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ОглавлениеChapter 1
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty
And Hashem [‘the Name’, a translation of the Tetragrammaton] God formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call each one; and whatever the man would call to a living soul is its name.
—Genesis 2:19
“Whatever the man would call to a living soul is its name.” Invert the verse and explain it as follows: Any living soul to which man would give a name, that name is its name forever.
—Rashi, Commentary on the Torah. Vol. 1: Bereishis/Genesis
Without inverting the verse, “call to” appears to be used in the sense of summoning; the verse would be saying, “Whatever living soul man would summon is its name.” [A variant reading of Rashi (1995), given in a footnote in the same edition of Rashi's commentary on Genesis from which the two above quotes are drawn.]
Kant's Notion of the Synthetic a Priori
Before I develop and flesh out the implications and entailments of the ideas expressed in the introduction, I wish to do more to bring into relief their ontological purport. I can do this by putting them in a language more familiar to the expression of universals, namely, philosophy. There is no shortage today of postmodernist critiques maintaining that this (basically Greek) language is essentially culture-bound and, insofar as it continues to present itself as otherwise, has come to its end. However, the endeavor to express in philosophical terms the ontological reflections in question here—nondualist reflections—serves to bring out a self-deconstructive side of philosophy, a side that is, with reference to the strict sense of ‘ontology, de-ontologizing. In this light, the presupposition of foundations or universals, a key diagnostic of philosophy, is not so much abolished as radically revised, such that foundations become, paradoxically, at once both relative and essential—or, more exactly, not only essentially relative but also relatively essential. My notion of ‘primordial choice, as explained in the introduction, is meant to capture this paradoxical sense of foundations, as well as to suggest that foundations of the kind necessarily describe human existence as ethics. I also anticipate here the arguments of part 2 by directly linking this revised ontology of foundations (that are not foundations) to the traditional anthropological fare of magico-religious thought.
The philosophical notion proper of the a priori lacks a prominent professional anthropological genealogy. Nevertheless, it should serve well here to give my anthropological ideas philosophical expression. Although it is a Scholastic term that emerged from certain ideas of Aristotle, in recent centuries it is most critically associated with the thought of Kant and his ‘Copernican revolution’, in which he denied the obvious: not, as Copernicus had already done, that the universe has the earth as its center, but, in a limited yet deep sense restoring to humans the centrality of place of which Copernicus had deprived them, that the world, as we find it, stands utterly outside of our experience of it.1
The term ‘a priori’ literally translates as ‘from what is prior’, as opposed to a posteriori or ‘from what is posterior’. Initially, the terms related directly to the idea of causality, since to know something from what comes before it is to know it by its cause. For Kant, however, who was concerned with the conditions of knowing, the term had to do with whether one's knowledge was based on experience or not. For to know something from what comes after the fact is to know it inductively, from the facts themselves. The critical Kantian distinction, then, obtained between a posteriori truths, or knowledge derived empirically, and a priori truths, or knowledge derived otherwise.
Obviously, at least in Western thought, insofar as it is defined as non-empirical, a priori knowledge appears to be a question of reason in Hume's sense of the relations of ideas. As such, it would seem to be logically necessary and universal, in contrast to a posteriori knowledge, which is contingent or relative and particular. For Kant, however, who was chiefly concerned to put metaphysical knowledge on a sound footing, it could not do to reduce the a priori thus to a matter of ordinary reason. He saw that humans cannot help making important and far-reaching judgments that present themselves as necessarily and universally true but are nevertheless not simply a matter of formal logical connection.
Judgments based on a relation of identity between subject and predicate, in which it would be self-contradictory to deny the truth of the predicate (as in, say, ‘all bodies are extended’), Kant called analytic; judgments that do not enjoy this sheer logical independence, but are, instead, matters of fact, he spoke of as synthetic. Kant observed, however, that there are critical judgments that cut across the usual classifications, amounting to knowledge that is neither exactly learned by experience nor derived from formal logic as such, knowledge that is, as he said, both a priori and synthetic. The privileged philosophical site of such judgments is the Meno, in which Plato takes up the problem of how it is possible to inquire into the nature of something if one does not know what it is. In response to this problem, Plato has Socrates argue (to Meno) that because the soul is immortal and has had a previous existence, it recalls what it had learned before; arithmetic and geometry are given as examples of such knowledge. Kant, too, draws on these examples, arguing that the truths of mathematics and geometry—for example, the sum of the angles of any triangle is 180 degrees—are, although neither given in the concept of a triangle nor produced simply on the basis of knowing, a priori or universally necessary. But in addressing the question of how we come to have such synthetic a priori knowledge, even though he invokes a sense of prior knowledge from experience, Kant departs from the Platonic belief in rebirth and from Platonic metaphysics, since the latter's idealism posits a supersensible reality without regard to the subject's point of view. For Kant, the connection between the concept of a triangle and the truths about its angles consists in intuitive forms and transcendental logic. That is, he found his answer in pure reason, the reason of necessary and universal categories rather than the reason of particular ideas. Acknowledging that any world presupposes a subjective point of view, he sought to determine the logical conditions of the very possibility of a point a view and of experiential knowledge. Consequently, while Kant tended to exemplify synthetic a priori knowledge by referring to arithmetic and geometry, natural science, and metaphysics, following his conception of transcendental logic, most if not all of our most fundamental understandings about the world must ultimately be keyed to knowledge of this kind.
As knowledge that lies somehow between apparently mutually exclusive onto-epistemological categories, Kant's synthetic a priori plainly turns in the direction of nondualism. Such a turning is implicit in his revolutionary understanding that far from being wholly independent of us, the external world conforms to the categorical structures of mind, or, in other words, that that world is given form by us. Nevertheless, for all its revolutionary force, Kant's synthetic a priori not only falls short of nondualism, but also managed to put dualism on a more sophisticated intellectual footing than had previously been the case. Although he aims to critique reason, his deductive appeal to transcendental logic rather than to experience (in this word's dynamic sense of ‘practice’) leaves reason, in the last instance, in command.
Kant argued that although synthetic a priori truths are not analytically—and thus tautologically—necessary, they must be the case if human life is to be thinkable. In other words, asking himself what are the conceptual categories necessary to conceive of the human world, he deduced certain constituting concepts. Thus, he found that although spatio-temporal concepts such as, for example, ‘object’ and ‘cause’ are neither, strictly speaking, analytic nor empirically learned, they are presupposed in all human experience. As such, they and their like are necessary and universal, presenting themselves as the categorical begetters of human existence.
Plainly, Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori runs contrary to Hume's skepticism, according to which our knowledge of the external world can never really be rationally justified. Hume's skepticism followed naturally from his coupling of radical empiricism with ontological dualism, a combination that guarantees that what we know by experience to be the case can be established psychologically but not logically. Nevertheless, Kant's notion served in at least two crucial ways to reinforce rather than refute ontological dualism. One way concerns the fact that Kant, in an important sense, and despite his anti-Cartesianism, embraced the Cartesian cogito or ‘I think’ (Heidegger 1978: 45, 367). In Kant's argument, the self is rendered as, although emphatically not, as in Descartes’ discourse, a ‘thinking stuff’ or substance, certainly timeless—something akin to a transcendental ego. “There can be in us,” Kant writes (quoted in Walsh 1967: 312),
no items of knowledge…without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception…[U]nity of consciousness would be impossible if the mind in knowledge of the manifold could not become conscious of the identity of function whereby it synthetically combines it in one knowledge. The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules.
In other words, subjectivity is still presented by Kant as ontologically utterly distinct from the objective world. Indeed, for Kant, the subject is not part of the ‘real’ world. Instead, it obtains in the transcendental logic (the realm of the ideal) that makes it possible to experience a world at all. To be sure, Kant's depiction of consciousness as active rather than passive serves, in a significant way, to link the subject to the object. But that dialectical linkage is predicated on a logically formal and complete distinction between form and content, by virtue of which what we give to the world is not empirical substance but shape alone. (“The identification of the a priori with the formal is the fundamental error of Kant,” observed Scheler [cited in Dufrenne 1966: 57].) As a consequence, the linking remains no less ontologically problematical than in the philosophy of Descartes, who found it necessary to appeal to divine omnipotence to account for the obvious fact that he never met a mind and then a body but always the twain as one. It is not surprising, then, that Kant concluded—ironically deepening Hume's empiricist skepticism by refuting it with idealism—that things in themselves, unconditioned things, or, as he called them, ‘noumena’ (by contrast to phenomena, or things that may be known by their worldly appearance) were indeed inaccessible to human knowing.2
A second way in which Kant's synthetic a priori promoted rather than undermined dualism is this. Correlative to his preservation of an absolute distinction between subject and object, that is, between an inside or mental world and an outside or physical one, is the consideration that his argument continues to predicate a reason that is autonomous and pure. Although by definition it is not analytic, the synthetic a priori is nonetheless conceptual before it is experiential. Indeed, even while it moves to criticize reason by referring it to the evidence of experience, Kant's synthetic a priori proposes that that evidence is not exactly given but intellectually constituted. As Burke puts it (1969: 191), for Kant “experience derives its appearance from the nature of consciousness (the ‘I think, or ‘transcendental synthesis of apperception’).” That is to say, instead of starting with human experience (in the mediatory middle, so to speak), he starts with reason qua reason (transcendental or not), arguing that the human world is begotten conceptually (categorically). Thus, he ends up with such universals as ‘cause’ and ‘object’, that is, with relative but determinate notions that he universalizes, rather than with ‘universals’ that are basically—and paradoxically—conditioned or not specifiable outside of their particular manifestations.3
At this juncture, I can make explicit that the philosophical notion of the a priori is connectable to anthropology at the very core of the latter's scholarly enterprise. As the notion of the a priori directly implicates the idea of universals, so it bears squarely on the question of cultural relativism. Indeed, the deployment of this philosophical notion has powerful implications for anthropological inquiry, from—to sum up broadly the direction of this inquiry—nineteenth-century evolutionism to twentieth-century relativism.
