Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning and Astonishment [1st ed.] 978-3-030-16938-1;978-3-030-16939-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction (Maria Balaska)....Pages 1-14
The Expression of Astonishment (Maria Balaska)....Pages 15-31
Groundlessness in the Tractatus (Maria Balaska)....Pages 33-65
The Groundlessness of Meaning in Lacan’s Work (Maria Balaska)....Pages 67-93
From Deflection to Reflection: A Creative Involvement with Language (Maria Balaska)....Pages 95-119
From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Wittgenstein (Maria Balaska)....Pages 121-140
From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Lacan (Maria Balaska)....Pages 141-161
Conclusion (Maria Balaska)....Pages 163-166
Back Matter ....Pages 167-171

Citation preview

Maria Balaska

WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN AT THE LIMIT Meaning and Astonishment

Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit

Maria Balaska

Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit Meaning and Astonishment

Maria Balaska University of Hertfordshire Hertfordshire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-16938-1    ISBN 978-3-030-16939-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 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, express 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. Cover image: Landscape, by Péris Iérémiadis This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The essence of discourse is prayer E. Levinas

To my parents, Olympia and Giorgos Στους γονείς μου, Γιώργο και Ολυμπία

Preface

My aim is not to compare Jacques Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Rather, I use their work to address a challenge that arises in our lives with language, the challenge of bringing language to bear on certain experiences that seem to resist meaning. One such experience that resists meaning is what I here call an experience of astonishment and this is where this book’s journey commences. My focus will be the dissatisfaction with meaning that is generated when one attempts to articulate such experiences in language, and the concomitant realization that meaning is contingent, or groundless. Both Lacan and Wittgenstein have a story to tell about this. Their stories, as presented here, are stories about the challenges that the groundlessness of meaning can present, the temptations to avoid these challenges, and the significance that they have for one’s ethical life. Of course, when one brings two stories or thinkers together there is a temptation to compare them, and one could even take the mere fact that they are brought together as a sign of comparison. But this needn’t be so. Their stories are similar, albeit told with very different conceptual tools, which would make any direct comparison futile. To offer a few examples, Wittgenstein speaks of the sign/symbol distinction, Lacan speaks of the signifier/signified distinction; Wittgenstein speaks of the will, Lacan speaks of desire; Wittgenstein speaks of rumbling and roaring, Lacan speaks of empty speech; Wittgenstein discusses an experience of absolute safety, Lacan discusses the experience of feeling peace at the close of a stormy and tiring day; Wittgenstein criticizes the thinking or representing subject of psychology, Lacan criticizes ego psychology. These concepts do create a common ground for dialogue, but they are in no way ­interchangeable. ix

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In the above-mentioned conceptual examples from their work, there are important overlaps, as there are also in Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s more general views on the groundlessness of meaning. However, we would not, I think, be paying justice to them if we were to follow a direct comparison. Hence, their coming together in this book has the character of “at the limit” (as the title suggests), because I never confront one with the other, as people often do when they compare theories. Rather, I put them side by side like the family portraits that Wittgenstein used to place next to each other to create composite portraits that allow one to observe common aspects rather than a direct one-to-one comparison of particular facial traits. Moreover, in the case of this book, having Lacan and Wittgenstein side by side serves the purpose of bringing their narratives together to help explore the difficulty with meaning that accompanies what I describe as an experience of astonishment and the problem of groundlessness that this opens onto. The focus then is not on the two thinkers and their relation, but on the issue that interests me. If bringing them together succeeds in offering a richer account of the issue, then the purpose of the book has been served. This project has grown through and out of various different life journeys in Greece, France, the Czech Republic, and England. During this time, I have been gifted with the support from various people in the form of comments, discussions, and practical help with the making of the book; acknowledging those gifts in a way that pays justice to them is, as Derrida stresses, strictly speaking impossible. Nevertheless, I wish to thank Reshef Agam-Segal, Amalia Balaska, Cora Diamond, Sebastian Greve, Jakub Macha, Iordanis Marcoulatos, Elise Marrou, Stephen Mulhall, Jean-­ Philippe Narboux, Zik Nelson, Spyros Petrounakos, Antonia Soulez, Yannis Stavrakakis, Hugo Stradberg, Amy Tai, Ben Ware, and Carolyn Wilde. Many thanks to Alfred Le Maitre for proofreading parts of my manuscript in a timely and engaged manner and to the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value for being a supportive environment during the intense year of finishing my book. Special thanks to Amy Invernizzi at Palgrave Macmillan, for having been a helpful, supportive, and enthusiastic editor from the very beginning till the very end. I am also grateful to Miltos and Katina Ieremiadis who helped me find the right cover for the content of this book, by granting me permission to use a work by Peris Ieremiadis. Two very dear creatures, who remain a source of inspiration, would have been particularly proud to see this book coming to life: one is

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my teacher and friend Emilios Metaxopoulos, and the other one is my grandmother and friend Amalia. Last but not least, the project would not have existed without the guidance and support of Aristides Baltas, whose relation to philosophy has greatly inspired my own life as a philosopher. I cannot thank him enough. I am also grateful to him for the extra reason that he introduced me to Eli Friedlander’s work on Wittgenstein. Eli Friedlander’s careful and serious thinking as well as our discussions on meaning and ethics has been a great source of inspiration and influence for this project. The book is dedicated to my parents, Giorgos and Olympia, without whom nothing whatsoever would have been possible. London, UK

Maria Balaska

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 The Experience of Astonishment  1 1.2 A Fine Summer Day: Wittgenstein’s Description  5 1.3 A Stormy, Tiring Day: Lacan’s Description  9 References 13 2 The Expression of Astonishment 15 2.1 A Difficulty with Meaning 15 2.2 The Groundlessness of Meaning 18 2.3 Deflection: An Avoidance of the Groundlessness of Meaning 24 2.4 The Recourse to Transcendence: Grounding Meaning in Metaphysics 25 2.5 The Recourse to Facts: Astonishment as a Grammatical Illusion 27 References 31 3 Groundlessness in the Tractatus 33 3.1 The Tractatus: A Story About Groundlessness 33 3.2 The World Is All That Is the Case: A Moment of Astonishment 34 3.3 The Nature of Signification: The Symbol 37 3.4 Grounding Meaning in the a priori: The Lure of an Autonomous Logical Syntax 39 3.5 Why Logical Syntax Presupposes Meaningfulness 44 xiii

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3.6 Grounding Meaning in the a priori: The Lure of Grounding Meaning in Objects 48 3.7 Anti-apriorism in the Tractarian Objects 52 3.8 Leaving Grounding to the Application of Logic 56 3.9 Summing Up and Moving On 60 References 64 4 The Groundlessness of Meaning in Lacan’s Work 67 4.1 The Enthralling Phenomenon of Meaning: Introducing Lacan’s Theory of the Signifier 67 4.2 The Real: Ground and Groundlessness 73 4.3 Meaning as a Discursive Construction: The Temptation of a Recourse to Facts 75 4.4 The Real Qua Substratum: The Temptation of Metaphysics 79 4.5 Beyond the Two Temptations: The Real as Ab-sens 83 References 91 5 From Deflection to Reflection: A Creative Involvement with Language 95 5.1 Introduction 95 5.2 The Miraculousness of a Stove in Wittgenstein and Heraclitus 97 5.3 Significance Qua Bedeutung: The Recovery of Logical Space101 5.4 Wittgenstein’s Own Temptation to Deflect105 5.5 An Example of Reflection108 References117 6 From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Wittgenstein121 6.1 This Running Up Against the Limits of Language Is Ethics121 6.2 My Involvement with Meaning: A Critique of the Thinking Subject125 6.3 My Involvement with Meaning: Willing as Acting129 6.4 Uniqueness, Creativity, and the Ethical132 References139

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7 From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Lacan141 7.1 The Ethics of the Real141 7.2 Where It Was, I Shall Come into Being143 7.3 What Kind of Subject?147 7.4 Returning to the Meaning of One’s Actions: Desire and Responsibility150 7.5 A Creative Involvement with Meaning153 References159 8 Conclusion163 References166

Index167

About the Author

Maria  Balaska is lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, London, UK.  She is also the editor of Cora Diamond on Ethics, forthcoming in Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Aesthetic wonder is: that the world exists. That what exists does exist. Wittgenstein, Notebooks

1.1   The Experience of Astonishment This is a story about certain times or cases in the human life when expression through language seems inescapably inadequate, when words seem bound to fail us, and meaning to escape. Such a case is the experience of astonishment. I use the word “astonishment” to describe the experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant and which can have a positive emotional tone or a negative emotional tone. Dating back to 1300, the word “astonishment” comes from the old French word estoner that means “to stun, daze, deafen, astound,” which originates from the Latin verb attonare or extonare that literally means to leave someone thunderstruck, to strike with lightning. In its root, then, the word “astonishment” is neutral: it can be positive or negative, but in both cases, it has a profoundly unsettling, dazing effect. Examples of positive astonishment may include an experience of overwhelming beauty, or kindness. Examples of negative astonishment may include an experience of the absurdity of death, of a terrifying evil, or of absolute guilt; in the face of these, one feels anxious and saddened, and perhaps left with a sense of despair. Although I offer here examples of cases in the face of which one might experience astonishment, positive or negative, the principal aim of © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_1

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this book is not to examine what triggers an experience of astonishment; hence I will not address questions such as: “are there certain things in life that are more likely to astonish us?,” or “can anything appear to be astonishing?” These are not my questions. Rather, the book focuses on a central trait of that experience, namely, the way it appears to resist expression in language. What interests me primarily is the fact that the experience herein described is tied up with a difficulty of expression, along with a sense of dissatisfaction with meaning or language. In the question “what is it that makes x astonishing?” no satisfying answer can be given, for it is not any new fact about x that can account for the experience. This is what differentiates the experience I focus on from other experiences that could be regarded as its conceptual siblings, such as wonder, bewilderment, and surprise. Most usually in the everyday discourse, these words appear to be synonymous with “astonishment”: we often speak of “being astonished” interchangeably with “wondering” at something or “being bewildered” by something. Indeed, there are things in common between these experiences and the experience of astonishment, and because of the overlapping features, I will myself sometimes use those terms too (for example, I will refer to the case of wondering at the existence of the world as a case of astonishment—Wittgenstein uses both the terms “wonder” and “astonishment” without drawing a distinction). The main overlapping traits include being struck by something, the presence of very positive or negative emotions, and the presence of puzzlement. However, as it will become clear in the course of the book, the nature of puzzlement can differ from case to case, because puzzlement does not always take the form of a difficulty of expression, nor is the difficulty always an essential part of the experience (whereas I claim that this is the case in an experience of astonishment). Philip Fischer, for example, defines wonder as “a sudden experience of an extraordinary phenomenon that produces delight” (2003, 55) and connects it primarily to the response to a novelty or a rare experience (such as the phenomenon of a rainbow). To the extent that wonder,1 bewilderment, surprise come as a response to novelty, to a rare experience, or to an aporia, they are different from the experience I introduce here. What makes these distinct from astonishment is that they are linked to the knowledge of a new and perhaps curious fact, for example, to a new scientific discovery, to something that has proven to be possible when we believed it not to be possible, to an apparent contradiction. A rainbow, the quantum world, a ghost, Zeno’s paradox, the Platonic thought in Parmenides that the same thing is many

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and one, Scheffer’s stroke in logic are all candidates for marvelling, and despite their differences, they share one trait: they are, in principle, meaningful questions which can be answered by stating a particular set of (previously unknown or not fully understood) facts that make them wonderful, something we did not know or thought we knew and proved to be mistaken. In that sense, those experiences do not involve a sense that we must “run up against the limits of language.” If we go back to Fischer’s definition of wonder as “a sudden experience of an extraordinary phenomenon that produces delight” and try to rephrase it to fit an experience of astonishment, the definition would change into: “a sudden experience of significance that looks extraordinary and produces a difficulty with meaning, a sense that language fails us.” John McDowell addresses the difficulty of expression that is crucial to the experience I describe, when he says that in such experiences “one is losing the capacity to instantiate one’s allotted life form as a speaking animal,” or else one is “losing one’s capacity to capture reality in language,” which offers us a “perception, say of our finitude and dependence as empirical knowers” (2008, 137). McDowell’s words are offered in reply to a type of experience that Cora Diamond calls a “difficulty of reality”: “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability” (2008, 45–46). Even though Diamond seems to reserve astonishment for positive experiences only, whereas I choose to use the term in a neutral way that applies to both positive and negative experiences, Diamond’s examples of positive astonishment at beauty and kindness, but also of dread towards the absurdity of death, and evil are examples of the experience I have in mind. In the first of her examples, Diamond focuses on a poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men,” in which the speaker of the poem looks at a picture of six smiling young men and then finds out that within six months of the picture’s being taken all were dead. The impossibility that the poet, the speaker, or the reader of the poem faces is the impossibility of simultaneously embracing the aliveness of the six men and their deadness, the impossibility of the simultaneous awareness of death and life. The speaker is astonished at the unavoidability and the absurdity of death: how can these six young living bodies and minds that smell the bilberries, hear the sound of the rushing water, and stand in front of a camera and smile be deprived of their life? How can something (so) alive become dead? Notice that Ted Hughes is not astonished as a result of having learnt a new fact.

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He already knew that we, humans, are mortal, we live for a while and sooner or later die, either of ageing or of other causes; rather, this fact took on a certain significance (I will come back to this in the next chapter). Another example Diamond uses is that of astonishment in front of goodness, through Ruth Kluger’s memoir of Auschwitz (2001, 103–109). Kluger describes that she has never ceased to wonder at the incomparable and inexplicable goodness a young girl showed when she stood up for her in the camp. Diamond connects the astonishment at kindness to what one would feel towards a miracle, what is “at one and the same time empirically certain and conceptually impossible” (2008, 63), also following here Simone Weil when she says that compassion can be “a more astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the sick or raising the dead” (Weil, 1977, 441). The conceptual difficulty with seeing an act of kindness as astonishing is that this does not seem to fit in with our ordinary ways of understanding the value of an act as informed by particular interests or characterized by particular facts. What struck Kluger about this act of kindness is that it seems to transcend the realm of instincts and partial interests. Why would a young girl risk her life to save a stranger? “Because she likes to help,” one could reply, and this would transform the astonishing or miraculous character of the act into something ordinary or trivial. This sense of mystery can also be experienced in relation to the existence of beauty, and Diamond brings in an example of astonishing beauty from Czeslaw Milosz, who speaks of the mystery in the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green, or the voices of birds outside the window greeting the morning. Their beauty “should not exist,” Milosz says, and although I am unsure what Milosz means when he further says that “there is not only no reason for it but an argument against” (Diamond, 2008, 60, my emphasis), I would agree that it is part of the experience of astonishment that what astonishes does not have to be the way it is; for example, the beauty Milosz describes need not exist, in the sense that someone could just as well look at what Milosz is astonished by and see just a simple green tree and a bunch of birds producing bird noises, instead of the mystery of the tree and the birds greeting the morning. Astonishment is then, according to the present book, the positive or negative emotional state accompanying or accompanied by a difficulty of expression and a sense of mystery around the importance that something comes to have. In fact, the emotion and the difficulty of expression are internally connected, so that in expressing the emotion one is also

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e­ xpressing the difficulty. This sense of mystery can give rise to a question about the sense-making capacities of language, a kind of doubting guided by what McDowell earlier described as the loss of one’s capacity to capture reality in language. McDowell’s formulation might, however, appear too strong. For how can the capacity to capture reality in language, a capacity so characteristic of the human animal, get lost? Does it get lost? This is one of the questions that this book attempts to answer through an examination of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan. As I show, both Wittgenstein and Lacan have a place for the experience of astonishment in their work. Furthermore, and more importantly for my purposes, they are interested in such experiences insofar as they present a difficulty of intelligible expression, insofar as they can lead to a question about the “limits of language.” To the best of my knowledge, neither Wittgenstein nor Lacan has so far been examined in relation to the difficulty of intelligible expression in such experiences, and it is part of the original contribution of this study to highlight this aspect of their work and to explore what the two authors can offer. In the rest of this introductory chapter, I will explore the character of this experience through offering a few more examples, including Wittgenstein’s and Lacan’s descriptions.

1.2   A Fine Summer Day: Wittgenstein’s Description Wittgenstein discusses an experience of astonishment in the Lecture on Ethics, in his attempt to speak about the difficulty of expressing judgements of absolute value. Wittgenstein draws a distinction in that Lecture, central for his early work and arguably for his whole work, between relative judgements of value and absolute judgements of value. Representational content (the ordinary form of expression in which a proposition represents a state of affairs truly or falsely) cannot convey absolute meaning: “Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense” (1993, 40). Natural meaning is factual meaning, as opposed to what Wittgenstein goes on to call supernatural meaning: “Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water [even] if I were to pour out a gallon over it” (1993, 40).

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If facts and propositions can only hold relative value and relative good, how are we to express absolute value? Having spent half of the Lecture on Ethics repeating that ethics can have nothing to do with facts but is related to the absolute good, Wittgenstein further perplexes us by saying that an absolute state of affairs, the one that would invite an absolute judgement, is a “chimera.” Wittgenstein does not clarify this “chimeric” character, and, despite it, he does not dismiss absolute value. Instead, he insists on trying to understand the type of experience that tempts him to use such expressions as “absolute good” and “absolute value,” and asks what it is that we have in mind when we use such expressions. It is at this point that the experience of astonishment comes in, when Wittgenstein attempts to explore his (and perhaps our) inclination to use expressions of absolute value. It is crucial that what I approach as Wittgenstein’s examples of astonishment comes up in the context of his discussion on absolute value. As I discussed earlier, the experience of astonishment, positive or negative, does not come as a result of having learnt a new fact about the object of one’s astonishment. It is rather that the same set of facts comes to have an absolute significance for the person who is astonished. This is, once again, the difference from other cases of wondering which are linked to a particular fact or a set of facts: wonder, surprise, bewilderment would go under what Wittgenstein describes as relative value. On the contrary, the description of absolute value is more suitable for these cases when something comes to appear significant without any new fact having been added or without it being possible to explain this value through a description of the facts alone. I have chosen the term “astonishment” to describe this.2 Wittgenstein offers three examples of such experiences, the main and longer example being that of astonishment at the existence of the world. Wittgenstein begins by describing a scene from a walk on a fine summer’s day during which he feels inclined to use such phrases as “how extraordinary that anything should exist” or “how extraordinary that the world should exist.” Whereas in Diamond’s first example, Ted Hughes is astonished at the idea that being can dissolve into nothingness, Wittgenstein is astonished at the fact that there is being rather than nothing—to use Heidegger’s terms (2000). The astonishment at the possibility of a world coming to an end becomes here the astonishment at the very existence of the world, while in both cases this does not come about as a result of a (set of ) fact(s) about the world; as suggested earlier, Ted Hughes already

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knows that humans die, and Wittgenstein already knows that the world exists. Let us try to imagine Wittgenstein’s experience: we can perhaps imagine being struck by the beauty of the world, taken, for example, by the blue summer sky or the beauty of the blossoming flowers and trees, the abundance of life around us, of birds, insects, plants. And perhaps my reader, like Wittgenstein, has also experienced the astonishment that beauty can create, as an inclination to wonder at the existence of the flower, the bee, the sky, and consequently the whole world as something extraordinary, as a miracle. “Why is there beauty?” one might ask in front of a beautiful flower or a work of art, and like Milosz one might think: how astonishing it is that beauty exists, given that it didn’t have to exist in the first place! Indeed, this experience is described by Wittgenstein as an experience of the miraculous, of seeing the world as a miracle. In the case of astonishment at the existence of the world, the miraculous character of the world is to be taken at face value. The existence of the world is experienced as puzzling and baffling, as it would be to experience the case of someone growing a lion’s head and beginning to roar.3 By creating this analogy between the two cases (of wondering at the existence of the world and wondering at someone growing a lion’s head), Wittgenstein, I think, stresses the radically striking character of astonishment. Astonishment has a grip on us, it leaves us bewildered, dazed, as if we had been struck by thunder. In that sense, the ordinariness of a fine summer day should be taken with a pinch of salt: although such experiences take place within the ordinary and the everydayness of our human lives (rather than in metaphysical reflections), the ordinary and trivial turns into something extraordinary, unthinkable, and strange. In other words, Wittgenstein does not merely speak of a case of taking a walk and remarking how lovely everything looks; an experience of astonishment (as an experience of radical inexplicability) is not an experience we can switch on and off, whenever we want. This incurable, radical character of the miraculous is further stressed by Wittgenstein when he presents astonishment as something “we recover from” (1993, 43). We recover from an illness, or from a shock, but not from something that we can choose whether and when to feel or not to feel; the grammar of “recovering from” suggests that something has had a grip on us and some time or distance is needed for its effect to lessen. Yet, even when we have recovered from our surprise, Wittgenstein continues, and we wish to understand and unravel what has created this astonishment in us, we are doomed to fail. For, even if, as he says, in the case of

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someone growing a lion’s head, one could have the case scientifically investigated, this would not address the miraculous in any way: For it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say “Science has proved that there are no miracles.” (1993, 43)

The inexplicability of such experiences will be addressed separately in the next chapter. For now, I ask my reader to be patient and stay for a bit longer with the description of such experiences. Wittgenstein offers us two more examples of an experience of astonishing inexplicability: that of feeling absolute safety and that of feeling absolute guilt. Wittgenstein does not provide an extensive description of these two experiences. Being struck by a sense of absolute safety is described as a case where one is inclined to say, “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.” Socrates speaks perhaps of a similar experience in the Apology (Plato, 2010), when he says that nothing can harm a good man neither in life nor in death. A similar description is offered by the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: Sometimes I am filled with a sense of absolutely breathtaking happiness, which shakes my very soul, and in those moments of harmony the world around me begins to look as it really is—balanced and purposeful. […] At those moments I believe myself to be all powerful: that my love is capable of any physical fit of heroism, that all obstacles can be overcome, that grief and yearning will be ended, and suffering be transformed into the fulfillment of dreams and hopes. (1994, 316–317)

The feeling of absolute safety and all-powerfulness (all-powerfulness that comes from humility rather than omnipotence) appears, in all three examples, to be an experience of moral order, in which nothing can affect negatively or threaten one’s existence. It is a safety that seems to be made possible by goodness (in Socratic terms), by God (“I am safe in the hands of God,”4 as Wittgenstein puts it), or by life itself (Tarkovsky.) The third experience that Wittgenstein describes, the experience of feeling absolute guilt, is the least discussed. We could call it a negative astonishing experience, an experience of dread and anxiety when confronted with the loss or the possibility of loss of one’s soul. It is the moral self or one’s moral existence that we fear to be lost or failed.5 Perhaps

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bringing in a description by Brothers Karamazov, one of the books Wittgenstein had read most (see Bouwsma, 1986, 11), might help make sense of this example. There we find Father Dostoyevsky describing how his brother, Markel, after being hit by fatal tuberculosis, underwent “a complete spiritual alteration […], a wondrous change” (2003, 373), and part of this alteration was Markel’s sense that he is guiltier than anyone else, as he says to his mother: ‘And I say to you also, dear mother, that each of us is guilty before the other for everything, and I more than any. Dear mother smiled wryly at this, she wept and smiled, saying: ‘But why are you more before all than anyone else? What about the murderers and brigands? What offences have you committed, that you should blame yourself more than anyone else?’ ‘Dear mother, droplet of my blood,’ he said, ‘[…] you must learn that of a truth each of us is guilty before all for everyone and everything. I do not know how to explain this to you, but I feel that it is so, to the point of torment. And how could we have lived all this time being angry with one another and knowing nothing of this?’ (2003, 374–375)

Markel has not discovered any new fact about himself that could explain why he is guilty; he has not discovered new offences that would be bigger than the offences of murderers and brigands. Rather, what he already knows about himself and his behaviour now strikes him differently, takes on an absolute significance.

1.3   A Stormy, Tiring Day: Lacan’s Description Lacan’s own discussion (1997) of an experience of astonishment appears in the context of his analysis of the psychotic phenomenon, and more specifically of the miracles that President Schreber experiences during his delirium. However, his discussion is not specific to the delirious discourse but rather to that in its disturbance that allows us to understand our own “normal” speech and the function of the symbolic. Lacan presents something that anyone who has “a normal affective life” could experience, and refers to this experience as something his audience might be familiar with: You are at the close of a stormy and tiring day, you regard the darkness that is beginning to fall upon your surroundings, and something comes to mind, embodied in the expression, the peace of the evening. I don’t think anyone

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who has a normal affective life is unaware that this is something that exists and has a completely different value from the phenomenal apprehension of the close of the clamor of the day, of an attenuation of contours and passions. There is in the peace of the evening both a presence and a choice from everything that surrounds you. (1997, 138)

Lacan’s case is not as straightforward as the other cases described earlier, for at first sight it does not look like an experience that dazes or stuns us.6 It is only when we realize how close the emotional reality of this phrase is to the emotional reality of verbal hallucination that it becomes clearer that Lacan is describing a moment of astonishment. Pier Aldo Rovatti, in his paper “The Peace of the Evening,” brings forward the astonishing character of Lacan’s example, when he describes how Lacan “with a wonder more suited to an analysand […] ponders a phrase which breaks into the discourse and the text like a small bolt of lightning—not unlike Schreber’s supposed ‘verbal hallucination’” (1996, 2, my emphasis). Furthermore, Lacan warns us right from the beginning that it would be wrong to understand this experience as a simple phenomenal apprehension of the world; the peace of the evening is in no way a description of a fact. On the contrary, our phenomenal experience (a stormy, tiring day) seems to be the very opposite of what the phrase the peace of the evening makes us experience, “like a small bolt of lightning.” What is miraculous in what Lacan describes is that while one is in the midst of a stormy evening, an evening that would normally provoke “agitation” and “a panic feeling,” similar to the anxiety “we attribute to primitive peoples […] when we think they are perhaps afraid that the sun will not return,” one experiences an indisputable sense of peace. We can perhaps imagine Lacan, or someone having the experience, saying, “How extraordinary that I can experience such peace when everything around me is all but peaceful,” for example, when being in the middle of the storm, tired, and when everything around me is getting dark. In that sense, the peace of the evening might remind us of Wittgenstein’s example of an experience of absolute safety. Nothing in the facts guarantees safety; in fact, in Lacan’s example it is the very opposite. The end of a stormy, tiring day would make one feel a bit agitated and panicky, yet as soon as one is struck by this little phrase, a sense of calmness and peace overcomes them. The peace of the evening has a pacifying, calming effect, and this effect comes about in such a clear and indisputable way that it seems as if the phrase, “the peace of the evening,” has come

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from without. Indeed, Lacan refers to “the peace of the evening” as some being, some entity that presents itself to us at that moment: The more foreign we are to what is at issue in this being, the more it has a tendency to present itself to us, accompanied by this pacifying expression that presents itself as indeterminate, lying on the border between the field of our motor autonomy and this something that is said to us from outside, this something through which the world borders on speaking to us. (1997, 138–139)

It should be noted that both in Lacan’s and in Wittgenstein’s descriptions, astonishment is embodied in a phrase: for example, “the peace of the evening,” and “the world as a miracle.” These phrases seem to carry a certain power to transgress the phenomenal experience or the level of facts, as if it was the words themselves that were astonishing. For example, in Lacan’s case, the words seem to have such power that it feels as if someone else was uttering this phrase, as if the phrase came from the outside.7 This otherwise ordinary and everyday phrase stands out from the rest of one’s discourse as if it was cut off from the ordinary ways of making sense, thus taking on the characteristic trait of such experiences, a certain unintelligibility and resistance to expression. The centrality that the form of expression plays for astonishment is made even more prominent later in that text, when Lacan asks what link there is between the expression “the peace of the evening” and what one experiences. I will turn to this question in the next chapter, when I examine the dissatisfaction with meaning that accompanies such experiences. Both Wittgenstein and Lacan seem to be particularly interested in this aspect of the experience of astonishment, namely, the difficulty of expression that accompanies it. I will focus on the difficulty of expression and the inexplicability, and ask questions such as: In what way and to what extent is inexplicability an essential part of the experience? What do we learn from these experiences about how sense and meaning work? Are there ways to express the astonishment in language without a sense of constraint? And, if so, what is the merit of that expression? I will treat these questions from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s and Lacan’s work.

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Notes 1. My aim here is not to create boundaries around words, but to make a conceptual distinction. Most of these words—wonder, bewilderment, astonishment, surprise—come with their own history and philosophical baggage. The word “wonder,” for example, has been used to translate different ideas in the history of philosophy, from the Platonic and Aristotelian versions of thaumazein (θαυμάζειν), through to the Aquinas’ admiratio, the Cartesian l’ admiration, the Hegelian Verwunderung, and the Heideggerian Erstaunen, and often the differences in these philosophical takes on wonder connect to the question about the nature of the puzzlement involved and whether it is in principle resolvable. Although a discussion on this exceeds the book’s purposes, Heidegger’s Erstaunen (extreme wonder) is closer to what I want to describe, for one of its traits is, as he puts it, that it knows no way neither in nor out of the unusualness of what is most usual (1994, 143–146). I picked the word “astonishment,” mainly because of its etymology (to strike with lightning), to describe what one could also call “extreme wonder” and decided to not call it “extreme wonder” because of the complex conceptual baggage that the term “wonder” comes with. The term “wonder” therefore carries different conceptual aspects, some of which are closer to what I want to describe here, and some of which are further away. For a discussion on the history and grammar of wonder, see Llewelyn (2001), Vassalou (2015), and Rubenstein (2008). 2. My reader might wonder why I haven’t chosen to call these experiences that I am interested in “experiences of absolute value.” The answer is that the word “absolute value” can come with a conceptual baggage that I do not want, and that it also fails to address the affective element of the experience. 3. At first sight, there is a difference between the two cases: the second case seems to be a case of relative value, a case of wonder rather than astonishment, since we do learn a new fact, namely, that it is possible to grow a lion’s head. However, Wittgenstein is interested in how one can treat the case of growing a lion’s head (a case that according to what I have said so far would be described as a case of wonder) in terms of absolute value, a case of a miracle. 4. Wittgenstein connects all three experiences to God (as the creator of the world, as the source of absolute safety, and as someone in the eyes of whom I am absolutely guilty). However, introducing God is not meant to explain away the sense of astonishment. Rather, the concept of God encapsulates the sense of astonishment; it is the absolute of which one cannot speak. 5. Paul Tillich (1952) describes this as an anxiety in front of losing one’s moral self-affirmation: “Man’s being […] is not only given to him but also

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demanded of him. He is responsible for it. […] This situation produces the anxiety which, in relative terms, is the anxiety of guilt. […] The anxiety of guilt can drive us toward complete self-rejection, to the feeling of being condemned not to an external punishment but to the despair of having lost our destiny” (1952, 51, 53). 6. As I suggested earlier, the stunning element of these experiences is inextricable from the difficulty of expression that accompanies them. 7. The blurring of a distinction between what comes from within and what comes from without finds its most radical manifestation in delirious discourse, where a phrase appears with such intensity as if it was uttered by some external voice (in the Schreber case by God or an internal voice or someone else in a telepathic way).

