Naming is one kind of language game, is that what you're saying? Makes sense to me. I've always been suspicious of poets & theorists of poetry who name naming as the poet's primary role. In contemporary poetry, this fallacy can be traced back to the wonderful Chilian poet Pablo Neruda, who remarked once (as poets will) that the Latin American poets of the 20th century had an advantage over their North American brothers & sisters because "there are still birds in our forests that do not have names." It's a lovely & romantic notion, but in fact it is ornithologists or local folk who give names to birds, not poets. Poets, of course, will put those names to uses that were perhaps never envisioned by the scientist or hunter.

Chris, sorry to have missed your talk last night. Thursdays are long days for me in any case, but we're also dog-sitting Lew H's Golden Retriever this week & I didn't want to leave him by himself longer than necessary. And once I've driven home, it's pretty hard to get me to turn around & drive the 14 miles back into town. Anyway, I hope it went well.

Are two-part structures themselves suspect, whether binary or causal?

Logics: I think we can agree that different language games have different grammars. Use of the word logic seems . . . too determinative. One of the underlying structures of human thought--perhaps the underlying structure--is grammar(s). Logic comes along later, I think. William Barrett, in The Illusion of Technique, spends a good deal of time early in his text exploring the ways in which W's conception of logic came out of & diverged from Russell's & Whitehead's. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, writes Barrett, takes the idea of logic to its , , , logical conclusion: "Any one thing can either be the case, or not be the case, and everything else remains the same." This is a logic in which the statement "If twice two is four, then snow is white" is a perfectly formed proposition. Barrett notes, of this proposition, that it "jars our habits of ordinary speech," but adds that "it is precisely this kind of device that provides mathematical logic with its unique powers of manipulation and calculation." [TIOT 43] I remarked a couple of weeks ago to my Imagining Science class that scientific reductionism has proved to be boat a powerful intellectual tool & a deceptive intellectual trap leading to a callow kind of confidence in one's own powers of understanding. Reductionism is an instance of mathematical logic, no? Let's say the Greeks invented logic & that Russell & Whitehead completed the project. Did no one think before the Greeks? Did no one think rigorously before the Principia? Hardly. Human thought, emerging from & blending back into animal thought, surely precedes logic. Which must mean that logic is based on . . . what? Animal thought & human grammars? [Note: I need to go back & look at Santyana's "Skepticism and Animal Faith" again.]

[26, 27] The consciousness of animals & naming as a human activity. Garden of Eden, anyone? (I'll copy the Eco essay I mentioned recently & put it in your mailbox.) In 25 Wittgenstein dismisses another two-part logical structure: that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. Instead, Wittgenstein notes, all we really know is that they do not talk. (The evidence suggests that animals do think, but that's not W's concern here.) The question arises--& it is a tricky one--as to what we mean by thinking. Just for clarity, I'd suggest that there is a biological activity that we humans share with at least the "higher" animals & then there is something we might want to set apart & distinguish as human thinking, which is shot through with language. Thinking & human thinking probably grade into each other over some region of evolutionary space, but the consequence of seeing things this way is the recognition that while we share a great deal with our non-speaking cousins, language--for good or ill--also distinguishes us from them, radically. We are, in Auden's memorable phrase, "their lonely betters."

I find your post this morning illuninating. As a writier, I have found myself at various times veering toward the romantic, then back toward the skeptical. Seeing these two modes, not as binaries, but as regions on a topological surface provides a richer & more satisfying picture. Sorry for the short posts this week--I'm trying to catch up with several projects, bith domestic & academic.

"There are as many logics as there are language games" you say, summarizing Wittgenstein & I agree; except, don't the logics all share the quality or attribute of being a logic? I keep making arguments that are shaped like Klein bottles. That's the way I've thought about phenomenal reality since that bus ride between Bellingham & Seattle I mentioned a while back--as an infinite closed surface always turning back on itself. About the same time as my bus ride I remember pointing out to my students that definitions of beauty vary markedly from culture to culture, but that all cultures seem to have some notion of beauty. In the present discussion, this turn of mind leads me to my notion that there are many different logics, but that all of them have something in common--something perhaps unnameable, something that can only be indicated, pointed to.

Poets have need of philosophers nevertheless. It was Wordsworth, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, who pointed out that poety is more "philosophical" than history, by which he menas that poetry & philosophy are more generally applicable than the mater-of-fact of history. Paradoxically, philosophers & poets have historically come to that generality by different routes: philosophers have deployed abstractions whereas poet have tended to get to the general through the specific.

