Poetic Philosophy: the Wittgensteinstevens Connection

by Christopher Perricone It is well-known that Plato thinks philosophy and poetry are at odds with each other. Although both philosophy and poetry share a common medium of expression, nevertheless the manner and goal of their expressions are not at all the same. A philosopher such as Socrates employs simple words and phrases (Apology, 21 ). Poets of various sorts-tragic, epic, dithyrambic-use fancy words and phrases. Of course, philosophers know what they are talking about in the sense that they can present evidence, argument, explanation, and justification for what they say. While poets create their works "by a certain divine inspiration, like soothsayers and prophets"(Apology, 27). In short, poets don't know what they are saying.' Philosophers pursue the truth. The truth, which is not to be understood as merely a logical or an epistemological term, but as a metaphysical one, is to be, if not wholly attained, at least, approached by means of dialectic. Dialectic, as I understand Plato, is not only a process of cross examination, it is also a process of or a progress towards abstraction, abstraction which is also reality. Dialectic has been likened to a ladder we climb, both epistemologically and metaphysically, beyond the here and now. Philosophers and poets, accordingly, are headed in opposite directions. While philosophers try to live among ideas and perhaps cast a bird's eye view upon appearance, poets make images of appearances, i.e., appearances of appearances and revel (or is it wallow?) in them. The poet's aim is not the truth but merely a celebration of appearances, one perhaps a bit too rich, a bit too Dionysian for Plato's blood. The effects of poetry, especially poetry left to its own devices are quite grave; poets, in their blindness to the truth, intoxicated by the power of rhetoric, can create sores at the very heart of society; they can corrupt the moral and religious education of the young. Where education is poor justice shall never flourish. Alfred North Whitehead said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. In respect to the conflict between philosophy and poetry this is surely true; that is, at least, until the twentieth century. Since Plato the great moral philosophers have either avoided or ignored what poets have to say about moral issues, even though there are pockets of sympathy here and there, e.g., J. S. Mill's feel for Wordsworth. For the most part, poets have been thought of as weird and immoral, perhaps like actors, because their "performances" reveal the seamy side of life. Often one finds that the poet has to apologize for what he says, lest his audience think he is a bad character: "nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est" ["It is proper that a poet himself is pious, pure, although it is not at all necessary that his little verses be." my trans.] (Catullus, 16). As far as philosophers' attitudes as to what poets can tell us about the world, about existence, clearly philosophers believe they are talking about reality, while poets merely are creating fictions. The notion that philosophers actually discover something true about the world, that philosophy, like science, progresses, has been as abiding faith among philosophers ever since Plato sowed the seed of that faith. While philosophers foment Copernican-like revolutions, poets, in contrast, bear forward the lighter, and perhaps somewhat paltry, burden of tradition. Wittgenstein: Philosopher on Philosophy Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy, especially the later Wittgenstein, is a break from the way philosophy had been done since Plato's time. It is debatable whether Wittgenstein brought off the revolution single-handedly; some scholars would cite Karl Kraus or Nietzsche as Wittgenstein's comrades in arms;others would point out that people such as Heidegger and Dewey were independently working along lines similar to Wittgenstein's. No one, however, would deny that Wittgenstein was a major player in setting a new course for philosophy; or was it the very destruction of philosophy? It was, and perhaps still is, hard to tell. Even Bertrand Russell, who had

praised the Tractatus was baffled by what Wittgenstein was up to in his later Investigations; Russell said that Wittgenstein's later philosophy was "completely unintelligible" to him. "Its ]the Investigations'] positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages. . . . The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking. . . and possessed of true philosophical genius. The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true ... if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea table amusement."5 My interest in Wittgenstein in this essay is aimed at what he thought about philosophy. I am not so much specifically concerned about what he thought about language games, other minds, mathematics, etc, even though I realize there is some connection between the former and the latter. The reason why I have interest in Wittgenstein's view of philosophy is that I believe that in so far as Wittgenstein breaks away from the Platonic quest for essence (philosophy's mission of discovery, essence having a metaphysical status), Wittgenstein is implicitly resolving the conflict between philosophy and poetry, in effect making philosophy and poetry very much the same kinds of activities. As I suggested above, some thinkers might consider what Wittgenstein is doing as philosophy's death knell, especially if what I say is true, viz., that Wittgenstein is reducing philosophy (traditionally the quest for reality) to poetry (traditionally the making of fictions). As I shall argue, on the contrary, we may well see by Wittgenstein's insights not the death but the liberation, the deepening, and the expanding of philosophy.6 Wittgenstein is not easy to read. Well, that's nothing new in the history of philosophy; neither is Plato, Kant, or Hegel. But, of course, Wittgenstein does not write like the traditional Western philosophers; he does not write dialogues or treatises; perhaps Pascal, or better yet Nietzsche, is an exception, here.7 In the East, Zen writers also would be exceptions; as a matter of fact, some scholars have explored the stylistic and methodological similarities between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Zen.8 Fine. So Wittgenstein is not the only writer in the history of philosophy to have an idiosyncratic style. But such observations are not particularly helpful. After reading some of Wittgenstein's later work, one might still feel that one had traveled "a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing."' Of the Blue Book, O. K. Bouwsma, a seasoned reader of philosophy, says: "This book, notes, discussions, investigations, dictations, contains no introduction, no conclusion, no chapters, no chapter headings, no helpful title.""' As Bouwsma points out, you've seen nothing yet: things get worse. Readers of philosophy "are used to proofs, to arguments, to theories, to evidences, refutations, to infallibles, to indubitables, to foundations, to definitions, to analyses, etc. And if in these terms any reader should, having read, seek to turn his reading to some profit and ask himself: `What has the author proved, for what has he presented arguments, what is his theory, what has he refuted, and what are his infallibles?' he is certain to be disappointed. The author has neither proved nor refuted anything. And he has presented nothing as infallible, nor a theory."11 What Bouwsma says about the Blue Book applies to the Philosophical Investigations as well. True, unlike the Blue Book, the Investigations is divided into two parts: part I comprised of sections 193; part 2 comprised of sections i-xiv. There are distinguishable discussions: family resemblances, seeing as, having a pain. But how exactly this work is to be sliced up and understood is still a matter of debate; the numbering of the sections is of little help. When one is faced with such texts, one might start treating them (that is, if one does not toss them out the window) as sacred (unfortunately as some have done), or one might treat them poetically. Wittgenstein invites us to treat his writings in both ways. In a bad sense, Wittgenstein's mysterious personality, which he helped to cultivate, has led many people to treat him as a guru. However, putting aside biographical knowledge, the texts themselves, I should like to emphasize, look modernly poetic in many ways. Note the following examples from the Philosophical Investigations: 309. What is your aim in philosophy?-To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." 283 .... And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain'? What has a

