Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
'I think I get it,' Janice says.
'What?' I ask.
'The blog yesterday. It's like that bit in Black Earth/White Bones about Kit and his poetry. When he says he is the text and it's only really a text when he's writing it and not after... Or something like that.'
'Yes,' I say. 'Something like.'
'I don't have the brains to be a poet or to write novels and stuff but I sometimes wonder, well, when I'm writing an email or a letter to Mum, it just seems weird. I mean, where do the words come from? They just seem to happen.'
'A lot of writers feel that way.'
'Do they?' She looks pleased and maybe a little bit surprised.
'And I think it's the same with reading, too,' I say. 'The meanings just there. You don't have to figure it out.'
'Sometimes you do,' she says.
'Yes. But what is it does the figuring?'
'Your brain?'
'In a sense, yes. But explaining how various parts of the brain are wired up doesn't have anything to do with the experience of words meaning something.'
'It's just there, you mean? Like the writing?'
'I guess so.'
'Weird,' she says. 'Maybe I don't get it.'
I have one more thing to say on the subject. It does not exist objectively. I can refer to it objectively but as soon as I do so it becomes an object and therefore ceases to be a subject. Given that only objects can be explained, there is no explanation of the subject as subject. Some people, Rupert for example, would say that that means it doesn't exist. Maybe they're right.
What does exist, though, is the experience, which can be referred to objectively, and, of course, there is the person who does the experiencing (also an object). There may also be (but not necessarily) an object which is experienced.
I taste the wine. I can describe the taste and perhaps explain it. Janice can see me drinking and can ask me what the wine is like. What I can't grasp hold of, because it ceases to exist as soon as I refer to it, is some special 'thing', the subject, that is the possessor or recipient of those special subjective qualities that characterise the taste of the wine. There is no thing there. Does that mean there's nothing there?
I exist in the tasting, no more. But even that is to say to much. All I can say is that there are experiences and that they're mine.
And that's what Teapot Buddhism is all about.
Wittgenstein, of course, could have been a Teapot Buddhist if he had ever been able to achieve any semblance of serenity. The beetle in the box (Should that be the beetle in the teapot?) demonstrates precisely one of the central precepts of TPB. The point at issue is not whether the box is empty but the extent to which the subjective qualities of pain or red can ever be considered a thing that can be referred to in the same way that the contents of a box can be referred to. Things belong in the public world. The notion of a thing that is in principle (ie in all conceivable circumstances) private and incommunicable is a contradiction.
This doesn't mean that experience does not have a unique, subjective quality. Here's a question that people sometimes pose when they start getting tangled up in the briars of this territory.
'Is the smell that I smell when I smell bacon and eggs the same as the smell that you smell?'
This question seems to make sense until you start to think about it a bit.
One interpretation would be 'If I were you, would I smell the smell that you smell?' Answer yes, of course. The questioner, though, seems to be wanting more than this. Here's a possibility:
'If I were in your head (but were still somehow me) would the smell that I smelled be the same as the smell that I remember smelling when I was in my head.'
This variant of the question makes the problem clearer. I cannot be in your head and still be me. Another way to make the point is to say that the question involves a comparison and a comparison requires two things in the same category (apples, eggs or teapots) that we can somehow consider objectively. (Does your plate of bacon and eggs smell the same as mine? Sniff, sniff. Sniff, sniff. No, I think one of my eggs is a bit off. What do you think?) But, of course, I cannot be objective about the subjective qualities of my experience because to be the object is to cease to be the subject.
I've been mulling over something from last evening.
We were at our friend Ray's place, celebrating the fact that his magnum opus - a big novel based in military history - has just been accepted for publication. In the course of the conversation, he asked me about the meaning of the beetle in the box. I presumed he meant Wittgenstein's thought experiment and not my novel of the same name. (He's read the novel and said he liked it, which would suggest that he found it largely comprehensible.) In the event, I gave him an off-the-cuff explanation of what I thought Wittgenstein meant. I fear now it wasn't a particularly good one.
