the world, while in fact they only record features of our grammar.1

Heavy weather has been made of a similarly transparent metaphor, ‘The beetle in the box’ (PI:293). But we need only remember how “the little man in the box” (a.k.a. homunculus) denotes the thinking faculty in common parlance. No-one can look into another’s “box” to read their mind. We are all excluded from knowing the contents of other minds, although we readily project from our own upon others. But whatever that content might be, “it could not be used as the name of a thing”. Indeed, the box may (sometimes) be empty—ditto for our own! So When we look into ourselves, as we do in philosophy, we often get to see just such a picture. A full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar. No facts; but as it were illustrated turns of speech.2

Accordingly, the suggestion offers itself that the following should be inscribed on the doors of every lab in the world where the ‘visual room’ remains the paradigm of mind research:

1 2

) Hunter, p. 110. ) PI:295.

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Are sense-data the material of which the universe is made?1

Since Frege is the only author whom Wittgenstein quotes several times, we would not be wrong in looking to him for an entry into Wittgenstein’s conceptual legacy (rather than, e.g. Descartes). In Frege’s paper on Der Gedanke, eine logische Untersuchung,2 the basis of disquisition is the differentiation between sentence content and sentence meaning: What do we call a sentence? A succession of verbal utterances—but only if they have a meaning (which is not to say that every meaningful succession of such utterances comprise a sentence).3

For Frege this ‘meaning’ is not representation, but a thought: The intrinsically non-sensory thought is clothed in the sensory garment of a sentence and thereby becomes apprehensible. We say, the sentence expresses a thought.4

However, although thoughts may be clad in one of several types of sentence form, only assertion as the expression of a (positive or negative) judgement qualifies for a truth content. So where does this leave representation? According to Frege they belong to the ‘inner’ world and he elaborates a four-fold schema to explain this: (a) representations are not objects of apprehension, e.g. if I see a green meadow, I have a visual impression of green. But I do not see this impression. (b) representations are sensations, feelings, moods, inclinations, desires, i.e. contents of my consciousness. “The lawn, the frogs on it, the sun which is shining exist (whether I look or not); but the visual impression of green … exists only in me; I am its carrier. It seems absurd to us that a pain, 1

) PI:401. ) Frege, pp. 30-53. My few notes are indebted to the extensive treatment of Schärtl, pp. 5-9 and 55ff. 3 ) Frege, p. 33 [my translation]. 4 ) Loc. cit. 2

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a mood, a desire should roam independently through the world…”.1 (c) Accordingly, the external reality exists independently of my impressions. (d) Representations require a carrier, but no two people can possibly have the identical representation.

We can see the “bewitchment” in action here: I have a coin in my purse, a thought in my head; but as to thinking, what kind of language does a thought employ to make itself understood to “me”? Is this my secret? No, it’s nonsense, says Wittgenstein. There is no possible language game one can play according to private, ‘inner’ rules—for these ‘rules’ are templates for the purpose of social interaction.2 One here is conflating physical and psychological predicates, which are incompatible with each other, in one language game.3 What of ‘my’ pain? “What would be acceptable as a criterion of identity?”4 Can I have pain without being conscious of it? This is incomprehensible, but leads at least to the insight that we do not ‘have’ the pain, but awareness of it. Now we see that awareness is not an object; the false relation was to suppose that awareness could be reified as an “I” in a state of proprietorship. So the traditional solipsist, the fly in the fly-bottle,5 sees himself as a locked-away private self … he has not discovered that the ‘first person world’ and the ‘first person experience’ (wrongly identified by these terms since there is no ‘person’ involved in this) do not belong to anybody, but are, rather, overwhelmingly public.”6

In other words, the ‘self’ stands revealed as another grammati1

) Frege, p. 41. ) PI:272. 3 ) PI:273, 275. 4 ) PI:253. 5 ) PI:309. 6 ) Finch, p. 106. 2

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cal entity that philosophy attempted to arrogate into its canon of ‘real entities’; but to rebut this claim, it is only necessary to see that “what the solipsist is getting at is not something which affects the world or what I can say about it.”1 The tree in the forest will make a noise and thousands of creatures in its vicinity will be witnesses. Noise is a describable part of the world.

1

) Finch, p. 113.

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IX Danto and The Pale of Aesthetics Preliminary Note

ARTHUR DANTO’S Transfiguration of the Commonplace1 is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and compares them with the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus, the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this conception of art. 1 Introduction

Arthur Danto, only recently deceased, has been such a longtime institution-in-person for art criticism on the contemporary scene, that it seems appropriate to cast a retrospective glance at his ideas and rouse ourselves to an enquiry of whether his writings testify to a valid conception of the nature of art. Its secessionist impulse is unmistakable and recalls the crisis of aesthetics in the later 19th century, when the formalist theory 1

) See bibliography.

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of art was first introduced by Eduard Hanslick.1 At the focus of those disputes stood the concept of ‘arthood’, i.e. the quest for a boundary to the concept and the associated issue of ‘what is included, what is excluded?’ Additionally, the preceding idealist strain of Kant, Hegel and others had saddled philosophy with the dilemma of an ‘aesthetic subject’, as it were the hinge on which arthood swings back and forth in the process of deriving a philosophically tenable resolution. Debate on these desiderata never settled down to a widespread consensus, so that the doors stood wide open to several Secessionist movements in the arts at the turn of the century. Even so, philosophers of the 20th century continued to pay more than lips service to the tradition, content to absorb new impulses without upturning the apple cart.2 Danto’s Theory of Art, supported by a diverse collection of papers,3 inserts a wedge into this enquiry from a markedly different angle, seeking to circumvent its liabilities. His philosophical secession seemed all the more urgent as the art scene had been rocked for decades by drastic and ceaseless mutations of artistic practice and clamoured for a new doctrinal apostolate. Danto’s thinking may be captured in its five major dicta, which for the purposes of this paper may be summarised first: (1) “Any theory of art must compass the Brillo Box”,4 a claim 1

) The celebrated and controversial Viennese music critic, whose definition of music as ‘sonorous forms in motion’ raised hackles with its implied repudiation of an emotional ‘content’ in music (Hanslick 1854). 2 ) As there is no scope in this paper for engaging with this literature, the following list may serve as an indicator of the endurance of aestheticsbased philosophising: Adorno: Aesthetic Theory; Philosophy of New Music; Broch: Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst; Collingwood: The Principles of Art; Croce: The Essence of Aesthetic; Dewey: Art as Experience; Ehrenzweig: The Hidden Order of Art; Gadamer: The relevance of the Beautiful; Hauser: The Social History of Art; Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art; Langer: Feeling and Form; Lukacs: Ästhetik; Ortega y Gasset: The Dehumanisation of Art; Sartre: What is Literature? and The Imaginary. Wollheim: Art and its Objects. 3 ) Danto, 1981, 1996. 4 ) Transfig. vii.

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for the candidacy of “mere real things” for arthood under certain conditions; (2) repudiation of institutional definitions of art and the adoption of deliberate intention as crucial for public acceptance; (3) the demise of “art as we know it” and, by implication, art philosophy as-we-know-it; (4) the empowerment of the cognitive subject in accordance with Pierce’s dictum “man is the sum total of his language, as man is a sign;”1 (5) the proposition that a work of art embodies exoteric ideas which satisfy the demand for instantiation in, and the individuation of, works of art. The aim of this paper is to examine these criteria of his philosophy, in order to ascertain its exequatur vis-à-vis aesthetic doctrines. It seems best, therefore, to preface the debate with a brief statement on the philosophical culture in which aesthetics is at home, so as to lay its presuppositions on the table. 2 Aesthetic Philosophy—a Capsule Depiction

Aesthetic philosophy is a metaphysical doctrine concerned with artefacts bearing marks of intentional communication directed at an audience. Alternatively, the marks may comprise a set of instructions for beholders or intermediaries to act in a certain way (performance) so that an intentional communication is actualised. Accordingly its central tenet is the circuitry from the communicative intention to the recipient beholder. Before Kant, this tenet suffered from a mistaken emphasis on ‘inherence’, i.e. that some quality such as beauty resides ‘in’ a work; whereas Kant showed this to be a fallacy, as such qualities are engendered by the subject’s intuitions and comprise their personal reaction. Nevertheless, discriminatory consensus is possible as 1

) Transfig. 205.

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all humans are endowed with much the same sensibility, so that variances in perception can frequently be attributed to cultural conditioning. The best case for the fundamentality of intentional communication is furnished by artworks which require performance to be instantiated, as they are unambiguously directed to an audience and imperatively demand an aesthetic subject. However, artworks whose ab initio form of existence is as artefacts (e.g. sculptures) are also to be conceived as intentional objects prior to their execution. Michelangelo, though not a philosopher, explained that his act of sculpting involved “liberating the figure from the marble,” meaning that the vision is complete before the hand applies hammer and chisel. To this extent it seems wholly uncontentious that aesthetic philosophy can boast at least of a secure foundation. The difficulties which nonetheless persist when its detailed expositions are scrutinised need not be hidden nor disguised. Philosophers since the scholastic era (and foreshadowed in some ancient literature) cracked their teeth in vain on stabilising notions of arthood, objecthood, truth, beauty, mimesis, ideas, epistemology, heurism, morality etc., while the chief liability—the observer undergoing an aesthetic experience— remained throughout a theoretical embarrassment.1 Yet in spite of their deficiencies, these notions yielded an immensely rich harvest of profound philosophical insights, not only into art, but all facets of the human phenomenon. The philosophy of art thrusts its tentacles into many other branches such as ethics, politics, anthropology, psychology, epistemology, pedagogy and theories of mind and soul, collecting their 1

) In Hume’s essays “On the Standards of Taste” [Hume 1874-5] the qualifications for judging the merit of artworks are so stringent that only men of the highest education and culture and of mature age and wide experience are admitted. It has often been remarked that it ends up being a circular definition: that art is what the wisdom of such men approves of, but this wisdom can only be exhibited by men who approve of this art. Herein, however, lies the predicament.

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wisdom and pollinating them in turn. So the feeble excuses of those who deride philosophy, that only solutions justify the means, can be dismissed without ado. Philosophy is an exploration of the entire human landscape, not a drive from Point A to Point B. Therefore it matters that all the above notions entangled with art have exercised great minds, even if they remained throughout at loggerheads with the actual practice of art and each other. It also matters that all aesthetic doctrines of art concern the deepest aspirations and motivations of the human kind, to the extent that arthood has always denoted something special and exceptional, enlisting the creative imagination of unusually talented artists and touching the soul of aesthetic subjects—and therefore elevated above the common rut as custodian of the highest values to which a society may aspire. And so, we provided a niche of autonomy for art, as we did for religion, science, philosophy, history. Danto’s theory can, in this context, be regarded as an effort to salvage this autonomy from the seemingly lawless plethora of productions which must have appeared as miscreants to the sight of every keeper of hallowed tradition. By discarding the liability of constantly having to prop up the aesthetic subject, Danto facilitates concentration on art as a collection of objects, rendering their ontology secure while their arthood could be vouchsafed by the attachment of ideas to promote appropriate reflections. However, as soon as it is stated this way, objections spring to mind which must now be followed through, together with a detailed scrutiny of Danto’s tenets, following the same order as above, in the Introduction. 3 Deuteropraxis and Over-intellectualisation

The way the question for arthood is posed in the Transfiguration is not far removed from the notion of ‘deuteropraxis’, which may suitably open the discussion. This term, coined by

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Olsen and Bruner,1 denotes the setting aside of certain commonplace objects and common social practices for other than their intrinsic purposes; thereby they acquire a different status, having been “made special”. Specimens may be found in all types of society, from tribal to highly civilised, and they range from pebbles, pelts, claws, masks etc. being employed for the worship of gods and ancestors, to elaborate ceremonial occasions involving a tribe, kingdom or even an entire civilisation in collective behaviour. Collingwood, writing many years earlier, spoke of such practices in terms of ‘representation’ and emphasised that they arise from wholly quotidian impulses for togetherness and conviviality, i.e. “such things as weddings, funerals [etc.] which all involve dressing up which is not done for amusement … but according to a prescribed pattern, often very uncomfortable and always so designed as to emphasise the solemnity of the occasion [and] they all involve ritual instruments: a ring, a hearse, a peculiar and complicated outfit of knives and forks and glasses [as well as] a prescribed demeanour and prescribed forms of speech.”2 Collingwood’s point is, of course, the communal consensus on “making special”—it is not a private affair, but a custom resting on shared beliefs. A thing or occasion “made special” in this way carries an implicit freight of otherness, in the sense that it now represents not itself, but some issue of significance to society. Bruner and Olsen observe that in such contexts “deuteropraxis is responsible for the radical economisation of the experience of the tribe or nation in a few great myths and, more generally, for the world view implicit in one’s native language.” In other words, such objects tend to be ‘holons’ of multiple meanings gathered in one symbol or act. Although deuteropraxis is historically predominant in religious beliefs, all art is deeply vested with it—e.g. a work of art is never just a picture, but a message, story or encapsulation of something momentous. 1 2

) Bruner & Olsen, 1973. ) Collingwood, 1938, pp. 73-5.

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Thus art qua deuteropraxis has value in many facets of human experience, as for example in the cathartic experience one may have in the theatre which aids us in ‘seeing connections’ that remained opaque in the ordinary conduct of our lives. Olson and Bruner note in this context the time-binding effect, the “virtual simultanising” of temporal events which surpass ordinary experience. E.g. play acting, though a commonplace and ubiquitous performance in which we all engage spontaneously from childhood onward, is amenable to deuteropraxis, as it transforms and transfigures this kind of practice and the associated mode of experience in profound and meaningful experiences. The effort requires the invention of symbolical devices which speak from one mind to another and are perceived as possessing import. It goes without saying that this engages the aesthetic faculty, as the interpretation is not a cognitive analysis, but a recognition, frequently instantaneous. Accordingly in such performances, a metaprocess takes place which involves the audience in the reorganisation of experience into systems of communication, which in turn enable the individual to participate in them to gain the benefit of the experience by being involved in an intensely heuristic process. Art has always served, since time immemorial, as a principal bearer of such communications—to the point of becoming a ‘surrogate religion’, a substitute for the loss of faith that began to spread in the 19th century. The proximity of Danto’s ‘transfiguration’ to deuteropraxis is palpable. His proposition on the Brillo Box is none other than “making special” as, from the moment of being exhibited in a context normally associated with the display of artworks, it became (transfigured into) a work of art. Accordingly he prepares the reader from the start for what to expect from him: “The question of what made [transfigured objects] artworks could be broached without bringing aesthetic considerations

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in at all.”1 This anti-aesthetic emphasis alerts us at once to a crucial component of Danto’s thesis. He seeks to assuage us by an intellectually-driven construal of the kafuffle around Warhol’s ‘deuteropractical object’. He turns the argument on its head, writing that a commonplace object transforms nothing in the artworld. It only brings to consciousness the structures of art which, to be sure, required a certain historical development before that metaphor was possible. The moment it was possible, something like the Brillo Box was inevitable and pointless. It was inevitable, because the gesture had to be, whether with this object or some other. It was pointless because, once it could be made, there was no reason to make it.2

Danto might have said, more simply: “It is the unexpected environment that transforms the object”; but this would have become he first instance of rebuttal, as the environment is a museum space lacking vestment with such power. In any case, his manner of over-intellectualisation doesn’t quite meet the predicament—e.g. it could not be said that “a commonplace object ‘made special’ transforms nothing in the ritual world”. The opposite is the case, as their introduction changes perceptions on the nature, purpose and function of those objects, as well the nature of the rituals themselves. This is substantially the point made by Bruner and Olsen. Every splinter from the ‘True Cross’ wrought its magic in precisely this way; and likewise for innumerable relics in this and other religions. Hence Danto’s claim seems contrived. We might, at a pinch, concede that on an intellectual level, it’s all the same. But the mentality which engenders deuteropraxis is not the same. For that matter, it could hardly be maintained that the artworld itself remained unchanged by the impact of Brillo Boxes, as the ‘gesture’ spawned millions of words written for and against. Danto’s reduction of the exhibit to a gesture intrigues us, how1 2

) Transfig. vi. ) Transfig. 208.

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ever, inasmuch as the practice of contemporary art can, on one level, be seen as an endless succession of similar gestures, which under his criterion are each as useless as every other. Danto fails to mention this effect of the ‘gesture’, but it is altogether implicit, as it presaged “the end of art as we know it”. Therefore it is appropriate for him, having identified the exhibit ‘Brillo Box’ as a gesture, to now “speak as a philosopher … construing the gesture as a philosophical act”. It is not wholly clear who the claimant might be—Warhol or Danto? Surely Danto, as Warhol could be charged with plagiarising Duchamp. Yet, by now we are entitled to wonder how this intellectualised approach serves for clarity on the vexed issue of arthood? After all, the Brillo Box and all its progeny are ontological kinds, whereas gestures are other (metaphysical?) kinds. In addition, we can hardly ignore the fact that no work, no creativity, no aesthetic intention nor any previously known philosophy is involved. It suggests that we must now have recourse to the one instance of arbitration that bears responsibility also for deuteropraxis—the community, which in today’s world is represented by the segment of society which may be called ‘the artworld’. 4 The Institutional Theory of Art

It quickly becomes obvious that Danto has a jaundiced relationship with this theory. His initial take on it is as piquant as one would expect from his epigrammatical style of writing: Just as someone is a husband by virtue of satisfying certain institutionally defined conditions, though he may outwardly appear no different from any other man, so something is an artwork if it satisfies certain institutionally defined conditions, though outwardly it may appear no different from an object that is not an artwork.1 1

) Transfig. 28-9.

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This is terribly weak. “Institutionally defined” is the bone of contention, not a conclusion. Danto, admits it, calling the theory “shallow” and taking a vocal proponent, George Dickie, to task. The latter wrote: A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artefact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the art world).1

Danto greets this passus with a typically elegant sarcasm: “[the artworld] … an institutionally enfranchised group of persons who serve, so to speak, as trustees for the generalised musée imaginaire …” And indeed, Dickie’s thesis treads on shifting ground, as all such arguments depend on stable notions of arthood—yet they are the most unstable one can think of. Not only because the social institution he calls ‘artworld’ is in constant flux respecting its consensus opinions, but also because societies change, while different kinds of societies attach different kinds of values to whatever is art to them. This is Danto’s general objection; but he takes particular exception to Dickie’s claim that the crux of the matter is institutional “appreciation”. What, he asks, is being appreciated if, as he says of Dickie, he discounts aesthetic criteria? Then e.g. Duchamp’s Urinal surely exhibits features that ought to be appreciated, in terms as they resemble works by Brancusi, Moore et al. “Certainly the work itself [sic!] has properties that urinals themselves lack,” Danto writes, adding, “It is daring, impudent, irreverent, witty and clever.”2 Danto in the grip of the pathetic fallacy! The ‘work’ can hardly be all of that, although Duchamp might be.3 Altogether, however, Danto chas1

) Dickie, p. 34. ) Transfig. 93f. 3 ) I think this requires a philosophical interjection. It can hardly be maintained of an inert object that intentional expressions inhere in it as “properties”. A witticism is the intentional act of an intentional agent who accepts responsibility for the perception of his acts by others as well as their fa2

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tises Dickie for failing to resolve the ambiguity in the word “makes”, i.e. what quality or element makes an object a work of art. We can agree that this is indeed the central dilemma, as the word ‘institutional’, apart from its insinuation of a body of people constituted in late Western civil society to handle matters pertaining to art, has no relevance to other kinds of societies. Accordingly, Danto combats the institutional theory for its major failing, which is that one must first know that the object is an artwork, and hence the distinction between what is art and what is not is presumed available before the difference in response to that difference in identity is possible. … Hence we cannot appeal to aesthetic considerations in order to get our definition of art, inasmuch as we need the definition of art in order to identify the sorts of responses appropriate to works of art in contrast with mere real things.1

This is well said, though our suspicions are not allayed that Danto’s terms take some aspects of the matter back to front. They might cover objects already “made special” like fetishes or ritual implements; but hardly a work such as Homer’s Iliad, that was composed with precisely the aesthetic circumstances in mind which, according to Danto, cannot be established beforehand. A surprising lapse! But his motivation was probably the lack of a firm doctrinal basis from which to delimit candidates for arthood institutionally, in contrast to e.g. utilitarian artefacts which are constrained in their forms and flow from the past into the future (e.g. chairs çon de parler which attributes the act to the object. While this works well in ordinary language use, where it may serve for the short-circuiting of a lengthy circumlocution, its logic gets short shrift when such casual usage is carelessly transplanted into philosophical diction. It is the same sloppiness which attributes ‘sadness’ to music or ‘virility’ to a male statue, which one would not normally object to. But when a philosopher speaks philosophically, one expects greater circumspection, especially in the present context, where a fundamental principle of philosophy is at stake. 1 ) Transfig. 94-5.

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never change much). Works of art rarely give direction to the future except through certain kinds of impulses. Their evolution, in other words, is open-ended. Considerations of this nature also inform several papers published by Jerrold Levinson who, in pursuit of definition(s), endeavours to capture “what the concept of art is at present”.1 He makes the relevant point that the “Concept-of art-1777” is not identical to the “Concept-of-art-1977”. It is a good point, as one look at e.g. the Dutch art-and-craft industry in the time of Rembrandt shows us that the practice of that era did not rigorously separate the craftsmanship required for a ship’s prow from a work like the Night Watch. Many studios at Amsterdam would unquestioningly take commissions for sundry kinds of this work to be executed under one roof. It seems to give credence to the justification of ‘deuteropractical’ exhibits in the contemporary artworld, but is this as clear-cut a proposition as it seems? Take Levinson’s argument that “an object can be an artwork at one time and not another.” This is uncontentiously true, as already noted. But now, apparently making common cause with Danto, Levinson continues: The snow shovel involved in Duchamp’s Snow Shovel, or the bottle rack in his Bottle Rack, became works of art at a certain time owing to Duchamp’s appropriating them with a certain intention. The same goes for driftwood mounted and displayed in someone’s living room [etc.] … So what sort of definition have we given? In short, a definition that explains what it is to be art at a given time in terms of what art is at previous times.2

Against this it has to be said that even in Rembrandt’s era, few of the worthy burghers would have confused a mere ornament with the creative vision involved in the works of their great 1 2

) Levinson 23. ) Levinson 12-13.