soul, or pain, to do with a stone'? Only what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains. For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like a soul which some body has. And how can a body have a soul? 11, xi Think of this too: I can only see, not hear, red and green,--but sadness I can hear as much as I can see it. 11, i For a second he felt violent pain.-Why does it sound queer to say: 6For a second he felt deep grief'? Only because it so seldom happens'? 11, xi If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. 115. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. 11. Think of the tools in a tool box: there is a hammer, pliers. a saw, a screw driver, a rule, a glue pot, glue, nails and screws.-The function of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.) 203. Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about, you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about." 414. You think that after all you must be weaving a piece of cloth: because you are sitting at a loom-even if it is empty-and going through the motions of weaving. Although my samples from the Investigations are not entirely picked at random, nevertheless the samples give a fair indication of Wittgenstein's modes of expression, i.e. the sorts of ways he discussed philosophy. Indeed sometimes, as Bouwsma suggested. Wittgenstein's remarks are cryptic-one even begins to wonder why Arabic numerals in Part I, Roman numerals in Part II. However, I think it is important to note that seldom does Wittgenstein's style move very far from the concrete, or I would prefer to say, the lived experience, the poetic; very seldom is he merely prosaic. Whether he is talking about a picture holding us captive or weaving on an empty loom or talking of the similarity between language and tools, whether the point he is making is opaque or clear, Wittgenstein always expresses a deep sense of feeling and a feel for metaphor. Perhaps one might say that Wittgenstein is not only quite consciously saying something, he is also quite consciously showing something; in Wittgenstein's words there is a definite sense of both "true about" and "true to" life. As in the case of the poet, one knows that Wittgenstein's whole being is passionately committed to what he is doing. Stylistically he is experimental in his unusual examples, his odd juxtapositions of ideas and emotions-from the abstract to the concrete, from the emotionally cool to the emotionally painful. However, no matter how bizarre Wittgenstein's discussions might become, one is willing, as in respect to the poet, to suspend one's disbelief, because one senses a ring of truth, or at least a tantalizing claim. Like the poet, Wittgenstein seems to struggle with language, continually trying its resiliency and limits-like a test pilot who tests the metal of the latest aircraft design. Like the poet, too, Wittgenstein does not merely use language, that is, language is not merely a tool, it is a tool to make new tools that will offer new solutions to old problems and also create new ones. And, of course, what Wittgenstein says, too, is obviously deeply felt: "133.... The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.-The one that gives philosophy peace. . ." Perhaps the best compliment you give to a poet is that he or she has a distinctive voice. Wittgenstein had a voice of his own. And, of course, it is most evidently heard in the voices of his imitators." It is not terribly controversial what Wittgenstein thought of philosophy, that is, scholars pretty much agree as to what Wittgenstein's view of philosophy is, although not everyone would agree that his view is the true one.15 There are, of course, the famous aphorisms: "309. To shew the fly out of the fly bottle."(already cited) "119.... uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense

and the bumps that the understanding has got from running head up against the limits of language." "123. A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about."' However, perhaps the best way to describe Wittgenstein's view of philosophy is: non-essentialist. For Wittgenstein the task of philosophy is not to find essence, epistemologically or metaphysically. Epistemologically all we can do is point out and describe the language games we play. Alice Ambrose said: "Wittgenstein says: All I can give you is a method; I cannot teach you any new truths.""' Perhaps better is Wittgenstein himself: "133. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies." So, epistemology needs to be conceived in some organic, i.e., in some living sense: 23. But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?-There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call 'symbols', 'words', 'sentences'. And the multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all: but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten.... Here the term `language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. Metaphysically philosophy discovers nothing. This may be Wittgenstein's most radical, most puzzling, and to some his most despairing claim. 116. When philosophers use a word-`knowledge', 'being', 'object', 'I', . . . and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?-What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use." Wittgenstein here is clearly against any Platonic program in philosophy in so far as essence is anything discoverable in or about the nature of things. He also suggests that the metaphysical use of language is outworn, stilted, laced with cobwebs and soaked in formaldehyde, sublime in a pejorative sense. To save words from their metaphysical use and so return them to their everyday use is to revitalize language. Of course, it should be noted that in the most crucial sense, this is precisely what is the obsession of the poet; the examples are legion: from the classics, Lucretius and Virgil, down to the Americans, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams; poets are continually concerned with keeping language alive. Furthermore, in reference to philosophy discovering nothing, note the following which I take to be one of the most explicit passages on how philosophy is epistemology without metaphysics. Although the context here is about a man who says "only my pain is real," think of what Wittgenstein says as applying to traditional philosophers and philosophy in general; that is part of his point. He (the philosopher) sees a way of dividing the country differently from the one used on the ordinary map. He feels tempted, say, to use the name 'Devonshire' not for the county with its conventional boundary, but for a region differently bounded. He could express this by saying: `Isn't it absurd to make this a county, to draw the boundaries here?' But what he says is: `The real Devonshire is this.' We could answer, 'What you want is only a new notation, and by a new notation no facts of geography are changed. Philosophers think they are discovering things that are "real" when in fact all they are doing is redrawing boundaries on maps. One might ask: Isn't there a "real" map as opposed to the many maps that are merely perspectives of the "real"? Might not all the perspectives constitute the "real" map? The answer to the first question is: The hypothesized "real" map, the one that is perspective-less, would not be a map at all, by the very fact that it is unreadable; it would be a noumenal map; but a noumenal map is a contradiction in terms. The second question is quite simply answered by noting that, in principle, the number of perspectives is infinite. Hence one never possesses an actually real map, unless one were a Leibnizian God. Rather it is better to consider the history of philosophy to be like the history of political struggles-where yesterday our experience of or our talk about a defined area was called Germany, now it is called France; given

time even the people who now have a German form of life will slowly adopt a new perspective, a new form of life, which is French; also, I suppose, some of that residue of the German form of life will rub off on the French, and so all our perspectives evolve. Of course, ultimately I would suggest that the history of philosophy is very much like the history of poetry, histories of "methods of redrawing boundaries." Or think of philosophy this way: "The form of sentence in which a philosopher presents his remodeling of conventional language is the form of sentence ordinarily used to state a matter of fact."" However, the philosopher does not realize that his new model does not function as did the original. He thinks he is expressing a matter of fact or a theory, that is, talking about existence. But "his mistake lies in the construction he places on what he is doing..."" Philosophical problems "are not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language.... The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."2 In Zettel, Wittgenstein says: "do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." What Wittgenstein says of poetry is true of philosophy; as a matter of fact, much of what I have discussed has more or less supported this. Throughout the history of philosophy, students of philosophy have taken philosophers to be playing a quasi-scientific game; hence philosophy as metaphysics. Philosophers have been thought of as in search of the method A la Descartes, in search of the language of truth, as if there were an ideal language, one which might reveal the limits of language and the absolute criteria separating sense from nonsense. One of the results of the traditional philosophical quest has been to think that philosophers might find the real meanings of words, Socrates looking for piety in a haystack. Wittgenstein sees the history of philosophy qua the history of metaphysics as an illness, ironically in much the same way that Plato saw the history of poetry qua the history of science as an illness. One of the ways one cures oneself of these kind of illnesses is not to confuse the various functions of language-games. One ought not to take poetry for metaphysics or for science. One ought not to take philosophy for metaphysics or for science. Friedreich Waismann says: "you may confute and kill a scientific theory; a philosophy dies only of old age."21 Poems, too, die only of old age. One senses more and more that the languagegames of philosophy and poetry have important family resemblances. Stevens:Poet on Poetry When I browse through the writings of Wallace Stevens and find ... Poetry is a cure of the mind.22 I have no life except in poetry. (OP 175) My intention in poetry is to write poetry .. and to do this because I feel the need of doing it, (OP xxxvii) The poem is the cry of its occasion, Part of the res itself and not about it. (CW 473) The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. Does it move to and fro or is it of both At once? Is it a luminous flittering Or the concentration of a cloudy day? Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? ... It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination's Latin with The fingua franca et