Since empirical statements can always be refuted by further observation, their truth (what indeed it is usual to call synthetic truth) is essentially contingent. But in a manifest sense, so is the truth of analytic statements, since it is dependent on the truth of the other such statements that go to make up the particular system of logic by which truth of this nominal—or, if you like, pure—kind is defined. Moreover, the truth of analytic statements may be regarded as finally necessary or a priori rather than contingent or a posteriori only when the system of logic from which they derive is itself necessarily universal rather than particular (as Kant [1963], in line with his transcendental idealism, professed is in fact the case with classical Western logic [see also Evens 1983]).
Obviously, then, since neither synthetic nor analytic knowledge in itself can support a claim to the epistemic superiority of one culture over another, both are compatible with cultural relativism as opposed to (the Enlightenment idea of) progressive cultural evolutionism. Kant's synthetic a priori, however, which, by virtue of the so-called transcendental deduction, makes some specific concepts both necessary and universal, certainly can offer such support. This helps explain why Kant paid virtually no attention to the role of culture and society in his philosophy of reason and knowledge. To be sure, in picturing consciousness as active rather than passive, Kant made room for cultural activity. By insisting, though, that the synthetic a priori is universal in the received sense (the sense defined by dualism or absolute division between the universal and the particular), and hence according to the epistemological principle of certainty rather than that of basic ambiguity, he could not take advantage of this ethnological opportunity. On the contrary, by defining humanity primarily in terms of reason—a reason whose purity had been critically cut, but only to be further and sublimely rarefied by transcendental distillation—Kant made it possible to conclude (and here I anticipate the interpretation of the Holocaust in chapter 4), whatever his own opinions in such matters, that any peoples who could be shown to fall short of such reason were backward, inferior, or less than human.
Toward True Synthetic a Priori: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty
Wittgenstein
It seems ironic that in his critique of metaphysics, Kant, in the thrall of reason, failed to follow to its logical conclusion the implication of his own Copernican revolutionary thesis, for if it is the case that all knowledge presupposes a point of view, then his ‘transcendental logic’ cannot escape this circumstance. Even if Kant's ‘categories’ serve as preconditions of empirical knowledge, they too are a form of knowledge and therefore cannot but entail a point of view. The truth of Kant's usage of ‘transcendental’ (that is, its metalogical status) notwithstanding, unless Kant is claiming that this point of view is no less than God's, it must be characterized, as with all points of view, as particular and therefore as less than autonomous.
During his lifetime, Kant did not escape criticism of this kind. Most notably, Johann Georg Hamann, a compatriot of Kant and fellow inhabitant of the city of Königsberg, developed a substantial critique in reaction to Kant's critique of reason, one that had an enormous influence on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers (Beiser 1987: chap. 1). But I wish to focus on the twentieth century, when the idea of the synthetic a priori was subjected to further extensive revision, entailing fundamental rather than formal confusion of the a priori and the synthetic. Thus, for example, Saul Kripke (1980), in his brilliant Naming and Necessity, differentiates necessity from analyticity by arguing that referents are fixed by names rather than descriptions. In other words, for Kripke, a spade is a spade because it has been so called (or, as he says, “rigidly designated”), this name being passed on from one speaker to another, rather than because a spade fits a certain criterial description (the description could be variable or even wrong). Here, as in the biblical book of Genesis, the identity of a thing originates with its name, resulting in a truth that is a posteriori but also quite necessary (a spade is indeed a spade, no matter if, say, under changed circumstances, it is no longer found to be black). If a truth is both necessary and dependent upon concrete evidence for its warrant, a matter of sensory perception and yet inevitable, it would seem to play loose with the difference between the a priori and the a posteriori.
Again, for example, Harvard philosopher W V. O. Quine (1953) argues, in his well-known essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” for a gradualistic rather than dualistic distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. As he sees it, from the point of view of pragmatism, every system of logic in the end must give way at its edges to the lessons of experience, making its analyticity distinctly relative. If Quine is right, then there is—in the final instance—no logically necessary a priori but only a synthetic one.
In another place (Evens 1983), writing on the efficacy of the Nuer incest prohibition, I drew on Quine's argument about epistemological gradualism as between logic and experience, in order to propose a nondualist solution to the so-called anthropological problem of primitive mentality. My solution centered on a notion of half-logic, predicated on the ontological thesis of basic ambiguity, and capacitated therefore to endorse, in a subtle but forthright way, the apparently magical possibility of a rule or convention that enjoys the force of nature. Here, however, in order to ground my ideas directly in a phenomenological theory of perception, it is fitting to appeal to the thought of M. Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both giants of twentieth-century philosophy. Their work readily lends itself to discussion in terms that leave no doubt as to the essential relevance of the idea of the a priori to professional anthropology.
At one point in his career, Ludwig Wittgenstein asked his student and friend, M. O'C. Drury, to read to him from J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough. They read only from the first volume, not getting very far because of the profusion of Wittgenstein's critical remarks. His commentary, soon developed by him in writing, was eventually published as “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough” In this terse essay, Wittgenstein (1971) offers scathing criticism of Frazer's anthropological understanding of magical and religious practices among so-called primitives, and in doing so he sets out his own conception of how such practices might best be understood. His argument is, in my opinion, not only anthropologically rich and progressive, but also importantly revealing as to the way in which he came to think of the nature of the a priori in human life.
Basically, Wittgenstein argues that Frazer's understanding of magic and religion as a kind of foolishness is itself foolish, as it attributes to such practices a rational and instrumental objective that they do not entertain and fails to grasp their essentially expressive nature. In effect, Wittgenstein sets up a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive. However, in the course of his argumentation he makes points that are critically inconsistent with and transcend this dualism.
As Wittgenstein sees it, Frazer grasps magical and religious acts as mistakes, since such acts have no basis in the world of empirical fact. Wittgenstein objects (1971: 31): “There is a mistake only if magic is presented as science.” “If the adoption of a child is carried out by the mother pulling the child from beneath her clothes,” Wittgenstein goes on (ibid.), “then it is crazy to think there is an error in this and that she believes she has borne the child.” Such acts, he holds, are not intended instrumentally, and we therefore need to “distinguish between magical operations and those operations which rest on a false over-simplified notion of things and processes” (ibid.). “The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, sticks his knife through a picture of him, really does build his hut of wood and cuts his arrow with skill and not in effigy,” observes Wittgenstein (ibid.), as Malinowski similarly observed in his studies of magical usage among the Trobrianders.
How, then, as Wittgenstein sees it, should we understand magical acts? As essentially expressive (1971: 31):
And magic always rests on the idea of symbolism and of language.
The description of a wish is, eo ipso, the description of its fulfilment. And magic does give representation to a wish; it expresses a wish.
Thus far, the argument works as a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive, and I think that in the “Remarks,” Wittgenstein does indeed incline toward just such a dualism. However, when exemplifying and explicating what he means by the expressive, he plainly and importantly transcends the dualism (1971: 33):
The magic in Alice in Wonderland, trying to dry out by reading the driest thing there is.
In magical healing one indicates to an illness that it should leave the patient. After the description of any such magical cure we'd like to add: If the illness doesn't understand that, then I don't know how one ought to say it.
…[N]o phenomenon is particularly mysterious in itself, but any of them can become so to us, and it is precisely the characteristic feature of the awakening human spirit that a phenomenon has meaning for it. We could almost say, man is a ceremonious animal. This is partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.
In other words, one might begin a book on anthropology in this way: When we watch the life and behaviour of men all over the earth we see that apart from what we might call animal activities, taking food etc., etc., men also carry out actions that bear a peculiar character and might be called ritualistic.
In these passages, Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that what he sees as the ceremonious or ritualistic actions carried out by human beings is not simply expressive but in some sense true to the world as we find it. Hence, he concludes that when an illness is told to go away, if it fails to take heed, then he “doesn't know how one ought to say it”—as if such magical practices really do conform to nature. Or again, he finds that in arriving at his (misguided) conclusions about magic as misguided science, Frazer might just as well have believed “that when a savage dies he is in error” (ibid.: 34). In other words, the magical observances in question are, like death (and taxes), in some sense, necessary, certain, and natural. The sense in which this is so is, as Wittgenstein says, “partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.” What he means exactly by this reserved affirmation bears sharply on the notion of the a priori and can be plumbed by looking more closely at his account of ceremonious conduct.4
According to Wittgenstein, the reason why Frazer sees the magical and religious notions of humans as mistakes is because he pictured them, rationalistically, as attempts to explain the world, that is, as theoretical endeavors. By doing so, Frazer put himself in a position to offer an explanation of magical practices, for he was then able to see the practices as the forlorn products of the mistaken notions. As an upshot, or so Wittgenstein (1971: 29) concludes (providing in the process a concise description of what Evans-Pritchard called the “if I were a horse” fallacy): “All that Frazer does is to make [these practices] plausible to people who think as he does.”
But Wittgenstein points out that where a theory is not put forward, there can be no mistake, since ordinarily we use ‘mistake’ to characterize an incorrect explanation of things. If, then, the magical and religious notions at point are not intended as theories, they cannot be mistaken. “Was Augustine mistaken…when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?” Wittgenstein asks, rhetorically (1971: 29). Moreover, Wittgenstein finds it utterly implausible (as did Durkheim) that people construct and continue to deploy all these notions and practices “out of sheer stupidity” (ibid.).
If these notions are not attempts at explaining the world, then what are they? We have already seen that Wittgenstein was prone to regard them as expressive, but his descriptions are far richer than that. The notions are, to gather together his allusive and aphoristic remarks, strongly affective (“The crush of thoughts that do not get out because they all try to push forward and are wedged in the door”; 1971: 30); spiritual (“What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!” ibid.: 31); ceremonious or ritualistic (“The ceremonial [hot or cold] as opposed to the haphazard [lukewarm]”; ibid.: 32); highly relevant to our everyday lives and what makes an impression on us (“That a man's shadow, which looks like a man, or that his mirror image, or that rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the change of seasons, the likenesses and differences of animals to one another and to human beings, the phenomena of death, of birth and of sexual life, in short everything a man perceives year in, year out around him, should play a part in his thinking [his philosophy] and his practices, is obvious, or in other words it is what we really know and find interesting”; ibid.: 33); mythological (“A whole mythology is deposited in our language”; ibid.: 35); gesticulatory (“We have in the ancient rites the use of a very highly developed gesture-language”; ibid.: 36); and, finally, universalistic (“[T]here is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances by the savages”; ibid.: 34).