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painters and sculptors. Yet (unless I grossly misunderstand) Levinson seems to propose that a mere private intention empowers anyone with such an interest to promote or convert any thing whatever to the status of arthood. Indeed, a wisp of misgiving creeps in when he concedes that “[the definition] exhibits art as essentially referring to itself” and is “simply circular”. But we demur with his conclusion that eliminating this reflexivity would “eviscerate” the term ‘art’, and for a very simple reason: Missing from his kaleidoscope is a barometer of discernment. In today’s world, we find individuals calling themselves ‘artist’ whose ambition is to wrap a natural coastline in orange plastic sheets, while others re-arrange parts of a disused locomotive in any order their impulse dictates and achieve plaudits. Not to mention John Cage’s ‘composition’ 4’33”, which would seem like a joke gone sour, as we can hear it anytime when there is silence. Add the Urinal and the Brillo Box, and the temptation is near to hand to coin the new term ‘principle of whimsicality’ for their justification in Danto and Levinson’s canons, down to the absurdity of calling some of them ‘works’, despite no work being in evidence. This is letting the intellect run wild, manipulating words without meaning and framing concepts without content. Let us see, on the other hand, what happens when aesthetics is brought into the fray, as in this passage from a book by Luhmann: One might start from the assumption that art uses perceptions and, by doing so, seizes consciousness at the level of its own externalising activity. The function of art would then consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable—namely perception—into the communications network of society. … The art system concedes to the perceiving conciousness its own unique adventure in observing artworks—and yet it makes available as communication the formal selection that triggered the adventure. Unlike verbal communication, which all too quickly moves toward a yes/no bifurcation, communi-

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cation guided by perception relaxes the structural coupling of consciousness and communication … The freedom of movement entailed in the world of perception is recovered in language and against the narrow focus of language; and the encapsulation of perception within the psyche prevents one from subjecting one’s perceptions to a test for consensus. Consensus becomes an issue only in verbal communication, in commentary [italics added].1

This is not an institutional theory, though it belongs to one. But it shows, through the primacy of aesthetic traffic between object, psyche and society, the motor of intensification that makes ‘making special’ possible. What we call ‘aesthetics’ is in reality perceptions enhanced beyond their utilitarian purpose to serve awareness of the multilayered stream of signals that would be filtered out in a quotidian perceptive flow—and art is in large part its insightful manipulation. Once this is underway, it becomes productive within the aesthetic faculty, enlisting in addition the plethora of memorised percepts.2 One regrets to say that nothing in Danto’s theory or in Levinson’s attempted definitions speaks with equal plausibility and conviction for the process of ‘making special’. 5 Art, Optical Fidelity and Götterdämmerung

Danto is famous as the prophet who announced the descent of dusk on “art as we know it”—by which he means the artworks which fill our museums and predate the 20th century. They comprise a unique and unrepeatable museal repository, for which his explanation is that the camera killed off this spe1

) Luhmann 141. ) E.g. “Text-art does not seek automatically to repeat familiar meanings, it aims instead at disrupting automatisation and delaying understanding … connotations, not denotation, mediate meaning; it communicates not through the propositional content of its utterances, but [through] the ornamental structure of mutually limiting references that appear in words.” Luhmann 25.

2

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cies of art, as artists of the latter half of the 19th century were confronted with the dilemma that “the conquest of optical fidelity” could be mechanically accomplished. As an argument and justification, this is puzzling. A mere smattering acquaintance with art history would convince us without any doubt that optical fidelity was accomplished long ago—even if we ignore sculpture (not art?) and concentrate on paintings, men such as van Eyck, Dürer, Holbein, Canaletto and many others leave nothing to be desired in this respect; indeed it may be claimed for them that in certain respects they are more faithful to reality than a camera, since their pictures assist the eye with a more subtle discernment of relevant features.1 If Danto’s claim could be made to stand up, then the end of art “as we know it” would have been reached three centuries ago. It is rather strange, then, that Danto mentions Ingres as the last artist to trouble himself to the utmost with optical fidelity, yet fails to mention his contemporary William Turner, whose work is characterised by the discovery of a much greater reach into the depths of reality than mere optical fidelity. It is a specimen on which a philosopher could hang a rich epistemology of vision; but this applies in greater or lesser measure to every artist worth his salt between the Renaissance and Romanticism. In a word: The conquest of optical fidelity was never the principal point on their agenda. As it was achievable at will from the Burgundian era onward, and rested on nothing higher than appropriate technical training, it was no longer a challenge, although it remained an option for artists who invested their pride in it. Accordingly, we are at a loss explaining this double mistake on Danto’s part—as if he had never bothered himself with the history of art (which he did, profusely) and as if he seems to believe that art throughout those eras was noth1

) It is incidentally the same reason why drawings are preferred to photographs for the depiction of mechanisms, appliances, parts of gadgetry and the like, so as to guide the eye to their salient aspects.

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ing other than picture making. The upshot is, that Danto does not deny the art status to art before photography, but maintains that it had limited objectives. We cannot cavil with this viewpoint since it is selfexplanatory. But we must cavil with the implication, which is that art is in the main (if not wholly) picture making. Did Danto remember reading Gombrich in his student days, who says exactly these words?1 Then we have a simple, straightforward ontology on our hands and hardly need a philosophy of art. But this brings other problems in its train. Danto needs to separate the sheep from the goats, since optical fidelity as well as stylistic idiosyncrasies invite imitation and copying, not only for practice and self-development, but for pecuniary gain by the devious means of duping purchasers and collectors of art. Copies and forgeries comprise a gallery of ontological, epistemological and aesthetic troublemakers, that have befuddled not only the artworld, but philosophers as well—not least Danto himself. 6 Copies, Duplicates, Fakes and Forgeries

The temptation to produce fakes and forgeries is strong in a market whose wares are quantitatively exhaustible. It might encourage mediocre, but fastidious talents to test it for the consistency of its judgements on value. These problems, encompassing emulation of style without identifying the author, elicit from Danto an extended discussion. Their philosophical importance lies precisely in the concretisation of the concept of arthood again, as it is doubtful (to say the least) whether a forgery—for all its resemblance to the style of an acknowledged master—can be included in this category. Accordingly, Danto throws light on it from various angles, including debate on plain copies, inadvertent duplication, and of course forgery, 1

) Gombrich 18.

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which it is worthwhile to pursue with him.1 Beginning with the simplest case, the poem printed in a book, induces him to draw on Platonic forms as the ‘originals’. If a copy is burnt, it doesn’t affect the poem as such, as “by parallel reasoning the Poem Itself [capitalisation by Danto!] appears to be logically indestructible”. Danto is speaking in metaphorical terms here, but it strikes us as a breathtakingly bizarre gaffe, which perhaps no-one else could get away with! Nevertheless, one smells confusion with object ontology where a metaphysical slant would be more appropriate, and forgetfulness of the fact that the print is nothing more than the objective correlate of an intentional act which incidentally (not compulsorily) avails itself of a stable medium of transmission. Asking for the ultimate reality of the poem is therefore a non sequitur: it exists in its creator’s mind as an amalgam of perceptual, conceptual and verbalisable mind-images being made to unfold in time through performance. It is after all possible for a poet to forget and substitute some words in his own text in preparation for print, or (to draw on a specific specimen) for Beethoven to add two notes (!) to his Hammerklavier Sonata, four months after his acolyte Ries had taken the work to England for performances!2 But our hopes for illumination are further dampened by Danto’s disquisitions on the Don Quixote of Cervantes and Menard in the famous story of Borges.3 Here Danto’s prey is inadvertence; and the context of Borges’ story is the inadvertent duplication by Menard of the original, as every effort he makes to substitute other words to carry the same semantic freight as Cervantes’ words, entails some degree of falsification. Once again Danto is tempted to a superficial philosophi1

) Transfig. 32-53. ) Kaiser 532, who relates that the recipient at first believed his master had gone potty, but came to an understanding of the artistic necessity once his mind became attuned to their presence and could no longer conceive of dispensing with them. 3 ) Borges 2000. 2

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cal appropriation, this time to Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles; but one regrets to observe that it comes down to another instance of plumage worn for merely decorative purposes.1 Borges, on the contrary, was fascinated with Leibniz and drew frequently upon his thoughts for source material.2 One of Leibniz’s letters tells of a wager he made with some friends that they would not find a single duplicate specimen of clover in the field where they were partying. Although they all hunted for exact matches, none could be found, to Leibniz’s great satisfaction. This is the basis on which Borges’ story rests. However, Borges’ story is a paradox, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of an aspect of translation that is frequently broached in the literature under the banner of ‘utmost fidelity’ to the original in a foreign language—a desideratum impossible to adhere to, as no two languages have identical semantic fields and the same arsenal of synonyms, puns etc. But this point seems to have eluded Danto, while he was chasing a hare on the subject of “a problem of a familiar metaphysical sort concerning the identity of an artwork”.3 The thrust of his enquiry is in the direction of “indiscernible copies … but these would be copies of different, even importantly different, works, though nothing would be easier than to mistake a copy of Cervantes for a copy of Menard.”4 His question, “what makes them different?” 1

) Lawrenz 2010, 156-7. Leibniz’s indiscernibility principal rests on his doctrine of an information flow being generated by an individual monad (fundamental substance) at the instant of its creation. As this involves a unique time and location, it is asymmetrical and monodirectional; accordingly there is no logical avenue by which the exact duplicate of an existent could occur. As this is clearly a cosmological principle, and Leibniz not an author widely read in the art community, one cannot help wondering if Danto banked on the recherché allusion making its point by sleight of hand? 2 ) Another specimen, perhaps his best-known story, is The Garden of Forking Path. 3 ) Transfig. 33. 4 ) Ibid.

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elicits from the Leibnizian indiscernibility thesis whether it has been breached. Yet this is ad hoc reasoning, as Danto does not distinguish between the written (physical) copy and the intellectual (mental) effort that resulted in the duplication of Cervantes’ text. Such confusion is readily made when a theorist’s object mentality cannot see that there is a clearly distinguishable act of original creation, which is a mental act being transcribed into writing, while the written text is not the primary work of art, but only the first copy, on which the author may do much further work. But once this physical correlate of mental (imaginative) processes is finalised, it can be copied ad infinitum by the printing press and other copying devices. Therefore Menard was neither copying a text nor creating an original work, as Danto proposes—his work was a performance, which is comparable, qua performance, to Richard Burton delivering the speeches of Hamlet on stage, exactly as Shakespeare wrote them, while additionally engaging in appropriate bodily motions (‘acting’). Now Danto would hardly accuse Burton of either plagiarising or duplicating Shakespeare’s text—but he is, of course, as intended by the genre of the work! It seems Danto manoeuvred himself into a blind alley here, as the identity of a work, common properties across duplicates and the puzzle of individuation are applied to the wrong object and/or context. Borges, in depicting Menard’s desperate attempt to forge Cervantes’ text anew, in different words, shows him to be compelled by the incompatibility of the two dictions to find a medium of expression that remains absolutely true to the original. ‘Logically’, therefore, he reproduces the text word for word, which is nothing other than a performance, as already noted. As such, however, it is completely useless; and Borges finds a means of emphasising this point by abandoning Menard at the moment when the absurdity of his enterprise is manifest. In other words, Danto fell victim to his ontological as well as epistemological predilection, confounding the status of two or more apparently identical objects, with the intentional objects whose transcription resulted in copies.

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There is a concomitant to this, the ‘copy’ that pretends to be an original. “Van Meegeren,” Danto writes, “wanted to prove that he could paint as well as Vermeer, but we would hardly suppose that this is a statement he makes by means of his emulation.”1 Whereas “whatever statement Vermeer might have made” can only appear as a stylistic anachronism in the forgery. Danto acknowledges that the aesthetic difference may not be discernible; on the other hand, he quotes Nelson Goodman’s belief that familiarity will eventually refine the beholder’s sensitivity to fakery.2 We should add that forgers also tend to imitate the second rate or juvenile productions of geniuses; and further that familiarity with them is apt to breed contempt. For comparison we might draw on the sundry ‘completions’ of incomplete classical compositions (works by Schubert, Mahler, Puccini, Elgar; or the ‘symphonic syntheses’ of Wagner operas) which upon better acquaintance reveal the unsubtle ‘fingerprint’ of the imitator and devalue the organicity of the works. However, given the unstable state of conceptions referring to ‘arthood’, judgement on such issues rarely comes to rest on a full point. Picasso signing a forgery while refusing to attach his name to a clearly identified original, is a case where even the creator himself was duped. What then could a theory of things, an epistemology of vision or aesthetic contemplation tell us about copies and forgeries? Close to nothing, it seems. But when the Melbourne Gallery recently suffered the demotion of its presumed authentic Van Gogh painting, their hoarded wealth was significantly diminished. I’m not aware of any philosopher voicing an opinion on the experts’ judgement, but it does pose a deeply philosophical problem, as the judgement was, and could only have been, derived from aesthetic criteria—namely the ‘fingerprint of the creator’.3 Paradoxical or not, this is almost our only means of 1

) Transfig. 51. ) Transfig. 41-4. 3 ) I am aware that the materials used in the production (i.e. the ontological 2

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discrimination between authenticity and inauthenticity. God help the experts who may be called upon in the future to discern from four identical pictures of a red square on white canvas, who created the original, which one it is, and by what criterion the plagiaries should be distinguished! 7 Idea, Instantiation, Individuation and Identity

The last sentence alludes to the pièce de resistance of Danto’s work, which strangely enough opens proceedings in Chapter 1, and continues for eight pages before a change of scenery occurs. It is in those few pages that his conception of arthood is articulated—and where his apologia for contemporary art is not articulated, as he takes it wholly for granted that the works of art he describes in this chapter are in fact works of art. In short, he assumes that his readers are already au fait and need no reassurance that the descriptions being offered right from the start will be acceptable as valid and viable specimens of art.1 Since his introduction is prolix and his mise en scene unnecessarily overloaded with side issues like multiple artists, multiple works, rivalry and plagiarism, I propose a radical simplification, which I think conveys the message with greater clarity. Imagine therefore entering a Museum of Contemporary Art and coming to a niche where four identical works of art are hanging on display, side by side. I cannot print them in red, but this is apparently not crucial, as Danto doesn’t even bother with an illustration in his book (the reader might bear this refusal to illustrate in mind, when the coherence of his disquisitions comes under fire!). Consider features) are always the first to be researched; but assuming ceteris paribus, the final judgement rests on perceivable (recognisable) idiosyncrasies in design and execution. 1 ) I have dealt with this exhibit on an earlier occasion (Lawrenz 2011, 64ff), but the ensuing account is a considerably enlarged rendering, as it aims to highlight in detail the specificity of Danto’s doctrine.

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therefore four picture frames showing a red square, each identical to the others (same hue, same size, same type of mounting), while beneath each frame a caption informs you of the title, which reveals the content, or ‘idea’, exhibited by each. Allow me the observation, en passant, that a great deal of contemporary art of the non-representative genre gives to the title the burden of informing the audience on the subject matter of the work, so that titling is partially constitutive in terms of the meaning to be extracted by the beholder from the work. This is certainly the case with Danto’s four specimens (opposite). We begin by noting that this is not a quadrupled perspective, as Danto hopes to persuade us, but four identical canvases which differ only by the legends that appear at the bottom. Accordingly, we have to ask first: Is the title an intrinsic part of each of these exhibits? What if they had no titles? What would the beholder make of the exhibits? It is a consideration all the more relevant as a feasible response might be that the titles put in doubt that we dealing with works of art. In contemplating them, you might come to be dubious whether you should take them one by one, in pairs or all together as one exhibit. This doubt could be allayed if we were to assume a transparent material on which the squares are emblazoned; for then we could lay all four on top of each other, when the result is one image. Accordingly, the rather nasty corollary: Does the title aid the viewer to gain an understanding of the image? Does it assist him or her with having an aesthetic experience, or any experience at all? This question is tantamount to noting that the titles for three of the images do not describe the objective visual impression. Perhaps this one of Danto’s “witty, irreverent” exhibits? Yet it seems over the top to ask the spectator to close his/her eyes and internally ‘see’ something corresponding to the titles. That would make him/her the artist! Interim conclusion: The exhibits provoke a conceptual understanding, instead of an understanding within the appropriate artistic context. Moreover, if bereft of their titles, they fur-

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nish no aesthetic experience, as a square is a geometrical figure which, as such, is a cognitive item appropriate to the conceptual faculty and therefore an improbable bearer of intentional communication. Last but not least, if the beholder feels challenged by the titles, it needs not be met in situ, but equally well

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on the bus going home, or while cooking dinner, as the images themselves make no sense whatever. In a word: Danto’s whole razzamatazz is an intellectual gallimaufry, purporting to explain away what is first said to be there for the taking—namely an aesthetic occasion comprising four red squares on a white field. The titles do not change what you see; indeed, one of them is superfluous. For although Danto labours mightily to shift the burden of intelligibility to the conceptual side, the simple act of removing the other three titles shows that its philosophical yield is zero, an empty bucket. Aesthetic non-differentiation comes home to the roost, leaving the beholder in the lurch and the philosopher shocked by the rampant self-contradictions in this clutch of propositions. It is all the more strange as Danto’s exhibit is ‘on show’, i.e. designed to establish some kind of communicative rapport with an audience. It would have been more obvious if the occasion was a concert or play, but still not ‘beyond the pale’ in a gallery. Yet Danto makes no allowance for the fact (fact!) that neurologically an aesthetic experience is separated in time from its conceptualisation—that sense impressions receive priority and that concept formation ensues after the event. If we, as philosophers, embrace this knowledge, as we must, then logically we must disqualify his exhibits. They are not works of art, as the beholder is subjected to false visual clues and expected to ‘see’ imagery from instructions which is not present. Drawing up a summary on the ‘Red Squares’ reads like an indictment rather than an endorsement. Let the reader be the judge: – the exhibits are not paintings qua paintings, but embodiments each of a different ‘idea’, – the ‘idea’ is not instantiated in three of the canvases; therefore, it cannot address the beholder’s sensibility, which is tantamount to asking beholders to abandon the expectation of an aesthetic occasion and imagine a visual impression that conflicts with the visual impression in front of their eyes,

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– accordingly, the beholder’s aesthetic sensibility must be shut down to awaken the discursive faculty, – which makes nonsense of the invitation to behold them on a gallery wall, as the spectators might have stayed at home and just informed themselves on the titles. The proper angle on titles is, that they can help an audience to the context of a work. Most scenes from the Bible or mythology in traditional art depict the artists’ own environment, so that the titles refer, but without negating the communicative intent. By the same token, it is easily forgotten—certainly by Danto, as his first pages show—that long explanations of the ‘idea’ make no difference whatever—at least not in the pictorial, statuesque and musical genres. For example, if some wit were to change the title of Dvorak’s Othello Overture to The Last of the Mohicans, nothing in the music could contradict him. Arthood does not depend on titles, descriptions, verbal ideas, paraphrases and other extraneous factors. The sole relevant criterion is for an artist to have a painterly, sculptural, musical, dramatic or poetic idea that can stand on own feet, irrespective of the quality of its accompanying descriptive gadgetry. So we have not discovered what sense we may attach to the vocable ‘arthood’ from Danto. His mistake in these early pages was to assume that verbal clues about Kierkegaard, Moscow, Israelites, tablecloths and so on, have an enlightening bearing of red squares. But the insinuation that an artist’s inspiration along those lines can yield four paintings of a red square is not only unhelpful, but nonsense. As for instantiating ideas in an artwork, Danto (consistent with his anti-aesthetic stand) relies on the ‘intellectual intuition’ developed by Fichte;1 but it is nonetheless is an attribute of the aesthetic subject, as ideas cannot inhere in an object for the intuition to pull it out. So the embarrassing liability returns with a vengeance and must be mollycoddled with a non-aesthetic apparatus, as aforesaid, 1

) Fichte 119-20.

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which is not integral to the object. Finally, the transfiguration of his title it is merely posed, not consummated. This is because the ‘intention’ cannot inhere either and must be left dangling in the margins as a strain of verbal argument to be puzzled over by the beholder or the reader. We have now covered most of the ground, leaving only the ‘aetiology’ to be diagnosed. It is not far to seek. As Danto evinces great skepticism towards intentional communication and aisthesis generally, he must empower the cognitive subject. But it was a vain hope, since the cognitive faculty has no eyes, ears or fingers with which to sense the immediacy of aesthetic impulses. However, humans are aesthetic subjects first, like it or not; therefore Danto’s insistence on empowering cognitive experience is simply a category error. This, then, is the redeeming merit of aesthetic philosophy: that at least it got its order of precedence right! The reader is likely at this point to recollect a similar dilemma arising in ancient times between Plato and Aristotle. I take it that no elaboration of Plato’s ‘condemnation’ of art is necessary here, and why Plato felt driven to such a conclusion. It must suffice to take note of his extraordinary proposition that the experience of truth, goodness and beauty—on our terms ‘aesthetic experience’ to the point of an ecstatic vision—can only emerge from the impassioned contemplation of the eternal ideas. Whereas Aristotle, sober and almost matter of fact, discoursed on tragedy (a principal target of Plato’s opprobium) with a formulation that gives a clear-cut exemplification of the social ‘uses’ of this art. His explanation that spectators at a performance of a tragedy empathise in degree as they are temperamentally inclined, strikes us as wholly natural and to some extent self-explanatory, as dramatic enactments provoke a universal emotional identification. Hence his plausible view that some, perhaps many of the audience, will undergo a phase of anxiety transfer as well as pity-by-association; and when

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the crisis breaks, a sense of emotional collapse (catharsis), to which Aristotle ascribes a role in the purgation of their soul. In short, he went one step further than Plato by acknowledging that stage performance is more than a counterfeit of reality—it represents a productive and imaginative immersion in life and nature, and thus forms part of our natural mode of learning about nature while facilitating the aesthetic sensibility through shared (theatrical and ceremonial) experiences. Here is an acceptable anticipation of the concept of aesthetic experience which has ever since served as the bedrock of the autonomy of art in human affairs. Conclusion

Danto’s problem throughout his theoretical disquisitions is, that he got caught up in ontology, epistemology and transfiguration as mainstays of art—all intellectualised towards the cognitive instead of the aesthetic faculty. He supposes that private whimsy can enact the ‘transformation of the commonplace’ (pseudo-deuteropraxis), and disregards aspects of art which assign to its practice a central place in the enhancement of social vision, political cohesion, personal sensitisation and, ultimately, our collective as well as private aspirations (in other words, the value system in which art finds its place). Accordingly he cannot account for the universal human truism that magic, myth, ritual and ceremonial have the power to transfigure the commonplace, which all return vested with the same power in the arts, whereas urinals, cereal boxes and soup cans exhaust their meaning and value (as he himself sums it up) in scurrilous gestures. His insistence on art as objects, and more narrowly on art as picture making, disables his doctrine of exoteric ideas, as he cannot show how they appear in a work for a subject to recognise them. On this account, as noted above, his principles do not constitute an improvement on the evident deficits of aesthetic principles, and some indeed make matters much worse, inclining decidedly towards incoherence.