References Bouwsma, O.  K. (1986). Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (J.  Craft & R. Hustwit, Eds.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Diamond, C. (2008). The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking, & C. Wolfe (Eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life (pp. 43–91). New York: Columbia University Press. Dostoyevsky, F. (2003). The Brothers Karamazov (D. McDuff, Trans.). New York: Penguin Classics. Fischer, P. (2003). Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. (1994). Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’ (R. Rojcewitz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics (G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Kluger, R. (2001). Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Albany: SUNY Press. Lacan, J.  (1997). Seminar III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (J.-A.  Miller, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Llewelyn, J.  (2001). On the Saying That Philosophy Begins in Thaumazein. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 4, 48–57. McDowell, J. (2008). Comment on Stanley Cavell’s Companionable Thinking. In: Cavell et al. (Eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life (pp. 127–138). New York: Columbia University Press. Plato. (2010). The Last Days of Socrates. London: Penguin Books. Rovatti, P.-A. (1996). The Peace of the Evening. JEP, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3–4.

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Rubenstein, M.-J. (2008). Strange Wonder: The Closing of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press. Tarkovsky, A. (1994). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (K.  Hunter-­ Blair, Trans.). London: Faber & Faber. Tillich, P. (1952). The Courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vassalou, S. (2015). Wonder: A Grammar. SUNY Press. Weil, S. (1977). The Simone Weil Reader (G. A. Panichas, Ed.). Moyer Bell Ltd. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). A Lecture on Ethics. In J.  Klagge & A.  Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (pp.  37–44). Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 2

The Expression of Astonishment

How can it be possible, Socrates, or to give a name to anything else of this sort, if while we are speaking it always evades us, being, as it is, in flux? Plato, Theaetetus

2.1   A Difficulty with Meaning I suggested that experiencing astonishment brings us into contact with a difficulty of expression. Our sense-making capacities seem to fall short of the experience; it may look as if language could not provide the necessary means to do justice to the experience, or, to paraphrase McDowell, it may look as if the experience made us lose our capacity to capture reality in language. Both Wittgenstein and Lacan connect these experiences to a difficulty with meaning and thereby to a question about the limits of language: Wittgenstein uses the term “essential nonsensicality” to characterize such experiences, while Lacan says that in such experiences one faces what he calls the “signifier in the real,” and in Lacan’s work the real, as will be discussed, is what essentially resists meaning and symbolizing. Let us first look into what Wittgenstein calls essential nonsensicality: If I say “I wonder at the existence of the world” I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It makes perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_2

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wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is ­extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. […] To say “I wonder at such and such being the case” has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. (1993, 41–42)

Wondering at the existence of something, Wittgenstein says, suggests being able to imagine its non-existence. But how can one really imagine the non-existence of the world? And would this give meaning and sense to our sentence? As we will see in the following chapter, for Wittgenstein, nonsense is generated when we fail to give meaning to one or more of the constituents of a proposition (TLP, 5.4733). However, in this case it seems that meaning cannot be given, at least not in the way meaning is given to the constituents of facts. Furthermore, as I will argue, it seems that this is not what we want in the first place. For we could think of someone who would try to give a humbler meaning to the word “world” so as to imagine its non-existence. One could, for example, mean that they imagine the non-existence of this particular world as it exists now and as opposed to what could have been the case under different circumstances. But the question here is not to find a way for one’s words to have meaning, unless doing so can do justice to the astonishment. Turning such an experience into a question about one’s ability to really grasp or imagine the non-existence of the world is already an avoidance of the astonishing character of the experience. Wittgenstein is equally critical of the idea that the difficulty of expression could be avoided if we were to find a correct logical analysis of the expressions of the miraculous. According to this idea, there must be a way to accurately express the astonishing experience, but we still haven’t found the right language for these facts. Wittgenstein replies that no description would suit the absolute character of such experiences, and furthermore that every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest would be rejected by him, ab initio, on the grounds of its significance: “I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence” (1993, 44). Does this mean that there is something in or about astonishment that language cannot grasp and thus breaks down? Or does it mean that expression is possible

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but that the appropriate form of expression is one that produces nonsense, namely, one that leaves meaning undetermined? Such questions also arise with Lacan’s description of the experience of astonishment. Lacan suggests that there is a problem of meaning and expression when he relates the experience of the peace of the evening to a limit to expression. This limit is what he calls the signifier in the real: We have now come to the limit at which discourse, if it opens onto anything beyond meaning, opens into the signifier in the real. We shall never know, in the perfect ambiguity in which it dwells, what it owes to this marriage with discourse. (1997, 139)

I offer a detailed account of the real and the signifier in the real in Chap. 4, but for now it should suffice to say that in Lacan’s work, the real is used to describe the limit of the symbolic, a limit of language and symbolic expression. So when Lacan says that the peace of the evening opens us to the signifier in the real he means that it opens us to what resists meaning or sense. For, as already explained, the peace of the evening does not seem to correspond to any of the facts surrounding it, which gives it an inexplicable, unintelligible character; yet, it comes in such an indisputable and undeniable way, like a bolt of lightning, and with such undeniable importance. Lacan characterizes the difficulty of meaning that arises in that experience as a “perfect ambiguity,” where one cannot tell whether the experience touches on something that can really not be expressed (something ineffable, say), or whether the experience is so tightly connected to discourse (to language) that even the sense that there is a limit is a product of “this marriage with discourse.” The question can be formulated as follows: does astonishment show the limitations of language or is it a mere product of language (a trick that language plays on us, so to speak)? To put it in Lacan’s words, “what [is] the relationship between this order of being—which has its existence equivalent to all sorts of other existences in our lived experience, and which is called the peace of the evening—and its verbal expression?” (1997, 139). The answers to these questions will be provided gradually in this book. For now, I will focus on the kind of difficulty with meaning that Wittgenstein’s “essential nonsensicality” and Lacan’s “the signifier in the real” attempt to grasp and I will explore its broader relevance to the way meaning and the production of sense work.

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2.2   The Groundlessness of Meaning Stanley Cavell, commenting on what Diamond calls “the difficulty of reality,” writes: “I associate this […] with what I have sometimes discussed as a chronic difficulty in expressing oneself, especially in its manifestation as finding a difficulty or disappointment with meaning, or say with language, or with human expression, as such” (2008, 101, my emphasis). It is particularly interesting that Cavell speaks not only of a difficulty with meaning but also of a chronic difficulty. In this chapter, I want to explore the nature of this chronic character of a difficulty with meaning and understand how it emerges in an experience of astonishment. I will argue that the experience of astonishment in its inexplicability— what Wittgenstein calls the essential nonsensicality, and what Lacan calls the signifier in the real—brings us into contact with a more general problem with meaning: the problem that meaning is not grounded in anything other than our own human practices; thus it requires our own active involvement in it. I will approach this problem and chronic difficulty as the contingency or groundlessness of meaning. The term “groundlessness,” or the fact that I call this contingency a problem, might sound too heavy to the reader, almost metaphysically so. The reader might object that what I have just called a problem, namely, that meaning is not grounded in anything other than our own human practices, sounds more like a problem for someone trying to find some essential ground for meaning. It sounds more like a problem for the philosopher, or the metaphysician, rather than the ordinary person. From such a perspective, “groundlessness” would cause anxiety only to philosophers who have left everyday language and wish to ground meaning on some anchor point outside language, as if meaning were detached from their lives. This objection would see any talk of groundlessness as a sign of not trusting everyday language and would perhaps juxtapose such an attitude with the attitude of the ordinary person who can be naive or ingenuous with what they mean. I find this objection at least partly misguided; by contrast, this book argues that the problem of groundlessness is a chronic difficulty with meaning that concerns everyone, even though the philosopher might be the one who turns the experience of astonishment into a question about groundlessness. Besides, as I discuss later, astonishment could be one’s way into philosophy. Let me show why the objection fails and why the difficulty with meaning that an experience of astonishment brings us into

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contact with, concerns everyone, not just the philosopher. First, a ­question arises whether the ordinary person does in fact trust language and therefore has no difficulty with meaning. Is naivety a form of trust or does trust presuppose a loss of naivety? Second, let us think why one would object that there is no difficulty with meaning, let alone a chronic difficulty or a difficulty with groundlessness. One could say that it is assumed that meaning is accessible by the fact that one can provide an explanation of how they use their words, if someone asks them “What do you mean?” From this perspective, the ordinary person (as opposed to the philosopher) grounds meaning in their significant uses of words; we all do so even if we are not aware of it, or even if we don’t describe it that way. The question that should be asked in reply to this statement is “What is a significant use?” When do we use our propositions significantly? One answer could be that we use our propositions significantly when our interlocutor understands us. But how do we know that or when one has understood? Wittgenstein, in his Notebooks, imagines a similar situation when he says, “The watch is lying on the table,” and his interlocutor responds: “Yes, but if the watch were in such-and-such a position would you still say it was lying on the table?” Wittgenstein continues: And I should become uncertain. This shows that I did not know what I meant by “lying” in general. If someone were to drive me into a corner in this way in order to show that I did not know what I meant, I should say: “I know what I mean; I mean just this,” pointing to the appropriate complex with my finger. (1958, 70)

Wittgenstein’s pointing should not be seen as establishing a reference point for a word, but rather as bringing forward the dimension of showing (zeigen). Wittgenstein here does not draw a connection between a word and a thing, but rather between a complex (the watch is lying on the table) and a state of affairs (the actual watch lying on the table). Therefore, his pointing involves the action of placing a watch on the table in a way that  would correspond to what we mean by lying.1 What Wittgenstein expresses here (and overall in his early work, as I argue in Chap. 3) is that meaning is not a separate, hidden entity that one tries to grasp. Instead, meaning is connected with how one uses words. There is no need for endless digging, he would suggest, and some things can be taken for granted. In the same passage, we read:

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It is clear that I know what I mean by the vague proposition. But now someone else doesn’t understand and says: “Yes, but if you mean that then you should have added such and such”; and now someone else again will not understand it and will demand that the proposition should be given in more detail still. I shall then reply: “Now that can be taken for granted.” (1958, 70)

Wittgenstein does two things in this passage: first, he introduces the problem of groundlessness, showing that it is in principle impossible to ground meaning once and for all. The instances to which a concept, word, utterance, or speech act can be applied are always broader and greater than the particular context and meaning it takes therein. Second, he tries to calm the agonizing need to ground meaning once and for all. When he says that we can take it for granted, he asks us to trust language and to stop trying to ground meaning outside language. But trusting language should not be understood as an attitude of naivety. Wittgenstein is not saying that meaning should be taken for granted because words mean anything one wants them to mean, or because words have some independent meaning (that can be retrieved by pointing to a thing). To trust language is not to take one’s words for granted, but it is to take for granted that clarity can be achieved through language. It is to take for granted that possibilities of meaning can be recovered, and thus that intelligible communication with others is possible. The phrase “I can explain to you what I mean” already entails that one can recover the possibilities of meaning that surround an utterance, or, in Tractarian terms, that one can start the process of analysis.2 This is how significant use becomes possible. Cavell offers an example of taking meaning for granted as a resistance to being attentive to the meaning of one’s words and as a failure to use words significantly. He imagines the following dialogue, where person A’s “taking for granted” amounts to being indifferent towards meaning: A: There is a goldfinch in the garden. B: How do you know? A: From the color of its head. B: But goldcrests also have heads that color. A: Well, I think it’s a goldfinch (it’s a goldfinch to me).

Person A’s attitude does not show that he trusts language. Rather, we are led to think that “he is either mad, or doesn’t know what the word ‘know’ means, or is in some other way unintelligible to us. That is, we rule him out as a competent interlocutor in matters of knowledge” (1976, 92).

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But perhaps the examples I have used so far do not capture the broad character of the difficulty of groundlessness and what it means for our lives. In Wittgenstein’s example, the problem of what position a watch should be in so as to be characterized as “lying on the table” seems too trivial, as does Cavell’s example of whether a bird is a goldfinch or a goldcrest. Nothing could be more trivial, one might say! If groundlessness is a term that philosophers use when they are splitting hairs, then it is hardly evident why it deserves to be called a chronic difficulty with meaning. However, if we move to other, more complex (yet still everyday) spheres of human life, then it does become more evident. Let us think, for example, of the case of one single word and its meaning, a word that plays a very important role in human life: “love.” When we say that we love someone, the semantic and pragmatic implications are extremely complicated, and groundlessness is what we face the moment we realize that our conception of, and expectations from, love may be entirely different from those of another person. For instance, one might say that “love” does not mean exclusivity, because it is separate from “desire,” to which another might respond that it is not separate from “desire,” or that it is but it entails “commitment” and therefore a channelling of desire in one direction. Or one might say that they envy their partner because of love, for how can one not be jealous if one really loves someone, to which another person might respond that “if you really love someone you cannot (must not) be possessive.” One can perhaps imagine how such dialogues might even lead to a moment of astonishment, the astonishment at how close we are to understanding each other (using the same words), and yet how far away we are from each other, given that we can use the same word (love) to denote things that are so different. Eventually such dialogues end up with the question: what is love, really? Notice the use of the word “really,” which comes up because we realize that our definitions are so different that there must be some way of knowing what love really is (perhaps someone who knows and could tell us), just like when children argue over something and eventually turn to the parental figure to liberate them from the uncertainty of who is right and who is wrong. But we don’t have to look only at our everyday human dramas to see this groundlessness in action. We could also read Plato’s Symposium (2015) and engage with the Socratic discussion about the different types of love, in which we might feel compelled to ask ourselves whether we are familiar with those definitions of love. For example, when Pausanias speaks of brute common love, as opposed to delicate heavenly love, one is faced

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with the question of whether love is based on sexual desire or needs to deny sexual desire in order to flourish. If the second is the case, then is common love really love? And if it is not then why do we keep calling it love? Diotima’s voice further challenges this investigation, when she speaks of a third kind of love separate from the common and the heavenly—that which is tough, impetuous, and intense but is different from what had been called common love. It is the love of wisdom and beauty. We are then invited not only to examine our past experiences and to see if we are familiar with some love that is intense and tough but not sexual, but also to accept that there is no other grounding of the meaning of the word, and that it is our responsibility to be attentive to all these different uses. Lacan takes the problem of groundlessness to run across all kinds of human discourse. In Seminar II he offers a short story in which our ordinary dialogues are paralleled to a dialogue with an alien from Mars. The story involves three scientists who arrive on Mars, where they encounter a Martian whom they surprisingly find themselves understanding. Later they discuss what they heard the Martian saying: One says—He told me that he was doing some research on electronic physics. The other says—Yes, he told me that he was working on what constitutes the essence of solid bodies. And the third one says—He told me that he was working on metre poetry and the function of rhyme. That is what happens every time we engage in private or public discourse. (Lacan, 1988, 281)

Despite receiving the same message, all three men understand it completely differently, depending perhaps on their different dispositions, systems of beliefs, and so on. What happens with the Martian can happen with all of our concepts, Lacan points out, no matter how ordinary the situation happens to be. As I argue extensively in Chap. 4 of this book, Lacan discusses groundlessness through the idea that meaning is never ours to make, and believing that it is (ours to make) belongs to (what he calls) an imaginary position, a fantasy that we can control what (our) words mean, not unlike when Humpty Dumpty says that his words mean whatever he wants them to mean. Another imaginary position is to believe that there is an objective meaning of a word or an utterance, independent of our uses. These two imaginary positions will be examined next as signs of avoidance of the difficulty of meaning. For Lacan, using language in a significant way—communicating, discussing, disagreeing—is only possible insofar as we accept that meaning is heteronomous but also depends

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on our involvement with it. Finding a balance between the Lacanian symbolic and the real is, according to Lacan, a task for the human speaking being. As I show, this balance consists in the idea that there is a thing such as “what a word really means”; in other words there is a ground, yet this ground is not a metaphysical ground independent of our involvement in the search for it. What a word really means is not given by some expert; for example, it is not given in a dictionary or in some logical analysis (such as a complete analysis discussed in the Tractatus). What a word really means is given by being attentive to the different uses of the word: for example, in Plato’s Symposium the meaning of the word “love” is given through a careful study of everyone’s definitions. If there was no such thing as “what the word really means” then no dialogue would be possible, for each one of us would just stay with their own definitions. As Cavell puts it: There is […] something we may call finding-out-what-a-word-really-means. This is done when you already know what the dictionary can teach you; when, for some reason or other, you are forced into philosophizing. Then you begin by recollecting the various things we should say were such-and-­ such the case. Socrates gets his antagonists to withdraw their definitions not because they do not know what their words mean, but because they do know what they (their words) mean, and therefore know that Socrates has led them into paradox. (How could I be led into a paradox if I could mean what I wished by my words? Because I must be consistent? But how could I be inconsistent if words would mean what I wanted them to mean?). (1976, 39)

The question of groundlessness is what an experience of astonishment opens up for us, precisely because in this experience, the difficulty of meaning is accentuated. This is not the only case of experiences that open up the question of groundlessness; any experience that invites us to judge in a way that demands a different (not factual) form of expression can have that function (e.g., as I discuss later in the book, Wittgenstein’s experience of significance—a stove as his world—can also throw at us a question about groundlessness). However, the experience of astonishment has the added feature of urgency. Because of its striking character and the strong affective impact it has, positive or negative, it creates an urgency for expression. The intensity of the experience compels one to describe it and even ­perhaps to explain it. In this attempt to respond one faces the difficulty with ­meaning. When Wittgenstein says that he wonders at the existence of the world, when Lacan speaks of the peace of the evening, or when Kluger

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wonders at a girl’s kindness, the expressions used are not straightforwardly intelligible. Wittgenstein’s “I wonder at the existence of the world” is nonsensical because we cannot even imagine the world’s non-existence; Lacan’s phrase does not correspond in any way to the phenomenal experience one is having (of a stormy tiring day); and Kluger’s phrase sounds over the top—people can be altruistic, so what is there to wonder at? In facing the difficulty with meaning one could respond, “Well, in those cases, language falls short of our experience of astonishment, which is much greater or deeper than what language can grasp.” I argue that such an answer is problematic and raises the two following and equally problematic questions: (a) whether the experience of astonishment brings us into contact with some limit of language (but, if so, how do we manage to understand Lacan, Wittgenstein, Kluger, and so on when they use the above-mentioned phrases?); and (b) whether the difficulty of expression in an experience of astonishment is an illusion caused by language, grammar, and its forms of expression, in which case astonishment (as an experience accompanied by a difficulty with meaning) might be seen as a response that is over the top. These two questions are, I argue, two different ways of avoiding the dissatisfaction with meaning that an experience of astonishment can cause. I will use Diamond’s term and call this avoidance “deflection.” What the experience of astonishment invites towards, on the other hand, is a stance of what I call “reflection,” not only in the sense of thoughtfulness and openness to thinking but also in the sense of creativity. I will first look into the two temptations of deflection and then introduce the third possibility of being reflective.

2.3   Deflection: An Avoidance of the Groundlessness of Meaning I borrow the notion of deflection from Cora Diamond3 to describe the tendency to deny or avoid the “inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach” (2008, 58), but I will explore it further in terms of what I approach as two particular temptations of avoidance of the groundlessness of meaning. Wittgenstein and Lacan can both offer an understanding of deflection and help explore the possibility for a different response to the difficulty of meaning—that of reflection, as I call it. In attempting to express an experience of astonishment, when one runs up against the difficulty of meaning, one can be tempted either to give up on

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the expression of astonishment, finding the difficulty involved a mere ­matter of grammar, or to think that one can bypass nonsense by taking a metaphysical route, or by transcending language. Let us call these two temptations the temptation of facts and the temptation of metaphysics, respectively. The temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics amounts to seeing the experience of astonishment as a manifestation of the inexpressible or ineffable, namely, of a realm that lies beyond language. A metaphysical quest, a quest of the a priori, would promise the remedy for the groundlessness of meaning. The temptation of facts amounts to a trivialization of the experience, on the grounds that all there is are facts and their representation. Here, the difficulty of expression accompanying the experience is considered to be just a result of language games, cultural influences, or grammatical illusion. On the contrary, what I call the reflective choice of responding to astonishment and to the difficulty of meaning that thereby arises is to become creatively involved in meaning. I explore this in detail in the last two chapters of this book by examining Wittgenstein’s and Lacan’s ideas on the ethics of creativity. For now, let us look into the two temptations of avoiding groundlessness.

2.4   The Recourse to Transcendence: Grounding Meaning in Metaphysics When we are astonished at something, say at someone’s kindness or at the beauty of a flower, and we attempt to express our astonishment, the difficulty that arises can lead us to think that language fails to capture the experience. Given that language seems to be successful in most other cases, the reason why it fails in this case must be because there is something that ­transcends the facts. For example, one could say that this type of kindness and beauty are ineffable. This would turn the experience of astonishment into an experience of limitation and restriction, a sense that there is something that language cannot do. It is this sense of restriction that can lead us to imagine that there is a way of grounding meaning through a metaphysical investigation. As Eli Friedlander writes: It is the simultaneous recognition of the groundlessness of meaning and of the dependence of the very being of the subject on the assumption of meaning that generates anxiety and the concomitant tendency to conceal anxiety by seeking to ground meaning systematically in metaphysics. (2001, 148)

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The anxiety is brought about by the idea that language cannot fully grasp the world. From this perspective, the groundlessness of meaning stems from the failure of language to allow for a complete access to the world, and it is at certain times experienced as a gap between language and the world, a gap that seems to demand a metaphysical investigation for it to be bridged. As will be examined later, this is a central issue for both thinkers examined here. Both Wittgenstein’s Tractarian simple objects and Lacan’s conceptualization of a pre-symbolic real can be seen to function as anchors or as ground for meaning, and have been, mistakenly as I argue, interpreted in such ways. For example, in Lacan’s case, the temptation of metaphysics comes up with what he calls the “problematical term Being” (1997, 136), when he uses his example of astonishment, “the peace of the evening” to show “that discourse is essentially directed at something for which we have no other term than Being” (1997, 138). When Lacan presents that experience as something that seems to come from without, and as a way in which “the world borders on speaking to us,” he highlights the temptation to think that what one is astonished at is something language cannot represent. However, it should be remarked that the temptation is part of the difficulty of expression: one needs to be tempted in order for a different answer to be possible. For if one felt no temptation, neither towards metaphysics nor towards what will next be examined as the recourse to facts, one would not be experiencing the difficulty of expression. One way to think of this tight connection between deflection and reflection, namely, between the temptation of transcendence and the possibility of a different answer to the experience, is the example of Ulysses’ decision to hear the Sirens’ song (Homer, 2003).4 Ulysses knows that the Sirens’ song enchants anyone who hears it, and that the Sirens could lead him to death with the sweetness of their song, as Circe tells him. However, he decides to listen to it, to embrace the temptation, not only for the pleasure of it but also because he who listens will become wiser, according to the Sirens. In the story, Ulysses, on Circe’s advice, decides to put wax in his men’s ears so that they cannot hear, but not in his own ears. He asks his men to tie him to the mast so that he cannot jump into the sea, and he orders them not to change course under any circumstances and to leave him tied tightly to the mast, no matter how much he begs to be released. The analogy to be drawn is that, like the experience of the Sirens’ song, the experience of astonishment entails an aspect of enchantment, the enchantment of transcendence, and this enchantment is part of the astonishment. Being astonished means allowing

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oneself to be taken by the difficulty of meaning, which might create an urge to escape from it. One way to escape it is through metaphysics; the other is avoiding limitation (avoiding listening to the Sirens’ song) altogether.

2.5   The Recourse to Facts: Astonishment as a Grammatical Illusion The second way to avoid dissatisfaction with meaning is to regard the experience and the unintelligibility involved in its expression as an illusion created by language, which can be resolved through recourse to facts. For example, what first appears as “absolute value” can be relativized or trivialized, and the “astonishing kindness” or the “extraordinariness of the existence of the world” can become mere contingent matters of fact, for example facts of taste and character. In this case, the difficulty of expression and the supposed groundlessness of meaning that this difficulty makes manifest are mere products of grammar. Recall that Wittgenstein brings up this temptation of the recourse to facts in the example of the miracle of someone suddenly growing a lion’s head and beginning to roar. If we investigate the case scientifically, we make everything miraculous disappear. “And where would the miracle have got to?” Wittgenstein asks, making it clear that this way of responding to the experience just misses the point. The scientific way of looking at things is the factual way of looking at things; it is what Diamond (2011, 242) also describes as the way of asking and answering questions. But this, Wittgenstein says, is not the way to look at something as a miracle: “For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that term” (1993, 43). In Lacan’s case, the temptation of facts is to reduce the experience of the peace of the evening to the phenomenal apprehension of the world, or to see it as a mere product of discourse. But Lacan warns us against both ideas, when he says that while no experimentalist construction can justify the existence of the peace of the evening, there is definitely something in the experience that we cannot doubt (1997, 139). Let us also see how this temptation appears in Diamond’s examples. In the case of the astonishment at the impossibility of the simultaneous awareness of death and life as it appears in the Ted Hughes poem “Six Young Men,” a deflection through facts would be to see this astonishment in terms of an inability to follow a language game. As Diamond points out,

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in this case there is no real depth to be astonished at; this is just a switch of the language game. When the photo was taken, the six men were alive, but now what one sees is a photo of the past. So, of course, if one treats this from the perspective of the past, one gets feelings related to the aliveness of the picture, but if one treats it from the perspective of the present, one gets feelings related to the death of those men: nothing difficult here! Diamond presents a similar kind of deflection in Kluger’s case (of astonishment at kindness), when people respond with a trivialization of what Kluger is talking about: “people wonder at my wonder. They say, okay, some persons are altruistic. We understand that; it doesn’t surprise us. The girl who helped you was one of those who liked to help” (Diamond, 2008, 62). I have shown that the sense of being excluded from one’s ways of understanding and the dissatisfaction with meaning can be avoided or replaced either by mere facts or by transcendence (by super-facts, as it were). The question then re-emerges: how can one not deflect and stay exposed to this difficulty, taking a stance of what I call reflection? The term “exposure” is important in a double way here. On the one hand, being exposed means that one is no longer protected and might even become vulnerable. On the other hand, the term is also used in photography to designate the amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic film or sensor during the process of taking a photograph. This second aspect of the term “exposure” suggests that these experiences can engender creativity. Similarly, the word “reflection,” which I use in contrast to “deflection,” designates not only an attitude of thoughtfulness but also a process whereby light is received and sent back. According to my reading of Wittgenstein and Lacan, the experience of astonishment and the difficulty of expression it provokes may function as light functions in ­photography— as what can lead to creation and open up creativity. Earlier in this chapter, when the ordinary man and the philosopher were juxtaposed, I said that astonishment might actually become one’s way into philosophy, by promoting the activity of thinking. Such experience can work as a Socratic gadfly, something that creates uneasiness and opens up inexplicability. This can also find expression in the role that wonder and astonishment play for philosophy. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein (2008) points out, the idea that it is in wonder that philosophy is born has been central since Plato, since his Theaetetus and the dialogue therein between Socrates and a bright young student, Theodorus. Socrates invites Theodorus to explore what knowledge means, and Theodorus ends up being bewildered at the complexity of the subject and at the transformation of all the ideas he

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had thought to be true into mere phantoms. “By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things, says Theodorus,” to which Socrates responds that this is an experience “characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering ‘thaumazein’: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else” (Plato, 155d). As suggested in the previous chapter, there are different ways to understand the centrality of ‘thaumazein’ that Plato speaks of, which partly correspond to the different versions of wonder that I discussed earlier. For example, one can understand thaumazein in terms of surprise, curiosity, and aporia, namely, as what can in principle be connected to something one did not know (or mistakenly thought they knew). This would be a valid way to understand thaumazein, since often in philosophy one is faced with new facts about the world (new facts about the human life, about our practices, etc.) that undermine one’s preconceived ideas, definitions, and also the very certainty that they already knew. But it is also important to add that thaumazein in philosophy is not exhausted in learning new facts. Heidegger comments, I think, on the importance of not deflecting from the inexplicability of what is the constitutive moment of philosophy: the usual presentations of the origin of philosophy out of θαυμάζειν result in the opinion that philosophy arises from curiosity. This is a weak and pitiful determination of origin, possible only where there has never been any reflection on what is supposed to be determined here in its origin. […] Thus we fail to recognize how decisively this reference to θαυμάζειν as the origin of philosophy indicates precisely the inexplicability of philosophy, i­ nexplicability in the sense that here in general to explain and the will to explain are mistakes. (1994, 135–136)

A better way to think of philosophy as starting in wonder is under the description of astonishment I have offered so far, where an attempt to explain would constitute a deflection from it. (I will also discuss this in the following chapters.) Such a description is given by Diamond when she relates her difficulty of reality to the difficulty of philosophy, and through Cavell, to the tension between philosophy and poetry (2008, 75–76). The difficulty of philosophy, which I take to also be its generating force, is that it is invited to bear on groundlessness, on the aspect of the human existence in language that is best captured through poetry and literature (philosophy’s alter egos). I will show later why poetry and ­literature are forms of expression that allow one to stay exposed and to turn the difficulty into creativity.

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Under this reading, what Socrates describes as the beginning of ­ hilosophy is, I will show, the beginning of reflection and creativity in p language. As suggested earlier, by reflection I do not mean becoming a professional philosopher. Rather, I mean using concepts and words creatively and attentively, opening up to meaning as a realm of possibilities. This will be approached throughout the book as an attitude of recovering meaning. It is because meaning is groundless—because meaning is not grounded in ways that are wholly external to us, that creative forms of expression are not only needed but also made possible. The rest of the book is structured in two parts that serve these purposes. The first part examines the relation between the groundlessness of meaning and the space for a recovery of meaning, in Wittgenstein’s early work and in Lacan’s work on the real. The second part examines this recovery of meaning as a potential reflective (as opposed to deflective) response to astonishment and shows that in the early Wittgenstein and in Lacan’s work, the experience of astonishment has an ethical merit insofar as it invites us to be creative in language.

Notes 1. It might be helpful to add here Lacan’s own criticism of any equivalence between discourse and pointing, as well as of any act of pointing to a thing to show what one means. For even if one points to something, it still remains open what they are really pointing to, so that one is always in need of further meaning: In no way can we consider that the fundamental endpoint is to point to a thing. There is an absolute non-equivalence between discourse and pointing. Whatever you take the ultimate element of discourse to be reduced to, you will never be able to replace it with your index finger—recall the quite correct remark by Saint Augustine. If I designate something by pointing to it, no one will ever know whether my finger is designating the object’s colour or its matter, or whether it’s designating a stain or crack, etc. You need words, discourse, to discern this. (1997, 137) 2. As I discuss later on, I approach the notion of analysis in a way that objects to the logical empiricist reading of the Wittgensteinian analysis. Instead of being a tool for finding the cement of logic, analysis is rather a tool that we can use for clarity, a tool for understanding oneself and others. 3. This is her version of Cavell’s “avoidance.” 4. I owe this example to Christos Ioannidis.