From this emphasis on affect, existential relevance, and gesticulation or bodily language, it is tempting to conclude that all Wittgenstein is doing is juxtaposing practice to theory. He is certainly doing this, but it is not all he is doing. It is crucial to see, especially in view of the evidently dichotomous way in which he divides the expressive from the instrumental, that the juxtaposition does not constitute a dualism. For when one adds up the content of all these remarks, one sees that what Wittgenstein is opposing to theory (and opinion and explanation and belief) is no simple counterweight, no opposing but equal principle. On the contrary, what he has in mind enjoys a certain fundamental primacy with respect to theory. As pre-eminently affective and bodily, spiritual and mythological, existentially relevant and universalistic, such magical and religious notions bespeak the bedrock dynamic on which theory, opinions, explanations, and beliefs necessarily rest.
If this is so, then these notions cannot themselves be matters of opinion: “The characteristic feature of primitive man…is that he does not act from opinions” (Wittgenstein 1971: 37). Nor can they be open ultimately to explanation: “Even the idea of trying to explain [such practices]…seems to me wrong-headed” (ibid.: 29). Rather, the sole form of accounting they are open to is description: “We can only describe and say, human life is like that” (ibid.: 30). In effect, they constitute existential certainties or, to use the technical philosophical term, the synthetic a priori.
Precisely because this kind of a priori is neither theoretical nor empirical, it obtains in a logical and ontological nowhere, between necessity and contingency. For this reason, it confounds explanation, the representational demands of which leave no room to maneuver in the face of ambiguity that is basic. When confronted with ambiguity of this kind, all one can do is show it. That is to say, by definition that which is basically ambiguous cannot be logically determined. Since it is neither this nor that, with respect to saying what it is, one can only say (as the Hebrew scriptures say about the godhead), saying everything and nothing at once, that it is what it is. This is why I think that instead of saying “We could say, man is a ceremonious animal,” Wittgenstein says “We could almost say” this, and goes on to say that it is in any case a partly false and nonsensical proposition. Because man's “ceremonious” faculty, his capacity to make meaning, is precisely neither theoretical nor empirical, it is basically inexplicable. Any explanation of this faculty—that is, any attempt to rigidly designate it as either this or that—will in the very (creative and processive) endeavor of trying to do so necessarily go beyond itself and thus belie itself. As a result, although this faculty can be shown, or can show itself, it cannot be said as a truth-functional proposition, at least not without making a partial nonsense logically.
One provocative way of capturing such basic ambiguity is by reference to the so-called gestalt switch. About the famous ambiguous figure that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, Wittgenstein had this to say (in Monk 1990: 507–8): “Suppose I show it to a child. It says ‘It's a duck’ and then suddenly ‘Oh, it's a rabbit.’ So it recognises it as a rabbit.—This is an experience of recognition. So if you see me in the street and say ‘Ah, Wittgenstein.’ But you haven't an experience of recognition all the time.—The experience only comes at the moment of change from duck to rabbit and back. In between, the aspect is as it were dispositional.” What is important here is Wittgenstein's claim that insofar as the ambiguity is basic, the experience of recognition is dispositional and depends on a change of aspect. The moment of change is immediate and therefore inexplicable. Moreover, it describes perception in terms of an irreducible relationship between the perceiver and what is perceived. That is to say, the question to ask is not what the figure really is or if its determination as anything at all is simply a function of something that goes on inside the head of the perceiver. Rather, the only useful or sensible question that can be asked is, what difference does the change of aspect make? The other questions do not admit of clear answers as long as the ambiguity, as between the figure and itself as well as between the perceiver and the perceived, proves basic. The attempt to see the gestalt switch in terms of such questions always leads down the futile path of having to decide between materialism and idealism, as if the thing had to be either object or idea. What Wittgenstein is trying to show by reference to such gestalten is that although idea and experience or thinking and seeing or, more comprehensively, the internal and the external are not the same thing, neither does it make sense to understand them as perfectly separate and distinct from each other.
The immediacy of the change of aspect implicates a creative process. That is to say, at some point in looking in to it, the synthetic a priori lacks an empirical genesis or even an origin through learning. Wittgenstein (1971: 36) alludes to this creative process in terms of what we ordinarily construe as the conduct of choice: “If a human being could choose to be born in a tree in a forest, then there would be some who would seek out the most beautiful or the highest tree for themselves, some who would choose the smallest and some who would choose an average or below-average tree, and I do not mean out of philistinism, but for just the reason, or kind of reason, for which the other man chose the highest. That the feeling we have for our life is comparable to that of a being who could choose his own standpoint in the world, is, I believe, the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth.” Here Wittgenstein is pointing out that humans are given to experience their “standpoint in the world” as somehow their own choice, and he seems to imply that this experience provides a basis on which humans come to believe that the mind is one thing and the body another (“the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth”). But he also suggests that in a (logically impossible) sense, one's “standpoint in the world” is in fact a matter of ‘choice’. Hence, if one could choose to be born “in a tree in a forest,” one might choose to identify oneself with the most “beautiful” or “highest” or “smallest” or “average” or “below-average” tree, and whatever the choice, it is taken for “just the reason, or kind of reason”—that is, I think, the ‘reason’ of self-fashioning—for which other persons choose the other trees to house their particular identities.
These choices, though, arising as they do somehow between thought and perception, cannot be altogether witting and free. Hence, Wittgenstein calls the proposition that our minds somehow obtain prior to our bodies—and, it must follow, as against Kant, the proposition that our conduct of choice can be perfectly autonomous—a “myth.” It is for this reason—the reason that the conduct he is describing both does and does not amount to choice—that he qualifies by the conditional (“If one could choose”) his picture of choice throughout. Nevertheless, this conduct is, I believe, a question of ethics for him (1971: 36): “We might say ‘every view has its charm, but this would be wrong. What is true is that every view is significant for him who sees it so (but that does not mean ‘sees it as something other than it is’). And in this sense every view is equally significant. It is important also that the contempt each person feels for me is something I must make my own, an essential and significant part of the world seen from the place where I am.” Wittgenstein seems to be saying here that from the perspective of our faculty to make meaning of the world, no standpoint is more (or less) significant than any other. That is to say, synthetic a priori or foundations of human worlds, the standpoints of the highest tree and of the lowest, though different, are equal. If you live in the highest tree and your other in the lowest, that does not mean that the latter has got the world wrong—your other is not seeing it, as Frazer seems to think, “as something other than it is.” And precisely in order to see this, Wittgenstein finds that it is “important” to make the other's “contempt” for us (a contempt issuing from the other's particular standpoint in the world), “an essential and significant part” of our own standpoint. By doing so, of course, by learning the other's language (another way, according to Wittgenstein [1971: 36, third footnote] to understand what it means to incorporate into our own view the other's outlook on us), we position ourselves to see the ‘truth’ in the other's standpoint as well as the relativity of our own.
Such an exercise, one that Wittgenstein practiced with incomparable rigor over the course of his life (indeed, in a sense it is this exercise that defines his philosophy), is by any other name ethics. For it is an exercise in self-liberation and self-creation by means of, paradoxically, the respectful acknowledgment of the other as other. As such, it also implies the understanding, which I believe Wittgenstein held, that the synthetic a priori, the certainties in terms of which we define ourselves and take our existential bearings, remain open to human judgment despite the fact that ordinarily nothing seems to speak against them. By the same token, it implies that although all such standpoints may be equally meaningful as ciphers of ‘reality’, and therefore immune to theoretical judgments of right and wrong, they are not necessarily off-limits to judgments of good and bad. That is, their nature as existential attitudes toward the world may render theoretical assessments of them misplaced, but it cannot save them from ethical evaluations. It is for this reason that I speak of these attitudes, these a priori, as primordial choices. However much they may be taken for granted and acted on in terms of certainty, they are also auto-constructed in terms of a good. Wittgenstein saw that such standpoints are subject to evaluations of use, but I cannot say whether he formally entertained the point I am making about ethical evaluations. The point, though, is certainly implicit in his argumentation and also, I should think, his conduct: he had a strong sense of the good and was not shy about judging others according to it (cf. Monk 1990: 278).
In view of this understanding of the synthetic a priori, it is no wonder that Wittgenstein concluded that Frazer's evolutionary account of the Beltane May Day or fire festival fails to furnish satisfaction. This festival, which took place in certain parts of Great Britain and Northern Europe up to the nineteenth century, centered on a cake, ritually prepared and divided into lots (one of which could serve as a selector), which were then distributed for purposes of determining a victim to be thrown symbolically into the fire. Impressed with the sinister aura of this festival, Frazer explained it in terms of the hypothesis that the festival found its ultimate origin in ancient rites of human sacrifice. But Wittgenstein points out that even if Frazer's evolutionary hypothesis proved wrong, we would still be impressed with the sinister character of the Beltane festival. In other words, although the genetic explanation may throw a certain light on the festival, it cannot account for our impression that there is something deep and sinister about it.
“I think it is clear,” Wittgenstein says (1971: 38), “that what gives us a sinister impression is the inner nature of the practice as performed in recent times, and the facts of human sacrifice as we know them only indicate the direction in which we ought to see it.” By “inner nature of the practice,” he means (ibid.: 38), “all those circumstances in which it is carried out that are not included in the account of the festival, because they consist…in what we might call the spirit of the festival: which would be described by, for example, describing the sort of people that take part, their way of behaviour at other times, i.e. their character, and the other kinds of games that they play. And we should then see that what is sinister lies in the character of these people themselves.” Plainly, in this passage Wittgenstein is referring to ‘cultural context’, to the culturally certain foundations that distinguish and identify the people in question. The reason why we find something deep about this festival is, then, according to Wittgenstein, that the spirit of the festival, that is, its inner nature or existential meaning, smacks of the sinister. Put another way, the dark character in question is an aspect of who the rite's practitioners are, of their particular identity as cultural beings.