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On the whole therefore, his theory of art qualifies only as a theory of artefacts with some pretensions to arthood under untowardly over-intellectualised criteria, which sit very ill in a context that is often referred to as “mankind’s glory”. Accordingly it might occur to a reader at any time, what kind of philosophy it is, that has Brillo Boxes hovering over 200-odd pages of prose, without so much as a hint that the word ‘art’ also serves to identify the Sistine Ceiling, Oresteia, Brothers Karamasov, Fifth Symphony and Paradise Lost, to mention just a few. This seems to the present critic altogether beyond the pale, as a philosophy that short-changes mankind of one of its treasured outlets of creative energy, heurism, imagination and a special niche closed off to utilitarian ways and means, can only end up nullifying itself.

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X Music and the Aesthetic Copernican Revolution of the 18th Century

Prefatory Note

IN THE MID-18TH CENTURY music underwent a sudden and drastic revolution, when composers ‘discovered’ a new dimension to their art. It had immense repercussions on the philosophy of art, but philosophers seem not to have taken much notice. Yet looking back, the music created before and after this divide represent two different species of aesthetic experience; and this in due course affected our consciousness of the meaning and import of the other arts as well. Thus it is an issue of capital importance to the history of western culture. This paper details the emergence of the relevant musical criteria and draws conclusions on their impact on the philosophy of art altogether. 1 Introduction

This essay sets out to pinpoint aspects of a complete turnabout in the aesthetics of music whose importance deserves the Kantian borrowing ‘Aesthetic Copernican Revolution’ inasmuch as it changed the general and philosophical understanding of music as an art. In due course this led to the re-orientation of aesthetics altogether, affecting our conception of the nature of art, and impinging on metaphysics with its implicit re-definition of the subject’s role in an aesthetic experience. We identify six fundamental criteria of re-orientation: 1) from an understanding of music as primarily vocal to primarily instrumental; 2) from mimetic/representational to ‘absolute’;

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3) from entertainment and service to ‘work of art’ status; 4) from harmonic innocence to harmonic density (harmony as an integrated semantic feature); 5) from imitative/accumulative structuring to structuring in dynamic contrasts; 6) from the nature of a musical ‘theme’ to a musical ‘subject’. In Section 7 social and performance criteria are brought forward, while in Section 8 the repercussions on general aesthetics and metaphysics are exhibited and assessed. 2 Servant or Master?

In his 1877 essay, The School of Giorgione, Walter Pater made the extraordinary claim that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”.1 This conflicts at once with Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), where doubt prevails that music can be classified as an art at all, since we have to accept that in part it is mere pleasantry.2 Between these two incompatible poles of aesthetic thinking our problem is located. The contention also cuts through the middle of 18th century aesthetics. Note the programmatic utterances of two prominent opera composers. Gluck: “I have endeavoured to return music to its true vocation, which is to serve poetry.” Mozart: “In an opera, poetry can be none other than the obedient daughter of music.”3 We shall see that this is no theoretical storm in a teacup, but a struggle to define the status of music as an art, viz. Above and beyond the individual and his coincidental preferences, nothing less than a profound change in the very concept of music is taking place: no mere style change among forms and techniques, but a fundamental transformation of 1

) Pater, Renaissance, p. 129. ) Kant, Critique of Judgement, §51 (3) [A211]. 3 ) Quoted in Honolka, p. 7. 2

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what music is, what it means, and how it is understood.1

It will serve to explain why later ages adopted the views of Mozart and Pater, while dismissing the others as literary snobbery and/or misapplied theories of representation. Since the abovementioned perspectives encapsulate the essence of the problem, we may extract their meaning in concise terms as follows: – Gluck echoes a long-standing dictum that the function of music is to enhance the spoken word. But it was never very clear what the enhancement purports to accomplish, since speech and music are as incompatible as fire and water.2 – For Mozart, music extracts something from poetry which the latter cannot give—namely the inner and whole nature of the subject. Verbal semantics remain as pointers to necessary explicit circumstances. – Kant reflects a long critical legacy of music as the play of sensations. His views remain steeped in Plato’s mimetic theory and his own doctrine of representation. This is not effaced by his concession, in the same paragraph, of the affinity between mathematics and music. – In Pater’s dictum, music figures as the quintessential art form. What lies concealed in these points is a Copernican turn in the understanding of human communications resources. Except it was not Kant who took charge of it, but a motley band of musical avant guardists among whom no truly conspicuous genius wrought the change singlehandedly, so that when the first peak manifests itself with Haydn, the principles enumerated in our 1

) Dahlhaus, Absolute Music, pp. 1-2. ) Despite the appearance of supporting the case, the Lieder genre (which is much more closely tied to words than any operatic vocalism) confirms in fact the contrary argument: for the overwhelming bulk of settings by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms et al. feature verses by minor poets which would have difficulty standing on their own feet as poetry—accordingly, the convention assigns them to the composer, not the poet. The music rules.

2

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Introduction were laid down, albeit without a clear hint as to their coherence or organisation. Accordingly a few glosses on the points above are appropriate. It has been said both that a voice raised in song ennobles its text and that things too stupid to speak of can well be sung. This is an evident contradiction. But the presupposition of ‘enhancement’ which lies at its back resolves itself into a simple pro or contra issue based on the kind of semantics supposed to be communicated by a spoken or sung message. The roots of this problem emanate from Greek culture. Their idea of music (e.g. tragedy, dithyrambus) comprised an integrated unity of harmonia, rhythmos and logos. The latter was included in music as the expression of human reason, without which music was conceived to be incomplete.1 We can see that this is a different emphasis from what we are used to in modern times, where the usual practice is to ‘set’ a text and where accordingly music has the function of accompaniment, illustration or comment. But the deeper problem was that despite the Greeks’ theoretical affirmation of unity, in practice the three elements remained detachable from each other; and in this segregation the logos claimed the upper hand and eventually exclusive privilege as the communications faculty par excellence. We have testimony from the later career of tragedy that this divorce was already accomplished by the time of Euripides, when music was used as entr’actes purely for entertainment and choral singing partially or wholly dispensed with.2 One insalubrious consequence was the need to ‘save’ music qua music for aesthetics by asserting its mimetic function. This tradition has a millennia-long history which need not concern us here, except to note that Kant’s arguments are firmly ensconced in it. Thus, as late as 1798 (when the Copernican revolution in 1 2

) Dahlhaus, p. 8. ) Lang, Mus. West. Civ., pp. 11-12 and 18-19.

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music was already a fait accompli), Kant still maintained that “it is only because music serves as an instrument for poetry that it is a fine art”.1 In the Critique of Judgement, he sought to analyse the ‘representational content’, arriving eventually at the notion that music reproduces in an ‘enhanced’ way our “passionate speech”. Such speech naturally inclines towards musical pitching and modulation and thus music brings an “unutterable wealth” of expression into it which is denied to the placid forms of verbal discourse.2 But the next step, which recognises that an art form capable of communicating such “unutterable wealth” must have a richer content than he allows, eluded him. The very words he used already point compellingly to music as an autonomous realm of communication, leaving us with little more to surmise than unexamined prejudices keeping his eyes and mind closed. It is strange indeed that the German philosophers of that era, who lived and worked in the midst of the finest flowering of German music, demonstrate so little affinity for it. A generation later Hegel ostensibly scuttled ‘representation’ and placed ‘expressivity’ into the driver’s seat of musical aesthetics. But eventually he must define what he conceives to be the content of this expressivity, and at that moment we are rudely jolted back to a position which effectively retreats beyond even Kant and Rousseau: Music must, on account of its one-sidedness, call on the help of the more exact meaning of words and, in order to become more firmly conjoined with the detail and characteristic expression of the subject-matter, it demands a text which alone gives fuller content to the subjective life’s outpouring … 3

In short, for both Kant and Hegel it remained axiomatic that 1

) Kant, Anthropology, p. 114. ) We note, by the way, that Kant lifted this straight from Rousseau’s pages (cf. infra). 3 ) Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 960. 2

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a verbal content is laid into the fabric of musical expression.1 That music has other potential was, however, the point of departure for the theory which grew out of the innovations of the Copernican revolutionaries. But from these points, a natural division of the subject matter suggests itself. For under the aegis of aesthetics a claim on behalf of music as an independent art can only arise from the concept of an absolute music—that is: music unpolluted by any semantics beyond itself. It must be independent not only of words, but of association with dance, theatre and even sacred services. Although in the long run the stringency of this desideratum cannot be sustained—for vocal music cannot and need not be excluded from the canons of art music (although it must be judged from criteria pertinent to music, not from a basis of ‘exalted’ speech)—it remains in place as the aesthetic grounding criterion by which all claimants are judged. 3 Two Precursors of Absolute Music

It is important to the context that the idea of ‘absolute music’, when it finally erupt around 1780, is not without precursors. Paradoxically, the first such movement arose long ago among Burgundian choristers of the 15th century. These men cultivated the notion that service to God demanded the utmost profundity of accomplishment; and they sought to achieve this by developing their skills in counterpoint (especially the canon) to an unequalled peak of sophistication. Impulses derived from Pythagorean cosmic harmony and number lore dominated their agenda; their masses and motets began to resemble cosmic cryptograms.2 Understandably the discernibility of the 1

) This is all the more strange in that Kant should have been familiar with the music of Haydn and Mozart (but seems not to have been) and that Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and Schopenhauer should have been fully aware of Beethoven, Hummel, Spohr, Clementi, Boccherini (a.o.) who were all representatives of the classical style and prominent in the public eye. 2 ) For example, the cantus firmus of Ockeghem’s Ecce ancilla Domini con-

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words (which are after all the same for every mass) was sacrificed to pure relations among pure sounds and the power of sonority became an end in itself. “Vocal polyphony,” writes Kivy, had evolved into an extremely complex musical fabric that might well be described as a ‘setting’ for the text very much in the jeweller’s sense of the word. The text, like a jewel, was placed in a structure so elaborate and alluring in its own right as to overpower it aesthetically: a great compliment to the text ... but not a compliment to its meaning, which, as the clerics complained, was rendered completely unintelligible by the music.1

This movement was throttled by an edict of the Council of Trent (1545-63) which insisted on the discernibility of words in services. This event accounts for the legend that Palestrina ‘saved’ church music by satisfying the demand with his masses of 1565 whose textures (especially in the celebrated masterpiece of the series, the Missa Papae Marcelli) were perfectly ‘word transparent’. But in historical fact the edict killed off the church-music-as-art movement, because Palestrina bought this ‘salvation’ by returning music to its subservient role. Musicians working in the instrumental genre were more fortunate. Unaffected by doctrinal criteria, they simply took what was natural to them in the discharge of their normal duties (typically improvising on the organ during an official church service or providing musical support for elegant functions at tained 662 notes and 993 rests; and the whole work is presented as a musical image of the cross by the divisibility of all its structural elements by 5. The relationship between words and music is planned in a similarly exacting manner, their coincidence displaying a consistent ratio of 2:3. 1 ) Kivy, Differences, p. 7.—Tovey’s remark on this is also telling: “In the early 16th century Obrecht and other Flemish masters habitually produced masses which made it impossible for the officiating celebrant to find his place.” But he goes on to characterise this practice as of interest to a history of absolute music, viz. “To a 16th century master with a gift for extended composition, the Mass is the occasion for a musical art form representing the summit of his purely musical aspirations.” Tovey, Essays, p. 205 [italics added].

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courts) into their chambers to polish their best ideas to a high finish of expertise. Late in the 16th century a trend for the publication of so-called Kunstbücher (masterpiece books) began and persevered through to the 18th century. These were usually addressed to confreres and connoisseurs, i.e. exemplary displays of craftsmanship in narrow genres, written out on four staves in elaborate detail. It was a musica reservata tradition, disseminated in small editions and not intended for public performance: and the masters would produce at most four or five in their lifetime. Characteristic examples are the Libro di Capricci of Frescobaldi or the Art of Fugue by Bach. These genres serve as connecting links to the musical revolution of the 18th century. We shall hold fast to a few of the marked characteristics noted above, e.g. ‘pure relations among pure sounds and the power of sonority’; and in respect of instrumental genres the highly formalised disposition of musical elements. Of course, both Burgundian polyphony and the Kunstbuch tradition comprised tiny enclaves within the large stream of church and court patronised music making. It is no disparagement of courtly music to observe that in essence it was wallpaper; and since the craving for such simple pleasures is ever alert to the latest novelty, composers of that genre churned out works like sausages. Beginning with Haydn, on the contrary, a discernible trend is in evidence towards a greater emphasis on ‘art’ as the mainstay of a composer’s production and accordingly the emphasis on quantity went down. That this relates in great part also to changing perceptions among their audiences goes without saying.1 1

) The output of e.g. Vivaldi, Couperin, Telemann, Scarlatti, Bach, Handel is stupendous, ranging from 500 to over 1000 compositions; Beethoven in a comparable life span produced 130 works. The point made in the text is that post-Bach composers worked under different presuppositions. Noble patronage, on account of the servile status of music in their society, rarely challenged composers to reach for the greatest heights, being mostly content with the aural adornment of their environment. Bourgeoise patronage on the contrary arrived eventually at the point where the utmost exertion

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4 Transition to the Concept of ‘Absolute Music’

The first articulation of the concept of ‘absolute music’ occurs in the writings of Karl Philipp Moritz. Dahlhaus remarks of his Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik of 1785-8 that he “proclaimed the principle of art pour l’art with a bluntness attributable to his disgust with moral philosophy’s rationalisations.”1 Moritz seems also to be the first writer explicitly to deny that art has a moral or social duty to fulfil. Its duty is to be true to itself—and to remain impervious to such foreign impositions. Nor is his an isolated case. Friedrich Schlegel boldly put music and philosophy into this juxtaposition: But if we retain a sense for the wonderful affinities among all arts and sciences, then the matter will not be viewed from the shallow perspective of the so-called ‘naturalness’ according to which music is only the voice of sentiment. Then a certain trend of all pure instrumental music towards philosophy will be admitted at least in principle. Is it not the case that all purely instrumental music must create its own text? And is not this theme developed, emphasised, varied and contrasted in the same way as the object of a meditation in a sequence of philosophical ideas?2

The question arises to what extent they had a case beyond their obvious enthusiasm. From the perspectives drawn above, not an outstandingly good one; but on the affirmative side they wrote as witnesses to the transformations then ensuing, of which they were considerably more astute observers than the was expected from practitioners of the art. The best yardstick for this trend after 1750 is furnished by the genre of string quartet, which was considered the most prestigious in terms of ‘absolute music’, and here the figures speak eloquently. Thus Haydn produced 70-odd, Mozart 23, Beethoven 16, Mendelssohn fewer than 10, Brahms just three. 1 ) Dahlhaus, p. 5. 2 ) F. Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente 444, 1798 [Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, p. 87.]

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‘great’ philosophers. But the crucial hinge appears to be this: Given (a) the techniques of imitative counterpoint as practised throughout the pre-Bach era, and (b) an aesthetics of music as heightened speech, it has to be admitted that any conception of absolute music must be reserved to the cloistered Kunstbuch exercises of which we have taken note. However, it is precisely the point of the musical Copernican revolution that its outcome was a liberation from these constraints, and that this turnabout was prepared by a series of innovations which the second half of the 18th century brought to light and disseminated across the forums of aesthetic debate. On this revolution, from which the criteria enumerated in our Introduction emerged, Moritz’s case and that of his confreres must be seen to rest. 5 Affect and Melody

Philosophically the way was prepared by a doctrine of ‘affects’, which led to one of the great aesthetic controversies of the earlier 18th century, between Rousseau and Rameau. This was the same doctrine defended by Kant—the ‘passionate speech’ theory of origins, which Rousseau brought forward under his familiar slogan of ‘return to nature’.1 Rameau on the other hand argued that melody emerges from the organisation of harmony and rhythm, for all melody comprises broken chords with passing tones. For Rameau this implies a severance of music from the materiality imputed by the opposing faction.2 Historically the dispute, one among many which delighted the age, went into a blind alley and played no further part in 1

) Rousseau was himself the author of a celebrated opera Le Devin du Village, a Dictionnaire de Musique (1767) and pamphlets under the title of Lettres sur la musique française (1743-53). He also contributed the article on Music in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. That Kant was very familiar with Rousseau’s writings needs no stressing. 2 ) Dahlhaus, pp. 46-50.

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aesthetics in future. But it delivered to the ‘revolutionaries’ an insight which neither party might have expected, namely: that melody is neutral with respect to the medium of its articulation. The voice is not privileged; and it is possible without any loss whatever to make a wordless instrument sing.1 A melody can be autonomously expressive, affective and connotational, irrespective of which instrument delivers it. This was a very new attitude to the power of instrumental music. But it must be made clear immediately that contentions about ‘melody’ tend towards windy prose when they disregard the whole corpus of musical semantics. The kinds of melody that are possible embrace many different species; and many among them would have very little association with ‘affects’ of any kind. Rousseau’s arguments are heavily informed by the sentimentality that was fashionable in his period; it would make no sense at all to Frescobaldi. Where this becomes important as a criterion towards the elaboration of ‘absolute music’ must accordingly be the next point on our agenda. 6 From Theme to Subject

Mention of Frescobaldi brings to mind that the music to be found in Kunstbücher is structured from thematic cells designed to serve contrapuntal art. Such a cell is not expressive on its own; it is a mere thesis for musical development; and thus neither a ‘subject’ nor a ‘melody’. If anything, it resembles a small cluster of Lego blocks; for the whole artistry and ingenuity consists in constructing a large edifice by continuous addition of further clusters which directly resemble the origi1

) Telemann and Mattheson both exhorted their colleagues to draw the consequences: “If you play upon an instrument, be sure to bring your knowledge of singing with you”, wrote the former; and Mattheson concurred by stressing that all music, vocal as much as instrumental, must be written cantabile. Rolland, Reise, p. 81.

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nal. If melody arose from this texture, it would conform to the dicta of Rameau. However, it is easily seen that the constructive principle is imitation and iteration—raising the question, is this having the best of both worlds? It will be worth our while to spend a moment on this feature, since it is of the essence to all claims for and against ‘absolute music’. Some of the forms of ‘imitative’ variation are (a) straightforward embellishment by self-similar additions; (b) self-mirroring, as in a canon, where the theme accompanies itself in various complicated ways; (c) variation of two or more themes all simultaneously accompanying each other (fugue); (d) the cell on the march, unchanged beat after beat, while all around it the variations spin a huge web of pompous and colourful facets (chaconne, passacaglia). All this may remind the reader of how aniconism in Islamic art led to the extreme brilliance and ingenuity of the Arabesque style; and the propinquity is indeed unmistakable. In both cases, by the way, there is no insinuation that the texture of the music or the filigree of arabesques leave the aesthetic sensibility unaffected—Bach used to say, “expressivity is of course presupposed!” The main issue here is that Rousseau does not have this kind of music in mind when he argues for ‘affect’. Rather, he is promoting the relatively straightforward pleasantries of theatre and concert hall, which make few intellectual demands and represent the class of mass-production articles to which reference was made above. The ‘revolution’ brought about by the 18th century composers nevertheless rested on them. But there is a difference, a qualitative difference. For it is not affect per se which is questionable, but the inability of the means and methods to which Rousseau & Co. subscribed to plumb its possibilities beyond the surface tickle of sensual pleasure. And now the enabling characteristic of the new music is a new kind of theme characterised by affective contrasts. This new theme sheds the ‘objectivity’ of the earlier thematic cell and its affective neutrality and turns more directly

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towards ‘subject’ status and hence a ‘subjective’ mood. As a ‘subject’ it is individuated; no longer of indifferent specificity, but a highly articulate phrase—a statement, announcement, fanfare with an immediately recognisable and autonomous Gestalt. As Cooke writes, A typical contrapuntal point or fugue subject has no real significance until it takes its place in the construction as a whole; but a theme in a sonata, like a hand in a painting or a line in a poem, is already of absorbing emotional interest in itself, even if its full significance is only appreciated when its integration into the overall form is understood.1

Moreover, though not a melody in itself, melody is implicit in it and expected as one of its developments. But the form of which it is the head—known as ‘sonata form’—is a form in contrasts. Its development is uncongenial to constructive formalism, for individuation is a concept closely allied to personality, even to agency, and thus brings with it a dynamism unknown to thematic cells. Accordingly, the divergence in constructive principles is that formerly a whole was the sum of its parts; but in sonata form there is no sum: instead, we move towards a conclusion—the end of a journey, adventure, pilgrimage of which the ‘sum’ is an enrichment of experience. This theme, however, rarely embarks on its journey alone. Being of a robust, masculine type, it tends to be conjoined to another of a more lyrical comportment.2 In other words, sonata form is structured on a thematic duality, which facilitates the development of innumerable variations on the basic human dichotomy of male and female, power and grief, passion and renunciation, heroism and love, and so on. The fecundity of this 1

) Cooke, p. 8. ) However, this order is not fixed; and indeed, one of the virtues of sonata form is its freedom from stereotype. Although academic orthodoxy must insist on a certain amount of formalism, we can see e.g. among Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, that scarcely half abide by the rules which music professors extracted from them!

