Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire [1st ed. 2023] 3031402758, 9783031402753

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
About the Author
1: Introduction
2: The Other Side of ‘the Hard Problem of Consciousness’
2.1 The ‘Problem’
2.2 Self as Other: On the Decentred Subject of Existential Naturalism
2.3 ‘One Cannot See the Mind’: On the Structure of a Repression
2.4 The Wonder of Existence
References
3: The Excess of Descartes’ First Principle of Philosophy
3.1 The Basic Rationale of Descartes’ First Principle
3.2 What One Must Know Before One Can Know the First Principle
3.3 The Groundlessness of Descartes’ Hyperbolic Doubt: Doubt Is Grounded in Excess
3.4 The Insanity of Excess Tamed by a Division of Labour
3.5 Affirmation Belongs to the Other
3.6 From a Traumatic Scene to Paranoiac Knowledge
3.7 The Root of Error and Sin: From Body to the Will
3.8 The Double Negativity of the Self
3.9 The First Principle of Philosophy as Original Sin
3.10 Coda
References
4: The Truth of Desire Is Spoken Between Naked Souls: Reading Plato’s Gorgias
4.1 From Descartes to Plato
4.2 Two Conflicting Claims About Oratory: The Case of Gorgias
4.3 What You See Fit to Do Is Not Always What You Want: The Case of Polus
4.4 The Truth of Desire Speaks with a Fearful Man’s Voice: The Case of Callicles
4.5 The Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: The Case of the Eschatological Tale
4.6 The Good as the Telos of the Human Soul
4.7 What Truth Does the Interlocutor’s Desire Bespeak?
4.8 The Nakedness Between Self and Other Is the Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: On the Impasse of Reason
4.9 Coda
References
5: The Weight of Desire
5.1 Apropos of Descartes and Plato
5.2 The Pure Negativity of the Signifier as Such: Lacan’s Anti-structuralism
5.3 There Is No Metalanguage, Nor a Meta-Subject(ivity)
5.4 The Subject Is Ever Only the Other’s Supposition
5.5 Wittgenstein’s ‘Psychotic Ferocity’ in the Tractatus
5.6 Philosophical Investigations as Wittgenstein’s Sinthome
5.7 The Return of the Repressed
5.8 The Desire to Say Something to Someone: The Private Language Case
5.9 The Gift of Love, or the Other Side of Lack
5.10 When Am I Forgiven?
References
6: Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire n i k l a s t oi va k a i n e n

Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire

Niklas Toivakainen

Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire

Niklas Toivakainen Philosophy, History, and Art University of Helsinki HELSINKI, Finland

ISBN 978-3-031-40275-3    ISBN 978-3-031-40276-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

A book begins for its reader where it ends for its author. As its author, one cannot really know what book it is one has written before one has ended it. Or is this saying too much? For while a preface can truly be a preface only when a work constitutes a finished whole, which one can observe, read, and relate to, this does not really mean that one knows, or understands, as its author, what it is one has produced. At least not in an unambiguous sense. Rather, what has become of the work which one perhaps once thought one was in control of—as the standard academic practice seems to require—might in fact strike one with a sense of surprise. If for no other reason, then at least because in the process of writing, new horizons and new landscapes of ideas and questions opened up, at points where one had not anticipated them—openings that began altering one’s perception of the work. So indeed, the endpoint of a work, that is, the point at which one writes a preface, is really the starting point just as much for the author as for the reader. Only that the author is one lap ahead, as it were. That is, when offered to the reader in a preface like this one, the work has already begun to become something else for its author. Or, the process of redeeming one’s words has begun. And so, I offer you, the reader, this book, with the hope that it addresses you in a meaningful way, engendering a response, which you will feel inspired to redeem. The book itself concerns exactly these issues: offering words, redeeming them, and the desire for the other’s response. v

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I gather that one of the central reasons why I find myself somewhat surprised as to what has become of this book is that all of the thoughts that I follow here are not, as one might put it, originally my own thoughts. By this, I mean to say that while I do think I have made the thoughts expressed in this book my own and that the value of the book lies therein, the voice with which I have come to speak on these pages contains, so to speak, within it a multitude of other voices and echoes of voices. And during the process of writing, some of these voices and echoes, from time to time and unexpectedly, broke free and addressed me, made me aware of how they lived within me, and thereby revealed new openings, some of which I pursued, while others which I did not. Consequently, I feel the need to acknowledge at least some of these voices. Thomas Wallgren, Joel Backström, and Fredrik Westerlund are surely the ones with whom I have discussed the issues I deal with in this book the most. I hope these pages show them just how important they have been, and continue to be, to me. And as an extension to this, I want to say that the students of our small Swedish philosophy unit at the University of Helsinki have been irreplaceable companions. And I will perhaps just continue by saying that Hannes Nykänen, Salla Aldrin Salskov, Victor Krebs, Alenka Zupančič, Sara Heinämaa, Mladen Dolar, Bara Kolenc, Sakari Laurila, and everyone that I have not mentioned, but who surely deserves a mention, have all, in their respective ways and through our conversations, made their presence felt during the writing of this book. In ways that I do not feel the need to express here, Merita and our son Ornette linger in each word. I also want to thank the editorial team at Palgrave, especially Brendan Georg, Eliana Rangel, and Lakshmi Radhakrishnan, for their support and for their patience—they will know what I mean by this. Furthermore, I want to extend my gratitude to the Emil Aaltonen Foundation for their financial support, which has enabled the writing of this book. Helsinki, Finland

Niklas Toivakainen

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 2 The  Other Side of ‘the Hard Problem of Consciousness’  7 2.1 The ‘Problem’   7 2.2 Self as Other: On the Decentred Subject of Existential Naturalism  9 2.3 ‘One Cannot See the Mind’: On the Structure of a Repression 14 2.4 The Wonder of Existence  23 References 24 3 The  Excess of Descartes’ First Principle of Philosophy 27 3.1 The Basic Rationale of Descartes’ First Principle  27 3.2 What One Must Know Before One Can Know the First Principle  29 3.3 The Groundlessness of Descartes’ Hyperbolic Doubt: Doubt Is Grounded in Excess  34 3.4 The Insanity of Excess Tamed by a Division of Labour  41 3.5 Affirmation Belongs to the Other  45 3.6 From a Traumatic Scene to Paranoiac Knowledge  49 3.7 The Root of Error and Sin: From Body to the Will  52 3.8 The Double Negativity of the Self  59 vii

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3.9 The First Principle of Philosophy as Original Sin  62 3.10 Coda  65 References 66 4 The  Truth of Desire Is Spoken Between Naked Souls: Reading Plato’s Gorgias 69 4.1 From Descartes to Plato  69 4.2 Two Conflicting Claims About Oratory: The Case of Gorgias 72 4.3 What You See Fit to Do Is Not Always What You Want: The Case of Polus  75 4.4 The Truth of Desire Speaks with a Fearful Man’s Voice: The Case of Callicles  78 4.5 The Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: The Case of the Eschatological Tale  84 4.6 The Good as the Telos of the Human Soul  95 4.7 What Truth Does the Interlocutor’s Desire Bespeak?  97 4.8 The Nakedness Between Self and Other Is the Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: On the 102 Impasse of Reason 4.9 Coda 113 References115 5 T  he Weight of Desire117 5.1 Apropos of Descartes and Plato 117 5.2 The Pure Negativity of the Signifier as Such: Lacan’s Anti-structuralism121 5.3 There Is No Metalanguage, Nor a Meta-Subject(ivity) 124 5.4 The Subject Is Ever Only the Other’s Supposition 128 5.5 Wittgenstein’s ‘Psychotic Ferocity’ in the Tractatus132 5.6 Philosophical Investigations as Wittgenstein’s Sinthome139 5.7 The Return of the Repressed 144

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5.8 The Desire to Say Something to Someone: The Private 152 Language Case 5.9 The Gift of Love, or the Other Side of Lack 158 5.10 When Am I Forgiven? 167 References170 6 C  onclusion175 References177 I ndex179

About the Author

Niklas Toivakainen  is a researcher at the University of Helsinki and coeditor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave Macmillan).

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1 Introduction

This book comprises four essays, excluding the current introduction and the short conclusion at the end. With respect to style and thematic content, all essays both share a common ground and have their own individual characteristics. Perhaps more so than individual chapters usually allow for in monographs, the four essays can be read independently of each other. This is not advisable, however, for the book is not simply a collection of essays. Instead, the narrative of the book unfolds in the way in which each essay intertwines with the others. Indeed, the sense of the book lies in how the essays speak to and with each other. The unfolding of the narrative, of the central claim of the book, is performed, in other words, through repetition, reiteration, and re-articulation. There are, I suppose, numerous ways in which the essays intertwine and speak to and with each other. Put differently, there are sure to be numerous themes, questions, and issues that come to life in each essay in particular ways and that are followed up on, or reappear, in the other essays, sometimes explicitly, sometimes more or less implicitly. I say this, in a slightly apologetic tone, because I have not attempted to draw all the strings together to form a synthesis. This is not to say that the narrative that unfolds in the book is simply a diffuse overlapping of thoughts © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_1

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(although there is, I gather, inevitably that also). If I were forced to identify what the central theme of the book is, I would probably say—as a result of such pressure—that it concerns the way in which the search for truth is tied to ethics and how what we might call the moral substance of ethics inscribes our use of reason with a certain limit, or perhaps, rather, an impasse. And if I were forced to state what the central thesis of the book is, I would probably answer—again, as a result of such pressure— along the following lines: questions of truth not only answer to facts or ideas as such. Primarily, they answer to questions of meaning. To say that in order to discern truth, we must first understand the sense of the questions we seek the truth to, is, of course, primitive—although certainly no less relevant for that reason. What is perhaps less primitive is my claim that questions of truth, and thereby questions of meaning, have a responsibility towards the desire at work in what could be called the event of meaning as such; a desire that is originally informed by an always-­already present mutual address between the self and the other, between the I and the you. This original mutual address forms, I argue, a point of impossibility. Or rather, it forms a point of mystery, a point of inexplicability; a point that has no explanation over and above the very event of the address itself. Truth, reason, and meaning are thereby subject to ethics or the subjects of ethics, in a double sense. First, meaning inescapably remains tied to the original responsibility inscribed in the event of the address. Second, by being tied to the inexplicability of this event, meaning as such cannot be an object of knowledge; reason cannot take us there alone, so to speak. Rather, it is only through our moral strength that we may redeem our original responsibility which, in turn, informs the truth of meaning. It is, I think, fair to say, as a heads-up, that this book deals with primal, or ultimate, scenes. The first essay, ‘The Other Side of “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”’, concerns, as the title reveals, the famous point of mystery in naturalist philosophy of mind, namely the question of how to account for the qualitative character of consciousness in a fundamentally material universe. Instead of following the path taken by naturalist philosophy of mind, the essay seeks to unveil ‘the other side’ of the problem by following the moral-existential traces inscribed in the articulation, in the grammar, of the problem. The suggestion is that one can discern three

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different yet interlinked moral-existential dimensions informing the structural deadlock internal to the ‘hard problem’. The essay-cum-chapter offers a rewriting of each of them. But nothing more. The first essay thereby functions as a kind of prologue to the other three. It, so to speak, introduces the main method, or style, or spirit, of the book, namely to translate, to rewrite, points of structural deadlock into their (original) moral-existential landscapes by following traces of desire. The second essay, ‘The Excess of Descartes’ First Principle of Philosophy’, performs a rewriting of Descartes’ (in)famous first principle of philosophy, cogito, ergo sum. It follows his Meditations on First Philosophy along the path of what I will suggest is a certain excess informing the method of the Meditations, an excess in fact duly recognised by Descartes himself, yet at the same time repressed—that is, repressed in its very recognition. The main suggestion of the chapter is that this excess travels all the way into the first principle of philosophy; that the first principle is, in fact, excess par excellence. Moreover, the chapter relocates Descartes’ excessive demand for indubitable and certain knowledge from its epistemological landscape into a moral-existential one, suggesting that the first principle is the expression of an excessive demand for a failsafe and unlimited affirmation of the self. This excess is sustained at the cost of avoiding engagement with and repressing that which constitutes and sustains meaning, namely the self-other relationship. The chapter then goes on exploring the moral-existential landscape—the deadlocks and displacements—of the Cartesian subject and its relation to the Other/other. The third essay, ‘The Truth of Desire Speaks with a Naked Soul’s Voice: Reading Plato’s Gorgias’, presents a somewhat unconventional reading of one of Plato’s most known dialogues, Gorgias. My claim is that the dialogue illustrates or dramatizes how questions of truth and meaning are tied to ethics by showing that the grammar of our language is inescapably informed by and/or inescapably answers to desire and that desire is essentially a desire for a ‘naked’ encounter with another naked soul. The chapter thereby places itself as an answer to the deadlock of the Cartesian universe. As the counterpart of the unconscious truth of the excess of Descartes’ first principle, the essay identifies the, so to speak, original sin of Socrates’ interlocutors to be the excessive demand for guaranteed, unlimited, social affirmation and shows how such a demand, its

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grammar, unconsciously contains the opposite desire, namely a desire for the desire of the other as such, which is simultaneously a care for the other as such. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that it is this desire, this care, for the other’s desire that informs both the constitution (the Urszene) and the sustenance of meaning. That is to say, it is exactly that which the previous chapter suggested Descartes’ first principle repressed. However, the essay does not provide a solution to the problem of truth and normativity, but rather only shows us how the use of reason becomes essentially an ethical task, a continuous engagement with the meaning that lives inbetween us. At the core of Gorgias we find—as the essay rewrites the dialogue—a concern for our moral capacity and competence to deal with questions of truth and meaning. The focal point of the fourth and final essay, ‘The Weight of Desire’, is the question of the entanglements between meaning and desire. The essay is guided by readings of Lacan’s theory or analysis of the (subject of the) signifier and of Wittgenstein’s reflections on meaning. Here, as in the other essays, the readings come to, or end up as, rewritings, as relocations of central points of significance. One way of characterising how this comes about in the final essay is to say that it comprises a Wittgensteinian reading of Lacan and a Lacanian reading of Wittgenstein; both these readings are, in turn, implicitly rooted in, or inspired by, the heterogeneous tradition of philosophy of dialogue and/or the I-you perspective. Through these readings, a mutual point of impossibility, a mutual point of mystery, at the heart of meaning and (inter-)subjectivity, is identified. Furthermore, the essay suggests that this point of impossibility, or mystery, is rooted in the very way in which we are always-already addressed by each other without knowing, without being able to know, why; without knowing what it is about the other that addresses us as such. This, it is argued, is why one cannot know the object of one’s desire, why one cannot know why there is meaning in the first place. One simply cannot know what ultimately constitutes meaning over and above the unchosen, unintended, address. From there on, the essay continues to explore the moral-­existential landscape of this point of impossibility and how it engenders an original responsibility—an original responsibility to make sense of what our original responsibility means in each moment of our lives.

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As I have already implicated, although the four essays of this book are all informed by readings of philosophical texts, the reader should be aware that they are not meant to be expert scholarly interpretations of either naturalist philosophy of mind, Descartes, Plato, Lacan, or Wittgenstein. I do not, in other words, claim that the essays present exact or correct interpretations. For better or for worse, this is not my concern—in this book. Rather, my concern lies solely with the narrative, with the issues and landscapes, which I attempt to open up. Put differently, the central importance of this book lies in the rewritings it offers, in the relocations of centres of significance it (hopefully) provides. Hence, the different texts and ideas I engage with are primarily there as means to animate these shifts of centres of significance. One might say that the reader is advised to think of the different readings as analogous to elements in an artistic work. What the work shows us, what it helps us see, or does not show us, what it distorts, is what is at stake. So my reading of, say, Lacan might be flawed or biased. But this is relevant for this book primarily only to the extent this flaw or bias also constitutes a blind spot in the perspectives and landscapes I try to open up. Simply put, as any philosophical text, the essays of this book are just as much open to critical scrutiny—in fact, its author wishes for nothing more than for readers to engage with them seriously. Conversely, it is not impossible that the readings I offer in the essays reveal new and important insights to scholars and experts about the respective texts and philosophies the essays deal with, although this is not my primary aim. Is it irresponsible to utilise texts in this way? I think that the case can be made for both yes and no, which indicates that it all depends on what one is doing; in what spirit one does what one does. I do not wish to defend myself more than this. Suffice to say that I hope that by keeping in mind the things said just now, the reader will be able to receive the pages to come in an open-minded spirit.

2 The Other Side of ‘the Hard Problem of Consciousness’

2.1 The ‘Problem’ In his seminal paper ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’, David Chalmers (1995) introduced the notion of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, contrasting it with what he called the ‘easy problem’. While the ‘easy problem’ refers to those questions ‘that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms’ (Ibid., 200), the ‘hard problem’, in turn, identifies the challenge, or problem, of accounting for how it is that such computational or neural mechanisms come to have the qualitative, ‘subjective aspect’ of ‘experience’; the (in) famous ‘what it is like’ character of consciousness (Chalmers 1995, 214; Nagel 1974). In short, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is the problem of how to fit or place the mind or consciousness in—rather than outside or beyond—the natural world as informed by modern natural science or, rather, as informed by the modern scientific worldview. Of course, neither the term ‘hard problem of consciousness’ nor Chalmers’ paper more generally identified a new research question or programme. The intellectual challenge to reconcile the realm of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_2

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consciousness or mind with the natural world (as informed by modern science), or, more generally, the subjective with the objective, had been in place at least since the days of Descartes. And it had been at the centre of what could be termed mainstream analytical philosophy of mind and its mind-body problem since the 1960s, when the strong version of ‘identity theory’ was articulated by David Armstrong (1968). Chalmers’ paper came out during an epoch—stretching from the 1980s to the early 2000s—when the ‘hard problem’ already more or less dominated the field of mainstream analytic philosophy of mind, with such figures as John Searle, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn, and Chalmers himself at the epicentre. Chalmers simply coined a suiting, or catchy, term. While the question of how a lump of grey brain matter could ever produce, contain, or be something so extraordinary as conscious subjective experience has not vanished from the scene, it has, however, ceased to dominate it—as it used to. Arguably, the ‘hottest’ thing in mainstream philosophy of mind today is so-called ‘4E cognition’, that is, the notion of extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted cognition/ mind (e.g. Bruin et al. 2018). In contrast to the kind of ‘hard’ or ‘scientific’ naturalism, which informs the ‘hard problem’, 4E cognition largely commits to a ‘relaxed naturalism’, which stresses that a scientific conception of nature, as any and all normative human practices, is itself already part of what John McDowell calls ‘the space of reasons’ (McDowell 1994, 1998). As Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen explains: while ‘our rational and normatively informed understanding of the world, placed in what [McDowell] labels “the space of reason”, always already has a footing in raw nature’, the ‘space of reason’ can nevertheless only be captured through the ‘concept of second nature, which is meant to capture how human beings, through their upbringing, education, and initiation into a certain culture, develop their natural potential, their first nature, into something that involves completely new rational and linguistic abilities’ (Søndergaard Christensen 2019, 181). Furthermore, and as characterised by Phil Hutchinson, 4E cognition, together with ‘Radical Enactive Cognition’ and ‘Ecological approaches’, develops a new theoretical paradigm for overcoming the dualist/reductionist and representationalist framework, which has haunted philosophers since Plato, through

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Descartes, all the way to the ‘hard problem’, replacing it with, or (re-) embedding it within an ‘Aristotelian monist tradition’ (Hutchinson 2019, 116–117). Given, then, that the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and its associated scientific naturalism could be said to be, if not outdated then at least dethroned from the centre of discourse in the philosophy of mind, one might reasonably question the decision to take it as a starting point for this book. The choice might arouse even more suspicion in some readers when informed that I am not out to refute, dismiss, solve, or even dissolve this ‘hard problem’. Rather, my aim is to identify and articulate a certain moral-existential truth, or truths, residing in the grammar of the problem, an aim more or less akin to Stanley Cavell’s (1999) search for the ‘truth of scepticism’—rather than for the refutation of it. In this sense, my engagement with the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ will be minimal. That is, I will exclusively focus on the problem itself, on its grammar, to be more precise, whereas I will not engage with either reductionist (e.g. Churchland and Churchland 1998; Dennett 1991, 2006) or non-­ reductionist (e.g. Searle 1992; McGinn 1991; Nagel 1986) theories about it. Again, in a way akin to Cavell’s pursuit of the ‘truth of scepticism’, my implicit, not explicitly argued for suggestion will be that despite the possible merits of a theoretical framework like 4E cognition, replacing a previous dualistic framework with a monistic one risks losing touch with the moral-existential truth which the ‘hard problem’ carries within its grammar (cf. Toivakainen 2020, 66–67). So, in what follows, I shall attempt to rewrite the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. More precisely, I shall attempt to convey that the grammar of the ‘hard problem’ contains three different yet interlinked moral-­ existential concerns or landscapes.

2.2 Self as Other: On the Decentred Subject of Existential Naturalism Here is the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ once more, now in the words of Thomas Nagel: ‘Given our objective understanding of physical reality, the question arises, how does such an arrangement of basic physical

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materials, complex as it is, give rise not only to the remarkable physical capacities of the organism but also to a being with a mind, a point of view, a wide range of subjective experiences and mental capacities’ (Nagel 1986, 29). A true mystery, no doubt. But what exactly is the sense of this mystery? Let us begin by noting that the discourse of the ‘hard problem’ revolves, roughly put, around two interrelated axes. On the one hand, it is divided between the reductionists, who claim that the subjective aspect of consciousness can and ought to be accounted for in purely objective third-­ person terms, and the non-reductionists who, in turn, claim that the essence of the subjective aspect is irreducible to any objectivist account. On the other hand, again, we find the discourse divided between those who claim—some non-reductionists included—that we will be able to, or are already close to explaining how ‘brain processes cause consciousness’ (e.g. Searle 2002; Dennett 1991, 2006; cf. Toivakainen 2020, 30–34), and those who claim the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ to be a limiting case for scientific inquiry (e.g. Nagel 1986; McGinn 1991, 1999). However, what interests us here and now is the thing that unites all of these camps, rather than the differences that divide them. That is, our focus will solely be on the shared presuppositions, the shared background—the structure, so to speak—of the ‘hard problem’. The first thing to be observed concerning the shared presuppositions is, perhaps, the most obvious one—indeed, it is so obvious that it might seem ridiculous to even mention it. What I have in mind is that the sense and significance of the ‘hard problem’ rests on the conviction that this problem is the defining problem or question for philosophy of mind. What kind of a conviction is this? Well, at least on the surface, it is the conviction that while we might not yet know, or not even ever be able to know, how the brain causes consciousness, ‘we know in fact that brain processes do cause our states of consciousness’ (Searle 1997, 197, emphasis added). It is because of this conviction ‘that’, that the problem extends from being just a question about elaborating effective theories about the correlations between mind and body/brain (the ‘easy problem of consciousness’) to being a question about the need, the desire, to bridge the alleged mysterious explanatory gap between mind and matter.

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The discourses of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ are, in other words, assembled around a mutual existential commitment, which Colin McGinn most accurately dubs ‘existential naturalism’ (McGinn 1991, 87–88). Existential naturalism is the conviction that mind simply has to be part of the natural world—irrespective of whether it can be given a physicalist explanation—–and that a scientific account of the natural world is the ultimate counterpart to ‘subjective experience’, because otherwise we end up with dualism and supernaturalism (cf. Toivakainen 2020, 36–40). So, as John Searle notes, ‘[t]o accept dualism is to deny the scientific worldview that we have painfully achieved over the past several centuries’ (Searle 1997, 194). Or, as Dennett declares: ‘there is now a widespread agreement among scientists and philosophers that dualism is—must be—simply false: we are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, nonrobotic ingredients at all’ (Dennett 2006, 3).1 Here is another, self-evident aspect of the ‘hard problem’: the ‘hard problem’ presupposes, or derives its sense from, a discrepancy or gap between, on the one hand, something we might call the immediate experience of the subject and, on the other hand, the alleged objective, that is, scientific or rational-reflective, truth of the subject. Put otherwise, the thing that makes the question of consciousness so ‘mysterious’ or ‘hard’ is that while consciousness supposedly is caused by brain processes, there is nothing about or in the immediate subjective experience as such that would reveal this ‘objective’ truth. Subjective experience as subjective experience is, in other words, ‘noumenal with respect to perception’ (McGinn 1991, 11). Now the ‘mystery of consciousness’ (Dennett 1991; Searle 1997) has a peculiar character and differs from most other kinds of mysteries, For while there has been and still are all kinds of mysteries for science to crack, for example, the mystery of the construction of the great pyramids, these mysteries have been mysteries for us, not for the objects of those mysteries themselves. In the case of the mystery of consciousness, however, the very object of this mystery, this object of knowledge, is, well, we ourselves. The object is, somehow, also the subject. In fact, one  Wallgren (2019) identifies a similar point of existential commitment at the heart of McDowell’s ‘relaxed naturalism’. 1

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might say that the mystery of consciousness is the mystery about how or why there is a mystery here at all. Or, put differently, since there is nothing about immediate subjective experience as such that links it to brain processes, which it yet, allegedly, in some sense is, the subject is in some fundamental or constitutive sense alien to itself, to its own truth. It would seem that nature—and mind or consciousness as part of nature—is structurally alien to itself. And with a small gesture towards Hegel (1997), we could say that in order for the subject to know its own truth, it must be alienated from, torn apart from, its immediate, primordial, state of being, namely subjective experience as subjective experience. The point I want to bring out here is, then, that the grammar of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ seems to contain or give expression to some form of self-alienation. Or, the truth of the subject necessitates a self-alienation of the subject. The matrix of this self-alienation, it seems to me, refers to three interrelated centres or aspects of the subject. First, there is the immediate subjective experience. Second, there is the object of the neural processes, with which the former must somehow be fused or essentially, ontologically, associated. In addition to these, however, the mind plays a third role here, namely that of the knower. Let us call this last position of the mind ‘rational-reflective’ or ‘linguistic’ thought. In this capacity, the mind mediates, so to speak, knowledge and truth between immediate subjectivity and its objective self-position. This threefold structure has a quite direct similarity to Jacques Lacan’s threefold division of the structure of subjectivity into the stages or registers of ‘the real’, ‘the imaginary’, and ‘the symbolic’. In Lacan’s system, the ‘identification’ between the subject’s own, immediate, and private experience, on the one hand, and its ‘specular image’, on the other, constitutes an unbridgeable gap in the psychic (semantic and epistemological) structure of the subject (Lacan 2006a). Likewise, in the grammar of the ‘hard problem’ we find a constitutive discrepancy between the subject’s immediate and private experience and the image of—or the imaginary object of— the brain and its processes as truth of the subject. And like in Lacan’s system, it is the linguistically constituted thought, that is, the Lacanian ‘symbolic’, which mediates knowledge and truth between the subject’s immediate and its objective self (Lacan 2006b). As Slavoj Žižek (1991) emphasises, in the Lacanian framework—just as in the (unconscious)

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grammar of the ‘hard problem’—truth arises from misrecognition, from alienation. We need not at this point concern us in more detail either with Lacan’s theory or with the similarities between it and the (unconscious) grammar of the ‘hard problem’. Instead, let us simply continue with the ‘hard problem’ and take the reference to Lacan as an anticipation of the kinds of themes and issues we will be approaching throughout the book. What we have identified so far, then, is a self, so to speak, decentred within itself; a self displaced or scattered between the different ‘positions’ of the subject. Moreover, while the sustained pressure of the ‘hard problem’ seems to be how the private and immediate experience of the subject is to find itself in its objective position, the grammar of the ‘problem’ indicates that there is something about the private immediate experience that resists an identification with its objective position. Or, perhaps even, that there is something about the private immediate experience of the subject that distorts its own objective truth. Consequently, the linguistic thought which mediates the knowledge and truth between the subjective and the objective self and, which in the case of the ‘hard problem’ is primarily ascribed to modern scientific discourse (and its objects), seems to function as a kind discipliner of the immediate and, in an epistemological and an existential sense, blinding force or influence of subjective experience. In other words, because of the alleged structural split between the immediacy of experience and its objective-cum-scientific truth, the mind must impose a part of itself upon (another part of ) itself. Immediate experience must be regimented, informed, by (scientific) discourse—despite the fact that we might never be able to close the gap between the subjective and the objective definitely. If this is not done, dualism, supposedly, awaits us. Here we see, then, a certain kind of structural impasse generated by the anti-supernaturalism commitment of ‘existential naturalism’. Namely, the anti-supernaturalism, that is, the ‘existential naturalism’ of the ‘hard problem’, forces the naturalist to place or position the thought that construes the theory or model—through which the truth of nature and of mind as part of nature is to be found—as itself simply in the position of a part in the model/theory it has construed. It is as if the whole (the truth revealed by scientific discourse) was but a feature (part) of the part (the mind as part of nature). Arguably, it is this, rather than, pace McGinn,

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any ‘cognitive closure’ (McGinn 1999, 43–76), which engenders the ‘hard problem’s’ (seeming) structural impasse. In other words, the structural impasse seems to be a feature of the very existential commitments informing the concepts of mind and nature in the discourse of the ‘hard problem’. Those existential naturalists who battle with the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ understand the ‘problem’ as a mind-body (or consciousness-­ brain) problem, a problem more or less continuous with the mind-body opposition of Descartes’ dualism and the legacy it stood on.2 However, while it is clear how and why the ‘hard problem’ can essentially be understood as constituted between mind and body, my rewriting of it nevertheless suggests that the concern is just as much, if not more essentially so, a concern with the mind itself. That is, my claim is that we have reason to understand the naturalist mind-body problem, that is, the ‘hard problem’, as an entanglement between the following dichotomies: the mind-­ body problem ↔ the mind-nature or object problem ↔ the mind-science qua truth problem ↔ the mind-mind problem. In other words, the ‘hard problem’ seems to concern itself with an internal, or intrapsychic, relation between the self and an ‘it’, where the ‘it’ or the object, the experiential self, and the rational discursive self qua knower all somehow belong to mind itself; all are parts or positions of the subject.

2.3 ‘One Cannot See the Mind’: On the Structure of a Repression While the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ seems to involve or give expression to an intrapsychic grammar concerned with an inner displacement or decentring of the self, the problem also seems to involve or give expression to an intersubjectively orientated concern. As we have seen, the essential building block of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’—whether  For instance, Colin McGinn writes: ‘The question as to the relation between mental phenomena and physical states of the body, specifically of the brain, is generally referred to as “the mind-body problem”’ (McGinn 1996, 17). Similarly, Daniel Dennett reports: ‘My first year in college, I read Descartes’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem. Now here was a mystery’ (Dennett 1991, xi). 2

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one thinks it can be solved or not—is the assumption that on what we might call a pre-theoretical level, subjective experience as subjective experience is not objectifieable; subjectivity as subjective experience is nowhere to be found in the observable world of objects and bodies—this much both reductionists and non-reductionists agree on. Hence, McGinn observes that ‘[a]t root, the reason we cannot solve the mind body problem is that we cannot see the mind’ (McGinn 1999, 51). What I now want to do is to suggest that the sense of this alleged impossibility of ‘seeing the mind’ is in fact informed by an existentially felt split between the ‘inner’ and its expression in relation to another person. A split, that is, between the self and the other; the other whose mind or soul one desires to see (or avoid); whom one wants to be close to (or take distance from), and with whom one wants to be open, transparent (or from whom one wants to be shut off). What, then, establishes the connection between the alleged impossibility of seeing the mind and the split between the inner, expression, and the other? Let us begin by thinking of the situation counterfactually. If the mind of the other—intentions, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires, etc.—were openly, transparently, immediately, present in expressions, it would be unclear what would or could motivate the idea that ‘one cannot see the mind’ in the first place or the associated ‘experience’ (or conviction) that the mind is essentially inaccessible to the other. Unless, of course, we were referring to a situation of someone closing him- or herself off to such an extent that his/her mind became imperceptible. Likewise, if I felt that my own words or gestures openly and transparently gave expression to my thoughts and feelings, if I felt that nothing ever got left behind, it seems that there would be no obvious reason for why I would need to insist that you, or I, (logically) ‘cannot’ see my mind. Moreover, under such conditions—that is, if what it meant to see the mind would be to see the open and transparent expressions of the other (and oneself )—it would not at all be surprising that one does not, cannot, see the mind in the brain. The brain would simply not be ‘the right place’ to look for the mind (cf. Bennett and Hacker 2003). In short, if the ‘inner’ would, as it were, travel all the way with its expression, what would, or could, induce the existential feeling that something remained unseen? What would we, what could we, still long for? What gap would we need to bridge, reconcile?

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The point I am driving at here is that before one can be baffled or anxious about the seeming opposition between the mind and the world, or the body, or the brain for that matter, there has to be a felt existential experience that the other’s and one’s own expressions—and the responses to those expressions—leave something concealed; that something, the ‘inner/mind/soul’, remains hidden, as it were, behind the expressions— and the responses to them. For if it did not, if we would feel that our expressions left nothing behind, then it is not clear what would or even could motivate the notion that the mind ‘cannot be seen’. However, the naturalist dictum, which comes to expression in the ‘hard problem’, is, of course, that the mind does not remain hidden occasionally but rather always, necessarily. Insofar as one ‘cannot see the mind’ is meant to be a purely structural or (tauto)logical proposition, it is not meant to merely express a certain inability that we at certain moments happen to find ourselves in. Rather, it supposedly expresses a structural condition of thought, of our conceptual scheme, in that there is, so the claim goes, no such thing as seeing the mind since mind or consciousness is here defined—at least in its pre-scientific, everyday occurrence—as that which can only be experienced subjectively, that is, privately by each individual. Mind is, in other words, not hidden from perception. Instead, it is simply not of the order of perceptible things in the objective world. Paradoxically, however, at the same time the epistemological question internal to the ‘hard problem’ is, grammatically, built on the presupposition that there is in fact something unseen in the world or in nature, something hidden— be it virtual or not3—which needs to be explained in terms of, or in relation to, that which is seen. This is why the two truths about the mind, captured through the categories of ‘introspection’ and ‘perception’, need to be ‘reconciled’ (Searle 2002, 1). But how can we have it both ways? That is, how can the logical relation between mind and body, or consciousness and brain, in the ‘hard problem’ constitute an epistemological problem?  Dennett, for instance, holds that consciousness, while certainly appearing to the subjects themselves as something real, is nevertheless more akin to a fiction created by our brain; an abstraction akin to the centre of gravity (Dennett 1991, 95–96, 410). Nonetheless, this ‘fiction’ constitutes an object of knowledge just as much; something to be reconciled with the ‘objective world’, with a ‘third person-perspective’. 3

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Our conundrum is thus this: We concede that the ‘hard problem’ truly moves the desire of the naturalist existentially towards reconciliation. At the same time, we ask what it is that can motivate, what it is that can existentially move, the naturalist’s desire in such a way? If we would feel, for instance, that we must attempt to somehow reconcile the fact that a square cannot be round—or that this at least is a real problem or mystery—would our motivation in such cases really be informed by the tautological, conceptual, fact that a square is not round? Let us say that I see a person cry out in pain, or that my friend tells me of her intention to plant a flower. What is it that makes it possible for me to feel, to cognise, that something of the essence of this intention or pain—‘the mind’ of the other—remains unseen to me? What is it, in other words, that makes it possible for there to be a gap between the other, expression, and me? Given the naturalists’ basic assumption, it cannot obviously be because on some other occasion nothing was left unseen. I have, according to the naturalist, never experienced, could never have experienced, what it would be/mean to see the mind. Likewise, I have never experienced, could never have experienced, what it would be like to be seen, wholly, by the other. The very notion of seeing the mind lacks sense. Nevertheless, must I not have some contrast to draw on here if I am to say—to feel, to experience—that something is left out and remains unseen? If no contrast is given, how could anybody be in a position to draw the conclusion, to experience or cognise, that mind is not in fact perceptible in expression? Conversely, if there is no such experience to be found, that is, if the ‘hard problem’ in fact only gives expression to a conceptual tautology and not to an empirical fact or epistemological truth, if the opposite to ‘cannot see the mind’ is a non-thought, senseless, then it is hard to see what should, what could, be explained or reconciled here.4 What is obviously true is that if someone thinks, feels, sees, etc., something, this person will, in some form or another, have to give expression to these things for me to know what the feeling, thought, or sensation is. And vice versa. But again, what more does this amount to than stating  My point is not to say that we cannot aspire to give functionalist models of how a system must function in order to basically behave as a human does, or to map out the correlations between cognition and brain activity (the ‘easy problem’). 4

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that if we do not express ourselves we cut off our inner world from our outer, that is, cut off our inner world from the other. Or, perhaps we should say that we create an inner world that is cut off from the outer, form the other. We might of course suggest that this is what the claim ‘cannot see the mind’ means (or what we want it to mean), only that then it does not mean anything else than exactly that if one does not express oneself, one conceals one’s inner from the other, or the other fails to acknowledge what one expresses. Put differently, if the inner is cut off from expression, then the inner cannot be perceived/conceived. Again, however, can this really always, necessarily, be the case? For would it not then mean that there could be nothing to inform us, there could be no conditions under which we could experience, that we were in fact cut off from the inner? And would this not imply that it would be equally true, or equally arbitrary, to say that I really have seen the mind of the other, since my seeing or not seeing this would equally not correlate with anything. Consequently, if I am to take the existential concern of the naturalist—and of myself—seriously, that is, take seriously that there is an actual, existentially felt split between one’s inner life and one’s expression in one’s relationship to the other, I seem to be forced to say that the very condition for this split is that we in fact do understand what it means to ‘see the mind’. Or, more accurately put, what I seem to be forced to imply is that we do in fact understand what it means, what it is, to express one’s inner life directly and immediately, and to respond to the other’s expression similarly. Indeed, is there not something about the very way in which we are moved by each other that makes it quite hard for us to conceal our inner life from others; that it takes some effort, for the most part even an overwhelming amount of effort, to do so? My point here is simply to say that there is a possible and significant use to be given to the notion of ‘seeing the mind of the other’ and to the notion of ‘having one’s inner life seen by the other’ and, consequently, also to the expression ‘cannot see the mind’. By contrast, in the case of the self-understanding of the ‘hard problem’, it is quite unclear what use or sense can be given to ‘cannot see the mind’, since it logically excludes its contrast. Again, my point is not to deny that there is something like subjective experience, and that this subjective experience as subjective experience is not, (tauto)logically or grammatically cannot be, ‘observable’ in an

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object. Rather, the point I want to bring out is that this (tauto)logical or grammatical relation is not something that can, by itself or as such, induce an existential split and a longing for a unifying explanation and reconciliation. That the square is square and not round cannot as such be the reason for any felt anxiety about this (tauto)logical fact. Again, there has to be some existentially thematisable element or force at work in order for the (tauto)logical or grammatical ‘fact’ of the ‘cannot see the mind’ to become an existential, and therefore an epistemological, problem. Suppose I am right in making such a claim. What would then motivate the formulation of the ‘hard problem’; what would motivate the naturalist’s conviction that the conception of ‘cannot see the mind’ says something meaningful? I mean, what would the existential motivation for it be? A straightforward suggestion presents itself readily, namely that presenting an existential split or alienation as pertaining to a structural impossibility (‘seeing the mind’) provides a kind of justification for an urge to turn away from, to hide from, the openness of expression between individuals. In other words, it seems to bespeak an expressive openness that moves us in such a profound way that we, for some unknown reason, need a powerful, definite, prohibition in order to ward off its effects. It, as we might put it, acts, or would act, as a defensive response to some deeply disquieting, perhaps unbearable trait in our lives with, and our desire for, each other. Now my point here is to suggest, or bring to life, that what we might call a ‘non-thought’, that is, something that takes the form of a (tauto)logical or a ‘grammatical proposition’ (cf. Wittgenstein 1953, §251), such as ‘one cannot see the mind’, can itself become expressive of a desire while not itself being the (object of ) desire. Let us look into this suggestion more closely. We begin by translating the proposition ‘cannot see the mind’ into a different interpersonal register, asking ourselves what is, per impossible, implied by the notion of seeing the other’s mind, following here the (tauto)logical impossibility proposed by proponents of the ‘hard problem’? Well, it would simply mean that I would have to be(come) the other person and/or the other person would have to be(come) me. The impossibility, the ‘cannot’: If I become you, then it is no longer I who sees your mind, just as if you become me, then it is no longer you who sees my mind. To see the mind would, in other words, equal either to fully consume, or possess, the other

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or, alternatively, to be fully consumed, or possessed, by the other. In both cases, if any real distinction between the two can be made, the outcome would be annihilation of individuality and alterity, which equals the annihilation of the self-other relationship. A (tauto)logical impossibility, for sure. Only that the ‘hard problem’ seems to take this ‘cannot’ quite seriously; it is given an existential weight quite distinct from the weight we (sensibly) give to squares not being round. This now prompts me to put forth the following suggestion: it is as if the (tauto)logical ‘cannot’ in the ‘cannot see the mind’ states, on the one hand, a kind of disappointment and a kind of urge, while, on the other hand, putting forth a definitive prohibition. So, on the one hand, on an existential, yet unconscious plane, the (tauto)logical dimension of the ‘hard problem’ seems to be informed by a desire for total mergence with the other, that is, for an annihilation of individuality/alterity, insofar as the ‘cannot’ signals a disappointment; insofar as the ‘cannot’ must be reconciled. That is, it seems to signal, in its very directedness towards the self-other relationship, a desire to annihilate that relationship, insofar as the ‘cannot’ is felt as an obstacle (or problem), as something which distances us from satisfying a desire or urge. On the other hand, however, the ‘cannot’ seems to simultaneously have the form or function of a definitive prohibition; as if to prohibit the annihilating, all-consuming, desire or urge just referred to and, thereby, to save or sustain individuality/alterity and the self-other relationship. So far, then, we have identified two different dimensions to, two different rewritings of, both the ‘cannot see the mind’ and the ‘can see the mind’. One of these follows the ‘cannot see the mind’ and ‘can see the mind’ along the lines of the open expressive relation between self and other, where the ‘cannot’ is a reaction to the reality and possibility of the ‘can’. The other, which we just now discussed, follows the (tauto)logical character of the ‘cannot’ and the (tauto)logical impossibility of the ‘can’, and the existential fervour inscribed in this (tauto)logical relation. What I now want to bring to light is that whereas the ‘cannots’ of the two rewritings certainly both respond in a defensive fashion to their respective ‘cans’, what we can observe is that the two ‘cans’ in fact stand in a certain tension with, even in a certain opposition to, each other. This, in turn, reveals a similar tension between the two ‘cannots’. So, if in the first rewriting the ‘can see the mind’ signals some form of open expressiveness,

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and the first ‘cannot’ signal a form of disappointment, inability, or (empirical) barrier, then in the second rewriting the ‘can’, namely the urge to annihilate the self-other relationship, seems to itself work against the first ‘can’, insofar as the open expressiveness of the first ‘can’ is a form of relationality par excellence and the second ‘can’ seems to signal an urge to annihilate this relationality. A similar contrast can be found between the two ‘cannots’. For if the first ‘cannot’ is expressive of an inability or a certain wished for barrier with respect to open expressiveness, then the second ‘cannot’, which prohibits the annihilating character of the all-­ consuming urge of the second ‘can’, in turn strives to preserve or defend individuality/alterity and the self-other relationship in the face of the annihilating urge, and in this sense has a certain contrasting relation to the first ‘cannot’. Now, what I want to suggest is that these interlinkages between the two rewritings exhibit a structure of repression. Let me, however, once more repeat the underlying assumption, or claim, which my argument here hinges on. First, in order for the question of ‘seeing the mind’, and its impossibility, to become thematised in the first place, one must already desire to see—to be in communion with—the other and to be seen, to be desired, by the other. Alternatively, one must already be moved, addressed, by the other and the other by oneself, before the ‘hard problem’ can be meaningfully thematised. Moreover, the nature of this desire, of this address, must be of such a kind that it, so to speak, corresponds to the character of the ‘hard problem’, which in turn implies that this primary desire and address is, in some constitutive sense, characterised by an open expressiveness. On the basis of these assumptions, or claims, I am, then, encouraged to suggest that the first ‘cannot see the mind’ is a direct, an immediate, reactive response to the open expressiveness internal to an uncontrollable, inescapable, desire and address between the self and the other. The thing with this first cannot is, however, that it retains the acknowledgement of the open expressiveness (the ‘can see the mind’) as part of its own consciousness. Let us say that the first ‘cannot’ is a form of suppression. Now, I do believe that it is possible to sustain suppression as suppression. That is, it is, I believe, possible to sustain an acknowledgement of one’s suppression to the extent one keeps intact a directedness towards the reality of open expressiveness and strives, on a basic existential

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level at least, to realise it. Yet, to the extent we feel overwhelmed by our suppressions, to the extent the reality of the other’s address and one’s desire become unbearable, what one must, so to speak, get rid of is exactly the awareness, the acknowledgement, of the reality one cannot bear. Repression is called for. That is, what repression seems to offer us is the truly magical trick of making awareness or acknowledgement disappear; repression is the successful transmutation of awareness or acknowledgement into the unconscious. So, with reference to the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, my suggestion is that the/a way to transmute the existential weight of suppression into the unconscious is offered by displacing or transmuting the discourse of ‘seeing the mind’ to the domain of tautologies or grammatical propositions. In other words, my suggestion is that the subject of the ‘hard problem’ rewrites, that is, displaces the ‘can see the mind’ as a logical impossibility; rewrites it as ‘to see the mind is to be(come) the other’, which, in turn, in its very impossibility hosts or is informed by the urge to annihilate the relationship inscribed with open expressiveness. The final move of this structure of repression is, then, the affirmation of the (tauto) logical ‘cannot’ (the second rewriting), by which the primary relationship and desire—the very conditions for the meaning of ‘the hard problem’—is denied (transmuted into the unconscious) and, simultaneously, preserved through the inscription of the definitive prohibition of the annihilating desire. In other words, the final affirmation of the (tauto)logical impossibility of ‘cannot see the mind’ seeks to sustain the self-other relation by prohibiting the annihilating urge, while simultaneously displacing, warding off, the acknowledgement or consciousness of primary open expressiveness. What is left is a contained, controllable, manageable, self-other relationship with a definitive safety-gap, established through the inscription or invention of a fundamental impossibility. Let us call this structure of repression the domestication of the primary desire and address in the self-other relationship. The domestication is, however, not stable. Instead, it erupts through the writing of the tautology of ‘cannot see the mind’ as a problem. That is, the problem in the ‘hard problem’ signals how the domestication is never fully satisfied, how it does not fully function. Put differently, the virtue of the ‘hard problem’ is that it retains the problem as a problem and thereby gives truth a voice, be it that it is the voice of the unconscious. Be it that it is desire displaced.