But Wittgenstein's key point looks beyond the cultural context of the people of the rite to embrace the observer's context. “What makes human sacrifice something deep and sinister anyway?” he asks. His answer is (1971: 40): “[T]his deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves.” The impression is given not only because something deep and sinister rests with the inner spirit of the rite and with the character of the rite's practitioners, but also because “there is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances” (ibid.: 34). Here, with this turn to the beholder's share, Wittgenstein, despite his conspicuous and philosophically central discomfort with the idea of universals (he regarded as pathological the philosophical craving for generality), insinuates the universal—though not in the received sense of the notion. This movement is unmistakable in the sentence that brings his essay to a close (ibid.: 41): what we see in ceremonies and stories evocative of human sacrifice “is something they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does not seem directly connected with them—from the thought of man and his past, from the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard.”
Thus, Wittgenstein argues that the context of meaning to which the impression at point must be referred includes the observer's experience and stock of knowledge. In effect, he sees the observer as participant of what she is observing, helping to define and construct it as it does her in return. This point reiterates Wittgenstein's rejection of both empiricism and intellectualism in favor of the understanding that although the perceiver and the perceived are relatively separate and distinct, there obtains between them a fundamental continuity. As partly a product of the character of the ‘outside’ observer, the impression of something deep and sinister directly ties the idea of the synthetic a priori to the idea of the universal. This is true despite the fact that by virtue of its syntheticism, this kind of a priori is essentially particularistic. The possibility of an a priori that is at once both particular and universal is a function of the fact that the implied universalism does not project a world of fixed things, but rather evokes a perceptual dynamic that continuously fires the possibility of a world in common. Although each and every synthetic a priori is culturally particular, insofar as it is a product of the human faculty for making meaning, it must be open to the active understanding of others. Thus, by not allowing our intellectualism to obstruct our vision, and by keeping a sharp eye out for the “connexions” and “intermediate links” (Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that make a gestalt, including especially the gestalt formed by the observer with the observed, we put ourselves in a position to see directly the deep nature of the festival and thus satisfy ourselves as to why it impresses us as sinister. The capacity to do this bespeaks a universalizing nature, but because this nature describes the observer as being in the picture he himself projects, it remains ever beyond the reach of logical determination. It is, however, distinctly manifest in human interaction and therefore in a sense can be shown.
I have argued that Wittgenstein's “Remarks on Frazer's ‘Golden Bough’” offers an account of the synthetic a priori that radically revises the Kantian understanding. For unlike Kant, who held fast to the immaculate distinction between subject and object, inside and outside, and form and content, Wittgenstein (to leave aside his polemical argument about the expressive and the instrumental) relativizes these distinctions, making them definitively incomplete. As a consequence, while the distinctions do not disappear, their opposing principles enjoy a certain continuity with each other, meaning that they must be less than identical to themselves. This paralogical condition, a state of nondualism or basic ambiguity, yields an a priori that both is and is not certain, universal, and a matter of choice. The possibility of such an a priori stands with the picture of the human world as, in the first place, a dynamic of becoming, in which the said, for all its imposing power to fix and decide things, can never quite catch up with the saying. The said enters into the saying and may represent itself as the superior power, but it can never wholly supercede the primacy of its counterforce. For the human world proceeds in terms of meanings imprisoned in action, and although these meanings can be let out into the light of consciousness, if that light is to shine at all, there must always be further meanings that remain implicit and, in this sense, in the dark, behind the epistemic bars of practice—behind the limits of the self and self-consciousness.
I have read a good deal into the “Remarks,” a brief text that has certainly not been regarded by the philosophical commentators as central in the corpus of Wittgenstein's work (cf., however, Zengotita 1989). Still, I believe that I can reinforce my interpretation by glancing quickly at another work by Wittgenstein, especially On Certainty (1972), in which he deals with the problem of the a priori rather directly.
Wittgenstein's friend and Cambridge colleague, G. E. Moore, in his attempt to refute philosophical skepticism, that is, the position that there is nothing about the world that can be known with certainty, offered as evidence to the contrary certain common-sense understandings. The most famous of these is his proof that his two hands exist, which he demonstrated by holding them up and saying “Here is one hand, and here is another.” According to Wittgenstein, Moore's demonstration could hardly refute skepticism, since showing one's hands in this way cannot provide knowledge that one's hands exist. What it can do, said Wittgenstein, is make clear that it would be nonsensical to doubt the existence of one's hands. Moore, says Wittgenstein (1972: § 151), “does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him.”5
In other words, Wittgenstein drew a distinction between, on the one hand, the ordinary, everyday experience of not feeling any doubt and, on the other, the epistemological condition of having certain knowledge. Whereas the latter is a question of logic and rationality (“One says ‘I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. ‘I know’ relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth” [1972: § 243]), the former has to do simply with making sense or nonsense of anything at all. Were we to doubt the existence of our own two hands, as we hold them up for all to see, there would be nothing safe from doubt, including our being in the world and our senses: “Doesn't testing come to an end?” (ibid.: § 164). Wittgenstein was arguing neither that one's senses are perfectly reliable nor that different people cannot arrive at different existential certainties. Rather, he was pointing out that in order to make any sense at all, it is necessary that we take some propositions for granted, for these propositions (such as “here is my hand”) belong to the frame of reference by virtue of which we can make meaning of the world in the least. If we did not conduct ourselves as if our hands exist or the earth abides beneath our feet, our world would lack any integrity whatsoever, and we could take no meaningful direction from it for purposes of getting on with life (ibid.: § 150): “How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand?. If I don't trust myself here, why should I trust anyone else's judgment? Is there a why? Must I not begin to trust somewhere? That is to say: somewhere I must begin with not-doubting; and that is not, so to speak, hasty but excusable: it is part of judging.”
Plainly, Wittgenstein is pointing to a synthetic a priori, which can be conceived of in terms of a taken-for-granted world or, as he calls it, a world picture (Weltbild). The sort of picture he has in mind is not a proper theoretical projection of things, but a practical, meaningful framework on the basis of which we can judge and determine, which is to say, come to terms with things. Regarding Moore-type assertions as “absolutely solid,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 151), “is part of our method of doubt and enquiry.” By “method” here he does not intend a technical procedure but rather our everyday practice of making sense of things (ibid.: § 148): “Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don't. This is how I act.” Hence, for all practical purposes, this taken-for-granted framework, this “substratum of all my enquiring and asserting” (ibid.: § 162) is groundless, without ‘why’: “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (1972: § 166). Correlatively, Wittgenstein asserts (ibid.: § 152): “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.”
The last quotation suggests why such indubitable propositions constitute a world-view. Wittgenstein holds that unlike theoretical premises, they do not stand alone, as matters of logic proper, but rather together: “It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support” (1972: § 142). “When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole)” (ibid.: § 141). Wittgenstein describes how this holistic learning takes place as follows (ibid.): “I am told, for example, that someone climbed this mountain many years ago. Do I always enquire into the reliability of the teller of this story, and whether the mountain did exist years ago? A child learns there are reliable and unreliable informants much later than it learns facts which are told it. It doesn't learn at all that that mountain has existed for a long time: that is, the question whether it is so doesn't arise at all. It swallows this consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns.”
The holism of synthetic a priori propositions helps us to understand how such groundless propositions can “stand fast.” They are of course taken for granted, which means that normally they do not dwell in the light of consciousness and therefore are not open to question (as Wittgenstein says, some propositions are simply swallowed down together with what is learned). But there is more to this kind of pre-epistemological security. Because they are all tied together, these propositions are continually rein-forced by all the other such propositions, in the sense that to question any is implicitly to question many, if not all. And since together they constitute one's world picture, that is, the picture according to which one goes about the activities of one's everyday, ordinary life (standing up, sitting down, going from one place to another, etc.), such questioning tends to pull the very ground from beneath one's feet. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein tells us that what holds these propositions fast is the movement around them (1972: § 114): “The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.” Such propositions are groundless, then, because they themselves constitute the ground. And like any ground or horizon, they are fixed only relative to their correlative figure or theme, which in the present case amounts to one's everyday, precognitive practices.6
Gier (1981: chap. 8) finds that Wittgenstein distinguished two sorts of such synthetic a priori propositions, one having to do with grammatical rules and another that is a question of facts rather than rules. For example, “I cannot remember the future” runs contrary to certain fundamental Western understandings because it fails to adhere to the grammatical rules of usage. The proposition makes no sense since it defies the logic of grammatical convention rather than empirical fact: we simply do not use ‘remember’ in this way, to take as its object the future. But the proposition “I have only one body” is not a question of rules of usage; instead, it is bound up with empirical matters of fact.
Despite the difference between them, however, both kinds of proposition run irremediably between the analytic and the synthetic. Grammatical propositions constitute the logic of a language and the basis on which people act and make meaning. In this sense, they are a priori and enjoy an analytic nature. But plainly, as ‘rules’ of grammar, even if implicit ones, they are also subject to the material process of history and are thus synthetic. Hence, they obtain halfway between the formal and the factual or contingent. The other sort of a priori propositions have the form of ordinary empirical propositions but enjoy a special ontological status. “It is clear that our empirical propositions do not all have the same status,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 167), “since one can lay down such a proposition and turn it from an empirical proposition into a norm of description.” By “norm of description,” Wittgenstein intends a proposition that “gives our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts. (Every human being has parents.)” (ibid.: § 211). Such presuppositions are bound up, not with rules of usage, but with the way things are and what there is. They serve as pinions of reality, and, in this sense, may be thought of as analytic or even transcendental. But Wittgenstein's characterization of them as empirical propositions transformed into norms of description suggests that they too are synthetic in nature. Moreover, just as, like any rules, the rules of grammar are subject to change, so such hard propositions can lose their special status among empirical propositions. For example, whereas we have ordinarily always presupposed that every human being has two, and only two, parents, with the invention of the technology of surrogate motherhood, whereby the biological processes of ovulation and gestation are divided between two women, is it not the case that now some children may be said to have not two but three parents?7
Although on the surface of it, there do seem to be differences between grammatical and hard propositions, it is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different. Gier himself (1981: 175) suggests that the appearance of the distinction in Wittgenstein's work “reveals some possible confusion in Wittgenstein's thinking.” I have brought Gier's discussion to bear here because it is exceedingly helpful in clarifying Wittgenstein's focus on the question of the a priori. For my purposes, what is important to see is that both grammatical and hard propositions constitute synthetic a priori. As such, neither is normally a question of truth or falsity; rather, both embody the conditions for determining what is true and what is false. In addition, both confound the distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic, or reason and fact, such that these distinctions are rendered essentially fuzzy and less than fast.