2

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approach to thematic development is that melody is not a spurious incident, but a central developmental principle because a strong individuation seeks it out as its own consummation. From an aesthetic (i.e. philosophical) point of view, it is legitimate to note this down as the first pathbreaking element in the ‘Copernican’ revolution. The doctrine of affects was the “nervous centre” of the high baroque,1 but had to make to do with themes of indistinct profile and ‘arty’ depictions of emotions as in a picture album—one at a time. When on the contrary audiences at the famous Mannheim concerts rose to their feet in excitement at the orchestra’s upward bouncing arpeggios and crescendi,2 this was not affect, but an effect on their nervous system by the strident immediacy of a new diction which electrified them. Analogously to Kant’s 180 degree turn on his predecessors’ debates on mind and reality, this single element—the themequa-subject—was to disclose a metaphysical dimension to this art. The effect was to draw the listener into the music: no longer a passive spectator, or gourmet, or expert analyst, but a knower, able to instantaneously recognise the Gestalt meeting him, just as he might a friend, stranger or lover. Music, in other words, acquired a wholly new kind of patterning which bears (in Langer’s description) a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling—forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses—not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either or both—the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence.3 1

) Lang, p. 586. ) The so-called ‘Mannheim rocket’. 3 ) Langer, Feeling, p. 17.—At the cost of untoward iteration, let us stress 2

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For the listener this experience is of such immediacy because the factor of participation in the unravelling of form becomes paramount; which in turn rests on the absence of referential content and thereby inveigles the listener into completing the unconsummated symbol content.1 The notion of an ‘unconsummated symbol’ refers to the implicit content, experience qua experience, which can only be consummated (completed) by the participant bringing their own life circumstances, memories and willing interpretive judgement (a cognitive performance) into the act and establish for themselves the ‘meaning’ and ‘import’ of the pattern which they have weaved with the connivance of the composer.2 7 Harmonic Fields

The term ‘individuation’ carries with it a new emphasis on harmonisation. This is a two-fold aspect, since harmony pertains both to the step-by-step intervals of thematic/melodic progress (horizontal) and to the simultaneous sounding of two or more strands (vertical, chordal). In the pre-Bach era, harmonic criteria were steeped in Pythagorean lore. Early church music remained deeply indebted to Greek notions and content to work within the intervallic schemata of Dorian, Aeolian, Lydian (etc.) modes. The 15th century (initially in secular music) saw a gradual drift away from these strictures with their aurally uncomfortable cadencthat this paragraph does not describe the ‘stills’ of affective states which we encounter in pre-classical music, but the complex, continuous flow of affective contrasts of sonata-form. 1 ) Loc. cit. 2 ) That by and large their fellow listeners would agree on the nature, depth and intensity of the experience is not surprising since music necessarily reflects basic human concerns and feelings; but they frequently disagree as to the semantic specificity of the experience. But it should be said at least once that this is not a deficiency and reflects accurately the ineluctable multistrandedness of human experience.

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es in vertical harmony.1 In the ensuing centuries, down to the Rousseau/Rameau era, the major/minor harmonic mould became a stereotype; it carried no intrinsic weight in the musical argument beyond its obvious sensuous pleasure. Now it is a truism (not unknown of course, to pre-Bach theorists) that a melody ‘in itself’ is a nothing until its pitches are defined; for these define the specific nature of its vibratory tensions. It was a discovery of the era which also discovered instrumental melody, that a melody’s harmonic field is an immensely powerful contributor to its individuation and accordingly its ‘meaning’. We can see from this why in a thematic cell of contrapuntal music the harmonic texture is largely indifferent (or stereotyped), whereas it is indispensable to an individuated ‘subject’ and the carrier of any conception of musical autonomy. Thus Rosen writes: The two principal sources of musical energy are dissonance and sequence—the first because it demands resolution, the second because it implies continuation. The classical style immeasurably increased the power of dissonance, raising it from an unresolved interval to an unresolved chord and then to an unresolved key.2

This may be illustrated in the comparison with a typical baroque concert work, e.g. Bach’s Overtures, which comprise from four to nine sections all in the same key. Dissonances occur, but 1

) Greek modes expressed only linear harmony, i.e. melodic intervals. Their vertical harmony involved only the octave which coincides naturally with the division among human voices (soprano, tenor, bass). The problem mentioned in the text arose as a consequence of Western vertical harmonisation. The last examples of the older style are accessible from Burgundian polyphony, whose cadences of 1-3-4-8 still sound ‘severe’ and ‘unfinished’ to our ears. The major/minor mode substitution of 1-3-5-8 held the field since then. Cf. Cooke, Language of Music, p. 40ff for a full discussion of the development of vertical harmony from natural tonal tensions in Western music. 2 ) Rosen, p. 120.

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they are little more than the spice in the dish. Continuity rests entirely on a semi-automatic sequential chording (which was in fact called the ‘continuo’). In a Haydn quartet, on the other hand, the directional impulse arises from the propulsive force of an exposed dissonance, whose strength is such that it cannot be resolved at once, but requires modulation into another key; and this procedure, applied repeatedly, is precisely the element which conveys the sense of dramatic action.1 8 Social and Performance Developments

We have now covered the ingredients of the musical revolution, i.e. all points from the Introduction except No. 3. A few further developments need to be mentioned briefly to add dimensional depth. From the social perspective, a crucial event which changed the whole nature of music appreciation was the change in patronage—the gradual withdrawal of the nobility and the rise of the bourgoisie. This entailed a.o. a change of venues from the marbled baroque palaces and churches with their highly reflective and reverberant acoustics to public halls furnished with absorbent timbers and textiles. Reverberance produces a hard, transparent and analytical sound; it favours lean textures which become muffled in concert halls; and naturally the same argument can be reversed for the concert hall, which favours much thicker, homogeneous textures. Thus (as an example) in the former the harpsichord was at home; in the new concert halls its thin clanging became a whisper and by the turn of the century, it had disappeared from the scene and been replaced by the overtone-rich hammerclavier. Similar criteria applied to the instrumentarium of orchestras: deficient sound projection rendered many so-called ‘baroque’ instruments obsolete, including the whole gamba family, the many siblings of flutes and oboes, and all plucked in1

) Cf. Rosen, pp. 194-5.

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struments. All this was accounted for by the creation of a new type of orchestra in mid-1750 by the music-loving mercantile class of Mannheim. The contingent of this orchestra remains roughly the same today, in which for an observer of the time the most noteworthy feature would have been the sheer power of sound, its homogeneity and the replacement of the old (plucked) continuo section by horns.1 We need, finally, to look at the scores of composers on each side of the divide. On the ‘pre’ side, all scores except Kunstbuch productions would seem to our eyes very strange, not say deficient documents. The upper voice would be written out and the bass indicated; but middle voices and cadenzas for solo interjections were left blank. Further, the actual instruments were left largely to the discretion of the performers. In short, the latter were expected to improvise on the spot: to embellish the upper and fill out the middle voices, articulate the bass as they saw fit and supply their own solo cadenzas. Compare this to a typical Haydn (or later) symphony: here the composer writes down every note to be played and refuses the performer all freedom to add, subtract or embellish; dynamics and tempi clearly are indicated; and the instruments exactly specified. From these indications it is clear that to call the former a ‘work’ and carry our present-day notions to it, would be to completely misunderstand. Concerts patronised by the nobility were entertainments, shot through with opportunities for acrobatics with which a soloist might astonish the patrons. This music served primarily an occasion; and composers were expected to serve up a new composition for every occasion— much as the average consumer of novels demands a ‘new’ plot 1

) The new string instruments were generally bigger and more robust than the gamba family. The homogeneity refers to the blending capability of both strings and reeds, which was notably impossible with the highly individualised frequencies of the older reeds. All this made the continuo instruments inaudible; therefore the horns (two or three) were employed to support the double bass with their bright colour.

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every time they open a book. A pre-18th century composition therefore provided little more than a sketch and enlisted the active help of the musician to colour it in on the spot. In contrast, post-18th century scores are instruction manuals expected to be executed by the performer in every detail. 9 The whole Copernican Turn

We may now proceed to the remaining issue—the philosophical ramifications of these factors. Having begun with Pater, it seems appropriate at this point to enquire after the merit of his assertions. The gist of his thesis is that each of the arts, in addressing a specific sensory modality, is apt to be constrained to the production of such kinds of aesthetic effect as its material forms permit. This seems uncontentious and even trivially true; yet there have always been, and still are, schools of thought which dispute it and appeal to a ‘residual language’ factor which assumes that all arts imply an ultimate, common, quasi-verbal communicative platform.1 This issue cannot be finally resolved; but even if it could be shown to be true, Pater’s dictum paradoxically does not suffer its negation in the outcome, but an unexpected confirmation. For he goes on from his platform to show that each art, in its special mode of handling its given material, … may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben2—a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.3 1

) D. Cooke, Language of Music, is one exposition of this thesis. Another, Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, comes right out on page 1 with the assertion “that works of music have discursive meanings.” 2 ) A leaning towards or into something other. 3 ) Pater, p. 128.

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So architecture includes arabesques; sculpture may appear like frozen dance; poetry may lean towards engraving; drama towards statuary, and so on; “but all the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art …”1 This passage may almost be said to spell out that if any kind of language were to be called upon to fill the role of a ‘common residual language’, it must be music. Admittedly this is not what proponents of that theory have in mind; yet Pater argues further, and cogently, that “while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”2 Now the persistent search for a ‘common property’ to all the arts cannot truly be said to obey a coherent philosophical bidding. Rather the longevity of inconclusive debate argues for the presence of an unexamined prejudice which is in fact destroyed by the criteria arising out of music aesthetics. In a word, its defect is the lumping together of all arts into one cohort and placing them in opposition to verbal discourse. But the division between speech and music mirrors the divide between music and sculpture, sculpture and poetry and so on throughout, because the arts are individually autonomous in their forms and manifestations. To take Pater’s Anders-streben as a means toward the obliteration of these differences is to misconstrue it utterly. For it is a plain and indisputable fact that speech, music, drama and poetry all address primarily the aural sense; as painting, sculpture, dance address the visual sense; and moreover that all the arts, including speech address more than one sensory modality. Necessarily, then, the extraction of meaning must be the work of the faculty of judgement, whose capacity for discriminating between explicit and implicit 1 2

) Ibid, p. 129. ) Loc. cit.

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meaning continues to be undervalued, even while it is obvious that ordinary speech itself thrives on implicit connotations via metaphors, allegories, puns, double-meanings etc. Accordingly it must be at least highly dubious to place the arts and verbal discourse on different sides of the cognitive fence. It does not meet the realities which pertain to the way our faculties handle information. But to return to Pater: his is a strong argument, and he proves it by recourse to several examples, but especially to such poetry as deliberately seeks to disguise its verbal semantics with a powerful emphasis on word melody and rhythm. Had he a crystal ball at his disposal, he might have brought forward a plethora of specimens from 20th century poetry, painting, sculpture etc. It seems that the movement of artistic practice went exactly the way Pater defined Anders-streben. The invention of the photograph finally and irrevocably brought home the cardinal issue of aesthetic meaning: namely, that it does not spring from mimesis, nor representation nor from any kind of residual language factor. Even in the eras which practised mimesis, this was an avenue towards such non-mimetic, nonverbal meaning. Cicero knew this when he criticised Plato’s mimesis theory: “When Phidias fashioned the Jupiter or Minerva, he did not take some real person as his model; no, he drew from his own soul the ideal of beauty which resided therein, and which he contemplated in order to sculpt its image with his artist’s hands.”1

Although Pater gave philosophical weight to it, this appreciation of music had already become widespread. For example, Schopenhauer’s taxonomy of art accorded a similarly exalted spot to music. His point of departure was agreement with Hume that ideas are not the universal forms Plato believed in, of which phenomenal reality is a copy; but rather that ideas are 1

) Cicero, Orator 2.

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the only reality and the Platonic species a metaphysical fiction.1 Schopenhauer argued accordingly that the office of the arts is precisely what Plato denied them, namely to depict those ideas—not the flesh and blood cardinal of the portrait, but psyche hidden in that image. He also propounded that surrender to aesthetic effect is a means to marshalling the cognitive faculty and achieving a state of cognitive purity, using Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’ as an avenue towards suspending affective-volitional states. And thus, the less flesh-bound the medium, the more successful the dematerialisation: hence music performs this office best.2 Between Pater and Schopenhauer, we already have a substantial body of argumentation for the status of music as an art form. And it may be said here that neither of them spoke in a vacuum. It is a peculiarly interesting feature of the bourgoisie reception of music that it is the only art form ever accorded the status of a surrogate religion for those who lost their faith.3 At bottom of these expressions of esteem lies the expressive power of sonority-in-itself. That power in turn rested on the ‘evolutionary’ sonata principle and the individuation of the thematic content as a subject. Thus a dialectical framework was given for creating—so to speak in the realm of pure ideas— sonorous images of archetypal emotions. It seemed that music had the power to depict the whole of human psychology and simultaneously addressing the cognitive dimension. “The later 18th century,” writes Charles Rosen, “made further demands: the mere rendering of sentiment was not dramatic enough ... [and] dramatic sentiment was replaced by dramatic action”.4 1

) Hume, Treatise, Book I, Part IV, §6. ) Schopenhauer, WW IV, §§34, 36. 3 ) It is not possible to pursue this matter here, but the interested reader may wish to consult Kivy, Differences, Chapter 7, “The Liberation of Music” for an account of how he took up Schopenhauer’s thesis of the ‘soporific effect’ and turned it into a thesis of the ‘liberating effect’ of music on the human psyche. 4 ) Rosen, p. 43. 2

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As early as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the perception took hold that this music was more effective tragedy than tragedy, more tumultuous drama than drama, more operatic than opera; and at a pinch, of a deeper and more profound philosophical and moral relevance to humans than certain kinds of philosophy and/or moral theory. As noted at the beginning, the 18th-century ‘Copernican revolution’ in music was not a planned or concerted movement. It seems more like one of those mysterious transformations which can occur by one artist finding a striking formula, to which another responds with another novelty, and eventually the innovative impulse spreads. But if we wish to associate a date with this trend, we shall have no trouble finding it. The master mind who pulled all these strands together for the first time was Haydn who, in 1781, published his six String Quartets Op. 33, in which the new principles were assembled in one collection and presented to the world as the first ripe fruits of the ‘classical style’, as it is now termed. On the difference Charles Rosen remarked: To appreciate the music of the 1760s, we need all our historical sympathy, we have constantly to keep in mind the difficulties, inward as well as outward, that the composers had to face. On the other hand, from 1780 onward we only have to sit back and watch two friends and their disciple sweep almost every kind of music, from bagatelle to the mass, into their orbit ... We do not have to call upon any historical sympathy to appreciate the work of Mozart and Beethoven, and the late works of Haydn: they are still in the blood of most musicians today.1

These masters brought the revolution to its logical conclusion. “It is only in the works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven that all the contemporary elements of musical style ... work coherently together, or that the ideals of the period are realised on a

1

) Ibid, p. 47.

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level of any complexity.”1 The point is that in the works of these three masters we witness the apogee of that style in three very different, yet also intimately related consummations. But the claim announced in my Introduction is further, that the philosophy of all arts was affected by this reorientation. This can hardly be treated in its deserving depth in the few paragraphs remaining to us; instead, we shall have to rely on a few pointers in addition to the above remarks with similar import. There has been one further radical reorientation between 1780 and now, which occurred just prior to World War I (associated with the school of Schönberg); but this arose out of (and constituted a somewhat violent reaction to) post-romanticism and did not signal a new aesthetics. Accordingly, we still accept (albeit with modifications) that music aesthetics affected the fundamental question of ‘what is a work of art?’ The arts, as Ruskin said, are fed by the autobiographical impulse of the species. And paradoxically, it is the faculty put on the map by Kant, the productive imagination, which occupies centre stage in all aesthetics since.2 Its principal effect has been that theories based on mimesis and representation were dumped as the new insights conferred by music exposed their inadequacy. Beginning with the 19th century, non-verbal semantics became increasingly recognised across the whole domain of art and adopted as the yardstick by which to judge the meanings embodied in paintings, sculptures and indeed drama and poetry. Pater’s treatment of Giorgione’s school as ‘musical’ painters no longer raises eyebrows. Many aesthetic artefacts that were never before classified as art are now subsumed under this brace. Malraux’s pathbreaking study, whatever its demerits, awakened in us this consciousness of a universal artistic impulse seeking form wherever its

1 2

) Ibid, p. 22. ) Kearney, Wake Imag., pp. 155-77.

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spirit may drive it.1 Anders-streben has become commonplace in modern art; it is the aesthetic background to all art and taken for granted. This also affects works which occupy an ambiguous border terrain. Whatever the Aphrodite of Praxiteles, Wolfram’s Parzival or Handel’s Water Music might have meant to their audiences, to us they are unequivocally Art. Moreover, they are works of art without the need for recourse to criteria beyond those which seek in them a metaphysical drive to testify to the creativity of the human agent. Human agents as artists do not speak to their contemporaries or posterity as bodies, but as complex and ineffably susceptible nervous systems endowed with the faculty of creating and understanding import which transcend the causality of physics and mechanics. The very question of ‘what is a work of art’ is being rephrased under constantly revised presuppositions; but among those the obsolete (pre-music) criteria never appear again—they are definitely passé. Expressivity, long the stand-by of music-influenced aesthetics, has recently come under a shadow, but it is too early to see whether this is the outcome of cynicism or a genuine concern with the survival of romantic (autobiographical, intentional) fallacies. Art may finally best be understood in Wollheim’s Wittgensteinian dictum that “Art is form of life;”2 and it seems evident that such a proposal could scarcely be entertained until music had preceded it with its demonstration of the unqualified experiential nature of artistic production and appreciation. Conclusion

The six features enumerated in the Introduction emerged from almost nowhere in the revolutionary half-century from 17501800. Remarkably the incubation period of what is now called the ‘classical style’ lasted barely 20 years. A few composers 1 2

) Malraux, Voices of Silence, Ch. I “Museum without Walls”. ) Wollheim, Art, §45ff.

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made ad hoc decisions about their artistic practice; a small but thriving community gave them an ‘experimental laboratory’;1 society found agreeable delectation in it; and by the turn of the century a point of no return had been reached. As Leonard Meyer wrote, “The movement begun in the 18th century and continued into our own time is not merely different. It is not just that it seems more extreme and pervasive. Rather it constitutes a radical departure—a difference in kind.”2 It changed the perceptions and conceptions of western civilisation about what kind of thing music is and in due course what kind of things we may call works of art. Today, this ‘Copernican’ turn has become part of the unseen furniture of aesthetic theories. All present-day suppositions derive ultimately from that era; and significantly none refers beyond it to an earlier theoretical platform. Acknowledgement of the men who pioneered that spirit is grudging at best, and in any case reserved almost entirely to music historical literature. But as philosophers we should cultivate an awareness of this genesis, for if we philosophise about music and art today in an historical vacuum, we put ourselves at the mercy of (at least) incognisance of the roots of modern aesthetic thinking.

1 2

) The Mannheim Orchestra. ) Meyer, Style, p. 164.

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XI Profundity in Music Reflections on the Ineffable in the Musical Experience The artist’s brief is to sink the light deep into the human heart. ROBERT SCHUMANN Music expresses that which cannot be put into words, yet cannot remain silent. VICTOR HUGO Prefatory Note

IN THIS ARTICLE we confront the ineffability of music to seek out a tenable conception of profound depths being plumbed in many such works. We take our initial bearings from the writings of the late Peter Kivy, who was a musically trained thinker and tackled the subject no less than four times. Our main interest lies in his outright dismissal of the idea. However, the scaffolding of his arguments reveals that he privileges the discursive metier without any evidence in his support. Hence the bulk of the article is devoted to an analysis of the criteria relevant to this form of experience and the construction of a more tenable perspective. It will be shown that the issue of profundity in music cannot be segregated from the implications of our reactions and responses to literature and, by extension, to the arts altogether. 1 Introduction

Few philosophical issues are more recalcitrant to scrutiny and identification than the sense of profound experience in a musi-

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cal encounter. The effort of catching in words the impression of an awe-inspiring, sublime or even devastating truth having brushed the soul might seem at such times to be wholly futile. Nonetheless it gives us (contra Wittgenstein) a good reason not to lapse into silence, but rather (with Adorno) to “insist instead that philosophy consists in the effort to say what cannot be said.”1 It must therefore be recalled at the outset that philosophical enquiries into this puzzling aspect of human intuition have a long (and extremely frustrating) history behind them—beginning with Pythagoras and his conception of a “Music of the Spheres” as the gateway to ultimate wisdom, via his disciple Philolaos who sold his manuscripts on Harmonia to Plato; which then induced Plato himself to constrain music to a few morally acceptable modes in an effort to banish the hedonism and lasciviousness involved in musical experiences; down to Aristotle and his notions of phobia and catharsis, which are a kin to, if not an actual sibling, of our term “sublimity.”2 It is perfectly well arguable (as Aristotle did) that the experience of frightening scenes on stage can embroil the psyche of beholders in anxiety, and that the denouement might rough them up emotionally to such an extent that their soul is shaken. We mean nothing other than this when, in the course of this article, we make the claim that a musical experience can have a life-changing potential in a flash of momentary revelation. Please note in particular that Aristotle does not speak of verses being delivered, but of the triggering of these experiences by religious music!3 This is a point important enough to be cleared up at once. We would be very much in error in supposing that classical poetics were focused on the scanning of metres in poetical diction. On the contrary, writes Paul Henry Lang, “prosody and 1

) Wittgenstein, Tractatus, sect. 7; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 74. ) Plato, Republic XVI. 3 ) Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 14, 1452a-1453b15. 2

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metrics did not belong to the domain of linguistics and poetry, but formed part of the musical sciences.”1 And now we need only to look at operatic arias and Lieder in our world to discover that nothing has changed—the composer is in the driver’s seat and frequently “mangles” the text of his libretto or poem to ensure the predominance and memorability of the melodious flow. According to Mozart’s famous quip: “In an opera, the poetry must necessarily remain the obedient daughter of the music.”2 The parentage of Aristotle’s dictum that music is “the most mimetic” of the arts will shed some light on this. “Music,” he writes, “must have some influence on the character and the soul,” [hence] “rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these… which hardly fall short of the actual affections.”3 Plainly this has no truck with the notion of art as representational. Rather it turns the whole argument around: music is not representation, but stimulation—it jostles the auditors’ feelings out of their comfort zone by infecting souls with the welling up of their own emotions.4 Hence the “mimesis” of musicians 1

) Lang, 9. ) Mozart to Leopold Mozart, October 13, 1781. Moreover this “disrespect” to a poetical source is frequently observable throughout Western compositional history. We see it implemented in Bach’s so-called “parodial” practice, comprising the re-use of sacred music for cantatas with a worldly text and vice versa. This was a convention going right back to the Burgundian era, that is, to the composition of holy masses with themes drawn from popular folk tunes such as “L’homme armé.” In a word: The music rules! 3 ) Aristotle, Politics, 1340a5-40. 4 ) The character traits of which Aristotle speaks are evidently moulded by nature and nurture, instinct and education. They are in very large measure implanted in us by the noises in which life experiences are embedded. Accordingly, a correlation between noises with import and the emotions generated by them is permanently memorised (which is indeed a survival necessity, apart from the pleasure or repugnance they might evoke). The impulse for reproducing such sounds by singing or blowing into a tube, banging a surface or plucking a string is very probably a spontaneous dis2