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References Cavell, S. (1976). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, C. (2008). The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking, & C. Wolfe (Eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life (pp. 43–91). New York: Columbia University Press. Diamond, C. (2011). The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense. In O. Kuusella & M.  McGinn (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (pp.  240–275). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Friedlander, E. (2001). Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. (1994). Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’ (R. Rojcewitz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Homer. (2003). Odyssey (p. XII). London: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1988). Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (S. Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J.  (1997). Seminar III, The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (J.-A.  Miller, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Plato. (2015). Symposium. London: Penguin. Rubenstein, M.-J. (2008). Strange Wonder: The Closing of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Notebooks, 1914–1916 (G.  H. von Wright & G.  E. M. Anscombe, Eds. and G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). A Lecture on Ethics. In J.  Klagge & A.  Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (pp.  37–44). Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 3

Groundlessness in the Tractatus

[T]hat all is in flux must lie in the essence of language. Wittgenstein, Big Typescript

3.1   The Tractatus: A Story About Groundlessness On a first reading, the relation between the Tractatus1 and the topic of astonishment seems to be simply non-existent; there doesn’t seem to be any description of an experience of astonishment in the work. Things do not look any more promising when it comes to the second topic of this book, the problem of the groundlessness of meaning. Not only there is no direct mention of groundlessness in the Tractatus, but, furthermore, the work can be said, on the contrary, to offer a theory of meaning that grounds meaning in logic and objects. On a second reading, however, things can look different, and in this chapter, I present a different reading, according to which the Tractatus offers a story about groundlessness that is introduced through astonishment, a story that starts right at the beginning of the work. In what follows I draw attention to the fact that the opening remark of the work creates the sense that there is something that language cannot do, introducing an experience of limitation, the concomitant emotions,2 and potentially the problem of the groundlessness of meaning. “The world is all that is the case”; this sudden contact with the world, as if beyond language, has a particular importance given that it is the first of the seven core © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_3

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propositions of the Tractatus, the one that introduces the book and is followed by the other six propositions. The theme of a direct view of the world returns only at the end of the Tractatus, as if in a circular pattern, when the reader is invited to see the world aright, presumably to be made possible after the reader’s journey through the work. After I explain how the first proposition can generate feelings of astonishment and potentially introduce the problem of groundlessness, I discuss three different ways of responding to groundlessness that are offered in the Tractatus (and also characterize various interpretations of it). The first two responses to groundlessness can be connected to what I previously treated as a temptation to do away with groundlessness through metaphysics. This takes two forms in the Tractatus: either the form of grounding meaning on the formal features of logic or the form of grounding meaning on objects we can be acquainted with. Both are aprioristic ways of grounding. At the end of the chapter, I argue that there is also available in the Tractatus a possibility for a third response to groundlessness, an ex post facto “grounding” that takes place through the use of language and the application of logic. For now, let us examine how astonishment and the concomitant difficulty of expression are introduced in the work.

3.2   The World Is All That Is the Case: A Moment of Astonishment The Tractatus begins with the world—not with language, nor with logic, but with the world. Moreover, it gives us a very particular view of the world, an absolute view we could say, a view that brings the reader in contact with the world as what is, as what exists, as sheer thereness. What is the role of this heavily metaphysical tone in a work that focuses on logic and language, and has been described as “the swan song of metaphysics” (Hacker, 1986, 27)? With its radical tone, this first view of the world can certainly create feelings of awe and safety, but also anxiety and powerlessness. Moreover, this first remark—the world is all that is the case—creates a difficulty of intelligible expression. For where is the reader (or the author) supposed to be situated when this proposition is uttered? Any place within language allows us to represent the world only partially, for one can only speak meaningfully about particular things taking place within the world. The thought

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that the world is all that is the case makes no sense unless one can imagine the world being something else, for example what is not the case, or certain things as opposed to others. I remind my reader that a similar problem was described in the Lecture on Ethics, with the wonder at the existence of the world; as discussed in previous chapters, the significance that the existence of the world takes on does not make sense: it is unclear what it would mean to imagine the world not existing, since we can only imagine certain particular things not existing. Both remarks (the introductory proposition in the Tractatus, and the remark from the Lecture on Ethics) have a strong affective element and are characterized by a potential state of confusion, a difficulty of intelligible expression. These traits were discussed earlier as central traits of astonishment. Frege, in one of his letters to Wittgenstein, expresses this worry about the potential unintelligibility of the opening remark of the Tractatus, along with a sense of frustration and puzzlement: I start taking exception to what you have written immediately, at the first sentence (Satz). Not because I took it to be false, but because the sense (Sinn) was unclear to me. “The world is everything that is the case.” The “is” is used either as a mere copula, or as the sign of identity in the full sense of “is the same as.” While the “is” of the subordinate clause is obviously a mere copula, I can only understand the “is” of the main clause in the sense of an identity sign. Here I believe no doubt is possible. But is the identity to be understood as a definition? That is not so clear. Do you want to say, “I understand by ‘world’ everything that is the case?” Then “the world” is the defined expression, “everything that is the case” the defining expression. In this case nothing is thereby asserted of the world or of that which is the case; rather, if something is supposed to be asserted, then it is something about the author’s use of language. Whether and how this use might concur with the language of daily life is a separate matter, which is, however, of little concern to the philosopher once he has established his use of language. (Frege in Floyd, 1998, 96–97)

Frege’s thoughts here will perhaps remind the reader of Wittgenstein’s own later thoughts when, in the Lecture on Ethics, he worries about the nonsensical character of the phrase “How wonderful that the world exists.” The phrase “the world is all that is the case” may seem correct to Frege when understood in the context of daily life, but when uttered by a philosopher, namely, when the conditions of intelligibility are put under scrutiny, the phrase becomes unintelligible. Frege cannot understand

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whether this phrase should be understood as a definition, or as a relation of identity, in which case it seems empty: nothing is asserted of the world nor of what is the case, so why has Wittgenstein placed it there? Why is this phrase deemed to be so important as to start the Tractatus with it? Frege is not the only one to be puzzled; most commentators avoid any direct reference to this first sentence, let alone attempt an explanation. For example, in her interpretation of the Tractatus, Anscombe (1971) says nothing about it; Pears (1987) regards the content of the ontological remarks as a mere logical condition for what Wittgenstein calls the end of analysis; Mounce sees in Wittgenstein’s reference to the world an attempt to explain “how the world has to be if there is to be sense, if there are to be propositions” (1981, 19). However, it is crucial to pay justice to Wittgenstein’s choice and to the experience that the reader is offered with that introduction. As Eli Friedlander rightly argues, it seems that, with this first contact with the world, “Wittgenstein wants to open us to the world beyond our structuring efforts, to provide an experience of the world at the limits of language” (2001, 25). The present book further suggests that, through this first unmediated contact with the world, the Tractatus offers potentially a setting that bears similarities with an experience of astonishment, and the difficulty of intelligible expression that it generates is followed by a story about the groundlessness of meaning. I will now introduce and explore this story. If I were to present it in a chronological order, it would take the following form: first, the reader is exposed to this unmediated contact with the world, and like Frege, to a potential confusion regarding the legitimacy or intelligibility of that view. However, as the book progresses this view is forgotten and replaced by the propositions about objects and the substance of the world that will secure (as Wittgenstein announces early on) the determinacy of sense. Any worry about the world being in excess of language is remedied with the propositions on substance. But as the reader moves on, this kind of grounding looks less promising. For example, the Tractarian account of objects becomes increasingly unclear, and no examples are provided: are objects universals? Can we acquaint ourselves with them? Are they sense data? As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the forms of the objects cannot be known a priori and thus objects start looking more like empty conditions for sense (see Pears, 1987; McDonough, 1986). As the reader makes her way towards the section on logic, she might

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be tempted to turn towards what can be given a priori, namely the level of logical syntax as a candidate for grounding. However, as I show, the formal features of logic are not adequate for signification without semantics (which takes us back to objects), and therefore that kind of grounding does not, strictly speaking, work either. As the reader makes her way to the final propositions, perplexity and confusion grow deeper, only to be brought to an extreme with the famous final propositions in which Wittgenstein asks her to recognize all the previous sentences (and, therefore, all the efforts of grounding) as nonsensical. From the above point of view, the Tractatus is a story about groundlessness. My task here is not only to convince the reader that the Tractatus is such a story, but also, most importantly, to show that as such it aims at showing that there cannot be an a priori grounding. I will now explore in detail what I offered as a summary, but I will not do so in the chronological order I have just presented. Rather, I start with Wittgenstein’s account of what is essential for signification to explore two temptations of apriorism and metaphysical grounding, grounding meaning in the formal features of logic and grounding meaning in the Tractarian objects. In the end, I go back to the first propositions and show that what cannot be given a priori (the forms of the objects and the elementary propositions) is Wittgenstein’s way into the possibility of grounding meaning in the use of language, rather than in a priori features.3

3.3   The Nature of Signification: The Symbol How does a proposition describe the world? How does a thought relate to the object of the thought?4 These are some of the questions Wittgenstein attempts to understand by looking into the nature of signification. Wittgenstein asks what is necessary for a string of sounds to signify and be used for the projection of a possible situation, in other words what it takes for a propositional sign to be a fact, namely, to be articulate, not just a blend of words. He distinguishes between essential and accidental features of proposition and uses the terms “symbol” or “expression” to describe the essential features. He writes:

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3.31 I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol). (A proposition is itself an expression.) Everything essential to their sense that propositions can have in common with one another is an expression. An expression is the mark of a form and a content. 3.311 An expression presupposes the forms of all the propositions in which it can occur. It is the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions. 3.32 A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol. 3.321 So one and the same sign (written or spoken, etc.) can be common to two different symbols—in which case they will signify in different ways. 3.322 Our use of the same sign to signify two different objects can never indicate a common characteristic of the two, if we use it with two different modes of signification. For the sign, of course, is arbitrary. So we could choose two different signs instead, and then what would be left in common on the signifying side?

The sign is arbitrary; it is merely a unit that is perceptible by the senses. However, as a propositional sign (namely, in combination with other signs) it forms a fact that can express sense. Any fact expressing sense is conditioned by the expression or symbol, its background form and range of possibilities. In order to recover the symbol, in order to recover the mode of signification of the arbitrary sign, one has to look at the different propositions, the different propositional contexts, in which a sign occurs, and this provides the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions. So, for example, to bring out the way the linguistic sign “to be” is a symbol we would need to bring out the contexts of the propositions in which it can occur meaningfully (as copula, as sign of identity, etc.). Commonality between a class of propositions is, then, the main characteristic of the symbol, which Wittgenstein traces in three contexts: 1. in the general form of a proposition (cf. 3.311–3.312, an expression presupposes the forms of all the propositions in which it can occur. It is the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions. It is therefore presented by means of the general form of the propositions that it characterizes.); 2. in the nature of logical constants and logical operations (cf. 5.512: But in “-p” it is not “-” that negates; it is rather what is common to all the signs of this notation that negates p; that is to say the common rule that governs the construction of “-p,” “---p,” “-p v –p,” ­“-p.-p,” and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. And this common factor mirrors negation.);

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3. in the real name of an object (cf. 3.3411: So, one could say that the real name of an object is what all symbols that signified it had in common. Thus, one by one, every kind of composition would emerge as unessential to a name.). As announced earlier, I will explore two related temptations that might arise with regard to the parts of the symbol. One is to think that grounding is offered through the formal features of logic (the two first parts of the symbol) and the other is to think that it is offered through what is here referred to as the third aspect of what is essential for signification, namely, the “real name of an object.” The two first aspects of the symbol can be given a priori, and Wittgenstein spends a good part of the Tractatus showing what the general form of the proposition is and how all logical constants and truth operations can be reduced to one sole logical constant (N) that permits every logical operation. The third feature, however, the level of meaning, is what cannot be given a priori. I argue that this third feature takes us back to the problem of the groundlessness of meaning. The tension between these two aspects of the symbol is made manifest in one of the thorniest interpretative issues of the Tractatus, namely, how syntax and semantics come together, how the formal syntax relates to (and, as I show next, presupposes) what it cannot determine but what is not arbitrary either, namely, semantics and meaningfulness. I will now present Wittgenstein’s account of the formal features of signification, namely, what is common between all logical operations and all logical constants, and I will attempt to show its lure as a candidate ground for meaning.

3.4   Grounding Meaning in the a priori: The Lure of an Autonomous Logical Syntax There is a great temptation to think that meaning, the ability to produce sense, is grounded in the formal features of logic. The main root of this temptation is that these formal features of logic can be given a priori; we don’t need to know anything about the subject matter for them to operate: logic takes care of itself. Rudolf Carnap’s own ideas, seemingly5 influenced by the Tractatus, about the importance of the logical syntax of language, and more specifically his idea that the rules of syntax determine meaning, can be an example of this kind of grounding: “[L]et any postulates and any rules of inference be chosen arbitrarily; then this choice,

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whatever it may be, will determine what meaning is to be assigned to the fundamental logical symbols” (1937, xv). Indeed, with his concept of the symbol Wittgenstein seems to go against the existence of a referential relation between a logical sign and something in the world, for at this level (of form) it is only the commonality between different propositions, constants, and used signs that matters. Wittgenstein’s criticism is crucial for his account of logical constants; although both Frege and Russell were trying to find a kind of logical object6 that would be represented by logical constants, Wittgenstein opposes this idea and claims explicitly (making it also his fundamental idea) that logical constants do not represent: But it is important that the signs “p” and “-p” can say the same thing. For it shows that nothing in reality corresponds to the sign “-.” The occurrence of negation in a proposition is not enough to characterize its sense (--p = p). The propositions “p” and “-p” have opposite sense, but there corresponds to them one and the same reality.7 (4.0621)

In other words, it is the same fact that verifies or falsifies the proposition “p” or the proposition “-p,” and the presence or absence of the sign of negation is just a no or a yes of the proposition with regard to reality, and does not add anything new to the sense of the proposition: “Every proposition must already have a sense: it cannot be given a sense by affirmation. Indeed, its sense is just what is affirmed. And the same applies to negation, etc.” (4.064). In addition, the symbol of negation is not expressed just by the sign “-.” It is not by placing a “-” in front of a proposition to negate it that we grasp the symbol of negation. Instead, the symbol of negation can be grasped only if we consider what is common to all the signs of notation expressing the negation of a proposition (-p, ---p, -----p, etc.). This is how logical constants are part of the symbol, because to grasp negation one needs to bring out the whole network of internally related propositions and to see what is common. In other words, grasping “-p” involves grasping the whole logical space of “p,” and therefore it involves grasping negation, affirmation, conjunction, disjunction, and so on. Logical connectives are not just things we add to propositions that have sense, but rather they make up the sense of a proposition. It is the way propositions are logically constructed, the way they are generated from other propositions (first and foremost from elementary propositions): “-” is part of “p,” of its logical space.

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To understand better how essential logical constants are for signification, we should see what role they play in the logical construction of propositions, namely, the role they play in operations, and what must be done to the one proposition in order to make another out of it (5.23). The connection between logical connectives and logical operations is given in truth tables. For a proposition to have sense means automatically that it can be true or false. “True” and “false” are not accidental properties of a proposition such that when it has sense we can also say it is true or false. On the contrary, “to have sense” means to carry the possibility of being true or false. Wittgenstein’s truth tables are, thus, a kind of description of the logical space of a proposition. Logical connectives do not represent anything, but just reverse the truth values of the sentences. For example, that -p, ---p, -----p, and so on are logically equivalent and that they just reverse the sense of p (and of --p, ----p, etc.) is shown in the following truth table (Table 3.1). The idea that every proposition carries already within it a logical space means that a proposition is not simply constructed by an elementary proposition plus a logical connective, or two elementary propositions and a logical connective, and so on. This would imply that a logical connective adds something new to the elementary proposition that was not already there before. On the contrary, Wittgenstein claims that nothing new is added by logical constants and logical operations, because all logical operations are changes in the distribution of the Ts and Fs in a truth table. For example, in negation, we do not add a “no” (-) to the proposition but rather just switch its sense, or, in terms of a truth table (like the one above), we just change the Ts to Fs, and vice versa. In an implication involving two propositions (p, q), the composite proposition (p→q) can be rewritten as an expression of its truth values (TTFT), according to the following truth table (Table 3.2) (see also 4.442). Based on what was previously said, however, a proposition that has the same sequence of truth values (TTFT) would be logically equivalent to “p→q.” To grasp the symbol then means to grasp all these different signi-

Table 3.1

p

-p

--p

T F

F T

T F

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Table 3.2

p

q

p→q

T F T F

T T F F

T T F T

fication modes. Wittgenstein pushes this idea to its extreme and says in 5.5 that “Every truth-function is a result of successive applications to elementary propositions of the operation ‘(-----T)(ξ, …).’ This operation negates all the propositions in the right-hand pair of brackets, and I call it the negation of those propositions.” Wittgenstein makes a reduction of all logical operations and logical constants to one,8 N, and in 5.47 he says that the sole logical constant is what all propositions, by their very nature, have in common with one another. The fact that negation as a logical constant or logical operation can condense within it all logical constants and operations is not just an accidental feature of language that gives us a simple way of constructing propositions out of elementary propositions; on the contrary, it is so essential for propositions that Wittgenstein identifies it with the general form of the proposition.9 One could say that the sole logical constant was what all propositions, by their very nature, had in common with one another. But that is the general propositional form. (5.47) The description of the most general propositional form is the description of the one and only general primitive sign in logic. (5.472)

Table 3.3 demonstrates briefly how it is possible to define all standard truth functions in terms of a sole logical constant. This is par excellence a moment where the reader might be tempted to think that what is essential for signification is logical syntax and its formal rules. In order to see this, we will use the schema that Wittgenstein provides us with in 5.101,10 which sets out the truth functions of any given number of elementary sentences. Wittgenstein has already said in 4.27 that there are Kn possibilities for n facts obtaining or not obtaining, or in terms of truth possibilities there are Κn possibilities for n elementary propositions (where if K corresponds to the two (2) possibilities of truth falsity, and n corresponds to the number of elementary propositions, what we get is 2n).

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Table 3.3 p

q

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

T F T F

T T F F

T T T T

F T T T

T F T T

T T F T

T T T F

F F T T

F T F T

F T T F

T F F T

T F T F

T T F F

F F F T

F F T F

F T F F

T F F F

F F F F

Suppose we have a world with two possible states of affairs, then our table with two elementary propositions (p, q) would provide us with every possible proposition about this world (Kn would be K2 and this would give us [2 × 2] 4 rows of truth values and [Knn] 16 columns of possible propositions about the world). In these 16 columns there would also be included (as limit cases) the cases of tautology (1) and contradiction (16), which are not, strictly speaking, propositions about the world, but they are part of the symbolism, like 0 is part of the symbolism of arithmetic. Among the 16 propositions there would also be the elementary propositions themselves as a conjunction of themselves and a tautology, for instance “p and (q or not-q)” is p; this shows that even elementary propositions can be truth functions of themselves. As Wittgenstein insists in 5.3, all propositions are results of truth operations on elementary propositions. Let us now look at how every proposition of the table can be reached by the repeated application of the operation N to the elementary propositions of the table. I borrow this analysis from Anthony Kenny’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s schema of 5.101 (1976, 88–89). As we will see, the application of the N operator to a single proposition is simply the reversal of true to false, and vice versa; the application to two propositions is to get T whenever two Fs appear, and so on. For example, if we start with the negation of one proposition, then by applying negation to 10 we get 7 (-p) and by applying it to 11 we get 6 (-q). If we apply it to 10 and 7 we get 16 (contradiction), and if we apply negation to 16 we get 1 (tautology). If we apply it to 10 and 11, we get 12 (neither p nor q) and if we apply it to 12 we get 5 (p or q). If we apply negation to 6 and to 7 we get 15 (p and q), and the negation of 15 gives us 2 (not both p and q), and so on.11 This interconnection between truth functions and the application of the N operator, and the possibility of deriving every single one of them through the application of logical constants a priori, in a formal way and without any need to specify what is talked about, promises a solid ground

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for signification. This is, for example, the merit that Richard McDonough’s (1986) interpretation of the Tractatus finds in tautologies as the starting point for (the Tractarian theory of) meaning. Those propositions that tell us nothing about the world (we know nothing about the weather when we know that it is either raining or not raining) show the formal properties that allow our language to represent the world (6.12). For ΜcDonough, to understand the nature of tautologies is to understand the nature of non-logical propositions because there one can clearly see the formal properties of logic (see 1986, 61). However, in the section that follows I will question this supposed autonomy of logical syntax and show that it depends on there being a subject matter, namely, what I earlier called the third aspect of the Tractarian symbol, the real name of the object. This is why, it is further argued, grounding meaning a priori cannot work in the Tractatus.

3.5   Why Logical Syntax Presupposes Meaningfulness Even though, at first sight, meaning does not seem to play a role for the a priori rules of logical syntax, as if there could be a formal level of syntax devoid of meaning, a closer look will make clear that all the truth operations discussed above presuppose elementary propositions (see 5.234), including those that generate logical propositions; for example, tautologies are also created by the application of negation to elementary propositions. As introduced previously, the general propositional form is the common form that all propositions must share; to find the general form of the proposition one needs “to give a description of the propositions of any sign-language whatsoever in such a way that every possible sense can be expressed by a symbol satisfying the description, and every symbol satisfying the description can express a sense, provided that the meanings of the names are suitably chosen” (4.5, my emphasis). Elementary propositions must have sense in order for logical operations to take place, namely, in order to acquire propositions that have the general propositional form. What is essential to the symbol presupposes meaningfulness, and this is why in tautologies or contradictions the signs are not combined in a way that is essential to the symbol. (See 4.4661. Admittedly, the signs are still combined with one another even in tautologies and contradictions—i.e., they

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stand in certain relations to one another—but these relations have no meaning; they are not essential to the symbol.) Suppose that we have the tautology “p ∨ -p” and we place particular propositions instead of variables, for example “it rains or it doesn’t rain.” Even though the particular propositions when they stand alone tell us something about the world (“it rains” and “it doesn’t rain,” respectively), thus making it possible to tell if they are true or not by comparing with reality, the fact that these particular propositions are thus combined to form a tautology annuls their function as pictures of the world: they stop functioning as genuine propositions (McDonough, 1986, 50). When I introduced Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol, I said that one of the aspects of the symbol is the real name of the object; in other words part of reaching what is essential in signification is finding the real name of the object. Earlier we saw how the other two aspects of the symbol (logical constant N, and the general propositional form) were reached a priori. Now it is time to ask how this aspect of the symbol is reached. Finding the real name of an object demands an analysis of propositions, namely, an unveiling of what “characterizes the sense” of a proposition through an examination of the different propositional contexts in which the same sign occurs. An analysis is a process that takes place through what is arbitrary and aims at what is essential. As explained earlier, a proposition has essential and accidental features, where accidental features are those that result from the particular way in which the propositional sign is produced and the essential ones are those without which the proposition could not express its sense: “So what is essential in a proposition is what all propositions that can express the same sense have in common. And similarly, in general, what is essential in a symbol is what all symbols that can serve the same purpose have in common” (3.34–3.341). What is essential, what conditions our making of sense, cannot be seen prima facie, because in our everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification—and so belongs to different symbols—or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus, the word “is” figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; “exist” figures as an intransitive verb like “go,” and “identical” as an adjective; we speak of ­something, but also of something’s happening. (In the proposition “Green

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is green”—where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective—these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.) (3.323)

According to Wittgenstein, to see what all symbols that signify a thing have in common is to find what the real name of an object is, and this presupposes bringing out the forms of the objects (the forms of elementary propositions) where names and objects are logically equivalent.12 Herein lies the difficulty regarding the realm of meaning in the Tractatus: Wittgenstein says that the forms of elementary propositions cannot be given a priori and never offers an example of what a complete analysis would look like at its endpoint. This is the form of the world in the background of which the Tractarian account of signification is given, rather than a by-product of that account. Recall that the Tractatus starts with the world and the form of the world (objects). Meaning is a precondition for syntax, rather than an arbitrary by-product of it. As Norman Malcolm (1988, 5) puts it: [T]he boundary of language and of thinking is drawn against the background of the form of the world. The conception of the form of the world is not a product of the theory of language of the Tractatus although it is articulated by theory. I think that the conception that there is a fixed form of all possible worlds is one of the versions that inspired the Tractatus. It is proposed by Wittgenstein’s theories of language and thought.

But if this form cannot be given a priori, and no example of objects is ever provided, how can it play such an important role for signification, how can it be part of the symbol? The most common way around this aporia is to regard the realm of meaning (the level of elementary propositions) as an empty condition that cannot be accessed at all—and that does not need to be accessed either. According to this reply, all we need is the possibility for names to have meaning for sense to be determinate. Pears’ interpretation is one example of this approach when he says: “[Wittgenstein] argued a priori from the existence of factual sentences with senses to the existence of an underlying grid of elementary possibilities, with simple objects at the nodal points” (1987, 64). A similar position is also adopted by McDonough (1986), for whom the question whether the substance of the world (objects and names) is accessible or not is of no importance. As he claims: “All that one can justifiably mean by saying that the subject matter of propositions exists, or constantly exists, is that as far as that which is presented with the symbols

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goes, everything behaves as if there is a subject matter—a constantly existing subject matter—in the world. In the positive and negative propositions the proxies remain constant while their arrangement or contingent state is what can be or fail to be” (1986, 108–109); and, later on, “in other words, that genuine propositions are about a constantly existing subject matter in the world only means that, as far as that which is presented with the symbol is concerned, the meaning (bedeutung) of the proxies remains constant” (1986, 114). The meaningfulness of signs thus becomes an empty condition for the determinacy of sense, empty in the sense that it is not accessible in any way. Again, this does not resolve the aporia; it merely sidesteps it. McDonough seems to admit, however, that this solution has a significant drawback: the question of the objects in the Tractatus becomes a mystery. This leads him to connect the realm of objects and names with the limits of language, and even with a “beyond the limits.” As he writes: The whole doctrine that there are limits to language must be understood in light of the fact that the fundamental notion of meaning in the Tractatus is that of the presentational symbol. These limits must be encountered at any point at which one attempts to deal with that which cannot be presented with the propositional symbol, that is, its subject matter. What the proposition says about its subject matter, that it is or is not in some contingent state, is within the limits of that which can be expressed by language only because the being-in-a-contingent-state of an entity can be presented with the propositional symbol. But the existence or nature of the subject matter itself, apart from its contingent states, is beyond the limits of language. This is because it has to do, by hypothesis, with that which cannot be presented with the propositional symbol. […] Admittedly, this view that there are limits to language, and that they are encountered at just this point and in just this way, is one of the most problematic views of the Tractatus. The connection between the proxies and the subject matter “in the world” is clearly one of the most mysterious parts of Wittgenstein’s theory. (1986, 111 and 113, my emphasis)

It is precisely this drawback that drives the second temptation for metaphysical grounding in the Tractatus, namely, grounding meaning in objects, given that, according to it, the subject matter in the world is not beyond the limits of language but is something we can be acquainted with. According to such an interpretation, the Tractarian objects can offer a metaphysical grounding of the formal features of logic, rather than the other way around.

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3.6   Grounding Meaning in the a priori: The Lure of Grounding Meaning in Objects It might seem that grounding meaning in objects is what Wittgenstein aims to do in the Tractatus, if, for example, one focuses on the so-called argument for simples (2.02–2.0212). These remarks could indeed be understood as a straightforward argument for the existence of anchor points for meaning, sense data, logical atoms, or universals that form the substance of the world and are first and foremost characterized by their simplicity: 2.02 The object is simple. 2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes. 2.021 Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound. 2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. 2.0212 It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).

A similar aim to find the ultimate anchor points for meaning seems to be expressed in the Notebooks: “The great problem around which everything that I write turns is: is there an order in the world a-priori, and if so what does it consist in?”; and later on, “my whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose picture the proposition is. In giving the nature of all being. (And here Being does not mean existing—in that case it would be nonsensical)” (1979, 53). From this perspective, the aim of the complete analysis of a proposition would be to uncover these simple, bottom-level entities of the world and language. If a proposition is a complex that consists of simpler entities, the deconstruction to the simplest entities that make up a proposition would bring out a series of names that have the exact same possibilities as objects. Uncovering these referential relations can, according to this reading, allow us to reach a logically perfect language, one that has symbols with definite and unique meaning, namely, a language in which groundlessness is not an issue. If we can be sure that at least some of the symbols have a definite and unique meaning, then groundlessness cannot be a problem, for we

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know that at least at some level (that of the completely analysed proposition) world and language come together, and names (the simple linguistic entities) mean objects (the simple entities of the world). Given that objects contain all possibilities, they can be the perfect candidate for grounding meaning. Having an immediate referential relation to the simple building blocks of language (names), objects can secure the real meaning of a proposition. This is a view that Russell13 puts forward both in his own work and in his introduction to the Tractatus. As he says in his Lectures on Logical Atomism: “In a logically perfect language there will be one word and no more for every single object” (1964, 314). In this case, groundlessness makes itself manifest in the gap between our language and an ideal language; while an ideal language would allow us to represent the world accurately, with no confusions involved, our language fails to mean something definite. As Russell remarks in the Introduction to the Tractatus: Mr Wittgenstein […] is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence “means” something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise. […] A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning. Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language—not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate. (Wittgenstein, 1992, x, my emphasis)

According to Russell’s reading, there is an ideal of accurate Symbolism with rules of syntax that prevent nonsense and with single symbols with a definite and unique meaning. However, from our previous discussion on the symbol, it should be clear that the symbol brings out the dimension of form in the Tractatus, namely, what is common between all the signs that express a proposition. Therefore, finding single symbols with a unique meaning goes against Wittgenstein’s understanding of the symbol. One of the reasons for Russell’s confused reading of the symbol is that what he has in mind is artificial language (a logically perfect one, as he calls it), not everyday language. Whereas Wittgenstein does not want to replace the multiplicity of everyday language with the uniformity of an artificial

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language. Part of the difficulty here, and what makes the Russellian interpretation plausible, is that Wittgenstein does speak of simplicity, and it is possible to understand his account in terms of the traditional accounts of simples, namely, logical atoms, or sense data, or universals. Commentators have, thus, struggled with the following questions: are the Tractarian objects empirical entities or purely logical entities? Do they include relations or not? Can we be acquainted with them, and how? Russell himself struggled with the question of whether these simples are sense data or logical entities. On the one hand, his “principle of acquaintance” suggested that to understand a proposition one must be acquainted with the meaning of every name (see 1918, 159), hence with objects, and given his suggestion elsewhere that we can only be directly acquainted with sense data one could think of objects in terms of sense data. On the other hand, Russell also came to think that sense data can be complex; hence that the level of a completely analysed proposition is more of an ideal than a realistic option (analysis could carry on ad infinitum). In any case, whether the “ultimate furniture of the world” is sense data or logical atoms,14 a view that regards the Tractatus as grounding meaning in objects must assume that specifying the nature of these entities is possible, whereas Wittgenstein (as discussed) calls into question whether this a priori characterization of objects is possible. Although 5.55 starts with “We now have to answer a priori the question about all the possible forms of elementary propositions,” it ends with 5.5571: “If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense.” Why does it lead to nonsense to want to find them a priori? Because objects cannot be spoken about. To recover the forms of the elementary propositions, namely, the form of the objects, is to recover a part of the symbol, a web of internal relations between different propositional contexts. According to the Tractatus, nonsense comes up when we want to treat internal relations as facts one could speak about. Objects can be only shown, brought out through the symbol. To put it differently, the interpretations that regard the Tractatus as a project of grounding meaning in objects do not take seriously the idea that objects are form, and that the forms of elementary propositions cannot be given a priori. This is the main reason why the Tractatus cannot be regarded as a case of metaphysical grounding: knowing a priori is a condition of metaphysical grounding. This anti-apriorism is already elaborated in the Notebooks:

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Is a point in our visual field a simple object, a thing? Up to now I have always regarded such questions as the real philosophical ones: and so for sure they are in some sense—but once more what evidence could settle a question of this sort at all? Is there not a mistake in formulation here, for it looks as if nothing at all were self-evident to me on this question; it looks as if I could say definitively that these questions could never be settled at all. (1979, 3)

It seems that we have now arrived at a real deadlock. If grounding meaning in logical syntax and its rules does not work, and if grounding it in objects does not work either, what are we left with? Although the Tractatus promises an understanding of the nature of signification, and although it might tempt us to think that this can be given a priori, we are left with no a priori grounding. So, is there a possible grounding that the Tractatus aims to describe, one that cannot, however, be given a priori? The following passage from the Notebooks captures this tension between the necessity for grounding and Wittgenstein’s anti-apriorism: Is it, a priori, clear that in analysing we must arrive at simple components— is this, e.g., involved in the concept of analysis—or is analysis ad infinitum possible?—Or is there in the end even a third possibility? […] (my emphasis) And it keeps on forcing itself upon us that there is some simple indivisible, an element of being, in brief a thing. It does not go against our feeling, that we cannot analyse propositions so far as to mention the elements by name; no, we feel that the world must consist of elements. And it appears as if that were identical with the proposition that the world must be what it is, it must be definite. Or in other words, what vacillates is our determinations, not the world. It looks as if to deny things were as much as to say that the world can, as it were, be indefinite in some such sense as that in which our knowledge is uncertain and indefinite. (1979, 62, my emphasis)

The world appears again in this passage, along with the idea that it must be what it is, that it does not depend on language but rather grounds language. This leads us back to the question of how to find “a third possibility” in which there is a ground, albeit not an a priori one. What does the fact that “the world must be what it is” have to do with us, speakers of language? How does this idea show itself in our lives-in-language? As previously discussed, finding the nature of signification is one of the main tasks in the Tractatus, and the question of how meaning is grounded is of importance for the Tractatus. To put it differently, there is no space in the

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Tractatus for what I called in the previous chapter “the temptation of a recourse to facts.” If anything, the Tractatus is not relativistic about meaning. Therefore, anti-apriorism should not be mistaken for giving up on the question of meaning. This interesting combination of a ground for meaning that cannot be given a priori is reflected in the “mysterious” role that objects and elementary propositions play in the Tractatus. As I discuss in the next chapter, a similar move is made by Lacan, in which meaning is grounded on something impossible, the so-called real. Let us now go back to the beginning of the Tractatus and explore the question of what it is to recover objects, what it is to reach the level of the form (of objects, elementary propositions) in the Tractatus, in other words what it is to recover a ground for meaning that is not a priori.

3.7   Anti-apriorism in the Tractarian Objects The idea that the ground for meaning is not given a priori is introduced very early in the Tractatus, even though I choose here to introduce it through the later account of the symbol. In fact, the issue emerges right after the very first proposition, “the world is all that is the case,” if we pay attention to the paradoxical way it unfolds. Wittgenstein further develops the proposition that the world is all that is the case with the proposition that the world is the totality of facts and not of objects (things). However, in proposition 2 he claims that “what is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs” and in 2.01 that “a state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).” If we follow the line of thought in 1.1, 2, and 2.01, an aporia arises. If a fact is the existence of states of affairs and states of affairs are combinations of objects, then why can’t we say that facts are combinations of objects and therefore that the world is the totality of objects? What prevents us from decomposing facts, and therefore the world itself, into objects? Matthew Ostrow expresses a similar worry: “The difficulty is that if these remarks are taken to mean that a fact is made up of atomic facts and an atomic fact is made up of objects or entities, then it appears that the world is, at bottom, composed of things not facts after all” (2002, 24). What does not allow for the decomposing of facts to objects is also reflected in the rather obscure distinction between a “state of affairs” (Sachverhalt) and a “fact” (Tatsache). Is Sachverhalt an intermediary term between facts (Tatsache) and objects (Gegenstand)? Russell, for example, in his Introduction to the Tractatus understands a state of affairs as a

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simpler fact: “Facts which are not compounded of other facts are what Mr Wittgenstein calls Sachverhalt, whereas a fact which may consist of two or more facts is called a Tatsache: thus, for example, ‘Socrates is wise’ is a Sachverhalt, as well as a Tatsache, whereas ‘Socrates is wise and Plato is his pupil’ is a Tatsache but not a Sachverhalt” (Wittgenstein 1986, xxiii). However, Wittgenstein’s reply to Russell, when he asks for a clarification on the difference between Tatsache and Sachverhalt, shows that things are more complex than that: Sachverhalt is what corresponds to Elementarsatz if it is true. Tatsache is what corresponds to the logical product of elementary propositions when this product is true. The reason why I introduce Tatsache before introducing Sachverhalt would want a long explanation. (1974, 72)

Eli Friedlander (2001) offers, I think, the most convincing answer to the problem and explanation of the idea that a Tatsache is a “logical product.” Friedlander argues that the distinction between fact and object is a precursor of the distinction between what can be given a priori and what cannot be given a priori in the symbol. The fact (being a fact) carries with it certain logical possibilities that can be given a priori, those related to logical constants and logical relations which are internal to something being a fact (or proposition). To give an example, it is integral to the fact that it can be negated, or that it belongs to a space of inferential relations. Given, for example, a fact “p,” the possible operations on it and its ways of combining with other facts (say q) are already taken care of by its being a fact, so that “-p,” “--p,” “pUq,” “p∩q,” and so on they all belong to its being a fact. As Wittgenstein says in 3.42, “the whole of logical space must already be given by [a proposition, or else a fact]. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc. would introduce more and more new elements—in co-ordination.)” However, such logical relations are not part of the nature of the object. There are no rules a priori about the way objects combine with one another, no impossible combinations. As Friedlander remarks: “There are no facts about what an object is. To take a simplistic example: the absence of red sounds does not follow from a law or contentful characterization of objects. There is no reason why sounds cannot be red. There is no a priori specification of the range of states of affairs” (2001, 35). This does not mean that objects are separate from logical space, for objects exist in configurations (therefore in a factual way). However, the perspective of objects opens us up to a realm apart from the a priori.

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This distinction between the form of the object and the form of the fact carries on throughout Wittgenstein’s account of pictures, and then, as we have seen, in his account of the symbol. A picture shares the same form with what it presents (vorstellen) given that the possibilities of arrangement of its elements are the same with the possibilities of arrangement of the objects in the real situation. On the other hand, a picture can represent (darstellen) its subject correctly or incorrectly (see 2.173). The form of representation determines the possibilities of making sense of a picture. However, those possibilities are not the inner space of a picture but belong to the medium of representation. What is the inner space of a picture? One can be tempted to think that this level involves an arbitrariness, and that necessity is restricted, as it were, to the realm of representation or to the form of the fact, namely, the representational formal possibilities. But Wittgenstein makes it explicit that there is a necessity on that level too, a necessity that cannot be given a priori, but is parasitic on our ways of describing the world. Matthew Ostrow discusses this idea: [S]etting up this sort of arbitrary correlation [between a pictorial element and a thing] would not by itself seem sufficient to ensure that any picture I construct will portray a possible state of affairs. What is to stop me from, for example, placing a pictorial representative of an event into a pictorial representative of a hole or picturing a situation in which red is louder than green? […] Only if the pictorial representatives have all the same possibilities of combination as their real-world counterparts—only if they have the same form as those objects—will we say that they are really representatives of the latter. The legitimacy of the arbitrary correlations we set up would appear to depend in some sense on a deeper coordination of form. (2002, 40)

That the red cannot be louder than the green has nothing to do with syntax or the formal features of logic, but with the inner possibilities of combination. Given the fact that Wittgenstein characterizes these inner possibilities of combination (the form of objects) as the substance of the world, there is a great temptation to think of these possibilities in terms of metaphysics, as something that can be given a priori. However, this inner form does not reside in some kind of core of the world outside language, but—and this is for the present book the great contribution of the Tractatus—grounding comes after the fact, in the use of language rather than in some essence of the world that we must discover or reach. In Ostrow’s words again:

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In laying bare the pictorial form, the forms of the objects, it then seems that we would come to see the essence of representation; that is, the a priori core both of our means of representing and of what is represented. [However], what Wittgenstein’s account is meant to bring out is that the essential possibilities of combination common to the pictorial elements and the objects are given as it were, after the fact. Rather than having an a priori, normative status, the pictorial form is parasitic on our way of picturing with a picture. […] The assertion that the pictorial form can only be shown is equivalent to claiming that everything logic would want to say about the a priori nature of pictorial representation is a feature of how we operate with the picture. (2002, 41, my emphasis)

For example, the fact that sounds can or cannot be red, or—an example that Ostrow uses—the commonality of form between clapping one’s hands and representing the rhythm of a song is not a matter of some ontological laws. It is not a deep level of the world that allows sounds to be red or not, but it is the context of signifying. Ontology is left to the application of logic. When Wittgenstein discusses the internal complexity of objects (their being form and content, and having both external and internal properties) he explains that if there is a difference between two objects, this difference cannot be given a priori but will appear in a notational system (see 2.02331). If there is a difference, that is, then there will just be different names for those objects; one cannot look for the content of substance in an a priori way. Furthermore, in a later conversation with Desmond Lee, Wittgenstein reports the following regarding the opening remarks of the Tractatus about the world and objects: “The world does not consist of a catalogue of things and facts about them (like the catalogue of a show). … What the world is is given by description and not by a list of objects” (1980, 119). We have seen above that objects and names (the forms of elementary propositions) are essential for signification and allow for the determinacy of sense. Yet this seeming ground for meaning cannot be given a priori, and it cannot be regarded as an empty condition either (not without leading to interpretative problems). It would be completely arbitrary to give any specific form (5.554), yet in logic one should have to deal not with forms that one can invent, but rather with that which makes it possible to invent them (see 5.555). If meaning is grounded on the forms of the objects, and yet these cannot be given a priori, then what kind of grounding are we left with? In the last part of this chapter I wish to show that the ground for meaning is given through the application of logic, through our very activity of making sense, through language in use.

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3.8   Leaving Grounding to the Application of Logic Just before Wittgenstein writes that elementary propositions cannot be given a priori and that it leads to nonsense to try and do so, he introduces something that he calls the application (Anwendung) of logic, which decides the forms of elementary propositions: “the application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What belongs to its application, logic cannot anticipate” (5.557). The radical nature of this claim has not yet been given the space it deserves in the literature on the early Wittgenstein. A similar radicality characterizes his distinction between objects and facts, between what can be given a priori and what cannot. From the formal features of logic (what can be given a priori) one cannot reach the form of the object (and possibilities of meaning), for this is decided in the activity of making sense. Of course, producing sense always takes place within the context of possibilities that can be given a priori (the two first features of the symbol we discussed earlier): a fact (a proposition) bears its formal possibilities, but these two realms do not overlap completely. This relation of not clashing but not overlapping either is offered in the following propositions: It is clear that logic must not clash with its application. But logic has to be in contact with its application. Therefore logic and its application must not overlap. (5.557)

Peter Hylton suggests a similar idea15 when he discusses Wittgenstein’s “operations” as what can support an account of meaning as use, rather than in terms of some supposed ultimate constituents of propositions: An operation, as its name perhaps suggests, is less like an entity, that might be a constituent of more complex entity, than it is like something we do. We can use the senses of one or more elementary propositions to say that such-­ and-­such a sense does not obtain—this is how things are: not like this; or that one or other of these senses obtains—this is how things are: either like this or like that. To reify the notion of sense and then inquire into the composition of the sense of this or that sentence, as if we were chemists enquiring into the composition of some substance—that, I take it, is exactly the view that Wittgenstein opposes. (2005, 152)

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At this point we can introduce a third response to the problem of grounding: the forms of elementary propositions are decided in the activity of making sense. The very application of truth-functional operations on elementary propositions is the activity that gives us, as it were, the possibilities of the form of the objects. Yet this “giving” is not what we initially imagined or were looking for, for it is not an a priori layingout of the ultimate constituents of the world, as if we were looking for the chemical essence of something, but it is a recovery of the conditions of making sense. This turns the so-called complete analysis of the proposition into a very different sort of concept, not a tool for arriving at some ideal language where there can be no complications, but rather a tool for clarity in the midst of the complications of everyday language, given that the complications are constitutive of language that has life. Seeking clarity can only be a matter of the application of logic and everyday language, and not of logic itself, since at the level of logic everything is already crystal clear: “the proposition itself [is] as a matter of fact infinitely complex. That is, not the propositional sign by itself, but it together with its syntactical application” (1979, 64). In other words, it is within the universe of everyday language that the need for clarity and recovery of meaning emerges. There are two ways to understand Wittgenstein’s claims: one is to say that the problems arise in language that is used, in the application of the propositional sign, and a logical analysis can guide us away from these complications. This is not what I understand Wittgenstein to mean.16 The second way to understand his claims is that clarity only arises through a ­familiarization with the complications. The forms of the elementary propositions are decided through the application of logic; therefore, arriving at clarity becomes possible through the use of language, through what cannot be given a priori. In “Solipsism and the Uncaptive Eye” Juliet Floyd characterizes the anti-apriorism in the Tractatus as follows: “Any attempt to completely fix or demarcate the form of the so-called ‘elementary propositions’ without allowing for the full role of the ‘and so on’ fails […], genuine ‘logical syntax’ is a matter of use” (1998, 86).

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The idea that meaning is tied up with use already in the Tractatus has been gaining ground in recent years. Different interpretations17 have highlighted the role that use plays, as it is expressed by Wittgenstein in propositions 3.326, 3.327, 3.328: In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense. A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken together with its logico-syntactical employment. If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim. (If everything behaves as if a sign had meaning, then it does have meaning.)

Recovering meaning becomes a question of use, if we pay attention to the fact that we do not have a priori access to this bottom level of names and objects. As Paul Livingston also explains: the possibility of understanding the uses of symbols in a proposition, what Wittgenstein calls “recognizing the symbol in the sign,” is also one of the metaphysical preconditions for the possibility of meaning; for it is only by having significant uses that sequences of signs mean anything at all. Wittgenstein’s theory of meaningfulness—his theory of the conditions under which signs have meaning at all—therefore plays an essential role in his more general theory of meaning. (2004, 39)

If the forms of elementary propositions are determined through the application of logic, then to identify a logical form presupposes the application of logic, namely, the clarification of the ways in which signs are used significantly in combination, namely, the rules that determine the possibilities of their significant application in propositions. If the source of meaningfulness is situated in elementary propositions, in the concatenation of names, then it cannot but belong to the application of logic, to the use of language not to the formal features of logic that concern what can be anticipated in advance of experience. This is the critical point: what at first sight appears to be the substantive anchor point of logic (objects and names which form the elementary propositions) opens us up to the application of logic. What appears to be a securing referential point gestures towards use and practice. The distinction between the formal features of logic and what belongs to its application should be approached carefully. It is not the case that,

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on the one hand, we have a formal level of logical syntax and, on the other hand, the application, as two separate cases. The relation described by Wittgenstein as not overlapping and not clashing is very important. One could mistakenly think that the relation between logic and its application consists in first having an empty logical syntax to which semantics is then added. For example, this mistake could arise if one reads 3.33 without 3.334: 3.33 In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role. It must be possible to establish logical syntax without mentioning the meaning of a sign: only the description of expressions may be presupposed. 3.334 The rules of logical syntax must go without saying, once we know how each individual sign signifies.

Wittgenstein says that logical syntax—what concerns “the nature of the absolutely necessary signs” that “speaks for itself”—does not require mentioning the meaning of a sign. This could be misinterpreted as saying that logical syntax can be thought of apart from meaningfulness, but 3.334 makes it clear that the rules of logical syntax must go without saying, once we know how each individual sign signifies. As discussed throughout this chapter, without use the logical form stays undetermined. And for the logical form to be determined, the sign needs to be taken together with its logico-syntactical employment. Livingston argues for the same idea: “It is only insofar as signs have significant uses that they have logical forms at all; and it is, of course, only in virtue of their logical forms that they can embody meanings” (2004, 39). Furthermore, 3.26 read in tandem with 3.262 (which is a comment on it) points in the same direction: “A name cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition: it is a primitive sign. What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.” A sign with no meaning, namely, a sign that is out of circulation or else a dead sign, cannot have a logical form. Logico-syntactical employment is use with sense, a significant use. As James Conant puts it, in commenting on 3.326: “We must ask ourselves on what occasion we would utter this sentence and what, in that context of use we would then be meaning by it” (2000, 194). Wittgenstein’s mention of Occam’s principle also creates a clear link between meaningfulness and use. If one followed a ­representational idea of

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meaning (meaning as reference) then Occam’s maxim would be without sense for the Tractatus. For a traditional theory of meaning, use would play no role in the meaningfulness of a sign, which would have already been taken care of at the level of representation or reference. But in the Tractatus if the constituents of a proposition are not used, they become dead signs. As Wittgenstein says, if a sign is useless it is meaningless (3.328), adding in 5.47321 that “Occam’s maxim is, of course, not an arbitrary rule, nor one that is justified by its success in practice: its point is that unnecessary units in a sign-language mean nothing. Signs that serve one purpose are logically equivalent, and signs that serve none are logically meaningless.”

3.9   Summing Up and Moving On In this chapter I put forward the idea that in the Tractatus one can find a story about groundlessness, one that furthermore starts with a moment of astonishment and the concomitant feelings of frustration or anxiety when faced with the unintelligibility of its expression. In the Tractatus, this anxiety about finding the ground for meaning can take the form of a search for the a priori, either for the formal features of the symbol or for the objects as anchor points, also to be known a priori. I treat both these forms of the search for meaning as forms of what I discussed in the first part of the book as the temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics. However, I attempt to show that although these responses are available in the Tractatus (they are part of its story about groundlessness), they are not the last word. Given the problems they both face, a third kind of grounding is offered to the reader, that is linked with the anti-apriorism of the Tractatus. The ground for meaning is given after the fact, in the very use of language: the forms of the elementary propositions are decided through the application of logic. It is important to understand this tension between a necessity for grounding and the application or use of language. As was also pointed out earlier, the Tractatus is not relativistic about meaning; there is a world to be recovered through language, but the world is not some metaphysical entity that we discover in abstract thoughts, but rather it is the world of our human practices. This tension—as I call it— between the necessity for a ground and the anti-apriorism also explains why the two other possible responses offered by the Tractatus are an essential part of the story on groundlessness. For these two other responses, which I describe as two different forms of the lure of the a priori ground-

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ing, tell us something about the anxiety involved in groundlessness, and furthermore the specific forms this anxiety takes for the philosopher. As I discuss in the next chapter, this is a common point between the Tractarian and the Lacanian story about the groundlessness of meaning, for in Lacan’s work too, perhaps even more clearly, the search for a ground for meaning is tied up with the temptation to search for an ontological endpoint, what Lacan calls the “order of Being.” In that sense, Lacan also sees this temptation as inherent to the search for a ground and to the uneasiness that groundlessness might cause. I will now move on to Lacan and describe his story about groundlessness.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise stated, throughout the book all references to the Tractatus are from Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Trans.) London: Routledge. 2. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been any interpretation of the Tractatus that systematically brings out how the affects it creates influence the reader’s way throughout the book. 3. A similar idea is expressed by Juliet Floyd when she writes that “[t]he Tractatus is a deeply reflective rejection of the traditional a priori” (1998, 81). 4. It is important to clarify that Wittgenstein is not looking to describe any mental activity from the side of the thinking or representing subject; what he is interested in are those characteristics of language, logic, and the world that make representation possible. In the Tractatus a “thought” is a “logical picture” and is distinguished from the Fregean idea of thoughts as entities that we grasp through thinking. Thoughts for Frege are objective entities that can be grasped and are differentiated from thinking. For example, Frege writes: “The grasp of the thought presupposes someone who grasps it, who thinks. He is the owner of the thinking, not the thought. Although the thought does not belong with the contents of the thinker’s consciousness, there must be something in the consciousness that is aimed at the thought. But this should not be confused with the thought itself” (1997, 342). Later on, he adds: “The thinker does not create them but must take them as they are. They can be true without being grasped by a thinker; and they are not wholly unactual even then, at least if they could be grasped and so brought into action” (1997, 345). Also thoughts are the senses of sentences, so to understand a sentence means to grasp the thought it expresses: “The thought, in itself imperceptible to the senses, gets clothed in the perceptible garb of a sentence, and thereby we are able to grasp it” (1997, 328).

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5. By his own admission. See (1937, 282). 6. Frege treats logical constants as truth functions which can be meaningful by being correlated with entities in the world, such as concepts. Russell presupposes some kind of logical objects. As he says: “Such words as or, not, all, some, plainly involve logical notions; and since we can use such words intelligently, we must be acquainted with the logical objects involved.” See Russell (1984, 99). 7. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein wonders if there are other facts besides the positive facts, given that it is easy to confuse what does not take place with what takes place instead. In other words, Wittgenstein sees that there is a philosophical temptation to read -p as q, for example to take a proposition such as “the board is not black” to correspond for example to the proposition “the board is green.” He answers as follows: “the negative proposition excludes reality. It does not include any reality incompatible with that affirmed by the positive proposition” (NB, p. 39). This means that “p” and “-p” have the same representational content. What changes is just the position of the proposition towards reality. 8. The idea that a single connective was sufficient had already been suggested and proved by Henry Sheffer in 1913. This connective was either the Sheffer stroke (p↑ q, or joint denial) or the Sheffer dagger (p|q, alternative denial). 9. Wittgenstein gives us the form [p̄, ξ̄, N(ξ̄)] to establish a connection between the general form of proposition and the logical operation of negation. But in what sense can the general propositional form be related with negation? To understand this we should pay attention to the fact that if operations and constants are just the logical coordinates of the elementary proposition (the logical space around every proposition) and do not represent anything external to them (they don’t correspond to anything in reality), the logical operation of negation is just what all propositions have in common. In order to better understand how a logical operation can be related to the general propositional form, we will examine something that seems prima facie contradictory to this idea. In 4.5 Wittgenstein writes: “The general form of a proposition is: This is how things stand. How can the logical operation of negation be connected to ‘this is how things stand’”? Anthony Kenny’s (1976) interpretation might be helpful: he chooses to read “this is how things stand” as “this state of affairs exists” so that it can be combined more easily with 4.21 where Wittgenstein says that “an elementary proposition asserts the existence of a state of affairs.” If 6.001 was rewritten accordingly to 4.21, we would get: “every proposition is a result of successive applications of the operation N(ξ) to propositions asserting the existence of a state of affairs.” But according to 5.47, an elementary proposition really contains all logical operations, so Wittgenstein expresses the same thing from two different perspectives. We can also

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understand this in the following way: if the elementary propositions contain already all logical operations—like a point contains its coordinates— this means that logical operations also belong to (and presuppose) the same possibilities of combination of names of the elementary propositions (and of their correlate objects) (see 1976, 96). 10. The truth functions of a given number of elementary propositions can always be set out in a schema of the following kind: (T T T T) (p, q) Tautology (If p then p, and if q then q.) (p ⊃ p ∙ q ⊃ q) (F T T T) (p, q) In words: Not both p and q. (∼(p ∙ q)) (T F T T) (p, q) ,, ,, : If q then p. (q ⊃ p) (T T F T) (p, q) ,, ,, : If p then q. (p ⊃ q) (T T T F) (p, q) ,, ,, : p or q. (p v q) (F F T T) (p, q) ,, ,, : Not q. (∼q) (F T F T) (p, q) ,, ,, : Not p. (∼p) (F T T F) (p, q) ,, ,, : p or q, but not both. (p ∙ ∼q : v : q ∙ ∼p) (T F F T) (p, q) ,, ,, : If p then q, and if q then p. (p ≡ q) (T F T F) (p, q) ,, ,, : p (T T F F) (p, q) ,, ,, : q (F F F T) (p, q) ,, ,, : Neither p nor q. (∼P ∙ ∼q or p | q) (F F T F) (p, q) ,, ,, : p and not q. (p ∙ ∼q) (F T F F) (p, q) ,, ,, : q and not p. (q ∙ ∼p) (T F F F) (p, q) ,, ,, : q and p. (q ∙ p) (F F F F) (p, q) Contradiction (p and not p, and q and not q.) (p ∙ ∼p ∙ q ∙ ∼q)

11. For a demonstration of the rest, see Kenny (1976, 87–89). 12. As Aristides Baltas explains: “If a Wittgensteinian ‘object’ is merely the substantive ‘what’ that bears a manifold of logical possibilities, its corresponding ‘name,’ since it bears exactly the same manifold of logical possibilities, is logically indistinguishable from it. With respect to logical possibility, the object and the name of the object are strictly identical” (2012, 201). 13. For a more contemporary account that prioritizes metaphysical simplicity and argues for the idea that the metaphysical simples are the ultimate atoms of Wittgenstein’s ontology, see Bradley (1992). 14. Two different versions of Russell’s acquaintance are the approach by the Hintikkas and that by Hacker. The Hintikkas approach regards acquaintance as an acquaintance not with objects but with names. They stress that it is through an act of pointing that the relation between an object and a name is recovered, and they give the example of Russell’s own idea that there are “in our language only two logically proper names for particular objects other than oneself, to wit, ‘this’ or ‘that.’ If so, Russellian objects of acquaintance are introduced by displaying them and pointing to them” (Hintikkas in Friedlander, 174). On the other hand, Hacker understands

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acquaintance with objects either as acquaintance with elements in one’s experience or with their descriptions/elucidations: “knowledge of the correlation between its constituent names and the objects they name […] will be the case either if I have endowed the name-signs with a Bedeutung by correlating them through a mental act with elements in my experience, or alternatively if they have been explained to me by means of elucidations” (1986, 51). 15. I am grateful to Anton Leodolter for bringing this to my attention. 16. See also 5.5563: “In fact, all the propositions of everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order. That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)” 17. See, for example, Ishiguro (1969), Conant (1998), Friedlander (2001), Floyd (1998), and Livingston (2004).

References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1971). Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Baltas, A. (2012). Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bradley, R. (1992). The Nature of all Being: A Study of Wittgenstein’s Modal Atomism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carnap, R. (1937). The Logical Syntax of Language (A. Smeaton, Trans.). London: Routledge. Conant, J. (1998). Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use. Philosophical Investigations, 21(3). Conant, J. (2000). Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein. In A.  Crary & R.  Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein. London and New  York: Routledge. Floyd, J.  (1998). The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In L.  Rouner (Ed.), Loneliness. Notre Dame: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Frege, G. (1997). The Frege Reader (M. Beaney, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Friedlander, E. (2001). Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Hacker, P.  M. S. (1986). Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hylton, P. (2005). Propositions, Function, and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ishiguro, H. (1969). Use and Reference of Names. In P. Winch (Ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (pp. 20–50). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kenny, A. (1976). Wittgenstein. London: Penguin. Livingston, P. (2004). ‘Meaning Is Use’ in the Tractatus. Philosophical Investigations, 27(1), 34–67. Malcolm, N. (1988). Wittgenstein: Nothing Is Hidden. Oxford: Blackwell. McDonough, R. (1986). The Argument of the Tractatus. Its Relevance to Contemporary Theories of Logic, Language, Mind, and Philosophical Truth. SUNY Press. Mounce, H.  O. (1981). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ostrow, M.  B. (2002). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A dialectical interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pears, D. F. (1987). The False Prison (Vol. I). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Russell, B. (1918). Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description (1911). In Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (pp.  152–167). London: Longmans. Russell, B. (1964). Lectures on Logical Atomism. New York: The Free Press. Russell, B. (1984). Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore (G. H. von Wright & B. F. McGuinness, Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Notebooks, 1914–1916 (G.  H. von Wright & G.  E. M. Anscombe, Eds. and G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–32 (D.  Lee, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1986). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, Trans.). London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

The Groundlessness of Meaning in Lacan’s Work

It is not for nothing that the real is always in the background, and that I never refer to it directly in our commentaries here. It is, quite precisely, and quite properly speaking, excluded. Lacan, Seminar I (1991)

4.1   The Enthralling Phenomenon of Meaning: Introducing Lacan’s Theory of the Signifier As in the case of Wittgenstein, the question that interests me in this part of the book is how Lacan’s theory of meaning can help us understand the difficulty of expression involved in an experience of astonishment, a difficulty related to what I have described as the contingency or groundlessness of meaning. As shown throughout the book, the two thinkers, Wittgenstein and Lacan, share significant ideas in their approach to groundlessness, such as their treatment of the temptation to offer a metaphysical solution, and their rejection of an a priori solution to the problem of grounding meaning. Although primarily a psychoanalyst, Lacan offers us a systematic and coherent theory of meaning, and in many ways we could say that he offers a more detailed and ordered account than Wittgenstein. Lacan approaches the phenomena of mental illness largely in terms of the subject’s relation to meaning (literally to the signifier), and, vice versa, he thinks that mental illness (e.g., the psychotic’s discourse) can add to our understanding of © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_4

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what the realm of meaning is and the kinds of demands it makes on us. For instance, as the reader might recall, Lacan offers his example of an experience of astonishment—the peace of the evening—in a seminar on psychosis. In the midst of that discussion we find the following passage: What is the subject ultimately saying, especially at a certain period of his delusion? That there is meaning. What meaning he doesn’t know, but it comes to the foreground, it asserts itself, and for him it’s perfectly understandable. And it’s precisely because it’s situated at the level of understanding as an incomprehensible phenomenon, as it were, that paranoia is so difficult for us to grasp and, also, of such great interest. (Lacan, 1997, 22)

Even though it is not my aim here to provide a full-blown account of the Lacanian theory, it is important to highlight that the subject is, for Lacan, deeply interconnected with the signifier, that the human body is first and foremost a speaking body (a parlêtre), and therefore his account of symptoms, mental illness, and the unconscious is tied up with his philosophy of language. In what follows, especially in the chapter on the concept of the real, I focus on his theory of meaning and avoid discussing concepts such as repression, jouissance, sinthome, and drive. Although I might be accused of leaving out the more clinical aspects of Lacan’s work, or his theory of the unconscious, my focus is strictly on Lacan’s ideas on meaning. However, it should be stressed that the Lacanian theory of the unconscious is to a great extent based on the workings and complex character of human language and discourse. His famous and somewhat cryptic remark that the unconscious is structured like a language bears on this precise point: the unconscious is shaped by the way signifiers work (signifiers are broader than words), and by the fact that meaning is always open, anticipated, incomplete: The unconscious is fundamentally structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language. And not only does the signifier play as big a role there as the signified does, but it plays the fundamental role. In fact, what characterises language is the system of signifiers as such. (1997, 119)

So, instead of a psychological account of the unconscious as an inner realm of impulses and repressed emotions or ideas, Lacan gives us an external, linguistic account (the repressed and the return of the repressed are the same, as he says) in which the unconscious has the structure of language,

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and our body, affects, emotions, are all overdetermined by language, by the fact that we are speaking beings, and by the complications and contingency of meaning. Lacan is enthralled, as he says, by the fact that language can be effective and communication can be possible despite the complications and indeterminacy that characterize meaning. At this point it might be useful to recall from Chap. 2 Lacan’s little story of the scientists and the Martian, which bears precisely on what Wittgenstein would call the indeterminacy of sense; Lacan’s interest in the groundlessness of meaning is also expressed in the following passage: [H]ow does it happen that language is at its most effective when it manages to say something by saying something else? It’s enthralling indeed, and it’s even thought that this is the way to the crux of the phenomenon of language, in opposition to the naive notion. The naive notion has it that there is a superimposition, like tracing, of the order of things onto the order of words. (Lacan, 1997, 224)

What Lacan describes as the enthralling crux of language is the fact that meaning works, sense can be determinate, even though there is no superimposition of the world onto language, in other words even though meaning is not grounded before experience (a priori). As I will explain in this chapter, for Lacan, meaning is an open-ended process by which signification always refers to further signification, and words refer to other words, rather than primarily to some different kinds of entities. What Lacan calls a “naïve” way of looking at it is to think that there is a superimposition of the order of things onto the order of words: this is how the temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics appears in Lacan’s work. The experience of astonishment shows the enthralling character of meaning and poses the question about the relation between the order of being and the order of language: “[W]hat [is] the relationship between this order of being—which has its existence equivalent to all sorts of other existences in our lived experience, and which is called the peace of the evening—and its verbal expression?” (1997, 139). Lacan asks when he discusses “the peace of the evening.”

Fig. 4.1

Signifier Signified

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One of the main ways in which Lacan differentiates his theory from the naive theory of meaning that prioritizes a vertical relation of reference between the word and a different kind of entity is through differentiating his account of the sign from that of Saussure’s, for whom a sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, namely, of a sound-image and a concept tied together: “the two elements [signified and signifier] are intimately united,” Saussure writes (1972, 98–99).1 Lacan insists instead on their radical independence and inverts Saussure’s diagram (Fig. 4.1) so that the signifier dominates the signified rather than the other way round (2002, 499). The bar between the two represents the resistance or impossibility between the two realms (signifier and signified), and, as such, falls under the Lacanian concept of the real. I will come back to this in a little while. For Lacan, the only case of a unity of the signifier and the signified is the “biological sign,” namely, what is called a “code” and is connected to the way communication works in the animal kingdom. A code is based on a fundamental equivalence of the thing and the sign, with no ambiguity; for example, a red rag is for a bull a code for attack: In the very structure, in the morphology of animals there is something that has this captivating value due to which its receiver, who sees the red of the robin redbreast for instance, and who is made for receiving it, undertakes a series of actions […] that links the bearer of this sign with its perceiver. (1997, 167)

The code is the only case of what Lacan calls “natural meaning”; as we enter into the realm of human language, this characteristic of equivalence is lost, and we move from the presence of the signified and its referential relation to a signifier towards the complete absence of any such relation. To explain the change from code to signifier, Lacan offers a transitional concept, the concept of the trace, which lies somewhere between the code/biological sign and the signifier. To illustrate this, he uses the example of the footprint that Robinson Crusoe finds on the shore of the desert island. Here the sign (trace) and the object (foot) are separated, since the trace/footprint is left precisely after the foot has moved on, only when it is not there anymore: “[T]he trace, in its negative aspect, draws the natural sign to a limit at which it becomes evanescent.” Contrary to what happens with the code, there is no need here for a subject to recognize the

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trace; the trace is there even when unperceived. In the story, the impossibility of knowing which foot the trace belongs to makes Crusoe efface the trace and leave a cross as a marker in its place. In doing so, he introduces what Lacan calls “the signifier” as something distinct both from the trace and from the code. Lacan elaborates: When have we passed over into the order of the signifier? The signifier may extend over many of the elements within the domain of the sign. But the signifier is a sign that doesn’t refer to any object, not even to one in the form of a trace, even though the trace nevertheless heralds the signifier’s essential feature. It, too, is the sign of an absence. But insofar as it forms part of language, the signifier is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple. (Lacan, 1997, 167)

The similarity between a signifier and a trace is that there is in both an absence, but in the case of the signifier it is not the absence of anything specific (say, a foot). The signifier is a sign that does not need a referent at all; in fact, as Lacan points out, the signifier is the cross that Robinson Crusoe puts over the footprint, that is, that marks the absence of the effaced footprint. This is one way Lacan introduces the issue of groundlessness in his theory of meaning: the transition from sign to trace and then to signifier is a transition from presence to gradual absence. In the sign there is presence; in the trace there is the absence of something specific (the footprint marks the absence of a foot, not of any object); in the signifier there is the absence of something that already marked an absence (an absence of a trace). Because of the absence of any definite relation to a signified, the signifier can always be effaced and substituted by another signifier. If there is no way to guarantee that the signifier, and thus meaning, is grounded in something external that can resist this substitution, then how do we manage to communicate? This is the enthralling phenomenon that Lacan speaks about. How do we trust that our words mean something rather than something else, or that, in a discussion, our words mean what our interlocutor’s words mean? The only ground, Lacan says, the only thing that remains constant and allows us to trust that sense is not entirely contingent, in this incessant sliding of the signifier, is the place of the effacing itself:

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[I]n fact there again what we rediscover, is that just as after it is effaced, what remains, if there is a text, namely if this signifier is inscribed among other signifiers, what remains, is the place where it has been effaced, and it is indeed this place also which sustains the transmission, which is this essential thing thanks to which that which succeeds it in the passage takes on the consistency of something that can be trusted. (Seminar V, 8–10, 23.04.58)

As suggested earlier, the place of the signifier is different from that of the trace. The trace is also characterized by absence, but it is the absence of a particular thing (one can infer the presence, say of a foot, from the absence, say of the print of the foot). However, in the case of the cross with which Crusoe marks the trace, there is no inherent relation whatsoever between the cross and the initial presence. It would be wrong to think that if the signifier refers to the trace and the trace refers to the foot, then the signifier can transitively refer to the foot. The cross only refers to an empty place, or, to put it more radically, it engenders the empty place (the place that can be effaced) as such. In Lacan’s words, “[t]he signifier does not designate what is not there, it engenders it” (n.d.-b, 8). The signifier is based on an absence (the absence of any referential relation to the signified) and yet generates a place that introduces the idea of a presence (of a ground for meaning), given that the empty place marks the possibility of something being placed there. This tension between the two aspects of the signifier is one way to summarize the topic of the groundlessness of meaning in Lacan’s work. As announced in the beginning of this chapter, Lacan offers a specific concept, the concept of the real, to describe this paradoxical alternation of presence and absence that lies at the root of signification. The real describes both the impossibility or constant failure of discourse (the symbolic) and what can guarantee the trust that sense is determinate, and thus sustain the signifying chain. A similar idea was put forward in my reading of the Tractatus, in which the Tractarian objects appear at first sight to be what can secure the determinacy of sense, and yet they cannot be known a priori. I will now focus on the concept of the real, which best embodies, according to my argument, the Lacanian story about groundlessness.

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4.2   The Real: Ground and Groundlessness Lacan’s use of the term “the real”2 dates back to his paper “Beyond the Reality Principle” in 1936, and it appears possibly under the influence of a work by E. Meyerson who defines the real as an “ontological absolute, a true being in itself.” (1925, 79) As a “being in itself,” or as an “ontological absolute,” the concept of the real designates what is beyond the imaginary realm of appearance. Even though Lacan critically distances himself from the idea that there is such a thing as “a true being in itself ” it is important to keep in mind that this is part of the history of the concept (I will come back to this later), and consequently of the Lacanian theory of signification. The real is distinct from reality (“beyond the reality principle”) insofar as reality is for Lacan both symbolically and imaginarily marked from the outset. Reality is a grimace of the real, as he puts it; what we call reality is nothing but a discursive product (with all its curiosities, and contradictions, hence Lacan’s image of a grimace) of that which cannot be analysed, reached, known: “Reality is only the fantasy on which a thought is sustained, ‘reality’ doubtlessly, but to be understood as a grimace of the Real” (Lacan, 1990, 6). In his 1953 paper (Lacan, 1982) “The Symbolic, the imaginary and the Real,” Lacan further shows how the real is interconnected with the two other Lacanian orders, the symbolic and the imaginary, and their interconnection is represented by the topological figure of the Borromean knot—three interconnected rings—in which if one is cut the remaining two rings are separated. The Real’s connection to reality and to the two other registers takes two forms: first, it appears as a fixed, empty space that precedes the symbolic and the imaginary: “The meaning which man has always given to the Real is the following—it is something one always finds in the same place, whether or not one has been there. This Real may have moved, but if it has moved, one looks for it elsewhere” (1988, 297). From this perspective, the real is a continuum, “an indivisible brute materiality that exists prior to symbolization, [or] from a clinical perspective, [as] the brute pre-symbolic reality that always returns to its place in the form of a need, such as hunger” (Homer, 2005, 82). Second, the real is progressively conceptualized as the point of failure of both registers: it undermines the imaginary ideals of harmony and complementarity, as well as any symbolic, meaningful construction, from simple communication, and the stories we tell, to particular types of discourse (scientific, philosophical, religious, etc.); it is the

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­ reakdown of sense, and thus of communication and social existence. So, b we have two accounts of the real: the real as a realm that precedes and lies outside the symbolic, and the real as a limit, a point of breakdown or rupture inside the symbolic.3 Fink (1995; see also Pluth, 2007) describes Lacan’s first way of thinking about the real as a pre-symbolic real, and his second approach as a post-symbolic real4: “[there are] two different levels of the real: 1. a real before the letter, that is, a pre-symbolic real, which in the final analysis, is but our own hypothesis (R1), and 2. a real after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is, which is generated by the symbolic” (Fink, 1995, 27). Lacan’s choice to use the same concept for two seemingly different ideas (what precedes the symbolic and what exceeds the symbolic)5 is, according to my argument, part of his own story about the experience of the contingency of meaning and the two temptations of deflection so far discussed. Examining the real in its two aspects offers us a chance to look into both the temptation to avoid groundlessness by grounding meaning in metaphysics and the temptation of a recourse to facts. These two temptations find expression in two possible interpretations of the real: one that regards the real as what can offer a ground for the symbolic, thus prioritizing R1; and one that prioritizes R2, as a point of failure of the symbolic, and regards the latter as a discursive construction. Charles Shepherdson introduces these two different interpretations of the Lacanian real in relation to the following question: “Is everything really a ‘discursive construction,’ a product of a symbolic order and if not how can we speak of an ‘outside’ without returning to a naive realism?” The three basic answers that are given so far are: 1. an emphasis on the symbolic order and certain theories of social construction, 2. a reaction against postmodernism and a return to positive, empirical investigation, together with a return to biological, genetic, accounts of consciousness, behavior and sexuality and 3. an effort to think through the linguistic turn—not to react against the formative power of representation but rather to think its limit. (2008, 1)

Lacan’s treatment of the real qua pre-symbolic reality, but also the fact that he draws a connection between it and the order of being, can indeed create the impression that the real refers to a core of reality. On the other hand, if one chooses to focus on Lacan’s second elaboration of the real,

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then it can seem as if the real is pointing to a relativistic conception of meaning: if every utterance or discursive construction is ultimately groundless (the real qua failure of the symbolic) then what is the point of recovering or looking for the meaning of an utterance? This second line of thought can lead to an “anything goes” attitude. Judith Butler critically remarks this conceptual tension in Lacan’s work as a “sliding from substance to dissolution.” As she writes in “Arguing with the Real,” “the ‘real’ […] is a ‘rock’ or a ‘kernel’ or sometimes a substance [but it] is also, and sometimes within the same sentence, ‘a loss’ [or] a ‘negativity’” (1993, 198). According to Butler, as “substance” the real seems to refer to some kind of pre-discursive reality, but as “loss” or “negativity,” the real seems to bring Lacan closer to the thesis that reality is discursively constructed. However, according to my interpretation, this tension can be more fruitfully understood as part of a bigger story on the groundlessness of meaning, not as a sliding from substance to dissolution, but rather as an articulation of the two different forms that our “chronic difficulty with meaning” takes (1997, 198). To go back to Shepherdson’s two extremes, “discursive construction” and “naïve realism,” I will examine these as the two temptations I have so far discussed in response to an experience of meaning as groundless. As pointed out earlier, both the idea that meaning is just a discursive construction and the opposite idea that there is an a priori ground for meaning can be found in Lacan’s two accounts of the real as post-symbolic failure or as pre-symbolic ground; however, although part of the Lacanian story on groundlessness, these are not Lacan’s final word on the issue. I will start with the first temptation in Lacan’s work, the idea that everything is really a “discursive construction.”

4.3   Meaning as a Discursive Construction: The Temptation of a Recourse to Facts To introduce what I call here a temptation to see meaning and its groundlessness as a discursive construction, I want to point to the following two passages from Lacan’s late seminar, Encore, that can offer grounds for this temptation: “There’s no such thing as a metalanguage.” When I say that, it apparently means—no language of being. But is there being? As I pointed out last time, what I say is what there isn’t. Being is, as they say, and nonbeing is not.

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There is or there isn’t. Being is merely presumed in certain words— ‘individual,’ for instance, and ‘substance.’ In my view, it is but a fact of what is said (un fait de dit). […] I distinguish myself from the language of being. That implies that there may be verbal fiction (fiction de mot)—I mean, fiction on the basis of the word. (1998, 118)

And further down: Nothing is, if not insofar as it is said that it is. (1998, 135)

Lacan’s remarks are somewhat cryptic. His suggestion that being is fiction on the basis of the word, a fact of what is said, could be taken to mean that it is just fiction on the basis of the word, that it is just a fact of what is said, namely, that it is some sort of illusion caused by language. This would be further reinforced by the second quotation, which can be read as saying that there is nothing outside language, that everything is a fact of what is said to be. These passages, insofar as they are read in the way I have suggested, correspond to the second of the interpretative temptations I have mentioned, the temptation to regard any sense that there might be a limit to our discursive capacities as fiction or nonsense. The real, the failure of our sense-making capacities, is a mere product of the symbolic itself. This temptation to understand any sense of a limit of intelligibility (such as what happens in the experience of astonishment) as an impossibility caused by the way the signifying chain functions can find further support in Lacan’s discussion of the post-symbolic real as the caput mortuum of a signifying chain. This term, which comes from alchemy, literally means the “dead head,” and is used to designate the left-over material in a chemical operation. In his Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” (2002), Lacan uses a symbolic matrix to show how the post-symbolic real emerges at the level of an automatic function precisely as this useless remainder, a product of the (symbolic) operation itself. As Sheridan puts it in a note to Seminar XI, the real is “the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic” (Lacan 1979, 280). Lacan uses the example of flipping a coin and builds a symbolic structure around it to represent the possible and actual outcomes of the flipping. Apart from this initial reference to a random event (flipping a coin), there is no other connection to any event in the external world. He c­ odifies the flipping of the coin in various ways, through highly complex symbolic

77

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matrices (2002, 47) in order to show how a purely automatic level of signification works. Every toss bears a 50% possibility of resulting in heads or tails. He represents heads with “+” and tails with “−,” and encodes the toss results to create a first symbolic matrix. For reasons of simplicity, I will illustrate this by grouping the results in pairs here (whereas Lacan uses triplets6): the pair (++), namely, two times heads, is designated by the number 1; the pair (−−), two times tails, is designated by the number 3; and the pair (+− or −+), heads or tails, tails or heads, is designated by the number 2. According to this coding, if we had nine toss results represented by numbers and the referring result of every toss underneath in overlapping pairs, we would get something like Table 4.1. Already, with a first very basic coding certain possibilities and impossibilities seem to be formed at the heart of this emerging structure that have nothing to do with the actual result of the toss. For example, a “2” can follow and be followed by a “1” and a “3.” However, a “3” cannot be followed by a “1,” since for a “3” to appear we need the appearance of a minus (we need a “2”). In this example, the fact that a “1” cannot be followed by a “3,” but only by a “2” or another “1,” makes the “3” the caput mortuum of that part of the signifying chain, namely, what needs to be excluded. Lacan focuses here on a certain autonomy that syntax can take and explores the importance that this can have for signification. Recall that the autonomy of the logical syntax was also an important part of the Tractarian understanding of meaning, as shown from the discussion of the possibility of deriving every single truth function through the application of the N operator. Using a different conceptual vocabulary here, Lacan highlights that it is the way one cyphers an event (an experience, a state of affairs in the world, etc.) and not the event itself that gives rise to certain laws or to certain impossibilities, namely, it is the method or system for representing, rather than something about what is (or seemingly fails to be) represented. According to this reading, the real qua failure of the symbolic is a product of language, not of the order of being. In Fink’s words: Table 4.1

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

+

+

−

−

+

−

−

−

+

1

3

2

1

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The excluded symbols or letters comprising the caput mortuum take on a certain materiality, […] and it is less what the letters say—and insofar as they are letters they do not say anything—than their matter or object-like nature which has an effect. […] The first real [the pre-symbolic real], returns in a sense in the form of a center of gravity around which the symbolic order is condemned to circle, without ever being able to hit it. It gives rise to impossibilities within the chain itself (a given word cannot appear randomly, but only after certain other words) and creates a sort of lump that the chain is forced to skirt. (1995, 27–28)

To go back to our starting point—the difficulty of expression in an experience of astonishment—any unintelligible signifier (word, expression) would be, according to this reading of the real qua caput mortuum, a combination excluded from grammar. Whether certain combinations are excluded is not because of the content of these expressions (e.g., not about the real toss results, or, in the case of the experience of astonishment, not about an ineffable content); if certain signifiers appear mysterious or unintelligible, this is because of the way our grammar is structured. I discussed this idea earlier in terms of a recourse to facts: all there is are facts, and if any fact seems to have some intrinsic and unintelligible value (that cannot be expressed), it is just because of the place it happens to have in our grammar. Even though, as discussed earlier, it is important to show how this reading might be offered as an answer to the groundlessness of meaning, it would be a mistake to think that this is Lacan’s final word on groundlessness or his full account of how meaning works. There are at least two reasons why: first, this is definitely not his whole account of the real, given that Lacan does speak of the order of being, of a substratum, and of materiality as aspects of the real (although I have not yet shown how this differs from a naive realism); second, Lacan recognizes something particularly significant about the limit. One of the passages quoted earlier from his late work continues as follows: “[That implies that there may be verbal fiction (fiction de mot)—I mean, fiction on the basis of the word]. And as some of you may recall, that is what I began with when I spoke of ethics” (1998, 118). I will return to this connection with ethics in the last part of the book. For now, let us understand the other aspect of the real, the ­pre-­symbolic real, and how it can play the role of the second temptation in response to the groundlessness of meaning.

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4.4   The Real Qua Substratum: The Temptation of Metaphysics In the previous discussion of the post-symbolic real, the real was presented as what resists language and any kind of symbolization. From that perspective, the real is not a pre-symbolic realm but rather an aspect or quality that things (experiences and their expression) in the world can have, that of exceeding or resisting our symbolic capacities. This can be easily overlooked or disappear if one chooses to look at some other examples of the real that Lacan offers, such as the infant’s body before it undergoes the process of symbolization (before the needs, the desires, the cries are symbolized, invested, articulated7), or a traumatic experience that seems to resist understanding or processing. As Fink puts it when he summarizes the various ways Lacan characterizes this second aspect of the real: “it is a smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as much to a child’s body as to the whole universe” (1995, 24). The temptation that can arise with these examples, and the pre-­symbolic character of the real, is to reify this and to think of the real in terms of a substratum, a substance-like realm that precedes the symbolic. This I take to be a form of what I have previously treated as a temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics, and what I discussed, in relation to the Tractatus, as a temptation to imagine that meaning is anchored in the a priori. Lacan offers plenty of room for this temptation with his descriptions of the real in such terms, for example when he says that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (2002, 262), inspired by the Hegelian idea that the word is the murder of the thing. His remarks about a realm that precedes the symbolic raise the question of whether there are some extra-linguistic or non-linguistic categories that serve as a foundation for language (whether there is a thing in the first place that is then “murdered”). This reading of the real qua substratum that conditions the symbolic would also agree with the Meyersonian conceptual origins of the real as an ontological absolute. It is crucial that Lacan also traces that substratum in language itself, in the sonorous or visual materialities of language, what he calls “a letter”: “By letter I designate that material medium (support) that concrete ­discourse borrows from language” (2002, 413). This is a very interesting move, bearing similarities to the Tractarian treatment of substance qua objects and names that bear the exact same possibilities. Even though Lacan uses the term “materiality” to describe this substratum, he also, like

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Wittgenstein, takes a critical distance from it. What is material is the content that can fill the place of the letter; but the letter is (as we said earlier) a place rather than what is placed in it. Recall our earlier discussion of the footprint that is then marked by a cross: the cross marks an absence and that absence becomes a place, which constitutes the signifier. It is in this sense that we rediscover the idea that the real conditions the symbolic. It conditions it insofar as it is its very place. Although Lacan does not make this explicit, the real qua place can be understood as the realm of form (of what is possible) through which particular contents are generated and take shape. In this respect, Lacan’s conceptualization of the substratum as a form that characterizes both the world and language can be reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s choice to speak of a form of the world and language (the possibilities in objects and names) that work as an anchor point (one that cannot be given a priori, as we discussed). Lacan offers the example of a phoneme to describe the “essentially localized structure of the signifier”: These elements, the decisive discovery of linguistics are phonemes; but we must not look for any phonetic constancy in the modulatory variability to which this term applies, but rather the synchronic system of differential couplings that are necessary to discern vocables in a given language [langue]. This allows us to see that an essential element in speech itself was predestined to flow into moveable type which in Didots or Garamonds squeezing into lower-cases, renders validly present what I call the “letter”—namely the essentially localized structure of the signifier. (2002, 418)

The letter (the material support of the symbolic) is linked to the phoneme, not the specific phoneme but the structural place for the phoneme; it is the place that can be occupied by a variety of phonemes (and still remain the same). Lacan associates “the materiality of the signifier” with indivisibility: the letter is, in itself, indivisible. As he writes: “whereas it is first of all the materiality of the signifier that I have emphasized, that materiality is singular in many ways, the first of which is not to allow of partition. Cut a letter into small pieces, and it remains the letter it is” (2002, 16). Lacan’s idea of indivisibility is somewhat obscure: does it also apply to his examples of a pre-symbolic real in the world (what would it mean to think of the infant’s body as indivisible)? And does it make sense to say that the structural place of the signifier itself is indivisible? I assume that Lacan’s choice of the term “indivisibility” serves to express the sense that

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something is always there: recall his example of the real aspect of stars. This sense that something is there, independently of our structuring efforts, has been expressed in philosophy mainly with words such as “fixity,” “simplicity,” “atomicity,” and “indivisibility.” Although Lacan is not involved in an epistemological search for simples, he borrows certain philosophical terms to express what, in his own conceptual system, serves the role of what is fixed. The obscurity and the metaphysical connotations of these words that Lacan uses to describe the (pre-symbolic) real have led to criticisms of his work. For example, both Jacques Derrida (1987) and his students Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1992) accuse Lacan of an idealization of the signifier and of an account of meaning that is based on a metaphysics of presence: “[T]he signifier-letter, in the topology and the psychoanalytico-transcendental semantics with which we are dealing, has a proper place and meaning which form the condition, origin, and destination of the entire circulation, as of the entire logic of the signifier” (Derrida, 1987, 437, my emphasis). On Derrida’s critical reading, the Lacanian real qua letter, namely, qua the indivisibility of placeness, is a metaphysical remainder that conditions language and the production of meaning. Although the temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics is an important part of Lacan’s story about meaning (as it is for Wittgenstein), it is not his last word. In fact, Lacan chooses to speak of the order of being as the endpoint of discourse, but he understands “being” as a rather problematic term: “Discourse has an original property in comparison with pointing. But that’s not where we shall find the fundamental reference of discourse. Are we looking for where it stops? Well then, it’s always at the level of this problematical term called being” (1997, 137). Furthermore, Lacan insists that there is nothing prior to the letter: “Reality is at the outset marked by symbolic nihilation (néantisation)” (1997, 148). If reality is marked by symbolic nihilation at the outset, why speak of the real as a pre-symbolic order? It is crucial to pay attention to the reasons why Lacan calls the order of being problematic but nevertheless chooses to speak of an order of being. Wittgenstein, in his own elaboration of language, called this need for ­substance—for a bottom level of objects and names—a condition for the determinacy of sense. Lacan seems to be suggesting something similar when he claims that this gives the signifying chain the consistency of something that can be trusted. However, for Lacan this endpoint (the real

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as raw, pre-symbolic reality or as letter) is in fact nothing but an empty place, and the reason why it plays such a central role is that as such it sustains the production of meaning. As he argues: One sees in effect that if here the signifier is a melting pot (creuset) in so far as it bears witness to a presence that is past, and that inversely in what is signifying, there is always in the fully developed signifier which the word is, there is always a passage, namely something which is beyond each one of the elements which are articulated, and which are of their nature fleeting, vanishing, that it is the passage from one to the other which constitutes the essential of what we call the signifying chain, and that this passage qua vanishing, is this very thing which can be trusted (qui se fait foi). (n.d.-a, 8)

It is perhaps important to highlight that Lacan introduces the real qua letter in his seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” in which the letter (the envelope) is constantly moved from place to place; it is what everyone is looking for and cannot find, and as such it is what sustains the story. The search for the stolen and lost letter, its displacement but also the very search for it, sustains the continuation of the story. However, what takes on the consistency of something that can be trusted seems to be also accompanied by the temptation (a trap, as Lacan puts it) to think that we can be acquainted with the realm of the signified through perhaps grasping some referential relation with the world (in the Tractatus, through reaching the ultimate simples): You recall that in linguistics there is the signifier and the signified and that the signifier is to be taken in the sense of the material of language. The trap, the hole one must not fall into, is the belief that signifieds are objects, things. The signified is something quite different—it’s the meaning, and I explained to you by means of Saint Augustine, who is as much of a linguist as Monsieur Benveniste, that it always refers to meaning, that is, to another meaning. The system of language, at whatever point you take hold of it, never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality; it’s the whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of language. You can never say that this is what is being designated, for even were you to succeed you would never know what I am designating in this table—for example, the colour, the thickness, the table as object, or whatever else it might be. (1997, 32, my emphasis)

Lacan’s use of the word “trap” supports my idea that imagining an a priori ground for meaning is a temptation; it is something that we can be tricked by, or fall into without realizing it. The trap is to think that what

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sustains the transmission of meaning is some metaphysical presence (what Derrida mistakes Lacan to be doing), something (indivisibility or structural place) that can be reached independently of our ways of signifying or the content of what we say. And the only way not to fall into that trap—or perhaps to come out of it in case we have fallen into it—is, Lacan seems to be suggesting, to pay attention to the fact that meaning always belongs to the whole network of language. Signifiers “float,” as Lacan suggests, until any given sentence is finished, or furthermore until any given sentence is used. Sense is always anticipated and at the same time it is always inscribed in the field of the Other. This field of the Other is the body of conventions that sustain meaning, and as such (precisely because of its nature) cannot be given a priori. We face here a very similar paradox to the one discussed in the previous chapter on Wittgenstein: what, at first sight, plays the role of guaranteeing the determinacy of sense—in this case, the pre-symbolic real as a condition for the symbolic—leads us, when followed through, to the impossibility of a priori grounding. What at first seems to ground meaning (the objects/names in Wittgenstein’s case and the placeness or fixity of the pre-symbolic real in Lacan’s case) is an impossible endpoint. Lacan’s pre-symbolic real qua placeness is at the same time what sustains the signifying chain and also what delays infinitely any final fixity of meaning, namely, what prevents any a priori grounding. These are the two aspects of the real, signalling simultaneously a condition for the symbolic and the impossibility of the symbolic. The real is what prevents an exhaustive representation of the world, what destabilizes any referential kind of contact between language and world (and this is its post-symbolic aspect), but it is also what sustains the signifying chain itself (and this is its pre-­ symbolic aspect). Ernesto Laclau describes this paradox in Lacan’s work as follows: “Thus we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system—its limits—is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility—a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification” (1996, 37).

4.5   Beyond the Two Temptations: The Real as Ab-sens The two states or aspects of the real that Laclau summarizes above are accompanied by (what I have discussed as) the two concomitant temptations of deflecting from groundlessness. I argued that the pre-symbolic aspect of the real is accompanied by the temptation to imagine a ­pre-­symbolic

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materiality that conditions symbolization. This embodies what I previously called the temptation to ground meaning in metaphysics, and it is possible, albeit wrong, to understand Lacan as someone who succumbs to that temptation (as Derrida does). On the other hand, the temptation accompanying the post-symbolic aspect of the real qua impossibility is the idea that what might appear as a difficulty with meaning is just the result of the internal characteristics of the signifying chain itself (or of grammar). These two aspects of the real and the concomitant temptations reflect the tension that I took to be important in the encounter with the groundlessness of meaning, the tension between avoiding groundlessness through metaphysics and avoiding groundlessness by attributing any limitations or failures of language to the mere workings of grammar (thus trivializing it). I would like, however, to propose here a different way to understand the Lacanian real, and therefore to introduce what I take to be Lacan’s alternative to these two temptations, along the lines I have put forward in the first part of this book. This third solution that I sketched in the first part of the book, and that I also traced in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is the acceptance of groundlessness (if by grounding we want to imagine something wholly external to our practices and the use of language) and the recognition in it of a question about one’s own involvement in meaning, insofar as language and meaning concern one (me) personally, and are not realms that function independently of the speaker. One way that Lacan invites us to reflect on this possibility is with the idea that meaning always refers to further meaning: Let me sum this up. The sense is always moving towards something, towards another meaning, towards the closure of meaning. It always refers to something that is out ahead or that turns back upon itself, but there is a direction. Does this mean that we have no endpoint? I’m sure that this point still remains uncertain in your mind given the insistence with which I state that meaning always refers to meaning. (1997, 137)

Sense always eludes us; there is no endpoint that can guarantee its determinacy, yet Lacan says there is a direction and this direction is given in the fact that meaning refers always to more meaning (I read meaning here as the various possibilities that surround and condition sense-­making). In that sense the real as the absence of an endpoint can be an invitation to get involved in meaning, and such an approach to the real can thematize what was called earlier a stance of reflection (non-deflection), a stance of

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acceptance of the groundlessness of meaning and of a simultaneous effort to recover meaning. In his late 1972–1973 paper “L’étourdit,” Lacan introduces the term “absense” (ab-sens) for the real, a level of no sense that ex-sists (sic) as a void in the centre of our language and the production of sense. As Adrian Johnston points out: “The ‘ab-meant’ real, so to speak, is not a sublime and utterly withdrawn transcendence, but instead that which subsists immanently with respect to the accessible planes of articulable knowledge” (2010, 151). Ab-sens is the absence of meaning that subsists within the heart of sense, and although Alain Badiou proposes a strict distinction between absense and nonsense, I do not see how one can experience this level of ab-sense if not through nonsense. Badiou’s reason for insisting on the distinction is that these “sonorous and/or visual materialities of ideational-­psychical Vorstellungen” are not nonsense since nonsense presupposes already an effort of making sense: The point that needs to be understood, as concerns the complex decision Lacan is formulating here, is that ab-sense must be held absolutely distinct from nonsense. Lacan’s argument is not absurdist or in a general sense existentialist. He is not asserting that the Real is nonsense. He is asserting that an opening onto the Real cannot be breached save through the presupposition that it is an absence in sense, an ab-sense, or a subtracting of something from, or out of, sense. Everything depends on this distinction between absense and non-sense. (2006, 83)

I find this distinction not only obscure but also dangerous since it can lead one to reify the level of no sense, thus making the real look like some metaphysical entity that precedes the symbolic (or the production of sense). The real is tied up with the symbolic, which means that it emerges always within a process of making sense. A much more fruitful and accurate account of ab-sense would be, I think, the following: ab-sens is not a realm of being as an impossible endpoint, but it is the possibility of failure of sense that is inherent in human discourse. This failure manifests itself in nonsense, or in a breakdown of communication, and it is what invites us to produce further meaning, to recover meaning, and to pay more attention to what is said. As Lacan puts it in his third seminar: “The signified is not the things in their raw state, already there, given in an order open to meaning. Meaning is human discourse insofar as it always refers to another meaning” (1997, 119–120).

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A similar reading of the real qua ab-sens is, I think, offered by Tom Eyers, who, faced with the danger of the multiplicity of concepts around the real, proposes to read this variety of concepts from the perspective of a distinction between the “signifier-in-relation” and the “signifier-in-­ isolation.” As he remarks: “Some of the confusion that has tended to surround Lacan’s account of language might be explained as a result of the profusion of technical terms used throughout the seminar to designate the paradoxical materiality of the signifier” (2012, 57). To remedy this confusion, Eyers introduces the typology of a distinction between “signifier-in-­ relation” and “signifier-in-isolation,” which […] aims to reduce Lacan’s multifarious terms relating to language to their most pertinent, opposing characteristics: the signifier-in-relation designates the signifier as it exists negatively, defined purely by relation to other signifiers and producing meaning as the result of its perpetual displacement along the axes of metaphor and metonymy. The signifier-in-isolation designates the signifier as Real, isolated as a material element apart from the networks of relation that would render it conducive to meaning. […] It is worth emphasizing that the signifier-in-isolation and signifier in-relation should be considered as potential “states” for any signifier, rather than as different signifiers or fundamentally different modalities of signification. (2012, 57)

The first thing that needs to be highlighted is that, according to the above distinction, the real is not something, it is not a realm beyond the symbolic, but it is a potential state of every signifier, a state of unintelligibility, or, as Eyers puts it, a state of isolation from other signifiers. An experience can appear to stand out, and when one tries to put it into words and connect it to other experiences it might resist that connection. Notice that at this level the question of whether it is the experience or the expression of the experience that is isolated does not really make sense. For Lacan, the real is both an aspect of how the world appears to us and of how language appears to us. The real belongs neither to a separate order of being, nor to a separate order of language, but rather to an aspect of our being-in-language. This is why Lacan treats all these different ideas, such as organic body, trauma, and materiality of the signifier, under the umbrella term of the pre-symbolic real.8 The signifier-in-relation embodies the symbolic aspect of a signifier, namely, the signifier as part of the signifying chain and as a differential ­element situated within a signifying structure. A signifier-in-isolation is a signifier (a word, an expression, a gesture, an action) that appears as

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unintelligible, as “an insistent, senseless ground” (2012, 67) and seems to resist (and stand out from) the rest of the signifying chain; it is a signifier that has not been incorporated into or come into relation to other signifiers. Let me offer an example from the clinical practice. Someone, call him N, decides to visit an analyst complaining of repeated dysfunctional relationships. Soon it becomes clear that a certain signifier appears very often in the analysand’s discourse. This signifier is “Noone loves me.” At first this signifier seems to be connected both to a signified (certain events in his life) and to other signifiers; for example it comes in the form of a description such as “not only my previous partner left me for someone else, but she also left me when I had just lost my job, how could she do this to me? She couldn’t even wait until I felt stronger and more on my feet. She never loved me, why do I pick people who do not love me?” Here it seems that the “noone loves me” describes a state of affairs regarding previous relationships (noone from the set of my previous partners has ever loved me), so that an interlocutor can still say “yes, this was very unloving of her” or “yes but at least she was honest and tried to protect you from being lied to or deceived.” However as the analysis progresses, it becomes evident that this signifier (noone loves me) is a structuring point of the analysand’s discourse (it is, as Lacan would put it, an empty and void centre of gravity, the real that conditions the symbolic chain as its empty, impossible centre) and, as such, occupies most of the analysand’s psychic space; for example, the same idea comes up in relation to N’s workplace (a sense that most employers want to get rid of him or replace him with another employee), in all previous relationships, in the family (his mum never really loved him), but also in the analytic transferential relation (when N. confesses a constant thought that the analyst is looking at his watch while N is on the couch and cannot wait for their session to end). Now the signifier starts looking more like “an insistent, senseless ground.” The proposition “noone loves me” has such a level of generality that no states of affairs could ever falsify it, so everything in life ends up verifying it or being an instance of it. This is why Lacan is so interested in the phenomenon of meaning in relation to psychosis and more specifically in relation to paranoia, because paranoid discourse is full of propositions that have lost their truth value, so to speak. Through the interpretative work and paying attention to how this fantasy plays out in the relation between the analysand and the analyst, this signifier-in-isolation (noone loves me) can become reconnected to other signifiers, and come to bear on the (outer) reality of other people, not just

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the inner reality of the analysand. This means that gradually, as this signifier comes to be in relation with other signifiers, it will not play anymore the same structuring role for the patient’s life and discourse (structuring it by staying excluded from it). Instead, this signifier will come to appear as a fantasy of sense and not as a senseful proposition. In gaining sense, in exiting the state of isolation, the signifier will become integrated in significant communication. If we connect this example with our previous discussion, then one way to understand the real character of the signifier “noone really loves me” would be to imagine it as a traumatic event behind the signifier that makes it forever excluded from the symbolic: in this case ab-sens would be a content that has not been symbolized. But that would lead to a certain reification of that traumatic event and would overlook how the words “noone really loves me” are cut off from meaning because no other signifiers can be in significant relation with them, as well as how they have the potential of being reconnected to networks of relation with other signifiers. Part of the psychoanalytic work will be to bring those isolated words back to circulation, back in relation to other signifiers so that they can bear on the person’s reality. In Lacan’s work we find several descriptions of the signifier-in-isolation (of the real aspect of signification): the material, indivisible character of the letter, the empty signifier,9 the signifier that is not used anymore and is out of circulation, but also his story about the “peace of the evening” that this book began with. In the latter case, a certain expression (the peace of the evening) stands out from the rest of our experience in a way that makes it unintelligible. The phrase “the peace of the evening” is in isolation from the rest of the experience, which is anything but peaceful, and its effect on the person who has the experience seems inexplicable. According to the two temptations analysed here, either one could attempt to explain this as a manifestation of a limit of language, as if the phrase were a failed attempt to capture something inherently elusive; or one could attempt to explain this unintelligibility as a product of fiction, caused by the level of syntax itself, as an impossibility that arises just by the fact that our grammar is structured in the way it is. Highlighting the role of ab-sens in Lacan’s understanding of the real helps to clarify that there is nothing inherently real (impossible) about certain expressions or experiences. Understanding the real qua ab-sens allows us to understand why Lacan does not give up on the search for a ground, why he chooses to speak of the order of being despite the fact that it is, as he calls it, a fiction of the word. To put it differently, there is a ground, only that

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ground comes from signifiers being in relation (as opposed to isolation). The very term “isolation” entails the possibility of bringing signifiers (back) into relation to other signifiers; by definition, what is in isolation could also be in relation. The signifier-in-isolation combines both aspects of the real that were previously discussed as pre-symbolic and post-symbolic, for it both “underlies, and threatens to undermine, the temporary epistemological sedimentation of meaning via the ‘Imaginary effects’ of the signifier-in-­relation, [as well as] any final stabilization or naturalization of meaningfulness” (Eyers, 2012, 64). What Eyers calls the imaginary effects of the signifier-in-relation is the temptation to do away with limitation, impossibility, and unintelligibility, and to imagine, instead, a harmonious relation between language and our experiences. Lacan, as I read him, wants to stress that what happens in an experience of the contingency of meaning (such as the experience of astonishment) is not just a fiction caused by grammar, nor a manifestation of an ineffable realm, but rather it is a difficulty with meaning that arises insofar as meaning cannot be grounded independently of the involvement of the speaker. In an earlier quoted passage, Lacan suggests that looking for an endpoint for meaning blinds us to the fact that what lies behind meaning is more meaning (“meaning always refers to meaning”). This can sound like a problem (to someone who looks for a final grounding) or it can sound as the direction to a solution. We bring signifiers out of isolation, not by finding an independent metaphysical anchor point but by bringing them back to use, back in relation to other signifiers. As Lacan puts it, meaning insists in the signifying chain even though “none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment” (Lacan, 2002, 502). The signifier carries more meaning than might be gathered from the separate meanings of a proposition’s words since it “does not in advance contain within itself all the significations that we make it take on” (2002, 401). Not only do these significations not belong to a ­predetermined signified, but they also depend on what we do with them, on what significations we make the signifier take on. I read this as a comment on the creative potential speaking has, insofar as the speaker is actively involved in it. This creative potential can be lost in deflection. I will now turn my focus to what I have called a stance of reflection and will explore what this could look like and how it can become possible. I will then return to Wittgenstein’s and Lacan’s stories about groundlessness and argue that the experience of astonishment has for both of them a strongly ethical character insofar as it confronts us with a question about our own creative involvement in meaning.

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Notes 1. “The two elements [signified and signifier] are intimately united,” in Saussure (1972, 98–99). 2. The real is one of the most complex and obscure Lacanian concepts, with various (sometimes seemingly contradictory) aspects; it is also closely connected to other Lacanian terms such as the symbolic, the imaginary, the objet petit a, jouissance, lalangue, drive. Because of this connection between the concept of the real and other concepts and, therefore, because of the multiplicity of definitions provided throughout Lacan’s work, many commentators approach the real through a schematic division of Lacan’s work into early, middle, and late periods. As Voruz and Wolf put it: “The seminar of Jacques Lacan can be divided into three periods, each lasting for approximately a decade. Roughly speaking, and as developed by Jacques-Alain Miller in his ongoing Paris seminar, each of these periods is characterized by the prevalence of one of the three registers of the analytic experience that Lacan named imaginary, symbolic, and real, and in that order” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, viii). According to this division, the early Lacan is the Lacan of the mirror stage, in which he is mostly concerned with an elaboration of the imaginary (and the imaginary formation of the Ego); the middle Lacan shifts to the symbolic and the importance of the signifier, with the Name-­of-­ the-Father being the dominant notion; and the late Lacan brings the real into the centre of his work. Here, the symbolic seems always to be undermined by the real, and the subject becomes an unstable, void construction. I regard this as a simplistic way of understanding Lacan, even if it helps us organize his work. Such readings see the development of the concept of the real in a linear way and fail to take into account the interdependence between all three orders, which Lacan himself repeatedly stresses. Here, I approach Lacan’s work as a continuum, that is, not in terms of separate periods, but mostly as a space of a constant attempt to understand and ­conceptualize the relation between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. This is why I use references from Lacan’s different seminars (or different “periods”) on the real, as well as passages from the “late” Lacan to understand the “early” one, or vice versa. Contrary to the idea that Lacan’s elaboration of the real in his late work cancels out his early one, the different elaborations Lacan offers will be regarded here as different aspects of the real. 3. Lacan uses the term extimité to describe the paradoxical relation of the real to the symbolic, which is neither inside nor outside the symbolic. 4. Shepherdson reads the two versions of the real as follows: “In the first case, one can say the real ‘exists’ independently, and then go on to ask whether we can have any knowledge of it independent of our representations. But in

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the second case, we are led to speak of the ‘being of lack’—thereby initiating a whole series of apparently paradoxical claims about the ‘being’ of what ‘is not,’ reminiscent, perhaps, of theological disputes concerning the existence of God” (2008, 27). 5. There is an air of paradox here, like the paradox we encountered earlier in our discussion on the signifier and how, as an empty place, it designates both an absence (of the signified that can fill in the place) and a presence (of what could potentially fill in that place). Similarly, the very idea that the real is always in the same place (it is something fixed that precedes our symbolic or imaginary attempts) is bound up with the idea that it cannot be understood; it resists our attempts to come to terms with it. Lacan’s analogy with the stars can be helpful: since the beginning of time, human beings have tried to domesticate their fixity by naming the stars, thus including them in the symbolic. Also, apart from being named, stars have been included in the imaginary by being given an astrological efficacy or by being regarded as a source of truth. Both the symbolic and the imaginary are ways of appropriation and familiarization of the real fixity of the stars that resist a full appropriation. 6. In Lacan’s more complex version of this he cyphers the triplets +++ and −−− as 1, +−+ and −+− as 3, and any other irregular series, +−−, −++, ++−, −−+ as 2. He then adds another level of codification for the series of 1, 2, 3 with the Greek letters α, β, γ, δ. 7. Freud’s account of psychosexual development shows that the way our body desires and gets pleasure is a product of the symbolic progressive creation of erogenous zones as a progressive localization of pleasure. See Freud (1991). 8. Another good example is that of the symptom, which functions as a metaphor for what is not symbolized yet. Before the work of interpretation that allows the symptom to take on a meaning, a symptom is a floating signifier. The symptom is what brings us into contact with this level of ab-sense or non-meaning, with the signifier-in-isolation that awaits, so to speak, (the analyst’s) interpretation. 9. An empty or floating signifier is a signifier without referent.

References Badiou, A. (2006). The formulas of L’Étourdit. Lacanian Ink, p. 27. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. De Saussure, F. (1972). Cours de linguistique generale (T. de Mauro, Ed.). Paris: Payot.

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Derrida, J.  (1987). The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eyers, T. (2012). The Signifier-in-relation, the Signifier-in-isolation, and the Concept of the “Real” in Lacan. Parrhesia, 14, 56–70. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1991). On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works. London: Penguin. Homer, S. (2005). Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge. Johnston, A. (2010). This Philosophy Which is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy. S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 3(3), 137–158. Lacan, J. (n.d.-a). Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–1958 (C. Gallagher, Trans.). Private publication. Retrieved August 24, 2018, from http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ Book-05-the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf Lacan, J. (n.d.-b). Seminar XIV La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967. Unpublished. Lacan, J. (1979). Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (J.-A.  Miller, Ed. and A.  Sheridan, Trans.). New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J.  (1982). Le symbolique, l’imaginaire et le réel (1953). Bulletin de l’Association freudienne, p. 1. Lacan, J. (1988). Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (S.  Tomaselli, Trans.). New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J.  (1990). Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (J. Copjec, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. (1991). Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J.  (1997). Seminar III, The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (J.-A.  Miller, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. (1998). Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (B.  Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2002). Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., & Nancy, J.-L. (1992). The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press.

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Meyerson, E. (1925). La déduction relativiste. Paris: Payot. Pluth, E. (2007). Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press. Shepherdson, C. (2008). Lacan and the Limits of Language. New York: Fordham University Press. Voruz, V., & Wolf, B. (Eds.). (2007). The Later Lacan: An Introduction. Albany: SUNY Press.

CHAPTER 5

From Deflection to Reflection: A Creative Involvement with Language

5.1   Introduction In the first part of this book, I suggested that a different response from that of deflection is possible when, in an experience of astonishment, one is faced with the difficulty of intelligible expression, and I used the term “reflection” to describe such a response. I distinguished reflection from mere thinking, and described it as a creative, thoughtful, attentive involvement with language, a way of expressing astonishment not by avoiding but rather by assuming the contingency of meaning and turning it into a chance for creativity. In the second part of this book, I explored two temptations of deflection against the groundlessness of meaning, namely, the attempt to ground meaning in metaphysics, and the recourse to facts, as they appear in the works of Wittgenstein and Lacan, and I argued that for both thinkers meaning cannot be grounded a priori. In Wittgenstein’s case meaning (the form of the objects) is recovered through the application of logic and the recovery of contexts of use, and in Lacan’s work meaning is recovered through bringing signifiers in relation. The stance of reflection that can be adopted towards the difficulty of expressing astonishment presupposes that the search for a ground of meaning is left to our practices and use of language. However, it seems that even though our starting point, namely, an experience of astonishment, makes manifest a more general problem about the contingency or groundlessness of meaning, it also resists meaning in a © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_5

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very particular way. In fact, this was described as a central trait of an experience of astonishment. Recall that Wittgenstein described such experiences as essentially nonsensical, and Lacan described his example of “the peace of the evening” as a manifestation of “the signifier in the real.” Although I have, throughout the book, criticized the idea that there is something inherently inexpressible about these experiences, I have not yet systematically shown why this idea does not work. It is crucial to now do so, since if there were something inherently inexpressible about these experiences in particular, then it would become unclear why what I call creativity in language and the response of reflection is the appropriate response to the difficulty of expression that arises with an experience of astonishment. Is it possible to find forms of intelligible expression for these experiences despite the fact that they are tied up with a difficulty of meaning? Let us look first into the nature of their unintelligibility. What seems to cause their unintelligibility is, according to Wittgenstein, that they appear to have an absolute (as opposed to relative) value that cannot be determinately expressed in propositional contents. As we saw in the first chapter of this book, Wittgenstein draws in the Lecture on Ethics a sharp distinction between propositional facts and value: Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water if I were to pour out a gallon over it. I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc.

Wittgenstein’s division between the realm of meaning and that of value, through a clear-cut distinction between propositional content and value,1 is also prevalent in certain remarks in the Tractatus, according to which facts (and propositions qua facts) are all valueless. Coupled with the perplexing Tractarian references to sub specie aeterni (the viewpoint from eternity), and its relation to the mystical (see 1992, §6.45, 6.522), it is not remarkable why, for some interpretations, value in the early Wittgenstein is ineffable (Hacker, 2000; Russell in Wittgenstein, 1992; McGuinness, 1966) and thus not dependent on the realm of meaning in any way. From such perspectives, experiences of astonishment would not only be banned from the realm of meaning but also potentially tied up with an ineffable content. In this chapter I argue that these experiences, although linked with a difficulty of intelligible expression, are not manifestations of an ineffable

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content; there are ways to express intelligibly the absolute value of the experience that, however, presuppose the speaker’s own creative involvement with language, and a certain shift in the kind of expression we were looking for. I will discuss this different kind of expression, which I earlier called “reflection,” as a creative recovery of possibilities of meaning, and will differentiate it from the expression involved in the asking and answering of questions.

5.2   The Miraculousness of a Stove in Wittgenstein and Heraclitus One of the (confused) ideas that might cause one to think that an experience of astonishment has an ineffable content is that there are certain domains in life, such as aesthetics, ethics, and religion, that are often characterized by absolute as opposed to relative value and hence seem to be necessarily accompanied by a difficulty of expression: for example, saying that a road is good because it is the quickest or the less busy one compared to the other roads works fine, but saying that a work of art is good because it is the most colourful or the biggest one compared to other works of art does not work as a relevant aesthetic evaluation. This idea might compel one to imagine these domains (and the experience of astonishment insofar as it related to them) as cut off from propositional contents and thus from the realm of (linguistic) meaning. It is true that it is more likely to get a sense of absolute (as opposed to relative) value in one’s contact with the good, the beautiful, or the godly. However, the distinction is challenged as soon as one realizes that anything in life can appear as good, beautiful, or godly (and their opposites), but also that sometimes it is not even clear which, if any, of these three categories can best describe one’s experience of absolute value. In other words, the realization that ethics, aesthetics, and the religious are both ubiquitous2 and not so clearly definable, and that this aspect of absolute value can appear to us with any everyday object or case, can make it less compelling to think of these domains as cut off from our lives in language, and absolute value as cut off from meaning. I want to show here that there is a way of experiencing and expressing3 this value in language, and also that what appears as absolute value is actually grounded in the things we do and thus connected to the propositional facts that describe these things we do, everyday facts such as, “the kitchen

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is where we cook,” “milk is the first thing that nourishes us,” “wine and bread is what Jesus Christ gave his disciples during the Last Supper.” However, and this is, as I argue the distinguishing mark of the experience of absolute value, it is not reducible to any particular propositional fact, but is encapsulated in them all. To argue for the idea that what appears as absolute value is grounded in the things we do, and is directly related to the realm of (linguistic) meaning, I will turn my focus to the case of a trivial and ordinary object that has been described in the history of philosophy as having an absolute significance: the case of an oven or stove. In his Notebooks, Wittgenstein brings in this rather peculiar example of a stove being significant (bedeutent), “the true world among shadows.” Wittgenstein uses here the word bedeutent for significant and unbedeutent for insignificant, and I will address his choice of these words in a little while. Let us first look at the remark, which appears often in the literature on the Wittgensteinian notion of ethical and aesthetic value. To the best of my knowledge, none of the interpretations or commentaries of the remark have explained why he chooses to use the example of a stove instead of a work of art (see, e.g., Appelqvist, 2013; Tilghman, 1991): As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant (unbedeutend); as world each one equally significant (bedeutend). If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove, IT was my world, and everything else paled by contrast with it. For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows. (1979, 83, translation modified, my emphasis)

Like the kinds of astonishment experiences I described, here too we have the sense that the experience puts pressure on our ordinary forms of expression by having a kind of value that, when expressed in words, not only sounds peculiar or odd, but is unintelligible, for what would it mean to imagine the stove as “the true world among shadows”? This is not a problem when we take the stove as a thing among things, namely, when the value of a stove can be expressed with a particular (set of ) propositional fact(s). As I discuss later, the perspective “as a thing among things” is that of relative value; something can be better than

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something else given one’s particular set of aims or criteria. But the perspective of seeing as world makes a thing significant without qualification; it makes it absolutely valuable (rather than relatively). But how can a simple stove have anything to do with absolute value? This is an example that does not fit with (and thus challenges) the misconception I discussed earlier, in which absolute value might be an ineffable content that belongs to ethics, aesthetics, and religion. This is not the first philosophical story to link a kitchen with a miracle. The example of the miraculous value of a stove has also been used by Heraclitus, cited by Aristotle, commented on by Heidegger, and so on. In fact, given that Wittgenstein had read about Heraclitus, since he refers to his sayings in some parts of his work,4 one cannot rule out the possibility that his choice of example is connected to what Heraclitus is reported to have said about his own oven. The story is offered by Aristotle in his first book, Parts of Animals (644b22–645a36), to enhance his argument that we should value the study of humbler animals, such as sponges, snails, and grubs, like we value the study of humans: So one must not be childishly repelled by the examination of the humbler animals. For in all things of nature there is something wonderful. And just as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to the visitors who wanted to meet him and who stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself by the oven (παρα τω ιπνω)—he urged them to come in without fear, for there were gods there too—so one must approach the inquiry about each animal without aversion, since in all of them there is something natural and beautiful. (1972, 645a15–23, my emphasis)

While we usually expect value to appear only in certain contexts, and activities, “gods are there” even in the most everyday situations or unremarkable things. By inviting the visitors to come in, despite their disappointment with the fact that a philosopher is not in a room where profound thoughts are supposed to be thought, Heraclitus points to the intersection between the miraculous and the everyday, between absolute value (value that has to do with the gods) and the apparently worthless and trivial oven or kitchen. It is crucial that neither Wittgenstein nor Heraclitus speak of the usefulness of a stove or an oven. What they have in mind is not one particular fact that makes it valuable, say for example the fact that we cook food on it. For, in Wittgenstein’s case, that would be the relative value of a thing as a thing among things rather than as world, and for Heraclitus this would

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be the very reason why those who visited him were disappointed, namely, that it is just the place where we cook food. From the perspective of the particular, the stove has certain qualities that are similar to, or different from, other qualities, and if it got our attention, it would be by virtue of such qualities. For example, as a thing among things, the stove might be heavier than an urn, more useful than a pan, and so on, and, depending on our needs, we would deem it important and invest our attention and time in it, or not. However, this is not quite where significance emerges. The perspective of significance must arise, Wittgenstein says, beyond the particular and the contentful, when there is no comparison between things, not in a relative but in an absolute way. In the remark about the stove, the idea that significance does not arise from particular qualities or predicated properties is put forward with what, at first sight, might look like a paradox: “as world each thing is equally significant,” Wittgenstein writes. But how can something be equally significant to something else? Doesn’t Wittgenstein here undermine the significance of something if it can be equally significant to other things? This is almost like saying that everyone is a winner; just as if everyone was a winner, no one would be a winner; if as world each thing is equally significant, then significance would be lost. The paradoxical use of the phrase “equally significant” serves precisely as a reminder that comparison makes no sense, that there is no room for it here (see also Friedlander, 2014, 64). Significance—that is, absolute, as opposed to relative, evaluation—is not a matter of qualification, of one thing being superior to another. This explains the use of the word blass (paled)5 in the above passage (“everything else would be blass by contrast to the stove when the stove becomes significant”). Paled does not mean valueless and its grammar resists connotations of superiority or inferiority. Part of what it means for the stove to become significant without qualification is that the rest recedes into the background, just as when a colour loses its intensity and is paled. This idea was also discussed in the description of the experience of astonishment. Any description of the astonishing kindness that a young girl shows to Ruth Kluger in terms of comparison to other acts of kindness will not do, and any description of the absolute safety in relative terms (such as “I know that a bus will not hit me if I am to stay at home”) misses the point. The problem becomes even more pressing in the case of the value of a stove, precisely because there does not seem to be anything mysterious or valuable behind it. As I said earlier, the example challenges the idea that

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there are some separate domains in life where things are more likely to have absolute value. The example of the stove presents a challenge because it is not straightforwardly an aesthetic, ethical, or religious object, which might account for the fact that most interpretations of the passage can only make sense of it insofar as they treat it as a work of art, even though “curiously it is not an example that [Wittgenstein] explicitly connects with art” (Tilghman, 1991, 53). Seeing something apart from its particular qualities (as world) has traditionally (at least since Kant) been applied to works of art, for it seems that none of the parts of a work of art play the final role for its aesthetic value. If one is asked why they contemplate an object as a work of art, they will be (or should be) unable to point to some particular quality of the object (e.g., the theme of the painting or the specific pigment used by the painter). If one does point to a particular part of the object as what can explain its value then one speaks about the agreeable or the useful, not the beautiful. The aesthetic value of an object lies in it as a whole, in an organic unity. This is how Benjamin Tilghman understands the Wittgensteinian stove, as a work of art: “[T]he work of art selects an object, a scene, a situation and makes that object stand still to be contemplated and in so doing treats the object as if it were a world unto itself so that it becomes my world and a representative of the whole” (1991, 53). But what is the whole of which a stove becomes representative? It seems rather far-fetched to think that Wittgenstein refers to a stove in a museum (like Duchamp’s urine pot), and to the idea that if a stove was in a museum then its value would no longer lie in the fact that we can use it to cook, or in its black colour, or in the material it is made of. Again, we risk imagining here that an aesthetic context could almost magically play the explanatory role for this absolute value.

5.3   Significance Qua Bedeutung: The Recovery of Logical Space To begin to understand how a stove can have significance that is not expressible in particular propositional contents, and yet is not cut off from intelligible expression either, I propose to turn our attention to the use of the words bedeutent-unbedeutent in the passage. This is not the first time Wittgenstein uses the words bedeutung or sinn to denote value. In the Notebooks, for example, he writes that things acquire “significance” (bedeutung) only through their relation to will, that “good and evil are somehow

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connected to the meaning of the world (Sinn der Welt)” (1979, 73), and that “To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning” (1979, 74). The connection also appears in the 6.41 of the Tractatus, where, for example, Wittgenstein treats the sense of the world and value synonymously: “the sense of the world (Sinn der Welt) must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists.” This should not be dismissed as a random, accidental choice by Wittgenstein. The words sinn and bedeutung play a central role in his early work, since, as discussed previously, one of the main issues (if not the main issue) in the Tractatus is how propositions can have sense and words can have meaning. “[G]iven Wittgenstein’s commitment to clarity, it is highly unlikely that he would use the same words to denote something different unless he thought that there was some conceptual connection between them” (Balaska, 2019, 43). Moreover, his choice of the same words to denote meaning and value is further strengthened by certain other remarks in the Notebooks in which a conceptual relation is straightforwardly suggested. For example, one of the above-quoted remarks in the Notebooks continues as follows: “If good and evil willing affects the world it can only affect the boundaries of the world, not the facts. The world must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. As if by accession or loss of meaning (Sinn).” Also, in the remark that immediately precedes his remark on the stove being bedeutent, we read, “each thing modifies the whole of logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak. The thought forces itself upon one, the thing seen sub specie aeternitatis is the thing seen together with the whole logical space” (1979, 83). The first remark draws a connection between the world being a significant world and whether there is more or less (linguistic) meaning in it, and although the “as if” could weaken the connection and make it look as a mere metaphor that Wittgenstein draws between a change in the boundaries of the world and a change in the status of linguistic meaning, the second remark strengthens that connection, by drawing a direct relation between the realm of linguistic meaning and that of value. Let me explain why: the thing seen sub specie aeterni(tatis) is the thing seen as valuable, as (aesthetically and ethically) good. Sub specie aeterni(tatis) is the view from eternity that sees the world as a whole and gives rise to a mystical feeling (1992, §6.45), and as he writes in the same remark as the one quoted above from the Notebooks: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie

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aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics” (1979, 83). Furthermore, the sub specie aeternitatis is the only way to contemplate the world as valuable, given that Wittgenstein introduces the concept in the Tractatus after he has stated that “all propositions are of equal value.” This only way to contemplate the world as valuable is then identified with “seeing with the whole logical space.” Recall that “logical space” is a central concept for Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and sense and it refers to the realm of possibilities that allows for a mere sign to be a symbol, the space that allows for signification, or, arguably, as the later Wittgenstein would put it, the space of grammar. To open the logical space of a sign one needs to also recover the contexts where the sign works as a symbol, namely, to start a process of analysis. But given, as we saw, that the forms of the elementary propositions cannot be given a priori (1992, §5.55), the process of analysis cannot ever have a clear end, and thus the whole logical space can never be given in advance, for to do so one would have to know all the facts, thus one would have to occupy what could be called God’s perspective. As Diamond also points out: In terms of metaphor of logical space, the Tractatus view can be put this way: we become clear what our sentences mean by becoming clear what place within logical space they determine. We get the layout (as it were) of logical space through our grasp of logical relations. Only in that way can we find out what elementary propositions there are; only in that way can we thus actually get clear what the exact truth conditions of our sentences are. (2000b, 280)

The way I read Wittgenstein’s remark on seeing something with the whole logical space is not as seeing the whole logical space of something, but rather as opening up to logical space as a referential whole, namely, to the simple fact that possibilities of meaning exist. To explain this, let us return to the remark about the stove, and see what a recovery of logical space has to do with seeing the stove as bedeutent. In the passage, we read: “If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial.” This is a further clarification that the way of seeing Wittgenstein describes is not that of seeing a thing (a stove in this case) in isolation. It is not the way a philosopher contemplates a thing when they look for its essence, as Descartes does with his piece of wax, nor the way

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one focuses on an object when they meditate. To repeat Wittgenstein’s point, it is not about any particular characteristic of the stove, nothing that can be given in the form of the proposition: “[T]his is what makes the stove significant.” Rather, seeing something as significant involves recovering the context of the human practices in which a stove appears; this could be for example the world of a kitchen and the related activities, or the world of a house and what we do in a house. This connection between significance and worldhood (a meaningful web of interrelated things) is further stressed by Wittgenstein’s remark that if all he knew was the stove, then his result would appear trivial. That the stove is his world does not arise from Wittgenstein focusing only on the stove in isolation from other things, for this would be a partial and narrow way of seeing and would take us back to the perspective of the particular. On the contrary, one gets a perspective of significance through opening up to a referential context, namely, the context of our human life and practices by which we understand anything at all. This referential context is, as I have tried to show, what the Tractarian logical space points to.6 As I also discuss elsewhere: A thing can become significant insofar as it carries with it a referential whole, by virtue of which anything has meaning: any contemplation of a thing as significant cannot but lead us to other things, an environment in which they exist, a human practice, yet another human practice, etc. For example, as already mentioned, the stove is related to the environment of a kitchen, and to the practice of cooking. But the practice of cooking refers not only to the practice of eating but also to that of gathering and nourishing others, and perhaps to a manifestation of love. In this sense, a stove could also be regarded as constitutive of what we call “home.” Grasping the stove as world might include grasping the loving aspects that the activity of cooking has come to have. In doing so, in recovering these contexts of human activity we open possibilities of meaning, and engage in an imaginative and attentive activity of understanding (active contemplation rather than intuition) that makes the stove significant. This is an open-ended process because, of course, the referential whole cannot be imagined or grasped in advance. For example, the connection between a stove and the activity of cooking is not a necessary one. We could imagine children using the stove as an iron-made castle, and not caring at all or not having anything to do with its cooking-related properties. Or we could imagine a child being familiar with the stove only through the fairy tale of the Iron Stove by the Brothers Grimm. (2019, x)7

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To go back to Heraclitus, and Heidegger’s discussion of it, the miraculous, godly aspect of a kitchen is tied up with it being a world, with the fact that it is worldhood we are facing. Ultimately, if one could continue (ad infinitum) the process of opening possibilities of meaning, through opening worlds and activities, then one would finally reach the bare fact that meaning exists, and it is in the very existence of (semantic) meaning that significance emerges, not in particular propositional facts, but in the referential whole of the realm of meaning.8 As I am about to discuss, this idea is expressed by Wittgenstein when he states that it is the existence of language as a whole that can express the miracle of the existence of the world.

5.4   Wittgenstein’s Own Temptation to Deflect The idea that absolute value is not cut off from expression in language, and furthermore that the appropriate expression for the miraculous entails a certain relation to the realm of meaning, is also voiced by Wittgenstein when, in the Lecture on Ethics (1993), he says that it is the existence of language that can express the astonishment: Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. (1993, 43–44)

But how can one express themselves by the existence of language? What would an expression by the existence of language look like? Wittgenstein continues: But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we can say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. (1993, 44, my emphasis)

This is a passage in which I think Wittgenstein arrives at an insight but does not follow it through, perhaps because he is not sure what to imagine as an expression by the existence of language or, perhaps, because a logical positivistic idea prevails according to which whatever is not expressed in a propositional fact is nonsense. Wittgenstein’s own temptation to deflect also appears, I think, when he understands all other forms of expression as a sign of misuse:

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Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. (1993, 42) Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense. (1993, 43)

Although Wittgenstein’s positivistic residues might be getting in the way of his exploring the alternative form of expression he introduced earlier, I also think it is important to emphasize his idea that “we do not want” certain kinds of expression: “all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express.” According to this second idea, the sense of a failed expression has to do with us not wanting that kind of expression, not with something that language cannot do, but rather with something that we do not want to do with language. This also comes up when he explains that “not only […] no description that [he] can think of would do to describe what [he] means by absolute value, but […] [he] would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance” (1993, 44). Cora Diamond proposes a similar reading of the role that “what we want to express” plays in such cases and argues that one should not confuse what Wittgenstein describes as an essential nonsensicality with a sense of constraint, or limitation. Hence it is important to emphasize, she says, “the difference between thinking of the inexpressibility of something as being a matter of the something lying beyond the expressible and thinking of it as not being anything within the expressible, within what can be said, i.e. thinking of oneself as in a position to reject anything sayable as an expression of the something” (2011, 242). Diamond explores the idea that “nothing that can be said would be what one is seeking, or takes oneself to be seeking.” But “nothing that can be said” should be taken with a pinch of salt: it is nothing that can be said as an answer to a question, as a propositional fact, rather than nothing full stop. In fact, Diamond goes on to suggest, like Wittgenstein, that there is a kind of expression that would do, namely, that there is a way of presenting senseful language, but this presentation would not take the form of asking and answering questions. As she says:

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We remain, as we see ourselves in our asking of such questions, “in the midst of things”; the implicit conception of what it would be to have a solution to the questions we ask is that it would add something to what we know to be the case. What difference, then, can be made by a philosophical approach that presents senseful language, that gets it clearly into focus for us? When we are in the midst of sense, talking sense, asking and answering questions, sense is not something that is an object of our awareness; or, rather, insofar as it does become an object of awareness at all, it is as something about which we may ask questions. So we remain within the asking and answering of questions. (2011, 258)

I have already suggested that not wanting to be satisfied with the expression of astonishment is part of what the experience entails. This temptation to deflect can take the form of “asking and answering questions,” either in an attempt to find the right expression in the a priori (the ultimate answer) or in the dismissal of the absolute character of the experience and its treatment as a particular language game with its own set of questions. Perhaps the time has come to ask: Why is it so easy to deflect? Why is it so easy to look for propositional contents that can express the experience in terms of questions and answers, and then be dissatisfied when we cannot find any appropriate ones, when no answer seems to do the job? I argued, in the first part of the book, that these experiences expose a more chronic difficulty with meaning, namely, its contingency or groundlessness, and to that extent they confront the speaker with the problem of grounding (finding the right expression). In other words, the difficulty involved in not having ready-made propositional facts that can express the absolute value of these experiences without relativizing them (without deflecting) explains our experience away without deflecting, and thus the difficulty involved in the manifestation of the contingency of meaning consists in the fact that this requires from us to become personally and actively involved with meaning. Both temptations of deflection belong to a particular way of relating to language through asking for the particular fact that can capture or explain one’s experience away. But if one were to stop asking for propositional facts that can supposedly resolve the ­difficulty with meaning, and became instead creatively and personally involved with meaning, then it could turn out that they were more content with the expression of such experiences than they expected. Wittgenstein is wrong, I think, to only speak of similes as the appropriate forms of expression. Similes are just a small part of language. I want to

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present here another form of expression “by the existence of language” that can be used to open up possibilities of meaning and the “referential whole.” This form of expression is the telling of a story which can also involve the use of similes and metaphors. What all three of them have in common is that they resist the reduction to particular facts, leave meaning open-ended, and thus invite the use of imagination. Recall the example of seeing the stove as world: as I have presented it, it is the telling of a story that brings worldhood into a narrative, namely, that can bring out the referential context of it, without reducing it to particular facts about the stove. For it is a trait of language that when facts are told in the way of a story, they serve different or broader purposes than when they are told in isolation. Imagining the stories that bring out what a stove is or does makes use of (and thus points to) the very existence of language and the abundance of meaning and sense. I will now turn to an example from literature to show how telling a story can be a form of expression that leaves us satisfied by not restricting us to the asking and answering of questions, namely, a form of what I earlier called reflection. Furthermore, it is a form of “expression by the existence of language” that opens possibilities of meaning and a view of senseful language as such.

5.5   An Example of Reflection Reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, we find ourselves confronted with the following scene. Prince Muishkin is having a conversation with General Epanchin’s daughters, one of whom is Adelaida, who likes to paint. Because this is a story, I will cite the passage at length, and will move on to its analysis afterwards. The dialogue is between Adelaida and Prince Muishkin: “[…] I’ve been two years looking out for a good subject for a picture. I’ve done all I know. ‘The North and South I know by heart,’ as our poet observes. Do help me to a subject, prince.” [said Adelaida] “Oh, but I know nothing about painting. It seems to me one only has to look, and paint what one sees.” “But I don’t know how to see!” “Nonsense, what rubbish you talk!” the mother struck in. “Not know how to see! Open your eyes and look! If you can’t see here, you won’t see abroad either. Tell us what you saw yourself, prince!”

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[…] “Just now, I confess,” began the prince, with more animation, “when you asked me for a subject for a picture, I confess I had serious thoughts of giving you one. I thought of asking you to draw the face of a criminal, one minute before the fall of the guillotine, while the wretched man is still standing on the scaffold, preparatory to placing his neck on the block.” “What, his face? only his face?” asked Adelaida. “That would be a strange subject indeed. And what sort of a picture would that make?” […] “Tell us about that face as it appeared to your imagination—how should it be drawn?—just the face alone, do you mean?” “It was just a minute before the execution,” began the prince, readily, carried away by the recollection and evidently forgetting everything else in a moment; “just at the instant when he stepped off the ladder on to the scaffold.” He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and understood all, at once—but how am I to describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw it, you, if possible. I thought at the time what a picture it would make. You must imagine all that went before, of course, all—all. He had lived in the prison for some time and had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet—he had counted on all the formalities and so on taking time; but it so happened that his papers had been got ready quickly. At five o’clock in the morning he was asleep—it was October, and at five in the morning it was cold and dark. The governor of the prison comes in on tip-toe and touches the sleeping man’s shoulder gently. He starts up. ‘What is it?’ he says. ‘The execution is fixed for ten o’clock.’ He was only just awake, and would not believe at first, but began to argue that his papers would not be out for a week, and so on. When he was wide awake and realized the truth, he became very silent and argued no more—so they say; but after a bit he said: ‘It comes very hard on one so suddenly’ and then he was silent again and said nothing. The three or four hours went by, of course, in necessary preparations—the priest, breakfast, (coffee, meat, and some wine they gave him; doesn’t it seem ridiculous?) And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast out of pure kindness of heart, and believe that they are doing a good action. Then he is dressed, and then begins the procession through the town to the scaffold. I think he, too, must feel that he has an age to live still while they cart him along. Probably he thought, on the way, ‘Oh, I have a long, long time yet. Three streets of life yet! When we’ve passed this street there’ll be that other one; and then that one where the baker’s shop is on the right; and when shall we get there? It’s ages, ages!’ Around him are crowds shouting, yelling—ten thousand faces, twenty thousand eyes. All this has to be endured, and especially the thought: ‘Here are ten thousand men, and not one of them is going to be executed, and yet I am to die.’ Well, all that is preparatory. At the scaffold

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there is a ladder, and just there he burst into tears—and this was a strong man, and a terribly wicked one, they say! There was a priest with him the whole time, talking; even in the cart as they drove along, he talked and talked. Probably the other heard nothing; he would begin to listen now and then, and at the third word or so he had forgotten all about it. At last he began to mount the steps; his legs were tied, so that he had to take very small steps. The priest, who seemed to be a wise man, had stopped talking now, and only held the cross for the wretched fellow to kiss. At the foot of the ladder he had been pale enough; but when he set foot on the scaffold at the top, his face suddenly became the colour of paper, positively like white notepaper. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and helpless, and he felt a choking in his throat—you know the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear, when one does not lose one’s wits, but is absolutely powerless to move? If some dreadful thing were suddenly to happen; if a house were just about to fall on one;—don’t you know how one would long to sit down and shut one’s eyes and wait, and wait? Well, when this terrible feeling came over him, the priest quickly pressed the cross to his lips, without a word—a little silver cross it was—and he kept on pressing it to the man’s lips every second. And whenever the cross touched his lips, the eyes would open for a moment, and the legs moved once, and he kissed the cross greedily, hurriedly—just as though he were anxious to catch hold of something in case of its being useful to him afterwards, though he could hardly have had any connected religious thoughts at the time. And so up to the very block. How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active, and works incessantly—probably hard, hard, hard—like an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head—all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts, very likely!—like this, for instance: ‘That man is looking at me, and he has a wart on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his buttons, and the lowest one is all rusty!’ And meanwhile he notices and remembers everything. There is one point that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else dances and turns about; and because of this point he cannot faint, and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows—that’s the point, he knows that he is just now about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it, too! There would probably be but the tenth part of an instant left to hear it in, but one would certainly hear it. And imagine, some people declare that when the head flies off it is conscious of having flown off! Just imagine what a thing to realize! Fancy if consciousness were to last for even five seconds! (2002, 60–63)

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I chose to begin this quotation a little earlier than Prince Muishkin’s description because the context in which his description appears is crucial for my purposes. My quotation starts with Adelaida’s looking for a subject to paint; what a strange thing, my reader would be right to think, and that voice comes up in the text through the mother’s voice: “Nonsense, what rubbish you talk! […] Open your eyes and look!” What makes Adelaida’s words appear odd or strange is that part of what it means to create is to use one’s own voice, eyes, thoughts. Both the subject and its forms of expression must be one’s own and personal. Of course, in some sense all subjects are borrowed subjects and all words have already been used by others, and so on, but owning here should not be confused with having an exclusive access to something. Rather, owning comes from the appropriation of forms of expression or subject matters that might have already been used, seen, and so on. Uniqueness becomes possible when words become one’s own words, when a subject matter becomes one’s own subject matter. This is why we don’t tend to recognize as unique an exact copy of another painting, skilful as it might be, although we can recognize as unique a painting that is inspired by another well-known painting. Adelaida does not seem to understand why the fact that she is looking for a borrowed subject, one that has not emerged in response to her own unique way of seeing, means that something is wrong with the way she relates to her identity as a would-be painter. This point will be crucial for my purposes, for, as I discuss extensively in the next two chapters of the book, the creativity of a speaker (just like that of a painter) presupposes that the words are or have become one’s own, that language becomes appropriated. Although I haven’t yet commented on it, this point has already come up in the example of the stove, when Wittgenstein calls the stove his (MY) world. It is, I argue, this condition of appropriation, of being personally involved in meaning, and the difficulty it involves, that makes it easier instead to deflect. I find it particularly interesting, then, that Prince Muishkin’s stance of reflection in response to the astonishing moment of witnessing an execution of a fellow man appears in Dostoyevsky’s text in juxtaposition to a difficulty of reflection, namely, to Adelaida’s lack of creativity and her impersonal search of a subject to paint. I will go back to the importance of appropriation, and of personal involvement, in the next and last part of the book; for now, I will focus on the prince’s story. The prince finally gives in to Adelaida’s requests and starts his description. In the very beginning we witness the prince’s own temptation to deflect, a momentary mistrust of language as capable of expressing his

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astonishment: “He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and understood all, at once—but how am I to describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw it, you, if possible. I thought at the time what a picture it would make.” At this moment of hesitation, the reader might also doubt whether Dostoyevsky, in the voice of Prince Muishkin, will manage to convey that moment in a way that leaves her satisfied. Notice that the prince does not wish someone else could describe it for him, but rather draw it for him, as if drawing could capture the astonishment better. Perhaps in the face of the difficulty to make sense of the experience, the prince thinks it would be better expressed in a non-linguistic medium, and it seems that for him the main difficulty of describing this experience in language is that, in order for it to work, one “must imagine all that went before, of course, all—all.” But if that is the difficulty, why would Muishkin be tempted to think that a drawing would be more successful than words, unless the concept of language that comes in here is once again language in its supposedly primarily fact-stating function? Only if reduced to this function, it appears more limited than a drawing, for a drawing can at once bring together a whole web of things, without particularizing them, thus allowing the imagination to participate in opening possibilities of meaning. Despite the moment of hesitation, or rather through that moment of hesitation,9 Prince Muishkin continues. The result of his description is itself astonishing, for with one page of description the prince (and Dostoyevsky) has not only managed to convey the astonishment, but also to make the reader herself astonished at the event of the execution through the description. Notice that in Muishkin’s description there is no particularization of the thing that makes the experience astonishing; one would be unable to point to a particular fact about the moment of the execution. For example, it is not the event of death per se, for one could say that we all eventually die; it is not that the man was woken up in the middle of the night to be told he would be executed, for one could say that he already knew it would eventually happen, or point to the fact that he was given some time before the execution to confess, to enjoy a meal, and to say goodbye to the things he cherished and loved. Of course, Muishkin’s description is made up of a series of facts, but these facts are taken as a whole, not as answers to particular questions. Every single description that the prince offers, every single fact he narrates, plays its own part in this jigsaw puzzle, like a thread in a tapestry that, when taken in isolation, is nothing more than a thread.

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Contrary to what Wittgenstein says in the Lecture on Ethics, here it is not the use of similes that allows for the expression of the absolute value of this moment. It is the telling of a story that does it. Story-telling invites the use of imagination that opens up possibilities of making sense and brings facts together in a way that forms a referential whole for the event or moment therein described. This was discussed earlier, in the example of the stove, as a recovery of possibilities of meaning. As soon as the value of the stove is described in terms of a particular fact about it, the stove becomes relatively valuable, as opposed to miraculously valuable. But that does not mean that the absolute aspect should not be taken seriously, or that it is cut off from the realm of meaning. Grasping its referential context, bringing out the multiplicity of the ways in which a stove might feature in our activities, is what makes its value intelligible. Here, in the example of the absolute value of the execution as experienced by Muishkin, that value can only become intelligibly expressed insofar as its referential whole is brought out, creatively. And creation is necessarily personal, for, as we can see in the prince’s description above, he is very much in his words, in what he sees and experiences, which is conveyed with phrases like the following (where he speaks in the first person, and actively uses his imagination to describe the moment of the execution): The three or four hours went by, of course, in necessary preparations—the priest, breakfast, (coffee, meat, and some wine they gave him; doesn’t it seem ridiculous?) And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast out of pure kindness of heart, and believe that they are doing a good action. I think he, too, must feel that he has an age to live still while they cart him along. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and helpless, and he felt a choking in his throat—you know the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear, when one does not lose one’s wits, but is absolutely powerless to move? If some dreadful thing were suddenly to happen; if a house were just about to fall on one;—don’t you know how one would long to sit down and shut one’s eyes and wait, and wait? I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head—all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it, too!

When I first introduced reflection as the opposite of deflection, I spoke of the importance of exposure as a condition to reflection and used the word

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“exposure” in two ways: in the sense of being vulnerable, and also as what happens in photography for an image to be produced when light falls on the photographic film or sensor. Prince Muishkin’s description is successful because it is exposed to the terror, anxiety, fear in that man at the moment of execution and thus to the temptation to deflect too. Part of what shows his exposure is the fact that he is able to speak in the first person, and to express what he experienced instead of trying to find a formula that could express it (say, a particular fact), or abandon the overall search for expression. Literature is not the only way of telling a story; poetry10 can be another way, philosophy11 still another.12 But there is also the combination of these forms, as it frequently happens in the everyday ways we tell stories or describe something that has significance for us. The important thing is to avoid treating this difficulty of expression as some ineffable feature, in which case the question about one’s own involvement in meaning would turn into a metaphysical question, and equally to avoid trivializing such an experience by reducing it to “yet another language game,” in which case the question about the significance of one’s own active involvement in meaning does not come up at all. Someone embracing such a position would not only find it hard to use language creatively but would perhaps also not be moved by Muishkin’s description. Having described the nature of a response of reflection, I will now go back to Wittgenstein and Lacan and discuss the merits of reflection, and therefore the merits of such experiences insofar as they can invite us to be creatively involved with meaning.

Notes 1. Here is the relevant passage in the Tractatus (1992, §6.4–6.42): “All propositions are of equal value. The sense (sinn) of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is a­ ccidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.” 2. Cora Diamond (2000a) has very convincingly criticized the idea that Ethics is a separate subject matter and shown how ubiquitous a phenomenon it is.

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3. I say experiencing and expressing because it is wrong to draw a distinction between the experience of the absolute value on the one hand and the difficulty of expression on the other, as if one could know what they experience but when they put it into words, it doesn’t work. The idea here is that the difficulty of expression is part of the astonishment, part of the experience. 4. See for example Wittgenstein (1981, #459). For an overview of Wittgenstein’s relation to Heraclitus, see Stern (1991, 579–604). 5. Piergiorgio Donatelli (2005) translates blass as colourless and interprets the characterization differently in a literal way, as if it meant that the stove has colour but all things around it do not. From that he infers that this is a case of nonsense where an object (a concept) is cut off from its logical connections with other things. As he writes: “We want to say, for example, that the colour of a leaf is the true colour and that the colour of things around it is not really colour in comparison to it. We want to cut off colourdescription from its ordinary environment and imagine at the same time that there is a meaning assigned to the notion of a green leaf (while on the contrary this assignment depends upon the context of meaning which has been imaginatively abolished). There needs to be both the notion of colour as it is meant in ordinary contexts (in which a meaning is assigned to such a word) and the same word as being cut off from such ordinary contexts: a colour as being compared to a world in which there is no colour around it. […] This wonder comes from wanting to see both that object as it is identified through its ordinary connections with things and language and as it is cut off from such connections” (2005, 19). Donatelli’s conclusion risks taking us back to the idea that seeing the stove as world is cut off from meaningful expression. I argue instead that the bedeutung of the stove does not arise when it is cut off from its ordinary connections with other things, but rather precisely in the background of these connections and the referential whole they constitute. This confusion can be remedied if we are more careful with the translation of the German word blass and, following Friedlander (2017, 42), we translate blass as “paled” instead of “colourless”; the German word for “colourless” would be farblos. 6. The contrast between focusing on a single thing in isolation from other things (the perspective of the particular) and focusing instead on the single thing in a way that opens up to the whole worldhood can also be found in 3.3421 of the Tractatus. There Wittgenstein speaks of the significance of “the single thing” as being that it reveals the world. “The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.” 3.3421 further explains 3.342 which reads: “in our notations there is indeed something arbitrary, but this is not arbitrary, namely that if we have determined anything arbitrarily, then something else must be the case. (This results

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from the essence of the notation.)” It is crucial that 3.3421 appears in the context of the discussion on the symbol as what is essential for signification, given that, as discussed previously, finding the symbol, namely, what propositions that can express the same sense have in common, requires an opening to this referential context, to worldhood as the background of possibilities of meaning. The single thing in isolation is unimportant insofar as it is arbitrary, insofar as it is seen from the perspective of the particular. Its significance lies in its carrying the referential whole with it, in it having the function of a symbol. Seeing the single thing in that way (qua symbol) accounts for its importance. I am grateful to Cora Diamond for drawing my attention to this passage and its relevance for my argument. 7. One could object that there is a gap between the thing stove and the word “stove,” but this objection would be mistaken not only because of the Tractarian perspective on the relation between world and language but also because it would overlook that the thing stove is in principle describable as the use made of the word “stove.” Hence, a practice in which human beings use the thing stove to cook food for their loved ones, namely, a practice of care, can translate into a series of propositions that describe that very practice, such as “families have always gathered around a stove,” “… you would always find the grandmother by the stove, cooking for her loved ones,” and so on. 8. The importance that the referential whole has for the human involvement with the world is clearly seen in the Heideggerian concept of readiness to hand, which is grounded in a reference relation in which there is no further involvement but “for the sake of the Being of Dasein”: “[W]ith this thing, for instance, which is ready-to-hand, and which we accordingly call a ‘hammer,’ there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein, that is to say for the sake of possibility of Dasein’s being” (1962, 18, 116). The entirety of all these references, from making something fast to sheltering for bad weather, makes up, in Heidegger’s work, the world. According to my argument, Wittgenstein’s seeing as world qua opening a logical space would translate in Heidegger’s work into seeing something together with this referential whole. For a comparative reading of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, see Mulhall (1990). 9. As I have discussed throughout the book, the temptation to deflect, the difficulty of expression, the moment of hesitation are an essential part of the experience I describe, and an essential part of the possibility for a reflective response, like hearing the Siren song is a condition for Ulysses to resist it and get through. Recognizing the groundlessness of meaning is a

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c­ ondition of creatively assuming it, and this recognition of groundlessness may manifest itself in a temptation to deflect, in hesitation. 10. For example, in the opening chapter of this book I brought in one of Diamond’s examples of difficulty of reality, the astonishment at the horror of death, and the impossibility of the simultaneous awareness of death and life, as it is expressed in a poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men.” Here, the poem itself can be seen as a reflective expression of the horror and impossibility, an expression that makes the astonishment intelligible and does not leave us with a sense that there is something language cannot do. Here is the relevant stanza (1957, 54–55):                           

That man’s not more alive whom you confront And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud, Than any of these six celluloid smiles are, Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead; No thought so vivid as their smoking blood: To regard this photograph might well dement, Such contradictory permanent horrors here Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out One’s own body from its instant and heat.

11. Philosophy might look like the form of expression that has the greatest trouble with reflection, possible because it is a discipline that is to a great extent exercised through the asking and answering of questions, thus through offering facts about the world. Perhaps this is why Heidegger warns philosophers about the danger of losing creativity and thus ending up using borrowed words and ready-made answers or questions (like Adelaida): it is in the end the business of philosophy to preserve the force of the most fundamental words, in which the Dasein expresses itself, from being levelled to incomprehensibility by the common understanding (1962, 220). 12. See Diamond’s aforementioned discussion on how philosophy can go beyond the asking and answering of questions by pointing to senseful language as a whole (which is according to her what the Tractatus succeeds in doing).

References Appelqvist, H. (2013). Why Does Wittgenstein Say that Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same? In P. Sullivan & M. Potter (Eds.), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation (pp. 40–58). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. (1972). Parts of Animals (Clarendon Aristotle Series) (D.  M. Balme, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Balaska, M. (2019). Seeing the Stove as World: Significance (Bedeutung) in the Early Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 42(1), 40–60. Diamond, C. (2000a). Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 149–173). London and New York: Routledge. Diamond, C. (2000b). Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box? In A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 262–292). London and New York: Routledge. Diamond, C. (2011). The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense. In O. Kuusella & M.  McGinn (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (pp.  240–275). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Donatelli, P. (2005). The Problem of the Higher in the Tractatus. In D. Z. Phillips & M. von der Ruhr (Eds.), Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy (pp.  11–38). London: Routledge. Dostoyevsky, F. (2002). The Idiot (R.  Pevear & L.  Volokhonsky, Trans.). London: Vintage. Friedlander, E. (2014). Missing a Step Up the Ladder. Philosophical Topics, 42(2), 45–73. Friedlander, E. (2017). Logic, Ethics and Existence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In R. Agam-Segal & E. Dain (Eds.), Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought. London: Routledge. Hacker, P. M. S. (2000). Was He Trying to Whistle It? In A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp.  353–387). London and New  York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Hughes, T. (1957). ‘Six Young Men’. Hawk in the Rain. London: Faber and Faber. McGuinness, B. (1966). The Mysticism of the Tractatus. The Philosophical Review, 75, 305–328. Mulhall, S. (1990). On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects. London: Routledge. Stern, D. (1991). Heraclitus’ and Wittgenstein’s River Images: Stepping Twice into the Same River. Monist, 74, 579–604. Tilghman, B. R. (1991). Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Notebooks, 1914–1916 (G.  H. von Wright & G.  E. M. Anscombe, Eds. and G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1981). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Wittgenstein, L. (1992). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, Trans.). London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). A Lecture on Ethics. In J.  Klagge & A.  Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (pp.  37–44). Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 6

From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Wittgenstein

Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion— science—And art. And this consciousness is life itself. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916

6.1   This Running Up Against the Limits of Language Is Ethics As I have already suggested, for both Lacan and Wittgenstein, the experience of astonishment is not just a philosophically interesting experience. More importantly, and perhaps at first sight curiously, it is an experience that can have an ethical import. But what, if anything, could be of ethical import about astonishment? In this chapter I will discuss this question from Wittgenstein’s perspective. Wittgenstein relates directly such experiences to ethics in the following passage from his conversations with Waismann: I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up-against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up-­ against Paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics.

