More isolationism ...

Inasmuch as we've concretised abstractions (mind/body, quality/quantity ...) and literalised metaphors (inner/outer, introspection/extrospection ...), dualism is built into our language. And inasmuch as it is built into our language, a dualistic necessitarianism is generated. 'This is how it has to be,' we say (Philosophical Investigations, §112). Thus an early-modern picture holds us captive. And we can't get outside it, for it lies in our language, and language seems only to repeat it to us (ibid., §115). It's an unwholesome picture, too, which has much discomposed Lady Philosophy. She can hardly sleep nowadays, worrying that the men she sees are really 'hats and coats concealing automatons' (Descartes, Meditation II), that bodily visibilia do ever but 'suggest and infer' mental invisibilia (Berkeley, Alciphron), that even if she believes elsewise, she cannot know elsewise. And, alackaday, this is how it has to be—yes? No! If we are already given over to that disputable seventeenth-century dualism, or to a metaphysic logically-isomorphic therewith (e.g. today's scientistic you're-your-brainism), then the foregoing is foregone. But we needn't give ourselves over. (And don't let's.)

' "I can't know what is going on in him" is, above all, a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not obvious.' (Philosophy of Psychology, XI, §326.)

Wittgenstein

Outer goings-on are not, as it were, 'symptoms' of inner goings-on, correlated therewith in a contingently 'loose and separate' way (to borrow from Hume); rather they're logico-grammatical criteria thereof and therefor (Zettel, §466, PI, §580, Blue and Brown Books, p.25, et alibi). 'The fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but symptoms' (PI, §354; cf. BB, p. 113, Z, §438)—i.e., nothing at all but empirico-inductive correlations, e.g. that between barometric pressure and rainfall (PI, §354)—yet this isn't so. Bodily perceptibilia aren't empirico-inductive ('symptomatic') evidences for mental imperceptibilia; they're conceptuo-criterial evidences. We do not reason by induction from the bodily to the mental, from the outer to the inner, travelling through a mind-body interspace. 'We do not see facial contortions and make inferences from them (like a doctor framing a diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom' (Z, §225). If a man thrown into a blazing fire screams in agony, onlookers don't say, 'Probably he's in pain—very probably even. But, then, maybe he's pretending.' (No, 'one can't pretend like that' [ibid., §570].) And 'if I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause, I do not think, "All the same, his feelings are hidden from me" ' (PP, XI, §324), or, 'His mind is in pain, but what has that to do with his body?' (PI, §391).

Consider infancy. An infant is an altogether self-revealing creature. His inner's his outer, his outer's his inner. If he is mewling and squirming fretfully then we know that something's wrong, although we mayn't know just what. (We know that something's wrong; we believe that it's colic.) And if he is smiling peacefully, or giggling gleefully, we do not say, 'Notwithstanding, maybe he's severely perturbed within.' For we learn self-control and self-restraint, concealment and suppression, dissimulation and dissemblance. (And these actions are now virtuous, now vicious.) It doesn't make sense to say that we can do them ab initio. 'A child has much to learn before it can pretend' (PP, XI, §363). And 'lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one' (PI, §249).

'A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.
   ' "So you are saying that the word '"pain"' really means crying?" On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it doesn't describe it.' (ibid., §224.)

The mind-body connection is not contingent, but that's not to say that it's necessary. It's neither/nor. For there's no literal connecting to speak of. We're not talking about an efficient causality; we're talking about a formal be-causality. Criterial evidences are not inductive—so '[we] do not say that the evidence makes what goes on within us only probable' (MS., 169)—but that's not to say that they're deductive. It's neither/nor again. And although third-person experiential propositions ('so-and-so believes X, feels Y, desires Z ...') are defeasible, certainty is nevertheless possible. Defeasibility is not defeat. (Omnia praesumuntur legitime facta donec probetur in contrarium.)

'I can be as certain of someone else's feelings as of any fact. But this does not make the sentences "He is very depressed," "25+25=50," and "I am 60 years old" into similar instruments. A natural explanation is that the certainty is of a different kind. This seems to point to a psychological difference. But the difference is a logical one.' (PP, XI, §330.)

