Abstract
Although an experience of astonishment shows a more general problem about the contingency or groundlessness of meaning, it also resists meaning in a very particular way. This is its central trait: Wittgenstein describes such experiences as essentially nonsensical; Lacan as a manifestation of “the signifier in the Real.” In this chapter I argue that although linked with a difficulty of intelligible expression, these experiences are not manifestations of an ineffable content. A different kind of expression, which I earlier called “reflection,” is possible but requires the speaker’s own creative involvement with language, and a certain shift in the kind of expression one was looking for. I discuss “reflection” and offer examples.
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- 1.
Here is the relevant passage in the Tractatus (1992, §6.4–6.42): “All propositions are of equal value. The sense (sinn) of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.”
- 2.
Cora Diamond (2000a) has very convincingly criticized the idea that Ethics is a separate subject matter and shown how ubiquitous a phenomenon it is.
- 3.
I say experiencing and expressing because it is wrong to draw a distinction between the experience of the absolute value on the one hand and the difficulty of expression on the other, as if one could know what they experience but when they put it into words, it doesn’t work. The idea here is that the difficulty of expression is part of the astonishment, part of the experience.
- 4.
- 5.
Piergiorgio Donatelli (2005) translates blass as colourless and interprets the characterization differently in a literal way, as if it meant that the stove has colour but all things around it do not. From that he infers that this is a case of nonsense where an object (a concept) is cut off from its logical connections with other things. As he writes: “We want to say, for example, that the colour of a leaf is the true colour and that the colour of things around it is not really colour in comparison to it. We want to cut off colour-description from its ordinary environment and imagine at the same time that there is a meaning assigned to the notion of a green leaf (while on the contrary this assignment depends upon the context of meaning which has been imaginatively abolished). There needs to be both the notion of colour as it is meant in ordinary contexts (in which a meaning is assigned to such a word) and the same word as being cut off from such ordinary contexts: a colour as being compared to a world in which there is no colour around it. […] This wonder comes from wanting to see both that object as it is identified through its ordinary connections with things and language and as it is cut off from such connections” (2005, 19). Donatelli’s conclusion risks taking us back to the idea that seeing the stove as world is cut off from meaningful expression. I argue instead that the bedeutung of the stove does not arise when it is cut off from its ordinary connections with other things, but rather precisely in the background of these connections and the referential whole they constitute. This confusion can be remedied if we are more careful with the translation of the German word blass and, following Friedlander (2017, 42), we translate blass as “paled” instead of “colourless”; the German word for “colourless” would be farblos.
- 6.
The contrast between focusing on a single thing in isolation from other things (the perspective of the particular) and focusing instead on the single thing in a way that opens up to the whole worldhood can also be found in 3.3421 of the Tractatus. There Wittgenstein speaks of the significance of “the single thing” as being that it reveals the world. “The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.” 3.3421 further explains 3.342 which reads: “in our notations there is indeed something arbitrary, but this is not arbitrary, namely that if we have determined anything arbitrarily, then something else must be the case. (This results from the essence of the notation.)” It is crucial that 3.3421 appears in the context of the discussion on the symbol as what is essential for signification, given that, as discussed previously, finding the symbol, namely, what propositions that can express the same sense have in common, requires an opening to this referential context, to worldhood as the background of possibilities of meaning. The single thing in isolation is unimportant insofar as it is arbitrary, insofar as it is seen from the perspective of the particular. Its significance lies in its carrying the referential whole with it, in it having the function of a symbol. Seeing the single thing in that way (qua symbol) accounts for its importance. I am grateful to Cora Diamond for drawing my attention to this passage and its relevance for my argument.
- 7.
One could object that there is a gap between the thing stove and the word “stove,” but this objection would be mistaken not only because of the Tractarian perspective on the relation between world and language but also because it would overlook that the thing stove is in principle describable as the use made of the word “stove.” Hence, a practice in which human beings use the thing stove to cook food for their loved ones, namely, a practice of care, can translate into a series of propositions that describe that very practice, such as “families have always gathered around a stove,” “… you would always find the grandmother by the stove, cooking for her loved ones,” and so on.
- 8.
The importance that the referential whole has for the human involvement with the world is clearly seen in the Heideggerian concept of readiness to hand, which is grounded in a reference relation in which there is no further involvement but “for the sake of the Being of Dasein”: “[W]ith this thing, for instance, which is ready-to-hand, and which we accordingly call a ‘hammer,’ there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein, that is to say for the sake of possibility of Dasein’s being” (1962, 18, 116). The entirety of all these references, from making something fast to sheltering for bad weather, makes up, in Heidegger’s work, the world. According to my argument, Wittgenstein’s seeing as world qua opening a logical space would translate in Heidegger’s work into seeing something together with this referential whole. For a comparative reading of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, see Mulhall (1990).
- 9.
As I have discussed throughout the book, the temptation to deflect, the difficulty of expression, the moment of hesitation are an essential part of the experience I describe, and an essential part of the possibility for a reflective response, like hearing the Siren song is a condition for Ulysses to resist it and get through. Recognizing the groundlessness of meaning is a condition of creatively assuming it, and this recognition of groundlessness may manifest itself in a temptation to deflect, in hesitation.
- 10.
For example, in the opening chapter of this book I brought in one of Diamond’s examples of difficulty of reality, the astonishment at the horror of death, and the impossibility of the simultaneous awareness of death and life, as it is expressed in a poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men.” Here, the poem itself can be seen as a reflective expression of the horror and impossibility, an expression that makes the astonishment intelligible and does not leave us with a sense that there is something language cannot do. Here is the relevant stanza (1957, 54–55):Verse
Verse That man’s not more alive whom you confront And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud, Than any of these six celluloid smiles are, Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead; No thought so vivid as their smoking blood: To regard this photograph might well dement, Such contradictory permanent horrors here Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out One’s own body from its instant and heat.
- 11.
Philosophy might look like the form of expression that has the greatest trouble with reflection, possible because it is a discipline that is to a great extent exercised through the asking and answering of questions, thus through offering facts about the world. Perhaps this is why Heidegger warns philosophers about the danger of losing creativity and thus ending up using borrowed words and ready-made answers or questions (like Adelaida): it is in the end the business of philosophy to preserve the force of the most fundamental words, in which the Dasein expresses itself, from being levelled to incomprehensibility by the common understanding (1962, 220).
- 12.
See Diamond’s aforementioned discussion on how philosophy can go beyond the asking and answering of questions by pointing to senseful language as a whole (which is according to her what the Tractatus succeeds in doing).
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Balaska, M. (2019). From Deflection to Reflection: A Creative Involvement with Language. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_5
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