jocundissima." (CW 397) Natives of poverty, children of malheur, The gaiety of language is our seigneur. (CW 322) Words at ding else in the world. (OP' 1-74)II The loss of language creates confusion and dumbness. (OP 159) It may be said that poetic truth is an agreement with reality, brought about by the imagination of a man disposed to be strongly influenced by his imagination." (NA 54) ... when I browse through Stevens, I tend to think of Wittgenstein. I am not going to argue that Wittgenstein and Stevens are identical twins in respect to what each is doing in philosophy and poetry. However, I shall argue that there are enough striking family resemblances between them to make them fundamentally brothers. Stevens was a not a philosopher in any strict sense of the word. Yet it seems he read a fair amount of philosophy. It is probably best to think of him as an amateur philosopher. Of those philosophers contemporary to him, he writes of Russell, Bergson, Santayana, et al., traditional philosophers from the perspective of the later Wittgenstein. Nowhere, however, as far as I know, does Stevens mention Wittgenstein. This is not surprising since Wittgenstein's reputation had not spread during his lifetime much beyond academic circles, and furthermore the Investigations was published posthumously. If there are fundamental similarities between Wittgenstein and Stevens, then these similarities are accidents, coincidences, rather than the result of design. Certainly, any similarities between Wittgenstein and Stevens are not the direct result of Stevens' deliberate meditations on philosophy. If similarities between Wittgenstein and Stevens exist, on Stevens' side they become manifest not consciously but unconsciously through the very activity of his poetry. As philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is a doing so, too, is poetry, according to Stevens. Wittgenstein says the language-game we call philosophy is a "form of life." Stevens says "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words." (NA 32) "The body is the great poem." (OP 168) These factors and others make the WittgensteinStevens connection a provocative one. As I said above, when I read Stevens I often think of Wittgenstein. Also when I read Stevens I think of Cezanne and sometimes Braques; I definitely do not think of Poussin or Claude.24 Like Wittgenstein, Stevens was particularly interested in landscapes and maps and drawing and redrawing boundaries. His poetry is not a poetry of people (as Cezanne's paintings are also not of people), it is more a poetry of place.25 But it is not of permanent places, of Arcadian places, all rolling hills and golden sunsets. Stevens' places are more austere, more clearly delineated, places that can be rotated in one's mind and seen from different angles; they are pregnant with perspective, cubist or bordering-on-cubist places, moving still lives. Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound. Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self, Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind. (CW 466) Notice how we rotate around in the imagination the houses Stevens speaks of by means of the repetitions of words and sounds, such as the repetition of "impalpable" and the hiss of one sibilant after the next. This is typical of Stevens; note again in the same poem: "In the land of the lemon trees, yellow and yellow/were/ Yellow-blue, yellow-green pungent with citron sap,/Dangling and spangling, the mic-mac of mocking/birds" (CW 486). But not only is repetition typical of Stevens' style, also typical is his tendency towards aphorism, his use of unfamiliar words, his odd juxtapositions, his non sequiturs. The following is a nicely compressed example of Stevens' powers.

Bantams In Pine-Woods Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachinan tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos. (CW 75) As we have come to expect from modernist poetry (and may I suggest, bearing forward the Wittgensteinian banner, what we ought to expect from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy), Stevens' style is continually pushing at the limits of language.=fi There is a clear reason for this. Like all poets, Stevens is in love with language and in love with exercising his linguistic skills deftly. Our sense of the world is reflected in the very way we talk about the worl"oth the medium and the manner are the message. Hence: Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. (CW 59) Or note these Wittgensteinian lines from "Six Significant Landscapes": Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses-- As, for example, the ellipse of the halfmoonRationalists would wear sombreros. (CW 75) How you say something and what you say are indistinguishable; like all poets, Stevens labors over le mot juste. I suppose this is a commonplace. However, the way Stevens goes about extending our language and our world is what makes him interesting. In an essay/poems entitled "3 Academic Pieces," Stevens talks at length about the idea of resemblance. I think this is one of the keys to understanding Stevens on poetry and the world. He says at the beginning of the essay section of that piece, if one wants to formulate a theory of poetry, one must examine the structure of reality. Ultimately, the structures) of reality are a reflection of the structures of the creative imagination. Hence the importance of resemblance (NA 71 ).27 To talk about resemblance, as one might expect, is to talk of metaphor. But it is to talk of metaphor as a binding power. What is curious and significant about metaphor, according to Stevens, is that it has the potential to connect anything to anything;21 it has a power analogous to light to compose scenes and the power of light, when it changes in brilliance and hue, to suggest an infinite variety of nuances of intellectual and emotional moods. As Stevens says: "Resemblance in metaphor is an activity of the imagination; and in metaphor the imagination is life"(NA 73). Now this is not to say that every resemblance creates a metaphor. Stevens is careful to distinguish between a true resemblance which produces a true metaphor and a mere resemblance which produces imitation. Imitations, says Stevens, are "artificial" and "lifeless" (NA 73). But still we might ask Stevens: what do you mean? I think Stevens would answer thus: A resemblance, a metaphor is true not lifeless when like "a strand of a child's hair [it] brings back the whole child and in that way resembles the child" (NA 75). Metaphor not only has the power of

connecting what seemed not to be connected and not only the power to make us see old things in new ways, metaphor, too, has the power of synecdoche; the right combination of words, an interesting re-drawing of boundaries of a landscape, focus on an ordinary detail from a slightly different angle, all these have the power of suggesting wholes, generating unthought of vistas, supreme fictions. And what also makes a true metaphor is its natural, almost unconscious, feel, a surprise that in some deep sense is not at all surprising; one naturally wants to say in response to the true metaphor: but, of course, the strand of child's hair is the whole child. Poetry's "singularity is that in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it.... It makes it brilliant. When the similarity is between things of adequate dignity, the resemblance may be said to transfigure or to sublimate them" (NA 77). Stevens' discussion of resemblance in respect to metaphor is especially important to my overall discussion, because Stevens emphasizes, like Wittgenstein, that (metaphorical) thinking does not move in a linear or progressive way. What metaphor teaches us about ourselves and the world is: (1) that between ourselves and the world there is no sharp dividing line; (2) that ourselves and the world are to be understood and appreciated from many different perspectives; (3) that we are inexhaustible generators of meanings. Stevens' poetry itself is the best evidence for these claims. He often reminds me of a jazzman (although I know of no mention of jazz in his work); some of the lines of his poems sound like scatting, that play with nonsense sound, that inarticulate or half articulate groping for meaning, as it were an echo of man's infancy, or perhaps a satirical poke at man's aspirations to clarity when all, in fact, is gibberish; Stevens is enchanted with repetition, too, as I have already mentioned, along with variation, improvisation, surprises, experiments, the never- ending quest for new licks. Like Charlie Parker or Stephane Grappelli or Bill Evans, Stevens loves to say the same thing in many ways. But to say the same thing in different ways is not merely to say the same thing. It is to make the thing into something different; it is to extend the thing, embellish it, boil it down, distort it, make it more than it could have been were it left alone. In a sense, the more ways you can say the same thing differently, the more the thing is revealed; and the more it is revealed, it is further revealed that any one thing is not just one thing but all the things we can imagine it to be. Of course, the more a thing is revealed the more we are revealed. Hence Stevens says the "structure of poetry and the structure of reality are one or, in effect, that poetry and reality are one, or should be."(NA 81) One finds what I have been saying most obviously demonstrated in such poems as "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Six Significant Landscapes," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," or perhaps best in "Man with a Blue Guitar" ("The man replied, `Things are as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar'"[CW 165].) which alludes to Picasso's picture, "The Old Guitarist"-perhaps Stevens' homage to a fellow jazzman-an improviser of color. Like Stevens, Picasso, too, was quite fond of variation, perhaps his most famous are the variations on Velaquez's "Las Meninas. Stevens' first book was entitled Harmonium. An harmonium is a small organ wellsuited for a living room, at which one could occasionally spend some time playing tunes for oneself or for some friends. The harmonium functions as an apt metaphor to describe the nature and purpose of poetry, and maybe, too, a Wittgensteinian style philosophy."' As I have already suggested, although Stevens had a profound fondness for philosophy, he did not think that man's highest intellectual virtues were achieved by means of progressive thinking or that any final conclusions or beliefs could be reached by means of philosophy. In the sense that philosophy is a quest for the method or certainty, Stevens is not a follower of philosophy at all.." Actually he thought the best philosophy and the best poetry were one-something Wittgenstein strongly intimates but never quite says- i.e. modes of disillusionment and exercises of insight, intuition, and imagination; in flashes or on occasions, as the need arises, at the harmonium one plays the tunes, "the supreme fictions" by which one is able, at least, temporarily to live. These fictions, or more to the point, these performances of fictionalizing, as the subtitles of "Notes to a Supreme Fiction" state: ". . . Must Be Abstract," "... Must Change," and "... Must Give Pleasure." At the harmonium one seeks "poetic truth (which) is an agreement with reality, brought about by the imagination of a man disposed to be strongly influenced by his imagination, which he believes, for a time, to be true, expressed in terms of his emotions or since it is less of a restriction to say so, in terms of his own personality"(NA 54). It should be noted that at the harmonium we are players of tunes, of a game,