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consists in them being able to ring the same emotional changes by instrumental means, which means that auditors experience them in exactly the same way as the incidental mood-changing sounds and noises of their quotidian days. The paradox is only that the beauty of those sounds diminishes auditors’ alertness to the empirical analogues of the melos, so that even a “danger signal” is transmuted into pleasure.1 This is direct and unmediated, the term “mimesis” serving as a reminder that the musical flow stimulates states of mind or states of emotion that are already “in” the subject, but not in his/her present situation before the music “speaks.”2 *

We cannot in this essay pursue the ensuing trajectory of reorientation, but need to skip two millennia to take note of the rediscovery of that unruly genius of the stage William Shakespeare in the early romantic era. His works posed an altogether new challenge to thinkers on the question of the communication of “ineffable” yet “sublime” sentiments through the impact of ghastly, horrendous, repulsive and frightening (but also ugly and scurrilous) depictions in the theatre as well as the visual arts.3 How all this could be drawn into the orbit of valid artistic covery that all humans make at some time in their life. From here, however, it is only one step to the Aristotelian mimesis, as those sounds would have a purpose tied to the conveyance of some kind of message: many of them for the sake of creating an alert, others for simply having fun. 1 ) However, these considerations must be matched to others to which we moderns can hardly relate any more, namely that “we are dealing with a period of history which did not know [vertical] harmony or polyphony. The listeners of antiquity followed a non-polyphonic musical melody with an intensity unknown to us… they were capable of enjoying the slight and delicate inflections of a melodic line; their ears were keen enough to apprehend subtleties of intonation and colour which we, with our harmonically and polyphonically trained ears, cannot perceive.” Lang, 10. 2 ) If that present “state” of the subject were to be waiting on a dance floor with an arm around a partner of the opposite sex, the music would then be a signal for them to dance in accordance with the rhythm of the music. 3 ) A great deal of Jacobean drama fits that mould, but also novels such

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expression was an urgent demand on intellectuals; it was the age of Lessing’s Laokoon, Burke’s The Sublime and Beautiful, and Friedrich Schlegel’s foray into the missing theory of ugliness as a foil to the interminable quests for beauty. During the nineteenth century, when kitsch first raised its head, the correlation between surface beauty and deep-seated moral ambiguity posed new problems, embroiling (possibly for the first time) music as well—for example, whether the word “kitsch” is applicable to such works as Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words or Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, not to mention the vast output of salon music by travelling performers?1 We cannot treat of these diversions in our essay, other than making mention of them. The twentieth century has continued in this vein, albeit with increasing lack of conviction before the backdrop of two monstrously evil wars and the slide of intellectual disquisitions into various “postmodern” positions which supposedly see art “as we knew it” on the verge of dying out.2 Meanwhile the oxymoron of “atonal music” had captured a whole generation of composers of “serious” music, on whose “works” the audiences of serious music turned their back, leaving a dwindling coterie behind who might well be called the “Anti-Pythagorean Brotherhood.”3 as Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, some of Kleist’s novellas and above all the fiction of Dostoyevsky. 1 ) In 1853 Karl Rosenkranz broke the deadlock with his Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Aesthetic of Ugliness); a twentieth-century counterpart is Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1930) as well as Adorno’s chap. 3 of Aesthetic Theory (1853). 2 ) Cf. Hermann Broch, “Kunst und Kitsch” and “Geist und Zeitgeist,” in Schriften zur Literatur 2 Theorie, 118-200; but also the elegant coffee-table book by Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness. 3 ) Pieces in which the parameters are serialised, aleatoric or left to a computer program fall under a category of which Stephen Davies writes in Musical Meaning and Expression: “Where the composer relinquishes control of the progress of the work’s content… there is no reason to expect the result to sound musically interesting, no reason to expect it to ‘say’ something worth understanding” (361). One is tempted to say: it did not need being said!

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Accordingly, concert and recording industries cling to “tradition” that (as the recent flurry of rediscoveries from former eras shows) is by no means exhausted. In fact, it justifies a thorough re-engagement with philosophical tenets pertaining to music that have been shunted aside without a cogent reason to warrant it. For every critical voice crying “deja-vu,” there is a re-thinker to whom it is “jamais vu”—the mere pretence of having settled an issue that was never genuinely confronted. *

Since one of these issues is the ineffability music and its broadly acknowledged capacity for arousing a sense of profound illumination in an auditor’s mind, it seems apt to turn to such a thinker, the late Rutgers professor Peter Kivy, in his travails— albeit posthumously. Although wholly committed to the tradition, his disquisitions are equally appropriate to a traditional as to a modernist environment, so to speak non dependens in tempore. Kivy dealt with this issue in no less than four of his papers.1 Although he eventually arrived at a negative conclusion, his arguments are worth inspecting inasmuch as this outcome rested on unquestioned presuppositions prejudicing his layout of the case. Our aim is therefore to question the unquestioned behind this downhill slide and then to build up a more propitious pathway towards a resolution. The logical starting point for Kivy’s approach is announced in Music Alone (1990), where he offers the quasi-definition that all intentional communication is addressed to an audience as a subject matter, so that a spoken or written message can be understood as “treating a subject matter in a profound way,” that is, discursively. Naturally this subject matter, or “aboutness” as he calls it, must concern issues of “abiding interest or 1

) Kivy, Music Alone, 202ff.; Philosophies of Art, 140ff.; and Music, Language and Cognition; 154ff. Hereafter page references to Music Alone are cited in the text.

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importance to human beings” (203). It seems like a sound proposition, for it enables us to point immediately to authors such as Plato, Dante, Shakespeare or Tolstoy who may all be said to “treat their subject matters in a profound way.” Yet bafflingly, these criteria no longer hold when we turn to music. On the contrary, the attribution of profundity to music rests predominantly on tacit perception claiming an aura of profundity for certain kinds of music. Moreover, composers do not treat their subject matter discursively, even in works that are coupled to the narrative metier. As for absolute (instrumental) music, even if there is a stated subject matter such as an underlying poetical idea, it can hardly be “treated” in a manner resembling discourse. When therefore Kivy seeks to close in on the “aboutness” of music, he quickly runs into an unforeseen cul-de-sac. Kivy’s own prime candidate is the Well-tempered Clavier of Bach. Many musicians would unhesitatingly ascribe profundity to these 24 pieces, irrespective of the fact that they were intended as didactic specimens of his craft. Yet their aboutness does not rely on extraneous ideas; rather, they served as a contribution to an ongoing debate in Bach’s time on the virtues of equal temperament in the tuning of keyboard instruments, and comprise an exhibition of those virtues, which Kivy calls “nonpropositional showing.” This leads to the suggestive claim that the aboutness of this music comprises nothing other than a discourse in music, about music. However, putting it this way seems to invite an oxymoron, since a discourse must be on, not in the music. Let us nonetheless grant the non-propositional showing (aka demonstration) for the moment to test its relevance to the subject matter. Bach did two things simultaneously in his Well-tempered Clavier: first, “showing” how a technical issue related to the tuning of a family of instruments can broaden their utility in performance; second, “showing up” the effect on compositional practice by his provision of suitable specimens in a widely practised genre (prelude and fugue) in which his supreme ex-

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pertise was well acknowledged.1 These two aspects captured a high place for the work in the literature of keyboard music for generations to come. In the first instance because it served as an outstanding teaching manual for aspiring musicians, but also because it conveyed something beyond mere technicalities to future composers— specifically a conception of music as the bearer of profound sentiments to a suitably attuned soul. Not a few composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven among them) testified to a “life changing” encounter with the Well-tempered Clavier that was of the utmost benefit to them in their own conception of the art of music; and who could forget Goethe’s encomium on it “as if the eternal harmony were in communion with itself, as might have occurred in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.”2 Should we now wonder if Bach’s supreme craft could conceivably convey a sense of wonder akin to profundity? Was Bach being profound malgre lui? Perhaps. But exalted craftsmanship without the slightest whiff of profundity is not all that rare—for example Fabergé’s Easter eggs.3 1

) On the specific issue of tuning, “well-tempered” refers to the tuning of the instrument (e.g., a harpsichord) in such a way that the cumbersome re-tuning along the path of all 24 clefs is unnecessary, since a normal human ear cannot discern the minute departures involved in perfect tuning. In other words: the instrument is actually being “mistuned” according to perfectionist criteria; but without discomfort to either the player or an audience (the exception being those rare people who are imbued with perfect pitch). 2 ) Goethe to C. F. Zelter (Mendelssohn’s teacher), 21 June 1827: “Als wenn die ewige Harmonie sich mit sich selbst unterhielte, wie sich’s etwa in Gottes Busen kurz vor der Weltschöpfung möchte zugetragen haben.” 3 ) The prestige of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier induced a surprisingly large number of twentieth-century composers to publish their own sets of 24 Preludes and Fugues. But even the ambitious Shostakovich could not (in the estimation of the critical confraternity) aspire to the same heights as Bach with his Op. 87, although it is more frequently performed and recorded than the sets of other composers (e.g., Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Nikolai Kapushkin, Pavel Novak, Trygve Madsen et al., all hitching a ride on Bach’s prestige, one of them, Kapushkin, even trying his luck and skill with the

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So the expertise shown by Bach’s craftmanship is not the central criterion in the appreciation of his work: It cannot vouchsafe an attribution of profundity. And so, we are caught in a cleft stick, apparently—that musicians and music lovers admire Bach’s technical mastery, but what they “get out of the music” is not a sense of “splendidly done” but a feeling, an impression, an emanation of “something” akin to deep admiration, perhaps love, but certainly profundity. Yet Kivy will not have it. He felt forced to concede in Music Alone that his focus on discursiveness and aboutness yielded a blank and that none of his arguments sufficed to break through to an acknowledgement of profundity on behalf of music (211). Therefore (responding to objections from his colleagues) he sought to widen the net of his criteria by admitting the adverb “profoundly” into the argument, that is, treating themes “in a profoundly contrapuntal manner.” But this only served to multiply ambiguities, since the adverb functions as merely a rhetorical device. And so, discouraged in his efforts, Kivy resorted to a point-blank volte face: Absolute music cannot have a meaning [as it] cannot have a subject matter about which it speaks; [it follows] it cannot be profound.1

This is not what he had in mind when he began his foray. But what was at stake here was a copulation of meaning with profundity, so that “the question of musical meaning lies at the heart of whether music can be brought into the circle of the fine arts by means of an analogy to literature.”2 This led in his last article, “Another Go at Musical Profundity,” to a summary redrawing of the lines. He now felt a need to rescind his earlier “category error” of ascribing profundity to (some) music, as it resulted from a failure to face up to his own conclusion, that provision of such an opus for the domain of jazz). 1 ) Kivy, Philosophies of Art, 141. 2 ) Ibid.,142. Take note that Kivy singles out literature.

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music—especially absolute (wordless) music—simply has no conduit available to it to impress a profound sentiment upon a listener or performer. His category error was therefore the attempt to actualise a wish and a promise which led him down the path of “creating a need” for an “artificial lack” that never existed and would not be felt if we were simply to acknowledge that music cannot exhibit profundity.1 A curious case of culpa mea, made more curious by the fact that Kivy did not at any point in his four essays question his very first presuppositions of associating profundity with “treating a profound matter discursively” and the adjunctive prejudice of an analogy to literature. *

Having gone this far down the road, we can only wonder what prompted Kivy to look for profundity in the discursive metier. Not a single illustration of the means, manners and specifications of profound utterance disturbs this naked faux pas. Let us therefore posit the example of locking four theologians of different doctrinal persuasion into a cell and have them debate the most holy issues involving God and Christ, resurrection and redemption: The most likely outcome would be a fracas with little dignity and the conspicuous absence of profundity. But an even more debilitating issue handicaps his assertion that written literature sets the standards for profound utterance by its discursive treatment of matters of deep relevance to human beings. It is too late now to ask him how a reader or an auditor at a performance of Hamlet discerns the onset of “profound treatment” amid the frequent monkey play. Is all of Dante’s Comedia soaked in profound matters or shall we point the finger at its numerous instances of blatant revenge on his enemies as well as much objectionable sanctimoniousness? Is the vast quantity of squalor, sordidness and debauchery in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov suffused with profundity 1

) Kivy, Music, Language and Cognition, 162-66.

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or simply grubby shock treatment? Many literate people know the line “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” and it might strike them as a profound utterance ipso facto. What do they know of the rest of Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus? Or does this line stand in for the profoundness of the whole drama? Equally many readers know about Thucydides’ profundity only from the famous speech on the issue of “might is right” in his Peloponnesian Wars.1 Knowing as we do that literature qua art never offers guarantees, it seems that the choice of this metier as a yardstick of profundity may not be the happiest in terms of measuring its relevance to the quest. An example is furnished by JeanPaul Sartre’s dealings with Maurice Blanchot’s Aminadab as a foil to Kafka’s The Castle. Sartre roundly castigates the plagiaristic banality of Blanchot’s novel.2 We might have no difficulty agreeing with him; yet his critique amounts to nothing more substantial than a warning to the reader that Blanchot is wasting our time over matters that Kafka treated much more profoundly. Yet the degree of Kafka’s depth is not measured out, because it is not demonstrable! This is the handicap under which all proponents of profundity in literature must labour, because the effect of such a work on a reader is not of a kaleidoscope of moments, but of a cumulative impression. At this point we need to look back and draw together the skeins of our criticism. We charged Kivy with importing untested prior assumptions into his arguments; we add here that he does not for one moment delve into the issue through his vast knowledge of music, as if no evidence whatever were to hand in support of a possible alternative scenario than his insistence on associating profundity with discursive “aboutness” through an “analogy to literature.” But on a wider scope, his failure to nail down this analogy leaves him vulnerable to assumptions that don’t hold water in any communicative context 1 2

) Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars, Bk. VI. ) Cf. Sartre, Essays, chap. 4.

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between humans, namely: 1) that human communicative intercourse is inherently discursive; 2) that our sense of profundity discloses a cognitive illumination; 3) that profundity is a demonstrable adjunct to certain species of literary performance. All three of these presumptions are false. First through the disregard of innumerable forms of indirect, tacit, colloquial, implicit, insinuated and ineffable discourse. Second, by the erroneous assignation of cognition to the office of arbiter of profundity, which skips mindlessly over the much more capacious understanding of the various aesthetic cortices that are charged with discriminating signs and signals into messages prior to any ratiocinative activity. Third, it is in principle impossible to produce a scale of qualitative indicators for the degree of profundity in any artistic artefact whatever. But the cardinal hinge on which all debates along these lines founder is the simple fact that profundity is not a fact in the world.1 Nor is it a “constituent” of a work, or an attribute that can be singled out from other attributes of a work of art. But if it is not a fact, nor an attribute or constituent, how can so many people, including philosophers, talk and write so much about it? This is indeed the cardinal hinge on which the theses of “treatment,” “aboutness” and demonstrability founder. Accordingly, we must resolve the disparity by relocating the concept of profundity. If it is neither “in” the work, nor (necessarily) an attribute of the person doing profound work, nor finally a “fact” in the world, where do we find it? 1

) Putting it in this blunt way is meant to emphasise that profundity is an outcome of private experience, known only to the person who is affected this way. If it were a fact, it would be ascertainable objectively and therefore remove all doubt on its actuality.

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The answer is so simple and self-recommending that we ought to be astonished how little attention is paid to it: Profundity is a fact of the human world.1 *

This affords no licence to Kivy and like-minded intellectuals to thrust the cognitive faculties before our noses as arbiters on issues which they are not equipped to handle. For the point at issue is that we are predominantly impressionable creatures; and that accordingly the phenomena of the world (none of which arrives in our sensorium with a label affixed to it) must initially be discriminated into auditory, tactile, and visual species and then distributed to the cortices which take responsibility for converting them into stable images (percepts). This is not magic, but organisation! But as we are dealing with auditory phenomena, it is crucial to beware of the mistaken assumption that words occupy a privileged partition in this traffic. As they impinge on the auditory system, they are initially nothing other than sounds—along with all sounds that impinge simultaneously. If the species of noise is identified as a verbal communication, it is transferred to the faculty handling verbal semantics. If it is music that is heard, the faculty of musical semantics is addressed. Here now is the crucial difference: Verbal noises are turned into, or identified as, verbal concepts. Therefore all further processing—another discrete step—now occurs in the cognitive faculty, since words are usually compounded into sentences and carry a substantial denotational freight. Whereas on the contrary a musical sound or a succession of notes make an immediate, unfiltered impact on the aesthetic faculties which can easily result in an instantaneous emotional reaction. None 1

) Pursuant to the previous note, it is nonetheless beyond dispute that other individuals may be similarly affected. Therefore the claim that it is a fact in the human world serves as the basis of a consensual acceptance that a work of art conveys an import of profundity.

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of these needs to be referred to the conceptual faculty until much water has flowed down the bridge—that is, when the piece has run some of its course and the auditor gets curious about technical issues like the harmonic development or the structuring of its themes. 1 It should be clear from this why cognition is not an impressionable faculty: as the “manager” of our conceptual resources it is referential and indeed largely self-referential.2 But profundity is an impression, related to sensibility. Therefore, although a verbal text may convey an impression of profundity, this is not due to its cognitive content, but because it conveys an ineffable import in addition to its articulate texture. Another way of putting it would be to say that the import conveys a sense to the recipient of his/her understanding being illuminated. We discern a problem of understanding looming here that is closely affiliated to some of the oldest philosophical criteria, namely justice, goodness, beauty, and truth. None of these are in the world as objective features; but they are in the human world, together with profundity, as “matters of profound and abiding interest” to humans. Based on these clues, we can start on another tack. Profundity is entangled with passion, pathos, revelation, illumination, insight, sanctity, imagination and burning personal interest. All of these fall into the basket of emotional and psychological attributes of persons. Moreover, they share connotations of being unfathomable, ineffable and irreducible. In short, the key is 1

) It would be going too far to bring a discussion of the neurophysiological traffic into this essay: the gist of the point in the text is simply that percepts enjoy a natural precedence over concepts in the order of distribution into their relevant cortices. For example, it is far more important to be able to instantly identify a gunshot than a greeting. It stands to reason nonetheless that some verbal noises require no deeper identification than a gunshot because they signal danger and are therefore held in memory as verbal percepts (e.g., the case of someone crying “fire” in a crowded theatre—which needs no analysis to produce an instantaneous reaction). 2 ) For an elaborate description of the “inner workings” of the conceptual faculty, see Koestler, Act of Creation, 645ff.

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intuition, the term understood in the widest sense in which it may be used to cover all forms of intercourse and communication. But this is a subject’s prerogative, and by this none other can be meant than the subject of an aesthetic experience. *

The aesthetic faculty is not bound to reference even when the reference is clear, as it can be in some poetic works. The meaning of aesthesis leans most strongly on rapport, the appeal to sensibility. When a composer wishes to transmit a sentiment, he resorts to a succession of tones that exhibit a gestalt. Selfevidently, it exfoliates into more gestalten either similar, contrasted, or complementary to the first, and eventually a large number of them will blend in such a manner as to yield an overall physiognomy. The point of bringing this up is that the gestalt or physiognomy does not strike the ears, as both are constructs of the aesthetic faculty. This is where explicit description meets its limitations.1 Nor can science help us; it can only explain the mechanics of acoustic sensation which is indifferently affected by other kinds of vibratory impingements, such as traffic noise, the whistling of the wind and so forth, which all make our ear drums tremble. The difference is most remarkable in that our sensibility identifies musical sounds as agents of affective agitation, translating the affect into a feeling, or emotion, and frequently a nervous and even muscular reaction. This is the mystery for us: How can we possibly explain that a purely electromagnetic species of vibrations lights up so many different perceptions? It is not “normal,” to be sure. But then humans can sense another person’s mood and find themselves in silent rapport 1

) Cognition in cooperation with the conceptual faculties may of course serve for the mediation of the many technical aspects of music, but evidently cannot spring into operation until some time after the aesthetic faculties have done their spadework. Inasmuch as it represents the intellectual dimension of music appreciation, it tends to assist primarily those aficionados who are either deeply interested or professionally engaged.

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with them. Both types of sensibility, the physical which touches our nerves, and the immaterial which touches nothing but is still perceived, proceed in seamless conjunction in our minds. But while “vibration” indicates a locomotive cause affecting our nerve strands, the resulting feelings or emotions are not locomotively engendered—they transpire in a completely acausal environment because they are not reactions but volitional responses to stimuli. This is, in the end, the only path towards an understanding of the fact that music has the capacity of altering the physiology of a person: that the heartbeat can be accelerated, the nerves whipped, the blood heated up, and excitation rise even to the point of ecstasy—as in Romain Rolland’s famous “oceanic feeling.” By the same token, music is not “in itself” intentional and does not “contain” intentional properties, therefore we must take note of the contradiction offered by “affect” and “expression.” If we accept that any artefact is mute “in itself,” then the affect and the resulting expressive connotations belong to the beholder. While this is plain in respect of a painting, which does not “affect” if no-one is looking, music often obtrudes— frequently by design as, for example, in shopping malls. However, such music is not heard with attention; it “affects” only when someone is actually listening. This is part of its ontological ambiguity. Let us also note that the expression of feelings is generally a behavioural matter that cuts across all living creatures in a readily discernible way; but again, music does not “behave.” It is the beholder who transforms the impact of a work into behaviour—and affective relations do not pertain to music alone, but to all the arts.1 What we understand as the advantage of 1

) On this issue we owe a fundamental insight to Kant. How do we arrive at a judgment of the attributes of a work, such as its beauty? Wrong question! According to Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic: “The Kantian subject… discovers in it a unity and harmony which are in fact the effect of the free play of its own faculties [and] misperceives as a quality of the object what is in fact a pleasurable coordination of its own powers” (87).