Part of the problem is that explanation and Wittgenstein don't go awfully well together. He felt that explanations always fell short of the truth and wanted to get beyond them into demonstration. This is all very well if you are dealing with a puncture or a pancake but a little trickier when the subject is some abstract point of philosophy.
Anyway, what I should have said to Ray but didn't quite goes something like this:
The beetle in the box is a criticism of a commonly held view that our sensory and mental experience (our inner world) is in the last analysis private and incommunicable. I can only know what pain is by feeling my own pain. I can only know what the colour red is from my own experience of looking at red things. A corollary to this is that I can't explain such sensations to anyone else. If you have never felt pain, then no amount of talking will get you anywhere near the experience.
Suppose, Wittgenstein says, we each of us have a box with something in it. We each call the contents of the box 'a beetle'. Now none of us can see into another person's box. I don't know what your beetle is like. It might be what I would call a slug or a tube of toothpaste or a puff of smoke. Only you have the private, incommunicable experience of your particular beetle. Only I can truly know what mine is like.
Suppose, though, we talk about our beetles. The word 'beetle' has a part to play in our language, just as the word 'pain' does. In fact, we go on quite happily using the word with only the occasional hiccup in our mutual understanding. In the world of ordinary discourse I know perfectly well what you mean by 'beetle' and you know what I mean. Given this situation, Wittgenstein suggests, the content of the box is irrelevant. Indeed, we could go on just as we are if the box were empty.
The point here is not to deny the existence of individual sensory experience or an 'inner' mental life but to show that there is something very fishy about the idea that such a life is private and unknowable to someone else. Wittgenstein isn't trying to comment on any particular conclusion, in other words. He is concerened to show that the way we formulate and think about the problem is fundamentally wrong.
Conversation on the verandah recently turned to the vexed topic of grammar and style. As in most gatherings, there was a fairly even split between the liberals who think that change in a living language is not only inevitable but also desirable and the conservatives who want to preserve the linguistic purity of the Mother Tongue. Janice and I were in the liberal camp. Amanda, Felix and Rupert were in the conservative. Trevor, as in most arguments, was intent on playing off one side against the othere and causing as much disruption as possible.
When I say that I am a liberal in such matters, I don't mean that I think anything goes. I have my pet hates and my irrational prejudices. One - the spelling of the word 'whisky' - I've already confessed to. Another, which I only recalled in the course of our sometimes heated discussion, is my hatred of what I call 'danglers'.
The classic example of this problem is the dangling present participle. For example:
'Running through the door, the carpet tripped him up.'
This is not the only type, however. Consider:
'Unjustly imprisoned for three years, the pardon came as a huge relief.'
or
'Though tired, the journey seemed short.'
Such sentences are just wrong according to standard views of grammar. To be grammatically correct, the agent in the first part of the sentence ought to be the agent in the second. However, even when this is so, as in
'Running through the door, he tripped over the carpet.'
or
'Unjustly imprisoned for three years, he felt huge relief at the pardon.'
my pedant's hackles still rise. What's wrong with such sentences? I'm not sure. Perhaps a true grammarian could enlighten me. To my mind they just seems like sloppy writing.
I suspect that writers who indulge in such constructions are trying to add variety and perhaps pace or liveliness to their writing. If so, the attempt is a failure in my view. A dangler 's main effect is to fudge the question of who does what. The reader has to stop and think for a second to make sense of it. This means that the writing is vague, if not downright ambiguous, and the pace of the text is slowed down.
I have to admit that others are not as deeply upset by this matter as I am. Rupert, for example, claims to be much more concerned about the word 'issue' which, he stoutly maintains, is not and never should be used to mean 'problem' or 'matter for decision'. It should only be used to mean 'outflow' or 'emergence'. I suspect his own practice is not always consistent with this stern view but I am not about to challenge him on it.