of a form of life. Think of Wittgenstein here; the maps we draw mediate between the imagination and our experience; the imagination and experience continually feed each other; they are not clearly distinguishable; the relationship between them is dynamic; hence no one map that the imagination concocts is the final map; hence maps become outmoded; the imagination cannot sit still by its very nature; it must play, play again, and so on.'2 The imagination by its re-ordering function is not discovering new sounds; it is not at all at the service of metaphysics, as it might have been in the past. The player, the imagination, brings out meaning and therefore allows us to hear differently; it allows us to perceive more keenly and therefore believe i.e., get pleasure momentarily from our playing selves. Of course, it must be emphasized that believing has no specific referent. Believing for Stevens is bringing the ego to realize although "He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest/ In a permanent realization"(CW 425) nevertheless "Nothing is final... No man shall see the end" (CW 150). "It never can be satisfied, the mind, never" (CW 247)."' Once one realizes that disillusionment is necessary-that there is no underlying metaphysical order, no one scheme to which one might cling, no "real" score, only performancesthen freed from metaphysical demands we demand nothing except the orders we might invent, the tunes we might play. 14 Summary of The Wittgenstein-Stevens Connection 1. Although one cannot compare strictly speaking the writing styles of Wittgenstein and Stevens, since they write in different languages, nevertheless many of the stylistic devices each employs are quite similar. Both are fond of punchy aphorisms, unusual examples, odd juxtapositions, and, as I suggested, they seem to possess a similar sense of humor, a dry and an ironic one to be sure. Although from any writer one can discern affinities between style and substance, in both Wittgenstein and Stevens one senses a conscious effort to form style and substance into an alloy of thought and affection. As a result, neither Wittgenstein's philosophy nor Stevens' poetry seems to move forward in a traditional sense; as I have pointed out, neither of them thinks progressively; neither of them reaches conclusions; both of them love to improvise. Although I mentioned that for Stevens making and appreciating poetry is like playing the harmonium, I did not mention anything about Wittgenstein's deep interest in music. Unlike Stevens, Wittgenstein's life was filled with music. One wonders how this musical side to Wittgenstein's life might have affected his philosophical/improvisational side.i5 2. Wittgenstein and Stevens are both against metaphysical thinking in a traditional sense; both repudiate the quest for certainty in the sense that such a quest would be a discovery of anything and especially a discovery of essence; as we have seen, philosophy and poetry are a doing without a having, a possessing. The function of philosophy and poetry is to re-draw boundaries, to produce "methods" or "fictions"; Wittgenstein asks: "But how many kinds of sentences are there. . ?"; Stevens asks: How many ways can you look at a blackbird? In a negative sense; if metaphysics is denied by philosophers, as in some sense it has always been denied by poets, i.e., poets traditionally create fictions, then philosophers save themselves from the trap of thinking that they are talking about something, i.e., that they are on a mission of discovery, when they are not. Perhaps you could say it saves the philosopher from the propensity to dogmatism; and you might furthermore say it saves him from intolerance; in the most extreme sense, if metaphysics is denied, Galileo is saved from the Cardinal Bellarmine. In a positive sense, if metaphysics is denied and all one does as a philosopher or a poet is epistemology, then one is engaged continually in the re-vitalization of one's language, ultimately a most humanistic endeavor, a re-vitalization of one's forms of life. So Wittgenstein says: "What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use." So Stevens says: "The poet makes silk dresses out of worms"(OP 157). If these qualities are what make philosophy and poetry valuable, then it will always be an inspiration to the philosopher and the poet to be leaning against the conventional modes of expression, i.e., distrusting language. Furthermore especially in reference to philosophy, once the quest for certainty is given up, as poetic works have been evaluated in terms of their consistency, coherence, interest, inimitability, fecundity, etc., so, too, then will philosophical works be judged by similar standards. Hence the history of philosophy begins to look less like the history of science, which on some accounts presupposes the idea of progress, and more like the history of literature

