josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Where do the distinctions drawn by philosophers exist? What sustains them? Less, it seems, than sustains our words, or the diagrams and notations that mathematicians use. It's not, as urged, that they are finer; they are practically insubstantial. —The philosopher's mania is that they not go unthought.
The windows that light my room open onto a neighboring backyard and a view of clutter such as one meets in alleys: a fence, garages, ledges, ladders laid aside, bushes and the tops of trees, rooftops, poles, and lines which maybe power my building. Prior days' snow, though visibly melted, still sheaths the lines, and lends them something of the contingency of snow, as if they were not slung permanently there but happened to have fallen—then happened to have held, thanks to a balance in condition and circumstance like that of sunlight and exposure to winter air, a balance I almost feel I see because I view the wires from inside my heated room, where the sun that penetrates my windows warms with no competition from that air. I see further than my skin because the sun pervades the air.
In §81: '… daß wir nämlich in der Philosophie den Gebrauch der Wörter oft mit Spielen, Kalkülen nach festen Regeln, vergleichen, aber nicht sagen können, wer die Sprache gebraucht, müsse ein solches Spiel spielen.'
—Perhaps the qualification there, 'but we can't say…', is meant to bring out what should ring wrong, sound off, about Ramsey's expression characterizing logic, as a 'normative science'. What kind of a science says how things have to be? What kind of a science finds out how things have to be? As usual, Wittgenstein rejects more questions than one even knew were being asked.
I've been hobbled since a hard fall from my bike on December ice did a number on my ankle. On one of the first trips I made, weeks later, to the grocery store by my usual route, walking through uncleared snow and ice on my stupid boots, thwarted by all kinds of uneven surfaces, smooth surfaces, steps up, and worst of all steps down, I made the mistake of trying to cross at a typical spot, middle of a road, a quick hop onto and over the broad median. Broad, but very steep—more than a step down into the road from my side and even more to get up onto and down off of the median. With the snow and my shaky ankle, and a constant fear of misstepping and falling all over again, I just made it on, then realized that I couldn't make it off—not that way. I picked a path up the median through the snow without slipping, up to the next intersection, where the terrain graded down to nothing to meet the pavement and I could cross onto a sidewalk. On the way back, I just looked, not just at my usual way but at other less direct ways, and thought: I can't do that. I can't do that. I went all the way down the main road, and waited until the next main road to turn my way, so that if I were to fall again maybe someone would see and help.
As my ankle got stronger with return trips I started eyeing the little path worn through the grass from the sidewalk up a little incline to the parking lot at my store. I had been avoiding it, up or down (especially down—no question of down), for a while, feeling stupid and just a tiny bit embarrassed every time I edged along that lot by way of the sidewalk around it. It's the kind of shortcut you don't not take. But hard to take on my ankle, still tender enough not to permit any jumping around, sliding: a risk I felt. I did it as I could, some weeks giving it a pass if I felt sore or if the accumulated snow seemed too icy, too slushy.
It's been a while; I'm still not healed but it matters less once we finally make it to a forty-degree day like today. The snow fell very heavily this week, so all of a sudden, my shortcut is truly blocked: plowed over. Again, I can't do that. But no one could, or would think to. So I pass by it without a thought.
Cavell on the modernist perspective on convention:
‘Convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand. Nothing we now say, no personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we now share. In a time… where words have lost touch with their sources or objects… our choices seem to be those of silence, or nihilism…, or statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention’ (‘Music Discomposed’, Must We Mean What We Say?, pp. 201–2).
The denial in the second sentence emphasizes ‘personal’ utterance: ‘nothing we now say’. What is denied about what we say, speaking as ourselves, in our own voices, is that it ‘has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we now share’. So we (this is relevant to ‘personal’) do share conventions, formulas; but they do not ‘convey the meaning of what we say’. Perhaps it could be put in terms of adequacy. Our conventions, our formulas, are not enough. We mean more than our formulas do. So they do not express our meaning, express us.
There is a diagnosis: our conventions are no longer adequate in this way because words (the, or some of the, ultimate constituents of these conventions?) ‘have lost touch with their sources or objects’, where the alternative there perhaps alludes to sources in us (say, feelings, intuitions, what naturally prompts us to speak certain words) and to the things for which words are suited.
The three alternative choices enumerated in the face of this diagnosis refer back to the difficulty with convention being one of utterance, of speech:
1. silence
2. nihilism
3. statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention
Suppose we represent these choices as if they were made on the basis of conclusions drawn about the difficulty with convention. Then to choose silence would be to conclude either that one cannot, ought not, or simply is satisfied with not speaking—a range of conclusions which indicates the ways in which the choice of silence could variously be regarded as one which is prevented, forced, obliged, or accepted, say a choice one learns to live with. To choose nihilism would be to conclude that convention’s (inherent?) failure to convey what we have it in us to say means that it’s not worth saying; no longer worth trying; perhaps that nothing is ultimately worth saying or doing.
Conclusions leading to either of those first two choices can be framed in terms such that the choices appear to be fated, fixed in the nature of things. There are just some things about which we must be silent; language can’t but come up short. But the conclusions can also be framed in terms which at least highlight a possible role for the personal, for what one needs or wants to say, for how one responds to the difficulty of making oneself understood—a potential for personal involvement which at least suggests that even the ways of regarding the choices as ‘fated’ may fall under suspicion of being evasions, avoidances, of something which it is left to each of us personally to do, to bear.
Obviously, that way of framing things is meant to suggest Cavell’s tendency of viewing meaning in terms of an absolute personal responsibility, as it were an unending and unavoidable task, unavoidable in the sense that, one way or another, our choices come with costs, consequences.
It’s also meant to suggest the way in which Cavell might see the third choice above as situated ‘between’ the other two, as the choice made on the basis of an appropriate recognition of the role of the personal in meaning what we say and saying what we mean, in the face of the present inadequacy of the shared conventions and formulas which are our means of expression.
Note that I said, ‘an appropriate recognition of the role of the personal in meaning…’. I think it’s important to see that Cavell is not necessarily imagining total shouldering of a burden of meaning in the face of a complete inadequacy of convention. See the phrase he uses to describe the third choice: ‘statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention’. That is to say, they are personal enough, or personal to such a (perhaps) remarkable degree that, should convention fail to support successful communication by means of those statements, they may nevertheless succeed, on the strength of their being so personal, at conveying our meaning. This is not to say that convention always and everywhere fails, that we can never make ourselves understood, never say what we mean and mean what we say. And so this is not to say that we cannot make use of conventions, even in making such ‘statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention’. It is just that it would be senseless, on this third choice, to try to leave the uses we make of convention unsupported by the personal, if we have any hope of compensating for our acknowledged difficulties with making ourselves fully understood by conventional means.
‘So personal’: how personal (or: personal, how)? How does Cavell imagine that statements would be, or be made so as to be, personal enough to surmount the difficulties with convention that he imagines?