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2.4 The Wonder of Existence Both in the Introduction and in the beginning of this chapter, I said that the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ concealed not only two, but three interlinked existentially charged dimensions or aspect to it, and that I would attempt to write them out. Our third and final rewriting will be short and we shall enter it through the following two quotes. My first year in college, I read Descartes’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem. Now here was a mystery. How on earth could my thoughts and feelings fit in the same world with the nerve cells and molecules that made up my brain? (Dennett 1991, xi) Given our objective understanding of physical reality, the question arises, how does such an arrangement of basic physical materials, complex as it is, give rise not only to the remarkable physical capacities of the organism but also to a being with a mind, a point of view, a wide range of subjective experiences and mental capacities. (Nagel 1986, 29)

Although diametrically opposed in their treatment of the ‘hard problem’—one of them a reductionist who believes that the question has already more or less been answered by science, the other one a non-­ reductionist who identifies consciousness as a limiting case for science— we can, nevertheless, observe in both Dennett’s and Nagel’s respective statements above an undertone of wonder informing their identification of the ‘problem’. There is something unfathomably remarkable about the fact that we are here pondering these thoughts. Something mysteriously remarkable about the fact that we exist at all. I have not wanted to question, undermine, or abolish this wonder in my rewritings. In fact, the wonder present in Dennett’s and Nagel’s descriptions has nowhere disappeared. Rather it lingers on in each rewriting just as strongly. For nothing I have said makes it any less remarkable, or mysterious, that we exist, and that the world exists, and that we stand in a relation to this world and to ourselves, and that we stand in such a relation to these that we also feel distant to them, that is, that the question of truth exists. Or; nothing I have said makes it any less remarkable, mysterious, that we exist as beings that stand in relation to others, that there truly is an ‘I’ and a ‘you’. That

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is, it is no less remarkable or mysterious that ‘I’ am ‘I’ and ‘you’ are ‘you’, and that we are somehow constitutively entangled with, and address, each other. Only that the rewritings have altered, reoriented, repositioned, the object of wonder, as one might put it. The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is a question of origin. Or rather, it is a wonder at origin. Not of empirical origin, although that question also enters the picture. Rather, of a primary origin; an origin of (a thing’s) existence as such. And so it is: wonder at sheer existence inherently contains the question of the origin of, and the question of the destiny of, existence. Moreover, is not this wonder something all of us inevitably stand before? That is, is this wonder not inherent to, inscribe into, the grammar of our existence because we are not ourselves the cause of or reason for existence—least of all our own existence? As inscribed in the grammar of the ‘hard problem’, this mysterious relation to origin tends to, in the anxious minds of humans, take on the form of an urge or struggle to explain (away) the mystery of origin, an urge that contains, to note, its own resistance, its own deadlock. The point, then, is not so much that our relationship to (absolute) origin is a limiting case of human capacity for knowledge. Rather, it seems that the truth of the desire for an explanation of (absolute) origin is not, so to speak, about that explanation as much as it concerns the anxious response to the reality of the existential weight inherent in existence. By this, I do not mean, however, that we cannot respond to the question of origin inherent in our wonder at existence. If anything, this book can itself be read as an attempt at such a response.

References Armstrong, D.M. 1968. A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge. Bennett, M., and P.M.S. Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bruin, L.D., S. Gallagher, and A. Newen. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. 1999. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chalmers, D. 1995. Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200–219. Churchland, P.M., and P.S. Churchland. 1998. On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987–1997. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ———. 2006. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1997. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, P. 2019. The Missing ‘E’: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Ecological Psychology and the Place of Ethics in Our Responsiveness to the Lifeworld. In Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, ed. J.  Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen, and T. Wallgren. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacan, J. 2006a. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/ London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006b. The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In Ècrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGinn, C. 1991. The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a Resolution. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1996. The Character of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Nagel, T. 1974. What is it Like to be a Bat? Philosophical Review 4: 435–450. ———. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1997. The Mystery of Consciousness: Exchanges with Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. London: Granta Books Cop. ———. 2002. Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Søndergaard Christensen, A.-M. 2019. Wittgenstein, Psychological Self-­ Ascriptions and the Moral Dimensions of Our Inner Lives. In Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, ed. J.  Backström, H.  Nykänen, N. Toivakainen, and T. Wallgren. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Toivakainen, N. 2020. Displacing Desire: An Essay on the Moral-Existential Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem. Helsinki: Unigrafia. Wallgren, T. 2019. Mind and Moral Matter. In Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen, and T. Wallgren. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. 1991. The Truth Arises from Misrecognition. In Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. E.  Ragland-Sullivan and M.  Bracher. New  York/London: Routledge.

3 The Excess of Descartes’ First Principle of Philosophy

3.1 The Basic Rationale of Descartes’ First Principle As I pointed out in the Introduction, the sense of this book lies in the way in which the four essays speak to each other. Now one might surely say that there exists a direct historical and conceptual lineage between Descartes’ philosophy and the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. And this might surely call for a genealogical analysis of how Descartes’ thoughts translate themselves into the contemporary naturalist landscape, with all the transmutations that the processes of modernity and secularisation, if not demanded, then at least engendered (cf. Taylor 2007). While we shall not engage in any such endeavours, our engagement with Descartes’ first principle of philosophy will, nonetheless, bring to light, perhaps not so much genealogical relations—although they might well be that also— but rather kinships in the moral-existential landscape. For just as in the case of the ‘hard problem’, what we shall now pursue is the repositioning of Descartes’ Mediations on First Philosophy from its epistemological to its moral-existential landscape. And it is in this repositioning, in this rewriting, that our current essay-cum-chapter will converse with the previous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_3

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one. So, without further ado, let us turn to Descartes’ (in)famous search for infallible and certain knowledge. The basic rationale of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is, at least for most readers, quite well known. Beginning his Meditation I, Descartes states that ‘[i]t is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had constructed on this basis’ (Descartes 1967a,144). He then goes on to say that ‘from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences’, asserting that the way to this salvation from falsehood required ‘to withhold assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable’ (Ibid., 144–145). In the hope of thus discovering at least ‘one thing only which is certain and indubitable’ (Ibid., 149), Descartes beings by directing his doubts towards ‘the sense’, which he claims are the source of what he has, formerly, ‘accepted as most true and certain’, a knowledge that from time to time nevertheless has proven to be false and deceitful (Ibid., 145). However, while the senses do deceive us from time to time, and while we from time to time believe that we are awake although we in fact are dreaming, Descartes admits that the deceptiveness of what is represented to the mind in illusions and dreams is parasitic on, presupposes, real entities, qualities, magnitudes etc.; ‘that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and universal, which are real and true’ (Ibid., 146). Furthermore, while such ‘real entities’ pertain to ‘the class’ of ‘corporeal nature in general’ and are in this sense dependent upon the existence of the corporeal world, Descartes observes that the truths of geometry and arithmetic hold just as well ‘whether [one is] awake or asleep’ (Ibid., 147). In other words, mathematical truths are what they are in some sense independently of the existence of the corporeal world. Descartes is not content however. That is, he does not conclude from this grammatical relationship between illusion and reality, or from the seemingly indubitable nature of mathematical truths, that he has arrived at the very foundation of certain and indubitable knowledge. Instead, he thinks one can and must push the doubting a step further by entertaining the idea of an ‘evil genius’, who

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has the power to produce the illusion that something like the external world as such exists or, apropos mathematical truths, that the nature of rational reasoning is itself, well, rational (Ibid., 148). This evil genius would, in other words, have the stupendously magnificent power to override the grammatical relationship between illusion and reality, making reality conceptually secondary to illusion. Of course, Descartes will soon conclude that this is, in fact, impossible. But the first principle which reveals this impossibility lies, famously, in the notion that even if the world was a grand illusion, even if the grammatical relationship between illusion and reality was itself but an illusion, even if the truth of mathematics were illusory, an illusion still exists as an illusion in or for the very thought in which it is perceived. In other words, what cannot be put into question, what is indubitably certain, Descartes proclaims, is the thinking, the doubting, itself. The evil genius ‘can never cause me to be nothing as long as I think’ (Ibid., 150). Consequently, the notorious first principle of philosophy: ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (Descartes 1967b, 101).

3.2 What One Must Know Before One Can Know the First Principle Like the Platonic doctrine of the realm of ideas, Descartes’ first principle of philosophy has been as widely criticised as it has been celebrated. While my reading and rewriting will be rather of the critical than of the celebrating kind, my interest lies not so much with the fallacies of the principle, as with trying to capture the existential landscape in which Descartes’ meditations move. Put differently, my interest lies with what moral-existential truth is contained within the fallacies. To begin with, we shall have a look—in this and the following sub-section—at some preliminary ambiguities pertaining to the rationale Descartes deploys in his pursuit of an indubitable foundation of knowledge, which will anticipate the kind of reinterpretation, the kind of rewriting, that I shall be providing throughout the chapter. So, in this sub-section, we shall consider some ambiguous features of the first principle of philosophy, especially its relationship to its own presuppositions, while in the following

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we shall ask what, if anything, grounds Descartes’ sceptical method/question, and what this tells us about the nature or sense of the first principle. We begin, then, by going back to Descartes’ observation, noted above, that there is what I called a grammatical interdependency between illusion and reality—and dream and wakefulness—and, furthermore, that mathematical truths hold just as much in sleep as in wakefulness. Now the question we are obliged to ask is why Descartes is not content with this insight? That is, why could not the grammatical fact that even illusions presuppose ‘that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and universal, which are real and true’, or the insight that mathematical truths do not depend on whether they are ‘actually existent or not’, be the first principle of philosophy? To the extent that Descartes has an argument here—and we will come back to the issue in the next sub-section— it is this: it seems possible for him to question the truth of, say, mathematical truths, because it is not he himself that has grounded or construed these truths. Rather, Descartes reasons, one perceives mathematical truths as certain and indubitable simply because one is constituted in such a way. As he reports: ‘Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God exists by whom I have been created such as I am’ (Descartes 1967a, 147; cf. Descartes 1967c, 220). And since the very rationality of whatever rational reason discerns is not transparent to the subject him/herself, Descartes continues: ‘how do I know that I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square, or judge of things yet simpler, if any simpler can be imagined?’ (Ibid., 147; cf. Descartes 1967c, 220) So even if it seems indubitable that mathematical truths are true just as much in dreams as when awake, nothing, nevertheless, guarantees that these truths are really true, for our perception of truth simply hinges on how the mind, how reason, is itself constituted. Perhaps it is constituted as inherently untrue. Perhaps there is a truer rationality behind or beyond our conception of it, one that indeed falsifies ours. However, Descartes notes already early on that God, due to his (conceptually binding) perfection and goodness, cannot be a deceiver—Descartes will demonstrate this later on in Meditation III. Therefore, he conjures up the alternative notion of an ‘evil genius’ who, although not supremely good as God, is no ‘less powerful than deceitful’ (Descartes 1967a, 148). Consequently, ‘I think,

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therefore I am’ reaches the height of the first principle because whereas the certainty of mathematical truths presupposes the truth or consistency of the very conditions of thought itself, that is, presupposes that whatever reason conceives to be certain and indubitable actually is so, the first principle does not—so Descartes claims—hinge on such presuppositions since its certainty, that is, the certainty of existence, is exclusively internal to the very act of thinking, as opposed to what is thought. In short, the first principle admits, in Descartes’ words, to nothing ‘which is not necessarily true’ (Ibid., 152). Solely that one is thinking is the infallible proof of existence. However, while the first principle of philosophy certainly has a kind of enchanting aura of self-sufficient indubitableness and certainty around it, Descartes’ reasoning is, if not contradictory, then at least ambiguous. For in the Principles of Philosophy, where he sets out to explain and defend the Meditations against the criticism it received, he makes the following observation about the ‘various terms of which [he had] availed [him]self ’ in the process of discovering the first principle: [W]hen I stated that this proposition I think, therefore I am is the first and most certain which presents itself to those who philosophise in orderly fashion, I did not for all that deny that we must first of all know what is knowledge, what is existence, and what is certainty, and that in order to think we must be, and such alike; but because these are notions of the simplest possible kind, which of themselves give us no knowledge of anything that exists, I did not think them worthy of being put on record. (Descartes 1967c, 222. Second emphasis added)

There is, then, Descartes (rightly) admits, a kind of knowledge, or understanding, before the first principle, a knowledge on which the very possibility of the first principle in fact hinges. Let us call this knowledge linguistic—or semantic—knowledge. But does this not in effect mean that Descartes knows a multitude of things indubitably and with certainty independently of the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’, and does this not, in turn, suggest that there is something superfluous, something excessive, about the first principle? To see what I am driving at here, let us compare what I dubbed linguistic knowledge with that of

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mathematical truths. Linguistic knowledge, as we have seen, pertains to notions that are ‘of the simplest possible kind, which of themselves give us no knowledge of anything that exists’ and are thereby, apparently, indubitable and certain. In fact, so indubitable and certain that doubt cannot (be allowed to) enter it. Mathematical knowledge or notions are, similarly, ‘very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not’, and thereby possess a measure of indubitableness and certainty so that ‘it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity (or uncertainty)’ (Descartes 1967a, 147). The thing with linguistic knowledge, however, is that it cannot really be put into question in the same manner as the truths of mathematical ideas. And this Descartes does note. But he seems to be somewhat reluctant to fully consider why this is so. For if the non-fallibility of mathematical truths depends on or presupposes that we are not deceived by our maker or an ‘evil genius’, that is, they logically or grammatically seem to allow for the possibility of deception, this cannot really apply to linguistic knowledge since the very sense of the first principle would itself be undermined thereby. Put otherwise, if one were to question the sense of the most basic notions of linguistic knowledge, then indubitable and certain knowledge would as such be impossible. But if this is the case, how can Descartes then draw a distinction between sense and existence when it comes to linguistic knowledge? That is, how is it that ‘I think, therefore I am’ is the first infallible proof of existence? Why not simply every understanding of the meaning of words? Is it, perhaps, because linguistic knowledge cannot really be an object of knowledge at all—because we cannot know why things have sense, meaning, in the first place? Alternatively, why does Descartes not allow for his methodological doubt to enter linguistic knowledge, and thereby force himself to conclude that nothing can, in fact, be known with indubitable certainty? Could he not, ought he not, just as well say that anything that he thinks or says may quite well be completely nonsensical? It might of course not be nonsensical, but how can we know that? In other words, why could not Descartes be fooled, by an evil genius, in thinking that he knows or understands the meaning of ‘to know’, ‘to

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exist’, ‘I’, ‘think’, ‘therefore’, etc.?1 The point here being, that what Descartes is ultimately unable to place under doubt—if he is to reach any certainty and indubitableness at all; if anything is to make sense at all—is not simply the proposition, or proclamation ‘I think, therefore I am’, but rather the sense, the meaning of the proposition, which is supported by what we might, with reference to Lacan (2006), call the ‘Other’ of linguistic knowledge. It is linguistic knowledge that supports or sustains both the ‘Cogito’ and the ‘ergo sum’. Or, to put it somewhat differently, simply proclaiming or announcing, ‘I think, therefore I am’ does not constitute any knowledge of existence as such, since it can be ‘knowledge’ and ‘existence’, have the sense of ‘knowledge’ and ‘existence’, only when supported by (the Other of ) linguistic knowledge (cf. Dolar 1998). Of course, Descartes does seem to acknowledge that he prohibits the methodological doubt from entering the domain of linguistic knowledge in order for any proposition at all to be able to count as ‘certain knowledge’. But why so? Has not Descartes thereby simply produced evidence for his own presuppositions, rather than the certainty he was after? And what exactly is it that he is after? I do not want to say that what we have here is a clear contradiction, because this would entail clarity as to what is being contradicted. Only that the relationship between the first principle and what I called linguistic knowledge is ambiguous, which of course also makes the position or sense of the first principle itself ambiguous. To repeat, one feature of this ambiguity is that if the first principle is meant to be reached only after bracketing or suspending the existence of everything that can logically be bracketed or suspended, and if this includes, according to Descartes, everything except the first principle, it is not at all clear where or how in all of this the linguistic knowledge, which supports the sense of the first principle, is supposed to be sustained. That is, it is not at all clear to what extent Descartes in fact can suspend the existence of the world and other people to the extent he (thinks that he) does, since it is not clear how to  It is exactly this point that separates Descartes’ scepticism from so-called Pyrrhonian scepticism. For while Descartes thinks he can find a secure foundation, that is, set a limit to full blown scepticism by not exposing a certain domain (in Descartes’ case, linguistic knowledge) to the sceptical attitude, Pyrrhonian scepticism denounces exactly this limiting. For more on Pyrrhonian scepticism see Sinnott-Armstrong (2004) and Wallgren (2021). 1

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sustain linguistic knowledge without these. Again, ought not Descartes in fact conclude that sense itself is, if not utterly doubtful, then at least, let us call it, open-ended; that we cannot in fact know anything with failsafe certainty; that the very notion of failsafe certainty is itself unclear—the Pyrrhonian stance in other words (see footnote 1). Another feature of the ambiguity is that it is not at all clear why Descartes’ sceptical search for indubitable and certain knowledge finds its object, or rather its subject, in the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’. Why is it the ‘existence’ of the ‘I’ that is put on a pedestal? In fact, given Descartes’ own reasoning, ought the first principle not in fact concern, or take as its object, linguistic knowledge? Shouldn’t the first principle of philosophy contain the following complementary proposition: ‘“I think therefore I am” is indubitable and certain because words have meaning’? For sure, such a formulation is altogether less satisfying than ‘I think, therefore I am’ because it places certainty inside of language, while meaning thus remains outside the supposed transparency allegedly satisfied by the ‘I think’. But again, does this not indicate that there is something excessive about the first principle as it stands? Or; does this not indicate that there is something excessive about the whole endeavour of finding a first principle of knowledge, since any such knowledge would seem to inevitably presuppose a pre-existing (linguistic) knowledge as its constitutive support?

3.3 The Groundlessness of Descartes’ Hyperbolic Doubt: Doubt Is Grounded in Excess Let us now pursue more or less the same ambiguity from a somewhat different perspective. There is, to be sure, something close to hypnotically persuasive about Descartes’ argument leading up to the first principle. To the extent that one gives in to his invitation to start doubting everything—excluding, though, the very basis of sense—and follows him on this path, one easily becomes enchantingly immersed in his reasoning, and the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ truly enters the scene with

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the appearance of something extraordinarily true, indubitable, and illuminating. However, what is it that we buy into when we accept Descartes’ premise that we can and ought to place (almost) everything in doubt, and wherefrom has Descartes’ himself derived this notion, this intuition? While it will entail some repetition, I want to bring attention to how Descartes’ path to his methodological doubt plays out in terms of a three-­ step movement. As noted, in the opening of Meditation I Descartes proclaims that ‘It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had constructed on this basis’. Now, although Descartes will soon direct his sceptical attention to ‘the senses’, on its own, the opening sentence makes one—at least me—think first and foremost of all the knowledge which Descartes has inherited and learned from people close to him and from his culture and its institutions. This hunch is indeed verified in the Discourse on Method. For there we find Descartes recollecting how he had ‘been nourished on letters’ since his childhood, how, although he had studied in ‘one of the most celebrated Schools in Europe’ and had discussed with the most learned persons thinkable (and with the dead through their writings), experience nevertheless showed him that both he and his masters (both dead and alive) in fact frequently erred and, consequently, that ‘there was no learning in the world such as I was formerly lead to believe it to be’ (Descartes 1967b, 83–84). So, by the end of the first part of the Discourse, Descartes concludes that ‘I learned to believe nothing too certainly of which I had only been convinced by examples and custom’ (Ibid., 87). We of course already know that Descartes’ focus does not remain fixed on the body of knowledge of culture and society, but is rather directed towards ‘the senses’. The reason for this second step, Descartes informs us, is that what ‘up to the present time [he had] accepted as most true and certain [he has] learned either from the senses or through the senses’ (Descartes 1967a, 145). In other words, he turns to the senses because they seem to provide a paradigm of truth and certainty more rigid and secure than knowledge passed down or mediated through cultural institutions, customs, and other people. The rationale behind this is, I gather, quite straight forward: when we learn about, say, the nature of plants, animals, and humans in schools, books, or from people close to us, there

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exists a multitude of possibilities of error. It is as if error was produced in and through the mediation. When, on the other hand, we see a glass of water in front of us, the mediating factor between perception and reality seems to be absent; the perception itself seems to be knowledge of reality. Only that it of course is not. For as Descartes notes, continuing the just now quoted sentence, ‘it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive’ (Ibid., 145). Or, as he reasons shortly afterwards: ‘there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep’ (Ibid., 146). So even in the case of perception, or more generally, in the case of the senses, there is a mediating factor which carries the possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, of error. From the (un)certainty of the senses, Descartes then proceeds to arithmetic and geometry, suggesting that they have a degree of indubitableness and certainty beyond the senses, so great in fact that ‘it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity (or uncertainty)’ (Ibid., 147). As we know, however, even mathematical truths fail to reach the status of failsafe indubitableness and certainty because there is no guarantee that the clearness and distinctness of mathematical truths are not themselves deceptions, as they are fundamentally conditioned by a power greater than the self. Once more, then, a distance, a mediation, between the subject and reality or truth crops up; the sought-for immediacy between subject and reality-cum-truth fails once more, as (the content of ) reason is itself akin to a medium given to the subject. The hope invested in the first principle is, then, that it will abolish any dependency on a medium; that it is in no need of mediation, of interpretation. Or, as we might put it, the first principle thinks itself able to abolish the gap between the signifier and the signified, thus establishing a full self-transparency and self-sufficiency to the enunciation ‘I think…’. This is exactly why the question of linguistic knowledge as the pre-condition for the first principle makes the idea of such a principle quite unclear, even phantasmatic. In short, then, the successive steps towards the hyperbolic doubt of Descartes’ method and, thereby, the first principle of philosophy, move from a kind of cultural self-critique through the senses to a doubt about the very constitution of, or conditions for the truthfulness or rationality of reason itself, each time stumbling upon the same dissatisfaction, namely a distance and a mediation.

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While I suspect that there are and have been cultures or societies where individuals do/did not encounter any drastic clashes with culturally (linguistically and symbolically) mediated and inherited knowledge and beliefs, it seems quite hard to imagine a ‘modern’ individual who never had to re-evaluate his or her own inherited beliefs or norms. Put in (loosely) Foucauldian terms, there is a prevailing element of cultural self-­ scrutiny internal to the discourses of modernity which perceives the effects of culture, tradition, family, etc., upon the individual in a fundamentally critical and suspicious light. In other words, I suspect that any modern person will be able to relate to Descartes’ realisation that many of the things that he had inherited, as true, were in fact open to scrutiny and that there were more satisfactory—whatever that means in a specific context—ways of accounting for the world and its phenomena than what the prevailing normative structures offered.2 And is it not true that experience in fact does show us this, just as experience shows us that we are, as Descartes notes, sometimes deceived by our senses. In other words, it seems hard to deny that we do fall into error. But is this not true precisely only sometimes, and not always? For as Descartes himself notes, what triggered his suspicion, and motivated his search for infallible knowledge, was not that experience always showed him that traditions and the senses deceive. Rather, as he clearly states at the beginning of the Meditations, ‘it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive’ (Ibid., 145, emphasis added). Or, as he notes later on, he came to see, ‘from time to time’, that the senses were not to be trusted (Ibid., 189). But why does, how does, Descartes arrive from the ‘sometimes’ and ‘from time to time’ at the conclusion that one must entertain the, in fact, nonsensical/impossible idea of an evil genius? Let us consider the grammar of some paradigmatic examples of sensorial deceptions, like objects of ‘hardly perceptible’ size and objects far away (Ibid., 145). Or, say, the appearance that a straight stick half  And while it is unquestionable that Descartes’ philosophical temperament and his project itself in many ways have informed the nature of contemporary thought—and this is why we, as heirs of this culture (whomever this may concern), so naturally identify with his cultural self-scrutiny—it is, I gather, safe to say that this ‘modern’ tendency towards cultural self-scrutiny is something internal to the very birth of, at least western philosophy. After all, has not philosophy, at least already since the event of Socrates, in one way or another and at its core, taken issue with common, established, opinion, that is, with doxa. 2

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submerged in water is bent. Now in both cases, the illusions are, of course, parasitic on our conception of objects really being bent and small respectively, as well as objects really being straight and large/normal size (or near and far). Consequently, a stick half submerged in water looks as if it were bent because we know that it is, in fact, straight. Or, a large object far away looks as if it was smaller than it actually is because we know, or have the means to discern (exceptions obviously exist), the relation between actual size and distance. If this were not paradigmatically the case, we might just as well say that each time a straight stick is half submerged in water it really is, or becomes, bent—how could we judge otherwise! Or, that a large object far away really is as small as it seems—how could we judge otherwise! The point here being that in such cases we would lack the grammar of, the means of discerning something as, an illusion. The case of dreams is, of course, similar. Namely, we know what a dream (and its deceptiveness) is only in relation to wakefulness. If this were not the case, if we would lose the ability to discern between dream and wakefulness, we would also seem to lose the ability to think of something as a dream. In other words, each ‘everyday’ example of illusion and deception depends, grammatically, on its opposite; they are deceptions and illusions because we know what non-deception and wakefulness are. Consequently, the rationale of the ‘evil genius’, that is, the rationale of Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt, does not in fact seem to be, as such, derived from ordinary experiences of deception, despite his claim to the contrary. That is, the rationale of the evil genius lacks any precedence in our everyday experience. Instead, Descartes’ doubt and the demand he places on reality and certainty exceeds the rationale of his examples. Or; it is the excessive demand placed on reality and certainty which comes to invoke the suggestion that we lack ‘certain indications by which we might clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep’3 (Descartes 1967a, 146), and not the other way around, namely, that it is our lack of certainty which warrants the blurring of the difference between wakefulness and sleep.  In the Discourse Descartes writes: ‘And since all the same thoughts and conceptions which we have while awake may also come to us in sleep, without any of them being at that time true, I resolved to assume [the original French is feindre, i.e. pretend] that everything that ever entered into my mind was no more true than the illusions of my dreams’ (Descartes 1967b, 101). 3

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Let us move on to the case of mathematical truths. As we saw, endowed with a higher degree of indubitableness and certainty, these truths are nevertheless also put in doubt. In fact, as noted above, what is put in doubt is the very rationality or truth of reason itself—although Descartes omits the truth/sense of linguistic knowledge from this doubt. While, as I just argued, the common experience of the deceptiveness of the senses does not as such provide Descartes with any clear grounds for extending sceptical doubt to everything, there is, nonetheless, something like an experience of being deceived by the senses. But in the case of mathematical truths, their deceptiveness does not really have any precedence at all— as Descartes clearly acknowledges. For mathematical truths are indubitable and certain, Descartes observes, because they are as true in dreams as when awake. Ergo, Descartes has never experienced what it would be like to be deceived by 2 + 3 = 5, nor can he in fact even conceive of what it would be like. And yet, without any precedence, exceeding any precedence, we are nonetheless encouraged to extend our doubt even to these spheres. But wherefrom does the very sense, the very motivation to doubt arise from, if the deceptiveness of mathematical truths, that is, if the notion of an ‘evil genius’, is unprecedented? Must it not arise from the previous successive steps, namely from the actual experiences of deception in relation to the senses and culturally mediated/inherited knowledge, which provide the very grammar of deception vis-á-vis reality? As pointed out, however, it is not clear how these experiences of deception could, as such, ground the rationale of Descartes’ doubt of mathematical truths, as the very movement of the doubting from each successive step exceeds the rationale of those very steps. In other words, Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt seems to be grounded in nothing else than the excessive demand placed on reality and certainty. Of course, this is not to say that the excess of Descartes’ doubt-cum-demand is unrelated to everyday experiences of deceit. Perhaps we might want to say that everyday experiences have triggered or aroused the existential excess of his doubt-cum-­ demand. Or, perhaps even more so, that the excess is somehow internal to the very fabric of the everyday. We shall soon come back to this issue. First, however, let us pay attention to the other side of doubt, namely the lack of trust that it implies. So, if Descartes’ (methodological) doubt is excessive, so, it seems, is his (methodological?) loss of trust. Indeed,

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Descartes writes: ‘it is sometimes proved to me that the senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived’ (Ibid., 145, emphasis added). Again, it is not at all clear why or how ‘sometimes’ being deceived, which presupposes a paradigm of non-deception, leads to a method undergirded by the notion of systematic, possibly complete and unavoidable, deception; a method based on a systematic loss of trust. Rather, it is as if this ‘sometimes’, that is, specific everyday instances of deception, had managed to magically, without any direct reason, break what we might call, with a certain distorted salute to K. E. Løgstrup (1997), a ‘fundamental trust’ in the existence of the world and other people, as well as in the senses and the conditions of reason itself, leaving behind only a pervasive (methodological) untrustworthiness. Only that what I am proposing here is, in fact, the reverse. Namely, that Descartes’ suggestion that an all-pervasive loss of trust follows from particular everyday instances of deception, reveals his excessive notion of, excessive demand for, a fundamental, unbreakable trust: it is the demand for the unbreakable, failsafe trust which makes everything that the ‘everyday’ world has to offer in terms of trust seem insufficient. Moreover, the roots of this supposed loss of trust seem to be at the beginning of the successive steps of doubt qua demand, that is, in the, what we might call, everyday relationships Descartes’ has to other people and to his culture/inheritance, whereas the successive paradigms of certainty and indubitableness built up in the Meditations are a search for a restoration of, or, rather, an inauguration of fundamental and unbreakable trust(worthiness). It is, then, exactly in relation to notions of trust and trustworthiness that Descartes’ introduction of the ‘evil genius’ must be understood. For if the everyday occurrences of bent sticks in water and dreams constantly interact with the straight sticks on dry land and wakefulness, then the scene of the evil genius suggests, more than simply illusions, something akin to complete and comprehensive sorcery or trickery. At least in what we might dub structural terms, Descartes’ Meditations portrays the suspicion that his whole life has been spent at the mercy of a trickster, with no access to the real world—like the life of the prisoners in Plato’s notorious cave. And there is surely no contesting the fact that actually living in such a (phantasmatic) world would most certainly occasion the warranted

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experience of a loss of ‘fundamental trust’. To repeat, however, my suggestion is not that any actual betrayal of trust explains the excess of Descartes’ doubt qua demand. Rather, what I propose is exactly the opposite, namely that the sense of a loss of fundamental trust seems to be the outcome of, or the symptom of, the excess itself.

3.4 The Insanity of Excess Tamed by a Division of Labour Perhaps contrary to what I said at the beginning of the chapter, the preceding two sub-sections have already involved a great deal of rewriting, rather than just preliminary observations of some ambiguities in Descartes’ reasoning. Be that as it may, we shall now continue with this rewriting by reading the first principle of philosophy in light of the excessive nature of Descartes’ method. Now it might seem as if the characterisations of Descartes’ method as ‘excessive’ is simply an epithet conjured up by me. Strangely enough, though, Descartes himself uses the exact same word, and similar ones, on decisive occasions when discussing and characterising the rationale of his method. In the Discourse, for instance, he informs us that he has ‘always had an excessive [the original French word is extreme] desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false’ (Descartes 1967b, 87), and that it is indeed this excessive or extreme desire that underpins his search for the first principle of philosophy and his requirement that it constitute a failsafe indubitableness and certainty. How extreme, how excessive, is this desire? In Meditation I, in connection to considering what reasonably can be doubted, we find the following queer acknowledgement: For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by this fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, where it perhaps not that I compared myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really

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without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthen-ware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant. (Descartes 1967a, 145. Emphasis added)

The strange thing here is, of course, that simultaneously as Descartes acknowledges the kinship between his method—his excessive demand for truth/knowledge—and madness, he is decisively persuaded that he needs this madness-like extremity in order to pursue his (excessive) desire for indubitableness and certainty-cum-trust. But how, then, does Descartes think he can avoid being ‘any the less insane’; how can something sane be reached by insane means? Descartes’ proposed solution is a kind of division of labour. On the one hand, he informs us, he shall pursue his excessive search for the first principle of philosophy by way of excessive insane-like doubt while, on the other hand, in the course of everyday life, he shall not ‘lose the habit of deferring to [the anciently and commonly held opinions] or of placing [his] confidence in them’ (Ibid., 148). Or, to use one of the famous pictures or analogies from the Discourse, Descartes notes that ‘it is not sufficient, before commencing to rebuild the house which we inhabit, to pull it down and provide materials and an architect (or to act in this capacity ourselves, and make a careful drawing of its design), unless we have also provided ourselves with some other house where we can be comfortably lodged during the time of rebuilding’ (Descartes 1967b, 95). Continuing therefrom by noting that ‘in order that I should not remain irresolute in my actions while reason obliged me to be so in my judgments’ (Ibid.), Descartes then enumerates ‘three or four maxims’ for his everyday life of action, which will function as countermeasures to the extremity or excess of his philosophical meditations. Here are some central passages: The first [maxim] was to obey the laws and customs of my country, adhering constantly to the religion in which by God’s grace I had been instructed since my childhood, and in all other things directing my conduct by opinions the most moderate in nature, and the farthest removed from excess in all those which are commonly received and acted on by the most judicious of those with whom I might come in contact. For since I began to count

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my own opinions as nought, because I desired to place all under examination, I was convinced that I could not do better than follow those held by people on whose judgment reliance could be placed. […] And amongst many opinions all equally received, I chose only the most moderate, both because these are always most suited for putting into practice, and probably the best (for all excess has a tendency to be bad), and also because I should have in a less degree turned aside from the right path, supposing that I was wrong, than if, having chosen an extreme course, I found that I had chosen amiss. (Ibid., 95) My second maxim was that of being as firm and resolute in my actions as I could be, and not to follow less faithfully opinions the most dubious, when my mind was once made up regarding them, than if these had been beyond doubt. (Ibid. 96) My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely within our power but our own thoughts: so that after we have done our best in regard to the things that are without us, our ill-success cannot possibly be failure on our part. And this alone seemed to me sufficient to prevent my desiring anything in the future beyond what I could actually obtain, hence rendering me content. (Ibid., 96–97)4

So, in contrast to the metaphysical meditations, the practice of everyday life, the temporary lodging, is determined by moderation—we might even say that it is determined by an excessive or extreme degree of moderation, as it is, indeed, supposed to function as a contrast to the excess of the metaphysical meditations. Alternatively, we might say that the excessive moderation prescribed in the maxims bespeaks Descartes’ deeply engrained urge for total submission to the principles of the Other, a submission that provides the existential sense of complete safety and trust—a complete safety and trust which Descartes hopes to find at the end of his excessive ventures into the foundations of knowledge qua demand. In other words, in order to make his search for absolute and failsafe certainty  The fourth maxim basically defends the rationale of his burning desire for truth and his occupational choice of philosophy. In this sense it is not a maxim that counterbalances the extreme character of his method, but rather counterbalances the extreme moderation of the three previous maxims. This is, one gathers, why Descartes talks about ‘three or four maxims’.

