Abstract
This chapter explores the significance that Wittgenstein’s work in the philosophy of mind holds for self-understanding, looking into issues of the dualist-introspectionist model of the mind, its antithesis in behaviorism, and the role of language as what Wittgenstein called “the vehicle of thought”, where these considerations are all brought together as a way of investigating how we think of the contents of consciousness. It then takes these Wittgensteinian reflections into a discussion of the way in which Henry James illuminates both the contents and the nature of consciousness in The Golden Bowl. The self-understanding that Maggie Verver achieves is here seen not as a result of inner reflection on private pure or pre-linguistic thought within a metaphysically-sealed mental interior, but rather as the result of becoming ever more aware of the network of relations through which she moves and ever more aware of the power of the words and the subtly-developing narrative that gives shape to who she is and that determines what she will become.
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Notes
- 1.
There is good reason to see an influence of Schopenhauer on his younger view of the matter (linked in ways to a solipsistic picture and private mental enclosure) that did not survive his mature reconsiderations; for an incisive brief discussion of this along with helpful references, see Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 84–86.
- 2.
I discuss this (and the matter of whether “Cartesian ” as it has been used in twentieth-century philosophy describes Descartes) in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–14: “Confronting the Cartesian Legacy”.
- 3.
For a particularly helpful anthology of writings incorporating both sides (and more) of this dichotomy , see David M. Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially the pieces brought together in “Mind as Consciousness”, pp. 15–81, and “Consciousness, Self, and Personhood”, pp. 422–477.
- 4.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
- 5.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
- 6.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, Sec. 151.
- 7.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, Sec. 45.
- 8.
Quite apart from the issue of the possibility of any form of religious knowledge , there is a good deal under this heading that holds direct significance for the understanding of consciousness and its contents. Renford Bambrough, in his “Fools and Heretics”, in Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 239–250, asks “Can we, by taking thought, alter either our theoretical beliefs or our practical attitudes ?”, and he quotes in this context John Henry Newman, who wrote in his Parochial Sermons, “Which of our tastes and likings can we change at our will in a moment? Not the most superficial. Can we then at a word change the whole form and character of our minds? Is not holiness the result of many patient, repeated efforts after obedience, gradually working on us, and first modifying and then changing our hearts?”, p. 243. Reflections of this kind bring into higher relief the telling difference between our ability to change the furniture in a room and change the “furnishings” of consciousness.
- 9.
Wittgenstein is here making a comparison to show a clarifying difference; he is not laying the foundation for a dispositional account of belief .
- 10.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, Sec. 50.
- 11.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, Sec. 51.
- 12.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, Sec. 57.
- 13.
Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 413.
- 14.
See Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 416.
- 15.
Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 416.
- 16.
Norman Malcolm , “Wittgenstein on the Nature of the Mind”, in Studies in the Theory of Knowledge, ed. N. Rescher (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 9–29, this passage p. 22; quoted in Garth Hallett, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 456. See also Malcolm’s essay “Subjectivity”, in his Wittgensteinian Themes, ed. G. H. von Wright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 118–132, where he reconsiders the notion that “whenever a person has a conscious thought, desire, or intention, that person is, or is operating from, ‘a point of view’”, or more broadly that the comprehension of consciousness necessitates our seeing it in terms of a subjective point of view. Malcolm’s discussion shows how fruitful a detailed Wittgensteinian analysis of presupposed general philosophical language concerning consciousness can be. (I return to this matter below.)
- 17.
In his insightful discussion of the actual human role and power of names (implicitly working against the conception of language as arbitrary attachments under discussion here), Frank Cioffi, in his article “Wittgenstein on Making Homeopathic Magic Clear”, in his Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 155–182, quotes a passage from Goethe in which he expresses annoyance at Herder’s having taken “liberties with the name Goethe by punning on Goth” and how this “provides an illustration of the peculiarly intimate relation in which we stand to our names”. Goethe writes, “It was not in very good taste to take such jocular liberties with my name; for a person’s name is not like a cloak which only hangs round him and may be pulled and tugged at, but a perfectly fitting garment grown over and around him like his very skin, which one cannot scrape and scratch at without hurting the man himself”, pp. 166–167. Proper names function within linguistic consciousness in the intertwined and inseparable way Goethe captures here – and in a way the dualistic conception of language systematically misses.
- 18.
For a presentation of this approach that powerfully conveys a sense of its philosophical value, see Rush Rhees, “Philosophy, Life, and Language”, in his Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, 2nd ed., ed. D. Z. Phillips (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 243–256.
- 19.
Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 417.
- 20.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 7. Part of this passage is helpfully contextualized with related citations in Hallett, p. 462.
- 21.