which presupposes the idea of perspective. 3. If philosophers or poets discover nothing, what is their raison d'etre? To paraphrase Stevens: they give pleasure to themselves and to others. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: they bring relief, a momentary peace to themselves or perhaps to others.36 And the pleasure and relief they gain or give ultimately is the pleasure and relief in the act of creation. As we saw, both Wittgenstein and Stevens create out of need; it is as if they had no choice. This seems to be true most dramatically with virtually all great creators. However, to a lesser degree we are all creators out of necessity; creation seems intrinsic to human life, as it were man, homo creans. However, as I said, all pleasure, all relief is only temporary, which, of course, is consistent with philosophy's and poetry's persistent task of re-drawing boundaries. And again, of course, this is a mixed blessing: in a negative sense philosophy's and poetry's task is never done precisely because there is no one task to do, as it were the riddle of the universe to solve--that is the metaphysical view; in a positive sense, the wonder of creation is forever alive. Plato Redux I said at the beginning of this essay that Wittgenstein's view of philosophy implicitly resolves the conflict between poetry and philosophy initiated by Plato. I hope my readings of Wittgenstein and Stevens have shown that claim to be true. Or maybe more modestly I should hope that my readings of Wittgenstein and Stevens have shown that there is a legitimacy to a certain form of philosophy and to a certain form of poetry, forms one might call poetic philosophy and philosophical poetry. Throughout the essay, I have mentioned or suggested benefits especially in respect to a poetic philosophy; these are the most important: (1) A poetic philosophy liberated from metaphysics and the dogmatism metaphysics historically has implied allows for constellations of truths, many paths to those truths, and the coexistence of many wise men; of course, this need not imply philosophical anarchy; to deny The Truth is not to deny better or worse, more or less satisfactory, more or less beautiful, more or less fecund... (2) A poetic philosophy also, as I have said, emphasizes the creative and the experimental, which, I should hope, liberate us from excessive past-looking, a conservative strain in yet many philosophers who might call themselves Aristotelians or Kantians or Hegelians, etc. Unlike poets, who strain towards the future, who have a healthier view of tradition (I've never heard of poets unabashedly characterizing themselves as Homeric poets or Shakespearean poets or Whitmanian poets), philosophers tend to be stuffy and often accept the burden of the past without ever trying to throw it off. (3) Most importantly, rather than accepting the burden of the past or foolishly trying to deny it, a poetic philosophy connects in a symbiotic fashion current philosophical activity with its sources, both natural and historical. Plato thought that philosophy would be freed from error if it were severed from its sources; had Plato not thought that he had to separate logos from mythos in order to awaken men from their dogmatic slumbers, Plato himself might have been the very model of the poetic philosopher. However, Plato unwittingly went too far; logos itself when it is severed from mythos, becomes the ground of metaphysics, and because of its rarefied nature it, too, soon drops off into a mythic coma of its own. What Plato did not realize, or perhaps only unconsciously realized by his own myth making genius, is that the mythic and the logic need continually to be at odds with each other in order to nourish each other. One might say that what Wittgenstein and Stevens show is that severing mythos from logos cripples the whole person, and rather than undermining false ideals, ethical or aesthetical, the separation produces disembodied ideals, i.e., logos aiming at the abstract tends to become impious in the sense that it turns away from the irrational substratum of reason: the partiality intrinsic to man's feelings and the local status of man's life. In fact, mythos and logos together help to form the organic unity of the person. Among the Greeks before Plato there is no literature, philosophy, history, science; there is just Greek talk. Everything is united in the works of Parmenides, Homer, Empedocles, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Herodotus. Wittgenstein and Stevens try in some sense to recapture those pre-Platonic times, but now with a greater critical consciousness of language, language never trusted, language both a vehicle for the expression of concepts and judgments and for the expression of the texture and rhythm of life." -1-

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: Poetic Philosophy: the Wittgenstein-stevens Connection. Contributors: Christopher Perricone - author. Journal Title: Philosophy Today. Volume: 44. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 245+. 2000 DePaul University. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

What makes language possible? Ethological foundationalism in Reid and Wittgenstein.

by Rom Harre , Daniel N. Robinson Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the twentieth made strong cases for the existence of "communication systems" that must be in place if there is to be the acquisition of any language; language in the full sense of a system of words, displaying distinctions into word classes and ordered by a grammar that is sensitive to those word classes. Although their pre-languages have something of the character of language proper, Reid and Wittgenstein offer a very different conception of the necessary conditions for the existence of language from that proposed by Chomsky, much criticized for its implausible cognitivism. (For a recent and devastating criticism see Malcolm.(1)) In this paper we compare and contrast Reidian and Wittgensteinian conceptions of what there must be for language to be possible, and draw some morals for the vexed, but in our view, empty question of the demarcation of language from all other intentional and normative systems in use amongst people and animals. I Reid on Natural Language. There is a long philosophical tradition, beginning with the Stoics, which sets humanity apart from the balance of the animal economy on the basis of linguistic prowess.(2) It is centrally featured in the works of Descartes. In part 5 of his Discourse on the Method, for example, he offers two tests that would be failed by any machine, no matter how complex, designed to match or simulate genuinely human life. First, it would be unable to use language creatively, even if it could utter words connected with its actions. Second, it would not be able to adapt itself to the welter of changing conditions which rational beings easily accommodate. From this he concludes, "Now in just these two ways we can also know the difference between man and beast.... This shows not merely that the beasts have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all."(3) On this account language is innate and restricted to human beings, an ability that is unnatural and thus outside the order of nature. John Locke's philosophy of mind explicitly eschews such nativistic explanations--or nonexplanations--by emphasizing the experiential sources and social purposes of language. On Locke's account language becomes the means by which the "invisible ideas" in consciousness are given public expression. Communication being necessary to the "comfort and advantage of society", he says, "it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others." Thus, it must be by local conventions that words come to serve as the signs of thoughts; or else, says Locke, "there would be but one language amongst all men."(4) Superficial evidence to the contrary, however, neither Descartes nor Locke closely examined the basis upon which linguistic signs come to function within patterns of shared meaning. The Cartesian account offers an essentially nativistic theory of linguistic and rational powers, citing the fact, in Chomskian fashion, as if it were an explanation. No argument is developed to establish the nonexperiential sources of language. The Lockean account, which does locate sources of meaning in the domain of experience, remains reliant on invisible ideas while passing over the difficulty of explaining how others might come to share them. Thomas Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), attempted to reconcile both of these positions, supplying at once something of a formal proof of a version of the nativistic thesis and, at the same time, an essentially ethological theory of meaning. His thesis is expressed with commendable efficiency:

I think it is demonstrable that, if mankind had not a natural language, they could never have invented an artificial one by their reason and ingenuity. For all artificial language supposes some compact or agreement to affix a certain meaning to certain signs, therefore there must be compacts or agreements before the use of artificial signs; but there can be no compact or agreement without signs, nor without language; and therefore there must be a natural language before any artificial language can be invented: Which was to be demonstrated.(5) The words used to stand for objects bear no physical resemblance to what is signified. They are, then, artificial signs. So-called natural signs in Reidian psychology are the natural responses to objects perceived in the external world. Thus, the (physiological) effect a visible stimulus has on the percipient is the natural sign of that stimulus. Reid's realist epistemology then presupposes that the mind, by a power yet unknown and unexplained, is able to move from the natural sign to the thing signified On this account, the mind is not in possession of the images of things, nor does it make (Humean) "copies" of impressions. Rather, it is part of the natural constitution of animals to perceive actual objects. Though experience is mediated by physiological processes, the perceptual result is not the experience of the mediational processes but of the instigating stimulus. Reid's most general defense of realism against impressionism is pragmatic and ethological. The lowly caterpillar, he insists, will traverse a thousand leaves until it finds one right for its diet; an achievement foreordained if there would be caterpillars. One finds in Reid reference to both a providential deity and "the constitution of our nature", the terms employed indifferently to underscore the noncoincidental and functional relationship between a given form of animal life and the perceptual, behavioral and cognitive powers required for it. The animal kingdom faces a world rich in threats and promises. To function within such a context creatures must be provided with ready means by which to signal certain states and dispositions. The behavior of one animal serves as a natural sign to certain others. Reid notes that such signs are associated with food and danger, affection, honor and disgrace, resentment and gratitude. The complex social relationships, hierarchies and intraspecific arrangements in evidence in the animal kingdom leave no doubt that certain sounds and gestures and postures signify matters of consequence. If all this were not in place naturally, no degree of "wit and ingenuity", says Reid, would allow them to be invented. Indeed, their invention would presuppose the very grounds of shared meaning allegedly invented. Considering the conditions that must be naturally in place for there to be a recognizable human society, Reid offers a modest list: The elements of this natural language of mankind, or the signs that are naturally expressive of our thoughts, may, I think, be reduced to these three kinds; modulations of the voice, gestures, and features. By means of these two savages who have no common artificial language, can converse together; can communicate their thoughts in some tolerable manner; can ask and refuse, affirm and deny, threaten and supplicate; can traffic, enter into covenants, and plight their faith. This might be confirmed by historical facts of undoubted credit, if it were necessary.(6) Reid ties artificial language to natural language, and it is the latter that creates the very possibility of joint action. He recognizes that the richness and complexity of the former is a mixed blessing, allowing at once for the priceless achievements of literate man but, at the same time, for epidemic confusions and opacities. The virtue becomes a vice as the very grounding of artificial language is set loose from its natural-language moorings. Evidence that this has taken place is a diminished capacity for cooperative and concerted labor, and a diminished agreement within the community of linguists as to what words actually mean, that is, what they signify. On Reid's account, a near universality of meaning is to be expected where artificial signs are tightly tethered to the natural requirements, the needs, fears and expectations of human communities. As thought and action become ever more provincial--as they do in grand philosophical theories-conventional meaning is often the first casualty. He attempts no exhaustive catalogue of the elements of natural language. He is content to identify the genre as that which bears centrally on cooperative, defensive and agonistic relationships within and between groups of mutually influential beings. Students of Wittgenstein will find a resemblance between this Reidian account of natural