4

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sane, that is, safe through the complete submission to the Other, Descartes establishes a division, an excessive division, of the self. A division between, on the one hand, an everyday self (of action) and, on the other hand, a metaphysical self (of contemplation), where the former upholds the duty and labour of sanity, while the latter takes on the burden—and enjoyment—of insanity. No wonder, then, that the metaphysical essence of the self or soul is, in the course of the Meditations, revealed to be exclusively rational thought: ‘to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason’ (Descartes 1967a, 152). In other words, it seems to me that the source of Descartes’ substance dualism lies exactly in this division of the self at the point of excess. What this division of the self in effect then does is to enable Descartes to extract or differentiate the insane excess of doubt qua demand from everyday life, grounding the everyday in the secure hands of moderation qua the Other, while injecting the excessive desire for truth into a purely epistemological sphere. He, as it were, transmutes the insanity-like excess into an epistemological method. Consequently, this division of the self provides Descartes and his meditations with the means to contain and thus to affirm the excessive insane-like character of his demand for failsafe certainty, something he could not do while the excess was immersed in the everyday without risking the disintegration of the self. Perhaps one might say that while suffering the insane-like excess in everyday life would have disintegrated Descartes’ own subjectivity, made him mad, this disintegration is now contained and mastered by imposing it, that is, by imposing—rather than suffering—a division on the self. What I want to bring attention to now is that if Descartes’ method is essentially informed by an excess, it seems to follow that the essence or sense of this excess is manifest or reaches its pinnacle in the first principle of philosophy, exactly because the first principle is meant to answer to or satisfy the doubt qua demand internal to the method. Again, not that the first principle in any neutral sense answers to a demand for certainty. For while Descartes could just as well have been content that he knows, with certainty, that illusions must correlate with some real/existing objects (or ideas), or that language exists, the fact that he is content only after ending with the proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ implies that it is in this

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proposition that we find the (non)sense of the excess. Moreover, as I have suggested, the excess of Descartes’ method seems to be concerned with, to be connected to, a sense of a loss of a (phantasmatic) fundamental trust. And what is lost, or not attained, because of this (phantasmatic) loss, is what is found, what is satisfied, in the first principle. So what is it that is satisfied in the first principle? While Descartes’ puts effort into demonstrating how the first principle, through the affirmation of the existence of God also implicitly affirms the existence of ‘the world’ (and thereby other living beings), the principle or proposition itself, ‘I think, therefore I am’, is, of course, first and foremost a (supposed) failsafe, guaranteed, affirmation of the self. As if, because the distance between thought and reality is reduced, thought necessarily cannot but affirm itself as existent. In other words, it seems that what underpins the supposed loss of a (phantasmatic) fundamental trust is a failure to infallibly secure the existence qua affirmation of the self; that the world and other people had failed to provide a sufficient, failsafe, affirmation of the self— and that one’s fundamental trust in the world hinged on such affirmation.

3.5 Affirmation Belongs to the Other Although essentially a self-affirmation—an affirmation of the self as thought by thought—the first principle of philosophy does not, however, indubitably and with certainty carry out the function of affirmation because Descartes—or any other individual soul—announces it or thinks it. True, in Descartes’ system the path to knowledge about essences, that is, clear and distinct understanding of ideas, always requires that ‘mind turns on itself, and considers some of the ideas which it possesses in itself ’ (Descartes 1967a, 186). But as already noted, it is not Descartes’ own individual soul that has originated these ideas and their essences. For the quintessential trait of Descartes’ meditations is that he is exactly not able to suspend existence or sense as such. If this were the case, then, per impossible, Descartes’ own individual/individuated soul would be the originator and source of all—including his self-affirmation. Consequently, instead of a ‘semantic privacy’ (Cottingham 2008, 115), Descartes’ (re) discovers, or acknowledges, in the clear and distinct understanding of the

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first principle, an objectively or ‘publicly accessible’ (Ibid., 117) idea given as part of the very nature of the soul. Consider, for instance, Descartes’ observations, in Meditation V, on the nature of a clear and distinct idea of geometrical forms: For example, when I imagine a triangle, although there may nowhere in the world be such a figure outside my thought, or ever have been, there is nevertheless in this figure a certain determinate nature, form, or essence, which is immutable and eternal, which I have not invented, and which in no wise depends on my mind, as appears from the fact that diverse properties of that triangle can be demonstrated, […] which now, whether I wish it or do not wish it, I recognize very clearly as pertaining to it, although I never thought of the matter at all when I imagined a triangle for the first time, and which therefore cannot be said to have been invented by me. (Descartes 1967a, 180, emphasis added)

Understanding the essence of a triangle ‘appears from the fact that diverse properties of that triangle can be demonstrated’. Yet, the understanding of these properties cannot depend on the image of a/any triangle. Instead, the understanding must be ‘naked’ (Ibid., 156), deprived of all appearances, as ‘withdrawn from all contact with matter’, as ‘purely intelligible’ (Ibid., 171); as ‘the object of pure mathematics’ (Ibid., 191).5 In other words, the essence of geometrical ideas ‘appear’ in and through their notational structure, or, alternatively, in and through their geometrical or notational grammar; and this grammar is laid out, articulated, in or as the demonstration of it. Perhaps we might even apply a remark from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation, ‘Essence is expressed by grammar’ (Wittgenstein 1953, § 371),6 to characterise Cartesian essences.

 Descartes argues for the separation of understanding essences and (the faculty of ) imagination by, for instance, using the case of two different geometrical forms. While we can understand, in purely mathematical or formal terms the meaning of a triangle just as well as that of a chiliagon, we can, however, only imagine the former and not the latter (Descartes 1967a, 186). Hence, our understanding, our clear and distinct ideas of geometrical forms, is categorically different from our being able to imagine them. Or, understanding is not dependent on the faculty of imagination. For more on the issue see Toivakainen (2020, 80–88). 6  See also remark 373: ‘Grammar tells what kind of an object anything is’ (Wittgenstein 1953, §373). 5

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The same logic applies generally to all and every instance of understanding essences, including the essence of the soul and the first principle. And as in the case of the grammar of a triangle, the grammar of any and all ideas is discovered as already there, as given, rather than created, ex nihilo, by the individual, by the ‘I think’. It is here that we once more meet the linguistic knowledge supporting the sense of the first principle, as noted above. So again, ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not indubitably true, the ‘I’ is not indubitably affirmed, because Descartes’, or even the metaphysical ‘I’ of the ‘I think’, thinks or says it. Rather, because ideas/propositions are supported by the Other of linguistic sense, it might be more appropriate to say that the essence of ideas, their grammar, speak for themselves; they speak in the place of Descartes, the individuated soul. To add, though, the source or origin of the grammar-cum-essence of ideas, the source that supports linguistic knowledge, is not simply the ideas themselves—whatever that might mean. Rather, the grammar of ideas is fundamentally affirmed by, or their grammar belongs to, the Other. For although the first principle of philosophy reveals to Descartes that the essence of mind is thought, it simultaneously contains the clear and distinct idea that the understanding of the origin or source—and the constant upholder—of the existence of thought/ideas is internal to the first principle of philosophy only as something beyond. Again, the first principle of philosophy only finds the mind as already existing, as already containing the ideas at its disposal. Needless to say, this beyond, this source and upholder of existence qua ideas, this (big) Other, is, for Descartes, God. As Descartes explains on two different occasions: I perceive this similitude [between the essence of the human mind and that of God] (in which the idea of God is contained) by means of the same faculty by which I perceive myself—that is to say, when I reflect on myself I not only know that I am something (imperfect), incomplete and dependent on another, which incessantly aspires after something which is better and greater than myself, but I also know that He on whom I depend possesses in Himself all the great things towards which I aspire (and the ideas of which I find within myself ), and that not indefinitely or potentially alone, but really, actually and infinitely; and that thus He is God. (Descartes 1967a, 170)

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And when I consider that I doubt, that is to say, that I am an incomplete and dependent being, the idea of a being that is complete and independent, that is of God, presents itself to my mind with so much distinctness and clearness—and from the fact alone that this idea is found in me, or that I who possess this idea exist, I conclude so certainly that God exists, and that my existence depends entirely on Him in every moment of my life—that I do not think that the human mind is capable of knowing anything with more evidence and certitude. (Ibid., 171–172)

Let us now link these observations back to our diagnosis of the sense of the first principle of philosophy, namely its self-affirmative nature. As with the case of the triangle, the sense of the idea or the first principle ‘appears’, that is, is understood, only through the way in which it is demonstrated. Simply saying ‘I think, therefore I am’, does not mean that one understands it clearly and distinctly as the first principle of philosophy. Alternatively, to understand the meaning of, the essence of, the idea of the first principle is to understand how one arrives at it. Consequently, we are back to the excess of the methodological doubt qua demand, by which the ‘I think, therefore I am’ is recognised as the first principle. Yet now we see more clearly that the source of the self-affirmation of the first principle belongs, ultimately, to the Other, to God. That is, it is the sense, which belongs to the Other of the idea, that affirms the ‘I’, and not the ‘I’ of ‘I think’. And if we previously said that the excessive essence of the first principle is a search for, a demand for, failsafe guarantee of affirmation of the self, we can now add that it is, in fact, a search for a failsafe affirmation or support from the Other. In other words, it is a search for the Other who cannot deceive us, who cannot fail to affirm us, our existence. As Descartes argues, the clear and distinct idea of God shows us that given God’s perfection, He ‘is liable to no errors or defects’ and ‘[f ]rom this it is manifest that He cannot be a deceiver, since the light of nature teaches us that fraud and deception necessarily proceed from some defect’ (Descartes 1967a, 171). Consequently, the end result of the Meditations is that, when God’s existence is established (Meditations III), any clearly and distinctly understood idea, not only the first principle, is, in fact, failsafe. The world is restored with a fundamental trustworthiness.

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It is of course important to see how the first principle of philosophy is directly connected to the complete submission to the principles of the Other inscribe in the three maxims, which constituted the temporary lodging. For, on the one hand, we might say that the failsafe affirmation of the self by the Other in the first principle provides a fundamental trust, which Descartes can then return to the world with, replacing the principles of the Other of the three maxims with an even more definitive and immovable (submission to the) Other. On the other hand, it might be even more true to say that it is in fact the (desire for the) total submission to the principles of the Other inscribed in the three maxims that contains the blueprint for what the first principle of philosophy is to achieve and establish. Be this as it may, the division of labour sustaining the search for the first principle of philosophy is truly a cooperation, as both sides of the division seem to ultimately work towards the same aim; seem ultimately to both be informed by the same (displaced) desire.

3.6 From a Traumatic Scene to Paranoiac Knowledge Descartes might very well, in the safe detachment of ‘pure’ epistemology, bracket the sense or existence of the world with a cool calmness—as long as he has placed his trust in the world in the excessive submission internal to his three maxims. The implicit moral-existential ramifications of the detachment are, however, all but cool and calm. For while the detached focus lies on the untrustworthiness of the senses, as well as on the conditions of thought itself, there is a whole life, an affect-laden, moral-­ existential life, embedded in those senses, in those thoughts, equally placed under suspicion and suspended. Now, if the senses have failed to produce trustworthy knowledge, and if the very conditions of thought share the same potential untrustworthiness, that is, if they both have failed to sufficiently affirm Descartes’ existence, then this concurrently means, at least implicitly or structurally, that the touch or address of other people have, ‘from [his] earliest youth’, also failed to do so. Suspending the sense of the world as such means, in other words, that the

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interpersonal relationships one has had from earliest youth are just as unreliable, just as much up for grabs, as any old sensory input. Why has the other’s, the ‘small other’s’, touch failed to sufficiently affirm Descartes’ existence, and how can he say that one ought not to trust that which once has deceived? What say does the other have in all of this? How can Descartes so irresponsibly leave the other out of the matter? How can he reduce the other, and his relationship to the other, to mere sensorial impressions? We might, of course, directly reply here that the question is not so much that the other has failed to affirm Descartes’ existence, just as Descartes continuously keeps on acknowledging that sense impressions ‘sometimes’ fail us, or ‘may also’ fail us; that they have not always done so. Rather, it is just that the affirmation provided by the senses, by the other’s touch, cannot satisfy the excessive demand Descartes places on certainty qua affirmation. There is, in fact, Descartes seems to be saying, nothing the other could every do or have done to satisfy it. No matter how honestly, how affectionately, no matter with how much devotion and love the other addresses or touches someone, it can and ought to be placed in question—until the first principle, that is, the failsafe affirmation of the self through the Other, has been settled. In contrast to the failsafe, ‘once for all’ knowledge qua affirmation of the first principle of philosophy, the affirmation and knowledge we acquire in and through our relationship with other people is, then, apparently always and necessarily vulnerable, inexact, undecided, open-ended and thus always potentially deceptive, because of the very distance or in-betweenness of the self and the other—which is, apropos of our second rewriting of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Sect. 2.3), simultaneously the very condition for individuality/alterity and relationality. Conversely, in order to eliminate such potentials, such open-endedness, the first principle must be reached through a method that suspends the relevance, the moral-­ existential relevance or sense, of other people. Alternatively, the first principle has the character of ‘once for all’ only because the affirmation it provides is completely detached from any and all actual other persons, at the same time as it, nevertheless, demands total submission to the it that speaks, that is, to the grammar of the idea of the Other, reminiscent,

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perhaps, of the (phantasmatic/nostalgic) unquestionable and complete reliance or trust between infant and parent. Seen from this other side of the cool calmness of detached or pure epistemology, the scene Descartes draws up for us in the Meditations is nothing short of traumatic—which is arguably why Descartes must impose, rather than suffer, a division of the self in order to contain and master this trauma. If we might call the scene of the Meditations traumatic, that is, if we say that the scene of the Mediations contains an unfilled void of meaning qua affirmation, then we might call its excessive demand for knowledge qua affirmation paranoiac. For the thing with trauma is that the unanswered demand, the void of meaning it is structured around, never stops reintroducing, reinventing, itself. So when trauma is shifted to, or takes the form of epistemology, it risks becoming paranoiac and split, as it decisively is, between an all-pervasive suspicion and a ‘once for all’, unchanging, immoveable, certainty. To borrow from Lacanian psychoanalytic vocabulary, the hysteric subject of paranoiac knowledge postulates, presupposes, demands, ‘the subject supposed to know’—supposed to know qua affirm everything with failsafe certainty (cf. Mills 2019). Consequently, if the void of meaning of trauma involves obsessive or compulsory, even though unconscious, repetitive reiterations of the traumatic scene, then paranoiac knowledge, in turn, involves an endless repetitive reiteration of the excessive demand for verification of all instances of any given (signifying) chain of knowledge qua affirmation. That is, once the relationship to the world and other people enters or is transposed to a scene of trauma-cum-­ paranoia, once deception and misinterpretations cannot be healed through an engagement with those instances of deception and misinterpretations from which they stem, once any and all instances of human interaction are identified with the traumatic possibility of deception, any and all ‘worldly’ forms of knowledge and affirmation start to demand endless repetitive reiterations of verification—postulating the ‘subject supposed to know’. The hope invested in the first principle of philosophy, the fundamental trust it is supposed to re-establish or inaugurate—depending on the perspective one takes—is of course meant to cut off this obsessive-­compulsory repetitive pattern. In fact, the promise of the Meditations is nothing short

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of magnificent, as its claim is that it only takes one meditation (in six parts) to completely disperse with the trauma of a lack of fundamental trust and, thanks to the methodological division of the self with its three/ four maxims, without ever letting the Meditations’ obsessive-compulsory paranoia take hold of our everyday life. As is to be expected, however, the overcoming is not quite complete, and we can still find traces of the repetitive compulsion of trauma engraved in the first principle itself. Note, for instance, Descartes’ formulation in the following passage: ‘I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist’ (Descartes 1967a, 151–152). To Descartes’ satisfaction, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ settles with failsafe certainty the existence qua affirmation of the self. Yet, it settles it only on grounds that thoughts— the thoughts supported by the Other—do not stop being thought. Existence must, is doomed to, continuously, endlessly, be thought. Perhaps even, the first principle must become, is doomed to become, something of a mantra, something one can repeat in order to reiterate self-affirmation, which might well be forgotten or clouded in the course of everyday life. On the other hand, again, although the truth qua affirmation of the first principle belongs to the Other, and although it hinges on the reiteration of thought, the passage to self-affirmation is inherently controlled or mastered by, contained within, the self, as its thinking is, supposedly, independent of other people. In this sense, the first principle has a seemingly definite, although relative, character of self-sufficiency and control beyond the confines of other people—as long as the first principle’s ambiguous relation to linguistic knowledge is overlooked, repressed.

3.7 The Root of Error and Sin: From Body to the Will If I have said that Descartes irresponsibly excludes other people in and from his pursuit of failsafe self-affirmation, this does not mean that he blames others for any lack or deception. After all, other people cannot be

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blamed for their structural or inherent insufficiency, just as the senses cannot be so blamed. One might add: other people, and the senses, are not to be blamed for, are not to be held responsible for, Descartes’ excessive doubt qua demand. The thing to be kept in mind here is that the question of, or the quest for, indubitable and certain knowledge qua affirmation is essentially linked to not only the experience of being deceived by culturally mediated knowledge and the senses but also the question of why humans fall into error and sin at all. ‘Wherefrom does error and sin originate?’ becomes one of the main questions Descartes occupies himself with. And if it was noted earlier that error in some way seemed to be linked to the distance, to the mediation between thought and reality, we shall now see that the actual source lies elsewhere. For while, say, the senses, as a medium, might give false impression about some state of affairs, error and sin, Descartes plainly states, is always informed by a judgement of some kind. And judgements are, by their very nature, never necessitated by anything in the sense impressions or in the states of affairs as such. Rather, judgements are always acts of the will. We will have to take a closer look at this. Let us begin, however, with Descartes’ formal identification of error and sin as deficiencies, or more strongly put, as privation. Following here an Augustinian Neoplatonist cosmology (cf. Menn 2002), Descartes argues that since God is perfect and has no deficiencies, and since He is the source and upholder of all existent things, deficiencies, that is, error and sin, cannot in a positive sense be existent; they cannot come from God. Hence, the following statement: ‘As to the privation in which alone the formal reason of error or sin consists, it has no need of any concurrence from God, since it is not a thing (or an existence), and since it is not related to God as to a cause, but should be termed merely a negation (according to the significance given to these words in the Schools)’ (Descartes 1967a, 177). The nut to crack here is of course the question of theodicy: if error and sin do not come from something existent, if it is but a defect of being, what then occasions or causes it, since this privation can be witnessed all around us? Once more, Descartes’ answer to this question contains some ambiguity. For although Descartes makes it quite clear that error and sin are

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judgements, that is, acts of the will, he also, and in line with Augustine, develops an intrinsic connection between the privation of error and sin and the body. So for instance, in his Passions of the Soul we find the following statement: it is the functions ‘of the body, to which alone we must attribute every thing which can be observed in us that is opposed to our reason’ (Descartes 1967d, 353). Or, as is suggested in Principles of Philosophy, the ‘principal cause of error is found in the prejudices of childhood’ when the mind, in its infancy, is so tightly connected with the body that ‘it applied itself to nothing but those thoughts alone by which it was aware of the things which affected the body’ (Descartes 1967c, 248). What, then, is the rationale behind these statements? To begin with, if error and sin are defective judgements, then the notion that the body is somehow the, so to speak, matter of error and sin means that the more a judgement is tied to or informed by the senses, by the movements of the body,7 the less it has any relation to existence (cf. Menn 2002, 245–261). But why would this be? The reason lies in the metaphysical identification or definition of the essence of the body, as contrasted with the soul. For although Descartes declares the essence of body to be extension (Descartes 1967a, 154–155), this essence is not something that the body has, neither in-itself nor for-itself, to use Hegelian terminology (Hegel 1997). Rather, as with all essences, the essence of body is an idea internal to mind itself: the understanding finds the essence of body by turning on itself, not by turning towards bodies, which is what the

 Essentially, the embodied mind in Descartes’ system is in contact with the body through the movements of ‘the animal spirits’. Descartes explains that what he means by the concept of animal spirits is ‘nothing but material bodies and their one peculiarity is that they are bodies of extreme minuteness and that they move very quickly like the particles of the flame which issues from a torch. Thus it is that they never remain at rest in any spot, and just as some of them enter into the cavities of the brain, others issue forth by the pores which are in its substance, which pores conduct them into the nerves, and from there into the muscles, by means of which they move the body in all the different ways in which it can be moved’ (Descartes 1967d, 336). One might thus characterise the animal spirits as that force which gives the body its dispositional characteristics. 7

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faculty of imagination does.8 So, the essence of body is not an idea by virtue of the body itself. Rather, it is what it is only by virtue of what it is for its other, namely mind or soul. Consequently, what the essence of body absolutely lacks is a self, a soul, a mind; in the idea of the essence of body, the essence of mind finds its absolute non-self. Both in-itself and for-itself—in fact nonsensical or contradictory epithets for the body— the essence of body is devoid of form, of meaning, of existence; it is absolute, infinite, potential of variations of forms for the mind (Toivakainen 2020, 81–84). Consequently, the empirical, embodied human being is then ‘something intermediate between God and nought’, something ‘between the supreme Being and non-being’ (Descartes 1967a, 172). The human being has, in other words, a ‘similitude’ with God or is created in the image of God (Ibid., 172); it has an essential part in Being (mind/soul) and a part in something essentially arbitrary (body). Because of this mixture of essential being and complete arbitrariness, any ideas or thoughts that concern or are tied to, or emerge from, the ‘substantial union’ between mind and body (cf. Alanen 2003, 44–77; Broughton and  In order to fully grasp the sense of this passage, we first need to clarify the distinction Descartes draws between understanding essences, on the one hand, and the faculty of imagination on the other. In Meditation II, after having secured with indubitable security that the ‘I’ or/as thought exists, Descartes begins to contemplate the nature or essence of body: what about the body is it that he has a clear and distinct idea of? Descartes then famously turns his attention to a piece of wax in front of him. He begins by describing its different qualities, which are known to him through ‘the senses’, only to quickly acknowledge that ‘while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted’ (Descartes 1967a, 154). He then continues by asking ‘Does the same wax remain after these changes?’, concluding, somewhat unclearly, that ‘none would judge otherwise’ (Ibid., 154). So, regardless of all the changes and variations the body of wax might go through, Descartes claims that one nevertheless has a distinct conception of one and the same piece of wax. Ergo, whatever this distinct conception is, it cannot be due to the ‘sense impressions’, but must rather have its locus in something else. Consequently, Descartes goes on asking himself what it is that he conceives of when he forms his conception of body as deprived of any sense impressions. ‘Certainly nothing remains excepting a certain extended thing which is flexible and movable’ (Ibid., 154). However, whatever is extended and movable and flexible ‘admits of an infinitude of [...] changes’ (Ibid., 155), and as one cannot comprehend all the infinite potential variations, Descartes concludes that ‘this conception which I have of the wax is not brought about by the faculty of imagination’ (Ibid., 155). Interestingly, the same goes for ‘extension’ itself, as the imagining, that is, the forming of an image (effingo) of extension also allows for an infinitude of variations of forms (Ibid., 155). And so, because the human mind is finite and cannot conceive of all the infinite variations, yet nonetheless has a clear and distinct idea of extension, understanding the essence of body as extension is independent of the images/representations one forms of the idea. 8

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Mattern 1978) inevitably remain ‘confused mode[s] of thought’ (Descartes 1967a, 192), that is, cannot be understood with the clearness and distinctness of purely intellectual thought. Instead, these modes of thought, this sphere of human life, is to be the object of ‘practical philosophy’, guided and disciplined by the foundations of clear and distinct ideas, and ultimately by the first principle (cf. Descartes 1967b; Toivakainen 2020, 68–73). Yet, as said, there seems to be some ambiguity here between, on the one hand, the body as some kind of locus of error and sin and, on the other hand, the will as the cause of false judgements. In the picture of the body as the locus of error and sin, it is as if, once more, a distance and a medium played the role of a cause. At the same time, Descartes is quite explicit in denying any such possibility. For although he informs us that there exists a natural or inherent strife between mind and body, between reason-cum-will and appetites/passions (Descartes 1967d), he at the same time decisively argues that since the mind-body union is willed by God, and since God has blessed us with a free will, we cannot find any ultimate reason or cause for the actual event of error and sin in the body or in the mind-body strife. In short, God does not will or cause, through the order of Nature, error and sin. Rather, error and sin are, as noted, false judgements about states of affairs, and nothing about the states of affairs necessitates or by themselves cause false judgements, for then they would, per impossible, stem from God. So the only source left is the free, the radically free, will of man. Just have a look at the following two passages: From all this I recognise that the power of will which I have received from God is not of itself the source of my errors—for it is very ample and very perfect of its kind—any more than is the power of understanding; for since I understand nothing but by the power which God has given me for understanding, there is no doubt that all that I understand, I understand as I ought, and it is not possible that I err in this. Whence then come my errors? They come from the sole fact that since the will is much wider in its range and compass than the understanding, I do not restrain it with the same bounds, but extend it also to things which I do not understand: and as the will is of itself indifferent to these, it easily falls into error and sin,

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and chooses the evil for the good, or the false for the true. (Descartes 1967a, 175–176) But if I abstain from giving my judgement on any thing when I do not perceive it with sufficient clearness and distinctness, it is plain that I act rightly and am not deceived. But if I determine to deny or affirm, I no longer make use as I should of my free will, and if I affirm what is not true, it is evident that I deceive myself; even though I judge according to truth, this comes about only by chance, and I do not escape the blame of misusing my freedom; for the light of nature teaches us that the knowledge of the understanding should always precede the determination of the will. And it is in the misuse of the free will that the privation which constitutes the characteristic nature of error is met with. Privation, I say, is found in the act, in so far as it proceeds from me, but it is not found in the faculty which I have received from God, nor even in the act in so far as it depends on Him. (Ibid., 176–177)9

The ambiguity in relation to the discourse on the body as the source of error and sin is, then, that neither of the quoted passages need to make any essential reference to the body, which is of course consistent with Descartes’ method: every essential aspect of the mind is metaphysically independent of the body. Rather, in the first of these passages, Descartes simply draws a distinction between the understanding and the will, ascribing to the latter a wider range than to the former. That is, he articulates the very conditions for the possibility of error and sin simply by reference to the formal fact that we are free and able to make judgements that transgress the limits of our (finite) clear and distinct understanding. No essential reference to the body, to the animal spirits, or to the passions needed. The only reference needed is simply that the human mind cannot escape judgements. Equally, this distinction between the scope of the will  Descartes continues: ‘I have further no reason to complain that He has given me a will more ample than my understanding, for since the will consists only of one single element, and is so to speak indivisible, it appears that its nature is such that nothing can be abstracted from it [without destroying it]; and certainly the more comprehensive it is found to be, the more reason I have to render gratitude to the giver. And, finally, I must also not complain that God concurs with me in forming the acts of the will, that is the judgement in which I go astray, because these acts are entirely true and good, inasmuch as they depend on God; and in a certain sense more perfection accrues to my nature from the fact that I can form them, than if I could not do so’ (Descartes 1967a, 177). 9

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and the scope of the understanding constitutes the very condition for the existence of a ‘free will’, that is, the condition for an individuation of the will and of the soul—again no reference to the body needed. Or, again, the only essential reference needed is that the human mind is doomed to making judgements. This shows us, in turn, and without any essential reference to the essence of body, that the essence of finite being consists not simply of the finite, but of an intermediate point between a limit and limitlessness. So to say that we are not necessitated by the faculty of understanding, to say that our will is not limited to our understanding, is to say that any knowledge of the understanding must be ours; must be claimed or willed by us. Knowledge, judgement, is our responsibility. So as the second passage makes clear, the sole source of error and sin, of false judgements, consists in nothing but the act of the (mis)use of this free will. That is, knowledge derived from the understanding is claimed, error and sin avoided, a defect made inexistent, by actively resisting the boundlessness of the will, by actively keeping it within the bounds of the understanding. In short, by acting as if we were inseparably bound by Law, acting as if we were not free. Again, it is hard to see in what way exactly the body has anything to do with ‘causing’ error and sin; the conditions for error and sin can be identified sufficiently in the discourse of the will-understanding relation. For while we might surely say, as Descartes does, that the body, that the movements of the animal spirits, attempt to effect, or produce effects that are sometimes (although not necessarily) against or opposite to the will and reason (Descartes 1967d, 353), these effects cannot, however, reach the threshold of a cause since they do not necessitate any judgement, any act of the will. It is only the act of the free will which can take the position of a cause here, because it is the only thing which can act against, or transgress, the structure, the Law of Nature/Creation—the Will of God. For as Descartes explains in the first quoted passage above, the understanding is fully in tune with the Will of God and Law of Nature. Strangely enough, then, transgression, that is, the misuse of the free will, seems to be the most intimate ownness of human existence; it is the one thing that does not belong to or does not find support in or from the order or Law of creation, since it surely belongs to the Will of God that human’s freely will to keep within the bounds of the understanding. Similarly, it is not

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at all clear why one should, or how one could say, as Descartes does in the Passions, that it is the body ‘to which alone we must attribute every thing which can be observed in us that is opposed to our reason’. Not to deny that passions sometimes can be opposed to reason. Only that the quintessential thing opposing reason, at least if we follow Descartes, is the ‘misuse of the free will’. And is not this ‘misuse of the free will’, more than anything else, exactly very intimately ‘in us’, since it cannot be anywhere else? So, are we not obliged to say that the decisive, the constitutive, battlefield of the human soul lies not in the strife between mind and body, but rather in the strife internal to mind or soul itself; a strife centred on the distance between the self-cum-will and truth; a battle of a self alienated by or through itself from (its) truth as self. Recall our first rewriting of the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Sect. 2.2).

3.8 The Double Negativity of the Self It is not hard to see that what Descartes is describing as the cause of error and sin is tantamount to St. Augustine’s reading of Original sin. For according to Augustine, nothing can be found in the conditions of the finite human being, or in the creation as a whole, or even in the powers of the devil, which could have caused man’s falling away from the will of God. The sole cause is found, rather, in the transgressive (free) will of humans to ‘live for themselves’ (Augustine 1952, XIV:12, 388). As Stephen Menn observes, Descartes ‘adopts Augustine’s view of the results [of Original sin], and uses it to describe the disease he is intending to cure’ (Menn 2002, 318). And one should add: Descartes also adopts Augustine’s formal view of the cause of the fall, as this characterises the consequences that are to be cured. What I want to draw attention to now is a somewhat formal feature of this movement from error and sin to truth, namely the interplay between transgression and discipline and how they characterise the very nature of the Cartesian subject as bound to a certain double negativity. Although this theme actually runs through the whole of Western philosophy-cum-theology—in the question of theodicy—and reached a certain pinnacle in Hegel, I shall more or less restrict myself to Descartes’ thoughts.

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We begin by noting how the conditions for (autonomous) subjectivity, that is, the conditions for a finite, individuated (free) will, presupposes the possibility of transgression beyond necessity, beyond the Will of God and Law of Nature. Or, in Descartes’ terms, (autonomous) subjectivity presupposes that the will extends beyond the bounds of the understanding. As noted above, transgression seems in fact to be the most intimate ownness the individuated soul has, since nothing or no one else can will, can cause, it. In contrast, however, to Hegel’s suggestion that the free will and knowledge of truth in fact emerge only through the act of transgression (Hegel 2007), Descartes does not attempt to account for the (dialectic) relation between pre- and post-fall existence. That is, Descartes does not consider whether or not the will, to be free, must always-already have, so to speak, moved in the realm of transgression. He does not, in other words, ask the following types of questions: Could the will be free without a knowledge of, without a recognition of, transgression as transgression, and could such a knowledge, such recognition, be possible, apropos of Hegel, without having actually transgressed in the realm of judgement/ action, that is, without already having fallen? Instead, Descartes’ point of departure is simply in the fallen state, where ‘experience shows’ us that we are ‘subject to an infinitude of errors’ (Descartes 1967a, 172) and constant transgressors of the Law (of the understanding). In this fallen state, then, the human soul is alienated from truth;10 it lives in a state of (self-)delusion. Consequently, in Descartes’ system, to live in accordance with truth, to be freed from illusion, is to discipline the will-cum-judgement so as to keep it within the bounds of the understanding. Alternatively, to live in accordance with truth is to act, to will, to judge, as if one was not free; to will (should one say ‘choose’?) un-­ freedom, to will (choose?) to obey the Law, is to live in accordance with truth. Or, apropos of something we discussed earlier, to live in truth demands that it is not we who speak with our unbound wills, but rather that the clear and distinct ideas of the Other, their grammar, speaks in our place. So, if the epithet ‘authentic subjectivity’ can be applied here— meaning of course a subject living in accordance with the understanding  Hegel would say, it is only now that the soul stands in relation to truth: to know the truth/Law necessitates evil, that is, separation, estrangement (Hegel 2007). 10

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and the will of God—then this authenticity is characterised by a kind of double negativity. On the one hand, the fallen and transgressive individual is, in his/her very nature as fallen, inherently characterised by privation, by a lack. On the other hand, again, to reconnect with God’s Will-cum-Law, the subject must negate, or devour, or restrict, any positive affirmation of the unbound-cum-transgressive nature of the free will. That is, if transgression is the most intimate ownness of the free will/soul, then this ownness is transfigured, our freedom is correctly used, only by making the freeness of our freedom a determinate negativity. Truth and understanding only have room for a negative affirmation of the free will; truth demands a negation of the free use of the free will. In Hegelian terms, then, the determinate negativity of the freedom of will does not amount to the same as a will necessitated by Law. Rather, the unity of the individuated soul with the will of God is essentially bound to the determinate negativity of freedom. So, in the ethics of Descartes’ metaphysics, the positive agency of the subject is centrally determined in the negative: the negative of privation must be negated. Such a double negation is, of course, not unique to Descartes. What is characteristic, though, is that for Descartes the negation of privation does not express a logic of reconciliation. In contrast, Augustine for instance holds that while the fallen nature of the secular world does not provide any means for an ultimate healing of the soul of man, not even the full discipline of the passions-cum-body, the afterworld however does so, reconciling and reinstating a perfect unity between mind and body, and between the will of man and that of God (Augustine 1952, 391). Or as Hegel suggests, the negation of the negation heals the wound of self-­ alienation not, pace Augustine, by returning to a pre-existing unity, but rather by retroactively positing the negation of the negation as the very origin to which it returns (Hegel 2007).11 As said, for Descartes, however, the strife between mind and body, or reason and the passions, persists as 11  Slavoj Žižek (2019) has the following to add: ‘Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound was cut. It is in this precise sense that, according to Hegel, “the wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.” Hegel’s point is not that Spirit heals its wounds so perfectly that, in a magic gesture of retroactive sublation, even their scars disappear. The point is rather that, in the course of dialectical process, a shift of perspective occurs which makes the wound itself appear as its opposite—the wound itself is its own healing when perceived from another standpoint.’

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a part of creation, without any notion of true reconciliation. So the ‘healthy’ state of the human soul is defined simply as a conquering of the passions-cum-body in favour of reason: ‘even those who have the feeblest souls can acquire a very absolute dominion over all their passions if sufficient industry is applied in training and guiding them’ (Descartes 1967d, 356). No wound is healed or done away with. Rather, Descartes philosophy, like that of Bacon (1999; cf. Toivakainen 2020, 52–73), points towards the end of ‘render[ing] ourselves the masters and possessors of nature’, as he says in the Method (Descartes 1967b, 119). Simply, mind over matter—not mind with matter. While I will have more to say about the issue shortly, I would like to announce the tentative suggestion that this negative character of agency is directly and essentially informed by the fact that the principal, excessive, demand of the Cartesian subject is for failsafe affirmation; this is what structures the logic of the subject’s negativity. For the very premise of affirmation, its very Urszene, is that the Other has something which the ‘I’ lacks: affirmation belongs to the Other—and the self is fully subject to the power of the Other. Hence, it is this lack of affirmation that must be negated, and the only thing that can fill this lack, in terms of an excessive demand, is a failsafe guarantee. Again, this lacking subject is not the one to speak. Rather, it is the grammar of ideas, the desire/authority of the Other, which must speak in the place of the ‘I’, thus providing the sought-for failsafe guarantee of affirmation. In other words, Descartes’ first principle functions on the pretence of founding knowledge on a ground independent of judgement through total submission to the Other.

3.9 The First Principle of Philosophy as Original Sin If, then, the sole source or cause of error and sin lies in the misuse of the free will, that is, in Original sin, and if this endows the soul with an essentially (double) negative agency, what exactly is the nature of this misuse? What kind of a phenomenon, what kind of an experience, is it supposed to capture, if it indeed must be found in our very (mis)usage of the will?

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Although Descartes does not really manage to thematise this question in the Meditations, in the Principles he comes with this brief, yet revealing remark: But inasmuch as we know that all our errors depend on our will, and as no one desires to deceive himself we may wonder that we err at all. We must, however, observe that there is a great deal of difference between willing to be deceived and willing to give one’s assent to opinions in which error is sometimes found. For although there is no one who expressly desires to err, there is hardly one who is not willing to give his assent to things in which unsuspected error is to be found. And it even frequently happens that it is the very desire for knowing the truth which causes those who are not fully aware of the order in which it should be sought for, to give judgement on things of which they have no real knowledge and thereby fall into error. (Descartes 1967c, 235–236)

Before we take issue with the essential aspect of this passage, namely the relation, or discrepancy, between truth and the desire for truth, let me make a few brief remarks on two other aspects. Descartes is surely right in saying that ‘there is no one who expressly desires to err’, if by this he simply means that one cannot really make errors intentionally, for then one would be conscious of them as errors. That is, one can of course intentionally affirm an error. Yet such an affirmation is parasitic upon the knowledge of something as an error, which means that one knows it to be an error and has not thereby really erred but rather just, so to speak, ‘played the game’ of error. So far so good. The problem is, however, that Descartes thereby seems to attempt to dismiss the possibility of (systematic) self-deception—which is, perhaps, an exemplary occurrence of self-­ deception. Consequently, one wonders how exactly Descartes wanted us to understand his claim that all human error—and sin—is fundamentally informed by an unfortunate mistake generated by a desire to assent to such things in which only unsuspected error—and sin—is to be found? For instance, is it simply the case that a person makes an ‘unsuspected error’ when she/he murders or enslaves another person, or that it is simply a case of unsuspected error that underpins the lack of considerations for, say, social- and environmental justice in our current political

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economy? Or, is it simply an unsuspected error that underlies the theories and practices of eugenics? And what should we think of the science of the atom bomb—which means thinking about the whole institution of modern technoscience? Is the atom bomb rational or irrational; does it stem from sound reasoning or does it involve misfired, excessive, judgement, and would such a judgement be the result of innocent mistakes? Without letting Descartes off the hook here, let us move on to our main question, which is, of course, not unrelated to those just raised. So, irrespective of how we should think about the idea of false judgements as bound to unsuspected errors, what Descartes is in effect saying in the quoted passage is that the misuse of the will is essentially tied to our desire, or excessive desire, for truth. This is of course explicitly mentioned in the last sentence, but holds just as much for the whole passage. Namely, in minimal terms, the willingness ‘to give assent to things in which unsuspected error is to be found’ implies that it is exactly our willingness to affirm truth that, in an ‘unsuspected’ manner, indeed separates us from truth. In other words, what Descartes seems to be admitting to here, although not consciously I think, is that there is as such, or inherently, an excess inscribed in our desire for truth, which, when not aligned, through the ‘negation of the negation’, with the understanding-cum-law, realises its transgressive nature and makes false judgements in the spirit of Original sin. This suggests then, in turn, a sharp distinction between the desire for truth, on the one hand, and something we might call disciplined pursuit of knowledge, on the other—is this latter one then to be called a desire for disciplined knowledge? For whereas the disciplined use of reason, that is, knowledge produced by the correct method, is what regulates the inherently transgressive bounds of the will, the desire for truth must, apparently, be understood simply as a desire to affirm truth, to possess truth. This division between disciplined, contained, knowledge, and the excessive desire for truth is what the last part of the quoted passage brings to light: ‘the very desire for knowing the truth which causes those who are not fully aware of the order in which it should be sought for, to give judgement on things of which they have no real knowledge’. Now while there might be good reasons for drawing a conceptual distinction between the desire for truth and its excess, on the one hand, and

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methodologically produced knowledge on the other, it is not clear if this distinction is applicable to Descartes’ Meditations and his first principle of philosophy. Sure, at the outset, we have what Descartes himself in the Discourse calls his ‘excessive desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false’, coupled with his stringent method by which such knowledge is to be acquired. So desire for truth, on the one hand, and disciplined methodology, on the other. However, as I have tried to illustrate, the very thing which organises the principles of the method is itself excessive, is itself excess par excellence; is itself based on an excessive desire to be affirmed by truth qua the Other. And it is precisely in the first principle that this excess reaches its pinnacle, that is, its ultimate—yet phantasmatic— satisfaction. Consequently, does this not lead us to the suspicion that the first principle of philosophy in fact coincides with, or is in fact the very essence of, Original sin? Seen in such a light, the paradoxical strategy of Descartes’ Meditations seems to be that through a division of labour/self, the madness-like excess—original sin—of the method is employed in order to reach a foundation that penetrates or overcomes even the madness-like excess—original sin—by way of itself. Yet, this strategy seems never to be able to transcend or break with its own excess, with its transgression. Rather, the first principle is simply led to affirm itself as excess. As one might put it, the first principle simply reduces the excess to its pure form, namely to the excessive desire for guaranteed, infallible, affirmation of the self; to a total submission to the order, the law, of the Other.