I should note – although this is a partly separate matter – that the philosophical grammar of the word “meaning ” would require a parallel investigation of the kind I am discussing here for its clarification: the word “meaning ” is not the name of, or does not refer to, one single kind of generic entity any more than the word “consciousness”. Wittgenstein writes, in the Blue Book, “This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of the name with the meaning of the name)”, p. 18.
- 22.
Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 503. Here I am directly following Hallet’s insightful connection of these passages; see his discussion, pp. 462–463.
- 23.
In this connection consider Wittgenstein’s remark, “Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete”, in Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 77. This is intelligible privacy – privacy within a public language . This connects directly to the much-discussed “private language” issues, where the alleged inner private sensation (which Wittgenstein shows to be an incoherent notion) would be the meaning-determining referent of an external word naming inner consciousness-content.
- 24.
In connection with this issue, see the conceptually clarifying chapter “Memory ”, in Joachim Schulte, Experience & Expression: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 95–119.
- 25.
See Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 420, where Wittgenstein discusses the (instructively failed) attempt to see people as automata or as “behaving entities” first, from which we would then draw an inference of humanity. This holds for self-consciousness as well as for consciousness of others; he considers the falsification of human expressivity on the behaviorist model in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, Sec. 925, where he writes: “If someone imitates grief for himself in his study, he will indeed readily be conscious of the tensions in his face. But really grieve, or follow a sorrowful action in a film, and ask yourself if you were conscious of your face.” One way to put this point, contra behaviorism , is that consciousness may be manifest in the face but it is not translated there. For a lucid discussion of this issue (including this and related passages), see Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 143–146.
- 26.
It is of interest in this respect that we have the general categories of “philosophical novel” and “psychological novel”; these literary categories hardly display fixed boundaries, but it would not be surprising if novels so categorized made contributions to understanding of precisely this kind.
- 27.
I offer a discussion of the contribution autobiographical and self-descriptive writing can make to this kind of conceptual understanding in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness, passim.
- 28.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), Sec. 881.
- 29.
For an intricate discussion of the sort of process of self-inquiry I am suggesting here, see Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life, Chapter VIII, “The Overcoming of the Past and Our Concern for the Future” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 226–256. Wollheim’s focus on psychoanalytically working through a fantasy and its similarity to coming to understand a work of art captures the active, and not merely spectatorial, character of the process to which I am here alluding.
- 30.
On this matter see Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. S. Greve and J. Macha (London: Palgrave, 2015).
- 31.
Central among such language-games of mental life are of course autobiographies ; see Christopher Cowley, ed., The Philosophy of Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 32.
Or the length of a poem. In Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), Sec. 155, Wittgenstein writes: “A poet’s words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words.”
- 33.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London: Penguin, 2009; orig. Pub. 1904).
- 34.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Introduction, in The Golden Bowl, p. xiii.
- 35.
Yeazell, p. xiii.
- 36.
Yeazell, p. xiv. The internal quotes are from James himself, in Henry James, The Complete Notebooks, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 74.
- 37.
Yeazell, p. xv.
- 38.
Yeazell, p. xv.
- 39.
Yeazell, p. xvi.
- 40.
Yeazell, p. xvii.
- 41.
Yeazell, pp. xviii–xix.
- 42.
Yeazell, p. xix.
- 43.
The Golden Bowl, p. 244.
- 44.
The Golden Bowl, p. 244.
- 45.
Yeazell, p. xxvii.
- 46.
I discuss James Joyce in similar terms in, “A Portrait of Consciousness: Joyce’s Ulysses as Philosophical Psychology”, James Joyce’s Ulysses: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Philip Kitcher (Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming 2020).
- 47.
The Golden Bowl, p. 530.
- 48.
Yeazell, p. xx.
- 49.
Yeazell, p. xx.
- 50.
The Golden Bowl, p. 595.
- 51.
The Golden Bowl, p. 595.
- 52.
The Golden Bowl, p. 83.
- 53.
The Golden Bowl, p. 106.
- 54.
The Golden Bowl, p. 107.
- 55.
The Golden Bowl, pp. 109–110.
- 56.
The Golden Bowl, p. 584.
- 57.
The Golden Bowl, pp. 128 and 346 respectively.
- 58.
The Golden Bowl, p. 128. I offer a fuller discussion of this issue in Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- 59.
The Golden Bowl, p. 129.
- 60.
The Golden Bowl, p. 162.
- 61.
The Golden Bowl, p. 304.
- 62.
The Golden Bowl, p. 362.
- 63.
The Golden Bowl, p. 470.
- 64.
The Golden Bowl, p. 425.
- 65.
The Golden Bowl, p. 500.
- 66.
The Golden Bowl, p. 501.
- 67.
The Golden Bowl, p. 555.
- 68.
The Golden Bowl, p. 584.
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Hagberg, G.L. (2019). Wittgenstein, Consciousness, and The Golden Bowl: James’s Maggie Verver and the Linguistic Mind. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Narrative and Self-Understanding. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28289-9_13
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