Merleau-Ponty
In his monumental work, Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes Kant to task for failing to follow out his own program, “which was to define our cognitive powers in terms of our factual condition” (1962: 220–21). Had Kant done so, finds Merleau-Ponty, he would have arrived at “a new definition of the a priori” (ibid.: 220), in which the a priori is no longer cleanly distinguishable from the a posteriori: “From the moment that experience—that is, the opening on to our de facto world—is recognized as the beginning of knowledge, there is no longer any way of distinguishing a level of a priori truths and one of factual ones, what the world must necessarily be and what it actually is” (ibid.: 221). Put in a nutshell (ibid.: 394): “[E]very truth of fact is a truth of reason, and vice versa” So much for Kant's continued adherence to a dualism of form and content, or of the analytic and the empirical.
In order to explain himself, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 394) appeals to a phenomenological notion of “founding” (Fundierung), by which he has in mind a dynamic two-way relationship, in which one sort of truth serves to found another, which in turn acts back on the first sort, making itself more than derivative and the founding truth less than primary. That is to say, in our practical engagement of the world, we manage, especially by means of language, to transform truths of fact into truths of reason. Although the latter truths can never break entirely free from their founding facts, they become sedimented into cultural forms (into, as Wittgenstein would say, the “scaffolding” of our thoughts) and therewith inform the facts from which they derive, giving these facts, irremovably, a cultural character. In light of this dynamic picture of essential ambiguity, ultimately there is no distinguishing between the two kinds of truth, and wherever they can be distinguished, the distinction is relative. This I take it is what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he maintains (ibid.: 393–94) that “there is not one of my actions…which has not been directed toward a value or a truth…Conversely, there is not one truth of reason which does not retain its coefficient of facticity.”
In order to demonstrate that ideas or truths of reason are always tied to being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty takes up Descartes’ example (in his Fifth Meditation, but harking back to Plato and forward to Kant) of the triangle as a pure idea, that is, as an idea in itself, cleanly detached from the empirical world. Merleau-Ponty's discussion is involved (1962: 383ff.; cf. Hall 1979), but the following highly anthropological observation by him—evocative of Wittgenstein's that “norms of description” can grow from hard to soft propositions—suffices here to indicate the spirit of his point (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394): “[T]he alleged transparency of Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as operative for a certain period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that, for a time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional space as the ‘ground’ of their thoughts, and to assume unquestioningly what generalized science will come to consider as a contingent account of space.”
What, then, of the other side of the two-way relationship he called “founding”? If, as against intellectualism, the truths of reason are always derivative, then must we, as dualism bids us, plump for empiricism? But the whole of Merleau-Ponty's great book is geared to show that neither empiricism nor intellectualism can do the ontological trick. For the founding facts in which Merleau-Ponty's “founding” begins are, like Wittgenstein's hard propositions, far from ordinary empirical facts. Instead, they are matters of basic ambiguity. Such ambiguity, which cannot be “resolved” but can be “understood as ultimate” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394), recalls Wittgenstein's thesis of truths that can be shown but, precisely because they are imprisoned in practice and do not stop for logical logic, cannot be said.
Merleau-Ponty, providing a loose and open-ended list of terms, does speak of the “founding term, or originator”: “time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception” (1962: 394). But he uses none of these terms here in an ordinary sense. Let me take up “perception” alone, as this concept forms the axis of his phenomenology and may serve to elucidate the other terms. “[T]he perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence,” he says (1964b: 13). Merleau-Ponty is interested in the presuppositions of our existence, the world as we live it before we reflect on it, which is what he means by “the perceived world.” Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, the perceiving being cannot be in the first place a pure consciousness, as it is for, say, Descartes and Kant. Otherwise it would be, instead of pre-reflective, a disengaged self, like Descartes’ cogito or Kant's transcendental ego. In order to transcend this dualistic conception of the perceiver as that which is wholly set over and against the world, Merleau-Ponty renders the perceiving being as a body-subject. Obviously, by making it out as no less bodily than mindful, Merleau-Ponty construes it, not as detached from but as participating in the world. In which case, unlike Descartes’ ‘I think’, which extends in neither space nor time, it must be a matter of temporality and facticity.
Since the body-subject ‘thinks’, it must enjoy language, in the sense of expression. Language-as-expression reconfigures the world, making the world meaningful, and yet remains inseparable from being-in-the-world, which is to say, from bodily existence or experience. Language in this sense, as for Wittgenstein, is a matter of gesticulation and silence before speech. For Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that perceives and the body that speaks. And the body can do this because, in the first place, it is not the objective phenomenon that science projects. Purely objective phenomena, in Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's philosophy, are nothing but high abstractions, the production of which depends on the as-if existential detachment afforded by the intellectual or theoretical standpoint. Instead of an objective phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty's ‘body’ goes without organs.8 A body without organs is integrally tied to the world and is therefore less than perfectly separate and discrete; but it is tied in a way so open and dynamic that its movements characteristically reconfigure its relationship to the world, thus always transcending itself in its act.
Even if the perceiving being remains tied to the world, though, perception seems still to presuppose a consciousness of sorts. Hence, Merleau-Ponty posited a cogito or ‘I think’, but, in critical contrast to Descartes’, a tacit one. Such a cogito is the name Merleau-Ponty (1962: 371) gives to the self-consciousness that necessarily accompanies all perception, even if perception is essentially bodily, a movement toward the world in which the perceiving being transcends itself by reconfiguring itself in relation to the world: “All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness, failing which it could have no object. At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence.” Plainly, as it proceeds in action, that is, “through direct contact with…existence,” the cogito of which Merleau-Ponty speaks must be less than transparent to itself, which is why he calls it “tacit” (ibid.: 402).
But despite its pronounced nature as action rather than thought qua thought, the tacit cogito would not be a cogito at all, an ‘I think, if it eluded itself completely. For this reason, the idea of the tacit cogito might still evoke body-mind dualism, rather than the patent ambiguity of a body that is no less a subject than an object, and thus project perception as an act of consciousness. Seeing this and taking an even more radical ontological turn, one that dovetails with Wittgenstein’s (1972: § 142) notion of a system of “mutual support,” in The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was working on when he died, Merleau-Ponty (1968) reconceived “founding” in terms of “intertwining” or “reversibility.” Instead of a movement in which one thing founds another that in turn reconfigures its source (as culture, our second nature, informs the human practice from which it springs), he conceives of a dynamic crossing arrangement (ibid.: 133):
[B]etween my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are…the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part. Through this crisscrossing within it of the touching and the tangible, its own movements incorporate themselves into the universe they interrogate, are recorded on the same map as it.
Instead of citing the hands, then, as does Moore, in an exercise of ostension, to prove that we can have certain knowledge of the external world, Merleau-Ponty cites them in their dynamic relationship to each other, in order to describe how perception works and how it solicits faith in its act. That is, he brings our hands to bear, not as objects, but as modes of engaging or perceiving the world. The hand can touch because it too is palpable. It can make sense of (behave sensibly in) the world precisely because it is of the world, a part of the same “universe.” There is a substantive identity between it and the world, such that its touch can be relied upon, not because it provides certain knowledge, but because, as Wittgenstein might say, what it touches resonates with it in practical harmony.
Precisely because there is such identity, however, because the hand's ability to touch depends on its status as itself tangible, its touch can never exhaust in perception what it touches. Its own palpability makes its touch self-referential and thus constitutionally limited (“a veritable touching of the touch, when my right hand touches my left hand while it is palpating the things, where the ‘touching subject’ passes over into the rank of the touched”; Merleau-Ponty 1968: 133–34). Only if the hand were itself untouchable, the veritable hand of God, would it be capable of transforming what it touches into an object pure and simple (and even then, judging from the Hebraic creation story, as in Michelangelo's glorious Sistine depiction of it, such sheer objectification is dubious). In other words, the relationship Merleau-Ponty describes, the dynamic of perception, cannot be captured by subject-object dualism. The substantive identity between the body-subject and the object-world, the identity that makes perception possible, also precludes the possibility of grasping the perceived phenomenon totally, as a pure object. For its identity with its other ensures that the perceiving being must be less than identical to itself. And inasmuch as it is, it—and of course the perceptible other, which it also is—is by definition always already beyond itself.
This dynamic of identity within difference is for Merleau-Ponty the “ultimate truth” (1968: 155). That is to say, he describes the presuppositional foundation of human existence, not as a foundation in the positivistic sense of the term, a firm and unambiguous edifice, but as (perceptual) movement of the sensible body in the world. Of course, the shibboleth of identity-in-difference recalls Hegel's dialectic. But just as it is the nature of that dialectic to resolve itself, so it is the nature of Merleau-Ponty's never to reach final resolution, never to catch up with itself. For the identity that makes the movement of perception possible also ensures the difference that makes the movement ongoing. This dynamic, a bodily but sensible connectivity, is called by Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 138 and chap. 4) “flesh,” and, in view of the way in which it connects all things to one another in an open whole, a whole that is, paradoxically, less than a totality, he speaks of it as “the flesh of the world” (ibid.: 146).