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music in those stakes, is the direct and unfiltered appeal to our emotions and the sheer strength of music over the other arts in this respect. Plainly these contradictions cry out for a resolution. It is after all an incontrovertible fact that music is of absorbing interest to millions of people, and many among them look to it as a value that contributes to the “meaning of life.” *

This raises fundamental problems concerning the powers of music to “express” what in actuality we feel, and how what we sense of what music expresses is conveyed with words or without. Let us start with our sensitivity to the sounds of nature. Distant thunder can arouse a feeling of apprehension, the soft gurgle of water can be felt as soothing, and so on. Moreover, a personal tone of voice is readily understood as “adding” something to whatever the message may be. Composers know all this and command the technique to evoke analogues in musical figures. Yet a glance over the vast explanatory literature on music exhibits a perplexing emphasis on supposedly overarching emotional spans, such as “heroism” for Beethoven’s Eroica, “despair” for Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique and so on. But to pick a more modest example at random, Jerrold Levinson in his analysis of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture seeks to tease a single emotion out of it and alights on “hope.”1 But this is bluntly preposterous. Hope is an attribute of a person, not a “thing in itself.” Hence his result can only apply to himself; what other listeners might feel cannot be prognosticated for them (and it led one witty commentator to suggest the possibility of “a duck in a state of gastric distress”).2 In other words, an enveloping emotion might be triggered by the 50 seconds 1

) Levinson, “Hope in the Hebrides,” in Music, Art and Metaphysics, 336ff. 2 ) Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 351.

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of a Chopin Prélude, or the three minutes of Shirley Bassey singing “Goldfinger,” but hardly by a work that contains 15 to 50 minutes of incident and thrives on a succession of episodes and a concomitant sequence of changing moods. We must not forget that musical sensation is no different in kind from a caress or a wisp of wind. What the recipient makes of it is their business. They can be touched, or not be touched, or pretend to be touched, or touched the wrong way. One way or another it shows the difficulty of stringing up an elaborate theory of the putative transmission of the emotional content of music to a person. To elaborate on this a little—when Aristotle analysed the responses of audiences at the tragedies, he found that they identify with the characters on stage, even though the actors are only mimicking the sufferings of their role. Hence spectators exercise the willing suspension of disbelief. They feel empathetic emotions welling up; they fear the consequences of the acts which they are made to witness; they pity the victims of fate; and in the denouément they may well undergo a cathartic collapse or release that brings them back to their empirical present, with their internal state altered from what it was before the performance. Something of this kind pertains to music as well. The crucial issue is that for a stretch of time these surrogate experiences become real because they are felt; and this is the obvious rebuttal to critics who speak of symbolism, correlation, logical form and inference.1 The only word that fits here is “experience.” We don’t react cathartically to mere symbols. The sounds issuing from a concert stage or from a recording comprise an invitation to the listener to get involved—which in this case means to attend to the formed appearances of emotional states, allow them to stimulate their sentiments and awaken their sensibility

1 ) E.g. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key; Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

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to its immediacy of affective empathy.1 Evidently this cannot be captured in a verbal definition, for its modus operandi is none other than profoundly affecting, non-discursive communication. *

One more issue needs to be settled: why do we put such a high premium on the emotions that music can evoke in us, while in our quotidian social habitat the display of strong emotions is frequently frowned upon? During an average day of work and leisure our emotions tend to simmer along with small highs and lows, all forgotten a minute later. None of this is considered a value in its own right. But set it to music (or paint a picture or write a nice verse) and suddenly a moment of it is frozen in a gestalt that acquires a halo of value. And so, we are placed in a proximate situation with a mind imbued with a powerful imagination across the flimsy bridge of a formed sound spectrum. The value of this is that the music draws us into itself, for us to submerge (apropos Schopenhauer) our will in its textures in order to participate in a creative will that has something to give, of which we possess only the dimmest notion within ourselves—namely, the full power of emotional communication without the hindrance of empirical clutter suppressing it. But what kind of communication is it? Are we not falling for the pathetic fallacy of receiving a letter from the composer via his work? By no means: these richnesses are in us already as a potential; but a life of work, social obligations concerned with children, religion, politics and what all this entails is a most effective suppressant. Music makes them flow, unhindered, like 1

) It goes without saying that none of the above covers the human spectrum entire. Modern musical sensibility, just as the tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks, is a culture-dependent phenomenon. Spectators or auditors from a culture to whom these sensibilities are foreign will not make the same connections unless they are tutored. Irrespective of this, they are still likely to undergo some form of empathic receptivity.

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a broad stream that overflows its banks. All art is born from, and connected to, such immersions in a more intense than average emotional existence. The expressivity of music is part of the human value system because it conveys to us an intimate knowledge of our capacity for a deeper emotional life; and because this kind of experience has the capacity (apropos Aristotle) for healing damaged souls, for promoting shared and communal forms of engagement and, last but not least, for the gratification received from sounds that please the ear. In all these respects, music enriches our life and indeed enhances our sensitivity to many kinds of sounds to which we might not respond at all without first having been awakened by music to discern them. Let us elaborate on this a little. Each of the many conduits we employ to reflect on our life, from speaking and singing to painting and sculpting, relies on an initial filtering process that draws on memories of our learning and includes a plethora of instinctual resources that have been passed down the line of generations. In a word, in an aesthetic experience the past flows into the present, becomes conterminous with it; and in that present I stand with myself as the measure of the authenticity of my estate. This is why the depth and profundity, shallowness and triviality bounce off the self-reflection that is the sum total of “who I am” in the here and now of the experience. When such an experience affects us deeply, we call it “profound.” If it yields an illuminating insight on questions entangled in life and death—such as rites of passage, love and hate, passion and suffering, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, faith and justice—it might pierce our comfort zone, so that any such encounter could conceivably have a life-transforming potential. It is a side of the experience that Schopenhauer speaks of, but in his emphasis on temporary relief from life’s problems he missed this crucial piece of wisdom. The arts bear the “meaning of it all” in their very existence as mimetic and heuristic enterprises of the human species. Artists have taught us from times immemorial what and how to

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see, hear and feel, and how to respond within ourselves to phenomena which affect us. We associate and identify with them as stimuli in a direct, unforced manner, as they are the features which insinuate themselves persistently on our lives. From this facility it is only one step to felicity—to an answer to our question. What affects us in Bach’s handling of the pieces of his Well-tempered Clavier is precisely this sense of propinquity to “the meaning of it all.” It was not “put in there” by design; nor did it have to be, because Bach’s mind and spirit was already en rapport with the “meaning of it all” before he put pen to paper.1 *

A brief historical interlude may to illustrate the metamorphosis of these cultural mores in our civilisation. The passion of the modern West, it has often been said, is for knowledge; but on a deeper level this quest goes beyond the satisfactions (and power) bestowed on us by the collection and exploitation of facts. It thrives on plumbing for depths, for encompassing the unknowable and inscrutable. The preparation for this through two millennia was the transfiguration of Plato’s philosophy into a religious passion and ecstasy in which the arts were prominently represented. It began in the churches as a surrogate for the illiteracy of the vast masses to whom the story and mission of Christ needed to be taught by way of pictures. What those ubiquitous images of suffering and their opposites of salvation and an allforgiving grace showed was precisely the same exaltation with the ultimate vision of supreme goodness, truth and beauty that animated Plato. The difference between the two visions lies in how the Christian doctrine filled up the residual ambiguity in Plato’s concept of justice: Christ is Love. These turns did 1

) Whereas, to cite a counter-example, the music of Grieg touches no deeper chords than the bourgeois yearning for homely cheer and a little self-indulgent sadness.

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not leave music unaffected. The Gregorian chant became the preferred mode for monks addressing God, with the effect of musical kernels imbuing the words with a halo of aspiration and love. In due course these musical capsules were adopted for all services and elaborated. But even in their vastly ramified textures, they always retained the sanctity of their association with praying and the aspirational efflux directed to the heavens. If there are people today unable to sense in this evolution a relation to profundity, we must not castigate them for their profanity, but lament the general loss of attunement that makes us strangers to ourselves. *

So then, how shall we define the ineffable, the profound? In truth, we can’t. In this respect we tend to cultivate a deliberate blindness by refusing to acknowledge that “what we cannot speak about” may yet pertain to our sentient estate. In other words: We express our love with flowers and a smile; our grief with a bowed head and withdrawn mien; our faith with a solemn gait; our exuberance with hops and skips; our despair with silent tears and head buried in the hands—feelings transmuted into gestures and comportment. Consoling another person with deep sincerity is not easy for others who are not at that moment likewise engulfed. But music is always an appropriate accompaniment to such situations. It illuminates the background, and when it sounds it draws aside the veil that obscures our being in time, our being amid phenomena, by banishing both. This we can talk about, but without touching the essence, since it resolves itself into an experience permeated with rapport—soul experience, temporary and fragile, subject to intrusion and disturbance; while at its end, there is no object at all, but only a reminiscence of something that might be erroneously quantified as a quasi-object. But this thing cannot be contemplated, nor interrogated: it isn’t there, and was never surrounded by the material clut-

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ter of quotidian existence—it was time itself set in motion in contradiction of clock time and the feelings it engendered are unreachable even to the quantum physicist. Music is, and always was, in all cultures, a phenomenon at the perimeter that segregates real from unreal, human from divine, abyss from cosmos and, not least, the aspiration that opens a soul to inspiration. Finally, so as not to miss the one permissible analogue to speech language: the referential aspect of music consistently points to facets of reality that cannot be captured in the rational structures of language, of which in consequence only music is empowered to speak in its own diction and syntax. Our final deliberations must therefore be devoted to two tenets, cognitive uptake and conceptualisation, whose consistent misappropriation in the arts (but especially in music) leaves us in the lurch about the intentions they were supposed to serve. *

According to common notions, cognition goes hand in glove with consciousness. But this copulation is fraught with an overwhelming ambiguity of which we are scarcely aware. Namely, that our consciousness is unlikely to be in touch with more than a minuscule percentage of the tumult going on in the central nervous system. The reason for this is self-evident: we could not cope with the profusion. Accordingly, it is withheld until a deliberate decision is demanded. This spells out that subconscious and unconscious activities (not to be confused with their Freudian counterparts) are superabundant in the nervous system and frequently called up in situations where cognition is literally the “stranger in their midst.” Musical experiences (and aesthetic experiences in general), attentive and concentrated, hardly ever strive for (or achieve) a cognitive and/or conceptual involvement. They are tantamount to a search for the subconscious stirrings of meaning and import in the artefact, whose making was guided by an equally subconscious, though creative spur. Pascal’s words, “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot discern” meet

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this condition of non-conceptual communication. Hence profundity is not a word that can or needs to be analysed, because it belongs to the tacit spheres of our being. Defining it falsifies every relevant criterion of its use. What is needed instead is an acknowledgement that humans—all humans—possess an organ for both profound utterance and profound understanding in contexts where discourse stands as a mute witness to experiences in which it cannot participate. This leads finally to the question of whether we can exercise our critical acuity and speak intelligibly about music and human affectivity, despite the inadequacy of our verbal resources. The answer is affirmative. For although the subjective experiences of different people can at times remain irreconcilably at odds with each other in the qualitative sense, a significant degree of consensus, even unanimity, is always possible and tends on the whole to be achieved in the world of music and the world of art as a whole. Thus we also distinguish wisdom, justice and beauty from mere knowledge, rectitude or pleasure; and although we are philosophically prone to reify them all as metaphysical entities, this only indicates our speculative bent and our need to abide by a system of socially and religiously cohesive values. So apart from the subjective terms we have been obliged to associate with aesthetic experiences, we must now add that words like judgment, opinion, point of view, consensus, agreement, unanimity et alia are all cut from the same cloth that identifies them as human apparel, not as denizens of the concourse of the heavens. Conclusion

The foregoing has shown the error of seeking access to musical profundity by appeals to cognitive and discursive means. We identified the flaw in these suppositions as a confusion between aesthetic and conceptual faculties—specifically a failure to acknowledge the necessary correlation of rapport and attunement to musical experiences; the downplaying of music as

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an agent of affective agitation, and the mistaken emphasis on sensory uptake, which is countermanded by the blunt fact that the senses apperceive sounds, whereas music is aural imagery extracted from “the dust of its molecular conveyor belt.” Likewise, with our emotions as volitional responses to stimuli, unsheathing both gestalt and physiognomy from a musical stream. This entails as well a capacity for coordinating them with our highest aspirations, so that profundity can be an outcome of a deeply affecting occasion, of an exceptional nature, powerful, illuminating, insightful and holistic. The difficulty of accounting for profundity conceptually does not amount to intellectual self-emasculation. Nothing in aesthetic experience compels us to engage cognition until it is water under the bridge. Instead, it highlights that music can enrich our faculties beyond the reach of the most refined verbal discourse—as indicated by the fact that even poetry and prayer gain in felicity by being sung.

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XII Deacon’s Guide to Mt Improbable “Don’t confuse the map with the terrain!” Introduction

DEACON’S FIRST MAJOR PUBLICATION under the flag of biological anthropology was, in the sights of his confreres, a marvellously rich account of the mysteries of language, drawn from places in the world where the furnaces of human cultures are still evolving new forms of speech amid the collisions of polyglot cultures.1 Fourteen years later the author came out with another book, surprisingly unrelated to his former anthropological pursuits. In fact, there is no point of contact between them at all. If one may put it in a picturesque way, it seems as if the adept of brains and tongues abandoned his Darwinian metier for the sake of unravelling something from the metier of Einstein instead. Accordingly, the thrust of his enquiries, previously embedded in richly philosophically fecund soil, underwent a rotation of 180 degrees, abandoning the creatures that live, speak and act in order to focus on a clutch of purely theoretical entities of physics and chemistry.2 C’est le metier? Well, my title line rather suggests ‘jumping on the band wagon’ of a profoundly unphilosophical exposé in form of pop-science, in which the dominant impulse is an unremitting use of illicit intuition pumps in place of evidence and proof.3 It does not augur well for the philosophical calibre of a 1

) Deacon 1997. ) Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, New York, W. W. Norton, 2011. 3 ) Dawkins 1996. 2

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work whose subtitle carries the weight of an enormous insinuation of drawing the veil on how “mind emerged from matter”. Our first question, however, before we begin, is to ask what Deacon’s ‘incomplete nature’ refers to? Nothing as such in nature itself, it transpires; but rather certain hidden causal features of nature that have remained untouched by our scientific theories. Accordingly, Deacons’ mise en scene comprises an account of certain kinds of molecular species imbued with unsuspected biological propensities that have not been previously taken into consideration for such a role. But the clue to this paradoxical omission appears to be our propensity for attending preferentially to concepts of autonomous agency and creature spontaneity, including pseudo-teleological and pseudo-intentional characteristics that are apt to be rendered superfluous once they are embraced by a rigorously scientific description. But it is on these issues—on the conflict between a philosophical layout of the case and its surmised scientific prerogative—that our enquiry in these pages will be seen to hinge. 1 When Absence Matters

The most difficult and indeed perennially vexing problem for us humans is to account for ‘what exists’ when ‘it’ doesn’t show itself. All myths and religions thrive on notions that the world is populated by spirit beings that reveal themselves only to a few people, and then mostly in dreams or visions. Their ‘existence’ seems indeed to be testified through their actions, as when they ‘interfere’ in the human domain. But in skeptical eras, driven by empirical research and technological mastery, such beliefs lose credence. Even so, scientific belief systems are not immune to infection with ‘irrational’ presuppositions. Our so-called “naive realism” is just as apt to ‘go though the roof’ by insisting that existence is ipso facto constituted by

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material objects, i.e. the res extensa of Descartes. This wholly plausible, though hardly compelling dogma, simply disregards what we can not know for lack of an appropriate sensory capacity. “Imagine the notions of the cosmos held by a mackerel philosopher!” a friend of mine once suggested. In a word: Our world consists of the objects of physics and chemistry; ‘therefore’ the universe as well as life can be wholly accounted for by building theoretical models which comprehend them all in a hierarchical construction where “all arrows point to physics.” Notwithstanding this misplaced confidence in the coherence of our knowledge, we continue to struggle with the recalcitrant features of Life and Mind. They manifestly act in and on the world, without so far having suffered reduction to either an ‘it’ or ‘bit’.1 But such ‘hidden’ attributes and properties comprise the subject matter of Deacon’s book. His title leaves us in no doubt that mind “emerged from” something that is not mind and that he is determined to nail down the culprit, i.e. the phenomenon, or process, propensity or transformation from among the plethora of non-present and unseen conditions—i.e. the ‘absentia’ among molecular species that failed for one reason or another to make their mark on our theories. We might open this discussion with a paradox to which Deacon draws explicit attention. We assume the Earth had a beginning, and that for some time thereafter it was an inhospitable planet. Life must have sprung up a long time down the track when conditions favoured it, hence all scientific effort is directed to research on the circumstances in which this may have occurred. However, there remains a considerable undertow of opinion that life was created by supernatural powers or that it sprang up by spontaneous generation. Evidently such opinions evince a skeptical attitude toward science and tend to insist that life is absolutely incognisable to its methods. 1

) Wheeler 1992, p. 300.

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Deacon points out, however, that a third perspective on the matter is not only possible but logically compelling. “Only life begets life,” he writes and explains that it leads to a conceptual paradox. Either life has been around forever in a universe without beginning, or else it originated from some other non-physical realm (e.g. of spirit). … And so we are left with the problem of proving the spontaneous generation theorists right. (431–42)

It is not a solution that other disputants would endorse, nor does it reflect Deacon’s own stance. In fact, he is on the contrary committed to explaining the emergence of life from molecular resources and later transfers the same methodology to his disquisitions on sentience, consciousness, and mind. In the process, two other pieces of terminology displace nomenclatures one would normally expect in a book of this kind, viz. teleonomy and ententionality. It accords with Deacon’s approach in that many purely molecular species and processes exhibit a seeming teleological drift as well as seeming intentional aspects—the word “seeming” marking the difference between the behaviour of organisms and their chemical analogues. Of the two terms, teleonomy was actually coined some fifty years ago by Jacques Monod,1 though in Deacon’s text it spawns “teleomorphic” and “teleodynamic” variants in its train. Moreover, ententionality is his own invention, and the reader will have no difficulty identifying the “absent phenomenon” that is involved here. It is, in fact, the elephant in the boudoir, for we all know that it is present and accounted for—but is not accounted for by science, because science has no means of acknowledging its presence. Indeed, the peculiarity of this physical non-presence has been felt by humans since time immemorial and figures prominently in numerous metaphysical systems from Aristotle to Heidegger. As for his absentia, they may well be the latest intellectual 1

) Monod 1971.

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species to be discovered and his book the first effort to recognise and come to grips with them. In his own words: The inability to integrate these many species of absencebased causality into our scientific methodologies has not just seriously handicapped us, it has effectively left a vast fraction of the world orphaned from theories that are presumed to apply to everything. … Indeed, what might be described as the two most challenging scientific mysteries of the age—explaining the origin of life and explaining the nature of conscious experience—are both held hostage by this presumed incompatibility. (12)

We need not cavil with this except perhaps for the use of the word “scientific” in this paragraph—by which I mean that it has not been demonstrated that these are indeed challenges to science. Yet the very issue underlying Deacon’s concerns is none other than the possibility of grappling with life and mind scientifically. After all, we cannot close our eyes to the problem that inheres in the very conception we entertain about knowledge: Is “exact” knowledge alone admissible, or can the term be allowed to stand for something wider and deeper than facts, causes and principles? Deacon’s investiture of the adjective absential carries this suggestion into a fairly extensive domain of ambiguity, where science is groping in the dark and reliant on dubious makeshifts (cf. 36–37). As such it represents a powerful guide towards a radically new understanding of many of our most puzzling scientific and philosophical issues. 2 Intentionality, Agency, Telos

Nevertheless, Deacon’s investiture of the term ententionality seems to bring on more embarrassment than enlightenment. Intentionality presumes upon an agent in possession of some form of consciousness which Deacon identifies as a “residual

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phenomenon remaining unaccounted for after all correlated physical processes are described” (7). This is more problematic than he allows. For the issue is not merely that many intentional decisions by a living creature will have some causal outcome in the world, but also that intentionality is not exactly hiding itself. It may be absential in respect of not being a measurable or ascertainable phenomenon, but it nonetheless exhibits a phenomenology that is recognised by other intentional witnesses—who are not peering into a microscope, but establishing a relationship. That this is not restricted to human intercourse is also perfectly clear, as innumerable species among the world’s fauna and flora, including humans, engage in some kind of symbiosis. Whereas Deacon’s term ententional conceals rather than solving a problem. Quoting some prominent scientists, among them Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, and Francis Crick, he notes they all maintain that “in principle” (take note of the scarecrows) all human fancies about free will, self-identity and so forth amount “in fact” to “no more than” the gambolling of the same substances we deal with in chemistry and physics (31–32). Deacon does not question the scientific foundations on which these opinions rest, though perhaps he should have. For the blunt fact is that they are not derived from scientific proofs but from scientists voicing their private beliefs—which cannot be binding on other private beliefs. Rather the opposite, for reductive analysis as well as various theories of emergence and/or supervenience have signally failed to improve our insight into this issue. This brings us to a related concept that is also characteristically absential, though in a different manner: telos. We usually associate it with the growth towards maturity of a plant or creature, and take it as one of their distinguishing marks from non-teleological entities. But in recent years, the concept of teleology has come in for a lot of derision from physics-oriented quarters. Deacon’s emphasis lies with the absential, with what we make of it, namely that “we recognise teleological

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phenomena by their development towards something they are not” but are predetermined to be (24); and this spells out that they are not common objects but entities en route to organic being. At any rate, Deacon rouses himself to a proper riposte on this issue: The metaphor of the world as an immense machine full of smaller machines is deeply infected with the special assumptions associated with human artefact design. … this analogy can set up quite misleading expectations. (36–37)

We might add: Especially confusion about the category to which “design” applies when it arises from random assemblies (e.g., the “blind watchmaker” syndrome). Deacon is not in favour: “Machines are simplifications of the causal world … a machine is finite and all its features and future states are fully describable” (37). This cannot be said of even the simplest organism. 3 Information Transmogrified

Lurking just around the corner from such deliberations is the concept of information—another instance of vexing misuse in physics and especially in computer science, turning intentional terms into special nomenclatures with sometimes very odd semantics. Thus, Deacon complains with good justification that quantum theorists argue that “information is a critical feature of every quantum-level event … [being regarded as] a measure of difference and order, irrespective of any referential function” (41). Strictly speaking “information” is a reified verb, “forming a mind.” Precisely this meaning gets lost in its estrangement from common usage. Deacon continues: “Brains are organised with respect to the vast absential world of possible future events and abstract properties” (41).

