Oh, man, you are getting ahead of me here. I've been working on an article. I have, however, just read 50 & 51 again & want to say a little about the notion of correspondence. First, autobiographically, my own work as a poet comes out of a Romantic-Symbolist-Modernist tradition that believes in Correspondence. Especially Yeats, with his elaborate symbolist mythology (which, interestingly, began to drop away--or at least drop out of the poetry--as he became an old man. Age makes materialists of us all.) Nevertheless, there is a great comfort in the belief that our words correspond to actual real things in the world in a direct & meaningful way; there is further comfort in the belief that our words & images & metaphors correspond to some higher "Platonic" world of Forms. Wittgenstein, of course, is the hardnosed Austrian disciplinarian who shatters our dreams of easy sense-making. He takes us to task. My best understanding of these remarks is that the prefigure & even to some extent outdistance the analytical rigor of Deconstruction. My best understanding of what Wittgenstein is trying to convince us of is that there is no meaning inherent in a word, no direct object-word relation upon which we can rely; that there is use within a particular situation / language game. Meaning is always contextual & always human.

I can see that you are about to go on to discuss the practice of philosophy. In light of the above, let me say something about the practice of poetry. Of all the Romantics, Blake (chronologically the earliest) is the most radical. Blake refuses to accept the dualism of real / imaginary. "Everything that is possible to be believed is an image of the truth." Well, I believe in the raccoon who raided the garbage last night & I believe in the existence of a gal named Barbry Allen, though the evidence for my beliefs in the two cases is a little different: spilled garbage v. a ballad in a book. But both of these seem ontologically equal to me, in light of Blake's formulation. I have to deal with both. I believe in God the same way I believe in Barbry Allen or spilled garbage--I have to deal with him. Blake wants to erase the ontological difference between heaven & earth, heaven & hell. It is a mistake to read Blake as ethereal or "mad." I'm moving onto shakier ground here, but I think I'd argue that Blake wants to force us to deal with things from close to. In any case, Blake was the poet who broke me free as an adolescent from traditional metaphysics. It is what allowed me to accept the "lie" that Plato bans: the lie of the poets about reality. Politically, the lie is anti-authoritarian because it demands the freedom of the human imagination. Now it may seem like a long leap from Wittgenstein to Blake, but I see them as both on the same side of the question. Blake calls "from close to" Hell in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, in which Hell is a far more interesting & energetic place. It is a place in which one can have conversation, not merely receive revelations or the law. It is a place where the meaning of a word comes from its use. Blake took great care with the production of his books, attributing his technique to the technologies of Hell. But each version of his books is different, each is a particular case of color & form & so meaning.



Suburban meditations: I've spent a fair amount of time this summer working on Carole's & my 2/3 acre on the Raquette. Yesterday I took some big flat native stones--granite? schist? Metamorphic in any case--& laid them in a bed of sand at the foot of our front stairs. Came out nicely, I think. Also this summer I have been watching some of the home design shows on the cable channels & what I realized about my own work on my own small place is that I compose my yard the way I compose a poem. I am interested in the ideas of the designers, but I am not interested in their programmatic approach to landscape. I am delighted to discover particular techniques, but I want this knowledge so as to order my patch of earth the way I would order a poem: Okay, if I put the stones here, I will need to bring in fill to level the ground there. Oh, & that tree will have to come down, but I can use its trunk as fenceposts over there. Meaning emerges from feeling one's way, not by following a program. I cook the same way, but that's a different story. (Have to admit I also watch cooking shows on cable.)

When you say "reductionism is a quality of reality," I can agree in one sense, but have problems in another. The statement is true in the sense that reality can be "reduced" by human beings to its constituents; but whether that reduction is fundamental or accidental remains, to me, an open question. I am not, as I said, troubled by the human usefulness of the reductionist technique, but I suspect that technique is itself an illusion. As you have already noted, we do not live in the world of table legs & table tops--to say nothing of the organic molecules of which the table is made--but in the world of tables. I was thinking about wood today, & logic. We humans call a great many different substances wood, don't we? From balsa to ebony. But we could arrange things differently, no? Balsa has more in common with a kitchen sponge than it has with ebony & ebony more in common with a metal or mineral than with balsa. To what extent are our logical categories reflections of reality?