3.10 Coda The Cartesian subject inherently lacks what the Other supposedly possesses. What it lacks is the guaranteed affirmation of the ‘I’ which the first principle establishes at the cost of complete subjection to the law and order of the Other. However, at the same time Descartes’ system seems to tell us that that which restores truth is exactly that which causes it to be displaced. In other words, the very obedience to the law and order of the Other is unconsciously written as that which in fact fails this law. But why is the fulfilment of the desire for the first principle, the desire for guaranteed affirmation of the self, unconsciously written as Original sin,

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that is, as the very cause of sin and error? What is it about the demand for guaranteed affirmation of the self that makes it essentially excessive? Why does it work against that which it claims to desire? The following two chapters-cum-essays are attempts, not perhaps to answer these questions so much as open up a landscape in which they gain a new life.

References Alanen, L. 2003. Descartes’s Concept of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Augustine. 1952. The City of God. In Great Books of the Western World: 18. Augustine, ed. R.M. Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton. Bacon, F. 1999. Novum Organum Scientiarum. In Francis Bacon: Selected Philosophical Works, ed. R.-M. Sargent. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Broughton, J., and R. Mattern. 1978. Reinterpreting Descartes on the Notion of the Union of Mind and Body. Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1): 23–32. Cottingham, J. 2008. Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes’s Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descartes, R. 1967a. Mediations on the First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 4th ed. Edited and Translated by E.S. Haldane, and G.S.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1967b. Discourse on Method. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 4th ed. Edited and Translated by E.S. Haldane, and G.S.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1967c. Principles of Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 4th ed. Edited and Translated by E.S. Haldane, and G.S.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1967d. Passions of the Soul. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 4th ed. Edited and Translated by E.S. Haldane, and G.S.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dolar, M. 1998. Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious. In Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. S. Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1997. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Volume III. The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter Crafts Hodgson. Translated by Robert F. Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lacan, J. 2006. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. Løgstrup, K.E. 1997. The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Menn, S. 2002. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, J. 2019. Lacan on Paranoiac Knowledge. In Lacan on Psychosis: From Theory to Praxis, ed. J. Mills and D.L. Downing. New York: Routledge. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. 2004. Pyrrhonian Skepticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Toivakainen, N. 2020. Displacing Desire: An Essay on the Moral-Existential Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem. Helsinki: Unigrafia. Wallgren, T. 2021. Queer Scepticism: Socrates, Sextus and Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein and the Sceptical Tradition, ed. A. Marques and R.B. Romao. Lausanne: Peter Lang Verlag. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. 2019. Making Use of Religion? No, Thanks!. In The Philosophical Salon, 3 June 2019. Accessed December 4, 2019. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/making-­use-­of-­religion-­no-­thanks/#_edn1.

4 The Truth of Desire Is Spoken Between Naked Souls: Reading Plato’s Gorgias

4.1 From Descartes to Plato My reading of Descartes’ Meditations was essentially bound to my attempt to show that the text and its ‘arguments’ were played out as and informed by a dramatic existential narrative or landscape. It is of course true that the Meditations, as well as Descartes’ other writings (especially the Discourse on Method), are not without explicit dramatic form. In fact, the Meditations is quite clearly written as a dramatic venture into the uncertain and dangerous territory called truth, or philosophy—just think of the threat of insanity Descartes stands up against in his unwavering pursuit of indubitable and certain knowledge. Yet, Descartes seems to detach the moral-existential drama of the Meditations from the rigid method and the first principle of philosophy it aspires to ground. The method of doubt constitutes, in a Baconian spirit (cf. Bacon 1999; Toivakainen 2020), a kind of universal algorithmic procedure, which the mind is to apply in order to reach secure foundations. The moral-existential drama, on the other hand, assumes and portrays a bewildered, vulnerable, human being, lost in the complexities and forces of the subject’s relation to the world, other people, and the body. The former, that is, the method, is there to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_4

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correct, to discipline, the latter. In other words, the moral-existential difficulties of human life, which involve truth and error—and goodness contra sin—are not dealt with on their own terms, in their own language, so to speak. In the end, the function of the moral-existential drama of the Meditations seems to be to elevate the philosophical task, the relationship to truth, to a heroic one—a tendency, a temptation, integral, I gather, to any human pursuit of ‘depth’. What I have tried to do is bring these two, the method and the moral-existential landscape, closer together. It was, indeed, one of my central claims in the previous chapter that the cleavage or disassociation in Descartes’ Mediations between the method and the moral-existential landscape was symptomatic of a displacement. Instead of bringing us clarity as to the nature of our predicament, the first principle of philosophy expressed, or coincided with, the very thing that was the difficulty/obstacle. It is against this background that I shall now turn to what I gather we must call a reading—rather than a scholarly, exegetical study—of the Gorgias. Let us directly lay the cards on the table: I shall argue that Gorgias—my reading of Gorgias—presents an idea of the sources of truth and goodness, as well as error and sin, which answers to the central displacements in both Descartes and the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. An important, essential part of this picture is exactly the way in which the cleavage between the moral-­existential and the epistemological (or methodological) is, well, healed. Or, to be more precise, what I will attempt to argue is that Gorgias illustrates to us the somewhat unsettling truth, which devastates a certain philosophical self-understanding, that while methods and methodological approaches, as well as rational reasoning more generally, have their place in our lives, they are in themselves quite impotent; they lack any essential covenant with truth. Or, to put it in yet other terms, what I will argue is that Gorgias illustrates to us that there is an unbridgeable gap, or cut, between the signifier and the signified, that the question of the good is inscribed in this cut, and that the question of the good thereby mediates the relation between reason and truth. And, moreover, that the realisation of goodness is essentially tied to an inherent desire and care for the other. No small claim, to be sure. Now if it was, as suggested, important to read Descartes’ Meditations with a special focus on its dramatic moral-existential structure or landscape in mind, this is no less the case with Plato’s Gorgias—or, arguably, any other philosophical text for that matter. Moreover, while the

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dramatic structure in the Meditations was cut loose from, or external to, its ‘epistemological’ arguments, in Gorgias, the very sense of the ‘argument’ is, I shall argue, internal to the dramatic structure of the dialogue. In its bare form, Gorgias consists of three discursive exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors, in successive steps, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. On top of these, the dialogue finishes with an eschatological tale, which, Socrates suggests, confirms the central conceptual findings of the aforementioned dialogical exchanges. Given such a structure, the idea that the dialogue is divided into two distinctive ‘parts’, namely a rational-­ discursive and mythical/eschatological part, respectively, readily invites itself. The function of the mythical part, one might come to suggest, is Plato’s attempt to ground the rational-discursive findings-cum-arguments in something non-rational, in something deeper, by appealing to parts of our soul that are receptive or susceptive to eschatological tales. Plato will then be read as someone who holds that truth, or at least the soul’s relation to truth, must in the end be grounded in something beyond ‘mere reason’. Such a reading would, I think, have a grain of truth to it, taking into consideration the persistent presence of myths and/or allegories in Plato’s corpus (e.g. Collobert et al. 2012). However—and this is really one of the main issues one must sort out if one is to understand the Gorgias—the mythical or allegorical dimensions ‘beyond mere reason’ in Gorgias are, I propose, better understood as mirrors of or complements to the reality of the rational-discursive, rather than as appeals to some irrational part of the human soul, something opposed to reason. If not, that is, if we think of the function of the eschatological tale as an appeal to the non-rational or even irrational parts of our souls, then what Plato offers us is simply a more sophisticated and a more advanced form of flattery and persuasion than what Socrates’ interlocutors advance. And for sure, Gorgias can be read as Plato’s ressentiment, as his bitter revenge on those who possess political power—a power that ought to really belong to Plato, the philosopher. Or, alternatively, it can be read as Plato’s ironic, and somewhat cynical, illustration that the real power of persuasion, which the interlocutors’ claim they possess, in fact lies with him, Plato, the philosopher. Such readings would, however, impoverish the text. Or so I will argue. For not only would they fail to properly acknowledge that the dialogue explicitly thematises and deals with the ressentiment potentially engrained in the discursive practice of philosophy. What such

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readings would essentially fail to recognise is Plato’s radical illustration of how taking the use of reason seriously, how seeing reason as—so to speak—an end in itself, and how acknowledging its importance and proper place in our lives involves a kind of dethroning of (a certain wishful idea of ) reason. In short, what I will try to show is that the relationship between the discursive-rational and the mythological-eschatological goes both ways: while the eschatological tale mirrors the conceptual findings of the discursive-rational exchange between Socrates and his interlocutors, this mirroring exposes to us, in turn, a radical feature of the discursive-rational itself.

4.2 Two Conflicting Claims About Oratory: The Case of Gorgias Let us then move on to the dialogue itself and its main dramatic structure. What was said above still holds, namely that the division of the dialogue into a rational-discursive and a mythological part, respectively, is important for understanding the sense of the dialogue. Nonetheless, it is equally important to see how the dramatic structure progresses gradually through Socrates’ exchange with each interlocutor all the way to the eschatological tale. We have, then, on our pallet the cases of Gorgias, Polus, Callicles, and, finally, the eschatological tale. As is quite common for a great deal of Plato’s dialogues, also Gorgias starts off with Socrates inviting his interlocutor to provide a definition of a given concept. Arriving at a gathering too late and finding that the renowned orator Gorgias has just given an ‘admirable, varied presentation’ (447 a),1 it is Gorgias whom Socrates first approaches, yet not with the intention of receiving a summary of the presentation, but with the aim of examining the nature of Gorgias’ craft, namely, oratory. However, as is also a commonplace in Plato’s dialogues, in attempting to provide an answer to Socrates’ question, Gorgias voices, through Socrates’  I will use the standard reference style by Stephanus number, e.g. (448 c) when referring to Plato’s works. Moreover, when referring to the Gorgias, I will only use the Stephanus number, while when referring to other dialogues, I will include the name of the dialogue (e.g. Republic, 514 a). The respective dialogues will be referred to in the reference list as follows: Apology (Plato 1997a); Cratylus (Plato 1997b); Gorgias (Plato 1997c); Republic (Plato 1997d); Theaetetu (PLato 1997e). 1

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guidance, a definition that contains conflicting elements. Gorgias’ claim, his self-­understanding, is dissonant, split between two conflicting aspirations. This dissonance is the dramatic/structural crux of the exchange between Socrates and Gorgias. However, what the dissonance is about, what the conflicting elements in Gorgias’ ‘definition’ are, is also of great importance, for in and through it, Plato reveals to us—by and by throughout the dialogue—a profound character of our souls and the way in which truth and justice spring from it. In general terms, the dissonance of Gorgias’ claims concern what it is that he thinks makes oratory ‘the most admirable of the crafts’ (448 c), a craft which circumscribes ‘[t]he greatest of human concerns, Socrates, and the best’ (451 d). On the one hand, after confirming Socrates’ suggestion that orators ‘carry out and exercise their influence entirely by speech’ (451 d), Gorgias continues by confirming that this exercise of influence, this craft of ‘persuasion’ (452 d), unlike other crafts such as arithmetic, which persuades with knowledge, results in ‘conviction without knowledge’ (454 e). In other words, oratory is defined as a craft that convinces its audience about whatever matter it sets out to tackle without producing any real understanding or knowledge of these matters. Moreover, Gorgias concedes, the orators themselves need not possess any knowledge of whatever they are giving speeches about. In fact, Gorgias boasts, despite or perhaps exactly because of the lack of any knowledge of the subject matter (459 b–c), oratory ‘encompasses and subordinates to itself just about anything that can be accomplished’ (456 b) and the orator will be even ‘more persuasive than the one who has knowledge’—‘in a gathering, anyhow’ Gorgias emphasises (459 a). What Gorgias seems to be suggesting, then, is that oratory is a craft consisting of and producing what we might call manipulative power and control. Simultaneously, however, Gorgias also wishes or feels obliged to answer Socrates’ question, ‘Of what sort of persuasion is oratory a craft, and what is its persuasion about?’ with the following words: ‘The persuasion I mean, Socrates, is the kind that takes place in law courts and in those other large gatherings […] And it’s concerned with those matters that are just and unjust’ (454 b, emphasis added). Consequently, Gorgias comes to claim—or is forced to agree with Socrates—that in contrast to the persuasive power of oratory in other matters, when it comes to the case of the just and the unjust, and the good and the bad, ‘it is necessary for [the orator] to know

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what’s just and unjust, either beforehand, or by learning it from [an orator] afterwards’ (460 a, emphasis added). In fact, the logic of Gorgias’ claim of the orator’s knowledge of the just amounts to the queer notion, articulated by Socrates, that ‘an orator [is] necessarily just, and […] necessarily want[s] to do just things’ (460 c). ‘Apparently so’, a somewhat bewildered Gorgias concedes (460 c). Now the path to the final exposure of the conflicting attributes or virtues ascribed to the craft of oratory by Gorgias takes an intermediate step through observation of an inconsistency in Gorgias’ characterisation of the place and function of the orator’s alleged knowledge of the just and the unjust vis-á-vis the teaching of this knowledge. For in implying that (1) he does possess the knowledge of the just and the unjust, and (2) in suggesting that he can teach this knowledge to others, Gorgias (3) comes in conflict with his earlier announcement (456 b–457 c) that if oratory is unjustly utilised, one is not to blame the teacher but rather the wrongdoer (implying that there are orators known to have misused their craft), because (4) he is led to agree with Socrates that one who ‘has learned justice is a just man’ and that ‘a just man does just things’ (460 b) and ‘[t]herefore an orator will never want to do what’s unjust’ (460 c). So, while on one hand seemingly agreeing with Socrates’ suggestions and seemingly claiming that oratory is primarily concerned with matters of the just and the unjust, Gorgias is simultaneously, and in fact much more sincerely, claiming that oratory is essentially comparable to ‘any other competitive skill’, for instance ‘boxing’ and ‘wrestling’ (456 d). In fact, it is exactly in comparison to such competitive skills that Gorgias claims that the teacher of oratory is not to be blamed for any unjust usage any of his pupils might succumb to. Just because someone knowledgeable in the art of boxing or wrestling ‘went to strike his father or mother or any other family member or friend [...] that’s no reason to hate physical trainers and people who teach fighting in armour’ (456 d). And this surely seems to apply to the case of competitive crafts. That is to say, when the craft concerns a form of might or power over others, and not the knowledge of justice, it is perhaps right to say that the teacher is not to be blamed for any injustice done by the student, since there is no claim that the craft (e.g. boxing) concerns justice or that justice has been taught. However, since Gorgias nevertheless claims that oratory, in its essence, also centres on the knowledge of the just—and its transmission—the

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analogy he ought to have drawn between boxing and oratory is the following: If a teacher of boxing claims to have taught the art of boxing to a student, yet when brought into the boxing arena the student reveals him/ herself to be completely ignorant of the art, we should say that he has not at all learned boxing, and we might come to suspect that the teacher him/ herself lacked any true knowledge of the art. Consequently, since Gorgias seems content in saying that an orator can possess the competitive skills of oratory, yet nevertheless act unjustly, his desire for oratory’s competitive might of persuasion through conviction without knowledge comes in conflict with his (pressured urge to) claim that knowledge of the just is at the core of oratory. Surely a queer ending, preceded by some quite queer reasoning. What, one might ask, is Socrates really up to here? And how is it that Gorgias does not immediately recognise how Socrates intentionally pushes him to make such absurd and conflicting claims? Is Socrates simply out to humiliate Gorgias, or is there something important about Gorgias’—and our own—soul(s) that is perhaps beginning to come to light here?

4.3 What You See Fit to Do Is Not Always What You Want: The Case of Polus Instead of Socrates himself, it is the dialogue’s second interlocutor, Polus, irritated by what he sees as Socrates’ cunning method of leading people into contradiction, who will provide us with a tentative answer to our questions. ‘Gorgias’, Polus explains, ‘was too ashamed not to concede to [the] further claim that the orator also knows what’s just, what’s admirable, and what’s good’, for, Polus continues, ‘who do you think would deny that he himself knows what’s just and would teach others’ (461 b–c). What a shameful and rude act on Socrates behalf, Polus concludes, ‘To lead your arguments to such outcome’ (461 c). Two things then: Gorgias is not ashamed of his/oratory’s aspiration for purely manipulative power, while he nonetheless is ashamed of not portraying himself/oratory as on the side of justice and the good. The dissonance, the conflict: he seems to be ashamed of what he is not ashamed of. The locus of the contradiction: While the manipulative power of oratory is that which brings

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orators great power and admiration in the city, the economy of social affirmation, that is, the social-symbolic structure of value through which one is seen as worthy of social admiration—by which one, supposedly, gains power in the city—is, however, so it seems, heavily informed by the notion of the pursuit of, or the promotion of, ‘justice’. And the pursuit or promotion of ‘justice’, shows itself to be conceptually the very opposite of manipulative power. In other words, the social admiration that both Gorgias and Polus seem to be aspiring for is informed by a conflicting structural logic. Furthermore, what Polus seems to openly proclaim, and Gorgias silently confirm, is that while orators do in fact possess manipulative power, that is, great power in the city, they do not have any well-­ articulated understanding of, or any real interest in, what knowledge of justice and the good means or is. If anything, they seem to want to think that great (manipulative) power and justice (the good) somehow come to the same thing, although they do seem to understand that one must ‘officially’ keep them separate. Arguably, then, the ultimate aim of Socrates’ queer and, according to Polus, rude examination is not to bewilder his interlocutors in order to ‘win’ the discussion. Rather, the aim is to mobilise those moral-existential forces that inform or underwrite the claims and beliefs of the interlocutors, and to expose these forces and their dissonances on a rational-discursive plane. Now, if the dramatic crux of the discussion between Socrates and Gorgias was the exposure of conflicting claims about the nature of oratory, in Polus’ case we find not only an exposure of conflicting views, but more strongly, the proposition that Polus in fact (what we shall call) rationally holds the opposite view of what he professes, despite his consistent reluctance to accept this. The matter in question is epitomised in Polus’ claim that it is better to commit unjust acts than to suffer them, and that it is better to escape just punishment than to receive it (469). The rationale behind this claim is exactly the attempt to overcome the rational conflict Gorgias had ended up in. For Polus professes not to be ashamed of saying what he really thinks, namely that it is power that the orator wants, in fact what every man wants, and any consideration of justice is simply a means to this end. A claim that, as we might expect, Socrates completely reverses with Polus’ rational, yet reluctant, agreement. The path to this reversal is typical Socratic irony. Firmly holding on to his

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claim (alluded to just now), Polus is then asked by Socrates which he thinks is the more ‘shameful’, rather than the worse, of the two. Out of some yet unrevealed urge, Polus unhesitatingly answers that doing injustice is more shameful, although not worse, than being the victim of unjust acts (474 c). He thereby draws an essential distinction between what is ‘admirable’ and what is ‘good’ or ‘better’, and, consequently, between what is ‘shameful’ and what is ‘bad’ (474 d), which in turn is not easily reconcilable with the initial boasting of both Gorgias and Polus, namely that oratory is the most admirable of all crafts. Polus then proceeds to agree with Socrates that the admirable is defined in terms of ‘being either pleasant or beneficial [good], or both’ (474 e), and so ‘whenever one of two admirable things is more admirable than the other, it is so it surpasses the other either in one of these, pleasure or benefit, or in both’ (475 a). Likewise with the shameful: ‘whenever one of two shameful things is more shameful than the other, it will be so because it surpasses the other either in pain or in badness’. ‘Isn’t it necessarily so?’ Socrates asks, to which Polus replies, ‘Yes’ (475 b). Poor Polus. For now, he is consequently forced to agree that what makes doing what is unjust more shameful than suffering it, cannot be due to the pain it generates, since it is rather the one who suffers the injustice who is inflicted with pain. In other words, what makes doing what is unjust more shameful has to be due to the badness of injustice (475 c). And so, Polus cannot but rationally endorse the claim that it is because of the badness that ‘doing what’s unjust would be worse than suffering it’ (475 c). So is it in the case of just punishment as well. If it is, as Polus has agreed, more shameful to escape just punishment than to receive it, the admirableness of the just punishment must be due either to the pleasure or to the benefit it results in. A just punishment, analogous to medical intervention, is more or less guaranteed not to cause pleasure but rather its opposite, pain, or at least displeasure. So, the admirableness of a just punishment must be due to the benefit, the goodness, the justice, of the punishment, and surely not due to the pleasantness of it. Moreover, the good here is grammatically tied to a purification of the soul’s corruption (477 b), in that ‘one who pays what is due gets rid of something bad in his soul’ (477 a). And what then is the craft, implicitly one of the most admirable crafts, to which one is to turn when in search of just

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punishment and the bettering of one’s own and others’ souls, Socrates ironically asks? Judges and the craft of judging are mutually identified by Polus and Socrates (478 a). And so the rest follows: Polus is, in the end, forced, rationally, to agree with Socrates that doing what is unjust is worse than suffering it, and that avoiding just punishment is worse than having to justly ‘pay what’s due’ (478 a). In fact, Polus learns, and is forced to agree that he, Polus, in fact must want—while certainly not preferring— justice and just punishment rather than the power he at the outset claimed to aspire for. Moreover, because of this rational consent, oratory also appears in a completely worthless light, unless oratory is used solely for the purpose of always seeking to know what is just and, if needed, always to have just punishment inflicted upon oneself and all those for whom one cares (480 c–d)—an understanding of oratory more or less completely in opposition to both Gorgias’ and Polus’ aspirations.

4.4 The Truth of Desire Speaks with a Fearful Man’s Voice: The Case of Callicles Now Polus might be forced to concede rationally, given what has been said, that Socrates has indeed been able to reverse his claims. But this concession is, of course, not one stemming from the heart. In fact, regardless of the rational outcome of the discussion, Polus remains unmoved, convinced that Socrates’ claims are ‘absurd’ (480 e); ‘the likes of which no human being would maintain’ (473 e). So, what has caused Polus to articulate not only conflicting views, but more strongly than that, a view that is opposite to the one he aspires to defend? Exemplary of the dramatic brilliance of the dialogue, Plato lets Polus face the same destiny as his forerunner Gorgias did: he fails to deliver in excellence, is exposed in front of others as a holder of inconsistent beliefs, to which he has ended up because of shame, and is replaced by a stronger, more determinate, and bolder successor who has the courage to say things as they really are, that is, who says things unmoved by shame, and thereby attempts to save the honour of the orator. Ergo, Callicles enters the stage. Socrates’ method of argumentation, we learn from the newcomer, relies on his cunning ability to pressure his interlocutors into inconsistencies by appealing to their ‘deference to human custom’ (482 d). For just

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as in the case of Gorgias, Polus came to contradict himself because he felt ashamed not to concede what is prescribed by custom, namely that it is more shameful (although not worse) to do what is unjust than to suffer it, and to escape just punishment than to suffer it. The economy of social affirmation weighs, so it seems, heavily on Polus’ poor shoulders. And by utilising this pressure of social customs, Socrates is, Callicles states, rather than pursuing truth, ‘in fact bringing the discussion around the sort of crowd-pleasing vulgarities that are admirable only by law and not by nature’ (482 e). For, Callicles continues, ‘While Polus meant that doing [what’s unjust] is more shameful by law, [Socrates] pursued the argument as though [Polus] meant by nature’ (483 b)—something Polus himself was, as said, ashamed to acknowledge. In contrast, Callicles claims that ‘by nature all that is worse is also more shameful, like suffering what’s unjust’ and that ‘no man would’, in truth/by nature, ‘put up with suffering what’s unjust; only a slave would do so, one who is better dead than alive, who when he’s treated unjustly and abused can’t protect himself or anyone else he cares about’ (483 b). Continuing on, Callicles suggests that it is in fact these ‘weak’ slaves who ‘institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind [...] frightening the more powerful among men, the ones who are capable of having a greater share, out of getting a greater share than they’, thus labelling unjust ‘nothing but trying to get more than one’s share’ (483 c). ‘I think’, Callicles concludes, ‘they [the slaves] like getting an equal share, since they are inferior’ (483 c). In contrast to this ‘slave morality’ and its ressentiment, Callicles declares that in truth, that is to say, in accordance with ‘nature’, it is just for the naturally ‘better and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man and the less capable man’ (483 d). Touché! Now, finally, the true aspiration of the interlocutors has been mobilised. But what exactly is this aspiration, this desire? Both Gorgias and Polus have contradicted themselves, and thus failed to provide sound justifications for their existential investments in oratory, because they have deferred to the normative customs of ‘the people’, of demos, and thereby worked against themselves, against their true aspirations. What the rational consistency of oratory needs, then, Callicles proclaims, is a proto-Nietzschean (cf. Nietzsche 1996; Toivakainen 2020, 146–157) unification of law and nature. So, while the customs of demos separate law

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from natural impulse, that is, separate law from the instinctive search for satisfaction of the appetites, Callicles claims that it is only those who are able to realise their natural instincts, or at least accept their own impotence, who obey the true law of nature. They are the truly just, or the ‘by nature’ just (483 b). Conversely, the separation of law from nature imposed by customs is a perversion of nature, of the natural order, fuelled by ressentiment. So, in order to keep his reasoning sound, that is, to succeed in justifying the rationale of what he and his companions have invested their lives in, Callicles needs to attempt to advance the claim that those who are ‘by nature’ just are those who never allow anyone or anything to rule over themselves. Even self-discipline falls under the banner of ‘contracts of men that go against nature, [and are] worthless nonsense!’ (492 b). Consequently, Callicles is forced to declare that excess is the virtue of human life, and that those who succeed in realising their excess are the truly admirable ones. As Callicles so aptly puts it, the ‘man who’ll live correctly ought to allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not to restrain them’ (492 a)—for to restrain would be to make oneself slave to an order different from that of one’s own nature. Upholding such a claim nevertheless leads to a host of absurd consequences—which Socrates is quick to have Callicles acknowledge. For as Callicles himself recognises, in order to be consistent, he needs to claim that ‘pleasant and good are the same, and that knowledge and bravery are different both from each other and from what’s good’ (495 d), thus refusing a discrimination between ‘good kinds of pleasures and bad’ (495 a). The absurd outcome of which is that a person who would scratch an itch his whole life (494 d) would be a happy and admirable person since every time he would scratch he would find satisfaction—again, and again, and again… Now the force with which the Socratic examination counters the interlocutors’ claims is not through any direct reference to a reality or truth ‘out there’. Rather, Callicles is not able to uphold his claims because he himself does not believe in them, that is, because he does not really think that any fool who constantly scratches an itch is an admirable and good person—because he scratches. So caught red-handed in his own inconsistency, Callicles takes on a defensive position and scorns Socrates for being so naive as to think that he, Callicles, could in fact have meant to say that there is no difference between good and bad pleasures. Of

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course there are, he now declares, completely reversing his earlier claim and confirming, together with Socrates, the notion of goodness as the human telos: we do the pleasurable because of the benefit or good it brings about (499 d–e). Well, then, Socrates asks, what is the craft by which one is to discriminate between the good and the bad, since Callicles now happily agrees that as there are good and bad pleasures, there must also be a craft or knowledge, as opposed to a ‘knack’ and ‘flattery’, by which to tell one from the other (500 a)? If Polus was forced to, rationally, agree with Socrates that judges and the craft of judging are the craft by which to discern how to better the state of the soul, Callicles faces the same ironic fate. For he also finds himself rationally conceding that the craft which discerns between good and bad pleasures concerns the organisation and order of the soul. And is not, Socrates ironically asks, ‘the name for the state of organisation and order of the soul [...] “lawful” and “law”, which lead people to become law-abiding and orderly, and these are justice and self-control’ (504 d). Callicles’ consent is, understandably, a reluctant ‘Let it be so’. But what has happened? How has Callicles run into the same kind of contradiction as his forerunners, despite having articulated his aspirations without shame or without any deference to custom? For was it not exactly shame which was disclosed as the source of the (rational) inconsistencies of Gorgias and Polus? Is shame truly not an issue for Callicles, or is the proto-Nietzschean account in fact informed by something connected to shame? What moral-existential force still dwells unacknowledged, stirring the rational order of Callicles’ soul? Perhaps Callicles cannot bring forth a single ‘witness’ (cf. 474 a), that is, a single rational justification/position that would counter what he and Socrates rationally keep agreeing on. All the same, Callicles complains until the bitter end: how can Socrates seriously think that ‘a man who’s unable to protect himself, is to be admired?’ (522 b). So when Socrates asks what ‘the craft by which we make sure that we don’t suffer anything unjust’ is, suggesting that it would require ‘that one ought either to be a ruler himself in his city or even be a tyrant, or else to be a partisan of the regime in power’ (510 a), Callicles lights up. Finally, Socrates says something worthwhile: ‘Do you see, Socrates, how ready I am to applaud you whenever you say anything right? I think that this statement of yours is

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right on the mark’ (510 b). Yes, do you see how Socrates mobilises his interlocutor’s desire! For now, we can see more clearly: It is not because (social) power belongs to Callicles by nature that he wants it. He does not really desire any proto-Nietzschean superiority for its own sake. In fact, he seems to dread such power deep down. For it is the callous, inconsiderate, unjust, workings of the (supposed) other, of the (supposed) one who is callous and unjust, that Callicles fears, and from which he thinks oratory can protect him. Recall his characterisation of the ‘slave’ as the one ‘who when he’s treated unjustly and abused can’t protect himself or anyone else he cares about’ (483 b). The thing here is that Callicles’ account of the slave and of his, Callicles’, desire for power in order to protect himself against that which the slave threatens to suffer from reveals a primary identification with the slave. This is why he aspires for unlimited power. He aspires for it because it, so he seems to think, protects him from that very same power, that is, protects him from the (supposed) callous use of power—which he now has to himself deploy. But at the same time, because of his primary identification with the slave, Callicles’ whole position remains entangled with shame. For what he must attempt to hide, what he is ashamed to expose of himself, is exactly how his whole public persona, his identification as the orator who has power, is in fact underpinned and informed by his primary identification with the position of the slave. Having this truth of his soul exposed would mean losing hope of gaining the position that secures the desired protection, that is, the position of social power, because it would expose that position as itself displaced, as itself weak. This is the logic of the interlocutors’ shame. And what Socrates has to offer, that is, having the truth of the soul guiding one’s life, certainly does nothing to improve one’s security—except, of course, the security of the soul, but that is something completely different. As Socrates duly agrees, if anyone felt the urge to persecute him, he would not stand a chance. ‘[I]t wouldn’t be at all strange’, Socrates informs Callicles, ‘if I were to be put to death’ (521 d). Yet, apropos of the life of the soul: ‘no one who isn’t totally bereft of reason and courage is afraid to die; doing what’s unjust is what he’s afraid of ’ (522 e). It is this primary identification with the slave and the deep rooted sense of existential vulnerability that undergirds Callicles’ resistance to Socrates.

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However, despite the resistance and his reluctance to accept the rational outcome of their discussion, the truth of Callicles’ soul inevitably crops up in the grammar of what he professes. For in enthusiastically agreeing with Socrates that if one is to be a partisan of the regime in power, one will do well in trying to, not only pretend or imitate the regime and its customs, ‘but be naturally like them in your own person’ (513 b; cf. 481 d–e). Callicles is hereby also admitting, unconsciously, grammatically, that he himself is in fact the slave par excellence of the Other (demos). That is, Callicles fully articulates, although he does not dare to acknowledge it, that he is a slave, par excellence, to the economy of social affirmation. In order to enjoy unlimited social power, Callicles must be wholly determined by the Other. And it is this displacement, this chain of misidentification, inscribed in the grammar of Callicles’ speech, which causes the inconsistency of his claims to continuously follow wherever the discussion goes. So when Callicles at one point confesses to Socrates, ‘I don’t know, Socrates—in a way you seem to me to be right, but the thing that happens to most people has happened to me: I’m not really persuaded by you’ (513 c), Socrates replies: ‘It’s your love for the people [demos], Callicles, existing in your soul, that stands against me’ (513 d). In the case of Callicles, we have, then, not only an inconsistency in the account—like in the case of Gorgias. Nor is it simply that, as in the case of Polus, the inconsistency reveals itself to mean that Callicles in fact rationally holds the opposite of what he initially claims—that he, rationally speaking, does not want what he thinks fitting. For through the mobilisation of desire throughout the dialogue, Socrates is able to have Callicles’ desire speak more openly, revealing that the desire for invulnerability is a desire for unlimited affirmation of the self by the Other, voicing thereby a kind of lack of fundamental trust towards others: a general form of paranoia—warranted or not—which in turn bespeaks his primary identification with the image of the slave, which he himself conjures up. It is not hard to see the same kind of logic at work in Descartes’ Meditations, apropos of our previous chapter. Only in Plato’s case, this desire is, pace Descartes, exactly seen as a fundamental displacement, a trace of a fundamental dissonance of the soul.

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4.5 The Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: The Case of the Eschatological Tale Socrates’ and Callicles’ discussion ends in rational agreement. No consistent case has been made against Socrates. The desire of the interlocutors has been extensively mobilised. Yet the interlocutors’ souls remain resistant, reluctant to accept the rational outcome of the discussion. Is this a limit to what Socrates can do? Has he exhausted the force unleashed by the mobilisation of the interlocutor’s desire? Could he not go on? Could he not do more? Is this why Plato takes recourse to an eschatological tale presented by Socrates at the end of the dialogue? Is this Plato’s desperate attempt to exalt truth—to give it an ultimate, transcendental justification which would dissolve the interlocutors’ resistance? Perhaps. Perhaps Plato is tempted to do exactly this. And perhaps this is exactly what he does. But what I want to do is show that this need not be the only possible reading, and that it is possible to place the eschatological tale differently in the dramatic structure of Gorgias. I will begin by saying that yes, the eschatological tale is evoked in order to answer to, in order to illustrate, a limit in the dialogical exchange. Yet the limit is not, as it were, an empirical one. That is, there is no a priori limit to what Socrates could actually have achieved in relation to Callicles. Of course, he certainly could have gone on and on. And perhaps, at some point, Callicles might have truly been transformed. Nevertheless, regardless of how far Socrates might have pushed the examination, there is not any point at which Callicles would necessarily have stopped resisting—a point at which Callicles would necessarily have embraced Socrates. The very contrast that Plato puts at the forefront of the dialogue between oratory and philosophy bespeaks precisely this limit. While the business of oratory is, according to the interlocutors, to hypnotically produce convictions in others, to enchant the listener into accepting whatever the orator happens to be advocating for, the business of philosophy, on the other hand, is exactly to awaken the soul to its own truth, to its telos, and have the person in question consciously take on the responsibility of that position. In other words, the power of philosophy, the power of rational discourse, inescapably contains a limit or an impasse,

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namely our souls and their desires. So yes, the eschatological tale enters at the point of a limit, and it enters in the shape of an ultimate—or primary—scene, depicting the ‘ultimate of all bad things’, which is ‘to arrive in Hades with one’s soul stuffed full of unjust actions’ (522 e). Yet, as we shall see, there is something about this ultimate scene that bespeaks the inherent limit or impasse of reason with respect to truth. Or, again, bespeaks that there is a cut between the signifier and the signified. Before we look into the tale itself, let us begin by considering the way in which Socrates relates this tale, which he will ‘tell you as true’ (523 a), to the Socratic examinations he has had with his interlocutors. As he explains to Callicles: Maybe you think this account is told as an old wives’ tale, and you feel contempt for it. And it certainly wouldn’t be a surprising thing to feel contempt for it if we could look for and somehow find one better and truer than this. As it is, you see that there are three of you, the wisest of the Greeks today—you, Polus, and Gorgias—and you’re not able to prove that there’s any other life one should live than the one which will clearly turn out to be advantageous in that world [the afterlife], too. (527 a–b)

The preliminary observation that I want to draw attention to here, and which we will follow up on as we go along, concerns the last sentence. Namely, what Plato is, to my mind, suggesting here is that the truth of the tale is not derived from within the tale itself. That is, the tale does not have authority in or by itself. Rather, the tale is true, as Plato seems to be implying, because it mirrors, or corresponds to, the truth, to the meanings, arrived at in the dialogical exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors. In other words, it mirrors or corresponds to the way in which the rational commitment to justice is derived from within the souls of the interlocutors, by way of mobilising their desire. Or, it locates something ultimate, something corresponding to the ultimate scene of the soul, inscribed in the dialogical exchange itself. By this, I mean to say that the eschatological tale is not simply a superfluous tool for legitimation. It is not a form of moral blackmail. Rather, read carefully, in its mirroring of the dialogical exchange, the eschatological tale illuminates a profound feature of the nature of discursive reason and its rational truths. It suggests, in a profound way, that there is something ‘ultimate’ about rational

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truth, or consistency, which is not itself, well, rational. Or, to be more precise, it illuminates that rational reason cannot discern, provide or ground, its own rationality. What structures, so to speak, the rational order of the soul, of language and meaning, is something which concerns the soul’s telos, namely the good. In this sense, the eschatological tale has two aspects or sides. One that draws on the law and order of the soul-­ cum-­cosmos, another one that says something about the good which gives or structures the very sense of that order. Here is a summary of the tale with the first of these in focus. Ever since the time of Cronus, the tale has it, there has been in effect a ‘law concerning human beings’ which orders those ‘who have lived a just and pious life’ to ‘make [their] abode in complete happiness, beyond the reaches of evils’ on the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ (523 b). And while the just and pious reach heavenly bliss, the unjust and godless are, in contrast, ordered to ‘the prison of payment and retribution’ (523 b). These latter individuals are then in turn divided into two categories: those who can be cured, and eventually brought to the ‘Isles of the Blessed’, and those whose errors are incurable and will remain everlasting prisoners (525 b–c). As the tale has it, in order to be cured of one’s wickedness, if one can be cured, one must pay what is due, that is to say, one must receive just punishment. This was, as we might remember, exactly what both Polus and Callicles were already forced to rationally concede during their discussions with Socrates. The eschatological procedure of justice does not, of course, comprise any old punishment. Rather, the ultimate just punishment is one essentially of ‘pain and suffering, for there is no other possible way to get rid of injustice’, the tale explains (525 c). As for those who are incurable, they will in turn undergo ‘for all time the most grievous, intensely painful and frightening sufferings’ (525 d) without deriving any benefits thereof. Rather, they are ‘made examples for others, so that when they see him suffering whatever it is he suffers, they may be afraid and become better’ (525 b). What, then, does this first aspect of the eschatological tale mirror? What does it portray in the form of a myth? Well, the Isles of the Blessed, where the just souls are summoned, obviously mirrors Socrates’ argument, rationally conceded by his interlocutors, that a just soul cannot be harmed by injustice and that living a just life is what the soul really wants. That is, a just soul fulfils its telos. The unjust soul, caught up in its

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dissonance, is, on the other hand, either forced to pay what is due in order to correct its ills, that is, must receive a just punishment, or otherwise be doomed to eternal suffering because the soul cannot be, or refuses to be, corrected. A dissonant soul is simply, by ‘rational’ definition, one that is not happy, one that suffers. Notice how the tale’s mirroring here implies a certain reversal—as does any mirroring. Recall Socrates’ counterargument with respect to Polus’ claim that it is more shameful, although not worse, to commit than to suffer unjust acts. As Socrates’ showed, on the basis of Polus’ own account, what makes unjust acts more shameful cannot be due to the pain they causes, but must rather be due to them being worse. Conversely, avoiding just punishment is more shameful than receiving it, not because of the pain it causes, but because of its badness. In this scenario, it is the just person who receives pain in both cases. But now, in the eschatological tale, the bad and pain become one, as do the good and the pleasurable: the just on the Isles of the Blessed live in ‘complete happiness, beyond the reaches of evil’; the unjust in the prison of retribution live in pain and suffering. In other words, in the ‘ultimate’ scene, it is in fact also more pleasurable to be just, and more painful to be unjust. Of course, the reversal that occurs here is possible because the eschatological tale depicts the fate and state of the (rational) soul, not of the embodied, that is, not of the socially or collectively identified, person. However, read solely in the light of this first aspect of the tale, the tale does in fact once again raise the suspicion that the Platonic cosmos, the notion of the rational order of the soul, is inherently informed by a deeply engrained ressentiment. How dependent is the happiness of the just on the Isles of the Blessed on the pain and suffering of the unjust in the prison of retribution, that is, on those who have done as they please and succeeded in doing so—in secular existence? How much of this happiness is, in other words, due to the enjoyment of bitter revenge (cf. Toivakainen 2020, 146–157)? If, then, this is all that the tale had to offer, we would have been smacked in the face with the proposal, that the soul and the cosmos at large are structured by a rational-normative universal order—underpinned by ressentiment. As noted, however, the eschatological tale has an ‘other side’ to it, which in fact undermines or reverses, let us call it, the priority of the law and its rational order, thereby transmuting the very picture. Let us enter the courts of Hades once more.