You read Merrill? I get six lines into any poem of his & nod off. For Celan & Auden I share your reverence. I think it is in Life Studies, in a poem about Delmore Schwartz, that Lowell calls Freud & Marx the "prophets of joy." I'd better go look this up--I have the feeling I'm misquoting badly. Joy, clearly, is one of the functions of poetry--& as you have noted, certain kinds of philosophy. I'd even go so far as to suggest that philosophy that becomes divorced from the personality of the philosopher is somehow defective, denatured.

And that philosophical tradition of resistance begins where? I'm tempted to say Descartes. Isn't that where the wedge gets driven in between subject & object, between mind & body? Descartes' project is brilliant & even intellectually courageous; it has been immensely powerful in making dualism the dominant philosophical doctrine of the modern era; that Descartes' project ends in error yet remains so forceful is a kind of philosophical Tragedy.

[22, 23] Okay, these are in some sense difficult remarks, but the difficulty comes from a philosophical tradition of resistance rather than any intrinsic obscurity of the remarks themselves. There are places where I find W's language difficult to understand, but not here. Most poets, myself included, will find these remarks intuitively on the money. Poets are less likely to kiss the page than to yawn at this point in the Investigations. Old hat, comfortable.

[23] This remark seems pivotal--it summarizes the territory that we have traveled so far. By use of examples it suggests the poverty of the Positivist view of language. Rhetorically, it functions at this point in the text as a clearing of the field. Now that we've gotten that out of the way . . . Wittgenstein seems to be saying.

[24] We only know what we mean in a given utterance because that utterance is part of a language game, which is a social practice. Games, practices--as you pointed out earlier--come & go. This is true for individual lives as well as communities of language users: I don't play the same language games I did ten years ago.

In eliminating the space between language & the world, Wittgenstein could almost be seen as returning us to a prelapsarian linguistic state. Umberto Eco has an essay in The Role of the Reader (1979) called "Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language" that is relevant here. Eco sets up a little world with Adam, Eve, God, Serpent, Apple, & a "language" consisting of simple terms & semiotic chains:

red = edible = good = beautiful
blue = inedible = bad = ugly

But then God sets a condition the the red object known as an apple is bad. According to Eco, it is from this contradictory state of affairs that language as we know it emerges, particularly metaphor, irony, narrative: poetry. I've drastically over-simplified Eco, one of my favorite writers--the essay is both analytically powerful & funny. Did I ever tell you about the time I watched Stanley Fish attempt to humiliate Umberto Eco at a public lecture? Okay, another time.

In 22 I am really grabbed by this: "It is only a mistake if one thinks that the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting . . . " What should we name this pervasive fallacy? And your comment regarding W's introduction of an ethical componant to his view of language has had my brain buzzing all day. You wrote, "Wittgenstein says is that distance gives the illusion of objectification -- others are treated as objects. The illusion is that we can somehow step out of language. The dehumanizing result is real enough." This is something I have often felt & it ties back in, for me, to the fallacy that there is a difference between "entertaining and asserting." We have no place to stand outside of language, but centuries of philosophical & political damage have been done by pretending that such a stance exists somewhere, somehow. John Dewey is relevant here as well: his theraputic move in Experience & Nature is related to W's in PI. Dewey points out [in one example] that because human beings are weak & faced with daily struggle, we become acutely aware of the fininte nature of our existence; out of this we construct the Infinite & set it up as an absolute. The absolute then becomes the measure of our finite existence. The Infinite, in this case, has become a stance outside of language, outside of human reality. Perhaps I am conflating fallacies here. Where, in Wittgenstein, do you find the source for your comment about the ethical failure of Positivist views of language? (I ask, not becuase I don't believe you, but because I want to go more deeply into this.)

[22] "Of course we have the right to use an assertion sign in contrast with a question-mark, for example, or if we want to distinguish an assertion from a fiction or a supposition. It is only a mistake if one thinks that the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting (assigning the truth-value, or something of the kind), and that in performing these actions we follow the prepositional sign roughly as we sing from the musical score." 22 seems clear enough in its main emphasis, that the punctuation is a transcription of an already existent meaning, not a determinent of the meaning. But I also get the sense from this remark that Wittgenstein is working against the language-as-transcription-of-thought cognitive model. That is, we do not transcribe thought into language so much as make thought (meaning) through the use of language. This is a relatively uncontroversial notion for a poet, but I suspect it raises the hackles of certain scientists & analytical philosophers.

Final stray thought: Language games imply language communities--at the very least, groups of users who hold a game in common. (Can one play a game alone? Is there such a thing as solitaire? What about games on the computer?--I know we'll get to Private Language later, just seemed relevant to think about briefly in this context.) Okay, but what I'm really thinking about tonight is this: What are the effects of emotion within these groups / communities? That is, to look at it one way, what differences are there for behavior & consciousness between sympathetic & unsympathetic language communities? Language games can be "played" selfishly or alturistically.