Moreover, defeasibility is circumstantial. It has context, setting, background and foreground. Suppose a man is bleary-eyed and sniffling. He may be grief-stricken, he may be dicing onions, etc. To answer 'Why is he thus and so?' we need to look at the 'outer' and not the 'inner'; we need to look around him.

'Pain-behaviour and the behaviour of sorrow—these can only be described along with their external occasions. (If a child's mother leaves it alone it may cry because it is sad; if it falls down, from pain.) Behaviour and kind of occasion belong together. (Z, §492.)

'An "inner process" stands in need of outward criteria.' (PI, §580.) 

Isolationism ...

A man does want some privacy, if you please. But he doesn't want too much. True, if we all knew what we said about each other, there would not be four friends in the world (Pascal). If we all knew what we thought, there would not be two. And 'if God proclaimed the secrets of men, the world could not endure' (Lichtenberg). But suppose nobody knew what anybody said or thought (or anywise experienced), not because they didn't (factually) but because they couldn't (logically)—that would be worst of all. Solitary confinement is a punishment, don't let's forget.

How lamentable, then, that humankind has been in extreme solitary confinement for four hundred years! Who did this to us? The early modern philosophers. How? It comes to this. They concretised abstractions and they literalised metaphors, turning (as such) rightful methods and locutions into wrongful metaphysics, giving us two logically-isomorphic (although epistemically-dimorphic) worlds: here a private world of unshareable intramental objects, there a public world of shareable extramental objects.

Ex hypothesi, psychological 'experiences' (e.g. sensations) are object-relata over which the subject-referent has exclusive ownership. Such relata are immediately accessible to inlookers, but only mediately accessible to onlookers, if accessible at all. We know infallibly that we ourselves are experiencing such-and-such, but that others are so experiencing we know fallibly, if we know at all. Moreover, experiencers cannot have the same experiences, leastwise not numerically. Thus A.J. Ayer: 'It would be a contradiction to speak of the feelings of two different people as being numerically the same; it is logically impossible that one person should literally feel another's pain' (Problem of Knowledge, p. 202).

[Side-note: This seventeenth-century manor, originally built by Descartes & Co., has by now been severally refurbished. (The British empiricists, for example, changed the locks and repainted.) But it still stands as the building in which most philosophers and scientists are metaphysically tenanted, especially such as write books called Descartes' Error (wherein, as our Galen Strawson says, they super-erroneously out-Descartes Descartes).]

Wittgenstein (uncombed)

The older-wiser Wittgenstein had much critically to say here, most famously in his private-language arguments (most famously in his Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315). His many reductio, from the Investigations and elsewhere, show just how readily the above theorising goes 'from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense' (PI, §464). Wittgenstein exhorts us to de-metaphysicalise, 'to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use' (PI, §116). We need therefore to de-concretise the abstractions and de-literalise the metaphors. We need to put the question marks much deeper down than we have done (Culture and Value, p. 62).

'There are propositions of which we may say that they describe facts in the material world ... There are on the other hand propositions describing personal experiences ... At first sight it may appear [...] that here we have two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials: a mental world and a physical world. The mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal. But let me remind you here of the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy—when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object.' (Blue and Brown Books, pp. 46-7; cf. Zettel §482).

But an experience isn't an object. 'It's not a Something, but not a Nothing either!' (PI, §304). To objectify an experience is to concretise an abstraction. And such objectification is problematic for theorists, insomuch as there isn't an exact symmetry between the logic of objects and that of experiences. If experiences were objects then it would be alright to say that we have access to them. But they aren't, and we don't. (To be in pain, say, isn't literally to have access to anything, neither directly nor indirectly.) If a pain were an object, an intramental object-relatum, then it would be alright to say, 'Logically, you can't have my pain.' But it isn't, and it isn't.

' "Another person can't have my pains." My pains—what pains are they? What counts as a criterion of identity here? Consider what makes it possible in the case of physical objects to speak of "two exactly the same": for example, to say, "This chair is not the one you saw here yesterday, but it is exactly the same as it."
     In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (And it would also be conceivable that two people feel pain in the same, not just the corresponding, place. That might be the case with Siamese twins, for instance.)
     I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: "But surely another person can't have THIS pain!" The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatically enunciating the world "this." ' (PI, §253).

