THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 2

 At the end of the previous essay I wrote:

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

The ancient Greek terms "perata and apeiron" appeared before in a round of essays I wrote back in January, entitled LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, starting here.

Simply put, the Greek terms connote respectively "things that have limits" and "things that are boundless." I used them thusly: 

 For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe  -- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

I went on to explore this dichotomy through the lens of Georges Bataille's distinction between "work" (productive activity, oriented upon humans dealing with the limited physical world) and "play" (unproductive activity, oriented upon humans taking a vacation from work and its attendant moralities). It should be noted that both of these dichotomies-- limited/limitless and work/play-- might be deemed as "codefinitional" in the sense seen in Kauffman's quote in the previous essay: that one concept generates the other. (Back in the 2012 essay PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I employed Martin Buber's term "word pairs" to much the same end.)

Yet another pair of linked concepts relevant to this discussion are the opposed concepts of "verisimilitude" and "artifice" that I formulated (or re-interpreted) in the 2016 essay EFFICACY, MEET MYTH. "Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

With all that in mind, I go back to the two versions of Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed by Stuart A. Kauffman in INVESTIGATIONS. The first version of Wittgenstein was one who, in accordance with the prevalent mood of the period, valued the concept of "logical atomism." Kauffman wrote:

Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

Before going on Wittgenstein 2.0, I pose the question: does the philosophy of "logical atomism" parallel anything with the corpus of literary criticism? And, perhaps not surprisingly, the parallel I draw is to a type of criticism described by Northrop Frye:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Since Frye is the luminary from whom I partly borrowed my verisimilitude-artifice word-pair, it should be clear that I'm saying that the "high seriousness" critic is the one who values verisimilitude above everything else, and that this type of thinking parallels that of the logical atomists. 

Now for a return appearance, here's Kauffman on Wittgenstein's rejection of the atomist attitude:

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

And is there a parallel between this attitude and the opposing critical tendency described in Frye's essay? Let's see.

Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do no want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story.

 

Certainly Frye has ably contrasted the critic who wants "verisimilitude" as against the critic who wants "conventions." I would extend this to say that the appeal of the first is also, as stated before, the appeal of "cognitive restraint," and therefore perata, while the latter appeals in terms of "affective freedom," and therefore apeiron. I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation. And it is through being able to experience both of these proclivities that the often divided minds of humankind may potentially find at least a conditional wholeness.

 

 

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1

It's been nine years since I dove into the deep waters of a Stuart A. Kauffman book, which I examined somewhat in the NATURAL LAWBREAKING posts, all of which appeared in 2013, beginning here. That book, REINVENTING THE SACRED, came out in 2006, and the one I'm now slowly working through, INVESTIGATIONS, was written six years earlier. Both books are concerned with defining the processes by which life evolved on Earth, with Kauffman taking a less reductive (and thus more holistic) view of how a myriad of factors combine to bring about organisms capable of sexual generation. 

Not having ventured back into SACRED since that first reading, I don't remember if Kauffman had anything to say about the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, Kauffman has much to say in INVESTIGATIONS, noting that he derived the title of this 2000 book from the thinker's 1953 book PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. 

Now, my only direct contact with Wittgenstein was an unfavorable one, as I remarked in the 2014 essay WITLESS IN VIENNA-- in which, by an odd coincidence, I critiqued Edward Skidelsky's preference for Wittgenstein over Ernst Cassirer by comparing Cassirer's perspective to that of... Stuart A, Kauffman! The following quotes from the WITLESS essay accurately represents all I knew then about Wittgenstein as well as everything up until beginning Kauffman's 2000 tome--

It's been at least ten years since I plowed my way through Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  I found it thoroughly uninteresting and couldn't understand why this logic-chopper had become such a major voice in modern philosophy.

And--

I cannot speak to the veracity of Skidelsky's findings on Wittgenstein's motives.  I will note that my principal response to the TRACTATUS was that I too assumed that the author shared the purpose of the positivists: to devalue "sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience." 

And finally--

I cannot deny that Wittgenstein, even today, is viewed with more approval than Cassirer.  Yet I must ask: how many persons interested in philosophy are even aware of Wittgenstein's "mystical vision," or his critique of scientism, and how many have made the same assumptions that the Vienna Circle did, translating pure logic into empiricist epistemology?  Cassirer may not be understood by the average readers of philosophy today; he may well be regarded as "old hat." But do these readers understand that Wittgenstein opposed empiricist scientism?

I tend to doubt it, and I'm tempted to make a survey of philosophy blogs to determine how many people today write of "Wittgenstein, anti-empiricist."  Wittgenstein's focus upon a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content is at base allied to the language used by science

Now, without double checking I assume that everything Skidelsky wrote was based upon his admiration for the 1921 TRACTATUS, which bored the hell out of me. I don't think Skidelsky has much if anything to say about the closing works of Wittengenstein's life, which are the very works that Kauffman champions over the early ones.

In Chapter 3, Kauffman wrote:

In his early TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein had brought to conclusion the mandate of logical atomism from Russell. Logical atomism sought a firm epistemological foundation for all knowledge in terms of privileged "atomic statements" about "sense data"... One might be mistaken in saying that a chair is in the room, but one could hardly be mistaken in reporting bits and pieces of one's own awareness... Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

So this is the only Wittgenstein I knew, the one I remarked as having favored "a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content"-- by which I did NOT mean "sense data," but the content of the perceiver's personal reaction to the data. Kauffman, having outlined the position of 1921 Wittgenstein, then says:

It was Wittgenstein himself who, twenty years later, junked the entire enterprise. PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was his later-life revolution. His revolution has done much to destroy the concept of a privilege level of description and paved the way to an understanding that concepts at any level typically are formed in codefinitional circles.