Sorry about the screwed-up links. The one to Steve Himmer's blog now works, as does the one to Amazon. (I really shouldn't blog after more than two beers.) And I'm serious about getting you a blog of your own.

I wanted to elaborate a bit on the figure of Blake's Urizon: When I said before that I was acquainted with Urizon, I might have meant that I had seen & read Blake's poetry & painting dealing with Urizon as subject. This would have qualified as knowledge in Russell's system of logical atomism; but what I really meant was something quite different: I am familiar with the actual character Urizon that Blake called into existence. From my perspective, it simply does not make sense to draw an artificial distinction between these two ways of understanding Urizon. Urizon himself is of course symbolically apropos to this discussion as well: a very Judeo-Christian Ancient of Days, he looks down from heaven & presumes to measure out reality with his compass. It's not that Blake rejected Reason, but he saw it as a circumference, a boundary against which Imagination must always exert its pressure. (And yet Imagination itself dissolves into a thin gas--the universe expands forever--without the limit of Reason to contain it.)

You write: "What I want to say in coming down in favor of appearances is there is only this world. We cannot step beyond it to find a deeper source of unity and truth that this world of surfaces and change merely partakes in." I'll drink to that; it is exactly the sense in which I have been using / understanding appearance. I am indebted to you for explaining the other sense of appearance, which I hadn't really thought about in regard to this discussion, but it is very useful to bear in mind. We can surely speak meaningfully about the need to cut through the appearances thrown up by ideology & false consciousness. I was implying something of this sort when I mentioned that contemporary science has a tendency to take the intellectual tool of reductionism & transform (reify?) it into a quality of reality.

Logical atomism is an understandable development, given the intellectual history of the 19th century. I am even in sympathy with it to some extent. When I teach my course Imagining Science, I begin the discussion of scientific reductionism by talking about what a powerful tool it is & how much it has affected the shape of modern life. Only then do I begin to suggest the problems that arise when taking an exclusively reductionist view of the lived world. Your distinction, that logical atomism is not science but a "philosophical reflection" upon science is well-taken; at the same time, many scientists have adopted exactly this "philosophical reflection" when attempting to explain what it is that they do. Therein lies one of the internal problems of contemporary scientific thought.

I have spent a good deal of intellectual energy over the course of thirty years trying to figure out for myself the underlying relations between things & words. I should have come to philosophy sooner. What I arrived at all on my own, before ever reading a word of Wittgenstein, was the realization that the relationship was complex, not simple; that it defied reductionism. If there has been one theme to my own thinking since I was 20, it would be, things are always more complicated than we think. Two terms need to be foregrounded here: appearance & Russell's notion of acquaintance. To take the second term first, Russell claims that the subjects of true propositions must be objects with which we can be acquainted, but this really does not get us very far unless we can rigorously define what it means to be acquainted with an object. Certainly, I am acquainted with the computer mouse with which I navigate the page I am currently writing: it is black plastic, has two buttons & a little wheel . . . I could go on. But I am also acquainted with William Blake's Urizon:



What's the dif? The point being, that acquaintance is just not a rigorous notion. Can we perform the same critique of appearance? I think Blake has already done it for us: Everything that can be imagined is an image of the truth. Morally speaking, appearance is where the action is. It's where we live. Reductionism & generalization tend (in opposite directions) away from the world that appears before us & in which we must act. You have previously used the example of racism: It is possible to reduce an individual to the characteristics of his or her race & it is equally possible to generalize the characteristics of an individual to an entire "race." [Note: scare quotes added because there is only a human race.] Both these moves are moral mistakes--applying useful intellectual tools in the wrong domain.