We can experience the very same experiences—Deus gratia—feel the same feelings, believe the same beliefs, enjoy the same pleasures, endure the same pains, and so on. Note that although objective sameness is numerical or qualitative, experiential sameness is neither. (Compare chromatic sameness. Suppose two men had matching pocket-squares of red. Would it be right for them to say to each other, 'YOU can't have THIS red'? [Cf. BB, p. 55.])

What of the epistemic-privacy worry, that we can't really know what anybody else is (e.g.) thinking? Wittgenstein stands that on its head: 'I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking' (Philosophy of Psychology, §315).

'In what sense are my sensations private? "Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it." In one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word "know" as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know if I'm in pain. "Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself!" It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I'm in pain. What is it supposed to mean, except perhaps that I am in pain?' (PI, §246).

See, 'one says "I know" where one can also say "I believe" or "I suppose" ' (PP, §311). 'Doubting and non-doubting behaviour: There is the first only if there is the second.' (On Certainty, §354). Thus, where it makes sense to speak of knowing, it also makes sense to speak of not knowing—and here it does not.  Where certain knowledge is intelligible, uncertain acquaintance and outright ignorance are also intelligible—and here they are not. (Consider 'I don't know if I'm in pain, let me check,' 'I believed I was in severe pain, but I was mistaken,' etc.)

'Someone who remonstrates with me that one sometimes does say "But I must know if I am in pain!", "Only you can know what you feel," and similar things, should consider the occasion and purpose of these phrases. "War is war" is not an example of the law of identity, either.' (PP, §311).

'When you say, "I grant you that you can't know when A has a pain, you can only conjecture it," you don't see the difficulty which lies in the different uses of the words "conjecturing" and "knowing." What sort of impossibility were you referring to when you said that you couldn't know? Weren't you thinking of a case analogous to that when one couldn't know whether the other man had a gold tooth in his mouth because he had his mouth shut? Here what you didn't know you could nevertheless imagine knowing; it made sense to say that you saw that tooth although you didn't see it; or rather it makes sense to say that you don't see his tooth and therefore it also makes sense to say that you do. When on the other hand, you granted me that a man can't know whether the other person has pain, you do not wish to say that as a matter fact people didn't know, but that it made no sense to say that they knew (and therefore no sense to say that they don't know). If therefore in this case you use the term "conjecture" or "believe," you don't use it as opposed to "know." That is, you did not state that knowing was a goal which you could not reach, and that you have to be contented with conjecturing; rather, there is no goal in this game.' (BB, pp. 53-4). 

To be continued.

Geräuschmusik again ...

Lichtenberg

'It is easy to construct a landscape out of a mass of disorderly lines, but disorderly sounds cannot be made into music.'

'Everything grows more refined and polished: music was once noise, satire was once lampoon, and where we nowadays say Please excuse me, in the old days we cuffed his head.'

— G.C. Lichtenberg (Sudelbücher, A.40, D.83.)

Geräuschmusik ...

Schönberg (self portrait)

Roundabout the middle of his music-life, Schönberg experimented with Klangfarbenmelodien. These were to be strictly timbrous 'melodies'—successions of timbre that qua successions of timbre were not unlike melodies structurally. (And why not Klangfarbenharmonien, simultaneities of timbre that as such were not unlike harmonies?) Consider the following extracts from Schönberg's Harmonielehre (1911):

'If it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call "melodies" [...], then it must be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours [...], progressions whose relations with one another work with a kind of logic entirely equivalent to that logic which satisfies us in the melody of pitches. That has the appearance of a futuristic fantasy and is probably just that. But it is one that, I firmly believe, will be realised ... Tone colour melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things!'

Schönberg was a (minor) philosopher of music as well as a (major) composer and theorist. But his ontology is here-and-there wanting. Speaking in the manner of the Aristotelians, melody is a formality (as is harmony), whereas timbre is a materiality. And the timbre of a melody (or of a harmony) is logically accidental. (That is not to say that it is unimportant.) A Klangfarbenmelodie is thus a mix-up of ontological levels, a sort of category mistake. Twentieth-century music is full of such errors. After Klangfarbenmusik came Geräuschmusik. And today we have Christian Wolff (et al) telling us that 'no sound is preferable to any other sound or noise.' Ah, if only Chapelmaster Bach knew then what we do now, about this egalitarian levelling of sounds and noises—how much toilsome labour it would have saved him! The modern composer need only load his scattergun with note-shot, stand twenty paces from the page, aim (optional), and fire.