What's "codefinitional?"

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

These concepts are meant to serve Kauffman's long-range purpose of envisioning a biology not defined simply by mindless reproduction of templates, but holistic interaction of systems-- and that's all that I can say about Kauffman's biological agenda, having not finished the book yet. 

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

 

WITTLESS IN VIENNA

It's been at least ten years since I plowed my way through Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  I found it thoroughly uninteresting and couldn't understand why this logic-chopper had become such a major voice in modern philosophy.

Happily, Edward Skidelsky throws some light on this problem for me, as he devotes Chapter 6 of his Cassirer book to the differing encounters of Cassirer and Wittgenstein with the logical positivists who dominated the Vienna Circle.

The author begins the chapter by foregrounding the cordial relations between Cassirer and the positivists, and then defining their differences:

...although Cassirer and the logical positivists both strove to advance the cause of enlightenment, they envisaged this task quite differently... [The positivists'] ambition was to establish a rule separating sentences of science from sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience.

In contrast, Cassirer's "aim was not to sequester science but rather to reveal its continuity with the other forms of culture." 

After further exploration of the positivists' philosophical backgrounds, Skidelsky proceeds to analyze the influence of Wittgenstein's 1922 TRACTATUS on the Vienna Circle, and finds it "decisive."

[Wittgenstein's] doctrine that logic is nothing but a set of tautologies, combined with the logicist claim that all mathematics is reducible to logic, yielded the highly satisfactory conclusion that mathematics too is nothing but a set of tautologies. The main obstacle to radical empiricism was thereby removed.

However, Skidelsky stresses that while Wittgenstein was concerned only with the exercise of pure logic, the positivists chose to extend his meaning into the domain of epistemology.  In other words, if Wittgenstein wrote:

To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true

The positivists extended this to mean:

To understand a proposition means to know how to establish that it is true 

Thus the positivists took the question back into the "truth-finding" direction which also governed Russell and Frege's transformations of symbolic logic.  However, Skidelsky finds that Wittgenstein did not perfect his "sentences of science" for the same purpose as the positivists.

Wittgenstein's purpose in tightening the bounds of sense was not to destroy what lay on the other side but, on the contrary, to guard it against colonization by science... Thus by a curious irony, a technique arising out of a highly individual, mystical vision of the world ended up in the service of an anti-individualist, antimystical political agenda. 

I cannot speak to the veracity of Skidelsky's findings on Wittgenstein's motives.  I will note that my principal response to the TRACTATUS was that I too assumed that the author shared the purpose of the positivists: to devalue "sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience." 

Skidelsky then devotes most of the remainder of Chapter 6 to Cassirer's rejection of the positivist creed.  He expatiates on why Cassirer's believe in a Goethean concept of "unifying reason" was out of step with the times, which insisted on either pure empiricism (Comte, Mach) and pure "irrationalism" (Nietzsche, Bergson).  He concludes that Wittgenstein understood the standards of the "logicists," as Cassirer never completely did.

It is this that makes [Wittgenstein's] critique of scientism so much more powerful than Cassirer's. He has, so to speak, passed through and out the other side of the logicist mill, whereas Cassirer has not even entered it. Wittgenstein's humanism is radical; Cassirer's remains, in the last resort, that of a distinguished representative of a particular cultural tradition.

I cannot deny that Wittgenstein, even today, is viewed with more approval than Cassirer.  Yet I must ask: how many persons interested in philosophy are even aware of Wittgenstein's "mystical vision," or his critique of scientism, and how many have made the same assumptions that the Vienna Circle did, translating pure logic into empiricist epistemology?  Cassirer may not be understood by the average readers of philosophy today; he may well be regarded as "old hat." But do these readers understand that Wittgenstein opposed empiricist scientism?

I tend to doubt it, and I'm tempted to make a survey of philosophy blogs to determine how many people today write of "Wittgenstein, anti-empiricist."  Wittgenstein's focus upon a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content is at base allied to the language used by science: what Philip Wheelwright insightfully terms "steno-language:"

  …meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

While I wouldn't agree with McLuhan that the medium is always the message, in this case McLuhan's rule fully applies.  Words without sensuous content are steno-symbols, whether they are used for the purpose of science, logic, or philosophy.  One may disagree with Cassirer, or creatively misread him.  But his constant insistence on the "expressive" function of humankind-- an expressivity that lines up well with Wheelwright's "plurisignative" language-- makes it well-nigh impossible to ignore Cassirer's  critique of empiricism.

On a closing note, at the end of Skidelsky's Chapter 6 he makes this observation:

The logical positivists... were heirs to Wittgenstein's foundationalism.  Their goal was an a priori theory of meaning in general, a firm standard against which to measure the particular theories embodied in the special sciences. To Cassirer, of course, it looked as if they had simply sublimated the structure of one particular special science-- physics-- into the form of meaning as such.

Interestingly, in my readings of biological theorist Stuart A. Kauffman-- beginning here-- Kauffman finds his branch of science equally hamstrung by modern monocausalists who insist that biology must reduce down to physics.  It increasingly begins to seem like even true science has little use for the reductive qualities of scientism.