Holism of this kind bears comparison to Wittgenstein's, wherein together with every proposition one learns, one also ‘swallows down’—which is to say, learns unknowingly—a host of other propositions, for the latter are fundamentally linked to the former, as horizon to theme. Hence, with regard to such attendant propositions, Wittgenstein (1971: 34–35) bids us to “see the connexions,” to show them “in a perspicuous way,” a way that has nothing to do with genetic or explanatory relations but simply allows us to see all at once a meaningful configuration. Both holisms, Merleau-Ponty's and Wittgenstein's, are gestaltist in character, supposing that the meaningful forms of our existence are in a sense always already given, not exactly as ideas, but as lived and affective or ‘bodily’ predications—that is, as synthetic a priori. Although Wittgenstein does not use ‘flesh’ to describe what binds such propositions together, when one considers that the kind of horizon he has in mind is not properly propositional at all but a matter of concrete, everyday practice, Merleau-Ponty's term seems to fit the spirit of Wittgenstein's understanding well enough. Indeed, in light of the fact that Wittgenstein (1971: 41) critically includes in the horizonal context of any perception or understanding the beholder's share (to repeat the quote, with italics added: “the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard”), he approaches the very heart of Merleau-Ponty's holism: that the ultimate context and standpoint of every act of perception—the ineradicable, ‘visually’ enabling blind spot of the mind's eye—is the body-subject.
Of course, we ordinarily think of perception in terms of seeing rather than touching, and the other word Merleau-Ponty uses to speak of the intertwining—“chiasm”—is the physiological term for the crossing of the optic nerves that physically occasions vision. In starting with the example of the hands, Merleau-Ponty wants to show the basically bodily nature of perception, even when it is visual perception in question. As most any account of scientific methodology will exhibit, the dualistic picture of perception as an act of consciousness in relation to the external world is associated especially with our faculty of vision. The distance this faculty affords us from whatever happens to be under observation is so great relative to how our other senses work that it has encouraged us to conclude (mistakenly) that the break between the observer and the observed is clean. In sharp contrast, Merleau-Ponty (1968: 134) argues that we all see, like Lear's blinded Lord Gloucester, ‘feelingly’: “Between the massive sentiment I have of the sack in which I am enclosed, and the control from without that my hand exercises over my hand, there is as much difference as between the movements of my eyes and the changes they produce in the visible. And as, conversely, every experience of the visible has always been given to me within the context of the movements of the look, the visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither more nor less than do the ‘tactile qualities.’” It must follow that visual perception too works as a crossing function (ibid.): “[S]ince vision is a palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at.”
If the seer is thus continuous with the seen, in looking at its other it is also seeing itself. In the visual domain, Merleau-Ponty describes perception along the lines of mirror-imaging, making self and other reverse—and therefore less than absolute—projections of each other. In his phenomenological account of the development of the child's perception of others, Merleau-Ponty (1964b: chap. 4) makes extensive use of the example of how children respond to their own image in the mirror. He finds (on the basis of psychological research) that whereas at first the child tends to see the visual image of its body in the mirror as enjoying a quasi-existence, it gradually learns to displace the image and grasp the mirror's crucial developmental lesson: “[H]e can…be seen by an external witness at the very place at which he feels himself to be” (ibid.: 129). In the following passage, Merleau-Ponty (ibid.) attempts to lend support to the claim of an original and originary consciousness in which differentiation is less than complete:
Many pathological facts bear witness to this kind of external perception of the self…First, it is found in many dreams in which the subject figures as a quasi-visible character. There would also be phenomena of this kind in dying people, in certain hypnotic states, and in drowning people. What reappears in these pathological cases is comparable to the child's original consciousness of his own visible body in the mirror. “Primitive” people are capable of believing that the same person is in several places at the same time. The child knows well that he is there where his introceptive body is, and yet in the depth of the mirror he sees the same being present, in a bizarre way, in a visible appearance.
Granted, his comparison here of “primitive” people with children and pathological cases is anthropologically exceedingly crude and badly dated. But it makes a powerful difference to the anthropological import of the comparison that he aims to disclose by it, rather than (à la Frazer et al.) a mistaken perception of the world, a recognition that opens on the truth or a prioricity of nondualism, and therewith one that betrays the radical reduction carried out by intellectualization. Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 132) relates that Wallon, the psychologist on whose study he draws here, holds that once the child has learned to reduce the mirror image to an ideal space (that is, to intellectualize it), the image has become what it should be in an adult mind: “a simple reflection.” But, says Merleau-Ponty (ibid.), “there are two ways in which we can consider the image—one, a reflective, analytic way according to which the image is nothing but an appearance in a visible world and has nothing to do with me; the other, a global and indirect one, of the kind which we use in immediate life when we do not reflect and which gives us the image as something which solicits our belief.” In other words, he is suggesting that in fact the child's relatively undifferentiated perception has something fundamentally right about it (ibid.): “[T]he image in the mirror, even for the adult, when considered in direct unreflective experience, is not simply a physical phenomenon: it is mysteriously inhabited by me; it is something of myself.” As Wittgenstein would say, it is not a mistake.
If Merleau-Ponty is correct, then the lesson to be learned when the child comes to better differentiate his mirror image from himself, such that he learns to take that image as an external perspective on himself and thence to see himself in terms of how he may appear to the other, is that, far from being perfectly separate and distinct from his other, in some concrete (but, crucially, always imperfect) way he is his other. Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 135ff.) goes on to cite Lacan's famous psychoanalytic study of the role of the “mirror stage” in the development of the self, to the effect that the child's eventual assumption of the viewpoint taken on by him, as this viewpoint is given in the mirror image, is what makes the self possible. For it is only by assuming an ‘outside’ perspective, that is, the perspective of the other, that a self can appear at all to what is otherwise a mere “lived me” (ibid.: 136). “To use Dr. Lacan's terms,” writes Merleau-Ponty (ibid.), “I am ‘captured, caught up’ by my spatial image…The specular image is the ‘symbolic matrix…where the I springs up in primordial form before objectifying itself in the dialectic of identification with the other.’” Put differently, the immediate me is drawn away from itself and subjected. But Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 138; 140) is keen to stress that this development is made possible only because the lived me, the pre-eminently (but still not absolutely) undifferentiated childhood me, “is never radically liquidated”: “[W]e must consider the relation with others not only as one of the contents of our experience but as an actual structure in its own right. We can admit that what we call ‘intelligence’ is only another name designating an original type of relation with others (the relation of ‘reciprocity’) and that, from the start to the finish of the development, the living relation with others is the support, the vehicle, or the stimulus for what we abstractly call the ‘intelligence.’” For Merleau-Ponty, then, the intertwining constitutes a bodily a priori, one that, in view of its sensible or experiential nature, is no less synthetic than given.
Reversibility or the intertwining appears to make the self-other relationship sym-metrical, but this appearance of symmetry, although provocatively instructive, is misleading. It is instructive because it points to novel realizations, perhaps the most jarring (and, when one considers the considerable ubiquity of ‘the evil eye’, ethnographically gravid) of which is that the seen as well as the seer must have the capacity of sight. Of course, when the seen is another person, there is nothing outlandish about this condition. But as soon as ‘other’ is used to include all that is not self, then it must be the case that visible ‘things’ as well as persons can return the seer’s look. Merleau-Ponty takes this claim quite seriously, as in the following example of painters (1964b: 167): “Inevitably the roles between [the painter] and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As André Marchand says, after Klee: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…I was there, listening…I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it.’” I take it that Merleau-Ponty intends, against all logic, that the trees are actually looking at the painter as he is looking at them (pace Dillon 1988: 169). Under our received ontology (on which logic proper rests), this claim must be regarded as perfectly outlandish: trees as such do not possess organs of vision. But under Merleau-Ponty's (1964b: 163) revised ontology, in which the animate body is without organs, that is, does not amount to “the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts,” except in the abstract, the body is at once separate from and participant of the seen. In which case, reasons Merleau-Ponty (ibid.: 164): “It is more accurate to say that I see according to [the seen], or with it, than that I see it. ”
Once one takes up the ontological perspective of nondualism, then even if the trees are not seeing in the strict sense, it is sensible to say in earnest that the trees regard the painter. The strict sense is highly abstract, a very useful but readily misleading meaning constructed by setting aside the lived world, the world in which I and the trees participate in each other, such that the trees can see as a function of me and “[t]hings have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 164). In effect, the trees serve as a kind of mirror, and the mirror appears because “my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover…this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world…they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 248).
Nevertheless, the relation between the seer and the perceived, self and other, is definitely not symmetrical. The fact that there is only one flesh hardly means that significant difference is precluded. To the contrary, while reversibility entails commonality, it rests no less inescapably on difference. Hence, Merleau-Ponty tells us that all flesh is not the same (1968: 250): “The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh, nonetheless…in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibles…that it is therefore absolutely not an object, that the blosse Sache [brute fact] mode of being is but a partial and second expression of it…The flesh of the world is of the Being-seen, i.e. is a Being that is eminently percipi, and it is by it that we can understand the percipere…there is Being, not Being in itself, identical to itself, in the night, but the Being that also contains its negation, its percipi. ” If the flesh of the world is not sensible in the same way as is my flesh (which is sentient), must we then conclude that Merleau-Ponty does not mean what he says when he describes the trees as returning the painter's look? As long as we bear in mind that self-sensing flesh remains flesh, that it is the issue of the flesh of the world (which equals a “pregnancy of possibles”), then the answer must be no. The flesh of the world really does see, but it sees potentially, a potentiality that is realized in the painter's capacity to see herself according to or with the trees. From this understanding of imminent vision, it is tempting to slip back into thinking that Merleau-Ponty's description of the trees as sighted is merely a figure of speech. But as long we see the painter, ontologically, as continuous with the trees, we must take Merleau-Ponty to mean just what he says.