Chris, you're going to have to open you own blog. Steve Himmer has engaged you in conversation. Fiction & the Figures of Life as Wm. H Gass put it.

I have the sense that I won't be writing my novel on line; Steve Himmer, who has actually written a novel (more than I can say) has presented the issues with clarity & panache over at his blog, OnePotMeal, so I won't repeat them here. In the context of our discussion, though, I will say that doing the writing in public would change the language game is a way that would impede this particular story. For one thing, I want to use the aesthetic distance of fiction in order to write about certain themes very close to my own nerves; that is, I need the cover of fiction to give myself freedom to write about things like anger, madness, infidelity & brutality. To some extent, I need to be secretive. Without thinking much about it, I opened one of my little Vietnamese school notebooks to a middle page & took out my new CONFIDENTIAL stamp (which they gave me because I now handle student records) & stamped the top of the page where I began taking a few notes for the story I want to tell. I might try to blog a long poem, though. Something philosophical.

[48, 49] Actually, I was recalling the final paragraph of 48 in my last post: "But I do not know whether to say that the figure described by our sentence consists of four or nine elements! Well, does the sentence consist of four letters or nine?--and which are its elements, the types of letters or the letters? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?" This is the passage that got me off into logical atomism. What this says to me is that whether we talk about a chair as a single thing, or as sixteen pieces of wood, or as an engineered structure with certain properties, or as some very large collection of organic molecules or even atoms or--why not?--quarks, depends entirely on the context within which (i.e., which language game) we are working. The idea that the "purer" more reductive description is somehow more true just doesn't hold up to practice, though it is pretty easy to see how by generalizing scientific modes one might arrive at that conclusion. For instance, I've been wondering what the active ingredient in Jewelweed is & have even gone so far as to brew a tea of the stuff to try on insect bites & poison ivy rashes; but, if it works, all I will know is that some component of the plant's juice has been extracted & is soluble in water & remains active. Science, legitimately, wants to know what that component is; but by purifying the chemical--if it is a single chemical--what will we have gained in the context of curing skin rashes? None, though in the context of organic chemistry, we will have learned something. But doesn't it amount to a kind of sickness to always insist on the ultimate reduction as the final truth? Anyway, how does W's distinction between naming & describing fit into my example? "Naming is preparation for describing." And then in 50 the whole question of Being is raised, I think, in terms of names & naming.

[50] The present king of France is bald. The sentence, in terms of logical atomism, is meaningless (?) because it has no referent. At least that's the way I'm reading Russell & the various commentaries I've consulted (Glock, Grayling). Now I have empiricist leanings myself, but any theory of language & meaning that does not account for unicorns or centaurs or Zeus or for that matter the pilgrim Dante who travels through the cosmos, or the Mailman or Mr. Slippery in Vinge's True Names, is quite simply a bankrupt theory. A theory born of a kind of insane or manic vision of reduction. Though deeply suspicious of philosophical idealism (at least partly because of its potential political consequences), I nevertheless feel much more comfortable with William Blake's assertion, in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, that "Everything that is possible to be believed is an image of the truth." It occurs to me just now that the convention of using the present tense when referring to events in works of literature, i.e., Othello murders Desdemona in a fit of jealous rage, suggests that we believe in the present reality of these characters. How then, can we dismiss the literary character called into being by the sentence, The present king of France is bald?

I'm not sure I have the guts to write my novel on-line. It's something I'm still thinking about, though. I've also been thinking about W's method as reflected in remark 49, which I will write about in the morning. Because I have felt the need to understand what Wittgenstein was working against in the Investigations, I have been doing a little reading about Russell's logical atomism. Russell, though admirable in many respects (though he appears to have been a beast to women), seems fundamentally off target to me with the notion that logic can reduce the world to understandability. Which is of course where W's idea of meaning as use comes in. Anyway, more on this in the morning.