language and what Wittgenstein meant by "natural expression". How close are their respective understandings? For example, is the startle response (head thrown back, mouth open and eyes wide) a part of a "natural language"? It is certainly a Wittgensteinian "natural expression" ultimately displaced by the functionally equivalent, "Oh my!" or "Gosh" and so on, though neither of these is quite without further cognitive content. The question can be sharpened by introducing a fairly standard pair of criteria for distinguishing those signs which are linguistic or language-like from those which are part of a mere causal matrix of behaviors. Consider Saussure's well-known condition of arbitrariness. We run into difficulties with sign distinctions that are grammaticized, such as the two second-person forms in most European languages. The words "tu" and "vous" could, as vocables, have been anything you like, but the distinction expressed in their relationship is tightly tied to the actualities of French society. Thus, the startle response is not arbitrary, whereas saying "Oh my!" is. A display of surprise comprises the biological necessities of retreat and attention. What then could we turn to for some aid in making the distinction between what is language-like and what is language? Intentionality and normativity are obvious candidates. A sign is intentional if it is meant, and if, as so meant, it points to something other than itself. This means that a sign does not entail that its use requires reflective planning. The startle response is certainly intentional in part of the relevant sense. It points beyond itself to something surprising, sudden or dangerous. As a response we might be reluctant to say it was not meant. Yet is it normatively constrained? It seems quite implausible to suggest that it is. The big sister baboon does not punish and correct a baby brother whose startle response is not quite right; nor, for that matter, does mother homo sapiens do the like for infant homo sapiens. So if Reid's natural language is taken to include the startle response, it includes a category of signs at once only weakly intentional and nonnormative.(7) Accordingly, to ears attuned to the normative conception of language as a set of tools that are effective only if used rightly (within a penumbra of nonserious deviations), Reid's extension of the use of the word "language" to categorize all natural signs could be misleading. It would be an extension otherwise carefully avoided by Wittgenstein, who, ever alert to the misleading nuance, writes only of "natural expressions." We shall see, however, that far from undermining it, this is a subtlety which actually strengthens the general Reid-Wittgenstein view of the foundations of language. We need only avoid certain implications that might be drawn from Reid's terminology, but are not found in his own thesis. II Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, as we shall show, broadens the scope of the "natural history of mankind" to include not only ethological givens that frame our patterns of normative action, but also long-term stabilities of culture. Compatibly, Reid broadens the boundaries of what we should call "language." Reid's "natural language" is, roughly, an expressive ethology, including some of the natural actions that Wittgenstein too would incorporate into a general theory of social organization. Wittgenstein's elaboration of the ethological dimension to include the social is clearly illustrated by three key elements in his thought: the Private Language Argument; the solution to the problem of reference; and the nature of rules. It is to these that we now turn. Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument (PLA). This famous argument involves three interwoven and mutually supporting strands. There is a demonstration that the denotational account of meaning, that is, that meaning learned in situations in which the mentor points to an exemplar of what the word being taught stands for, cannot be exhaustive, since meaningful words for sensations and bodily feelings could not be learned that way. This demonstration depends upon a common sense but fundamental observation. Since feelings are private, experienced only by the person who, for example, feels itchy, they could not be exemplars from which an infant learns words for sensations and feelings. Exemplars must be public. Yet these words are learned with ease. The denotational account of meaning as "object signified," however, is based on the assumption that it is objects that words denote. The second strand of PLA is an argument to show that feelings are not "objects" in the sense of objects that are pointed to in situations of ostensive learning. This argument is based on an analysis of the concept of "same feeling" in two different contexts: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal. According to Wittgenstein, "same feeling" cannot be analyzed along the same lines as we analyze concepts of sameness for material things. Judgments of "sameness" in material contexts are based on criteria which make use of qualitative and numerical identity. In some later paragraphs in the exposition of the PLA, Wittgenstein shows in some detail that these

criteria of identity have no place in language games in which we snake such judgments as "It is the same feeling I had yesterday" or "I know just what you are feeling." Yet everyone makes many everyday unproblematic judgments of sameness and difference of feelings. Bodily feelings are not objects in the relevant sense. Even if they were, their privacy precludes their use as exemplars for denotational learning. How is this seemingly intractable problem resolved? We use feeling words perfectly well, yet it seems that we are never in a position to learn them. The impasse comes about because we took two things for granted. We assumed that all word learning is by a "baptismal" procedure. Words are learned, it was assumed, by the teacher uttering the word and pointing to an exemplar of the kind of object talked about. We also assumed that feelings were a special sort of object or entity, for which the usual, thing-related criteria of identity were appropriate. Feelings, however, are not thing-like. So we have two gaps to fill in understanding how it is possible to discuss our private feelings with others and to reflect on what we felt in the past. How is it that words for feelings and other private experiences do get their proper meanings? And what do we mean by "same feeling" in both intra- and interpersonal contexts? The Problem of Reference. How do words refer to sensations? There does not seem to be any problem here. Do we not talk about sensations every day, and give them names? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the names for sensations--of the word "pain" for example? Here is one possibility: Words are connected with the primitive, the natural expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain behavior. "So you are saying that the word `pain' really means crying?" On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.(8) In this well-known statement, both questions get the same answer, in effect. What are the language games in which feeling words are actually learned? A child falls over and cries. A client sighs with satisfaction as a masseur stretches a muscle. An aspirant weeps with frustration. These are natural expressions of how one is feeling. Words for feelings are learned as alternatives to natural ways of expressing feelings. Instead of groaning we learn to say "I am in pain." So here we have the essential move in a resolution of the problem of how it is possible to learn a feeling word. It is in just these sorts of language games that we can find a place for the judgments of "same and different feeling." They are not made by a comparison between your feelings and mine, or between my feeling of yesterday and my feeling of today. They are made by attention to parallel patterns in the language games in which our feelings are expressed. The distinctions here are prefigured in Reid's analysis of the difference between sensation and perception. In the sentences, "I feel a pain in my leg" and "I see a rose in the garden," we find grammatical objects in both (pain, rose). In the first of these sentences, however, the object is only grammatical (and not actual) in that the feeling just is the pain. We do not derive knowledge of our sensations in the sense in which we derive knowledge of roses. That we are in pain is not some sort of epistemic claim validated through appeals to public criteria. As Reid says, The form of the expression, I feel pain, might seem to imply that the feeling is something distinct from the pain felt; yet, in reality, there is no distinction. As thinking a thought is an expression which could signify no more than thinking, so feeling a pain signifies no more than being pained. What we have said of pain is applicable to every other mere sensation.(9) Consistent with this position, Wittgenstein goes on to develop a thoroughgoing distinction between describing something, say a state of mind, or a mental image, and expressing "how it is with me," for example how I am feeling. In the former case there is room for evidence, and error. In the latter there is no epistemological gap between the groan and the feeling. The groan expresses the feeling, it does not describe it. Feeling and the disposition or tendency to groan, sigh, rub the spot, weep and so on are integral parts of the same phenomenon. Abstract any of them and the phenomenon disappears. If we have no tendency to groan, then whatever the feeling is, it cannot be pain. We see, then, that in Wittgenstein as in Reid, expressive ways of using language depend on a preexisting ethological repertoire of natural expressions of the ways we are feeling: sad, in pain, surprised, threatened, happy, and so on. This is part of the natural history of humankind.