This opens a context that demanded further explanation, not

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given, of the important difference between ag-gregation and con-gregation, which is crucially implicated in the concept of information. Deacon admits, however, that “organisation” wrongly presumes on being self-understood: An aggregate is not organised, whereas a congregation involves a target and demands an answer to the why, where, when, and how of it. Altogether Deacon’s hypothesis so far gives the impression of hedging his bets. It advances the straightforward insight that intentionality cannot be engendered by something added to a chemical cluster, but rather that something is missing, or absent from, the cluster—something he calls “content” that cannot be discerned by inspection and is therefore omitted from a causal account. The question is, however, how can we possibly ascribe a content without stepping into homuncular fairylands? 4 Homunculi to the Fore

Deacon faces up to this problem courageously by exhibiting what he calls the suppressed homunculi that populate modern science: “Theoretical gremlins often sit at their virtual control panels behind names for functions… such as informing, signalling, adapting, recognising or regulating some biological or neurological process” (53). On this account they do their work without anyone noticing that they are all disguised entelechies. Evidently this will not do. Therefore, Deacon refuses to buy into the idea of intelligent design, for the perfect rebuttal is that we see design where we wish—in the zodiac, the anthropic principle, cladistics et al. His last witness, “epigenesis,” speaks for it trenchantly: It ignores the information ultimately embodied in the elaborate patterns of interaction among cells and how these affect which genes get expressed. The vast majority of this structural information is generated anew in each organism as an emergent consequence of a kind of ecology of developing cells. (69)

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His point here is that computerised modelling never cogently explains this because the models are full of unidentified “gremlins” as well as extrapolations from very tiny samples upon the whole ensemble. Whereas, apropos of “ecology,” it is the prior construction of internal landscapes that determine these epigenetic features. 5 Looking Through the Wrong End of the Tube

So far, we have little to complain about, with Deacon laying out the case for his absential thesis and analysing the scientific aporias which egged him on to his investigations. But beginning with chapter 9, entitled “Teleodynamics,” he turns to a fundamental issue of perspective—the perspective to be adopted by a witness in the quest for the truth of what can and should be seen in the molecular environment. It is from this moment that errors and omissions creep into his text and an alert reader might feel that the author’s grip on the subject matter is beginning to slacken. A test case is furnished by the celebrated BZ reaction. It is tempting to see this phenomenon (especially in its three-dimensional manifestations) as a template for the emergence of organisation and self-assembly in the biological realm. Indeed, Deacon’s coinage “ententional” could be said to have no better witness to its own legitimacy. Yet Deacon simply mentions it passim (243) and never returns to it. This is puzzling, for in referring instead to “teleodynamics” he leaves us with a sense of irresolution, as if BZ posed as an unwanted rival to his conception. But Deacon could hardly be unacquainted with the instantiation of BZ reactions by fungi and bacteria? Then the question presents itself: can the information content of teleodynamic processes attach itself to DNA and gain entry to a cell? Deacon jockeys inconclusively here with speculation, he seems to want this to be possible, knowing full well that genes are inert. But this knowledge points to the

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rather obvious conclusion that any such modification can only be implemented by the enzymatic “maintenance staff” in the nucleus or, alternatively, by a cell hijacking and installing the process. It leaves a big question mark hanging over Deacon’s disquisitions—that in the end they do not describe objective developments but highly targeted ones which only living cells are empowered to exploit. Hence his teleodynamic entities, if not chosen, could in principle hop and skip forever, without any biological consequence ensuing. Therefore, the preceding paragraphs amount to a criticism of Deacon’s cavalier handling of important issues that imperatively demand clarity. Accordingly, particular mention must now be made of two other omissions, which strike a truly bizarre note and drag a considerable trail of liability along with them. The first is that over the entire text of his book Deacon never mentions the carbon atom. This is tantamount to ignoring the indispensable and dominant member of any macromolecular retinue—an omission as serious (and seriously misleading) as a description of a bird’s anatomy without a word to indicate that its wings enable it to fly. Second, Deacon’s failure to discriminate between prokaryote and eukaryote cells. No hint in the book brings to notice that the former are monocells and the latter nucleated organisms. As a result, his readers remain from here on to the end of the book in a pickle over the issue of whether any, some, or all of Deacon’s chemical systems and processes contain carbonbased products or not, and whether their destined stomping ground is (figuratively speaking) inside a pill or an ocean liner’s power plant. The importance attaching to this ambiguity is simply that processes which do not involve carbon-bearing molecules are ipso facto disqualified from any consideration of biological emergence except on the aforesaid term of ‘hijacking’. But clearly this is apt to bring Deacon’s whole thesis to a standstill. For example, here is a passus that shows Deacon being fully aware that some things are not what they seem:

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On the living side we find processes that… produce behaviours that are so convoluted, divergent and idiosyncratic as to defy compact algorithmic description… they generate and maintain aggregate systemic properties that are quite distinct from properties of any component and reflect the effects of deep historical contingencies that may no longer be existent in their present context. (267; italics added)

Deacon ignores, however, that this is shouting intentional agency from the rooftops. And there is more on the same page, when Deacon notes that organisms actively reorganise their internal dynamics and relationships to the environment [to] counter or compensate for any depletion of the gradients that [must maintain] their dynamical integrity [and] they have evolved means of gradient assessment and spatial mobility that enable them to anticipate… depleted gradients and seek out more optimal gradients. (267; italics added)

The added italics speak for themselves, for this is not special physics nor chemical technobabble, but the description of an organic entity’s resourcefulness on a level for which no purely objective language commands an appropriately objective vocabulary. On to the “first precursor to life as we know it” (271–77). It brings Deacon’s fixation on molecular processes and disregard of the very “absences” which form the basis of his enquiry startingly to the fore. Deacon never as much as mentions the likelihood of an underlying matrix of generative potentials. As he seems familiar with the researches of Ilya Prigogine and of Stuart Kauffman, this is surprising, for their published accounts of the complexity of macromolecular phase shifts look like serious contenders in the stakes of incipience. In both of their theories life emerged from large carbon-based clusters. We would not guess the same from the discussion of chemical substrates enumerated by Deacon—nucleic acids, amino acids, phospholipids, purines, pyrimidines and sugars. Once more,

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therefore, it strikes me as very strange for Deacon to be wholly unaware that his disregard of carbons (not to mention cellular autonomy) vitiates the whole thesis he seeks to expound. 6 Self-reproduction

The unfortunate choice of a title for the ensuing subsection is “Self-reproducing Mechanisms.” More ambiguities ensue as a truly perplexing issue surfaces from Deacon’s remark on organisms that “we need to understand the nature and origins of this form of collective organisation… [yet] life demands an account of its molecular peculiarities” (289). Agreed, though with a caveat on its interpretation: A researcher should not prejudge the issue from a physics/chemistry dictated research platform, but cultivate a frame of mind that is willing to accept the information emerging from experiments. Clearly this is of merit when we confront Deacon’s distinction between “ententional” and “intentional.” We have no objection to Deacon’s class of ententional molecular processes; but a cell is more than the sum of its processes, so that his eschewal of intentional aspects behind the coordination of ententional processes in a cell keeps us wondering whether all this freewheeling tends. So where does Deacon’s first-begotten life-like process fit in? “It was fitted to its environment by chance alone… yet the very fact of its emergence indicates a consistency with its environment” (291).

We might well wonder, again, what this assertion amounts to, for the number of lucky dips required by molecular biologists to make things happen is beginning to outstrip the miracles wrought by the God of the scholastics. Surprisingly, Deacon concedes the point, but when he claims that “the challenge of this book is to explore the possibility that teleodynamic processes can emerge spontaneously by natural laws from physical and molecular processes” (291), he stakes everything on the

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comprehensiveness of our grasp of those laws—which is, to say the least, a pretty vast exaggeration. We are coming to suspect that in his concentration on molecular systems and networks and his resolute disregard of the sine qua non of organic chemistry, Deacon is not genuinely “on the ball.” Indeed, he deserts his readers at the very first step, his “first-begotten” lifelike thing, that no-one who is au fait with organic chemistry would associate with the assembly of the chemical clutter he brings forward. Indeed, he makes no attempt himself to describe the cell that results from it! 7 Individuality

When the discourse touches on cells, Deacon speaks of them in terms of “containment” which “creates physical individuality” (296). This brings a highly intriguing problem to the fore. In a thermodynamic situation, containment is an entropic feature. It can only be stopped or countered by the infusion of fresh energy. We know how this need was met—cells are dissipative entities, taking up fuel and expelling waste. But perplexingly, Deacon carries on with intrinsic integration, permanently interconnected devices, extrinsically maintained coherence, and other recondite issues without a word on the actual solution to the entropic threat, i.e., cellular homeostasis. But Deacon’s focus is on molecular issues, hence the needs of an organism become invisible; moreover, it escaped Deacon that homeostasis involves the cell in an overarching structural management. This leaves him at a loss to explain why cells “wish’ to persist and how they arrived at the recognition that anentropy is vouchsafed by the abovementioned dissipative throughflow. This is where Deacon’s artificial term “en-tentionality” becomes a liability rather than a virtue. All biological systems, even the most primitive microbes, command some resource of resistance and the capacity to devise means of self-defence

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when confronted with menace. That this involves organisms in trial and error is self-understood; but these words refer compellingly to intentionality and implicitly justify the cardinal tenets of evolutionary theory. In contrast, Deacon makes do with the observation that one does not need to imagine parts that are animated and seek others out. … Like crystal lattice formation, the growth of multi-unit macromolecular structures is an expression of the intrinsic geometry of component molecules [and] is in this sense an expression of a thermodynamic orthograde tendency to reduce total entropy. (298)

But this leaves the crucial factor out of sight that neither lattice formations nor orthograde tendencies enact autonomous agency in behest of molecular homeostasis, nor does it explain a cell’s ability to recognise a threat to its integrity. The general sense of Deacon’s disquisitions in this chapter is that atomic and molecular alignments together with precipitation, ionic concentrations, packing configurations and many serendipitous chances sufficiently explain all the criteria of cellular assembly. Maybe; but then the question arises (which Deacon fails to consider) why and how they are all strung up in the propitious order from which organisms benefit, since there is no sufficient reason (in fact no reason at all) why they should. Hence one gazes in perplexity at this wholesale evasion of the very core problems posed by cellular survival: self-maintenance, self-reproduction, homeostatic management, adaptation etc., not to mention the historically self-evident striving for diversification and proliferation. 8 Information and Absence

Deacon writes: “Although we use the concept of information almost daily without confusion … I believe that we still don’t really know what it is” (371). This is well said, because the word itself has multiple meanings stamped on it by a variety of inter-

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est groups, many of which depart from common usage into a semantic terrain of their own making. Thus, information flowing from one silicon chip to another or an electron being ejected by one atom and snatched up by another does not comprise information to those entities, but to a human observer. No wonder, then, that “we don’t really know what it is.” Deacon explains that information has a representational purpose: but “what matters… and produces its distinctive physical consequences, is a relationship to something not there. Information is the archetypal absential concept” (373). From this the next passage draws its legitimation: Intuitively, then, we are comfortable attributing real-world consequences to not thinking, not noticing, not doing… [it] indicates that deviation from regularity is not enough… something missing with respect to a tendency must also stand out with respect to another tendency that interprets it. (377)

This brings us to the most relevant aspect of information transmission. Creature activity tends to be easily perceivable: a beehive does not arise by accident but by the planned use of disordered materials and self-generated energy, which amounts to the arrest of entropic trends. This is informative, not only to the bees, but to bears and humans too. So, a crucial issue involved in information is the presence of a recipient. This is where all the abovementioned special nomenclatures fall afoul of common sense. An autonomous agent, unlike a pane of glass, may interpret a flying rock as a danger. Therefore, he acts on it, unless he failed to notice. So, Deacon is quite right in saying that “the interpretive process is more than a mere causal process” (393). It involves attending, imparting meaning and importance, weighing consequences and so on. Accordingly, he wants us to compare it with a primitive organism, yet his language remains fixed on molecular regulations, feedback logic:

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We are thus warranted in using the term information to describe the physical changes that get propagated from component to component in a designed or evolved feedback circuit only because the resultant attractor dynamics itself played the determinate role in generating the architecture of this mechanism. (396; italics in the original)

Agreed, but I would add, only if there is an understander around who learnt something useful. Deacon did not genuinely take Gregory Bateson’s advice on board, which nonetheless he quotes: Confusing information processes with energetic processes was one of the most problematic tendencies of 20th century science. Information and energy are distinct and in many respects should be treated as though they occupy independent causal realms. (399) 1

Substitute the physical embeddedness of Deacon’s own terminology for “energy” in the quote, and it becomes clear that the warning has remained unheeded. It tends to devalue much of Deacon’s further enquiries. 9 Evolution

For reasons that will immediately become evident, we begin in the middle of a paragraph on this subject: Consider a deciduous tree which alters its metabolism in response to decreasing day length and cooling temperatures… resulting in the eventual withdrawal of metabolic support for its leaves, so that they dry up and eventually become severed from the branches they grew on. This adaptation… involves a mechanism which treats these environmental changes as information [and] as this information is about likely future events… the mechanism has acquired 1

) From Bateson, Gregory: Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, Bantam Books, New York 1979, p. 50ff.

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interpretive reliability. (417; italics in the original).

This is followed up with the summary: “The evolved mechanism constrains the dynamics of possible interpretation” (418; italics in the original). Now Deacon is not short of words and synonyms; therefore, we must assume that the word “mechanism” represents exactly his intended meaning. Trees of this species (maybe all trees?) are equipped with a mechanism that monitors external changes to their life support, while a successful outcome causes the device to learn something, evolve and indeed to guide the metabolic process in its implementation of survival strategies. Or else the device learns nothing and the tree together with its lineage is doomed. However, it would considerably ease our intellectual travails if we turned the picture upside down and assumed that the tree itself had the capacity to manufacture, install and monitor such thermostatic equipment—after all, it is what cellular organisms routinely do! Therefore, as an initial statement on evolutionary processes, this is far from encouraging. Ditto for Deacon’s take on ‘evolution’ itself. The section on adaptation is rampant with mechanisms—eight mentions on three pages. Since we are ensconced in a biological setting, this is tantamount to loading up specific prejudices before we even touch on the crucial dictum, which appears only at the bottom of the eleventh of these preparatory elaborations—in the author’s italics: “The first teleodynamic systems emerged, they did not evolve” (429). Strictly speaking, we heard this before and it hardly warranted mention again, since evolution cannot possibly set in until there are evolving existents. Deacon’s in-principle statement on his aims here is worth quoting: A principled account of the origins of biological information is a critical step towards demystifying and de-homunculising our understanding of the relationship between genetic information and the defining property of life (434).

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But his manner of speaking remains ambiguous, if not downright self-contradictory, as here in the passage about DNA: [One has] the impression of a molecule that was honed by natural selection in response to its information-carrying function (437).

It is highly unclear what this actually states—on the face of it, that the DNA is the direct target of evolutionary selection. This is a risky line to take, and hardly commensurate with his absential thesis. It turns out, in any case, that Deacon is after easier-to-fry fish. Having hereabouts introduced the concept of autogens, he now discourses on their role as precursors to biological intentionality. Autogens are very simple molecules with complementary self-organising capacity, from which the possibility of autocatalysis is apt to arise. This is what he explores, beginning with the observation that autogen lineages may bind complementary substrates and engender an adaptive upward curve on the evolutionary ladder. Moreover “there is no intrinsic end-directedness to these mechanisms or physical processes,” hence their tendency to self-repair after an infraction of their integrity (446). Sounds too good to be true! And indeed I recall leaning back with slumped shoulders when informed at the end of this episode that autogens are purely software models, found nowhere in the real world! I can well imagine some readers feeling cheated by the sanguine optimism of the presentation, whose final result is nothing other than a double-stranded DNA helix as the progenitor of life. Deacon claims a “living parallel” to DNA-binding proteins, but is this cogent? Well, it says nothing other than that proteins are capable, which cannot be said of the computergenerated double helix. Moreover, the idea of DNA engendering life contradicts his own earlier remarks on every animal’s birth cycle—not to mention that no such code or capacity has been divulged to us by the Genome Project. This may there-

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fore be the moment to call to mind the fact that no life needs ever to be imparted to a foetus, since it simply shares in the mother’s life until it has grown to the point where its life develops its own momentum. Life is one stream, and all of us swim in it. Altogether we have been regaled in these chapters with an abundance of molecular entities and processes that are all in one way or another supposed to be entangled in the inception of life. Yet Deacon simply continues with more inconclusive examples of what our genes are supposed to “sample,” “affect” and “orchestrate,” none of which makes sense without the godfather of all homunculi finally being exhibited in its full glory as a “single ancestral homeobox gene” (461). A truly breathtaking volte face! 10 Self, Soul and Sentience

Deacon’s decision to participate in this game puzzles me. He made scarcely any headway so far merely to explain life, what it is. Accordingly, it seems pointless to follow him on this byway. I quote in passing his “solution” to the problem: “The subjective self is to be identified with the locus of neurological teleodynamics” (477), which cannot pretend to be an improvement on Kant’s “unity of apperceptions.” It stands to reason, however, that it must include the locus of agency, which Kant evidently thought unnecessary to stress since it is self-explanatory. Yet Deacon spends several more pages on explaining it, though he only succeeds in exposing his lack of philosophical muscle. On the related subject of sentience Deacon is of course committed to linking it to its putative homeo- and morphodynamic precursors, emphasising that “contrary to many of my neuroscience colleagues, I believe that these phenomena are entirely available to empirical neuroscientific analysis” (487). This is asking to be ignored, since his private beliefs belong somewhere else than this book. Nevertheless, his private opinions move to

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centre stage again when he speculates that at some time in the future a database may be compiled of all human responses to adaptive and cognitive challenges and fed into supercomputers (491). It would not result in machine sentience, he says; though referring to John Searle’s “Chinese Room” simile, he argues that isomorphism can be achieved—and result—in a form of unquestionable machine intelligence. A ready-made objection to this proposition pinpoints its assumption that human thoughts and sentiments can be represented by a numerical value. Likewise with his other gambit, tokens to stand in for sentient processes (494). It certainly changes nothing—as he says himself: “What we need is an account where the relevant interpretive process is intrinsic, not extrinsic” (498). Despite the existence of a huge industry devoted to AI, we clearly don’t know what intelligence is, sui generis, although we know (but shove that knowledge under the carpet) that the only kind of intelligence with which we are actually acquainted is creature intelligence. Hence it is sobering to find Deacon admitting right in the middle of his elaboration on sentience that “we scarcely have a general theory of how the simplest microscopic brains operate” (505). But it does not stem the flood of arguments, suggestions and insinuations of how we might nonetheless tackle the operations of a human brain: Our growing understanding of the molecular, cellular, connectional and signal transduction details [offers hope for] a hitherto unrecognised methodology (507).

Juxtaposing these two quotes, are we not entitled to ask Deacon if it is beneath the dignity of researchers to try this on the simplest brains first? Instead he launches at once into his “central claim that sentience is a typical emergent attribute of any teleodynamic system” (508). I think the word “typical” says it all, as it sounds like seeking to pre-empt countervailing ideas and/or dictating an agenda, even though the difference between fact and fancy is pretty well smeared out. More to the point is Deacon’s caveat that

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[having] critically deconstructed the computer analogy… mental experience cannot be identified with the signal patterns from neuron to neuron either. They are interpreted with respect to the cellular-level sentience [but] these neuronal signals do not constitute mental information. (515)

Quite so: and if one may say so on his behalf, the logic of this situation is simply that neuronal signalling is known to carouse at velocities where conscious creatures could not experience anything but a formless buzz, hence conscious uptake is restricted to quantities which the owners of brains can actually handle. Deacon shows a decided fondness for attractors in this context. One of them is supposedly responsible for our consciousness of a mental content. His description is plausible: The generation of any mental content… should take time to develop [and] require something like a persistent metabolic boost. … so that self-initiated shifts in cognitive activity will require something analogous to work. (518)

All this sounds reasonable, even the jolt of “self-initiated shifts”: that jarring ‘self’ indeed competes with his morpho-dynamic attractors. But the relevance of this little interlude becomes clear when Deacon asks, “how can the thermodynamics of thought be expressed?” His answer points to an attractor on an orthograde trend, elimination of insufficiently robust attractors and the ultimate formation of a robust attractor (520). Some readers may be tempted to mistake this for an ensemble of suction pumps. On the next few pages, seeking to sort this out intelligibly, we encounter the caveat: “I am not aware of evidence to support such a mechanism… but will assume that it is a reasonable possibility” (520–21). This is indeed an author’s prerogative, though a reader cannot be cajoled in this way to consent! So what sense do we make of good or bad feelings? Deacon’s reply is that the self-similarity-maintaining dynamic provides a constant

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invariant reference with respect to which all other dynamical regularities and disturbances are organised. … this teleodynamic core set of constraints serves as both a centre of dynamical inertia that neural activates cannot displace and a locus of dynamical self-sufficiency that is a constant platform from which distributed neural dynamics must begin their differentiation. But the teleodynamical integrity of this core neurological self is a direct reflection of the vegetative teleodynamics that is critical to its own persistence. To the extent that the vegetative teleodynamics is compromised, so too will a neurological self be compromised. (530)

For my part, I cannot see an answer, nor even a reference to the question in this verbiage. But some readers may be more perspicuous in this regard. Conclusion

Deacon begins his Epilogue with the question: “Have we now arrived at where we started?” Twenty years ago, Daniel Dennett wondered on his last page whether his book Consciousness Explained had “explained consciousness away.” Many of Dennett’s critics said “yes”; my own reply to Deacon is the same. As a reader I got the impression from Incomplete Nature that its author undertook a massive reading course and wanted to give all of it back to us. Alas, it sorely impairs the intelligibility of his text. Concerning his two central tenets—the seeming teleology of his “teleodynamics” and the seeming intentionality of his “ententionality”—they are evidently designed to explain the amazing preformation of sundry chemical products in a biological setting, as if they had all grown up with the prescience of their future use to organisms. Then we learn (not from Deacon) that a huge percentage of them don’t ever appear in a nonbiological environment. Another hen-and-egg conundrum? Well, there is one suggestive alternative: that organisms, all

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the way from the first microbes to mites and mastodons, are “experts” in the field of teleodynamics, both in terms of utilising and even manufacturing such molecules. Moreover, they seem also adept at concocting an intentional brew from ententionally predisposed processes. But although all this is implied in Deacon’s text, there are some truly staggering omissions. We have noted them earlier—his failure to distinguish carbon chemistry; his failure over pro- and eukaroyte differentiation; and finally, his failure to collect his molecular phantasmagoria in one organism for a depiction of how they all work together. Hence, as much as we might wish to admit that it was a laudable effort on Deacon’s part to bring to our notice the fact that many molecular species exist that are in some way congenial, even felicitous to biological assembly, there are serious question marks over the slant of his discourse. Many a reader might take away the impression that life is not much to shout about, since most of its hallmark distinctions could be interpreted as mere instantiations of molecular configurations, or as mechanisms and machines en route to an animate state which, by the way, Deacon resolutely ignores. In this regard, one regrets that he refrained from considering the one argument that is apt to infract his entire thesis—namely, that all living things can do. They may wait for, or tinker with, propitious circumstances, but they don’t expect inanimate nature to do what it cannot do. As mentioned, the proof of the pudding—a fully formed living cell—is the most glaring absentee from the book. But on this one item, every criterion announced in Deacon’s book must be said to hinge; and its non-appearance can hardly inspire much confidence that the molecular thesis does in fact have an outcome that we can associate with the realm of the living on this planet.