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Not surprisingly, according to the tale, the law and order determining the ultimate fate of each soul in Hades is overseen by judges, in whose power lies the final judgement. However, in the very early days of this unprecedented court, a fundamental problem or flaw, a contradiction, internal to the functioning of the court soon surfaced. For while the law prescribed that the just were to enter the Isles of the Blessed and the unjust the prison of retribution, many of the cases were, quite randomly or arbitrarily, ‘badly decided’ with some bad people unjustly ending up on the Isles of the blessed, and vice versa (523 b-c). The paradox this generated was, of course, that the ultimate judgement, the very thing that was to ultimately settle what and who is a just soul, was itself unjust; or at least did not manage to deliver justice. Put otherwise, the very prescriptions of the law could not satisfy, could not actualise, themselves; there was a cut between the signifiers of law and their proper signification, which the institution of the law was unable to manage by itself, so to speak. The tale, then, provides the following reason for this fundamental flaw: ‘In Cronus’ time, and even more recently during Zeus’ tenure of sovereignty, these men faced living judges while they were still alive, who judged them on the day they were going to die’ (523 b). Now why was it a problem that the ultimate judgement was made when both the judge and the judged were still alive? In line with what is usually understood as a Platonic dualism, the tale suggests that the problem with judgements being done while the respective parties were still alive had to do with the fact that while still alive, the soul was tied to, or resided in, the body, and that the body masked or veiled the true nature of the soul. Consequently, only a dead soul, that is, one that is separated from the body, can be ‘naked’ and thus justly judged (523 e). However, before we label the moral of the tale ‘Platonic dualism’ in the standard sense (e.g. Annas 2003, 65–76), there are a few things that we need to take into account. The first of these concerns the contrast or dichotomy deal/alive. Read in the light of the suspicion that Plato’s reasoning is underpinned by ressentiment, the tale surely seems to confirm the suspicion: death, that is, the ‘separation’ from the body, is the only way for a ‘just’ person, for a person driven by ressentiment, to overcome his/her impotence (cf. Toivakainen 2020, 146–157). However, quite another sense opens up if we contextualise the alive/dead dichotomy

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differently. Bring to mind Callicles’ claim that excessive pursuit of pleasure is what nature has prescribed to us. Now when Socrates comes with the proposal that self-discipline and temperance ought to be taken into consideration, Callicles scorns him by saying that such things are ‘worthless nonsense’ (492 b), and that if Socrates was right, then ‘stones and corpses would be the happiest’ (492 e). In reply, Socrates states that ‘[p]erhaps in reality we’re dead’ (493 a), perhaps ‘being dead is being alive’ (492 e), and perhaps it is so ‘that our bodies are our tombs’ (493 a). An ironic reply, for sure. For one must keep in mind that Socrates introduces the need for self-discipline exactly in response to Callicles’ praise of excess. That is, the notion of self-discipline is a kind of grammatical reminder, or intervention. As we might put it, Callicles is forced to (rationally) agree that self-­discipline is in fact something desirable, as opposed to relentless excess, because the very grammar of ‘excess’—such as it is used by Callicles—contains the normative prescription of ‘(self-)discipline’. So when Callicles claims to want a life of excess, the Socratic examination reverses the claim, ironically revealing that the rationally informed desire of Callicles seems to be for a life of self-discipline. The irony here is equal to the dissonance, displacement, or ambivalence of Callicles’ desire. Remember that what underpinned Callicles’ claims was his desire for safety and invulnerability, which he sought to acquire through unlimited social affirmation of his public persona by means of oratory. And in order to acquire that, he had to give up, even actively work against, justice, which the Socratic examination in turn ironically showed was what he actually wanted. So it is both true and not true that Callicles desires self-discipline. He thinks self-discipline is a sign of weakness, and in this he (unconsciously) recognises his own primary identification with the slave, that is, his primary identification with his own weakness and vulnerability, which he then struggles to overcome by striving to achieve (and to enjoy) the very (social) position which is the object of his primary fear. However, the path to this position requires of him that he slavishly ingratiates himself with ‘the people’ and their customs, customs where self-discipline, rather than excess, has normative priority. There is, then, as one might note, a double sense or function played by ‘self-discipline’ here. On the one hand, there is the necessary deference to the position ‘self-discipline’ plays in the symbolic economy

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of ‘the people’ who grant the sought-for social affirmation-cum-power. This ‘self-discipline’ Callicles perhaps quite sincerely despises, although he is nonetheless a slave to it. On the other hand, there is an ‘other side’ to the grammar of ‘self-discipline’ at work here. The very persona that Callicles is struggling to become is essentially predicated on not allowing for his primary identification with the slave, his deeply engrained sense of existential vulnerability, to surface. Self-discipline in the form of self-­ alienation, as one might put it. Moreover, to the extent Callicles, in his deference to ‘the people’, is exactly voicing the grammar of ‘the people’, it seems somewhat warranted to say that the grammar of ‘self-discipline’ in this second sense is what strongly informs, what in fact underpins, the grammar of ‘self-discipline’ that ‘the people’ value. So, if life is what Callicles stands for, then Socrates ironically shows that truth, justice, and the good must be on the side of death. It is, as it were, a grammatical consequence of Callicles’ belief. My point here is, of course, that it is this ironic contrast between life and death that is mirrored in the eschatological tale’s claim that the ultimate judgement was flawed because it happened between living individuals. What about the associated contrast between soul and body, then? That is, why does the ultimate realisation of justice require the separation of soul from body? Here is Zeus himself providing the explanation. ‘Many’, [Zeus] said, ‘whose souls are wicked are dressed in handsome bodies, good stock and wealth, and when the judgement takes place they have many witnesses appear to testify that they have lived just lives. Now the judges are awestruck by these things and pass judgement at a time when they themselves are fully dressed, too, having put their eyes and their ears and their whole bodies up as screens in front of their souls. All these things, their own clothing and that of those being judged, have proved to be obstructive to them.’ (523 c–d)

Appearance contra reality. An old notion and truism, which has probably been challenged for as long as it has been around. Yet, the way this contrast is depicted here in the tale seems to involve an interesting twist. To begin with, what is apparent here is that the body, which the naked soul has been stripped of, is, if not equal to, then at least essentially bound

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to its social status. One cannot emphasise enough the, let us call it, collective nature of this ‘body’, for it is truly a (let us call it) collective effort. Note how the very reason why the appearance of the body readily finds witnesses appearing to testify to its just nature is, arguably, that those who testify thus do it also, or essentially, for their own sake. In other words, these witnesses strive to legitimatise, justify, the identity between social appearance and the worth of the soul so as to provide themselves with the same promise, the same point of escape from existential vulnerability, as those being judged are offered precisely through these collectively exercised testimonies. Conversely, this is why the judgement can be just only when the soul is ‘stripped naked of all these things’, when the individual is ‘isolated from all his kinsmen and has left behind on earth all that adornment’ (523 e). Just like in the case of Socrates’ encounter with his interlocutors. The similarity between Socrates’ dialogic examinations and the scene in the tale is striking and surely intended by Plato. Earlier in the dialogue, Polus has said the following to Socrates: ‘Don’t you think you’ve been refuted, Socrates, when you’re saying things the likes of which no human being would maintain? Just ask any one of these people’ (473 e). The thing ‘no human being would maintain’ is of course the claim that it is worse to do than to suffer unjust acts, and to escape rather than to face just punishment. Furthermore, Socrates outrageously claims that not only do he and Polus in fact maintain this, but so does everyone else (474 b). Analogous to the tale, then, Polus apologetically calls upon his kinsmen to testify in his favour, hoping that Socrates would say what people, apparently, ordinarily say, rather than what he on reflection thinks is right. In other words, hoping that Plato would see and listen with the eyes and ears of his ‘body’, rather than with his soul-cum-reason. But such a ‘vote’ is something Socrates does ‘not know how to do’ (474 a). The sense of this incapability becomes clear when Socrates continues by saying: ‘I do know how to produce one witness to whatever I’m saying, and that’s the man I’m having a discussion with. The majority I disregard. And I do know how to call for a vote from one man, but I don’t even discuss things with the majority’ (474a–b). So, as in the tale, truth is revealed only in a naked examination between souls without regard to

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common opinion, that is, in spiritual isolation from all kinsmen qua the logic and economy of social affirmation.2 Moreover, as we remember, shame had functioned as the main obscurer of reason from Gorgias to Polus, all the way to Callicles. Or, the advancement of the dialogue, its progression towards clarity, is proportional to  Interestingly, we also find the same logic at the heart of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave (Republic, book VII). Remember Zeus’ diagnosis, in the eschatological tale in Gorgias, of why souls were misjudged and displaced, when people were judged alive by living judges: the judges and the judged, as well as their peers, had ‘put their eyes and ears and their whole bodies up as screens in front of their souls’ (523 c–d, emphasis added). In the allegory of the cave, on the other hand, the wall upon which the shadows of various artefacts are cast by the fire in the cave, and which composes the supposed reality of those chained in the cave, is also characterised as a ‘screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets’ (Republic, 514b, emphasis added). Now consider how Plato depicts life in the cave vis-á-vis outside of it. 2

‘What about when [the hero] reminds himself of his first dwelling place, his fellow prisoners, and what passed for wisdom there? Don’t you think he’d count himself happy for the change and pity the others? Certainly And if there had been any honors, praises, or prizes among them [the prisoners] for the one who was sharpest at identifying the shadows [on the screen] as they passed by and who best remembered which usually came earlier, which later, and which simultaneously, and who could thus best divine the future, do you think our man would desire these rewards or envy those among the prisoners who where honored and held power?’ (Republic, 516 c–d). And then: ‘Consider this too. If this man went down into the cave again and sat down in his same seat, wouldn’t his eyes—coming suddenly out of the sun like that—be filled with darkness? They certainly would. And before his eyes had recovered—and the adjustment would not be quick—while his vision was still dim, if he had to compete again with the perpetual prisoners in recognizing the shadows, wouldn’t he invite ridicule? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he’d returned from his upward journey with his eyesight ruined and that it isn’t worthwhile even to try to travel upward? And, as for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him? They certainly would.’ (Republic, 516 e–517 a) As we can see, the reality of the screen-cum-wall in the cave is characterised fully in terms of a desire for and rejoicing in social prestige and affirmation, as is the screen-cum-body in the eschatological tale in Gorgias. That is, not only is life in the cave retroactively, i.e. when the rational soul has gained full rule over the individual, characterised as essentially a competition amongst the ‘perpetual prisoners’ for social prestige. For when the philosopher returns to the cave to help his fellow beings out of it, he not only has lost the ability to play along in the social game but, more importantly, is met with hostile resistance: ‘what passes for wisdom there’, i.e. the ability to gain social affirmation, is the very thing that resists the voice of reason. As one is tempted to interpret this, the moral-existential investment in the appetite for social affirmation is itself the very ‘chains and shackles’ of the prisoners.

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the level of sincerity and courage of the interlocutors. That is, clarity is proportional to the degree to which the desire of the interlocutor is mobilised. So, if Gorgias starts off by simply praising oratory in contradictory terms, a new level of clarity is reached when Polus has the courage to more sincerely, that is, more nakedly, admit that his (and Gorgias’) real interest lies in oratory’s ability to produce social power, akin to the powers of a tyrant (466 c). When Polus himself falls prey to his own shame, a new level of clarity again emerges by way of Callicles’ frankness and courage. Through his characterisation of the proto-Nietzschean universe, we not only know more clearly what the oratory’s fantasy looks like. What we also get hold of, due to the level of nakedness that Callicles’ soul finds itself in, that is, due to the way in which his desire is mobilised in the discursive practice, is that the proto-Nietzschean claim is underpinned by an existential fear for the prospect of becoming a victim of unjust acts. In other words, it is underpinned by Callicles’ (and perhaps Gorgias’ and Polus’) primary identification with the ‘slave’. This is as close as we come to the state of Callicles’ soul, for he is not willing to accept the truth of his soul, but rather clings to the hope of securing his social status at the cost of displacement or dissonance. However, recall what Socrates’ response to Callicles’ confession ‘in a way you seem to me to be right, but […] I’m not really persuaded by you’ was: ‘—It’s your love for the people, Callicles, existing in your soul, that stands against me’ (513 c-d, emphasis added). Why ‘against me’? Why not simply ‘against truth’? Go back one step to the ultimate judgement. So far, we have emphasised the nakedness of the one who is to be judged. Yet, the twist in the tale is that both judged and judge must be naked. Sure, by virtue of the very grammar of the concept, the judge certainly holds a position of authority. Yet, the ultimate judgement of the tale does not include any, as it were, automatism; there is a cut between the signifiers and the signified. There is no ‘big Other’ who/that does the judgment. Rather, the judge is another soul, one who stands on equal grounds with the judged; the judge is an examiner of the state of the soul, yet himself equally susceptive to the deceptive dazzle of the collective ‘body’, equally in need of being or becoming naked. But why could not the ultimate judgement simply be a matter between the judged and the big Other? Is it because the law is grounded in the desire of the soul, and this is why it is only a soul that can judge the true sense of the law? At least

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this seems to be the case in the discursive exchange between Socrates and his interlocutors. For the major claim of Plato is, as I have argued, not simply that the interlocutors ought to be just because the law prescribes it. Rather, they should strive for the good, and follow reason, because this is what they actually want. The law is inscribed in their desire. Or; the law is the true expression of desire. But if this is so, then the reason why the ultimate judgement lacks the big Other, that is, why it does not have any automatism to it, is that it is only a soul that can move, mobilise, the desire of the other’s soul—as one might put it, what we can come to realise here is that the notion of the big Other does not really do any work, so to speak. Desire seems to be essentially entangled with the other, engendered between souls. In short, the nakedness between souls is the cut between the signifier and the signified, and it is only this nakedness that can mediate one to the other. Both judge and judged need to be undressed so that they can stand before each other naked. I have tried to illustrate that the discursive exchange between Socrates and his interlocutors is a gradual unclothing of the soul, meaning a gradual mobilisation of the interlocutors’ desire to the conscious, or reflective, side of their speech, so to speak. But Socrates is able to mobilise this unclothing because there is something about his soul, about his person, that is already naked. In other words, any truth we ascribe to the grammar of desire that the discursive exchange reveals presupposes the nakedness of Socrates’ soul—just as our judgement of the sense of the dialogue presupposes, or is directly entangled with, our own nakedness. What has made, what guarantees, this nakedness? The tale simply lets it be so, while the dialogical exchange simply takes Socrates’ nakedness as a given. Gorgias includes, then, the unsettling (?) suggestion that truth, reason, and justice are bound to our judgements and that the truth of these judgements seems to presuppose our goodness, our being just. That is, the dialogue presupposes our ability to (re)connect with our naked souls. It is not only that Callicles is against what is true or consistent. He stands against Socrates, the person. He stands against the truth that emerges in their encounter. In short, then: Yes, Plato seems to be saying that every speech act is endowed with a universal normative grammar and that we unearth it through rational discursive practice and must, then, strive to align

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ourselves with it if we are to do what we want, if we are to fulfil our telos. Yet, we can access this normative structure; we can be rational in our discursive practices, only through a naked encounter with the other person, an encounter between an I and a you, beyond the reaches of the collective ‘body’. And, finally, nothing other than nakedness can guarantee the nakedness.

4.6 The Good as the Telos of the Human Soul My reading of Gorgias has, as one might put it, identified a certain essential entanglement between reason, ethics, and desire. Or, it has located ethics and/as desire as the cut between the signifier and the signified. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall attempt to more clearly think through this entanglement and the kind of suggested impasse or limit it seems to include. The strategy here will be to start off with some further reflections on the relationship between reason, the will, and the good, after which we shall explore what the truth of the interlocutors’ desire is. Finally, we shall see how these two connect—and how and why they contain the impasse or limit alluded to. Some repetition of things said will be inevitable. So, reason and the will. Apropos of who is the happier of the two, the one committing injustice or the one suffering it, Polus admonishes Socrates by saying, ‘You’re just unwilling to admit it’, for ‘You really do think it’s the way I say it is’ (471e). The accusation is, then, that Socrates really wants to be like an orator or a tyrant, he wants to have unlimited power in the city, and what he says and claims, Callicles in turn observes, is just a form of flattery and crowd-pleasing in its own right (482 e). Socrates’ stance is, of course, more or less the reverse: while orators and tyrants, that is, while the interlocutors, say and do what they ‘see fit to do’, they ‘do just about nothing they want to’ (466 e). However, there is an important difference between these respective accusations. True, the discussion by and by reveals that the interlocutors’ claims and arguments are underpinned by insincerity, which in turn is informed by the desire for security and the desire for unlimited social affirmation. Nonetheless, Socrates does not deny or question that the interlocutors really think—or

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hope—that searching for security of this sort and by these means is what one really ought to do. In this sense, Socrates does not take the interlocutors to be cunning tricksters, which is what the interlocutors suggest Socrates is. And yet, Socrates claims that they, the interlocutors and their idols, do not do or say what they really want. Recall here the very process of a Socratic examination. For instance, Socrates asks Gorgias what his craft is, what meaning it bears. Gorgias says that it is the greatest of all crafts, that it persuades through conviction without knowledge, and so on. Socrates then points out unclarities and conflicts in the definition and comes with suggestion of the sort ‘do you mean this’ and ‘would you then also say this’. Simply put, what the interlocutor is challenged to do in a Socratic examination is lay bare the (underlying) grammatical structure of his claims. Or, simply put, to justify his claims. Yet, there is a further catch here. Socrates is not only interested in what the interlocutor says. Rather, what Socrates is constantly demanding is that the interlocutor ties his soul to his claims. That is, in being asked to provide sound reasons for his claims, what the interlocutor is asked to do is appeal to the ‘ought’, the good, of his claims. Or, more strongly put, the Socratic examination essentially includes the moral challenge to take responsibility for, to be able to fully stand behind, what is said and done; to redeem, to own, the desire informing the claims (cf. Vlastos 1991; Wallgren 2006). So, for instance, Callicles’ attempt to defend excess as the highest virtue of a human life fails, not simply because it is ‘untrue’, but rather because he cannot fully, undivided, stand behind the notion that any fool who scratches an itch lives an admirable life because of the pleasure that the scratching produces. His soul, his desire, cannot redeem the urge, the displaced desire, which informs his account. Independently, then, of whether what the interlocutor says and does actually is rationally sound, in the Socratic examination, the interlocutor cannot but rationally appeal to the soundness of his claims by appealing to their goodness, to their ‘ought’. That is, the appeal to the good, to the ought, is unavoidably present if and to the extent that the claim is that this is what the interlocutor wants. To will something means to conceive of it as, or claim it to be, good. Consequently, the soundness of one’s will is directly proportional to the soundness of one’s reason(s), while failure to provide sound reasons, that is, failure to tie one’s soul fully to one’s

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claims, reduces the grammatical space for saying that one does what one wants. Such is the logic of human telos, the telos of the rational soul. Interestingly, however, this teleological principle implies, as we might say with reference to Hegel (1997), retroactivity. Or, as we said before, the rational soul, the will of the soul, is something to be redeemed. For while human language and actions inevitably have a normative structure to them, their normativity exists as normative only in and through the practice of rational discourse. For it is only through the process of articulating one’s reasons in reply to the question or plea for them that they, so to speak, become or show themselves, retroactively, as the reasons, as the will, that have informed one’s claims and actions. Truth arises, in this sense, through a form of separation from one’s immediate self. Or, apropos of a picture Plato provides us with elsewhere, in his examination of the interlocutor’s soul, that is, in mobilising the interlocutor’s desire by asking for reasons and thereby putting forth the challenge of taking responsibility for desire, Socrates functions as the midwife in the labour of the interlocutor’s (rational) soul (Theaetetus, 148e; 150c). The existential queerness of this retroactive dynamic is, of course, that the interlocutors find their own will—reluctant though they might be to embrace it—in or through the voice of reason (Socrates), yet simultaneously they find it engraved in their own words and claims. The Socratic examination exposes that the true home of desire is elsewhere than where the interlocutors would consciously—and to some extent sincerely—locate it, yet simultaneously always-already there in the grammar of everything they do.

4.7 What Truth Does the Interlocutor’s Desire Bespeak? The suggestion is, then, that the Socratic search for truth is essentially subject to the question of ‘how should we live’ (cf. Vlastos 1991), and that truth is, therefore, proportional to the extent one is able to redeem the desire informing any given claim. Yet, as we have seen, this setup presupposes a nakedness between the souls engaged in this search for truth. Or, alternatively, any description of a successful redemption of desire is a description of a naked encounter, rather than an explanation of

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it. We already asked the question of why this nakedness between souls is needed. And we preliminarily entertained the suggestion that this is so because the desire to be redeemed in questions of truth and/or meaning is originally tied to the other. To the extent Gorgias provides us with some indications of the relationship between desire and the other, over and above the explicit imperatives given by the tale and by Socrates’ short remarks on the ‘love for the people’ vis-à-vis the witness of a single person, it must be found in the grammar, in the unconscious, of Callicles’ primary identification with the image of the slave—as he himself gives expression to it. For it is this primary identification which both motivates the desire for unlimited social affirmation-cum-power as well as inscribes a contradiction, a displacement, into this desire. That is, this is, par excellence, the desire that the interlocutors are not able to redeem. This must mean, in turn, that there is a desire internal to the primary identification with the slave that remains unacknowledged, waiting to be redeemed. I shall now try to rewrite Callicles’ primary identification and his desire for unlimited affirmation so that we get a glimpse of what this underlying, hidden desire is or at least might be. If what one fears is one’s vulnerability with respect to other people and, in response, attempts to secure an invulnerability by means of social affirmation, what is it that one then fears—and desires? To fear becoming the victim of unjust acts, which is what Callicles comes to consciously identify as bad or undesirable (and unconsciously as the condition of his primary identification), is to fear being mistreated or not being cared for. What the struggle for social affirmation then seeks—at least in the sense Socrates’ interlocutors depict it—is to avoid mistreatment by attempting to secure respect and admiration from others. The other side of this fear of being mistreated—the fear of not being cared for, of being abandoned—is, of course, the desire to be treated well, to be cared for and loved by others. And this is certainly what social affirmation tries to answer by attempting to secure it. What, then, is the problem with all of this? For if what the interlocutors want is to be cared for and loved by others, is this not exactly something that they will achieve through their struggles for fame and glory, regardless of the means? Is not their ‘love for the people’ exactly answered by love from the people? How is this in fact not what they want?

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Think once more of Callicles’ primary identification with the slave, that is, his primary identification as someone fundamentally vulnerable and at the mercy of (supposed) omnipresent perpetrators. Think also of the paradox that is generated by the attempt to secure oneself from this predicament: in this fear of being mistreated, which is what the interlocutors do not want, yet anticipate, and in their attempt to secure themselves against it, they must themselves become what they initially fear, namely perpetrators—perpetrators of desire. They must, in other words, take on that exact position which initially causes their own fear; they must, in this sense, become others to themselves. The sinister character of this is that in attempting to secure themselves against their primary fears, in order to attempt to secure the fulfilment of their primary desire to be loved and cared for, the interlocutors think they must become the very thing, callous creatures, that is, which stand in the way of their original, primary, desire for love and care. In this sense, one might say that injustice, or rather, the lack of love and care, is its own cause. Conversely, the problem with the initial, primary, desire for love and care, the initial desire to be desired by the other that is engraved in the grammar of the fear and in the anticipation of becoming a victim of injustice, is just that; it lacks any means by which it could guarantee or secure the fulfilment of itself—as Socrates frankly admits. The other, others, will just simply have to love and care. Note also, that the grammar here seems to imply that the initial desire, the desire prior to any fearful attempt to secure—and thereby displace—the love and care of others, is a desire to be desired as oneself, that is, as oneself prior to or outside of the logic of the collective body. Consequently, such a desire is a desire for others as themselves, that is, as themselves prior to or outside of the logic of the collective body. In other words, the reality of one’s initial desire comes with the acknowledgement (be it suppressed or repressed) that it is always persons themselves who desire and who love and care. What the reality of desire thus, grammatically, implies is that one, in one’s desire to be cared for and loved by the other, loves and cares for the ‘naked’ soul of the other. In short, in one’s initial desire, one, as oneself, cares for and loves, desires, others as themselves. My claim here is, then, that what Socrates’ interlocutors attempt to accomplish with the craft of oratory is not security against human

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vulnerability in any general sense.3 Rather, what they originally fear losing or never gaining is the love and care of the other, of the ‘you’. One might of course wonder what kind of reconciliation social affirmation is supposed to provide—in what way does it, seemingly, alleviate the terror of desire? The Platonic proposal is, as I have argued, that the reality of the soul is persistent; that it lingers on, engraves itself in the very expression of the soul; the reality of desire cannot be done away with. Transmutations, displacements, are needed. One must, in other words, transmute, displace, the reality of desire, that is, the fact that desire cannot be commanded or manipulated, but only given and received without reciprocal guarantee. Yet, simultaneously, one must keep the shadow or image of the real intact—think here of the structure of repression of the ‘cannot see the mind’ in the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Sect. 2.3). For without the shadow of the real, the displaced object would not, could not, answer our desire to displace desire. Consequently, in the struggle to secure unlimited social affirmation, the interlocutors displace their desire to be—as themselves—desired by the other—as themselves—by construing

 I think that many of us would, to some extent, find it, if not convincing, then at least close to the truth, to say that there is something fundamentally troubling about our mortality and, consequently, about being a living creature. And Socrates’ interlocutors do, in some sense, react to human mortality and finitude and think that oratory can, to some extent, secure them from this terrifying condition. Likewise, Socrates responds to Callicles’ claims by saying that a wise and just person should not fear death and that we would do best to not think so much about how to keep ourselves alive, but rather about how to live good lives (522d–e). So, fear of death (and pain) and the associated vulnerability of our embodied being are clearly part of the picture. However, as we have seen, we need to acknowledge how the fear of death and vulnerability are—in Gorgias—essentially, grammatically, entangled with a fear of losing face, with being humiliated; in the dialogue, we do not find any clear distinctions made between, on the one hand, a sheer and raw fear of death (or injustice) and, on the other hand, a fear of being seen in a shameful light by the social gaze, that is, of losing one’s affirmation or not achieving it in the first place. Put otherwise, it is of central importance to see that the vulnerability given voice to in the dialogue is not a vulnerability in some general sense (human morality and finitude), but specifically in relation to desire and its entanglement with social affirmation. For while we might certainly fear a tiger or a volcano (obviously, these two constitute grammatically different forms of fear from each other as well), we do not, in order to secure ourselves from them, seek or desire social affirmation from them (if we do so, then we have placed them within the dynamics of desire inherent in human relations, and to what extent we can do so, and what difference there is between doing so in relation to an animal and in relation to a volcano, is something to be discussed, but not here). Therefore, what we must seek to uncover is the dynamics involved in the specific fear to which the struggle for social affirmation is a reaction, a fear to which social affirmation is thought to be an antidote. 3

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themselves as images, signs (sēma), and bodies (sōma),4 which are affirmed, in a collective effort, by the social gaze—remember how, in the eschatological tale, the kinsmen of the judged eagerly flocked to testify in favour of the dazzling ‘body’. The transmutation, the displacement of desire, is possible exactly due to the collective nature of the ‘body’: because desire is collectively displaced onto the social gaze, to the symbolic matrix of social status, acquiring a given social position means the acquisition of the desire of the social gaze for its object—although never the desire of one person for another. It is, one might say, as if a social position had the potency of being the irresistible object of the other’s—collective—desire; as if the other would have to, necessarily, desire this. As one might put it, the genius of the collectively devised economy of social-symbolic affirmation is that it produces its own irresistible objects of desire, the position of which each individual belonging to this collective ‘body’ can aspire to fill—notwithstanding historically specific socio-hierarchical limitations. So, the search for social affirmation as a means to secure the desire of the other backfires throughout the complex of original desire. First, it is not we ourselves as ourselves who become cared for and loved. Nor is it we ourselves as ourselves who receive the desire of the other as themselves. Moreover, it is not we ourselves as ourselves who love and care for the other as themselves. To the extent we want to secure the desire of the other, we seek not the desire of the other’s soul (for this cannot be secured), but only the desire of the other as a representative of, in the position of, the collective effort to overcome the reality of desire. One might even say that in our pursuit of security and in our evasion of the reality of desire through social affirmation, we transmute the other’s soul and desire more and more into the object of our own paranoia, that is, our fear of desire. So, although we always want the love and desire of the other as themselves and love and desire others as themselves, that is, although we want the good, the rationally sound, our attempts to secure, to guarantee, the desire of the other cannot but result in doing what we see fit rather than  In Gorgias Socrates comes with the (ironic) claim ‘that our bodies are our tombs’ (493 a). In the Cratylus dialogue, Socrates notes, echoing the Gorgias, that ‘some people say that the body (sōma) is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, on the ground that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called “a sign” (sēma) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body’ (Cratylus, 400 c).

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what we really want, as we displace, or give up on, what it is we actually want, actually desire. In short, what the interlocutors ultimately fail to redeem is not only their desire for unlimited social affirmation. Rather, what they fundamentally fail to redeem is the complex reality of their original desire. If this was not the case, and if Plato did not in some sense also think this, that is to say, if we in truth did not care for and love others, if what we really wanted was simply mere social affirmation, then Socrates’ interlocutors should have had no problem giving sound reasons for their claims as there would have been nothing in their ‘rational positions’ that would have divided their souls and resisted the redeeming of their desire.

4.8 The Nakedness Between Self and Other Is the Cut Between the Signifier and the Signified: On the Impasse of Reason I want to propose that our reading of Gorgias so far can be thought of in terms of the following formula: At the heart of the interlocutors’ claims resides a, let us call it, primordial desire—a desire to be loved and cared for by the other, and thereby a love and care for the other. This desire does not have any reasons, as we might put it. Rather, it is what gives us reasons. However, each and every response to the desire between souls manifests its own grammar. That is, how one responds has its own particular structures of reason to it, which can be more or less in tune with, or the soul can be more or less in dissonance with, original desire. Yet, in order to determine the soundness of one’s response, in order to determine if one is able to redeem one’s desire, an open, naked, dialogical encounter is needed. That is, the study of the grammar of one’s response must be (re) connected with the very scene of the original desire of the soul in order for the soul to know and find out what it really wants. The claim of this formula is, of course, massive. What it suggests is that the whole web of the human soul stems from the complex dialectic between original desire

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and the redemption of it through our study of the soul in the actual lives we lead. Put differently, it suggests that the whole of philosophy is, in some sense, condensed in this dialectic movement. Of course, this formula does not say what truth is or means. Rather, it simply says something about the position or place of truth in our lives. Let us then walk through the proposed formula with some more attentiveness. As argued above, Callicles cannot want to be unjust because injustice forecloses, displaces, the very source of his desire. In order to push our investigation in the desired direction, I shall rephrase this thesis a bit by saying that Callicles, that all of us, cannot want to cause pain and suffering to, or want anything bad for, others per se. Put differently, we desire mutual love and care without any reasons—yet not ‘irrationally’. However, as said, each response to the constitutive desire of the soul has a grammar to it and has reasons underpinning it, which can be of various kinds. Now the thing I want to bring into focus here is that while we cannot want to cause pain and suffering to others per se, we can want to do so for good reasons. We can, in other words, want to cause pain and suffering if the pain and suffering is good, if it is part of our care and love for the other. Enter the need for philosophy—and its limits or impasse. Some years ago, when my son was around three years old, he hurt himself quite badly, leaving the wounded part severely sore. Naturally, every time his wound was to be tended, he would burst out in fearful tears and hysterically attempt to avoid treatment, a treatment which caused him pain and suffering and fear—as does the tending of any trauma. True, there was no real danger here. Yet, the terror in his eyes and in his whole body were, well, terror. In turn, the direct witnessing of this terror and fear in him gave rise, in me, to a desire not to have him experience them. Internal to the seeing of the other’s terror and pain is the desire not to cause pain and terror. Of course, to have refrained from causing him such pain and terror would have been completely irrational and destructive, as it would not, in fact, have been a way of caring for him, but would have led to much graver health risks and, consequently, worse pain and suffering—which was something I knew. The same could be said about the state of the soul. At least Plato wants to say so, and I believe with a certain right. For when someone has a corrupt or ill soul,

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we want this person to become good, ‘healthy’, and we want this consciously and precisely to the extent that we are actually ready to care for this person and have the courage to do so, that is, the courage to face the evil, the pain, and the suffering of the other. For to face the contradictions, the dissonance, the corruption, the evil, and the terror in one’s soul is a terrible thing—in some sense for corrupt reasons, of course; the difficulty of facing the dissonance of the soul is part of the very displacement itself—and might cause deep anxiety and resistance, which in turn easily gets transmuted into other symptoms. As said, protecting a person from such pain and suffering would, nevertheless, be irrational and amount to a lack of goodness, as one would not in fact be helping the other, would not in fact be caring for her, which is what one wants to do.5 There seems to be, in other words, something true about Plato’s suggestion—apropos of the ‘prison of retribution’ in the eschatological tale and the claim that it is better to suffer just punishment than to escape it— that correcting or healing a certain ill, a dissonance, might demand some pain and suffering. Consequently, there is a sense in which we can say that one can want to inflict pain and suffering on the other, insofar as the reasons are essentially tied to one’s caring and love for the other. However, while the reasons one has for inflicting pain and suffering might be an essential part of one’s love and care for the other, they look towards a state that is beyond the immediacy of that pain and suffering—again, we do not want pain and suffering per se. A crucial aspect of this is that reasons are, in a certain way, what makes it existentially possible to bear the terror and suffering, one witnesses in the other’s face and expressions. In other words, I am able to play an active part in inducing terror in my son because I think, believe, know, and hope that this is actually good for him.

 Although it is of course true that one must be somewhat attentive as to how much a person is able to handle at a given moment, one does not want the other person to break down completely and become, for example, psychotic or self-destructive. On the other hand, though, it is not at all clear how one can control such things. Nor is it always clear to what extent it in fact is desirable that a person avoids harsh psychic difficulties. As far as I can see, facing up to one’s displacements means finding oneself ‘at the bottom of one’s pit’. As long as one has not reached the ‘bottom’, one can always fall deeper, or learn to live with or manage one’s displacements. There is, however, no general rule as to where or when one reaches one’s ‘bottom’. To find oneself ‘at the bottom’ is to (finally) acknowledge one’s predicament and that the ‘abyss’ is self-inflicted and self-created. 5

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While the grammar, or reasons, of our loving responses to others’ sufferings fortunately include the courage to seek to understand ways in which to treat and heal those sufferings and, more generally, to seek ways in which to help others to be and do good, the existentially alleviating effect of reason in the face of pain and suffering is also a source of disquietude. For if causing pain and suffering to others is, on some basic level, existentially unbearable to our souls, then it is just as true that the appeal to reason is what makes the causing of unjust pain and suffering, doing evil to others, existentially bearable—for the wrongdoer. In short, whenever evil (displacement) is done (perhaps only in thought), and as long as one does not (dare to) acknowledge it as an evil (displacement), one will (have to) produce reasons for why, say, the unjust infliction of pain and suffering on another person is nevertheless ‘right’, ‘just’, and how this ‘in the end’ in fact benefits the victim (or why the victim justly ‘deserved it’)—or how it benefits oneself, others, society, etc. As rational beings, we always ‘want the good’, and this is why reason cannot but attempt to justify evil. This is, as far as I can see, what makes a notion such as ‘necessary evil’ (cf. Gaita 2004; Toivakainen 2017) grammatically possible, and so persistent. Once again we find ourselves in the courts of Hades, awaiting the ultimate judgement, which itself continuously risks being flawed and corrupt. I tend to the wounds of my son, inducing pain and suffering, as an expression of my care and love for him. If someone asks me why I am doing it, or why I think I ought to do it, my appeal to reasons beyond my limited medical know-how is quite narrow: I do it because I love my son—yet I do not know, and I have no reasons for, why I love my son. Or, I do not have, nor do I need, any justifications for why I love my son. Some 75 years earlier, in a most unhappy place in southern Poland, Commandant Rudolf Höss struggles with something, at least remotely, similar, namely his encounter with the most horrific pain and suffering imaginable—brought forth by his own hand. This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took a part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all of those detailed to do this monstrous “work”, this “service”, and

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who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked: is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler’s order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed forever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts. I myself dared not admit to such doubts. In order to make my subordinates carry on with their task, it was psychologically essential that I myself appear convinced of the necessity for this gruesomely harsh order. (Höss 1957, 169–170)

It is not with any ease that one begins to imagine the reality of these events—although we have all, of course, already done so. Anyway, it is clear that while Höss and his companions did not seem to have wanted to cause or witness pain and suffering per se, the existential investments in the ideological notion of the historical fate and destiny of the German people—or simply in the father figure of the Führer—were what made it possible for them to commit these horrific acts. They had their reasons! That is, given the actual state, the actual responses, of their souls, as reported by Höss, it would be inconceivable that they would not have needed to provide reasons, justifications, for their acts. At some point in Höss’ case, there needs to be an ‘ought’ that is turned into a ‘must’. However, one nevertheless hesitates to say that the reasons, the justifications, appealed to by Höss would have made his and his comrades’ acts of terror bearable to them. This hesitance stands in contrast to what I said just a few paragraphs earlier about reasons and justifications being those that make the causing of pain and terror to others bearable. At least what

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Höss describes does not seem bearable in the same sense as my inflictions of pain and suffering on my son in the tending of his wound was—as far as I can see. True, despite the gap that divides my soul from that of Commandant Höss’, we stand side by side, as fellow human beings, in our encounter with the terror, with the suffering, of another person piercing through our souls. Yet, while bearing the terror in my son’s eyes did not force an unbridgeable divide in me between an inner experience and an outer appearance/position, it seems clear that the outer, collective appearance/position of Höss necessarily suppressed, imprisoned, a part of his existential response to an inner, hidden/private, domain. So, as one might now suggest, rather than Höss existentially bearing the pain and suffering of his victims by way of his reasons, the reasons diminished, impoverished, and withered his soul and his desire—and for many of his comrades, this withering reached the point of self-annihilation. Nonetheless, Höss surely needed his reasons to protect himself. The heart of Höss’ torment was, of course, that the reasons which mobilised the acts of terror were not simply a call of duty indifferent to the suffering of others. On the contrary, the very essence of the call showed itself to be intimately tied to that suffering, and so the torment of his victims became his torment. Put differently, while it seems quite clear that Höss did not want the suffering of others per se, the reasons for his actions seemed to demand that he exactly ought to have, must have, wanted it. I have heard an anecdote—and think I have read it somewhere also, but cannot find it anymore—about how the great Mahatma Gandhi once refused medical treatment—of the ‘western’, ‘modern’, kind—to his child, who was, so I believe, mortally ill at that moment, thus placing the child’s life in danger. Now I am not sure if the anecdote is true or not, or if I am reporting it correctly or not. However, it is quite consistent with some of the core beliefs Gandhi held concerning the purpose and goal of human life, the health of the human mind vis-á-vis the human body, and modern civilisation. Just consider the following passage from his famous pamphlet Hind Swaraj: Doctors have almost unhinged us. Sometimes I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors. Let us consider: the business of a doctor

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is to take care of the body, or, properly speaking, not even that. Their business is really to rid the body of disease that may afflict it. How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I over-eat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured, I over-eat again, and I take his pills again. Had I not take the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me, and I would not have over-eaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease, but my mind became weakened. A continuance of a course of a medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind. […] The fact remains that the doctors induce us to indulge, and the result is that we have become deprived of self-control and have become effeminate. In these circumstances, we are unfit to serve the country. To study European medicine is to deepen our slavery. (Gandhi 1997, 63–64)

This is a tough piece to swallow, no doubt. For despite Gandhi’s confidence in his own reasoning, the argument, the appeal, is not in any obvious sense consistent. For instance, Gandhi does not take into account that much of medical treatment is related to health issues which do not, in any clear or necessary sense, stem from indulgences. Can, for instance, all accidents always be traced back to indulgence? And it is hard, for me at least, not to sense some degree of ressentiment in Gandhi’s voice—and one certainly comes to think of Callicles’ and Nietzsche’s critique of self-­ discipline when reading Gandhi. Yet, are we in a position to disregard it altogether? Is it not, rather, something we are obliged to chew on, regardless of how threatening, or undermining, it might seem to us and to our civilisation. If for no other reason, then at least because it is addressed to us by a voice whose investment in the claims professed reached quite unfathomable proportions. It is, in other words, addressed to us with a high degree of sincerity. Nonetheless, our business here is not to scrutinise Gandhi’s diagnosis of modern medicine. All we need is to simply acknowledge that there is something to be considered in it—or if we think that no such acknowledgement is in place, then we should give our reasons for it. So let us return to our main topic. Supposing our small anecdote to be true, then, like in both of our previous examples, it seems clear that Gandhi did not want the pain and suffering of his child per se, although he was not ready to alleviate it by