Nonetheless, the point here is a subtle one. Wittgenstein's account of an individual acquiring the "pain" language game cannot be generalized to an account of all of humanity acquiring it through some sort of drill. The "pain" language game must already be in place within the culture as a necessary condition for the suggestion sketched at section 244 in the Philosophical Investigations. Is there an explanation of the human practice summed up in our description of the "pain" language game? Certainly not, if by explanation we mean to give reasons for the existence of something. It makes no sense to say, prelinguistically, that human beings felt the need for a verbal expression of pain, and for that reason introduced it. Absent the language game of giving reasons, there are no reasons! It is very far from clear what "explaining" would be like in this context. Quite simply, to have the capacity to express pain in gestures and other characteristic behavior is part of what it is to be a human being. There may be some nonhuman animals possessing the same or similar behavioral tendencies and still others with their own species-specific ethologies of distress. In these respects Wittgenstein's position and Reid's are essentially the same. If it were the case that the natural means by which an entity (Smith-the-Martian) expressed an emotion otherwise like that felt by a sublunary entity (Jones-the-earthling), there would simply be no basis on which either could come to replace their respective natural languages with meaningful artificial linguistic signs. If Jones never met another earthling, he could never evolve replacement signs of the emotion in question. This is not to say that the emotion itself would be diminished, or that Jones would cease to express it by, for example, smiling. Rather, it would be the case that Jones's smile would be meaningless. It would not even mean anything to Jones, for it would be drawn from the same pool of physiological processes as the emotion itself. The smile is but a physical corollary of the feeling until such time as it can replace the feeling. Only then does it signify anything. Rules and the natural history of mankind. Yet what can we say about the normativity of the human uses of language, and indeed other symbolic systems? Reid's thesis, like Wittgenstein's, is ethological. Human beings (as well as other animals) are naturally constituted such that a given form of life becomes possible, even nearly inevitable. There are general principles that account at once for the basis upon which we receive information through the "natural language" shared with fellow creatures and also receive information from the external world through perception. Thus, when we begin to learn our mother tongue, we perceive, by the help of natural language, that they who speak to us use certain sounds to express certain things; we imitate the same sounds when we would express the same things and find that we are understood.(10) The question that naturally arises has to do with the source of our credulity, for it is not a matter of unfailing experience that persons have always performed this way; nor would such past consistency support the belief that the future will mimic the past. Nor, indeed, have others promised never to deceive or mislead and, in any case, promises, too, must be expressed in words and could only sustain belief on the very assumption that the words can be trusted. There is, rather, . . . an early anticipation, neither derived from experience, nor from reason, nor from any compact or promise, that our fellow-creatures will use the same signs in language, when they have the same sentiments. This is, in reality, a kind of prescience of human actions; and it seems to me an original principle of the human constitution without which we should be incapable of language, and consequently incapable of instruction.(11) To see where this prelinguistic, natural" aspect enters into Wittgenstein's account of language, we need to pay close attention to his distinction between the frame that makes the application of something possible and that application itself. Often in his critical discussions of psychological theories, he finds that a certain way of using words is adopted but it is empty; it has no application. Thus, as Malcolm has remarked, Chomsky's talk of an infant's inherent theory of language seems to make sense, but on closer scrutiny we can see that the phrase "theory of language" has no application in the context framed by infancy. Normativity in language use is expressed by Wittgenstein through the concept of a "rule," clearly identified as a family resemblance concept, its uses being a network of similarities and differences over the whole range of language games in which it plays a useful part. The question then is what it is that must

frame activities which we could properly call "rule-following." The most pervasive "framework" concept in this context is "regularity." The point is summed up by Baker and Hacker as follows: "Regularities belong to the framework of acting in accord with rules (and speaking a language), but 'rule' cannot usefully be defined in terms of 'regular' or `uniform'."(12) Wittgenstein says: Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right? . . . The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.(13) He follows this with a rhetorical question: Then am I defining "order" and "rule" by means of "regularity"?--How do I explain the meaning of "regularity", "uniform", "same" to anyone? ... if a person has not yet got the concepts, I shall teach him to use the words by example and by practice.--And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself.(14) Obeying an order and following a rule only make sense as practices in cases where people already have the idea of a regularity, howsoever they may have come by it. We do not find regularities in life because we have rules. It is because there are regularities that rule-following is possible. Similarly, "justifications of acts by reference to rules come to an end in forms of action accepted or acknowledged to be correct." Again, "Accepted patterns of action are the bedrock justifications of what is done in following rules."(15) What are these bedrock regularities and accepted patterns of action? They are constitutive of the human form of life. They frame what it is to live, speak and act as a human being. Yet they are diverse. Some are biological. The regularities expressed in the contrasting concepts of "birth" and "death" frame, that is, make applicable, all sorts of rule following practices. Some are ethological, such as those we have encountered in the discussion of the learning of sensation words. Some are cultural, such as the many examples Wittgenstein offers of calculations going right and wrong. Without the interest our culture has in discrete entities and their numerical comparisons, the natural numbers and the rules for their use would not play the central part they do in many of our everyday practices. The point is made even more starkly in Philosophical Investigations, book 1, section 217, where Wittgenstein asks: How am I able to obey a rule? If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. I have exhausted the justifications. I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. The,n I am inclined to say, "This is simply what I do." So much of the framework of rule following, be it in language use or any other practice, is framed in unproblematic agreements. Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question of whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don't come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the workings of our language is based.(16) Acting together, the fact of our agreement about accord or conflict with rules for actions both symbolic (linguistic) and practical, is again a feature of the big-cultural framework that makes the practice of rule following possible.(17) Again this is "agreement in a form of life." Though this sort of agreement is not a biological universal, so to speak, it must enter into the framing of every way of living that is human, in the sense of employing language. There is an internal relation between "being a human being" and "being capable of following a rule." No reasons are required, nor are they available on deeper scrutiny, to explain why we do follow rules "as a matter of course." Explanation and giving reasons are themselves in this respect products of rule following. To follow rules just is part of what it is to be human being. Again, this is close to Reid's understanding of "the principles of common sense" which, he declares, we are under an obligation to take for granted in all the common affairs of life. They are not analyzable into more fundamental principles, for they provide the basis upon which any such analysis might succeed. These constitutive principles include, on Reid's account, both a