Nevertheless, it would appear that the difference between the sensible and the sentient does constitute an asymmetry. The painter and the trees both do and do not see in the same way. It is important to recognize that the asymmetry runs deep—much deeper than may seem to be the case at first sight. Despite the fact that the difference provided for in the flesh of the world is a matter of degree, it is also, paradoxically, a question of kind. Since the being constituted by the flesh of the world is, as Merleau-Ponty says, not identical to itself but inclusive of its own negation, it cannot but present an infinite difference. And difference of this kind, unfathomable and irredeemable, cannot help manifesting itself in terms of values, that is, in terms of a difference between good and bad. It cannot because it bears with it the negative, which, when construed as an act rather than a concept, “slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii). And to the degree that these “intentional threads” are slackened, that is, to the extent that we enjoy a relative ‘distance’ or distinction from the world, we are free to determine our own ends. In which case, the world, even as it ever remains our ground, is also, in imperfect but consequential measure, ours to refuse and thus to transcend.
There is value only relative to evaluation, and there is evaluation wherever there is a transcendent end, which is to say, an end that is no less willed than determined in the nature of things. Such an end—a primordial choice, if you like—involving as it does, implicitly or not, evaluation between one thing and another, amounts to a good and therewith implicates the not-good or, at least, the not-so-good.
In view of this argument about the critical role of negation and valuation in the flesh of the world, the asymmetry between the two ways of seeing, the painter's and the tree's, is not simply logical but also, by implication, axiological. The possibility of evaluation rests on the relationship of negation as between sensibility (the way trees see) and sentience (the way we see). With the development of radically sentient beings, beings in whom reflexivity (which Merleau-Ponty identifies as the elemental dynamic of corporeality) has become acute to the point of conspicuous reversal, the will becomes manifest. In effect, where there's the way (of all flesh), there's a will; and where there's a will, there's a transcendent end, which is to say, a synthetic good. Hence, the ontological fact of reversibility becomes also a uniquely human or ethical modality.
By their very nature, such goods are particular and contextual rather than universal. As synthetic, they are products of history, singular courses of events significantly determined by willful acts under conditions of fundamental uncertainty. These acts are performed by reflective but embodied beings and are therefore, like all material processes, subject to contingency. Nevertheless, there is one end that all the others presuppose, for which reason it may be said to enjoy a certain universality. I have in mind the end of having ends. No matter how hard we try, we cannot help but engage the world with a view toward some particular end. In other words, we always take a stand and thus define a good, even when we aim to refrain from doing so. Merleau-Ponty put it this way (1962: xix): “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.” While the relaxation of our ties to the world allows us to give meaning—that is, assign value—to our particular situation, the fact that those ties are slackened but never broken ensures that we cannot do otherwise. We remain bound—as Merleau-Ponty would say, ‘embodied’—as the condition of our own freedom. As a result, the end of having ends enjoys a singular status.9
Like all other ends that are taken for granted, the end of having ends is both given and constructed—a synthetic a priori or primordial choice. But unlike our other ends, this end is given not only pre-reflectively but also ineluctably. Whatever humans do, wherever and whenever they exist, the end of having ends is necessarily implicit—which cannot be said of any of our other ends. Nor is this end a construct in quite the same way as the others. For unlike the latter, when this end is brought to the light of consciousness, it is not open to revision. We can do away with it to be sure, but only by ceasing to exist. Which is why, as I argue in this book, acts that run directly contrary to the end of having ends, although they are logically self-inconsistent and continue to entertain that end in all their contrariness, are essentially lethal. Nevertheless, the end of having ends remains synthetic, in that it is not a question of natural law but of human existence. It is made to appear only in virtue of beings whose defining nature it is to transcend or fashion themselves—not to be but to become.
Therefore, the end of having ends may be construed as, rather than a mere good, a hypergood. It is a synthetic a priori, but its syntheticity is more strictly limited and its a prioricity more categorically closed than is the case with the other goods. In the sense that the other goods always presuppose it, the end of having ends may be thought of as a kind of human universal. Its universality, though, has little to do with our received acceptation of this notion, which connotes a positively fixed certitude, a natural law. In contrast, the end of having ends remains an offer, but, to invoke the language of the cinema Wiseguy, “an offer that can't be refused.” That is to say, like all offers it may indeed be refused, but its terms of refusal carry with them the threat of death.
As a hypergood, the end of having ends presents what might be called, oxymoronically, a natural good. What makes this end no less decidedly synthetic than given is that by determining the producing of synthetic ends or goods, it transcends itself. That is to say, it is determining, but what it determines is its own partial negation as a determinant. Uniquely defined by this hypergood, human existence, insofar as it takes itself as its own end, necessarily presents a natural (a priori) but axiological (synthetic) bias toward the end of having ends.
It must follow from the fact of this bias that the asymmetry defined by the difference between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, is a matter of value. It is not merely a question of qualitatively different ways of touching and seeing, but of relative worth. Just as in each and every one of our acts we are condemned to meaning, so we are predestined to differential value. But, one might well ask, which side of the difference—between the sensible and the seen on the one hand, and the sentient and the seer on the other—makes the greater good?
Merleau-Ponty's ontology leaves no room for doubt here. The goodness in question rests with the power not simply to discover or recognize one's own end but to generate the possibility of making and having ends. It would appear, then, that the end of having ends is identifiable with the dynamic of transcendence, the intertwining itself, and not with either of the two sides defined by this dynamic. It is true that if the two sides are taken in themselves, as if they obtained apart from their crossing, then there is no differentiating the one from the other by reference to relative worth. But as soon as they are defined as functions of their crossing, one side appears to enjoy a certain, general primacy over the other. Although both are eminently tied to the intertwining, the one is more so than the other. Indeed, even as they generate and inform each other, one of them—the seer and the sentient—always stands belated relative to the other. This is because, as self-conscious acts, seeing and sentience are logically inclined to exclude—as the outside or the other—the seen and the sensible, whereas the latter, as was noted earlier, include vision and touch as immanent parts or potentialities of their nature.
This differential of generative power is what Merleau-Ponty (1964b: chap. 2) is getting at when he speaks of the “primacy of perception” and pictures perception as most basically a bodily faculty. He is saying that the seen and the sensible, so long as they are understood dynamically by reference to reversibility, constitute the very core of our identity, and that that identity—what we are—must be the starting point of all our perspectives, reflections, and practices, however variable and diverse they may be. It is true that Merleau-Ponty does not speak of the asymmetry between the sensible and the sentient, the seen and the seer, as axiological. His later philosophy made it even less likely that he would do so. In The Visible and the Invisible, he attempts to move beyond any cogito whatsoever, even a tacit, experiential one, in order to put behind him once and for all the metaphysics of subject-object dualism. An ontology preoccupied with attenuating the notion of the self or a being equipped to decide merit is not likely to project what there is as innately a matter of value.
If, however, the asymmetry of seer and seen, of sentient and sensible, is aligned with that of self and other, then it at once becomes apparent that human existence is an exercise in value judgment. Deciding on which enjoys primacy of place—self or other—is paradigmatically an ethical question. And since the seer and the sentient always betray selfhood, even if only as a tacit phenomenon, the pertinence of the self-other duality in their case is patent. Merleau-Ponty did indeed come to abandon the tacit cogito, which notion he had originally entertained to capture the self-consciousness implicit in any act of bodily perception. But even his distinction of the visible and the invisible, forged in his effort to do away with any sense of the pure subject, continues to evoke the self-like (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 215): “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar [originary not-present] which is presented to me as such within the world—one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).”
Judging from this quotation, the distinction between the visible and the invisible greatly complicates Merleau-Ponty's earlier organizing distinctions, undercutting their residual dualism. On the one hand, the visible would seem to correspond to the seen and the sensible, but on the other, the invisible paints a much deeper picture than do the sentient and seer. For instead of simply naming an emergent development of the visible (such as vision and touch), the invisible points to the “inner framework” or “secret counterpart” of the visible. In other words, it points directly to the visible's supporting or sustaining framework, that which “renders [the visible] visible, its own and interior possibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 151; my italics).
Thus, the invisible is an aspect of the visible, but, paradoxically, an aspect upon which one can never lay eyes. Merleau-Ponty calls this aspect “meaning,” but one can sense the intonement of spirituality—a philosophical caution against empiricist idolatry—in his usage of the invisible. The point I am making here is that although the invisible is precisely other than the pure subject, it is not intended to do away with subjectivity but rather to conceive of it in irreducibly nondualist terms. The nondualism is focused in the consideration that the irreparable blind spot of the mind's eye, the hole of perceptional invisibility without which perception could not happen, is the body. The body is the unseen standpoint of every perception. But the key thing is that while the notion of the invisible rules out any sense of a pure subject, it nonetheless smacks of inwardness, of “interior possibility.”
Thus, “the invisible” makes a stunning, productive paradox: it identifies self-transcendence or creation with the other rather than the self qua self. The invisible locates “interior possibility” or selfhood primarily in, instead of the seer and the sentient, what is participant of but invisible or other to the seen and the sensible as well as to the seer and the sentient. As a result, the self-other relation is undone as a dualism but not at all erased; it perdures as a primordial and ultimately unfathomable dynamic. If it is the case that the self-other relation obtains thus primordially, what there is is inconceivable, save as a question of differential value. It is a truth to which every religion seems to attest: even when self-consciousness is originarily attributed to the other rather than to the self, it renders the world in terms of the synthetic a priori, and the synthetic a priori is nothing if not value somehow given.
To come to the principal point, under these ontological conditions, by which the capacity to create or evaluate is associated in the first place with the other rather than the self, it is the other that enjoys the axiological primacy of the hypergood, not the sentient or even the sensible. In other words, it follows from Merleau-Ponty's ontology, that the universalistic bias toward the end of having ends, the at once (incomprehensibly) natural and ethical direction of our being, is toward the other.
The Synthetic a Priori and Ethics, Mysticism, and Magic
Merleau-Ponty does not couch his ontology of ambiguity and reversibility in the distinctly axiological terms I have used here. Indeed, although he wrote about the nature of human freedom and was politically concerned, he did not develop a systematic account of ethics. And although Wittgenstein essayed a lecture on ethics, he held that, in line with his dichotomy of showing and saying, philosophical ethics is an attempt to say what can only be shown. But I am anxious to show that Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's recasting of the synthetic a priori in uncompromisingly and irrevocably nondualist terms leads directly to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the driving objectivist pretension of science, at bottom we cannot perceive the world save in the language of non-indifference (cf. Evens 1995: 195ff.). A nondualist ontology entails the understanding that discretion is as generally necessary as it is necessarily particular in the world as we find it.