Theory in theory is to follow after practice, both logically and temporally. But in the twentieth century theory ran on ahead, and even to places that practice could not possibly go. Geräuschmusik is an example. Better theorising would have concluded that noise-music is a contradiction, and that contradictions are not more likely to obtain in music than elsewhere. (Is it noise? Then it is not music. Is it music? Then it is not noise. 'But music is made from "noise." ' And violins are made from trees, yet trees are not violins. The composer has as much formative work to do with his material as does the luthier.) Maybe in this way we can give some credence to the 'Heartless brainiac!' objection.

Heart versus brain ...

Schönberg (by Schiele)

In 1946 Schönberg published an article called 'Heart and Brain in Music,' on the adhockery of the heart-brain dichotomy. (He wrote polemics more so than irenics.) See, Schönberg was constantly accused of a brainiac heartlessness. Readers may now open their copies of Style and Idea, turning to page 53. (Readers without the book are asked to feel especially ashamed of themselves.) Twelve-tone composing, Schönberg is sorry to say, has given him 'the title of constructionist, engineer, mathematician, etc., meaning that these compositions are produced exclusively by the brain without the slightest participation of something like a human heart.' However:

'It is not the heart alone which creates all that is beautiful, emotional, pathetic, affectionate, and charming; nor is it the brain alone which is able to produce the well-constructed, the soundly organized, the logical, and the complicated.'

Some compositions are brainier than others, but all music is brainwork as well as heartwork. And if we call Schönberg a heartless brainiac, mustn't we call Chapelmaster Bach—that sovereign of the ars combinatoria—the same? Don't let's forget, in the earlier eighteenth century Bach was most famous for an arcanum.

Bach's celebrated 'Hudemann' canon (BWV 1074)

So far so good for Herr Schönberg. (NB: His musicianship cannot be questioned. He was an exemplar. Musicasters beware.) There is nonetheless a disanalogy. For where there was a realism there is but a nominalism.

To prove the legitimacy of his heirdom, Schönberg was always at-the-ready. He exhibited documentary evidence, juxtaposing tonal and atonal scoreworks, noting hereditary likenesses. Already tone-rows have their transpositions, cancrizans, inversions, and so on, as in olden-days canonic imitation. And look whether there are not even fugues in twelve-tone scores ... Or are there? We must acknowledge that the terms are not univocal, not monosemous. In Webern's Fünf Canons (op. 16), for example, there are 'canons' but not canons. Take Schönberg himself:

'There is no merit in writing canons of two or more voices, because the second, third, fourth, and further voice has only to begin two or more notes later and there will never occur parallel octaves. And who cares about fifths? ... Even the writing of fugues is a little too easy under these circumstances.'

[Note: A prohibition against parallel octaves is common to tonality and atonality, but the prohibitory wherefores are unalike. Tonally, parallels are prohibited for bringing about untoward monophony, monophony where there ought to be polyphony; atonally, for abetting tonicization, for coming nigh unto tonality.]

There could be less heart and more brain in the 'Heartless brainiac!' objections. But just what is it that's objectionable to the objectors?

More to come.

A prayer ...

From the BCP:

A Prayer for persons troubled in Mind or in Conscience 

O blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts, We beseech thee, looke down in pittie and compassion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bitter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniquities; Thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trouble: But O mercifull God, who hast written thy holy word for our learning, that we through patience, and comfort of thy holy Scriptures might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats, and promises, That he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his Temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised Reed, nor quench the smoaking Flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure, but make him to hear of joy, and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoyce. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

' Exceedingly stupid as the idea is ...'

Wittgenstein

'People still have the idea that psychology is one day going to explain all our aesthetic judgements, and they mean experimental psychology. This is very funny, very funny indeed.'

—Wittgenstein (Lectures and Conversations, § 19)