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certain means either. In a way similar to what we find in Plato, Gandhi seemed to think that an illness or a disease always requires a just, or ‘natural’, punishment in order for true health to re-establish itself. In other words, he thought that the pain and suffering of his child—if the anecdote is true—was good, not only for the child but also for civilisation, human kind, and the natural order. In fact, the good of these two, the child’s and civilisation’s, are inseparable in Gandhi’s mind. Now then, to the extent there is something to be seriously discussed in Gandhi’s claim, there seems also to be a question here to what extent my treatment of my son’s wound might have come with a certain undesirable cost; at the cost of his soul’s, and civilisation’s, actual well-being. For sure, my son’s wound was not a disease of the kind Gandhi was talking about, but it might just as well have been that. Consequently, and to the extent I do not doubt Gandhi’s sincerity, what separates me and him is that he really seemed to believe that giving medicine would be bad, whereas this was not, although it perhaps ought to have been, something I believed—it did not cross my mind at the time. Simultaneously, though, the distance between us is not that great. For one thing, my helping my son did not have the aim of doing ill to others, or to civilisation—or if this was my true aim, then I ought to be condemned for it. We could, of course, easily vary the example of my son’s wound in order to bring it closer to Gandhi’s idea(ls) by devising it to contain a choice for me between saving my son or rescuing, say, the life of other people, or why not hindering the demise of a whole civilisation. So, I still witness the terror in my son’s eyes and desire to alleviate it. At the same time, however, there are other lives at stake, other people’s torment at play, other things to be taken into account, and so I might become convinced that I cannot save my son, but must rather turn my helping hand elsewhere. It is certainly tempting to think that I, in such a scenario, would sacrifice my son’s life—and my own torment—for the benefit of others, for a greater good, as we say. As much as it certainly might feel like a sacrifice, there is, however, something obscure about thinking of it in such terms. Would I or would my son really have wanted that I acted differently? The hideous challenge Plato directs at our ‘appetites’ is that if it was indeed good for me not to save my son but rather the lives of others, then, in truth, this is what my son and I both really wanted, regardless of how terrible this might feel, regardless of how

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emotionally incapable we would be to acknowledge it. The truth of our soul certainly weighs heavy on us—as Plato duly acknowledges. Commandant Höss’ case is, to some extent at least, different and harder to acknowledge, or comprehend. In both my and Gandhi’s examples, the case can more easily be made that the reasons for our actions were for the good of others. That is, while Gandhi does not seem to think that the achievement of the good is essentially or per se tied to the suffering and pain of others, Höss does clearly acknowledge that the aim of the Nazi regime in fact essentially required the pain and suffering, and the extermination of, a massive amount of people as such. Ergo, the pain and suffering per se of the other was internal to the normative claims of Höss and his supposed ultimate authority-cum-superego. What, on the other hand, makes Höss—perhaps to our horror—human, is his lack of attempts to argue, existentially, that the pain and suffering of his victims were, in fact, in the end good for them as well, that is, something they themselves ought to have wanted. This is, of course, something that he could have done, and something, I gather, many took to. Höss’ contact with his soul resides in the very conflict, the torment, he finds himself in. In turn, it is exactly at this point that we might become, if there are good reasons for it, suspicious of anyone who claims that another’s pain and suffering is actually desirable, like in the case of Gandhi, Plato, and myself for that matter. Again, these three examples are meant to illustrate that there is a normative dimension to the grammar with which we respond to human life, and that the reasons we give and appeal to can be both a means for legitimatising evil as well as expressive of our care for each other. So while the normative structure ultimately corresponds with the extent to which we are able to redeem our desire, in order to discern the extent to which it is redeemed and to discern where evil and displacement linger, we need a proper examination of these issues and of our souls. Yet, how are we to produce the ideal speech situation, or secure proper discourse ethics, to borrow terms from Habermas (1990)? Let Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles engage in a Socratic examination amongst themselves and they will surely cook up the most elaborate justifications for their displaced desire for social affirmation, and be quite content with whatever arguments the discussion produces. Everything will seem completely sound and morally

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rigid. They will be, so to speak, blind to the unsoundness, to the actual grammar, of their claims exactly because their blindness is inscribed in their chosen view of things. Similarly, if I am bent on doing evil or displacing my desire, and if my interlocutor is bent on the same or some other corruption, then we will produce rational justifications which will seem completely legitimate to us, as these are exactly our ways of expressing or articulating our evil, our displacements. We might of course add that Socratic discursive reasoning comes with the requirement ‘say only what you sincerely believe’ (Vlastos 1991; Wallgren 2006), and that this entails a constant self-examination and search for what one truly wants. For sure, nothing hinders us from articulating such criteria. But the very means by which we are to discern the extent to which such criteria have been satisfied is part and parcel of the very moral-existential strength the criteria themselves call for. The moral order of things is manifest there in the grammar, in the use of our words, and in our lives with others. But it is only our goodness, and the level of goodness one is actually open to, which sets the limit to how close we can get to the truth about ourselves, others, and the world as it is manifest in the grammar of our language-cum-­responses.6 This is why Plato does not simply present us with a method, a system of principles, a doctrine. Instead, Plato offers us Socrates, the person, who incarnates the good. That is, he offers us Socrates as one who is postulated as someone with a good will and the courage to live according to it. Callicles is not only opposed to what is true or consistent. He stands against Socrates, the person. Again, Plato’s grand claim is, as I have come to suggest, that the very spirit in which, the will with which, we engage in rational discourse, in the rational study of the soul, needs to be (re)connected with a ‘naked’  Compare this with the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. There we find the hero of the story, the philosopher, ‘compelled’ and ‘dragged’ (Republic, 515d–e) towards the opening of the cave out into the real world, where he encounters, not simply human artefacts or their shadows (as in the cave) but real things, illuminated—or animated—by the real sun (not the fire in the cave), which, being the ‘last thing to be seen’, is ‘the good’ (Republic, 517b). And then Socrates continues by saying that ‘one must conclude that [the good] is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything’ (Republic, 517c). This seems to me to be more or less similar to what I have suggested that the eschatological tale in Gorgias points towards. Namely, that reason cannot serve the pursuit of truth, of meaning, without the good (will); it is the goodness that makes the truth true. We cannot produce a good will through reason alone, nor can we reason to truth without a good will. As one might put it, and as I think Plato means it, reason without the good (will) is not reason proper.

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encounter with the other, with the very source of our desire. This brings us back to the prison of retribution in the eschatological tale. I have already indicated that instead of reading the pain and suffering of those denied access to the Isles of the Blessed as outright ressentiment, this part of the tale can be read as a direct consequence of the offence against the desire of the soul in every evil and unjust act. That is, being nakedly open with another person redeems our consciousness with that part of us that has been foreclosed, displaced, by our evil and injustice. To face the offences against our souls, against our core desire, is to suffer the suffering of our victims as it has been imprinted in our souls. And such suffering is, arguably, worse than the suffering of the victim, because one must suffer both the cause (oneself ) and the effect (the suffering of the other) of evil. In other words, the pain and suffering in the prison of retribution is essentially self-inflicted. What, then, about those doomed to eternal punishment, those whose souls cannot be saved? At first sight, this sounds terrible. How could one say, without some sinister bitterness, that there are, possibly, those who have completely lost contact with their soul’s desire and are unable to redeem themselves? Yet, there might be something important embedded here. For if the pain and suffering in the prison of retribution is nothing but the weight of the offence against the core desire of the soul, then this entails that even in the hopeless cases envisioned by Plato, the soul, despite its incurable state, never loses its very core, its fundamental care or love for others. For it is exactly this core of the soul which makes pain and suffering possible in the prison of retribution; without it, the soul cannot suffer its injustice. What, then, makes a soul eternally lost is simply its continuous inability, its continuous unwillingness, its weakness, to accept its essential tie to the other, even while it is simultaneously never able to fully escape or negate this tie, this real of the soul’s desire, either. We can discern here a kind of eternal twilight in the guise of a phantasmatic desire to undo the undoable. The prospect that once we, our souls, have entered the realm of existence, there is no return to non-existence is, no doubt, a source of both hope and despair. For the price of the soul’s being, which we certainly never chose but simply find ourselves in, is the price of ultimate freedom, namely ultimate responsibility. We are, as

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Plato wants us to acknowledge, fully free to do whatever we ‘see fit’ with our souls and our desires. We may even attempt to fully deny them, for all eternity—but not without a cost: our being, our desire, exercises an inescapable force on us and is infinitely ours to bear. Consequently, were we not ready to accept the terrible possibility of ultimately turning our hearts into stone, we could never be free in a radical sense—a bit in the same way that our relationship to truth could never be, in a radical or full sense, ours, if we were not ready to accept that there is no method to secure a good will and hence an undistorted relation to truth. Similarly, if we wouldn’t be ready to accept that our desire for the other’s desire cannot be secured or determined, especially not by the other party alone, then we as ourselves could never really love or care for the other as themselves, and vice versa.

4.9 Coda Again, what does Plato offer us? What can he offer us? Take any of his dialogues, especially those with Socrates as the main protagonist, and it is clear that Plato’s vision of the philosopher, of philosophy, promises us intellectual excellence. Yet, excellence comes with a host of moral conditions, drawbacks, disappointments, and dangers. For the excellence he offers us is stripped of all the benefits, pleasures, and satisfactions of sophistry and oratory. Not monastic asceticism, but a harsh life nonetheless— filled with the joys of encountering others nakedly. For the life of true friendship and love—a life in truth—that he offers us comes at the probable cost of hate and despise from ‘the people’—and perhaps death by them. Yet, what else could we want! Say that we become attracted by this appeal, by this call. What then? We find some convincing arguments in the dialogue(s) like: it is better to suffer than to commit injustice, and it is better to suffer than to escape just punishment. Fine. But do we thereby know when we are unjust and when we are just, and what a just punishment is, what it means? Not really. Where are we then to turn? In the closing paragraph of Gorgias, Socrates has this to say.

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So, listen to me and follow me to where I am, and when you’ve come here you’ll be happy both during life and at its end, as the account [the eschatological tale] indicates. Let someone despise you as a fool and throw dirt on you, if he likes. And, yes, by Zeus, confidently let him deal you that demeaning blow. Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now. For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present—when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that—to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind education we’ve fallen. (527 d–e)

What kind of excellence is it that Socrates invites his interlocutors to partake in? How does Socrates himself essentially practise this excellence? Is it not by practising philosophy, that is, by studying his own soul by studying the soul of his interlocutor and thereby gradually advancing, not truths that once and for all satisfy absolute criteria, but rather a capacity to deal with questions of meaning and moral judgement, that is, a moral capacity to deliberate about whatever subjects (cf. Wallgren 2006, 54–60). So philosophy—the naked study of the soul—before politics and deliberation. A great recipe! But then again, in order to utilise our rational capacity for the development of our moral capacity, we already need to be good. True enough, there are normative requirements that need to be observed here: essentially, the principle of sincerity, which includes the acknowledgement of one’s ignorance of all the unclarities that prevail (Apology 22 d; 23 b). Yet, what is such a requirement without the moral strength to realise it, to cash it out, to redeem it—and the moral strength to acknowledge the moral difficulty of a life in truth and the acknowledgement of the lack of this strength. So here the recipes end, which means that all of the recipes we can find essentially become dependent on something that cannot be a recipe. I think it is not surprising if we feel a sense of hopelessness at the prospect that there really is nothing beyond a good will that can secure a good will and thus secure our alignment/alliance with truth. That is to say, it is not surprising if we feel terrified at the prospect that we are in the end individually responsible for

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our goodness and our relationship to truth, just as we may feel terrified with respect to the openness and vulnerability of—the lack of any guarantee of reciprocity in—desire. Yet, why is it so difficult to bear such responsibility? It is exactly because of the unbridgeable cut between the signifiers of the law and their signified that Plato essentially offers us Socrates, the person; one who, by stipulation, possessed the good will, and the moral strength, needed. The nakedness of the soul and the nakedness between souls is not something which bridges the cut. Rather, it is the cut, and it is in this cut that meaning exists—so to speak.

References Annas, J. 2003. Plato: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bacon, F. 1999. Novum Organum Scientiarum. In Francis Bacon: Selected Philosophical Works, ed. R.-M. Sargent. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Collobert, C., D. Pierre, and J.G. Francisco. 2012. Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths. Leiden: BRILL. Gaita, R. 2004. Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis. Gandhi, M.K. 1997. In Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. A. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1997. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Höss, R. 1957. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss. Translated by C. FritzGibbon. New York: World Publishing Company. Plato. 1997a. Apology. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1997b. Cratylus. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1997c. Gorgias. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by D.J. Zeyl. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1997d. Republic. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.

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———. 1997e. Theaetetu. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by M.J. Levett. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Toivakainen, N. 2017. To Think for Oneself: Philosophy as the Unravelling of Moral Responsibility. In A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education, ed. M.A. Peters and J. Stickney. Singapore: Springer Nature. ———. 2020. Displacing Desire: An Essay on the Moral-Existential Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem. Helsinki: Unigrafia. Vlastos, G. 1991. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wallgren, T. 2006. Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

5 The Weight of Desire

5.1 Apropos of Descartes and Plato The aim of the two previous chapters has been to portray two universes radically different from each other, in their proximity. The official—or, if you prefer, the conscious—drama of Descartes’ mediations is the search for an unshakable foundation of indubitable and certain knowledge. In a sense fully consistent with this demand, Descartes comes to see that such a foundation must constitute a form of knowledge beyond, or perhaps more accurately put, prior to any judgement, because in the realm of judgements, humans are always fallible, always smitten by original sin. That is, the foundation of infallible and certain knowledge requires abolishing any gap, any distance, any medium, between the signifier and the signified. Instead, the foundation of knowledge, if it is to be based on indubitableness and certainty, must allow for ideas themselves to speak, without any need for judgement. The first principle of philosophy, Descartes claims, is completely self-transparent and self-sufficient. The somewhat more unofficial—or again, if you prefer, the unconscious—although no less explicitly present story of the Mediations concerns the existential tensions and anxieties which inform the very quest © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Toivakainen, Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40276-0_5

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for a foundation of knowledge. As I argued, Descartes’ whole project is informed by an excessive demand, the function of which is to restores, or rather inaugurate, a fundamental trust in the world. The trust that is sought is fulfilled by a failsafe, unconditional affirmation of the self by the ‘big Other’—to use the quite suiting Lacanian idiom—as revealed in the first principle, cogito, ergo sum. What the first principle of philosophy, in other words, answers to is an excessive existential anxiety: the world and other people have not managed to satisfy the excessive demand for affirmation of the self. Of course, nobody could ever, even in principle, satisfy Descartes’ demand, as it exceeds the possible capabilities of any human being. But the first principle comes at a cost. Namely, it cannot allow for excessive doubt to spread to the domain that supports and sustains meaning. Consequently, this limiting of excessive doubt shows us a simple fact, namely, that which supports and sustains meaning cannot have the certainty of cogito. The picture of meaning which Descartes must thereby assume is one in which God has provided the meaning of ideas and installed these ideas, with their self-sufficient and transparent meanings, in the minds of each individual. Put differently, in this picture, each element of a proposition or idea would have to be fully identical with itself, that is, the signifier-signified relation would simply be inherently in the mind and without any cut, without any mediating, relational, realm. Only such an Urszene of meaning makes the first principle of philosophy possible, that is, secures the unconditional affirmation of the self. In other words, the primal scene of meaning, which Descartes assumes, is a reflection of, a consequence of, his demand for unconditional affirmation of the self. But why, on what grounds, does Descartes limit the spread of doubt to the domain of meaning? As we might recall, Descartes only gives the following answer: ‘because these are notions of the simplest possible kind, which of themselves give us no knowledge of anything that exists, I did not think them worthy of being put on record’ (Descartes 1967, 222). As I argued, this, however, in no way explains why excessive doubt is denied access to these simple notions, notions that support and sustain the existence of cogito. Instead, it seems that there is a resistance to letting the excess spread to the scene of meaning, and that this resistance is the trace of a repression. The suspicion here is that the primal picture of meaning

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and its associated notion of self-transparent ideas endorsed by Descartes are placed at the exact point of what is repressed. As if there was something about the domain of meaning, perhaps even the primal scene of meaning, which is the cause of his excess, the cause of his anxiety. As if there was something about the domain, the primal scene, of meaning in reaction to which unconditional affirmation of the self was posited as a demand. Is this something to do with the lack of unconditional affirmation? Is such a notion, that is, the notion that there could be something like unconditional affirmation of the self and that we could thus lack it, graspable? Or, ought we rather understand the very grammar of the demand for unconditional affirmation not as in fact concerned with any lack thereof, but rather think of the whole notion, or discourse, of a lack as itself a mask covering up, with its seemingly existential horror as its justification, something of a completely different order? There is at least this undeniable affinity or kinship between Plato and Descartes: both claim that human beings have, or essentially are, rational souls, and that truth is internal to this rational soul. That is, both voice the idea that there is an inherent truth, an inherent (normative) order, inscribed in the grammar of our ideas and expressions. The ironic twist with respect to Descartes is, however, that Plato—as I have, so to speak, re-created him—exactly undermines the pinnacle of the Cartesian universe, namely the notion that the cogito has a direct, transparent, self-­sufficient, access to the sense, to the meaning, of the order, the law, of truth. As mirrored in the eschatological tale, the Gorgias illustrates how, when left to its own (phantasmatic) powers, the cogito of law in fact displaces its own sense (justice), its own judgement, its own normative principles. Even more so, and this is the quintessential point, ruled only by its own (phantasmatic) powers, the cogito of law, its judgements, seem to inevitably be subject to the appetites of ‘the body’, that is, subject to a struggle for guaranteed, unlimited, affirmation of the self. So there are at least these points where Descartes’ and Socrates’ interlocutors stand on the same ground: for both, the ultimate and/or primal end of knowledge is to secure affirmation of the self, that is, to guard against a decisive point of vulnerability in the human condition. And for both, this comes at the cost of repressing a crucial feature in the relationship between truth, meaning, and desire. As a contrast to Descartes, in Plato’s Gorgias we find, as I have suggested, a

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characterisation of the domain of, the primal scene of, meaning as bound to an open encounter between naked souls. On the one hand, the final judgement symbolises the ultimate meaning, the ultimate aim or telos, of the human soul. On the other hand, in order to have the capacity, the understanding, to fulfil this telos, the understanding must be (re-)connected with the desire from which the grammar of language springs. It is desire that fundamentally informs the sense of normativity inscribed in the grammar of our language. The crucial point here is that in the Platonic universe, whatever the ultimate meaning, or truth, of the soul is, it cannot be determined, so to speak, outside of the naked encounter between souls. In this sense, whatever meaning or truth is, it cannot be a predetermined meaning or truth given independently of this nakedness. And this is why, I have come to suggest, the question of, even the primal scene of, meaning is always a search for, or an exploration of, meaning, since there is no possible universal application of sense outside of the naked encounter between souls. Thus the harsh-sounding maxim of Socrates: ‘[the] unexamined life is not worth living’ (Plato 1997, 38a). Moreover, (Socratic) philosophy, that is, the exploration of meaning through the study of the soul, does not aim to fix an axiomatic foundations of meaning. Rather, philosophy, in the Socratic sense, is the, say, development of our moral capacity and/or strength to redeem the weight, the bearing, of our own and the other’s desires and the meanings it engenders (cf. Wallgren 2006). In other words, meaning cannot, pace Descartes, be found simply where the supposed Other of language speaks in place of the I. While, as I have argued, Descartes imposes a primal scene of meaning which supports and satisfies his excessive demand for unconditional and unlimited affirmation of the self, and thus functions as a point of repression, my reading of Gorgias in turn puts forth an alternative Urszene in which no such thing is possible—as Socrates’ interlocutors sense with terror—since it locates the point of meaning, the telos of desire, elsewhere. Again, however, is the truth of Plato’s primal or ultimate scene really that it lacks what Socrates’ interlocutors and Descartes demand? Is it actually existential vulnerability that underpins and motivates the repression of the cut internal to the primal scene of meaning? Is it really existential vulnerability that motivates the demand for unconditional affirmation? Or, is it rather the very perception of a fundamental

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vulnerability at the heart of the primal scene, the perception of a lack of the unconditional, which in fact constitutes the actual point of repression? It is against this background that we shall now turn to our Wittgensteinian reading of Lacan, and our Lacanian reading of Wittgenstein, both implicitly rooted in, or inspired by, the heterogeneous tradition of philosophy of dialogue and/or the I-you perspective. Our focus will be on some crucial features of the primal scenes of meaning and subjectivity that Lacan and Wittgenstein, respectively, deploy, from whereon we shall push the investigation further.

5.2 The Pure Negativity of the Signifier as Such: Lacan’s Anti-structuralism At the heart of Lacan’s theory, or perhaps it is more appropriate to say his analysis, of meaning and subjectivity lies the notion of the signifier, which builds on the structuralist linguistics of his times—although, as we shall soon see, Lacan’s analysis involves a decisive anti-structuralist move. Echoing de Saussure’s statement that ‘concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system’ (Saussure 2011, 117), Lacan defines the signifier as ‘that which represents the subject for another signifier’, adding that ‘the signifier will therefore be the signifier for which all the other signifiers represent the subject’ (Lacan 2006a, 694). Each signifier is, in other words, what it is by way of its relation to all other signifiers. So, for instance, the signifier ‘chair’ is defined by its synchronic position in relation to all other signifiers (‘table’, ‘floor’, ‘sit down’, ‘house’, ‘food’, etc.), while its signification is the position this signifier has in ‘the diachronic set of concretely pronounced discourses, which historically affects the first network [the synchronic status of the signifier], just as the structure of the first governs the pathways of the second’ (Lacan 2006b, 345). Lacan’s insistency on the signifier as that which represents a subject to all other signifiers might be somewhat bewildering. For what it indicates is that, as he puts it, ‘signification comes about only on the basis of taking things as a whole [d’ensemble]’ (Ibid., 345); ‘that signification rests on a complex relationship of totality, or more exactly of entire system to entire

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system, of universe of signifiers to universe of signifiers’ (Lacan 1993, 119–120). However, the first thing to observe here is that what is countered here is the notion that the meaning of a signifier would be a one-to-­ one direct, perfect, correlation or unity/identity between name/word and object, or between a signifier and a ‘real’. As Lacan puts it, meaning ‘never come[s] down to a pure indication of reality [réel]’ (Lacan 2006b, 345), it ‘is not the things in their raw state, already there, given in an order open to meaning’ (Lacan 1993, 119). Secondly, instead of reading Lacan’s definition of the signifier as claiming that each production of signification must run through a totality of other signifiers, of other significations, Lacan’s point here is to say that each signifier, the sense it is, so to speak, able to achieve at each moment, is itself that which ‘guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole’ (Lacan 2006b, 345). So again, when I say ‘chair’, and when this gains a certain point or effect of signification—in my relation to others—then this sense stands in relation to a chain of signifiers, cut off to a (theoretically coherent) totality only by the very fact that the signifier has the, what we might call, effect of signification. It is the effect of signification that ‘guarantees the theoretical coherence’ of the whole chain of signifiers. Or, as Lacan no less enigmatically puts it, since the circle or loop of signification is ‘unable to close on anything other than its own scansion’ (Lacan 2006a, 682), it ends ‘always at the level of this problematical term called being’ (Lacan 1993, 137). Consequently, independent of the whole chain of signifiers, ‘every real signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing’ (ibid., 189). So, to the extent a signifier does signify, it verifies the loop of signification as a whole, as cut, as de-completed (cf. Lacan 2006a, 683; Lacan 2016, 99). In short, signification comes about only through or in the cut between the signifier and the signified. There is, then, a (seeming) paradox at the heart of meaning. For while the sense of the signifier depends on the whole chain of signifiers, this whole chain depends, in turn, on the event of the signifier as such. Reformulated, the paradox is this: the (theoretical) consistency of the whole of the chain of signifiers cannot be derived from the ‘battery of signifiers’, since that which ‘guarantees’ the (theoretical) consistency of the whole is exactly that which is not part of it. The key to understanding this point is to see how there is a kind of double property to the signifier

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as such, namely one related to fantasy, the other to truth. On the one hand, every real signifier as such is that which signifies nothing. Conversely, if the signifier itself or as such would, per impossible, be part of the whole battery of signifiers, it would be so only as an empty property. This notion of a (real) ‘zero symbol’ was, in fact, exactly what structuralists like LéviStrauss claimed mediated the signifier-signified relation (Lacan 2006a, 695). Lacan, on the other hand, sees in this structuralist stance the kernel of a phantasm, for any zero symbol/value that we could include in or ascribe to the signifier as such in the whole chain of signifiers, would no less be characterised by the signification of that symbol, that is, an empty yet positive (a positively empty) space in the chain of signifiers. Or, the reason why the notion of a zero symbol is a phantasm is that in the production of signification, the signifier as such cannot be seen, identified, or represented in the whole chain as a symbol—it cannot be written. Signification, in other words, is that which makes the symbolic value of the signifier as such not simply empty (as a positive value), but rather impossible—‘less than nothing’. In a decisive anti-structuralist fashion, Lacan then notes that instead of the zero symbol, the truth of the signifier as such is rather ‘the lack of this zero symbol’ (Ibid., 695, emphasis added). Therefore, the signifier ‘can be symbolized by the inherence of a (−1) in the whole set of signifiers’ (Ibid., 694). Put differently, the signifier is as such present in the whole chain of signifiers as its internal impossibility, as ‘less than nothing’, as a ‘pure void of negativity’ (Žižek 1997, 122). The crux of this anti-structuralist stance is, then, that the symbolic order, the whole battery of signifiers, cannot itself yield or constitute the meaning its structural organisation nevertheless supports. It cannot, in other words, supply the consistency of the whole—just as the consistency of the gestalt image in the mirror cannot be derived from the image as such, apropos of Lacan’s famous essay on the mirror stage (Lacan 2006c). Nor, of course, can the consistency be derived from the ‘real’, that is, from a (phantasmatic) pure designation between signifier and object. Instead, Lacan situates the realm of meaning, the location of the subject of the signifier, in ‘the field between the imaginary and the symbolic’ (Lacan 2016, 75), for the consistency of the whole through which the (subject of the) signifier gains its signification is an imaginary ‘entity’, as opposed to an entity or property of the ‘real’. ‘What is imagined’, Lacan

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writes, ‘in its form that is most devoid of meaning [the signifier as such], is consistency’ (Ibid., 51). Lacan also devises a function to illustrate this: ‘S(signifier)/s(signified) = s(statement)’ (Lacan 2006a, 694). The signified, which is supposed to be the sense of the signifier, is in fact governed by the signifier as such vis-á-vis the whole chain of signifiers, so that the actual place of signification, the meaning of the statement, lies in the cut between the signifier and the signified. Adding the value (−1) to the place of S, the function then yields s = √−1, i.e. i, the imaginary number (Ibid.). As the webpage mathsisfun.com puts it in perfect Lacanian verse, ‘by simply accepting that i exists we can […] fill a gap’. In fact, this quote brings to light a crucial feature of Lacan’s theory—or analysis—of meaning, namely that meaning cannot be accounted for from outside of meaning. As Lacan continuously emphasises, there is no metalanguage, no place from which to examine language, meaning, as such (e.g. Lacan 2006a), for each instance of cogito, each explanation, is itself only possible when meaning is already assumed—in the intersection between the symbolic and the imaginary. We can, in other words, speak of meaning only by accepting/assuming that it exists, only by already having it at work. On the one hand, ‘[n]othing forces us to imagine consistency, would you believe it!’ (Lacan 2016, 51). Yet there it is! Again, the cut that constitutes the whole from its indeterminacy (infinity/impossibility) is ‘always at the level of this problematical term called being’ (Lacan 1993, 137). As one might put it, we are speaking beings, there is meaning, and that is why we cannot account for it from ‘outside’. Or, being and cogito cannot coincide (cf. Lacan 2006a; Lacan 2016, 115; Dolar 1998).

5.3 There Is No Metalanguage, Nor a Meta-Subject(ivity) Our inability to account for meaning as such, the lack of any metalanguage, not only situates a ‘void of pure negativity’ internal to the structures of signification. For this point of negativity is also at the heart of our own subjectivity, Lacan argues. In fact, our subjectivity is an ‘effect’ of the signifier; it is ‘nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers’ (Lacan 1999, 49–50). Or, the Urszene of the subject is the Urszene of

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signification. And what more appropriate scene do we have than the most elementary cry of an infant. Now it might be the case—or so at least the history of philosophy as well as so-called common sense conceptions quite often seem to indicate—that we spontaneously feel that it must be so that the cry itself or as such of an infant means something; in a very primitive sense for sure, but nonetheless. In fact, is not the cry as such of an infant ‘pure’ meaning, since it is the immediate expression of, well, whatever it is an expression of!? Lacan however seems to claim the exact opposite, namely that the cry as such does not have a subject, does not have an ‘I’, does not have any meaning to it, because it is not yet a signifier. The signifier is engendered only through the field of the Other, that is, through the whole chain of signifiers in relation to which the signifier gains its signification. But how can Lacan say that this cry, that this raw and immediate expression of life, whose presence one really cannot hide from or ignore, is as such meaningless, ‘less than nothing’? To the extent this is how we conceive the situation, it is no wonder that we feel that we are left with only two alternatives: either meaning is nothing but a social construct—for the field of the Other, the symbolic, exhausts meaning— or then we feel obliged to cut loose, to annihilate, the Other and (re) claim meaning as our own private property. Compare this to ‘the hard problem of consciousness’: either consciousness must be fully explainable by the workings of our brains, or then it must constitute a private, first-­ person ontological reality. The challenge to understanding Lacan’s argument, and the problem with the caricature illustrated just now, is that there is, in fact, no real or actual moment at which the elementary cry would have been meaningless; no point at which the cry was not always-already a signifier. However, the reason for this is, again, not that the cry as such has meaning, that is, has meaning independently of the (field of the) Other. Rather, the reason is that there is no real moment (for the subject) when the Other has been absent, that is, when the elementary cry had not already passed through the field of the Other and thereby gained the position of a signifier. I will try to clarify this point by identifying two different, although interrelated, perspectives on the primary scene at play here. Let us call them the everyday intersubjective perspective and the metaphysical perspective. Seen from an everyday—intersubjective—perspective, the primal scene

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has the following structure: There is the elementary cry, which as such lacks a subject and sense. However, that cry, lacking meaning as such insofar as it is conceived of or imagined to be separate from the field of the Other, will nevertheless always-already have been taken by the other (say, the parent) as meaning something, as signifying something, e.g. ‘hunger’, ‘restlessness’, ‘discomfort’, ‘fear’, or simply some ‘primordial anxiety’. Put more strongly, it is (nothing but) the ‘all-powerfulness of the response’ of the Other (Lacan 2006d, 569) that engenders the subject of the signifier. If the cry signifies ‘hunger’, ‘discomfort’, or, say, ‘anxiety’, if it is to be a ‘cry’ in the first place, it is only from the Other that this comes into place. As Lacan puts it, ‘the subject constitutes himself on the basis of the message, such that he receives from the Other even the message he himself sends’ (Lacan 2006a, 683). Now it is surely tempting to see this engendering of the subject of the signifier as an essentially retrospective reconstruction: The raw sound, the ‘real’ of the cry, which is primary, is ascribed the position of a signifier by the other retrospectively. And for sure, Lacan duly acknowledges that retroversion is at play here (e.g. Lacan 2006a, 678 & 684). Only that the retroversion is in fact the opposite— for the subject, for thought. Namely, since the infant has always-already been someone for the other (parent), even before birth, in fact, even before the first signs of movement in the mother’s belly—for this is why the first recognisable movements are taken as having a subject—it is rather the ‘raw sound’, the ‘real’ of the cry, which is retrospectively cast onto a retrospectively postulated ‘time before the Other’, a place, a time, which has never existed independently of the Other. It is the event of the signifier, the ‘all-powerfulness of the response’, which engenders the topological place of the pre-symbolic ‘real’. As Lacan puts it, ‘[t]he signifier does not designate what is not there, it engenders it’ (Lacan 2002, 8). And here we see the crux of the impasse of the signifier as such: while ‘less than nothing’, and thus exactly that which as such resists all signification, the signifier as such is nonetheless internal to meaning or the symbolic— as a ‘pure void of negativity’—making it, inevitably and inescapably, meaningful to us. Of course, it is exactly here that, what I dubbed the metaphysical perspective tends to announce itself. ‘But is it not all the same true that the child cries before any response from the other, and how could we say that

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that cry is meaningless! What if there is no one there to receive and respond to this cry. How could that make it meaningless, empty!’ In addition to, or as an aspect of, the failure to acknowledge the signifier as such as exactly not empty but rather a ‘less than nothing’, the problem with this metaphysical outcry is that while it cuts loose the field of the Other from, so to speak, within the primal scene, it cannot, or does not, thereby obliviate this field altogether. Rather, it simply casts the field of the Other outside the scene, to the point or position of the one who ponders the scene. Consequently, the scene itself, the imagined elementary cry, remains, inescapably, always-already within, or has always-already passed through, the field of the Other. That is, one can of course imagine an infant alone in the wilderness with no response from the other in sight, and thereby picture the cry in itself or as such—‘and that must have some sense!’, we might say to ourselves. However, this imagined cry is inescapably a ‘cry’, that is, a signifier, for us who ponder this primal scene. The infant in this imagined scene is always someone for us. The ‘cry’—as a signifier—of this imagined infant is inscribed in our desire to know the other, that is, inscribed in the very way in which we are addressed by this imagined infant and its cry. Without this desire, we would never have heard, that is, imagined it. The fallacy of the metaphysical picture is, then, that by cutting loose the field of the Other from within the primal scene, the metaphysical perspective relates to the deserted or desert-like wilderness of the imagined scene and to the subject of that scene as if occupying the position of a metalanguage, and a meta-subject; a position where meaning as such, that is, meaning independent of the field of the Other, is an object of study. Consequently, this metalanguage perspective is in turn projected onto the supposed subject of the primal scene, suggesting that the cry as such, the ‘real’ of the cry, is itself its own meaning; the cry means what it means by virtue of itself, independent of the field of the Other, independent of the one who ponders the scene. That is, the metaphysical perspective cuts loose the primal cry from the field of meaning, from (inter)subjectivity, while at the same time postulating that ‘it’ has, must have, ‘meaning’, yet a meaning that is, well, exactly cut loose from whatever the ponderer of the primal scene can conceive or imagine ‘meaning’ to be, as the supposed meaning of the cry is exactly not supposed to come from the field, from the response, of the Other.

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5.4 The Subject Is Ever Only the Other’s Supposition All well: the primal scene of meaning and subjectivity (the primal scene of the subject of the signifier) is essentially an intersubjective scene, where the field of the Other cannot be cut loose. Again, while ‘less than nothing’, while a ‘pure void of negativity’ internal to the symbolic, the signifier as such, nonetheless, inescapably addresses us as meaning/meaningful. Let us, however, go back to the ‘all-powerfulness of the response’ of the Other in order to flesh out the full consequence of it for the subject of the signifier. For there is an important discrepancy, or gap, to be noted here between the way in which this all-powerful response of the Other seems to be directed both at the subject of the signifier as such and at the subject of a determinate signifier. By this I mean to say that while the other always-already takes the cry of the infant as signifying something determinate, say ‘hunger’ or ‘fear’, this implies that the other always-already takes the infant’s cry as a signifier independently of what it signifies, that is, as a signifier as such. Or, not really independently, for without the determinate signifier there would be no signifier as such; the real is engendered by the determinate signifier qua the field of the Other. With this retroversion in mind, we might, nevertheless, say that the other takes the cry of the infant as a signifier, and the infant as the subject of that signifier, before he/she knows what signifier it is. This is what makes it possible for the other to interpret what is signified by the cry. Yet, the other does not interpret that the infant is a subject of the signifier. Sure, there might be instances when there are reasons to doubt whether what one took to be a signifier really was so. Perhaps it was just a puppet, a robot, or the wind. However, in order for doubt to arise, that is, in order for the very possibility of interpretation to present itself, one has to first of all be addressed, evoked, or moved to respond. So, to say that the other always-­ already takes the cry of the infant as a signifier as such, is to say that the other is always-already addressed by the infant as such. And to be addressed is never a question of choice. That is, the other has not chosen to be addressed by the infant. And while it is true that one can, to a certain extent and in a certain sense, choose how one responds to the address—which includes the response of turning away, of not

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answering—that one responds is not a matter of choice or intention. To put it bluntly, the infant simply causes the other to be addressed and to inevitably respond. The other does not know why. Similarly, while it might be true that the infant causes the address, this is equally not a matter of choice or intention from the infant’s or anyone’s side. Consequently, the infant, the subject of the signifier, does not equally well know what has caused the address-response dialectic. The constitutive address can only be the intention of the Other. Only the Other can be the cause. Only the Other can be the one who is ‘supposed to know’ (Lacan 2004). So, something has caused the other to be addressed by me, and this something is me, or ‘in’ me. Nevertheless, I do not know, and I do not really own, the ‘treasure’ of this cause (Lacan 2006a, 693). Nor can the other ever tell me what it is. In fact, each actual instance of recognition is always necessary a recognition of the ‘I’ as the subject of a determinate signifier, a recognition that necessarily leaves silent, cannot pinpoint, represent, or articulate, that which prompts the recognition as such. Again, it is the recognition of the subject of a determinate signifier that puts forth, as a retroversion, the subject of the signifier as such. And we can, of course, reverse the positions and say that since the other does not own the primal recognition of the subject of the signifier as such, does not know why he/she is addressed in the first place, that is, does not know or control his/her desire, the other is equally the effect, the subject, of this address (cf. Dews 2007, 101). Consequently, the subject is captured in a kind of essential excess of being, as there is always something more to the subject than each occasion of signification, or each articulate recognition (of identity), amounts to. And this something more is the supposed substance of the ‘I’, insofar as ‘it’ is what prompts, causes, the primal address and response. Yet, to the extent substance is on the side of existence, the exhaustive redemption of the substance of the ‘I’ is doomed to remain a fantasy because its position in the realm of existence is exactly purely negative, an impossibility, a ‘less than nothing’. As Lacan puts it, ‘fantasy is really the “stuff” of the I that is primally repressed’ (Lacan 2006a, 691). Or put differently, since the other’s primary recognition of the subject of the signifier as such is not a recognition of a substance, Lacan observes that ‘very single subject in analysis reveals how he is always and only ever a supposition’ (Lacan 2016, 20).

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Nonetheless, the other is all the same addressed and inescapably responds to this address. And it is, nonetheless, the subject of the signifier as such who is the locus of this address. The only place where this locus can reside (as less than nothing) is in and/or as the other’s desire. It is the other’s/Other’s desire in which the address of the subject of the signifier is inscribed, contained. One might even put it more strongly and say that the substance of the ‘I’ is the other’s desire—ultimately the Other’s desire; the desire of the ‘Subject supposed to know’ (Lacan 2004; Mills 2019; Dews 2007). According to Lacan, then, the subject’s desire is not simply a desire for the other, but rather the desire of the Other. More accurately put, since each instance of recognition by the other cannot contain or articulate the substance of the subject of the signifier, cannot articulate the recognition of the subject as such, and thereby necessarily cannot fully satisfy the demand for recognition inscribed in each signifier, the desire that constitutes this surplus—this pure void of negativity—finds its locus only in or as the Other’s desire (Lacan 2006a; cf. Fryer 2004). This is why, Lacan claims, ‘it is qua Other that man desires’, and why ‘the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire’ is ‘What does [the Other] want from me?’ (Lacan 2006a, 690) In this sense, the fantasy stuff of the ‘I’ can be rewritten as the desire to become the object of the Other’s desire; the object that defines the Other’s lack (Ibid., 693). So, the (excessive) demand for recognition is the (excessive) demand for unconditional love because it is only by owning the Other’s desire in toto, or as such, that the subject could—per impossible—satisfy the surplus of demand left over from each instance of recognition of the subject of a determinate signifier. The excessive nature of this demand is, of course, that its phantasmatic object(ive) is the very annihilation of that which makes desire possible in the first place, namely exactly the fact that there is no ‘universal satisfaction’ for this demand because the thing that is demanded is the Other’s desire (Lacan 2006a, p. 689; Lacan 2006e, 525). Consequently, the recognition of the subject of the signifier as such is the Other’s desire; it must persist as the Other’s desire, and not be fully satisfied, in order for the subject’s desire to realise itself. Alternatively, desire’s rationale is ‘not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire’ (Žižek 1997, 39).

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There is, however, a, let us call it hidden, aspect to the excessive nature of this demand for unconditional love qua recognition which I want to bring attention to—and which perhaps pushes my reading, or rewriting, even further away from what Lacan himself would ascribe to. It is surely true that there cannot be any recognition of the subject of the signifier as such articulated as a recognition of the subject of the signifier as such, since any articulation or representation is necessarily always a determinate signifier—the tautology is clear enough. As said, the signifier is what it is only in its determinate position in relation to all other signifiers; I am always the subject of this or that signifier. Yet, the excessive demand inscribed in the structure of desire, as identified by Lacan, seems to build on the (distorted) existential sense that this means that one has not thereby been recognised or acknowledged as the subject of the signifier as such. This cannot, however, be true. Rather, it seems that whereas the other can exactly fail to recognise us as the subject of this or that signifier, as being this or that, what the other cannot fail to do, because it does not lie in the power of the other, is to recognise us as subjects of the signifier as such. In other words, unconditional recognition is exactly that which we can never lack. Why, then, the excessive demand for that which we already cannot but have? Does not Lacan in fact show us that excessive demand is a displacement, a repression, of that which it claims to desire precisely because we inevitably already have it? Is it unbearable to be recognised as the subject as such? And, apropos of our reading of Gorgias: It is of course true that we can never verify whether our conscious self-­ image/self-conception is equal to what the other recognises. Yet, given that we can scarcely say that we, as ourselves, have thereby not been recognised—to the extent that ‘we ourselves’ designates that which addresses the other’s desire as such—are we not obliged to understand this impasse between conscious self-conception and recognition as simply showing us that, indeed, while our conscious self-image can be the object of social affirmation, we as ourselves, that is, we who address the other’s desire as such, cannot be so. And why would this be a source of fantasy and displacement?

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5.5 Wittgenstein’s ‘Psychotic Ferocity’ in the Tractatus I left the above discussion on Lacan somewhat unfinished, dangling, as it were, in a landscape of questions. We shall not leave Lacan behind. Rather, we shall continue to investigate some of the central and defining features of Lacan’s theory by delving into Wittgenstein’s reflections on meaning and thereby, in a certain sense, superimposing the latter on the former. The reason for doing this, over and above the very value of bringing these two thinkers together, is that while we will find some potential tensions between the two, it is my claim that our discussion on Wittgenstein complements, or suggests a certain rewriting of, the way we qualify or conceive of the Lacanian notion of the inherent impossibility in the structure of meaning and subjectivity. In the same breath, it might also be noted that although it is somewhat rare to place Lacan and Wittgenstein in dialogue, or at least compare their respective takes on matters of meaning and subjectivity, doing so is, however, not as such novel (e.g. Badiou 2011, 2018; Balaska 2019; Turner and Sharpe 2022). That said, I nevertheless do think that the way in which I propose to read them together has some new features and will, hopefully, enrich our understanding of the interlinkages between meaning and intersubjectivity. Wittgenstein was not unknown to Lacan. In fact, Wittgenstein figures in some of Lacan’s works, perhaps most notably in seminar XVII (Lacan 2007), but also elsewhere (e.g. Lacan 2018). What is more, it seems quite clear that Lacan thought Wittgenstein to have been a profound thinker who had made his way to the very crux of the problems of meaning and subjectivity, as, for instance, the following quote reveals: It seems to me that [Wittgenstein’s famous closing paragraph in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] whereof one cannot speak [thereof one must be silent] is very precisely what is at issue when I designate as this isn’t it that which alone prompts a request such as to refuse my offering. And yet, if there is one thing that should be palpable for everyone, then it’s the this isn’t it. This is where we are, at each instance of our existence. (Lacan 2018, 72)

‘This isn’t it’, this point at which we are at each instance of our existence, obviously refers to the crucial impasse of meaning and subjectivity,

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to the point at which the substance of the subject of the signifier escapes each attempt at capturing it—or offering it—through symbolic/linguistic representation and through each instance of (conscious) recognition. Notably, then, Lacan reads Wittgenstein’s (1933) Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus (henceforth TLP)1—not Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953), which he seems not to have been acquainted with—as concluding at this very same point. Now there is of course the huge question of how to exactly read TLP, and the secondary literature offers us a vast amount of different interpretations. I will not attempt to give an extensive treatment of neither TLP nor the secondary literature, nor can it be said that I have a definitive take on TLP. (As already alluded to above, our main focus will instead be on Wittgenstein’s later work Philosophical Investigations.) This said, I will nevertheless attempt to give a general characterisation of TLP in such a manner that we come to see how Lacan most probably understood the crux of Wittgenstein’s (TLP’s) notion of meaning and subjectivity—although Lacan’s remarks on Wittgenstein do not really give us a very detailed account of how he read TLP since they are limited to quite short passages and individual remarks. It might be said that TLP gives the impression of having two central aims. On the one hand, it seems to aspire to provide a complete analysis of the form of propositions, which would, so to speak, ground meaning a priori or, alternatively, close the cut between the signifier and the signified—as his mentors Frege and Russell were keen on doing. Moreover, TLP offers us different, yet interlinked, attempts to characterise how this could be achieved (cf. Balaska 2019). On the other hand, already in the preface, Wittgenstein declares that ‘the book will […] draw a limit […] to the expression of thought’ (TLP, preface), a limit that in fact seems to annul the sense, the possibility, of the first aim. For the ‘whereof one cannot speak’ refers both to the very attempt to say what grounds meaning, that is, what closes the cut between the signifier and the signified, as well as to the attempt to say what the limits of thought or language are. There is no such meta-perspective available for the expression of thought. As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language’ (TLP 4.121). However, while the grounding of  In referring to this work, we shall be using the form TLP and then adding the number of the proposition, for example (TLP 4.121). 1

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meaning cannot be given a priori, TLP does seem to contend that meaning pertains to the ‘logical form’ of ‘elementary propositions’, which perfectly picture the world. Nonetheless, although meaning lies in the shared logical form of ‘names’ and elementary ‘objects’ respectively (TLP, 4.2 & 4.21)—the former perfectly picturing the latter—it cannot be grounded thus, since we cannot say what the logical form is, as pointed out just now. Instead, the sense of a proposition is ‘shown’, rather than said. The following two passages quite nicely sum up this point. Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—the logical form. To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world. (TLP 4.12) Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions. That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language. The propositions show the logical form of reality. They exhibit it. (TLP 4.121)

Later on, Wittgenstein suggests that what is shown, that is, ‘[t]he sense of the world’, ‘must’, in fact, ‘lie outside the world’ (TLP 6.41). Furthermore, note that Wittgenstein is saying, in the passages quoted just now, that the reason for the impossibility of achieving exhaustive analyses of propositions, which would ground meaning for us, lies in that we would ‘have to be able to put ourselves with the proposition outside logic’ or ‘the world’. There is, in other words, no metalanguage. Purely from the perspective of the world, ‘[a]ll propositions are of equal value’ (TLP 6.4), as the ‘world is [simply] the totality of facts’ (TLP 1.1). So, propositions cannot by themselves, as such, say why they matter, why such and such a fact has significance, or what sense it has. Whatever can be put in symbolic-­representational form, cannot itself contain the subject of the proposition/signifier. This is why the subject is that which constitutes the ‘limit of the world’ (TLP 5.632), that which circumscribes the sense of the totality of facts. Consequently, while the subject cannot change the

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facts of the world, cannot change ‘the things that can be expressed in language’, it does change ‘the limits of the world’, thereby making the world, the sense of the world, ‘of the happy […] quite another than that of the unhappy’ (TLP 6.43). As the limit of the world, ‘not a part of the world’ (TLP 5.641), the subject (of the TLP) is truly ‘nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers’, to use Lacan’s vocabulary. Yet, while TLP exposes the impossibility of a metalanguage, it nevertheless seems to presuppose or endorse a meta-subject(ivity). And here we come to the confusing, or rather, contradictory, part of TLP. For how, then, are we to understand the propositions of TLP itself? Can it say what it seems to want to say? Can it, how can it, draw the limits to the expression of thought? How can it say, for instance, that the sense of the world lies outside it? Would this not require a metalanguage? Is it not only able to show this? And how could it show it? To the first set of questions, namely, can it say what the propositions of TLP seem to be saying, Wittgenstein’s own answer appears to be a clear No! Consequently, the propositions of the book are themselves the annulation of their own sense. And it is exactly in this annulation of sense that the meaning of the book seems to lie.2 For as Wittgenstein observes, strictly following the logic of his propositions, the very impossibility of expressing the answer  To make this point more strongly, let me add some things. To repeat, in TLP meaningful propositions picture reality, yet that which pictures it, that is, the logical form, cannot be said by language; the logical form cannot be pictured, nor is it a picture. In contrast, then, to meaningful propositions, which either satisfy or do not satisfy the truth-conditions that determine whether a given proposition concerns the empirical reality/world or not, tautologies and contradictions both lack such truth-conditions, the former because it is unconditionally true, the latter because it is unconditionally false (TLP, 4.46–4.462). Tautologies and contradictions are, thus, not ‘combinations of signs’ and do not correspond to any ‘combination of the objects’ (TLP, 4.466). Instead, ‘they are the limiting cases of the combinations of symbols, namely their dissolution’ (TLP, 4.466): they mark limits to sense and show the conditions of their possibility. That is, as tautologies and contradictions consist exclusively of formal properties (TLP, 4.126) and lack any corresponding relation to the world of factual objects, they ‘are not pictures of the reality’: ‘they say nothing’ (TLP, 4.461 & 6.11); they have no sense (TLP, 4.461). Yet they show—they, as it were, simply show—‘the formal—logical—properties of language, of the world’ (TLP, 6.12). One might thus say that TLP aspires to be both a tautology and a contradiction. That is, its ‘truth-conditions’ must be completely independent of the factual world—satisfied under no conditions and under all conditions. In this sense, the TLP is both a set of logical propositions, that is, tautologies, as well as a contradiction. A tautology in that the work as a whole—as a logical proposition itself—simply depends upon the internal relations of the work and not the empirical world. A contradiction in that in order to climb the ladder, the words of the TLP must have sense, yet in the end, they do not have sense—as if A & −A, or A = −A. 2

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to the question TLP tries to articulate annuls the very possibility of expressing the question itself; strictly speaking ‘The riddle does not exist’ (TLP 6.5). Ergo, ‘[t]he solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem’ (TLP 6.521). And so we have the closing propositions of TLP: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless [als unsinnig erkennt], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it). He must surmount these propositions: then he sees the world rightly. (TLP. 6.54) Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (TLP 7)

A limit to ‘the expression of thoughts’ has been drawn, and anything that transgresses these limits is ‘simply nonsense’ (TLP, preface). Yet, the sense of the world is all the same outside it: ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (TLP 6.522). Now I will not be the judge of whether this is the correct way of reading TLP or not.3 I simply presented it in such a way as to give us a sense of how Lacan seems to place Wittgenstein. At least it gives us a sense of the close affinity between the two, namely their mutual identification of an inherent impossibility in the attempt to ground meaning in a direct or perfect relation between the signifier and the signified. And indeed, Lacan  At least since the early 2000s, there has been a heated debate amongst Wittgenstein scholars on how exactly to interpret this annulation of sense in TLP. A central divide in this field is and has been between the so-called new Wittgensteinian or ‘therapeutic’ readings and the more standard readings (cf. Crary and Reed 2000). One of the key issues in question is how to understand section 6.54 in relation to ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (TLP 6.522). The therapeutic reading (e.g. Conant 2000; Diamond 2000) suggests that everything must go, also the inexpressible, the mystical itself. The aim of TLP is, they contend, purely therapeutic, namely to rid us of the troubling, disquieting questions, or riddles, of life-cum-meaning. This is what the TLP ‘shows’ us. The standard reading, on the other hand, argues that Wittgenstein really believed that TLP showed the mystical, extra-linguistic truth of meaning. Wittgenstein was, as Peter Hacker (2000) puts it, ‘trying to whistle it’. Both interpretations are, in their own respective ways, compatible with Wittgenstein’s decision to leave philosophy, that is, his belief that there was nothing left for philosophy to do; either because he thought that he had solved the problem of philosophy by staying silent about what he could not speak, or, then, because he has dissolved it by exposing its senselessness. Our business is not to attempt to judge which of these interpretations is more valid. 3

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suggests that Wittgenstein’s philosophy brought about a ‘detection of philosophical skulduggery’ (Lacan 2007, 61). At the same time, we might also see why Lacan identifies a ‘psychotic ferocity’ at the core of TLP (Ibid., 62). This latter diagnosis derives its vocabulary, Lacan informs us, from Freud’s definition of the psychotic position, namely ‘not wanting to know anything about the spot where truth is in question’ (Ibid., 63). For, according to Lacan’s perhaps quite correct judgement, Wittgenstein was not ‘interested in saving the truth’ in or as part of speech. Instead, Lacan takes Wittgenstein’s position to be that the ‘real’ of meaning is extra-­linguistic, outside the world: ‘[n]othing can be said about truth’ (Ibid., 63). What, then, is this ‘spot where truth is in question’ which TLP does not want to know anything about? The answer: in identifying the subject as the limit of the world, as a kind of meta-subject(ivity), the author of TLP seems not to want to know that the subject is the effect of the signifier. That is, Wittgenstein does not seem to want to know that the cut between the signifier and the signified lies, or is inscribed, in the Other’s desire. As we saw in the previous section, in Lacan’s universe, the reason underpinning the impossibility of capturing the meaning of meaning through language is that the very reason for why the other always-already takes the infant as the subject of the signifier as such is at the same time the reason for why neither the subject nor the other cannot possibly know, cannot represent, this cause. Alternatively, recall the discrepancy between the recognition of the subject of a determinate signifier vis-á-vis the subject of the signifier as such. Wittgenstein’s position in TLP seems to be that it is only by staying silent about the impossibility internal to language—an impossibility which nevertheless addresses us as the very essence of meaning—that the position of the subject as such is shown. However, what is lost thereby, Lacan seems to argue, is that this position of the subject as such cannot be cut loose from determinate signifiers, from the field of the Other; the truth of the subject of the signifier lies in the Other’s desire. So, rather than setting a limit to the relation between the subject as such and language, it is the very impossibility of saying the, so to speak, whole truth, to capture meaning as such, which in fact engenders the truth of the subject as such in language. As Alenka Zupančič eloquently puts it: [I]nstead of the prohibition of the impossible, which we find in Wittgenstein (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” […]), we have in

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Lacan its double reversal: go on, speak about anything whatsoever, and with a little luck and help (from the analyst) you will sooner or later stumble against the Real, and get to formalize (write) it. The Real is not some realm or substance to be talked about, it is the inherent contradiction of speech, twisting its tongue, so to speak, And this is precisely why there is truth, and why, at the same time, it is not possible to say it all. (Zupančič 2017, 68–69)

One might thus say that the psychotic ferocity of TLP, according to Lacan, is rooted in TLP’s phantasmatic attempt to disentangle the real and the symbolic from each other, retaining the reality of the ‘real’ as ‘outside’. Or, alternatively, it is rooted in TLP’s disentanglement of the impossibility of a metalanguage from that of a meta-subject(ivity). However, this psychotic ferocity is not psychotic because it is directly false. For it simultaneously includes an insight and a mistake—this is at least the case if we follow Lacan (2016) in one of his last seminars, The Sinthome. For the only thing holding the symbolic and the real together is the very event of the signifier as such through the response of the other. So, the psychotic response involves the insight, if one wants to call it that, that there is no substance, no-thing in the world, which holds the real and the symbolic together; that the subject of the signifier as such is something like a supposition rather than a substance. The mistake is, however, that the psychotic ferocity assumes that the real can be separated from the symbolic, that these two are, essentially independent of each other, and thereby represses that the real itself is only engendered by the event of the signifier, and that the signifier always passes through the Other. Thus, Lacan states: ‘Should the symbolic thereby come free, as I once noted it would, we have a way of mending it, which is to fashion what I defined for the first time as a Sinthome’ (Lacan 2016, 77). The sinthome, in turn, which Lacan is referring to, is itself nothing more than the invention of a new signifier, which keeps the ‘real’ alive; a kind of reinvention of, or an identification with, a supposition, which is why in her quote above Zupančič notes that the analytic moment, where the subject stumbles against its real, involves the formalisation, the writing, of the real as a signifier, that is, the re-knotting of the real and the symbolic. The real ‘can only be [a] letter’ (Zupančič 2017, 131), and this is what TLP, with its psychotic ferocity, represses—Lacan seems to be saying.

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5.6  Philosophical Investigations as Wittgenstein’s Sinthome Again, I do not want to be the judge of Lacan’s assessment of TLP. What I do want to say, however, is that I believe that as an assessment of Wittgenstein, it is flawed. At least if we leave behind the Wittgenstein of TLP—for which it might very well be quite accurate—and move on to his Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI).4 As noted, Lacan seems unfortunately not at all to have acquainted himself with the ‘later’ Wittgenstein of PI.5 I say unfortunately, because it seems to me that there, in PI, Wittgenstein, while retaining the notion in TLP that signification inevitably pertains to a point of mystery, nevertheless came to illustrate quite clearly that this point of mystery is, in fact, internal to language and desire, and shows itself as an, let us call it, ethics of language. Perhaps we might even say that in PI, Wittgenstein does exactly what Lacan prescribes to the psychotic, namely, identifies with the symptom and rewrites the real as a signifier. In short, in PI, the subject of the signifier is unescapably intersubjective, rather than a meta-subject(ivity). In this sense, one might say, paraphrasing something Mladen Dolar has noted about Lacan’s relation to Hegel, that Lacan is actually most Wittgensteinian when he claims to depart from him. Or, so I will at least try to argue. TLP opens with the axiomatic statement, ‘The world is everything that is the case’ (TLP 1.), followed by other axiomatic statements and elaborations which, in the end, comprise a tautology and/or contradiction; an annulation of sense. In contrast, PI begins by offering us a scene, more precisely, a kind of primal scene of language acquisition. I am of course talking about the famous quote from Augustine’s Confessions. We will have a closer look at this scene in due time. For now, suffice to say that  When referring to the work, I shall use the form PI and then add the number of the remark, for example (PI §88). 5  As Lacan clearly indicates in the following passage, he thought of Wittgenstein exclusively in terms of TLP: ‘Throughout his whole life, with admirable asceticism, Wittgenstein stated the following, which I’m condensing—whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. In view of which he would hardly say anything at all’ (Lacan 2018, 72). 4

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the immediate interpretative response by one of the many voices of PI6 is that the Augustinian quote ‘gives us a particular picture of the essence of human language’, which is that ‘the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names’ (PI §1). Moreover: ‘—In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands’ (PI §1). We might note that this ‘picture’ strongly invites one of the central notions that held TLP in its grips, namely, portrays ‘the essence of speech [as] the composition of names’, and presupposes atomic or ‘primary elements’ as the constitutive building blocks of such compositions, like the ‘objects’ of TLP (PI §46). In other words, the opening scene of PI immediately places itself in conversation with TLP7—amongst others. Only four remarks into the book, that is, just a bit over half a page after the opening scene, the first decisive objection to the Augustinian picture is already voiced. The objection is not so much that the picture is directly false. Rather, what is observed is that it only concerns a ‘narrowly circumscribed region’ of language (PI §4); it is ‘an over-simple conception’ of language, instead of covering the whole of language (PI §5). No essence of language to be found here then. And this is the kernel of one of the most well-known therapeutic elements of PI, namely the reminder that human language consists of a multitude of different ‘language-games’. However, the pressing question of what constitutes meaning, that is, the theme of the primal scene of PI, quickly reinforms itself—and it does so throughout the book. Take the following as an example of this. In remark 20, the question is discussed to what extent one can or must say that each sense has a specific, unique, verbal expression to it. For instance, does the Russian equivalent (‘stone  It is quite standardly recognised that the form of PI is dialogical or conversational. Some, like Stanley Cavell (1999), identify the dialogue to be between two distinct voices: the voice of temptation and the voice of correctness. Others emphasised that there are multiple voices that pull in different directions and that PI is a polyphonic or heteroglossic work (e.g. Wallgren 2013; Rudrum 2006; Medina 2004). 7  In the Preface to PI, Wittgenstein notes the following: ‘Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking’ (PI, preface). See also, e.g. PI (§23; §97; §114). 6

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read’) to the English sentence ‘the stone is read’ have the same sense, although their verbal expressions are seemingly grammatically different? The elucidatory, or sober, voice which intervenes suggests that the sense ‘consists in their having the same use’ (PI §20). Again, we are met with one of the famous therapeutic interventions of the PI, namely the notion of meaning as use. But the same nagging question reappears, namely, how is it then that we acquire the capacity to use language, correctly? For while it might be true that how we understand, say, ostensive definitions ‘is seen in the use that we make of the word defined’ (PI §29), this nevertheless presupposes that the person acquiring the correct use already knows a great deal in advance. ‘Thus if I know that someone means to explain a colour-word to me the ostensive definition “That is called ‘sepia’” will help me to understand the word’ (PI §30). In other words, one will already have to know how to play the game, how to follow the rules, of ostensive definitions before ostensive definitions can even be a possibility (cf. Lacan 1993, 137). The above is meant to be an example of the way in which the ‘Augustinian picture’, that is, the weight of the opening scene of PI as a primal scene of language, persistently returns in a dialectic, or dialogical, fashion in the different scenes of PI, where attempts at leaving the Augustinian scene behind, overcoming it, dissolving it, are made. Moreover, each scene throughout PI contains within itself, in implicit form, the different disquieting features involved in the question of meaning. So, for example, in the above, we can see how the latent tension between the so-called internalist-externalist divide, and its comrade, the tension between the individual and the collective, silently informs itself. For one thing, we can sense that the notion that the understanding of the meaning of a word is shown in the use that the individual makes of it seems to imply that meaning is only concerned with the fulfilment of relevant behavioural/outer criteria, and completely unconcerned with what the subject him-/herself thinks and understands (cf. e.g. PI §157; 246; 307; 308). Furthermore, if meaning is use and, moreover, if the correct meaning is the correct use of words, then all authority seems to belong to the Other of the rules of language, on the one hand, and to other individuals as the judges/interpreters of the correctness or incorrectness of the application of a word, on the other. One clear example of

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when this tension reaches surface is the scene played out in remarks 143–147, where the question of how one teaches and learns the series of natural numbers is discussed. First, there is the return of the primal scene of meaning, as the guiding question is ‘how does [one] get to understand [the] notation’ (PI §143) in the first place? In agreement with the Augustinian picture of remark 1, the primary description concerns a form of ‘public training’ (cf. Eldridge 1997, 242–290), which goes gradually from helping the child copy the series from 0 to 9 to the drawing of the child’s attention to the recurrence of ‘the first series in the units; and then to its recurrence in the tens’ (PI §144). Reminiscent of our earlier examples, a voice steps in suggesting, or reminding us, that irrespective of whether we are tempted to say that the ‘understanding [of the series] is a[n inner] state which is the source of the correct use’, in every step of the learning process, ‘the application [of the series] is still a criterion of understanding’ (PI §146). However, this claim is, in turn, continuously shadowed by unsettling consequences. Now, however, let us suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part [the pupil] continues the series correctly, that is, as we do it. So now we can say he has mastered the system.—But how far need he continue the series for us to have the right to say that? Clearly you cannot state a limit here. (PI §145)

How many times, then, must the child apply the series correctly before we can, with certainty, say that she/he has actually understood? No limit seems to be at our disposal. But if we cannot state a definite limit to how many times the series must be applied correctly, then we seem to completely lose hold of any conclusive understanding as to who is, and who is not, applying the series according to the ‘right rules’. Consequently, we also seem to lose hold of how to determine, or understand, the criteria of what counts as the ‘right rules’. That is, we seem to lose hold of a conception of when we can say that an individual—any and all individuals— have learned a language and understood the meaning of words and of propositions. What will redeem us from such uncertainty, from such indeterminacy of meaning and understanding? For if ‘the application [of the series] is a criterion of understanding’, then this seems to mean—given

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the indeterminacy of the criterion—that the only way to account for the acquisition of language and meaning is by reference to how the individual is ‘accepted’ by the language community as one who has understood. So, in order for the individual to be part of a language community, to speak meaningfully, the individual seems to be forced to accept the authoritative judgement of the language community, and, perhaps more importantly (but more disturbingly), be accepted by this community. ‘But how can it be?’, a dissident voice cries out, ‘When I say that I understand the rule of a series, I am surely not saying so because I have found out that up to now I have applied the algebraic formula in such-­and-­such a way! In my own case at all events I surely know that I mean such-and-such a series; it doesn’t matter how far I have actually developed it’ (PI §147). And imagine to be told then that ‘grasping a rule [...] is not an interpretation, but [...] is exhibited in what we call “obeying a rule” and “going against it”’ (PI §201, the latter emphasis added). And then, furthermore, being told that ‘it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”’ (PI §202). What is left of the individual, of her understanding and desire, in the face of this all-­ consuming we, this Leviathan? How can we, under such (conceptual) circumstances ever talk about any understanding at all? That is, is it truly so that to learn a language, to mean something, is simply to say, affirm, and repeat, what the authority of a language community—an authority that does not belong to any single individual but rather to the Other of language itself—instantiates? Is there not something about meaning that cuts a hole in, or destabilises, the self-­sufficiency of the Other? And so the investigation continues indefinitely; new questions and disquietudes, but also sobering and ‘everyday’ voices, keep on re-entering the conversational landscape of PI. I urge the reader to look up the two final remarks (§ 692 & 693)—we will not waste space on them here— just to see how, as it were, unsuccessful PI is in getting any closer to a solution to, or to a dissolution of, the pressing questions that the primal scene engenders and which PI deals with throughout. The same limit and continuous question seem to follow every instance of sober clarification-­ cum-­dissolvement. Yet, PI does not end in silence. Rather, it ends only at the prospect that speech will continue indefinitely, with the mystery of meaning, with the mystery of the subject of the signifier as such, indefinitely inscribed therein.

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5.7 The Return of the Repressed My intention with the above has been to give a preliminary taste of the kind of dialectical, or dialogical, movement I think we find in PI. I have also preliminarily suggested that this movement is tied to the opening scene of PI; that the elements—the issues, questions, concerns, and disquietudes—that keep on reiterating themselves throughout PI are engendered by the very attempt to overcome, dissolve, something internal to the Augustinian picture. There is, in other words, something about the primal scene, the Augustinian picture, which haunts the whole body of PI. And this something is, I will argue, the continuous resurfacing of the repressed in this primal scene. Let us return to this scene in its entirety. When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (PI §1; Augustine 2008, 15–168)

I want to identify four elements at play in this opening, primal, scene—elements that are formative for the conversational landscape of PI. In this section, we shall examine the first three of them and continue with the fourth in the following section. To begin, then, the first of these elements concerns the individual inner lives—desires, intentions, ideas, etc., of the child and of the parents. Then there are, as the second element, the words and the rules of language that come from, or belong to,  I do not know which edition and translation Wittgenstein used. The translation I refer to as Augustine 2008 varies a bit from the one Wittgenstein uses. The quoted passage is, however, from PI. 8

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the field of the Other, the language community; there is an already established use of words which the child must assume, must learn to master; words and their uses which the parents teach the child, and which the parents themselves have been taught. Now, these first two elements are of course the source of the internalist-externalist tension referred to in the previous section. The thing is just this; the primary scene contains, presupposes, both the internalist and the externalist stances as part of its depiction of how meaning is established. That is, the scene itself contains a latent disquietude, a tension, between authority and subject(ivity); a tension between norms and conventions on the one hand, and individuality and, say, authenticity on the other. Consequently, the potential question or worry is ‘how can what I desire, feel, think, understand, etc. be carried by these words, which are not of my making?’ ‘How can I speak my mind with the Other’s language?’ Questions that again and again are given voice to throughout PI, and that all along presuppose, or derive their energy from, a primary scene where the self (seemingly at least) risks being completely consumed by the conventions of language, consequently engendering the urge to shift absolute authority to the individual (cf. Eldridge 1997). The reason for calling the resurfacing of this tension in the body of PI the return of the repressed, as I suggest it ought to be, is that these two elements form a point in the ‘picture’ of meaning which fails to make sense. Or, to put it in Lacanian verse, these two elements, as part of the ‘picture’ of language, form the point of an impossibility, a deadlock, internal, not external, to (the picture of ) language. What of course is evident, is that the specific form, the specific fervour, of the tension between the inner-outer, or the self-other, divide played out in PI is essentially informed by the presupposition that it is precisely in this divide that the question of meaning needs to be settled; that it is either one of the two that alone must ground meaning, since they do seem to stand in stark contrast to each other, that is, since they do not seem to fit into one harmonious whole. Now we might follow Lacan here and say that placing the question of the truth of meaning is surely not wrongheaded, but rather in line with human desire. And to the extent the return of the repressed is a way in which the question of truth does get posed, we should have no quarrel with the internalist-externalist debate continuously reiterating itself, insofar as it keeps alive the impasse of the

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attempt to close the definitive cut between the signifier and the signified. And I do think Wittgenstein is on par with this. That is, I do think that PI, in contrast to TLP, is all about keeping the question of truth intact in language, alive in conversation. On the other hand, however, the problem with the fervour of the internalist-externalist divide is that its identification of the place of truth, namely its conviction that it is in the internalist-externalist divide that the question of meaning must be settled, is itself a repressive response to something in the primal scene. Enter the third element: ‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples’. How striking is it not that this primal scene of language already presupposes what it supposedly aspires to explain or depict—insofar as the suggestion was that the Augustinian quote gave us a certain picture of the essence of language. For the infant in the Augustinian picture is able to learn to name objects and to use these names correctly, that is, is able to, as it were, fuse the internalist and externalist perspectives, only because he, the infant Augustine, always-­ already understands his parents, and vice versa. As we might put it, the internalist-externalist aspects of the picture function because of this third element—but not without it. For were it not for the always-already present understanding and sharing of significance, and meaningfulness, between the infant and parents, language would not be—what it is for us. In other words, the Augustinian picture of language, the primal scene of PI, gives us the seemingly peculiar mythology that in order for there to be meaning and understanding, these need to be always-already embedded in a primal contact between the infant/self and the other. The primal scene of PI, in other words, offers us, instead of or alongside an abstract notion of ‘logical form’ and/or definitive silence (TLP), a mysterious always-already present communion. In remark 32, Wittgenstein, or one of the voices of PI, notes: ‘I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one’ (PI §32). Indeed, this is exactly what the primal scene in fact depicts.

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That is, remark 32 is just one variant of the way in which this third element of the primal scene continuously re-enters the landscape of PI. Alternatively, we might say that this remark exemplifies, in its remark-­ specific form and context, the two-folded character of how this third element, as the repressed of the primal scene, continuously re-enters. For it seems to me that there are, in fact, two different paths by which this third element intervenes in the conversational landscape of PI. The first of these goes through what we might call the anti-metaphysical, therapeutic, voices of PI—the sober voices that seek to disenchant the philosopher’s-cum-metaphysician’s warped, phantasmatic, urges. This disenchantment comprises, as a famous passage in PI states, ‘not a philosophical method’, but methods, like there are ‘different therapies’ (PI §133). So, one can identify a cluster of different, yet interlinked, therapeutic concepts or notions that do the work. Although surely not exhaustively so, some of the central notions include the multiplicity of language-games, meaning as use, and the context dependence of language and meaning—as noted in the previous section. Just to rehearse what is in question here, let us take a look at some random examples. For instance, in remark 1, right after the short interpretation of the opening Augustinian scene where the essence of language is depicted as object-name centred, Wittgenstein construes a primitive language-game played out between a customer and a shopkeeper, where the only means of linguistic communication is reduced to a shopping list stating ‘five red apples’ and handed over to the keeper. The shopkeeper then opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word “five” and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer. (PI §1)

This is all that goes on, and ‘it is’, one of the sober voice adds, ‘in this and similar ways that one operates with words’ (PI §1). ——“But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?”——Well, I assume that he acts

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as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word “five”?—No such thing was in question here, only how the word “five” is used. (PI §1)

I think it is fair to say that the scene of this primitive language-game contains most of the, what I called, therapeutic interventions at work in PI. It makes us aware, by setting up a primitive language-game, that this is not how we could describe all of our uses or deployments of language; language is not simply an object-name-centred practice—although it might suit some parts of it. We see, or are able to sense, preliminarily, that there are certainly a multiplicity of potential language games. Moreover, we also see, or sense, that a specific language-game gives us a specific context, and that the relevant questions are tied to these contexts. The question of meaning is, relative to how the particular language-game functions, tied to how the word is used. That is, the question ‘what is the meaning of the word “five”’ becomes idle when, as it were, abstracted from the context specific setting. In the previous section, we already mentioned some other similar episodes from PI, where the sober voices entered with their therapeutic interventions. Let us, however, look at one more example. If I tell someone “Stand roughly here”—may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too? But isn’t it an inexact explanation?—Yes; why shouldn’t we call it “inexact”? Only let us understand what “inexact” means. For it does not mean “unusable”. And let us consider what we call an “exact” explanation in contrast with this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn’t the engine idling? And remember too that we have not yet defined what is to count as overstepping this exact boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be established. And so on. […] No single ideal of exactness has been laid down; we do not know what we should be supposed to imagine under this head— unless you yourself lay down what is to be so called. But you will find it difficult to hit upon such a convention; at least any that satisfies you. (PI §88)

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The notion of exactness was, of course, paramount to Frege’s and Russell’s struggle to describe the ‘logically perfect language’ (Russell 1933, 7), a project TLP aspired to answer, subversively. As one of the voices of PI observes immediately in the following remark, ‘[t]hese considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?’ (PI §89). So, as we can observe, all of our therapeutic notions are at work in remark 88, subverting the metaphysical stance. There is reference to the context in which a certain word is used, how this context interplays with the specific use that a word has in that language game, suggesting that this language game could well be changed, altered, by defining new criteria, new rules for the use of the word, setting the ground for a new convention, and so on. So, the metaphysical urge to think of ‘exactness’ as context-independent, as abstracted from the use, as correlating with one single determinate object, idea/ideal, thought, or reality, is, through the therapeutic intervention, exposed as an ‘engine idling’—as long as no real work is prescribed to it, that is. But this challenge, this freedom given us, to articulate what this one single ideal would be, directly pulls us down into an abyss of more and more ‘exactness’, hoping to find the object of ‘exactness’ at some unfathomable point. As in the Lacanian framework, the desire for the ‘thing itself ’ lacks any universal satisfaction. Or, apropos of TLP, it wisps off the object, the real, of ‘exactness’ to the transcendental realm, leaving us in complete silence—we might try to whistle it! The therapeutic liberation of PI is, then, that it releases us from the metaphysician’s obsessive compulsion for the real, and helps us to see that we can talk of things as exact without thereby talking falsely, imperfectly. ‘What we do’, the therapeutic voice of PI confidently informs us, ‘is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI §116). Yet, how successful is this liberation really? Or perhaps we should rather ask: what does therapeutic liberation consist in; where, how far, does it take us—and where, how far, does it not take us? At least we cannot say that PI has terminated the therapy—just look at the final remarks of PI and you will certainly see how the doubting, the search for something more satisfying, whispers in them. In fact, can we lay down a single idea/ideal for when our confusion, our metaphysical urge, is purged— apropos of the therapeutic insight itself? Of course, this does not

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undermine the potential success of each and every therapeutic intervention. For it is quite possible, even likely, that by reading PI we come to see that there is something warped about the ‘traditional’ metaphysical questions, and this might really loosen our anxious metaphysical grip on life—and perhaps make us ordinary language philosophers (a partly ironic remark). Yet, something undissolved nevertheless seems to persist. With regards to the third element of the primal scene of PI which informs our discussion right now, I would like to make the following suggestion. The force, the substance, of the therapeutic disenchantment of the metaphysical urge to ground meaning is this: the reason for why we cannot ground meaning a priori is the same reason for why we do not need to. The reason: meaning is always-already there, presupposed, present, in our ponderings on the primary scene of meaning. That is, the reason is not that meaning is, as such, ‘really’ groundless. Rather, its ground is something we cannot grasp as an object of knowledge because we cannot escape it or cannot place ourselves outside of it. There is no object correlating with, say, ‘exactness’ outside of the practices of language use. Where we, as thinking, speaking, sense-making beings go, it is always-already there—and if you want to call this ‘groundless’, then by all means do! In this strict sense, then, the therapeutic voices of PI are the return of the repressed in the ‘Augustinian picture’ to the main body of the book. However, and this is the second path along which the repressed third element re-enters the conversational landscape of PI, the therapeutic voices themselves contain or channel a repression, which goes beyond the consciousness of these therapeutic voices. For, to the extent that therapeutic interventions function as dissolvers of obsessional thought-urges, in their very dissolvement they nevertheless always leave something undissolved, something which exceeds whatever they are able to dissolve. In other words, to the extent the therapeutic self-understanding suggests that it manages to completely do away with questions of meaning, with philosophy, it is just as confused as its metaphysical patient. Well, I already implied what it is that is left undissolved: the mystical, unexplainable fact that we always-already understand each other as part of the contact, the communion, we always-already find ourselves entangled in. On some occasions, the mystical, the unexplainable, always-already presence of meaning and understanding returns in remarks, in scenes,

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which have no therapeutic interventions at all, that do not involve any therapeutic—or grammatical—dissolvements. Take, for instance, this remark on ostensive definition: But suppose someone said: “I always do the same thing when I attend to the shape: my eye follows the outline and I feel…”. And suppose this person to give someone else the ostensive definition “That is called a ‘circle’”, pointing to a circular object and having all these experiences——cannot his hearer still interpret the definition differently, even though he sees the other’s eyes following the outline, and even though he feels what the other feels? That is to say: this ‘interpretation’ may also consist in how he now makes use of the word; in what he points to, for example, when told: “Point to a circle”.—For neither the expression “to intend the definition in such-­ and-­such a way” nor the expression “to interpret the definition in such-­ and-­such a way” stands for a process which accompanies the giving and hearing of the definition. (PI, §34).

So even in the most simple cases, namely ostensive definitions, we must already presuppose an understanding of meaning, and this concerns just as much ‘ostensive teaching of words’ (PI §6). In other cases, including some of the ones we have already alluded to above, the repressed re-­ enters in the midst of the therapeutic exercise—even internal to, or as the other side of, the therapeutic intervention. Again, take, for instance, the small segment from remark 1: ‘——“But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?’——Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere’ (PI, §1, last emphasis added). And compare this, complement it, with, for instance, this: ‘If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (PI, §217, emphasis added). And then: “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (PI §241, last emphasis added)

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What is the therapeutic dissolvement of, not to speak of the intellectual solution to, the explanation of ‘explanations come to an end somewhere’. Likewise, what is the dissolvement of, the explanation of, the notion that language hinges on ‘an agreement in form of life’? The crucial point for us is that in spite of all the therapeutic work-cum-dissolvement done throughout PI, PI does not deliver a better, more satisfying explanation or account of the origin, or constitution, of meaning and understanding than what the primal scene, the Augustinian picture, already contained. That is, it does not dissolve the mystery that meaning is— always-already there. Rather, all attempts to account for meaning, for the conditions of possibility for meaning, end up with scenes in which a communion of meaning(fullness) and understanding is already in action, in place. As said, this is not to say that PI does not enrich our understanding of meaning and language with respect to, for instance, the object-­language of the Augustinian picture qua the universe of TLP. Only that ‘this is simply what I do’ and ‘forms of life’ are no less inexplicable and mystical, yet inevitably there, than the God given understanding between the child and parent, the communion they already find themselves in, which characterises the primal scene of PI. And it is only by allowing this mystical ‘always-already there’ to re-enter our accounts of, and our reflections on, language, as the point of impossibility, to use the Lacanian idiom, that the question of (the) truth (of meaning) can be sustained in language— where it belongs.

5.8 The Desire to Say Something to Someone: The Private Language Case Having discussed the three first ones, let us now move on to the fourth element internal to the primal scene of PI. This fourth element I am referring to is in a sense internal to, or an aspect of, the third one. Better yet, it is in fact something internal to or an aspect of, each of the three previous elements. What I am alluding to is the desire, the interpersonal desire, at play in language. So, if the two first elements, namely the individual with her own subjectivity and the field of the Other, respectively, both presupposed, in order to be able to be in these positions, to have this

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relation, that the self and the other are always-already moved or addressed by each other, then we can say that desire is that which animates all of this. Desire is, as one might put it, the force with which the mystical, inescapable, core of meaning and subjectivity sustains—and is sustained by—language. For, the relation between the self and the other, and all of the latent risks and tensions, would be absent were it not for the desire to reach out to the other person, the desire to be in communion with the other person. Put differently, the acknowledgement of the mystical core of meaning and subjectivity is the acknowledgement of desire. Alluding to what was just said, the reason for extracting or identifying desire as a fourth element, is that PI shows us something important about how the inexplicable way in which we are always-already someone—a subject of the signifier as such—for each other makes itself known in desire. Or, as we might put it, PI shows us something important about the telos, the orientation, of desire. And nowhere does this surface as clearly as in what has become known as the private language argument, usually taken to span from remark 243 to 304.9 The privacy of this private language is introduced, or defined, the following way. A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. […] But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and the rest—for his private use?——Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. (PI §243)  A note of caution, however: there is something artificial and potentially misleading about circumscribing a specific discussion, not to say an ‘argument’, tied to a specific set of remarks, in PI (cf. Venturinha 2010 and Wallgren 2023). If for no other reason, then at least because of the ongoing dialectical movement and the return of the repressed. That is to say, isolating an argument in PI risks overlooking how that which resists solutions and/or dissolvement continuously reorganises itself in the conversational landscape of PI, thereby repeating over and over again the same kinds of questions and discussions, from a slightly altered perspective. Anyway, to the extent we keep this in mind, we can pursue our investigation, for it is nevertheless true that there is a very explicit discussion on private language to be found, beginning with remark 243. 9

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Apropos of what I have been saying so far, there is, I gather, no single way of contextualising this remark. It belongs to a landscape so intricately intertwined with the whole body of PI that one is sure to lose something if one isolates it. However, our purpose here is somewhat specific, and the context of the book we know, arguably, well enough already from the above. So, let me try to frame remark 243 in the following way. Bring to mind our discussion on remarks 143 to 147 in Sect. 5.7, where we witnessed the tension between the individual and the collective. In these remarks, we could observe how the ongoing failure of the field of the Other to ground meaning constantly reinvigorated the internalist perspective—as the return of the repressed. This continuous pending is once more observable when, for instance, beginning from remark 185, the question of how we can decide when a rule has been followed correctly resurfaces, culminating in the famous paradox of remark 201: ‘no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule’ (PI §201). ‘The answer: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here’ (PI §201). As we can see, this is a failure of both the field of the Other and of the individual’s authority. For if every course of action can be made out to accord with a rule, then this implies that ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases’ (PI §201). Again, we find ourselves at the point at which ‘this is simply what [we] do’ (PI §217). The dialectic movement begins, however, immediately anew. So, when identified as ‘a practice’, the notion of ‘obeying a rule’ is directly shifted again to the field of the Other with the once again dire consequence to the individual as the claim is that ‘it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it’ (PI §202). And if it is not possible to do it privately, then we once again seem to be at the mercy of the Other; completely determined by the Other. Yet, once again, the field of the Other fails, or lacks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ (PI §242), and this agreement ‘is not agreement in opinions but in form of life’ (PI §241). You see where this is

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going: the return of the repressed; the impossible, the inexplicable, the mystical. It is at this point, then, that the notion—or fantasy rather—of the language of the ‘immediate private sensation’ is invoked. And the rationale behind it: the ‘insight’ that the only way of grounding meaning in the real, the only way of closing the cut between signifier and signified, is by completely cutting signification loose from the field of the Other by making the signifier itself completely a matter of an arbitrary personal choice. That is, by naming a sensation ‘S’—the symbol that, apropos of our discussion in Sect. 5.3, supposedly does not belong to the field of the Other—the sense of the signifier would thus be the sensation itself; the real itself (cf. PI §257 & 258). No rules for use or no criteria for correct application are needed—how strange that such a sensation would need to be named and written at all! Nonetheless, the Other does not let itself be abandoned, cut loose. Instead, it cunningly re-enters. The struggle of designating, of signifying, the signifier (supposedly) cut loose from the field of the Other is truly a frustrating, an endlessly frustrating, endeavour. What reason have we for calling “S” the sign for a sensation? For “sensation” is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone. So the use of this word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands. —And it would not help either to say that it need not be a sensation; that when he writes “S”, he has something—and that is all that can be said. “Has” and “something” also belong to our common language.—So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.—But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described. (PI §261)

But why does the Other so inescapably intrude? Well, because the other never left. Because the very landscape of PI is conversational and every word in it is inescapably an address. And this is of course the crux of the impasse. For, the essence of the private language was exactly supposed to be a language which the other does not understand, as the meaning of each word supposedly ultimately is the ‘real’, the object, of the sensation itself. Yet, simultaneously, it is addressed to the other. It is in

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fact the voice construing the (fantasy of the) private language that does not—unconsciously—allow for the imagined language to be solely the ‘private property’ of the individual, does not allow for the other/Other to leave the scene. Conversely, if the fantasy was not addressed to the other, if it did not travel with the desire to infiltrate the field of the Other, we would never have heard about it. In remark 293, we witness the decisive surfacing of this desire. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means—must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!——Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-­game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. (PI §293)

What this remark in fact does is that it reveals the internal presence of the other/Other in the fantasy of the private language on two different levels. First, it plays out a scene where the challenge of remark 261 is taken up, that is to say, it sets out to describe, to picture, what exactly the language-game of the private ‘S’ could or would look like. The leading idea is that it might look something like the game we are, in fact, so used to playing—with each other. Namely, saying things like ‘I can only myself know what I really feel, what I really mean by this’ (cf. PI §253). Now, by doing so, by providing this picture, the advocate of the private language answers to the challenge set up by the other’s voice—say the voice that ended remark 261. In short, the advocate of the private language all the time converses with the other, which bespeaks that the fantasy of the

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private language has a place in the desire between the self and the other. Moreover, on another level, the picture of the private language-game of remark 293 is itself conversational and tied to the other: everyone with their own boxes, with their own ‘beetle’, yet together, saying ‘beetle’ to each other. All of this becomes explicitly thematised when one of the voices asks what happens to this inner object (‘beetle’) if the word is to have any ‘use’ in ‘these people’s language’. Of course, it was always-already tied to a use, to a desire for a communion with others, for everyone was already saying that ‘he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle’. And to whom were they saying this if not to each other? This alone— what else could?—constitutes the devastating blow when the fantasy itself produces the dropping out of the ‘thing itself ’, the most precious emblem, as irrelevant. That which was supposed to be the essence of it all, namely the subject of the signifier as such, becomes completely cut loose. The lesson to be learnt: if one cuts loose the field of the Other from the inner, then the inner will, obviously, be completely cut loose from the field of the Other/other. To note, then, it is exactly the relevance of the irrelevance of the inner object which animates the devastation (cf. PI, §304), while, in turn, the irrelevance of the inner object arises due to the relevance of the desire to say something personal, to mean something personal, to someone else, and have it received personally by the other, by/in her desire.10 Conversely, if you really do not have such a desire, then there is no problem here—for then you never directed your words, your desire, to anyone.11 So, where the fantasy of a private language ‘fails’—where it reveals its displacement—is where my desire to reach out to the other with my soul begins—or where that desire always-already was. Here is, then, the quintessential reason for extracting the notion of desire as a fourth element out of the three others: The repressed, which inevitably returns in the search for the meaning of meaning for the subject of the signifier as such, is, the PI proposes to us, not in fact a desire  For a more comprehensive account of the entanglements between the ‘failure’ of private meaning and the desire for the other’s desire, see Toivakainen 2019, 2020. 11  Here one might think of remark 295: ‘Suppose everyone does say about himself that he knows what pain is only from his own pain. Not that people really say that, or are even prepared to say it. But if everybody said it—it might be a kind of exclamation. And even if it gives no information, still it is a picture, and why should we not want to call up such a picture?’ (PI §295). 10

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for annihilation of sense and individuality/alterity, but rather a desire to have one’s inner, one’s soul, travel all the way with one’s expression to the inner, to the soul, of the other. Apropos of Chapter 4: What I take PI to show us is that at the point of the mystical and unexplainable always-­ already-­present address to and from the other in the primal scene of meaning and subjectivity, there lives, in us, as a desire to orient our life with others and language so that our words travel from one soul to another nakedly. And, if it is not already clear, allow me to emphasise that ‘naked’ expression or communion between souls is not, apropos of everything we have been discussing, a notion of some phantasmatic immediacy between souls where no cut between the signifier and the signified exists. Rather, it is, only due to this cut that there can be a relationship between souls. So, ‘nakedness’ here in our discussion on PI’s private language case must be understood in the sense given to it in Chapter 4. Namely, one in which the spirit in which one communes with the other is oriented towards the very way in which we are originally addressed by each other in our desire, rather than towards the urge to secure affirmation. The cut between the signifier and the signified is the point of nakedness.

5.9 The Gift of Love, or the Other Side of Lack Perhaps to the reader’s disappointment, I shall not be giving a list of all the affinities and discrepancies between Lacan and Wittgenstein. Instead, I shall use the last parts of the chapter to highlight how we might now, after these two readings, perhaps want to come to rewrite or further qualify the point of impossibility, the mystical core, internal to meaning and subjectivity. What we shall be content with, then, is exactly this point of affinity between Lacan and Wittgenstein, namely the identification of a cut between the signifier and the signified, which situates signification as something we cannot place ourselves outside of. There is no metalanguage. Or, any ‘metalanguage’ is, nonetheless, still a language-game. Consequently, the desire to escape this absolute entanglement with meaning can be written, in Lacanian style, as the enactment of the primal

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repression of the lack of the object (of knowledge) that would stand for the ultimate cause of the address, which constitutes the event of the signifier as such in the response of the other. What I want to bring attention to now is the dialectic somersault this point of impossibility, this lack, invites us to perform. We begin our acrobatic exercise by identifying ‘the other side’ of our current position of ‘lack’. Namely, what I will try to show is that it is exactly the unintentional nature of the constitutive self-other relationship—a relationship that we in no way have chosen—that, paradoxical as it may sound, inscribes an original and inescapable responsibility in the core of subjectivity.12 The first thing I want to bring attention to is that while the infant (in our Urszene) always-already addresses the other/parent without any intention—in that it does not choose its expressiveness—it is, nonetheless, the infant that causes the address. To be a cause of something is of course not the same thing as being responsible for something—as long as the cause is an it. The thing is just that to the extent there is to be a subject, to the extent that ‘I’ am someone and cease to be an ‘it’, it is exactly ‘I’ who no longer simply causes the other to respond, but rather am/become responsible as the one who addresses the other, although I have never chosen to do so—but neither have I opposed it, neither have I not chosen it! ‘It’ caused the ‘all-powerfulness’ of the other’s response, yet ‘I’ am the one who the other, the you, responds to. This is of course not a normative statement. It does not say anything about how the ‘I’ should carry out its responsibility. It only states that each intersubjective moment, each instance of signification, involves this movement from an ‘it’ to an ‘I’, from a cause to responsibility. Moreover, our original responsibility has the definitive character of being limitless because there is no determinate point at which we have finally fulfilled it. Rather, it is something we stand in relation to at each moment anew, and in this sense, original responsibility, as inscribed in the desire of the subject, is the opposite, par excellence, of satisfaction. This prompts me to say that 12  This is a central theme for Lévinas (1969, 1999). Moreover, much of what I develop in this section is (somewhat implicitly) derived from the heterogeneous tradition of the philosophy of dialogue (in addition to Levinas, e.g. Buber 1983; Løgstrup 1997). Notably, however, in these matters I am in fact most strongly influenced by the works of my close colleagues Backström (2007, 2018), Nykänen (2002, 2019), and Westerlund (2019, 2022).

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the ‘I’ is something we redeem: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. That is, the ‘I’ is, originally, the redeeming of the position of responsibility (from the position of a cause). It seems to me that there are, in fact, two dimensions to this original redemption. For it involves both a redeeming of the sense of this cause as it is revealed, or as it unfolds, in the other’s response to the original address and it involves a redemption of the responsibility that the ‘I’ carries for the other’s subjectivity. With respect to the first of these, my intention is simply to capture the way in which the ‘I’ must redeem who he/she is to the other, redeem in what way he/she addresses, affects, moves, the other, and that the sense of this address is exactly always bound to the other’s response. For when I say something to the other, when I address the other, the sense of that address will always be revealed, or rather engendered, only through the way in which I—indefinitely—respond to the response of the other (who carries the field of the Other), precisely because signification lies in the cut between the signifier and the signified. Now, if the first of the two dimensions concerns the way in which the ‘I’ carries an original responsibility for redeeming who this ‘I’ is, then the second dimension concerns, as noted, the way in which the ‘I’ carries an original responsibility for redeeming that it is only through the ‘I’ that the other accesses his/her own subjectivity; it is only through the ‘I’ that the other finds who he/she is. That is, while it is only through the all-­ powerfulness of the response of the other that the ‘I’ is taken as the subject of the signifier, it must be kept in mind that in our Urszene the other is equally the effect of the address of its other. As we might put it, the all-powerfulness of the response of the other engenders the subject of the signifier, yet this response of the other gains its signification, receives its subject, only by way of being, in turn, responded to; the other finds his/ her subjectivity only by way of being the locus of an inescapable address. And the only one who can respond in such a way as to bring about the event of signification is the subject of the signifier (as such). So, at the same time as the infant in our primal scene is helplessly at the mercy of the other, the subjectivity it is ‘thrown into’ nonetheless contains the original responsibility which states that the ‘I’ always occupies, or is called to redeem, the position of the all-powerful response of the Other. The (position of the) ‘I’, which the infant/subject must redeem, is the only

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one who can take, who can respond to, the other as a subject of the signifier as such. As K. E. Løgstrup (1997) points out, we carry the other’s existence just as much in our hands as the other carries ours in theirs. But must the infant really redeem the position of the ‘I’? And how far must we, every one of us, really redeem the full weight of our original responsibility? We take the other to be the subject of the signifier without any choice. The other simply addresses us, and the ‘I’ cannot not respond to the other’s address, to the all-powerfulness of the other’s/Other’s response. In this sense, there seems to be no way in which the ‘I’ cannot not carry its original responsibility. At the same time, there seems to be no grammatical space available for ‘responsibility’ if all that is in question is a form of logical, or ontological, necessity. At least we know all too well that the necessity of original responsibility simultaneously contains within itself a queer domain that enables and allows us to enter (relative) denial, (relative) repression. Apropos of our discussion on the eternally lost souls in the prison of retribution (Sect. 4.8), it seems to be an inevitable condition of the grammar of the ‘I’ that nothing necessitates the acknowledgement of our original responsibility. So, to the extent that we deny our original responsibility, the ‘I’ cannot be there, for the ‘it’ consumes that position. This prompts me to say that the ‘I’ is something we redeem—or not: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—oder nicht. Is, then, original responsibility something we inevitably carry or not? Yes and no. But the connective ‘and’ does not so much signal a paradox as it signals the impossibility of having it either way. Our point of wonder here is none other than the fact that our subjectivity is a gift of grace— something we receive from, well, whatever term we want to use for the mystical core of our existence as subjects. And it really is, so it seems, a gift of grace: A gift, or grace, is not something one chooses to receive, but rather something one simply receives. When a gift is given, the relationship it sets up between the giver and the receiver cannot be annulled. We can refuse to accept the gift, we can ignore the other’s address, but such refusals or rejections are, nevertheless, inescapably responses to the gift, to the giving, to the grace. Consequently, to deny the gift of subjectivity, not to redeem the ‘I’, cannot undo the relation the ‘I’ finds itself in, and this relation, its weight, its responsibility, inevitably lingers on in the grammar, in the unconscious, of the ‘I’s’ expressions and soul. The thing with

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the gift of subjectivity is, of course, that it is absolute; it is either to receive it, to redeem it, or not to be. Alternatively, the thing with the gift of subjectivity is that it is not the other who has chosen to give or deliver it. Both the self and the other, both I and you find ourselves equally and simultaneously on the giving and receiving sides. Or, subjectivity is the gift of and from the Other—although now, perhaps, relocated from its Lacanian position. We might at this point be inclined to exclaim: ‘How hideous is not this gift of existence! To be responsible for something one has not chosen, and to suffer—because one cannot escape the desire this gift comes with—if one does not carry this responsibility properly, if one does not redeem the “I”!’ Certainly, who has not at one point or another felt existence as such to be an unfair, unjust, predicament? But the problem here is exactly that it is not clear to what extent we can say that we really would desire, would want, nonexistence over existence; that we do not desire to be beings who are given the gift of existence and responsibility. We might certainly prefer not to redeem and carry our original responsibility, just as Socrates’ interlocutors told themselves and Socrates that they would prefer not to. Yet, what I have wanted to show in these last two chapters is that while we might be inclined to wish for things to be differently, our desire is, nonetheless, inescapably bound to and engendered within our particular, unique existence and the original responsibility it carries in its name. We cannot escape our desire for the simple, yet inexplicably heavy reason that any desire to be quit our desire is, nonetheless, inescapably an articulation of desire. However, what I believe must be emphasised here is that although desire as original responsibility inevitably inscribes itself in all that we do, this does not make it a punishment. Existence is not a prison, a captivity—despite what Lévinas (1969, 1985) says. Or, the other side of this imprisonment, this captivity, is the love of the gift or grace of subjectivity. Love is, as it were, the soul of our original responsibility. ‘What romantic crap! When the other always-already takes me as a subject of the signifier, this “gift” is surely not in any clear and guaranteed sense an expression of love!’ And this is of course true—to a certain extent, in a certain sense. There is no denying, obviously, that our addresses to each other are, for the most part at least, ambiguously good, or ambiguously evil. We inscribe narcissistic demands into our addresses.

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Our addresses are informed by the economy of social affirmation, and we are tempted to invest quite much in being on top of the game, sometimes regardless of the costs. We cannot even say, unambiguously, that the address of a parent to its child is a pure act of unconditional love, through and through. None of this we need to deny and, yet, none of this speaks against the mystery that the gift of subjectivity is love. For as we discussed just now, redeeming the ‘I’ means to take on the position, the responsibility, of the one who, by responding to the address of the other is the one who acknowledges the other as the subject of the signifier as such. To redeem the position of the ‘I’ is, in other words, to place oneself, to take on the responsibility, as the one who offers or delivers the gift of existence to the other. And why do we give it to the other? We do not know. The only thing we know is that the other, the you, moves us, that the you is a locus of significance. And we know that this is where the ‘I’ is called to be. This gift of love, is it unconditional? Again, yes and no. It is unconditional exactly insofar as it is not the ‘I’ who sets any condition for giving the gift; the ‘I’ is not in control of this. That is, the other is the locus of significance without conditions; the ‘you’ moves us, addresses us, unconditionally. Yet, it is not unconditional if this is taken to mean that I do not care about how the other responds to the gift, that is, how the other responds to my address, how the other responds to his/her own subjectivity and responsibility. Consequently, the other’s response will affect how I am, how I can be, with the other in truth. The other’s responsibility is my responsibility, as Lévinas (1969, 1985), I think, rightly reminds us. We are now ready to finalise our dialectic somersault and to rewrite the cut between the signifier and the signified. Let us go back to Lacan’s definition of the (subject of the) signifier as such as the (−1) in the whole battery of signifiers; the lack of the subject as the lack in/of the Other/ other. What will guide our dialectical twist here are the two dimensions of responsibility discussed just now. First, the ‘I’ as something essentially, originally, redeemed. Second, the related inescapability of both the other’s address and the subject’s response to it. Now both of these can, indeed, be described or written as forms of original lack or negativity. In the first case, the ‘I’ is something that is originally not there, but rather only something redeemed. Yet, this redemption is never finalised; the response

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to the other’s always-already present address is what is originally missing. That is, original responsibility is something that signals an absence of something, an anticipation, rather than an empty place; (−1) rather than simply zero/empty. Moreover, since the responsibility to respond never ceases, is never finalised, the (−1), the ‘less than nothing’, of the subject of the signifier as such persists inescapably; the subject cannot find itself fully, finally, contained—that is, emptied out, annulled. However, and this brings us to the second dimension, what I want to argue in light of our explorations is that we can describe this lack, this original void of negativity, in a reverse manner. For does not our description illustrate just as well that the subject has something more-than-itself—a determinate surplus—as a constitutional part of itself? Something, that is, which belongs to the other, namely the always-already pending response to the other’s always-already present address. In other words, the original negativity of the subject can be rewritten as its original debt. And this debt, strangely enough, can be written as generated by our constitutive surplus. Put together, original debt and/as original surplus bespeak the primal gift of subjectivity; the gift or grace of love. For, returning what originally belongs to the other is giving to the other—who lacks—of the surplus of the ‘I’s’ existence; the surplus is the love inscribed in the gift of subjectivity. Note that our notion of the original or primal debt of the subject is not, as such, the debt of original sin; the redemption of the ‘I’ is not payback for original sin. Rather, the ‘I’ redeeming itself is simply the ‘I’ taking its place in/as love/desire. On the other hand, however, since nothing necessitates the ‘I’ to redeem itself, the call of responsibility can always be repressed—and the repressed always haunts the subject. To the extent, then, that the ‘I’ is unwilling to redeem itself, the redemption of the self will be tied to original sin. ‘Original sin’, because nothing necessitates, in turn, the repressing of one’s original responsibility. Somehow, it was absolutely our act that denied our responsibility—an act we must redeem. The queer thing about our human lives is, however, that it is not really clear to what extent we can keep these two separate. I mean: while we might, so to speak, analytically separate the redeeming of the ‘I’ as such from its empirical entanglements with denial and avoidance, it is quite

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hard to think of a human life—least of all our own—that would simply never have actively denied its original responsibility as it inscribes itself in our empirical lives. On the other hand again, it is exactly the (logical) possibility—or necessity—of this separation which enables us to feel a connection to, or at least in some way understand, say, the person of Jesus as the son of man and as the son of God; to understand him as someone (God as a subject) who is/was free of sin without thereby being forced to imagine him as ready-made; as not having led a human life. I gather that notions, or ideals, such as Jesus are exactly so disturbingly challenging to us because we do not really have any logical arguments against his call to live fully in God’s love. Or, perhaps the disturbing thing here is that it deprives us of the notion that the fall (into sin) is a fall from a prior state of purity; a state that we nostalgically can dream of returning to exactly because there is no such thing to return to. Yet: ‘Just look at that small child being callously treated, threatened to be abandoned. How can we demand of it not to strive for safety, for social affirmation, even if this means displacement, or even injustice!’ Certainly, who am I to demand such moral strength from anyone, least of all from a small child. At the same time, however, what am I really saying if I say that a child, or anyone, cannot live in truth because the price is just too high? How can I deny the other the possibility of a life in truth without diminishing him/her? With what right do I deny the other the light of truth? Am I, ultimately, defending my own urge to diminish myself here? I think that it is not hard to see how all of this risks becoming understood as moralism, a moralism fuelled, perhaps, by ressentiment. Furthermore, if we do indeed allow for the possibility of a life without sin, then we seem to imprison ourselves in moral fatigue. For how are we not then to feel that our ‘past sins’ are a kind of overwhelming accumulation of debt, making us hopelessly ashamed of the unworthy ‘persons’ we are or have become? The possible destructive responses to such moral sentiments are multiple, and we shall not dwell on them here. Rather, I shall simply point out what I think to be the crucial displacement in such a perspective. Namely, a failure, an unwillingness rather, to acknowledge that it is at each moment that the responsibility of the ‘I’, of the whole ‘I’ (including its past and future), is at stake. In other words, the risk of

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moralism and moral fatigue is tied to an unwillingness to see what forgiveness is, what it entails. This is why I shall end this final chapter with some informal reflections on the logic of forgiveness. However, before venturing onto this final leg, I want to shortly return to the end of Sect. 5.4, where I raised some suspicions about the way in which the Lacanian framework seemed to identify the so-called primal repression of the subject of the signifier, and how it seemed to diagnose the phantasmatic structures of the ‘hysterical subject’, as engendered by the structural impossibility of a conscious or identifiable/symbolic recognition (by the other) of the subject of the signifier as such. As I pointed out, the tautology of this structural impossibility is clear enough—it is just as clear as the impossibility in the tautology of a square not being round. However, and apropos of the structure of the repression of ‘one cannot see the mind’ (Sect. 2.3), it is not at all clear in what sense we can say that it is the tautological nature of the signifier as such that informs the existential ‘hysteria’ of the subject. Again, say that someone is existentially disquieted by the ‘fact’ that a square cannot be round—‘but cannot even God make it so!?’, is desperately cried out. Rather than the tautology itself being the root cause of the disquietude, we might perhaps say that such existential disquietude is informed by an anxiety, even a form of terror, that the ‘Real’ has a limit to it; that existence is not fundamentally arbitrary; that existence is, in an inescapable way, determined for us rather than by us. What I have wanted to say, then, is that it is not so much the structural features of the tautology of the subject of the signifier as such that informs the phantasmatic displacements of subjectivity. Rather, we must look to the existential weight that the tautology is invested with. What I have come to propose is that the true source of this existential weight is the impossibility of the absence of fundamental recognition or acknowledgement. For, what I have argued is that the other cannot fail to recognise or acknowledge us as subjects of the signifier as such. Furthermore, I have come to claim, and hopefully shown, that the reality of this impossibility is fundamentally inscribed with what I called original responsibility, that is, with the call to redeem the ‘I’ as love. It is, in other words, the repression of this weight of desire that engenders and informs the displacements of the subject. This is what I have wanted to say.

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5.10 When Am I Forgiven? Standing before another person, I find that she addresses me in a certain way, moves my desire in certain ways. I find that there are things that I desire to say to this person, ways in which I want to reach her soul and have her see, and be addressed by, mine. I hesitate, become anxious, stiff, and swallow my desire. I suppress the truth of myself. The suppression of this truth speaks with, and is followed by, two different voices. Or, two different voices enact the very act of suppression. One voice speaks of reasons why it is better this way, why, perhaps, the other does not deserve the ‘truth of me’. Or, it slanders me for my pettiness, for being a coward. I feel ashamed. The second voice speaks another language. Call this other language, with all the reservations needed, the language of conscience. As long as the truth of my soul remains concealed, the voice of conscience produces, in the very division, and dissonance of my soul, a debt. Or, my unwillingness to redeem my desire sustains my original debt, rather than creating it. I am not simply afraid of how the other will respond. I am afraid of what the truth of my desire means, what it would mean for me to redeem it. Is there a limit to how far I must go with my desire, and my responsibility? Perhaps there is. Yet, in what sense could I know what that limit is beforehand, a priori? On some level, I know, I anticipate, that the truth of my soul demands more than what I can conceive of, not to speak of what fits my preferences. However, the picture attached to this knowledge, to this anticipation, is infused with, informed by, my fear of what the truth of my desire means. The picture is a phantasm, no doubt, and part and parcel of my possible justification for the ‘belief ’ that I do not want the truth of my soul, or that the other does not want it, or does not deserve it. Or, the picture is the possible justification for why the other cannot, anyway, see my soul. Indeed, the truth of the truth of my soul is not a picture, yet this picture of the truth of my soul is, now, my tie to truth. If I did not on some level know or anticipate what truth demanded of me, then the uncertainty and vulnerability that surround such moments of truth would be like the uncertainty of, and lack of control over, whether it will be sunny or rainy tomorrow—when nothing is invested in it.

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Each time I close myself from the other, each time I turn away from the truth of my desire and deny my original responsibility, I not only displace my soul and its desire. As said, internal to this displacement, a debt is sustained. For I do not give to the other what belongs to her, namely the truth of my desire. The truth of my desire does not belong to me, it belongs to the other. Something remains inside of me that belongs to the other. I cannot recall a time when displacement was not part of my soul; I cannot conceive of myself as not always-already having had this debt on my conscience. If refusing to redeem my original responsibility is to sustain an original debt, then how much must not this debt have increased since my first offence! How am I ever going to repay this debt? So numerous are my debts that repaying them—to their rightful owners—would leave no room for living. Is this what the truth demands of me? But how could I locate each person I have ever wronged, each person I have ever turned away from? And what about the dead, how can my words, my deeds, pierce to the ‘other side’? What is the price of compensation? Absolute servitude? Endless repentance? But before we condemn ourselves to a life of complete servitude, or to a life of endless self-blame, disgrace, let us reverse our point of reference. Let us ask: How do I want those who have wronged me, those who have turned away from me, how do I want these persons to repay me? What is forgiveness? If I am bitter, if I crave revenge, if I, in my bitterness, desire that the other be humiliated, as I have suffered humiliation at the hands of the other, I will bitterly want to be asked for forgiveness. Bitterly will I want the other to prosper in front of me, begging me for forgiveness. Bitterly, will I enjoy having the power, at my sovereign will, to free the other from her torment, from her bad conscience—or not. Bitterly will I exalt myself. Do I really want this? Is this what I really desire? Say that I really do love a person—just imagine that it is possible, if you can—and that this person has wronged me, wronged herself, and our relationship. What does forgiveness mean here? Certainly, I want the other to acknowledge the wrong, the displacements that she is guilty of. But why do I want this? Again, suppose, just suppose, that I am not bitter but really do love this person. If this is so, then I do not want this acknowledgement for my sake,

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so that I can feel good about myself. I want it because I want the other person not to displace herself, or displace her desire. Her acknowledgement is hers, for her. It is what it means to see one’s displacement, to see the truth of one’s desire. The other might turn to me, confess her sins, and ask me for forgiveness. This might be an important, an essential, part of what it means for her to acknowledge her displacement. But I, as the one wronged, do not need, nor do I desire, this confession as such. What I desire is simply that she no longer displaces herself; that she no longer turns away from me, and from herself. To the extent that I do not carry any bitterness in my heart, my desire has never been to forgive her, nor to be asked for forgiveness. I do not want her to have a bad conscience, even though she may never ask me, personally, for forgiveness; even though we will never see each other again. Or, in my love for her, I have always-already forgiven her. This is not to say, however, that as long as she continues her evil, her bitterness, her indifference, her displacement, in my love for her I will not long for her to stop, and continue to admonish her. For this is exactly what I will do. I will not, if I dare to love her, accept her displacements and play along as if they were not there. My forgiveness and her repayment of her debt, consists only in her acknowledgement of her displacement and in her desire to redeem her original responsibility—and in her uniting her desire with her deeds. This is what my forgiveness is in my love for the other. But, then, this means that this is what being forgiven means also for me. That is, this is how those whom I have wronged, in their love for me, forgive me—and admonish me. To redeem my sins is simply to stop working against redeeming my original responsibility. This is the only thing others—all others; the other as such—really want from me; this is what paying one’s debt means. There is no moral law over and above the very act of redeeming our original responsibility, of redeeming the love internal to the gift of existence, which can determine what our responsibility must answer to, what it means. The moment, each moment, I live in love and truth, I answer to each and every one I have ever wronged, each and every one I have ever turned away from. I redeem each and every instance of my existence—but never once and for all.

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References Augustine. 2008. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated by E.B. Pusey. Waiheke Island: Floating Press. Backström, J. 2007. The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. ———. 2018. From Nonsense to Openness: Wittgenstein on Moral Sense. In Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, ed. R. Agam-Segal and E. Dain. New York: Routledge. Badiou, A. 2011. Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy. Translated by B. Bosteels. London: Verso. ———. 2018. Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3. Translated by K. Reinhard, and S. Spitzer. New York: Columbia University Press. Balaska, M. 2019. Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buber, M. 1983. I and Thou. Translated by W. Kaufman. New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster. Cavell, S. 1999. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conant, J. 2000. Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Reed. New York: Routledge. Crary, A., and R. Reed. 2000. The New Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge. Descartes, R. 1967. Principles of Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. 4th ed. Edited and Translated by E.S. Haldane, and G.S.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dews, P. 2007. Logics of Disintegration. London/New York: Verso. Diamond, C. 2000. Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Reed. New York: Routledge. Dolar, M. 1998. Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious. In Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. S. Žižek. Durham: Duke University Press. Eldridge, R. 1997. Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Fryer, D.R. 2004. The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan. New York: Other Press.

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Hacker, P. M. S. 2000. Was He Trying to Whistle It? In The New Wittgenstein, ed. A. Crary and R. Reed. New York: Routledge Lacan, J. 1993. The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by R. Grigg. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 1999. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 2002. The Logic of Phantasy: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV. Translated by C. Gallagher. New York/London: Karnac. ———. 2004. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by A. Sheridan. London; New York: Karnac. ———. 2006a. The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006b. The Freudian Thing. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006c. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006d. Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2006e. The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2007. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by R. Grigg. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company ———. 2016. The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2018. …Or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, ed. J.-A. Miller. Translated by A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lévinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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———. 1999. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Løgstrup, K.E. 1997. The Ethical Demand. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Medina, J. 2004. The Meanings of Silence: Wittgensteinian Contextualism and Polyphony. Inquiry 47 (6): 562–579. Mills, J. 2019. Lacan on Paranoiac Knowledge. In Lacan on Psychosis: From Theory to Praxis, ed. J. Mills and D.L. Downing. New York: Routledge. Nykänen, H. 2002. The ‘I’ the ‘You’ and the Soul: An Ethics of Conscience. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. ———. 2019. This Thing with Philosophy. In Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen, and T. Wallgren. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Plato. 1997. Apology. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. Rudrum, D. 2006. Hearing Voices: A Dialogical Reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates, ed. D. Rudrum. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Russell, B. 1933. Introduction. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. L. Wittgenstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Saussure, F. de. 2011. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press. Toivakainen, N. 2019. So Much Fuss About Nothing: The Moral Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem. In Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Backström, H. Nykänen, N. Toivakainen, and T. Wallgren. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Displacing Desire: An Essay on the Moral-Existential Dynamics of the Mind-Body Problem. Helsinki: Unigrafia. Turner, K., and M. Sharpe. 2022. Wittgenstein’s Unglauben: Jacques Lacan and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 27: 201–217. Venturinha, N. 2010. Wittgenstein after His Nachlass. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallgren, T. 2006. Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2013. Radical Enlightenment Optimism: Socrates and Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein and Plato: Connections, Comparisons and Contrasts, ed. L. Perissinotto and R.C. Begona. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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———. 2023. The Creation of Wittgenstein: Understanding the Roles of Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Westerlund, F. 2019. To See Oneself as Seen by Others: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Interpersonal Motives and Structure of Shame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50 (1): 60–89. ———. 2022. Shame, Love, and Morality. The Journal of Ethics 26: 517. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10892-­022-­09402-­9. Wittgenstein, L. 1933. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, S. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London/New York: Verso. Zupančič, A. 2017. What is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

6 Conclusion

We ended chapter four with a discussion on what I called the impasse of reason, in which I suggested that reason cannot affirm itself as reason. There is no meta-reason, no meta-rationality, just as there is no metalanguage, or meta-subject(ivity)—these in fact come to the same thing. Instead, I came to suggest that goodness is the measure of the truth (or rationality) of reason, while the measure of goodness is, in turn, the extent to which the person is (re-)connected with original desire, with original responsibility, in relation to the other. The impasse is thus generated because there is no method, no ultimate guidelines, that could guarantee or even determine what this contact with the truth of desire is or when it is realised. There is only a moral, a spiritual, task. We have not managed to surpass this point in the previous chapter. On the contrary, we have come to affirm it. Notably, the impasse of reason does not, of course, abolish the question of normativity from philosophy. Normativity is an inescapable feature of language—an inescapable part of our rational souls. True, we cannot know what the normative dimensions inscribed in the grammar of our expressions are if we do not allow for ethics, for the original responsibility, to set the spirit in which we make sense of ourselves, others, and the world. However, the formal

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acknowledgement that reason ultimately answers to original responsibility does not supply us with a ready-made articulation or understanding of what this original responsibility means in each and every moment of our lives. Original responsibility is the reason for normativity. It is alwaysalready there and inescapable. Yet, it is just as well something to redeem, continuously. And it is exactly in this practice of redeeming that reason inscribes itself as the practice of making sense of the telos of desire as it articulates itself in the grammar of our sayings and doings. Perhaps we might be inclined to say, as does Lévinas (1985), that original responsibility, the ethical substance of the ‘face of the other’, contains the command ‘thou shalt not kill’. But this does not mean, as I have wanted to argue, that we thereby redeem our original responsibility by simply reframing from killing the other. Nor does it say, apropos of what was said in chapter four, and apropos of something Slavoj Žižek (2013) has observed, that, pace Levinas, killing the other is in any unambiguous sense not to respond responsibly, ethically. Or, perhaps we want to say, as Žižek (ibid.) is inclined to say, that the ultimate ethical responsibility is the practice of justice. I have no reason to quarrel with this, nor did Plato. Yet, Plato reminded us that my capacity to discern and identify what justice is, what it means, presupposes my being a just person. Žižek (Ibid.) is surely right in saying that justice must be blind to any privileging that comes at the cost of others, that is, at the cost of the ‘third’. He writes, against Levinas: ‘the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.’ (Ibid., p. 50) I will not take a stance here on whether Žižek’s assessment of Levinas is accurate—although I can say that I do think he touches a blind-spot in Levinas’ thought. Nevertheless, I do not think Žižek’s statement can sidestep the crucial question of the impasse of reason, namely the challenge of how we avoid justice being simply an arbitrary stipulation of a particular power-discourse—and thereby constitute justice as privileging, that is, as unjust. So, while it might be true that we must leave behind Levinas’ conception of the I-you relationship in order to reach the meaning of ethics, I nevertheless contend that it is only through contact with the primary scene of meaning, the original responsibility, the redeeming of the ‘I’, that ethics and justice can hope to be

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non-arbitrary; it is only these through which ethics is ethical, justice just. Put differently, in ethics (and in questions of truth and justice) there is no ‘going beyond’ what I have identified as original responsibility if this is meant to imply that we can understand justice without reference to original responsibility in the I-you relation. For how at all could we be, existentially, moved to be ethical, why would it matter that we treat others justly, if we lacked the sense of what makes life, subjectivity, meaningful; what moves desire in the first place. On the other hand, ethics surely is also always a ‘going beyond’ the primary I-you relationship, exactly because in its primary sense, the I-you relationship does not say to us how we are to act, what the actual meaning of original responsibility, of justice, is at any given moment. Again, our original responsibility is to make sense of our original responsibility. Normativity, as the incarnation of original responsibility in the grammar of our language, in the grammar of our existence, is of such a nature that it does not have a solution—nor a dissolvement. Yet, it cannot stop asking for its meaning. Questions of ethics do not have a solution because the substance of ethics is a living ethical relationship. Any solution would take the ethics out of ethics, dissolve it. And you might surely call this an impossibility, a void of negativity, internal to the symbolic.

References Lévinas, E. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Žižek, S. 2013. Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence. In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a New Preface, ed. S. Žižek, E.L. Santner, and K. Reinhard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index1

A

Armstrong, David, 8 Augustine, Saint (Augustinian), 54, 59, 61, 139–142, 144, 144n8, 146, 147, 150, 152

Cavell, Stanley, 9, 140n6 Chalmers, David, 7, 8 Cronus, 86, 88 D

B

Backström, Joel, vi, 159n12 Bacon, Francis, 62, 69 Buber, Martin, 159n12 C

Callicles, 71, 72, 78–86, 89, 90, 92–96, 98, 99, 103, 108, 110, 111

Dennett, Daniel, 8–11, 14n2, 16n3, 23 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 121 Descartes, René, 3–5, 8, 9, 14, 14n2, 23, 27–66, 69–72, 83, 117–121 Dolar, Mladen, vi, 33, 124, 139 F

Frege, Gottlob, 133, 149

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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180 Index G

P

Gandhi, M. K., 107–110 Gorgias, 3, 4, 69–115, 119, 120, 131

Plato, 3, 5, 8, 40, 69–115, 117–121, 176 Polus, 71, 72, 75–79, 81, 83, 85–87, 91–93, 95, 110

H

Habermas, Jürgen, 110 Hacker, Peter, 15, 136n3 Hegel, G. W. F., 12, 54, 59–61, 60n10, 61n11, 97, 139 Höss, Rudolf, 105–107, 110 Hutchinson, Phil, 8, 9 J

Jesus, 165 L

Lacan, Jacques, 4, 5, 12, 13, 33, 121–126, 129–133, 135–139, 139n5, 141, 145, 158, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel, 159n12, 176 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 123 Løgstrup, K. E., 40, 159n12, 161

R

Russell, Bertrand, 133, 149 S

Searle, John, 8–11, 16 Socrates, 3, 37n2, 71–87, 89–91, 93–99, 100n3, 101n4, 102, 111, 111n6, 113–115, 119, 120, 162 Søndergaard Christensen, Ann-Marie, 8 V

Vlastos, Gregory, 96, 97, 111 W

McDowell, John, 8, 11n1 McGinn, Colin, 8–11, 13–15, 14n2 Menn, Stephen, 53, 54, 59

Wallgren, Thomas, vi, 11n1, 33n1, 96, 111, 114, 120, 140n6 Westerlund, Fredrik, vi, 159n12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 5, 19, 46, 46n6, 121, 132–143, 136n3, 139n5, 140n7, 144n8, 158

N

Z

Nagel, Thomas, 7–10, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich (Nietzschean), 79, 82, 108 Nykänen, Hannes, vi, 159n12

Zeus, 88, 90, 92n2, 114 Žižek, Slavoj, 12, 61n11, 123, 130, 176 Zupančič, Alenka, vi, 137, 138

M