Merleau-Ponty's observation that we are condemned to meaning and Wittgenstein's that we are ceremonious animals implicate this picture of what I think of as the primacy of the ethical in human affairs. Both of these arguments bear on the diagnostic centrality of convention in human nature, and, as it is definitively void of instinct, conventional conduct proceeds according to its own evaluative ends. The interpretation of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as essentially, if inexplicably, concerned with the ethical nature of human existence is given support in the secondary literature, in the case of Wittgenstein substantially so (see especially Edwards 1982; with reference to Merleau-Ponty, see Yeo 1992).
I have drawn a number of suggestive parallels here between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. It has not been my intention, however, to make a rigorous, detailed comparison of their work; rather, I have tried to bring out a profound commonality of focus between them. That focus is their comprehensive concern to rethink the notion of the synthetic a priori in unrelentingly nondualist terms. As a result of this shared ontological problem, both thinkers, despite the fact that they are not normally mentioned in the same philosophical breath, and however outstanding the differences between them, developed remarkably comparable understandings of human conduct. These understandings picture that conduct as proceeding on the basis of, to highlight the paradox, foundations that are not foundations. In other words, the foundations are immanent and transcendent at the same time, both given and facultative. I have argued that this radically paralogical picture of human conduct necessarily committed both scholars to a counter-ontology, one that grasps what there is in terms of basic ambiguity and therewith processually as discretionary becoming or ethics, as I use the latter term here. I confess that the ethical implications of this ontology did not become transparent to me until I became familiar with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of otherness. Hence, when I dwell on ethics in the present work, more often than not I am drawing directly on Levinas for inspiration. At any rate, before leaving off this discussion of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, I want to point once more to the ethical force and heavy anthropological bearing of their work by citing their deep appreciation of what in Western thought tends to get dismissed as mere mysticism and magic.
Wittgenstein deleted (as “bad,” i.e., “S” for schlecht) the following lines from his original manuscript of his remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough (cited in Klagge and Nordmann 1993: 116–17):
I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic.
But in doing this I must not make a case for magic nor may I make fun of it. The depth of magic should be preserved.—
Indeed, here the elimination of magic has itself the character of magic.
For, back then, when I began talking about the ‘world’ (and not about this tree or table), what else did I want but to keep something higher spellbound in my words?
Wittgenstein is suggesting here that, like magic, metaphysical questions tend to evoke in us a sense of something deep and mysterious, something fundamental but also unfathomable. Hence, like magic, metaphysical philosophy—take, for example, the proposition that everything serves a purpose or that the universe is a vast mechanism or that what really exists are not trees or tables but monads—can be consequentially misleading, but not for that reason frivolous. On the one hand, since it makes logical nonsense, he does not wish to speak in favor of such ‘magical’ thought; on the other, since its depth needs to be preserved, neither does he wish to make fun of it. In effect, although he is far from uncritical of it, he takes magic very seriously.
The following quotation, which serves to link magic with ethics and religion, makes plain the respect in which Wittgenstein (in Monk 1990: 277) held such thought:
My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
Merleau-Ponty too takes magical thought seriously (1968: 24):
It was…evident to the man brought up in the objective cognition of the West that magic or myth has no intrinsic truth, that magical effects and the mythical and ritual life are to be explained by “objective” causes and what is left over ascribed to the illusions of Subjectivity…[T]he ethnologist in the face of societies called archaic cannot presuppose that, for example, those societies have a lived experience of time like ours [i.e., the experience of time as simply linear]…and [he] must describe a mythical time where certain events “in the beginning” maintain a continued efficacity…To be sure, we have repressed the magical into the subjectivity, but there is no guarantee that the relationship between men does not inevitably involve magical and oneiric components.
In point of fact, Merleau-Ponty is quite certain that “the relationship between men” does inevitably involve such components (1962: 365):
It will perhaps be maintained that a philosophy cannot be centred round a contradiction, and that all our descriptions, since they ultimately defy thought, are quite meaningless. The objection would be valid if we were content to lay bare, under the term phenomenon or phenomenal field, a layer of prelogical or magical experiences. For in that case we should have to choose between believing the descriptions and abandoning thought, or knowing what we are talking about and abandoning our descriptions. These descriptions must become an opportunity for defining a variety of comprehension and reflection altogether more radical than objective thought…We must return to the cogito, in search of a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one which endows the latter with its relative validity, and at the same time assigns to it its place.
The philosophy “centred round a contradiction” is of course his own, keyed as it is to the body-subject or subject-object regarded not as a relationship between two autonomous principles but as opposing principles, each of which integrally defines the other—that is, as a fundamental ambiguity. The distinction between ‘thought’ and ‘description’, in which the latter concept denotes what ultimately ‘defies’ the former, seems identical in essence to Wittgenstein's between what can be said (i.e., thought) and what can only be shown (because when we try to say it, we cannot really know “what we are talking about”). And like Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualism, choosing instead to privilege the descriptional pole as more fundamental, not because it replaces logical thought, but because it founds it (endows it “with its relative validity” and “assigns to it its place”). In this connection, recall that for Wittgenstein, ultimately practice can be described but not explained, and far from refuting thought, it serves as its scaffolding. Practice is the “substratum of all my enquiring and asserting,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 162). “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness” of this substratum (ibid.: § 166). Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1962: 365), once we discover this paradoxical layer of bodily or pre-logical reflection, “we shall understand that beyond [it] there is nothing to understand.”
This groundless ground, which is altogether more radical than objective thought and beyond which there is nothing to understand, forms of course the land of the synthetic a priori, and both scholars, as we have just seen, use the word ‘magic’ to describe it. When they do, as is also plain from the quotations, they have in mind a kind of thinking that is usually associated with so-called primitive peoples. In anthropological literature, perhaps the key diagnostic of such thought has been apparent indifference to logical contradiction. It is especially in view of the logical law of non-contradiction that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty find the word ‘magic’ appropriate to the sort of ground to which they are laboring to (re)turn the mind's eye. As this ground is also groundless, a foundation that is not a foundation, it basically flouts the law of non-contradiction and cannot be logically determined. Merleau-Ponty, again evoking the anthropological concern with thought that runs contrary to logical logic, speaks of this ground—on which objective reflection is said by him to rest—as “brute” or “wild” being (1968: 110).10
Wild being and the synthetic a priori implicate nondualism, and nondualism—since it can be shown but not said, that is, since it ultimately defies thought—is magical. Using an example from Wittgenstein, perhaps I can point more transparently to what these two thinkers are driving at when they speak of magic. With his inimitable genius for lighting up an issue at a stroke, Wittgenstein (1972: § 621) poses the following question: “[W]hat is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” In effect, he is posing the body-mind problem in an effort to clear up misleading expressions concerning willful or voluntary movement. To take an example of my own, if I were to ask a student to please close the classroom door (as I have done on occasion to make the present point), and she obliged, there would appear to be no mystery about what happened: the student took the meaning of my request, and, imparting physical energy to the door, closed it. But when I ask myself to raise my arm, and my arm goes up, a mystery immediately emerges. It seems that we know what caused the door to close; but what ‘caused’ my arm to go up? With this mystery, we can see that even the interpretation of the act of closing the classroom door is woefully inadequate. We so take for granted the possibility of intelligible communication between one another that we are inclined to see the student's behavior simply in terms of the physical energy she delivers to the door. But when the request is given internally—by oneself to oneself—the translation of request into physical movement poses an enigma for explanatory purposes. My request to her moved the student to move the door. To pose the question that escapes notice, though, how did the student move herself?
Ordinarily, we disregard the fact that the physical movement originated in something that we imagine to be irreducible to the physical, “to be without any mass” (Wittgenstein 1972: § 618)—call it, if you like, will or volition. Still, it is absolutely crucial to avoid the subject-object dualism that communicating with oneself, inside the cavity of one's own head, makes so inviting here, and to realize that what is mysterious is not volition in itself. For volition never really does appear in itself, that is, it never appears save as a component of physical action. What is ultimately mysterious and unfathomable is the action itself, which is as physical as can be but has as its defining end something proposed rather than given in the ‘nature’ of the case. The willing of the action is the action (“I raise my arm”), and yet its purposefulness contrasts with the fact of the action (“my arm goes up”). Logic proper has zero tolerance for such fundamental ambiguity. As a result, the action is ultimately inexplicable, in the critical sense that it cannot be clarified by reason as such. In Western thought, clarity is typically determined by the canonical laws of rationality, and each of these is predicated on the eschewal of ambiguity and contradiction in favor of mutual exclusion or absolute boundaries between one thing and another (cf. Evens 1983).
In the ethnographical literature, the condition of fundamental ambiguity has classically been construed as a mistaken picture of the world, wherein ideal relations are taken for real ones, and it is this picture that was held by anthropologists to reveal magical thought (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1956: 141–42). By striking contrast to classical anthropologists, who were inclined to see such thought simply as wrong, and for that matter to most modern anthropologists, who have tended to see it as merely symbolic, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are suggesting that this magical picture of the world, although nonsensical for logical reasons and purposes, is not only profoundly meaningful but also in some existential sense penetrating, and that accordingly it deserves the greatest respect. The answer, then, to Wittgenstein's cutting question is that because it is enchanted, we cannot really say what is left over when we subtract the one form of arm-raising from the other, but we can (and do) show it. Here, in trying to say it with the imagery of a transcendental opening in the fullness of biological life, Merleau-Ponty deftly points to the remainder in question (1962: 189):
The use a man is to make of his body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological entity. It is not more natural, and no less conventional, to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table ‘a table’. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which, like paternity, seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions [here Merleau-Ponty footnotes Malinowski on the Trobrianders]. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behaviour which one chooses to call ‘natural’, followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour, which does not owe something to purely biological being—and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behaviour to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.