principle of veracity and a principle of credulity, absent which we would be unable to receive what is "the greatest and most important part of our knowledge," which is what we obtain from others. The first principle is what strongly inclines us "to use the signs of language so as to convey our real sentiments." Even the liar, says Reid, speaks the truth a hundred times for every lie he tells. Truth, then, is "the natural issue of the mind." Tied to this is the principle of credulity which is "unlimited in children, until they meet with instances of deceit and falsehood." Were these not constitutive principles, ". . . distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits Of society, and place us in a worse condition than that of savages."(18) The upshot of these reflections is an amplification of what we should allow to fall under the idea of what is natural for people. The term "natural" tends to draw our attention to the evolved patterns of action studied by ethologists. The framing of our linguistic abilities and practices, however, also involves patterns of action that are cultural. This point is spelled out in the Philosophical Investigations. The natural history of mankind is predominantly, as Baker and Hacker remark, anthropological. Wittgenstein says, "Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing."(19) Foundationalism (without a "Vis Dormativa"). Much ink has been spilled in pursuit of this or that hard and fast division between language and nonlanguage. Benveniste distinguishes the "signal" and the "symbol" in the following way: A signal is a physical fact bound to another physical fact by a natural or conventional relationship.... Man, in so far as he is an animal, reacts to signals. But he uses in addition symbols that have been instituted by men.(20) Using the term "sign" somewhat differently, Bernard and Delbridge define human language as a "two tier abstract sign system." Each "controllable" sign has two parts, "the thing and the message . . . [which] need bear no logical relationship to one another.... Any thing can carry any message.,,"(21) Both definitions reflect Saussure's principle that the meaning of the linguistic sign is arbitrary. Hughes quotes some dictionary definitions of "language": "any means of expressing thought."(22) And this from Webster "The words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a considerable community and established by long usage."(23) There are even behavioristic definitions such as that offered by Hill: The symbols of language are simultaneously substitute stimuli and substitute responses and can call forth further stimuli and responses, so that discourse becomes independent of an immediate physical stimulus(24) Combining two of these major themes Hughes himself offers this: A system of arbitrary vocal symbols by which thought is conveyed from one human being to another.(25) Plains Indian sign "language"(26) is certainly a cultural artifact, used very effectively to "tell" stories. Yet it does not meet Saussure's influential criterion that the relation between a linguistic sign and what it signifies is arbitrary, since the sign system is clearly iconic. A space of deictic anchors, for instance, is sketched out by defining a sort of spatial map in the neighborhood of the story teller. Some signs are more opaque etiologically. The broadenings by Reid and by Wittgenstein of the domain of language and the domain of the natural should encourage us, therefore, to be skeptical about the value of any rigid boundary drawing. Both "the natural" and "language" are generic concepts. If we heed Wittgenstein's warning about the folly of thinking that the use of a common term in a variety of contexts requires us to postulate a transcultural essence, we should rest content with a pattern of similarities and differences, context by context. The "natural history of mankind," at least as Wittgenstein uses the concept in reflecting on the necessary framework for the language games of everyday life to be possible, encompasses cultural commonalities, while "the natural history of the horse-fly" does not. Still, there are similarities, since both classes of beings are embodied, and embodied in ways that are sufficiently different to influence how they live, and that they will live. In many places, but above all in On Certainty, Wittgenstein worked on the problem of the nature and justification of foundations for all sorts of human practices. For there to be foundations for a practice, the practice must be susceptible of presentation as a hierarchy, and there must be some criterion by which some level in the hierarchy can be identified a, that which is in no need of foundations, not just as a matter of fact, but by virtue of the nature of the foundational candidate. It was clear to Wittgenstein that a certain way of construing these requirements led

inevitably to skepticism. For example, if the hierarchy is a ladder of propositions, each being the reason for belief in the next in the chain, what could distinguish the founding proposition? As a proposition that is to be believed or known, it too stands in need of a reason for our believing it or claiming to know it. If we are to avoid skepticism, hierarchies of beliefs cannot be founded on beliefs nor can hierarchies of knowledge be founded in knowledge. Well then what is the basis of knowledge? One of Wittgenstein's great insights was that knowledge is founded on grammar. Using the frame and picture image, grammar is the frame and knowledge is the picture. Yet, G. E. Moore, trying to defeat the skeptic who doubts the reality of material things, tried to do this by famously insisting "I know I have two hands." No, says Wittgenstein, if that statement is to be part of the frame which makes possible true and false statements about material things, you cannot say that you know it. That brings all the wrong resonances into play, and you are only too likely to be tempted to try to offer a reason for your claim. Recently Stroll(27) has provided a remarkably apt term, the homogeneity principle, for characterizing Moore's mistake and Wittgenstein's insight. Since Descartes' writings on the subject, the quest for foundations has assumed the homogeneity principle, that the founding member of the hierarchy must itself be of the same kind as the members of the hierarchy that it founds. In On Certainty Wittgenstein works his way toward a way of looking for foundations which meet what we might call the inhomogeneity principle. Applying this to the question of the foundations of language leads to the answer, nonlinguistic foundations; the foundations must be natural expressions, human material practices, the most general ethological needs and dispositions.(28) Reid's expression "natural language" was intended not to convey something "linguistic" as such but the very scaffolding on which artificial signs could be practically arranged and supported. For Reid, not every natural process is foundational for language. Rather, of the many natural or constitutive features of human creatures, there are some--and only some capable of expressing what Reid called ". . . the thoughts, purposes, and dispositions of the mind." To a first approximation he identified ". . . the features of the face, the modulation of the voice, and the motion and attitude of the body" as among the chief means by which mutual influence and joint action become possible; the means by which the very conventions on which linguistic meaning depends can be brought about.(29) We hope we have shown that Reid's and Wittgenstein's thought supplies all that is needed for the necessary conditions of language while avoiding that Chomskian form of expression that begs the very question it is intended to address. (1) Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: From a Religious Point of View, ed. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). (2) See Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Reason (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993). (3) Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Robert Stoothoff, in vol. 1 of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 140. (4) John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander C. Fraser (1894; reprint in 2 vole., New York: Dover Publications, 1959), book 3, chap. 2, p. 8. (5) Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), chap. 4, sec. 2, p. 93. (6) Reid, chap. 4, sec. 2, p. 95. (7) This is discussed in detail in Vernon Reynolds and Rom Harre, The Meaning of Primate Signals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). (8) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), book 1, [sections] 244. (9) Reid, chap. 6, sec. 20, p. 154. (10) Reid, chap. 6, sec. 24, p. 167. (11) Ibid. (12) Gordon P. Baker and Peter M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 12. (13) Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, book 1, sec. 206, 82(e). (14) Ibid. (15) Baker and Hacker, 28-9. (16) Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, book 1, sec. 240, 88(e). (17) Ibid.

(18) Reid, chap. 6, sec. 24, p. 168. (19) Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, book 1, sec. 25, 12(e). (20) Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 24. (21) John Bernard and Arthur Delbridge, Introduction to Linguistics (Sydney: Prentice Hall, 1980), 10. (22) John P. Hughes, The Science of Language (New York: Random House, 1962), 5. (23) Webster's New International Dictionary, 3d ea., s.v. "language." (24) Archibald A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1958), 9. (25) Hughes, 6. (26) See Brenda Farnell, "Do you see what I mean? " Plains Indian Storytelling and the Embodiment of Action (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). (27) Avrum Stroll, Wittgenstein and Moore on Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). (28) Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). (29) Reid, chap. 5, sec. 3, p. 133. Correspondence to: Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057. -1Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: What Makes Language Possible? Ethological Foundationalism in Reid and Wittgenstein. Contributors: Rom Harre - author, Daniel N. Robinson - author. Journal Title: The Review of Metaphysics. Volume: 50. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 483+. COPYRIGHT 1997 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale G