Streams of life: Another metaphor I like is that of play. Mechanical devices require a certain amount of "play" between their parts in order to function. It's a metaphor that Wittgenstein, trained as an engineer, would appreciate, I think. Machinists also speak of "tolerances" for the amount of allowable variation in the size of a component. Those words--play & tolerance--resonate with me. I think there is a relationship here, too, to my transformations of W's color table the other day. W's original table is meant to demonstrate correspondences, but he goes on, as you note, to demonstrate that correspondences in a particular language game do not inevitably lead to a theory of correspondences, however comforting such a theory might be. My two variations on the table are meant to illustrate what is a perhaps obvious truth: We can change the conventions in a language game & adapt to calling green red & red green--you just have to be introduced to the conventions. But a totally randomized table leads to a break from the collaborative / imaginative reality of the language game--it leads to psychosis, I'd argue. Personal or political psychosis. This little exercise of the color tables also helps us deal with the issues we dealt with earlier about cross-cultural understanding. For me, Vietnam was like the second table, in which green had been switched with red; I had to learn a large number of such transformations, but the practice of organizing reality with language games remained intact.

Since Wittgenstein has by the time of the Philosophical Investigations clearly cast himself as a "therapeutic" philosopher, it is worth noting that this attack on the metaphysics of correspondence between word & world is part of a state of mind that rejects what we would now call essentialism. Essentialism is very attractive in some respects, especially in aesthetic theory & poetics. We'll have to return to this. (The history of philosophy & politics, of course, has been the story of one attempt after another to create all-encompassing, ultimately true, final "language games." But of course such totalizing systems are anathema to Wittgenstein. (Afterthought: correspondence theories & essentialism are so attractive in aesthetics & poetics precisely because that is where they have least application.)

Take a look at this exercise in visualization, then let's talk about the series 47, 48, 49. It appears obvious that language games require a certain amount of stability, but how much; clearly, complete stability is the death of a language game--no more game. Then comes the word / world problem, which seems to be at the heart of W's philosophy & which pervades all of Modernist thinking.

Lucien Freud & Francis Bacon are obsessions of mine, too. Let's let them stand for Nominalism & Realism respectively. I spent a lot of time looking at the actual paintings in London & Paris when I was in my thirties. When I first brought up nominalism here, I was using it as an acid to dissolve what I considered dangerous clumps of idealist political pronouncements. [Note: the terminology, as you know, is confusing. What the scholastics called Realism when they opposed it to Nominalism looks to us a lot like Idealism.] So, yeah, nominalism tends to dissolve things into individual hairs & pores & flecks of pigment in a subject's eye; at the same time, it stands against false unities.



Not that that's what Bacon presents us with, but his Realism / Idealism is what leads to the blurring effects. Or maybe it's more complex: maybe he begins as a nominalist, can't see his way to idealism & resorts to the blurred hands & smeared features as a way of gesturing toward something greater than the individual data points that Freud assembles into what at first appears to be Realism in the modern sense of photo-realist, but certainly isn't.



Your invocation of Wittgenstein's notion of the "steam of life" is salutary: Lucian Freud engages in one sort of Abstraction (I use Wm. Blake's capital letter), Bacon in another. What offends me in current political debate (to turn a rather sharp corner) is the use of soft abstractions like patriotism, defense, rights, nation, war, terror, etc. without a hair-by-hair examination of what these entities consist of. I find the current discourse surrounding the word war particularly troubling & "murky" what with the new War on Terror & the Older War on Drugs. Actually, both of these remind me a great deal of the War in Vietnam in terms of murkiness. Race is exactly the sort of term I have tried to use nominalism against. And in the current discourse, many peoble believe they know what they are talking about when they use terms like race or even Muslim. (In the second case, it is not that there is no such thing as Muslims, but there are so many kinds that the Realist term is, effectively, either a delusion or a lie!)

The question then becomes how to resolve the murk, whether Sartre's nausea or the blur of media-speak we are bathed in daily. How do we manage to, first, see, & second, speak? I think Wittgenstein, by offering a critique of the overly simple Augustan word-world duality while at the same time rejecting philosophical Idealism, manages to construct the best map I have yet found: the texture of daily life & language become the norm against which we judge both the world & language. The problem with W's method--if we can use a term he would probably reject--is that it is difficult. It requires the kind of constant attention that even artists find difficult to negotiate. Negotiate this, as they might say in the Bronx.

The old categories of Idealism / Materialism & Realism / Nominalism (not of course exact parallels) are no longer fully functional, but we don't seem to have a post-philosophical language in which to examine the questions that remain, well, philosophical.

A while back I invoked the doctrine of nominalism in an attempt to shoot down what I saw as a series of overly-broad political assertions. You noted that Wittgenstein is not a nominalist because he employs the analytical & descriptive tool of "family resemblences" among particulars. I agree that this is not classival nominalism, but it surely is nominalist in spirit, since family resemblences can evolve & change over time & have different configurations in different places. I'm not overly concerned with terminology, but it seems worthwhile to get this right.

What shall we call Wittgenstein? Again, I'm not sure the particular term is so important, though a term might serve us as a useful shorthand. In William Barrett's readinbg of W's "conventionalism" comes to the conclusion--at the end of Part 1 of The Illusion of Technique--that whatever linguistic reality we are able to parse, nature remains implacable.

. . . Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts . . .
[Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey]

The poet, drawing on Edward Young's Night Thoughts, understand that the human world is not the world itself & yet the world itself lies at least partly outside human understanding--human being.

I'm intrigued by the notion of object-reality as opposed to--what?--linguistic reality? But I'm a little uncomfortable with the division. It occurred to me yesterday, thinking about the word this, that the pair this / that operate to define (create?) space. (I noticed this first in learning the equivalent words in Vietnamese.) When I say this, I indicate some object within the range of my grasp; when I say that, I indicate something beyond the range of my grasp: the combination brings distance into existence(?) or perhaps consciousness. (G. Spencer Brown's calculus comes to mind just now.)

I have to beg pardon--many small duties have kept me from replying to your commentary. I particularly want to pick up with the problems surrounding nominalism as a philosophical position & will do so tomorrow. And I want to contest, perhaps, the sweeping aside of this. Anon.

Why does it seem so natural for human beings to fall into the error of linking words to things in a more or less one-to-one relationship? Seems almost universal. I've also been thinking about hallucinations & visions. We mean different things by these two words, but I'm having a hard time sorting out the differences. Blake had visions; the guy in the psychiatric ward has hallucinations. Are visions just culturally valued hallucinations. (I know this is running far afield, but it's what's been on my mind.) I've also been pursuing practical ethics over on my other weblog.

Wittgenstein has the deadpan delivery of a really good magician: I keep getting lulled into believing him when what he's really doing is setting me up. Then he snaps the tablecloth out from under the crystal & everything is the same, except different.

[40] Okay, just read this remark & now I get it. I think. As usual, W has been leading me down the garden path so he can put the double-whammy on me.

[39] Excalibur: Interesting choice, this word. The sword to which this name belongs is imaginary, or at least legendary; therefore, I would think, its existence is assured. It cannot be broken down into its parts, except by an act of imagination, let's say a literary act. Its name can never be "nonsense," unless perhaps all references to it fade from the cultural tradition. So what is going on in 39? I admit to being confused. If names must refer to "simples," then what is simple? Can't every object be reduced? The only names, in this case, would be the elements of the Periodic Table.

This: Many years ago I wrote a love poem, "The Second Person as Muse," that contains these lines:

Even after they got the thing
shut off, I didn't want to sleep. I wanted to ride
with the cops, get a look at better accidents than this
paltry one . . .

In the poem, I was describing being awakened by a burglar alarm going off in a florist shop on the ground floor of my apartment building. Standard free verse practice is to place important words at the ends of lines. I still like these lines because I used the alterative pair thing / this to good effect. This may not be a name, as W says, but it is a crucial marker of an indicative act that is closely related to ostensive naming.

Well, I worked in the yard a lot today. That's enough hard thinking for this evening. To quote an old Monty Python skit, "My brain HURTS!" (I think Ludwig would have loved Monty Python. A pity they didn't overlap.)