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Reference Matter BIBLIOGRAPHIES Ch. I Fichte, J. G., Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1979. Grundlage des Naturrechts, in Sämmtliche Werke, Dritter Band, Berlin, Veit und Comp. 1945. Hegel, G W. F., Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Leipzig, Felix Meiner 1930. — Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen Wood (ed.), trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Beiser, Frederick (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press 1993. Ferrarin, Alfredo, Hegel and Aristotle, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hardimon, Michael, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Honneth, Axel, Kampf um Anerkennung, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992. Redding, Paul, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996. Schnädelbach, Herbert, Hegels praktische Philosophie, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 2000. Westphal, Kenneth, ‘The Basic Context and Structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Beiser, pp. 234-269. Williams, Robert, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997. — ‘Hegel and Nietzsche: Recognition and Master Slave’, in Philosophy Today, Celina 2001, no. 5, p. 164ff. Wood, Allen, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge University Press 1990. — ‘Hegel’s Ethics’, in Beiser, pp. 211-33. Ch. II Confucius and Chinese philosophy Bodde, Derk. Chinese Thought, Science and Society. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991. Chai, Ch’u. The Story of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Washington Square Press, 1961. Contag, Victoria. Konfuzianische Bildung und Bildwelt. Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1964. Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Translated by Arthur Waley. London:

310 Referenve Matter Allen & Unwin, 1938. Creel, Herrlee. Confucius and the Chinese Way. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. Fung, Yu-Lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Hughes, E. R., Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times. London: Dent 1941. Schwartz, Benjamin. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985. Smith, Howard. Confucius. St Albans, UK: Paladin, 1973. Chan, Wing-Tsit, ed. & trans. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Yao, Xinzhong. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Aristotle McKeon, Richard, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941. Ackrill, J. L. “Aristotle on Eudaimonia.” In Rorty, pp. 15–33; “Reason and Responsibility in Aristotle.” In Rorty, pp. 117–56. Annas, Julia. “Aristotle on Pleasure and Goodness.” In Rorty, pp. 285– 300. Barnes, Jonathan, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Gigon, Olof. “Phronesis and Sophia in der Nikomach. Ethik des Aristoteles.” In Mueller-Goldingen, Schriften zur aristotelischen Ethik, 357–70. Guthrie, W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 6, Aristotle: An Encounter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Hardie, William. Aristotle’s Ethical Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Hutchinson, D. H. “Ethics.” In Barnes, pp. 195–232. Irwin, H. T. “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Rorty, pp. 35–54. Jaeger, Werner. “Medizin als methodische Vorbild in der Ethik des Aristoteles.” in Mueller-Goldingen, pp. 143–60. Mueller-Goldingen, Christian, ed. Schriften zur aristotelischen Ethik. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1988. Nagel, Thomas. “Aristotle on Eudaimonia.” In Rorty, pp. 7–14. Owen, G. E. L. “Aristotelian Pleasures.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society N.S. 72 (1972): 135–53. Reprinted in Mueller-Goldingen, pp. 293–310. Ritter, Joachim. “Das bürgerliche Leben. Zur aristotelischen Theorie des Glücks.” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik 32 (1956): 60–94. Reprinted in Mueller-Goldingen, pp. 107–42.

Referenve Matter 311 Rorty Oksenberg, Amélie, ed. Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Williams, Bernard. “Justice as a Virtue.” In Rorty, pp. 189–200. Ch. III Correspondence partners: Arnauld, Bourguet, Clarke, de Volder, Rémond, cited by A and/or G volume. A = Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1923. G = Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin & Halle 1849-3; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim 1962. L = Philosophical Papers and Letters. Ed. L. Loemker, Reidel Publishing, Dordrecht 1969. LA = Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence. Ed. H. T. Mason. Manchester University Press 1967. P = Philosophical Writings. Ed. G. H. Parkinson. Dent, London 1973. Theod. = Theodicy. Tr. E. M. Huggard. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1951. Disc. Met. = Discourse on Metaphysics. Nec. Cont. Truth = On Necessary and Contingent Truths. Mon. = Monadology. Philarete = Conversation of Philarete and Ariste. Spec. Disc. = A Specimen of Discoveries. Other references: Adams, Robert M.: Leibniz—Determinist, Theist, Idealist, New York, Oxford University Press 1999. Barbour, Julian & Lee Smolin: “Extremal Variety at the Foundations of a Cosmological Quantum Theory”, in arXiv: hep-th/9203041 March 1992. Cover, J. A. and O’Leary-Hawthorne, John: Substance and Individuation in Leibniz, Cambridge University Press 1999. Garber, Daniel: “Motion and Metaphysics in the Young Leibniz”, in Hooker, Michael (ed.): Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays, University of Minnesota Press 1982. Gurwitsch, Aron: Leibniz: Philosophie des Panlogismus. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter 1974. Jalabert, J.: La théorie leibnizienne de la substance, Paris 1947. Lawrenz, Jürgen: Leibniz—Prophet of New Era Science, Cambridge Scholars 2013. Sellars, Wilfrid: “Meditationes Leibniziennes”, in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 2 (1965). Wilson, Catherine: Leibniz’s Metaphysics. A historical and comparative study. Princeton University Press 1989.

312 Referenve Matter Ch. IV Boltzmann, Ludwig 1964. Lectures on Gas Theory. Berkeley, University of California Press. Eigen, Manfred 1996. Steps towards Life. A Perspective on Evolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hoyle, Fred and Wickramsinghe, Chadrar 1978. Lifecloud. The Origin of Life in the Universe. London, Dent. Jolley, N (ed.) 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge University Press 1995. Kauffman, Stuart 1995. At Home in the Universe. New York, Oxford University Press. Kauffman, Stuart 2000. Investigations. New York, Oxford University Press. L = Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. Edited and translated by Leroy E. Loemker. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht 1969. P = Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.): Leibniz Philosophical Writings, Dent, London 1973. RB = New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated and edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge University Press 1996. Rescher, Nicholas 1981. Leibniz’s Metaphysics of Nature. Reidel Publishing, Dordrecht. Rutherford, Donald 1995. Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. Cambridge University Press. Weaver, Jefferson (ed.) 1987. The World of Physics. New York, Simon & Schuster. Ch. V A = Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. Edited by C. I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin 1875-90; reprinted Olms, Hildesheim 1978. AG = Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis 1989. L = Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, translated and edited by Leroy Loemker, 2nd ed., Reidel, Dordrecht 1969. Rescher, Nicholas: “Leibniz on Possible Worlds”, in Studia Leibnitiana XXVIII/2, Wiesbaden 1996, pp. 129-62. Ch. VI Richard Arthur, “Cohesion, Division and Harmony: Physical Aspects of Leibniz’s Continuum Problem”, in Perspectives on Science 1998, vol. 6, Nos. 1 & 2, 110-35. Galilei, The Two Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1974. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, Pars physica, 1, Bk. 5, quoted by

Referenve Matter 313 Palmerino, op. cit., p. 406. Leibniz: The Labyrinth of the Continuum. Ed. Richard Arthur. Yale University 2001. Morris Kline: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, New York 1972. C. Lüthy, J. Murdoch & W. Newman (eds.): Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, Brill, Leiden, Boston & Köln 2001. Palmerino, “Galileo’s and Gassendi’s solutions to the Rota Aristotelis Paradox: A Bridge between Matter and Motion Theories”, in C. Lüthy, pp. 382-3. Heinrich Rombach, Substanz, System, Struktur II. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg 1954. Christina Schneider, “Monadenlehre als Grundlage der Leibnizschen Auffassung von Raum und Kontinuum”; in Dominique Berlioz and Frédéric Nef (eds): L’actualité de Leibniz: Les deux Labyrinthes, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1999. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, New York, Free Press 1978. Ch. VII Cavell, Stanley: Philosophical Passages. Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1995. Churchland, Paul: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1996. Dennett, Daniel: Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1991. Hachmöller, Johannes: Weltgegenwart und Lebensunruhe. Leibnizianische Studien. Verlag Günther Neske, Stutt-gart 1996. Leibniz, G. W.: Philosophical Writings. Edited by G. H. R. Parkinson. J. M. Dent & Sons, London 1973. —: New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge University Press 1996. Locke, J.: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. A. S. PringlePattison. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1950. Rorty, Richard: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1979. Ryle, Gilbert: The Concept of Mind. Barnes & Noble, New York 1949. Searle, John: The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1998. Wittgenstein, L.: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, Oxford 1958. Ch. VIII WITTGENSTEIN: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Transl. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1974.

314 Referenve Matter The Blue and Brown Books. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, Oxford 1960. Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). Bilingual edition. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, Oxford 1958. SECONDARY LITERATURE: Ackermann, Robert John: Wittgenstein’s City. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1988. Cavell, Stanley: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1979. —: Must we mean what we say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge University Press 1976. —: Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1995. Dilman, Ilham: Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution. The Question of Linguistic Idealism. Palgrave, Basingstroke & New York 2002. Eldridge, Richard: Leading a Human Life. Wittgenstein, Intentionality and Romanticism. University of Chicago Press 1997. Finch, Henry Le Roy: Wittgenstein—The Later Philosophy. Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ 1977. Findlay, John N.: Wittgenstein: A Critique. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1984. Frege, G.: Logische Untersuchungen. Ed. G. Patzig. Göttingen 1966. Garver, Newton: This Complicated Form of Life. Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Ill. 1994. Hacker, P. M. S.: Insight and Illusion. Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986. Hunter, J. F. M.: Understanding Wittgenstein. Studies of Philosophical Investigations. Edinburgh University Press 1985. Iliescu, Adrian-Paul: Wittgenstein: Why Philosophy is bound to err. Peter Lang, Europäisher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt/M 2000. Johnston, Paul: Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner. Routledge, London 1993. McGinn, Marie: Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks, London 1997. Majetschak, Stefan: Ludwig Wittgensteins Denkweg. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/München 2000. Pears, David: The False Prison. A Study of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Vol. II. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1988. Savigny, Eike von: Der Mensch als Mitmensch: Wittgenstein’s “Philosophische Untersuchungen”. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München 1996. Schärtl, Thomas: Jenseits von Innen und Aussen. Ludwig Wittgensteins Beitrag zu einer nicht-dualistischen Philosophie des Geistes. Lit Verlag

Referenve Matter 315 Münster 2000. Stroll, Avrum: Wittgenstein. One World Publications, Oxford 2002. Ch. IX Ankersmit, F. R.: Aesthetic Politics, Stanford University Press 1996. Borges, Jorge Luis: Pierre Menard, Author of the Don Quixote. In: Labyrinths—Selected Stories and other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. London, Penguin Classics 2000. Bruner, J.S. and Olsen, D.R. (1973): “Learning through Experience and Learning through Media”. In David R. Olsen, Media and Symbols: the Forms of Expression, Communication and Education. University of Chicago Press, 1974. Collingwood, R. G.: The Principles of Art, Oxford University Press 1938. Danto, Arthur: The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Theory of Art, Harvard 1981. —: After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton 1996. Gombrich, Ernst: The Story of Art. London, Phaidon Press 1955. Hanslick, Eduard: Vom Musikalisch Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (On Beauty in Music. A Contribution to the Revision of Musical Aesthetics). Leipzig, 1. Aufl. Rudolph Weigel 1854. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on the Fine Arts), vol. 1. Ed. Rüdiger Bubner. Stuttgart, Philipp Reclam Jun. 1971. Hume: “Of the Standards of Taste”, in: The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. 4 vols. London: Longman, Green, 1874–75, vol. 3. Kaiser, Joachim: Beethovens 32 Klaviersonaten und ihre Interpreten. Frankfurt/M, Fischer Taschenbuchverlag 1979. Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Reprint, New York, Dover Publications 1977. Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft und Schriften zur Naturphilosphie. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1957. Lawrenz, Jürgen: Leibniz—The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars 2010. —: Art and the Platonic Matrix. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars 2011. Levinson, Jerrold: Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Luhmann, Niklas: Art as a Social System. Transl. Eva Knodt. Stanford University Press 2000. Malraux, André, The Voices of Silence. London, Secker and Warburg, 1954. Schiller, Friedrich, Schillers Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Karl Goedeke. Stuttgart, Cotta’sche Buchhandlung 1877.

316 Referenve Matter Ch. X Adorno, Theodor W.: Philosophie der neuen Musik. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1948/1976. Adorno, Theodor W. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970. Bernstein, Leonard: The Unanswered Question. (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1973). Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Cicero. De Oratore. Translated by James M. May and Jakob Wisse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cooke, Derryck: The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Dahlhaus, Carl: The Idea of Absolute Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Davies, Stephen: Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Einstein, Alfred: Music in the Romantic Era. London: J.M. Dent, 1947. —: Mozart. Sein Charakter, sein Werk. Frankfurt/M: Fischer Verlag, 1968. Geiringer, Karl: Johann Sebastian Bach. München: Beck, 1978. Hagberg, G. L.: Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Honolka, Kurt: Der Musik gehorsame Tochter. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1962. Hume, David: Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by E. G. Mossner. London, Penguin Books, 1969. Kant, Immanuel: Kritik der Urteilskraft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975. Kearney, Richard: The Wake of the Imagination. London: Routledge, 1988. Kerman, Joseph: The Beethoven Quartets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Kivy, Peter: Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. —: Kivy, Peter. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge University Press, 1997. —: Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Kramer, Lawrence: Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Lang, Paul Henry: Music in Western Civilisation. London: J.M. Dent, 1942. Langer, Susanne: Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1953. —: Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. Levinson, Jerrold: Music, Art and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. —: The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Referenve Matter 317 Madell, Geoffrey: Philosophy, Music and Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. Mellers, Wilfrid: Bach and the Dance of God. London: Faber & Faber, 1980. —: Beethoven and the Voice of God. London: Faber & Faber, 1983. Meyer, Leonard B.: Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956. —: Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Moritz, Karl Philipp: Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik. Edited by Hans Joachim Schrimpf. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1962. Pater, Walter: The Renaissance. Ed, Kenneth Clark. Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1961. Rolland, Romain: Musikalische Reise ins Land der Vergangenheit. Literarische Anstalt Frankfurt/M: Rütten & Loening, 1922. Rosen, Charles: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Schlegel, Friedrich: Kritische Schriften. München: Carl Hanser, 1971. Schopenhauer, Arthur: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus, 1972. Schumann, Robert. On Music and Musicians. Ed. K. Wolff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946. Scruton, Roger: The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford University Press, 1997. Tovey, Donald Francis: Essays and Lectures on Music. Oxford University Press, 1949. Wollheim, Richard: Art and its Objects. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Ch. XI Adorno, Theodor W.: Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008). Adorno, Theodor W.: Aesthetic Theory, transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London, Continuum 2002. Bateson, Gregory: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York 1972. Broch, Hermann: Schriften zur Literatur 2 Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M 1975. Cassirer, Ernst: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press, New Haven 1955-7 (3 volumes). Eagleton, Terry: The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford 1990. Kivy, Peter: Same as for preceding chapter. Koestler, Arthur: The Act of Creation, London, Hutchinson 1976. Nehamas, Alexander: Only a Promise of Happiness—The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, Princeton UP 2007.

318 Referenve Matter Plato: Republic XVI. Penguin Classics 2007. Praz, Mario: The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press 1970. Sartre, Jean-Paul: Literary and Philosophical Essays. New York, Collier 1955. Scruton, Roger: Same as for preceding chapter. Ch. XII Dawkins, Richard: Climbing Mount Improbable. New York, W. W. Norton, 1996. De Duve, Christian: Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Dennett, Daniel: Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1991. Deacon, Terrence: The Symbolic Species—The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain, W.W. Norton & Co., New York 1997. Deacon, Terrence: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, New York, W. W. Norton, 2011. Kauffman, Stuart: At Home in the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 Monod, Jacques: Chance and Necessity. Translated by A. Wainhouse. New York: Vintage, 1971. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabella Stengers: Order Out of Chaos. London: Fontana, 1990.

Referenve Matter 319 NAME INDEX Adorno 10, 11, 206, 258, 260, 263 Anaxagoras 11 Andronicus of Rhodes 1 Aquinas 2 Aristotle v, 1, 2, 10, 11, 14, 15, 4179, 126, 230, 260, 261, 275, 277, 286 Arnauld 76-81 Augustine 157, 172, 174, 178-181, 189, 190 Bach, Johann Sebastian 240-248 258, 261, 265, 266, 278 Barbour, Julian 89, 91, 92 Bateson, Gregory 281, 298 Beethoven 221, 238, 240, 241, 245, 254, 255, 266, 275 Bergson 3 Bernoulli, Johann 87 Boeder, Heribert 10 Boltzmann 97, 98, 100, 105 Borges 221-223, 232 Bruner and Olsen 209, 210, 212 Burgundian choristers 219, 238, 240, 247, 261 Burton, Richard 222, 223 Caesar, Julius 80, 90, 95 Canaletto 218 Cavell, Stanley 157, 171, 174, 180, 204 Cervantes 221-223 Churchland, Paul 145-150, 167, 168, 171 Cicero 53, 253 Collingwood 206, 210, 232 Confucius 42-75 Cooke, Derryck 244, 245, 248, 251, 258 Cover and O’Leary 89 Dahlhaus, Carl 234, 236, 241, 242, 258 Dante 264, 268 Danto, Arthur 205-232 Dawkins, Richard 283, 288 Deacon, Terrence 283-305 Dedekind 139 Democritus 47, 114

Dennett 147, 171, 304 Descartes 28, 93, 94, 128, 143, 144, 153, 168, 186, 202, 284 Dewey 7, 8, 206 Dostoyevsky 262, 268 Dürer 218 Duve, Christian de 5 Dvorak 229 Eccles, John 145, 146 Edelman, Gerald 146 Eigen, Manfred 100, 104, 105 Einstein 258, 283 Elgar 224 Everett, Hugh 116, 118, 124 Feuerbach 4 Fichte 19, 24, 41, 229, 232, 238 Frege 179, 180, 196, 201-204 Frescobaldi 240, 243 Fung, Yu-Lang 46 Galileo 126-130, 142, 190 Gassendi 47, 114, 127-130, 142 Gluck (composer) 234, 235 Goethe 266 Gould, Stephen Jay 4 Grieg 263, 278 Gurwitsch 84 Guthrie, W. K. C. 48, 49 Handel 240, 256 Hanslick, Eduard 206, 232 Haydn 235, 238, 240, 241, 248, 250, 255, 266 Hegel v, 19-41, 206, 232, 237, 238 Heidegger 3, 10, 206, 286 Heraclitus 49 Herodotus 69 Hobbes 4, 24, 40 Holbein 218 Honneth, Axel 31, 41 Hoyle, Fred 97, 105 Humboldt, Wilhelm 177 Hume 4, 11, 208, 232, 253 Huxley, Thomas 96-99 Ingres 219 James, William 3, 199, 232 Jaspers 3 Kafka 269 Kandinsky 232 Kant 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 28, 190, 206,

320 Referenve Matter 207, 232-237, 242, 246, 253, 256, 274, 301 Kauffman, Stuart 97, 101, 102, 105, 293 Kivy, Peter 239, 254, 259, 264-270 Kuhn, Thomas 2 Langer, Susanne 206, 246, 276 Lang, Paul Henry 236, 246, 260, 262 Lao-Tse 48 Leibniz 3, 4, 76-105, 171, 190, 221, 222, 348, 349 Leonardo da Vinci 81 Levinson, Jerrold 215-218, 232, 275 Locke 34, 36, 40, 144, 154, 157, 158, 159, 171 Luhmann 217, 218, 232 Magritte 200 Mahler 224 Malebranche 93, 144 Malraux 232, 256 Mannheim orchestra 246, 249, 257 Marlowe 268 Michelangelo 208 Monod, Jacques 6, 286 Moritz, Karl Philipp 241, 242 Mozart 7, 234-241, 255, 258, 261, 266 Newton 110, 133, 204 Ockeghem 238 Ockham 4 Olson and Bruner 211 Ortega y Gasset 4, 11, 76, 206 Palestrina 239 Pascal 281 Pater, Walter 234, 235, 251-256 Philolaos 260 Plato 8, 28, 40, 46, 49, 51, 67, 72, 74, 230, 235, 253, 260, 264, 279 Popper 146 Prigogine, Ilya 115, 293

Protagoras 67 Puccini 224 Pythagoras 47, 260 Rameau 242, 243, 248 Rembrandt 216 Rescher, Nicholas 95, 105-108, 122, 124 Rolland, Romain 243, 274 Rorty, Richard 149, 150, 162, 168, 171 Rosen, Charles 248, 249, 254, 255 Rousseau 33, 237, 242-248 Ryle, Gilbert 153, 171 Santayana 4 Sartre 206, 269 Schlegel, Friedrich 241, 262 Schönberg, Arnold 256 Schopenhauer 200, 238, 253, 254, 277, 278 Schubert 224, 235 Scruton, Roger 275 Searle, John 146, 147, 155, 171, 302 Shakespeare 96, 99, 223, 262, 264 Shostakovich 266 Smolin, Lee 89-92 Socrates 47, 51, 172 Spinoza 93, 111, 144 Tchaikovsky 275 Telemann 240, 243 Thucydides 268 Tolstoy 264 Turner 219 Unamuno 3 van Eyck 218 Van Gogh 224 Wagner 224 Warhol 211, 213 Wheeler, John Archibald 6, 7, 115, 285 Whitehead 3, 135, 142 Wigner, Eugene 6, 7, 116 Wittgenstein 143-204, 258, 260

Referenve Matter 321

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