[21] "What makes it one or the other?" That's the question that devastates a positivist view of language. Language, it appears, only means anything within a particular context. More in the morning. It occurs to me just now as I'm signing off that most of the proposals for stron Artificial Intelligence rely on a positivist, propositional view of language. Need to think more about this.

I've just returned from a writers' conference in New Orleans, where the language games are played a little differently. I read a couple of interesting essays by the poet C.K. Williams in the airport on the way home that bear on our discussion here--I will post some thoughts on these tomorrow. In the language game we are playing here, in / on this blog, this post represents a ritual taking up of temporarily dropped threads. And is there something magical about the number 20 (as in PI 20) that wants to prevent us from passing over the threshold?

"The starting point for a unique "I" is a "we" of a form of life or language-game." This is what is true about Vietnamese society & false about American society. That is, Vietnamese society understands that the "I" emerges from the "we" & not the other way around. I had a lovely conversation with our student Tu Trinh this afternoon in which she told me a little bit about her family. Our conversation. mostly in English, alas, was supposed to have been a Vietnamese lesson, but another language game seemed more important: that of getting to know each other a little better. Trinh did, however, give me a little translation exercise that she had written out. I think she wanted to know if I really knew any Vietnamese or was just bluffing. The paragraph was about her family. Trinh had written, for my first exercise, about living near the Saigon River, her family poor but happy; about playing with her siblings along the river's bank. There's an expression in Vietnamese (that I can't reproduce here because of the lack of a font) that means "happy [as in having fun] and contented with life." I have come to understand that "contented with life" for most Vietnamese means something like "with family at home." Later, Trinh told me that because her father had abandoned them they were ostracized. "My brother and sister & I cried a lot," she told me. But it was clear--& this is important--that the unhappiness occurred within a larger (or smaller?) happiness. Here we enter into the territory in which language games & identity seem to fuse into a single system. In any case, I cannot help but see the Western, capitalist conception of the autonomous self as a kind of pathology. At the same time, I'm not terribly happy with the critique(s) of that conception that have been offered by the various schools of Postmodernism.

"But these games and/or forms must have a start in time." Some have astonishing stability, like the red spot on Jupiter; some are swirls of cigarette smoke in a nightclub in Hanoi.

Forms of life as "patterns of regularity" into which we settle. Yes, I see this. "The world here sounds as if it exists outside the form of life," you write. I see this too. And yet I have also been thinking of forms of life as a kind of analytical tool. I realize that Wittgenstein sets himself against method & technique in philosophy, but the language-game can be employed as a sort of anti-method method for understanding the use of language. This is what I was driving at when I was talking about "tiles" & "overlapping" games. But this sort of analysis must be carried out with due respect for what some have called "fuzzy logic." That is, language games, if they are an analytical tool at all, are not positivistic tools: there is always a zone of uncertainty or transformation around the edges of a particular l-game. This I think accords with Mark Taylor's description of the skin. The skins around l-games are transitional zones, just as the human body / consciousness are pools of probability & uncertainty.

Tie me kangaroo down sport,
tie me kangaroo down.
Tie me kangaroo down sport,
tie me kangaroo down. [ . . . ]

Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred,
tan me hide when I'm dead.
So we tanned his hide when he died Clyde,
[Spoken] And that's it hanging on the shed!
Altogether now!

[© 1960 Castle Music Pty, Ltd.Words and music by Rolf Harris]

Chris, the inside / outside dualism of course predates Descartes, who nevertheless gave it its modern shape; because it is perennial it perennially needs deconstructing. It remains useful (as in the phrase inside the language game of science) as long as it doesn't come to dominate the way we make & understand concepts. I have to admit, though, that I hadn't reaally taken the idea down to its biology, though--hadn't thought except superficially about the skin as the final delimiter between the inner world & the outer. In my existentialist & biologically unsophisticated youth I might have named the skull surrounding the brain as the boarder that cannot be crossed, but that would have been mostly a metaphorical conception anyway. But by citing Taylor, you transform the construction of outer / inner without denaturing it. This is helpful.

I have meditated on this theme topologically. Years ago, riding on the bus between Bellingham & Seattle in Washington State, I was struck by the fact that in order for me to be in the world, my consciousness had by definition to extend out into the world. That is, I realized that consciousness is extensive. On that bus ride I also remembered something I had seen a couple of years before in a museum Edinburgh: a Klien bottle. As you no doubt know, a Klien bottle is a three-dimensional single-sided surface--its outside is its inside. The Klien bottle became my private metaphor for the extensiveness of consciousness.