© The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_6

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I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics—whether there be knowledge, whether there be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it. It is a priori certain that whatever one might offer as a definition of the Good, it is always simply a misunderstanding to think that it corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means (Moore). Yet the tendency represented by running-up-against points to something. St Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you wretch, so you want to avoid talking nonsense? Talk some nonsense, it makes no difference! (1979, 69)

To begin with, as an example of running up against the limits of language, Wittgenstein offers here the example he also presents in the Lecture on Ethics—the experience of the astonishment that anything exists. Wittgenstein also refers to the Heideggerian description of dread. Both the experience of dread and the experience of astonishment at the existence of the world are cases—Wittgenstein repeats above—in which expression fails; hence, the experience takes the character of a running up against the limits of language. From this point onwards, there is a circular tone in the above passage. Wittgenstein states that this running up against the limits of language is ethics, leaving it unclear what it is in or about the running up against the limits of language that makes it “ethics,” or what one should understand here by “ethics.” The statement is so unclear and confusing that one finds oneself looking at what Wittgenstein calls “running up against” to understand what Wittgenstein means by “ethics,” and then looking at “ethics” to understand what he means by “running up against.” Furthermore, at points during the above passage the reader can get the impression that Wittgenstein regards ethics as a particular discipline or area (say, the area of an inquiry about what is good); at other times, Wittgenstein can give the impression that he speaks of ethics as the dimension of significance, or importance. Coupled with the knowledge that ethics is a very particular concept in the early Wittgenstein, often synonymous with aesthetics and religion (see 1986, 6.421), the remark can get quite confusing. In her attempt to understand the above passage and Wittgenstein’s claim that the running up against the limits of language is ethics, the reader might offer one of the following three interpretations. First, perhaps what Wittgenstein means is that ethics has no specific content, but it is the very effort to express something absolute (like God in Kierkegaard’s

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absolute paradox). In this case the phrase “[t]his running-up against the limits of language is Ethics” would turn into “Ethics is nothing more than a running up against paradox.” Or, second, Wittgenstein can be taken to mean that the ethical has an ineffable content and it is this ineffability that is to be identified with the running up against the limits of language. For example, when in the above passage Wittgenstein refers to Moore and says, “It is always simply a misunderstanding to think that [the Good] corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means,” the reader can be inclined to understand that there is “an authentic matter one actually means” but cannot express in language, and that an experience of astonishment brings us into contact with this authentic matter. In this case, the phrase in question would turn into something like “Ethics is an inexpressible content that makes itself manifest in the running up against paradox.” Or, third, Wittgenstein can be taken to mean that these moments of a running up against paradox can open us to the ethical, not as an area of thought but rather as an attitude towards life, namely, that they can bring us into contact with what it is to live a good life. In this case the sentence would turn into “This running up against the limits of language opens us onto the ethical.” There are two reasons why I think the first two interpretations are wrong. First, Wittgenstein never treats ethics as a separate discipline or area (unless he wants to criticize it); in fact, in the above passage he clearly says that all the idle talk about ethics should end. This would also challenge the second interpretation, for Wittgenstein would still be making a meta-ethical claim about the area of ethics, even if that claim had the form “We cannot talk about Ethics.” Furthermore, I argued extensively in the previous chapter against the ineffability of value in the early Wittgenstein, and I have treated the idea of ineffability as a moment of deflection. This leaves us with the third interpretation (that the running-up-against opens us onto the ethical) and I will argue for this one. According to this interpretation, it is the failure to make sense that has an ethical merit, not the content of the experience as such. In other words, the merit of these experiences does not consist in their supposedly ineffable content; the ethical is not what lies behind these experiences and cannot be expressed. On the contrary, the possibility1 of their merit begins with one’s contact with the failure to make sense, or with what I have discussed as the groundlessness of meaning. In a different passage from 1946, Wittgenstein complements his suggestion to go ahead and talk some nonsense with the imperative to pay attention to the nonsense: “Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of ­talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense” (1980, 56). What

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is the merit of paying attention to the failure of sense? And why is this an ethical merit? One—mistaken, I think—way to understand this merit is as the epistemic merit of learning something about our tendency to go beyond significant language. This way to understand Wittgenstein’s urge to pay attention to one’s nonsense can find textual evidence in a passage from the Lecture on Ethics, according to which paying attention to one’s nonsense points to a tendency to say something about the absolute. Here is the passage: My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running up against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. (1993, 44)

As with the passage quoted in the beginning of this chapter, this passage is also characterized by circularity, and suggests a sense of impasse. First, the same problems arise here about the connection between ethics (and religion) and the tendency to run up against the boundaries of language; the reader is left again with a “chicken or egg?” kind of question: ethics is the running up against paradox which is ethics which is the running up against paradox which is ethics, and so on ad infinitum. Second, Wittgenstein seems to suggest here that the tendency we learn about when we look at the nonsense produced is our tendency to say something about the absolute. But this epistemic merit seems to be rather empty! Of course, one already knew that they wanted to say something about the absolute, to use language that way. So why must we pay attention to the nonsense? Why not just produce nonsense and then the next time we want to say something about the absolute produce nonsense again? Moreover, why would one even be inclined to ridicule this socalled tendency in the first place? In other words, what have we learnt from Wittgenstein in this passage regarding the connection between ethics and our tendency to run up against the boundaries of language? This way of understanding the merit of these experiences does not get us very far. Furthermore, it seems to be subject to a positivistic outlook which ridicules any tendency to say ­something about the absolute. I want to

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suggest a different story here about the merit of paying attention to the nonsense produced in the cases described in this book. I will argue that through the failure of sense and the difficulty with meaning that they bring about these experiences represent a chance for individuation and for a personal assumption of meaning. This is their ethical merit. If one does not deflect in the face of the failure of sense and the groundlessness of meaning, then a question arises that is the entry point to reflection and therefore to the merit of the experience of astonishment. This question is: How am I involved in meaning? If meaning is not settled in ways wholly external to us, then meaningful expression depends on me as speaker. I will argue that this merit of individuation is connected to an ethics of responsibility and creativity. Recall our discussion (in Chap. 5) about what constitutes a stance of reflection and Dostoyevsky’s description of Prince Muishkin’s necessarily first-personal creative response to the difficulty of expression. This was juxtaposed to the case of a failure of an individuated, first-personal approach, and I used there the example of Adelaida’s search for a borrowed subject and her inability to look for and find one (for) herself. As I show here, in Wittgenstein’s early work the theme of individuation appears with the discussion on solipsism and the concomitant idea that the world is my world. In what follows, then, I will argue that in Wittgenstein’s work one’s contact with the groundlessness of meaning in an experience of astonishment can become a call for individuation, in the sense that it can become an entry point to seeing the world as one’s own (my) world and language as one’s own (my) language. But let us take one step at a time, and ask first what exactly the first-­ person-­singular possessive pronoun “my” denotes. For there are several different, and indeed opposing, ways to understand it. For example, when something is mine it could mean that I exert control over it, or that I possess it, or that it is something I have created, or that it is something I am responsible for. What is the character of individuation through the first-­ person pronoun (“my”) in Wittgenstein’s work?

6.2   My Involvement with Meaning: A Critique of the Thinking Subject As hinted earlier, one way to understand individuation would be through thinking or representing, in which case something would be described as mine insofar as it would be an object of my perception, thinking, feeling,

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experience. But, as I am about to show, there is no space for that kind of subject in Wittgenstein’s early work. In 5.54 (5.541) of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein offers a critique of the thinking or representing subject of psychology.2 Even if in propositions such as “A believes that p,” “A has the thought p,” “A says p” it looks as if an object A stands in an external relation to the proposition p, these propositions are actually of the form “‘p’ says p.” This means that the thinking or representing subject is already assumed in the production of sense, in the fact that “p” expresses the sense p. If A stood in an external relation to the judgement p, then it would be inexplicable why a subject could not judge what has no sense. The thinking subject is assumed in the production of sense; it adds nothing to the sense produced. The solipsistic subject cannot be an “I think” or an “I experience” because at this level the delimitation of the world is guaranteed by logic itself (and the thinking-representing subject adds nothing to that). Proposition 5.61 is a reminder that logic fills the world and leaves no space for a subject that delimits the world as if outside or apart from logic: “[…] We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world.” Furthermore, given the critical distance that the Tractatus takes from inner mental states, but also given Wittgenstein’s later critique of private language (the private language argument), it is not plausible to think of individuation as a demarcation through private mental contents or through the distinction between my mind and other minds. As Hintikka points out, “It appears rather far-fetched to see in Wittgenstein’s solipsism an anticipation of the troubles of the logical positivists about other minds. […] the limits of the metaphysical subject cannot be the limits of one’s actual thoughts, for there is nothing necessary about that limitation. The only necessary limits are the general limits of possible thoughts, i.e. the limits of language in general. This is the basis of Wittgenstein’s solipsism” (1958, 91). The same problem would arise if individuation was to be understood as a product of what I experience (I am my experiences). It is, in a way, obvious that I am my experiences, but it is wrong to presuppose the existence of a subject who owns these experiences and to imagine that everyone has their own language of experience. The only sense in which I am my experiences is that there is no position whatsoever from which I can say that I own one experience as opposed to another, or that I own one part of the world as opposed to another, as if I could step out of the world and talk

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about the world as a whole or the world as seen from the eyes of others. In other words, there is no place from which to make statements such as “This is my world but it is smaller or different from the world as a whole” or “This is my world, but it is different from the world of my neighbor.” As Cora Diamond rightly remarks, the Tractatus gives us a “further criticism of Russell on experience, a criticism of Russell’s conception of objects of acquaintance as belonging to subjects. The philosophical idea of ‘experience’ as a sort of realm defined by acquaintance is undercut: it is not a realm with neighboring realms; it has no ‘possessor’; and there is nothing outside it” (2000, 278). Selfhood cannot emerge from an act that decides what is mine and what is not. Experience is not a field for demarcating. As Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks: “All experience is world and does not need the subject” (1979, 89). Thinking, experiencing, and representing cannot, then, be the way to individuation. As Joachim Schulte also writes: The assumption of [a thinking or representing] subject is not […] necessary for providing a unique point of view from which the world is perceived and talked about. All I can do to give the world a certain orientation is to describe it (the world); there is no way of individuating the world I perceive by means of sentences about an alleged perceiver standing outside the world. (1992, 17)

Despite the disappearance of the thinking/experiencing/psychological subject, there still is a way in which the first-person possessive pronoun plays a central role in the delimitation of the world. In 5.6 of the Tractatus, the first-person possessive pronoun appears for the first time, along with the issue of solipsism: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, “The world has this in it, and this, but not that.” For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.3

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In 5.61 Wittgenstein reminds us—after his critique of the representing subject—that the world is delimited by language and logic, and at that level a subject does not add anything. It is worth noticing the textual context in which the critique of the thinking subject takes place and the context in which the subject reappears in the discussion, after that critique. The critique of the thinking subject appears in the context of the discussion on the general form of the proposition. Proposition 5.541 (which criticizes the thinking subject) is a comment on 5.54, which reads: “In the general propositional form propositions occur in other propositions only as bases of truth-operations,” while, on the other hand, the introduction of the first-person possessive pronoun follows the remark that it is impossible to give the forms of the elementary propositions a priori. Section 5.55 starts with “We now have to answer a priori the question about all the possible forms of elementary propositions” and ends with 5.5571, “If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense.” Eli Friedlander’s reading of the Tractatus is, to the best of my knowledge, the only reading that remarks on this and offers a convincing interpretation. As he puts it: the disappearance of the thinking subject seems to be closely linked to the proper understanding of the most general form of the proposition, of what can be given in advance of experience [while] the reappearance of the subject, that is, the way to speak of the subject in philosophy, follows the assertion that the specific forms of elementary propositions cannot be given a priori, [and it] is closely linked to the understanding that the limits of experience—set by the objects or the specific forms of elementary propositions— cannot be anticipated. (2001, 112–113)

This is crucial for my overall argument: as suggested earlier, the question of individuation arises with one’s contact with the groundlessness of meaning; hence, the experience of astonishment is a potential entry point to it. It is only insofar as meaning is not grounded in the a priori, that an individuated assumption of meaning (MY involvement with meaning) becomes an issue.4 The introduction of a subject in the Tractatus is connected to the realm of meaning as what cannot be grounded a priori, (namely, the level of the elementary propositions as what cannot be given through logic in advance of experience, but belongs to its application). The application of logic, which decides the forms of the elementary

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­ ropositions, directs us towards an attunement to the way language is p used, namely, to our practices. What could, then, be a source of subjectivity that does not arise from the inner (from thinking, representing, judging), but rather from an attunement to language and the world? This challenging and at first sight paradoxical, idea, that selfhood and my-ness arise from a recognition of myself in the world rather than a recognition of the world as being a part or product of me (say, of my experience or representation), is reflected on Wittgenstein’s challenging identification of solipsism with its opposite, realism. I will return to this point in a little while.

6.3   My Involvement with Meaning: Willing as Acting If thinking is not the way to an individuated assumption of meaning, or to making the world one’s own (my) world, then maybe willing is. In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein writes: “The thinking subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists. If the will did not exist, neither would there be that center of the world, which we call the I and which is the bearer of ethics” (1979, 80). There are two issues to unpack here. First, the character of the willing subject and its place in the world, and, second, its relation to the ethical. Let me start with the first. Like in the case of the thinking subject, one could be tempted to imagine that my-ness arises through something that lies behind the actions that one’s body performs, namely, the will, hence one could attempt to isolate a “willing subject” through what is subordinate to one’s will. This temptation is described in 5.631 of the Tractatus with the imaginary book, “The World as I found it”: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called “The World as I found it,” I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

One way to write “The World as I found it,” what we could call the book of individuation, would be through a report on the parts of my body that are subordinate to my will and those that are not. However, this cannot be a way to isolate a subject, for in that sense there is no subject at all.

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To understand why in that sense there is no subject, we need to ­understand Wittgenstein’s idea that willing is not something that precedes acting. If there is anything that precedes one’s actions or body movements, it is not willing but wishing,5 namely, a contingent mental state that would be of interest only to psychology. There is no necessary connection between wishing for something and something happening, but there is a necessary connection between willing and acting, and that consists in the fact that willing is acting. Here is the relevant passage from the Notebooks, where Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between willing and wishing: This is clear: it is impossible to will without already performing the act of the will. The act of the will is not the cause of the action but is the action itself. One cannot will without acting. If the will has to have an object in the world, the object can be the intended action itself. And the will does have to have an object. Otherwise we should have no foothold and could not know what we willed. And could not will different things. Does not the willed movement of the body happen just like any unwilled movement in the world, but that it is accompanied by the will? Yet it is not accompanied just by a wish. But by will. We feel, so to speak, responsible for the movement. My will fastens on to the world somewhere, and does not fasten on to other things. Wishing is not acting. But willing is acting. […] The fact that I will an action consists in my performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action. When I move something I move. When I perform an action I am in action. (1979, 88, my emphasis)

We tend to imagine the will as another “ghost in the machine” that is behind an action, a willing subject that deliberates and decides which action to perform and which action not to perform. Wittgenstein’s idea that willing is acting can help us shift from this initial, mistaken perspective, according to which there is the world on the one side and the subject on the other, with thought, or experience, or the will, securing the connection between the first two. This is the perspective Wittgenstein criticizes. There is no gap between the world and a subject to begin with: “The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from

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outside as into something that is already there […] What I know is that this world exists and that I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.”6 And in 5.64 of the Tractatus: “Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it” (my emphasis). I am my world, the world inhabited by my acting in it. There is no way to separate a moment of willing from a moment of acting, and the only way that willing makes itself manifest in the action and through the action is with the responsibility that accompanies an action. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension and there remains the reality coordinated with that point, a reality, however, that one is responsible for. However, this responsibility has no mark in it; namely, there are no particular facts that distinguish a world that has been appropriated from a world that has not. “The World as I found it” is then the world of one’s own actions for which one is responsible. Responsibility only arises for the speaking being; it is action in language, action that is inscribed in the context of meaning (linguistic meaning) that individuates us. I am me when I act in the world responsibly: acting responsibly does not mean doing x and not doing y; it is not about performing certain actions and not performing other actions, like when an environmentalist asks us to act responsibly by not throwing rubbish into the sea. Rather, acting responsibly means acting through the recognition that there is meaning.7 This is the ethical character of willing and individuation in the early Wittgenstein: an ethical existence arises from the recognition and assumption of the mere fact that my actions are in language, namely, that they are always inscribed in a semantic context and this is what makes me responsible-accountable for them. An ethical existence does not mean an existence that has some particular characteristics or facts in it; it is rather an existence in recognition of the binding conditions of language (of the normativity that being-in-language involves).8 There is no willing or acting outside language; it is the fact that we inhabit language that opens the space for action. At this stage it might be useful to recall the example of the stove as bedeutent, in particular when Wittgenstein says that the stove becomes significant (bedeutent) qua my world (1979, 83, emphasis in the original), and adds that “significance” (bedeutung) arises only in relation to my will (1979, 84). As discussed, it is not by virtue of any inner mental states that the stove becomes one’s world. Seeing the stove as my world is not a product of passive contemplation, nor of a meditative state of mind, but a

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product of a recovery of the human practices in which a stove figures, and therefore an engagement with these practices. The “realistic spirit” of Wittgenstein’s account of individuation consists precisely in the fact that my-ness does not arise through some inner state, such as thinking, wanting, desiring, or willing as supposedly separate from acting. Wittgenstein also expresses that thought in the Notebooks, when he asks: “What kind of reason is there for the assumption of a willing subject? Is not my world adequate for individuation?” (1979, 89). Individuation results from the world being my world, from the will penetrating the world through my actions in the world. This is what makes MY world unique: it is not a different fact in it, nor a particular connection between the world and some inner mental state that makes it unique, but rather the mere recognition of meaning.

6.4   Uniqueness, Creativity, and the Ethical Recognizing the world as MY world allows for uniqueness, for the possibility of a unique life and world: “This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so, on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out” (1979, 85, my emphasis). The uniqueness Wittgenstein refers to is not a way to single myself out. It is not about me having some special properties or traits. In fact, it is not even about “me”! As he puts it in the Notebooks, there is no pre-eminent place for oneself, since humans and animals are objects that are similar and belong together (see 1979, 82). It is the world that is unique, or, more accurately, it is the world in meaning that is unique, and this recognition takes place when one is personally involved in meaning. As Friedlander puts it: “Uniqueness is not my having something that is unlike anything else or anyone else. Almost the contrary: it is another name for sober realism. Uniqueness is realized in the recognition of a limit internal to my existence in meaning” (2014, 63). This internal limit to my existence with meaning is the possibility to become involved or to not become involved in meaning. As discussed above, becoming involved in meaning is tightly connected to assuming the responsibility that comes with the mere fact of being a speaker, given that responsibility presupposes that meaning is recognized, namely, it presupposes the recognition that one’s utterances have

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semantic and pragmatic implications. To put it more simply, one cannot act in an ethically (or aesthetically) good or bad way unless they recognize their actions as always already inscribed in a context of semantic implications; one cannot be held responsible unless there is a capacity to understand one’s actions, a capacity that is linguistically and conceptually informed. But, my reader might wonder, doesn’t one recognize meaning by the mere fact that one uses language? If, as I have argued, individuation as an active and personal involvement with meaning is intimately connected to the ethical, then one might wonder what a non-individuated world would be like. If the ethical is defined in terms of an involvement with meaning, couldn’t we say that every speaker is already open to an ethical life? The reader perhaps recalls that a similar question was already explored in the second chapter of this book. Doesn’t the mere use of language necessarily entail a recognition of meaning? Doesn’t one always know what they mean when they produce sense? In Chap. 2 I took a critical distance from this idea, suggesting that sense can be and is often produced without the recognition of meaning. Proposition 4.002 of the Tractatus seems to suggest something similar: Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes. The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.

Wittgenstein says that we can produce sense and communicate without recognizing meaning, namely (in Tractarian terms) without a grasp of the range of possibilities that condition representation. This grasp of the level of form, namely, of the possibilities of meaning that surround one’s words and utterances, is crucial for understanding each other, but also, as I showed in the previous chapter, it plays a central role in the case of seeing something as bedeutent (significant). Given that the multiplicity of mean-

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ing is connected to the multiplicity of things we do with words, revealing the form of the body of language presupposes knowing our human world, namely, becoming familiar with the multiplicity of our practices (of what we, human animals, do). To go back to our previous question, then, about whether the mere fact that one speaks means that meaning is recognized, the short answer is no; one is not personally involved in meaning merely by speaking and communicating, but, certainly, being a speaker comes with the potential for an involvement with meaning, and I have argued that this is precisely what an experience of astonishment can awaken one to, through the unintelligibility and the difficulty of expression that accompanies it. Let us now turn again to Wittgenstein to examine what a life without uniqueness looks like and to ask what really is at stake when the world is not recognized as one’s own, when one is not involved in meaning. The motto of the Tractatus describes, I think, a way in which a creative involvement with meaning and the possibility of uniqueness can be lost. Wittgenstein calls this “mere rumbling and roaring”: “and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” The intensity of the point of this passage might become accentuated if we look at it in the light of another remark from the Notebooks: “What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world. I have to judge the world, to measure things” (1979, 82). Being left to rumbling and roaring would be a case of being left to rumour, to the purely conventional ways of talking. When there is rumbling and roaring, then, words or utterances are empty,9 they are uttered carelessly, and therefore end up being cut off from a context of shared understanding. What is it that makes words one’s own instead of mere rumbling and roaring? Again, one might be tempted to imagine my-ness as springing from control through thought or intention; for example, one might imagine that appropriated words are words that are uttered very carefully and thoughtfully, with a clear knowledge of what one intends to say. But this view is misguided and would turn individuation into some kind of intellectual project, lacking in spontaneity. Instead, I think we should imagine rumbling and roaring as a danger for the intellectual too; there are many ways in which philosophers can talk in an empty way. Being present is not a result of being in touch with one’s inner life (intentions, feelings, thoughts), at least not primarily so. It is a result of being attuned to the level of form, to the possibilities of meaning that surround one’s words,

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namely, to the human practices that make words meaningful in the first place. Rumbling and roaring can have different manifestations, such as empty talk, parallel monologues, or cases in which words are uttered as if in vacuum. One can imagine this happening both in an everyday context (say, between two friends who talk past each other) and in a philosophy context (say, between two speakers at a philosophy conference who talk past one another through the use of philosophical jargon). But there are also ways in which a whole culture can lose the potential for individuation and get stuck in the rumbling and roaring mode. One helpful example of the most dangerous manifestation of rumbling and roaring is Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, in which a whole group of humans is transformed into rhinoceroses, lose their human identity, and instead take on a herd mentality. Only one human, the character called Bérenger, succeeds in resisting. The “rhinoceritis” stands for the phenomena of conformism, fanaticism, and dogmatism that can appear in the personal, social, and political spheres of life. What is crucial for our purposes here is that, in the play, this loss of identity and uniqueness takes place through certain transformations at the level of language. Words lose their life and become a rumbling and roaring, mere repetition of rumour or borrowed words, and gradually Bérenger (the only person who resists becoming a rhino) loses the possibility of being understood anymore and cannot understand anyone else either. The fact that the loss of identity happens through the loss of a living relation to language is brought out by the fact that Ionesco has the rhinoceroses talk in clichés and repeat empty phrases; for example, whenever they encounter another rhinoceros they all exclaim, “Well, of all things!” a phrase that occurs in the play 26 times. The same happens with the phrases “It’s never too late!” and “Come on, exercise your mind. Concentrate!” that are thrown around constantly.10 Ionesco with his work describes a historical reality: it is worth reminding ourselves that when Hannah Arendt introduces her concept of the banality of evil through examining the character of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann (who facilitated the death of millions of Jews), she highlights that Eichmann’s evil consisted in his sheer thoughtlessness, his inability to think for himself, to use thought and language in a way that was his own. Arendt describes Eichmann as incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché or officialiese (1964, 48–49); as he characteristically says during his trial, ‘officialiese is my only language’ (1964, 48). According to Arendt, his ethical failure comes from the inability to think and act uniquely, apart from convention and prevailing trends.

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To go back to the motto of the Tractatus, a book that Wittgenstein describes as having an ethical point,11 it is important to underline the perfectionist character of this motto (whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard can be said in three words). The motto does not say, “Do not rumble and roar, but only say things in three words.” Rather, the move from rumbling and roaring to attentiveness should be regarded as a constant task, as something a speaker always struggles with. In a sense, all words are borrowed words, and we always speak within convention; it is impossible to speak without convention, and an attitude that does not recognize the fact that we are always thrown into borrowed, conventional ways of speech is at best mistaken (at worst, cut off from the human ­reality). Recognizing and assuming meaning is a task that arises within convention in the recognition of the fact that we are speakers and that our utterances are answerable. It presupposes an attentiveness to the complications of the human forms of life, those that characterize the everyday language that is more complicated than a human organism (see 4.002 of the Tractatus). Rumbling and roaring can happen when utterances are cut off from significant communication, and communication, that is, being a speaker, comes with the responsibility to be understood by others and to understand others (and oneself ). Read in tandem with the opening motto of the Tractatus, the imperative to silence in the last proposition of the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” can be interpreted as an imperative to be attentive to meaning. As Friedlander also puts it when he discusses proposition 7: the implication is that the noise of the empty talk, whether it be nonsense or mere mindlessness, conceals something. To be silent means primarily not to fall prey to the rumbling and roaring of rumor. Silence is what we need in order to be attentive to what there is, to the showing of truth. (2001, 147)

Recall that when I introduced the experience of astonishment, in the first chapter of this book, I remarked that astonishment can be the way into one’s relation to philosophy. It is now time to revisit that remark. Astonishment brings us into philosophy, not only by making us curious or thoughtful, but also, as I have tried to show, by opening a question about one’s own involvement with meaning. In this chapter I have shown that asking the question “How am I involved in meaning?” is a way of appropriating the world, a way in which selfhood and individuation arise, and

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with it the possibility for creativity in language. As Wittgenstein puts it in the Tractatus: “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’” (5.641). This proposition makes two points: first, the appropriation of the world (my-ness) is the only non-psychological way in which philosophy can talk about the self; and, second, one is brought into doing philosophy, that is, into critical thinking, through the recognition that the world is my world and that language is my language. We enter into philosophy when we assume our role as speaking beings who are personally involved in meaning and have to measure and judge things. This is where the possibility for uniqueness emerges. In the next chapter, I turn my focus to Lacan and explore his story about the potential ethical import of an experience of astonishment.

Notes 1. Whether the possibility of their merit becomes actualized depends on whether one deflects or not from the difficulty of expression and the groundlessness of meaning. 2. This is also a critique against Russell and against Frege. See 5.541, 5.5422, but also 4.442, in which Wittgenstein criticizes the judgement stroke: “[…] Frege’s ‘judgement-stroke’ ‘|–’ is logically quite meaningless: in the works of Frege (and Russell) it simply indicates that these authors hold the propositions marked with this sign to be true.” The judging subject as the subject asserting that a proposition is true or false is logically meaningless. For a discussion on this, see Soulez (1995, 103–108). 3. I follow here the Ogden translation (Wittgenstein, 1986) “(of the language which I understand),” for reasons that will become clear later in this chapter. 4. Historically, the aim of individuation reaches its peak with the rise of modernity and the collapse of structures that had traditionally been seen as a solid ground (the death of God). 5. In everyday language we do sometimes use those words interchangeably. This does not mean that the sense of “willing” Wittgenstein employs is cut off from natural language, but that in this case to make his point he needs to bring out the differences between the two. 6. It is in this sense that the solipsistic subject (the willing subject) is a limit of the world: nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye (5.633). The visual field metaphor also comes up in the Tractatus, with an eye metaphor diagram in 5.6331. As Michael Morris (2008, 305– 306) remarks, understanding the two faults of the metaphor can help

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understand the nature of the unstatability of solipsism. The first fault is that the diagram Wittgenstein uses portrays the eye as existing within the visual field (“But really you do not see the eye” [5.633]; that is, you cannot contemplate the subject). The other fault is that the diagram draws a line around the visual field, marking its limits and therefore presupposing that there is a region beyond its limits. But the visual field has no limits from the inside, and we cannot contemplate any limits from the outside. 7. This can explain why the Tractarian solipsism cannot be cut off from the fact that there is language (that I am in language). In fact, in the proposition that, according to Wittgenstein, states the truth of solipsism (5.62), we read: “That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.” The translation of Der Sprache, die allein ich verstehe can be and has been an object of debate, given that it is equally possible to translate it as “of that language that I alone (or only) understand,” “of that language alone (or only) that I understand,” and “of the language which I understand.” In the first two translations, that language is my language is taken to mean that I cannot have access to word meanings that lie beyond my understanding of them: this can concern either a question about the (im) possibility of getting beyond the boundaries of oneself (beyond one’s private mental contents) or a question about the (im)possibility of getting beyond the boundaries of one’s experience or acquaintance (see Hintikka, 1958). From this perspective, that the world is my world means that my words and their meaning are either a private mental matter or restricted to what I have been acquainted with in the world, that is, to my proper experience of the world. These ideas take us back to an idea heavily criticized by Wittgenstein, as discussed earlier. In fact, Wittgenstein asked Ramsey to correct his first translation of the passage from “the language that I alone understand” to “the language which I understand,” and Wittgenstein’s insistence on “the language which I understand” should be interpreted as his insistence on the fact that we do not understand outside language, namely, that understanding itself presupposes language. 8. As explained in Chap. 2 and as I discuss here later, we can make sense without a recognition of the conditions of language, namely, we can make sense unaware of the responsibility that penetrates one’s words, and without a personal involvement with meaning. Being a speaker means that we have no choice except for our actions to have a moral potential, for our actions to be what we are responsible for, however one can ignore this or take it on. 9. This idea is close to the Heideggerian distinction between rede and gerede, authentic talk and “they” talk. As I discuss in the next chapter, this is another common point between Wittgenstein and Lacan, who borrows

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this Heideggerian idea and turns it into the distinction between parole pleine and parole vide. 10. Interestingly, one of the characters transformed into a rhinoceros is a logician, that is, a character who distorts the rules of logic and ends up with fallacies that look like reasoning: LOGICIAN: “The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot have four paws. Therefore, Isidore and Fricot are cats.” OLD GENTLEMAN: My dog has got four paws. LOGICIAN [to the Old Gentleman]: Then it’s a cat. BERENGER [to Jean]: I’ve barely got the strength to go on living. Maybe I don’t even want to. OLD GENTLEMAN [to the Logician, after deep reflection]: So then logically speaking, my dog must be a cat? LOGICIAN [to the Old Gentleman]: Logically, yes. But the contrary is also true. (Ionesco, 1994, 18–19) 11. In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein writes about the Tractatus: “In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical” (quoted in Monk, 1990, 178).

References Arendt, H. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Diamond, C. (2000). Does Bismarck have a Beetle in his Box? In A.  Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 262–292). London and New York: Routledge. Friedlander, E. (2001). Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Friedlander, E. (2014). Missing a Step up the Ladder. Philosophical Topics, 42(2), 45–73. Hintikka, J.  (1958). On Wittgenstein’s “Solipsism”. Mind (New Series), 67(265), 88–91. Ionesco, E. (1994). Rhinoceros and Other Plays. New York: Grove Press. Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Free Press. Morris, M. (2008). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and the Tractatus. London and New York: Routledge. Schulte, J. (1992). The Happy Man. In J. Schulte, G. Sundholm, & B. McGuinness (Eds.), Criss-Crossing a Philosophical Landscape: Essays on Wittgensteinian Themes, Dedicated to Brian McGuinness (Grazer philosophische Studien) (Vol. 42, pp. 3–22). Amsterdam: Brill-Rodopi.

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Soulez, A. (1995). De la souveraineté du cadre au sujet désidealisé (Lacan et Wittgenstein). Lysimaque, Coll. d’Ivry, pp. 103–108. Waismann, F. (1979). Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann (B. F. McGuiness, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Notebooks, 1914–1916 (G.  H. von Wright & G.  E. M. Anscombe, Eds. and G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and Value (P.  Winch, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1986). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (C.  K. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). A Lecture on Ethics. In J.  Klagge & A.  Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951 (pp.  37–44). Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 7

From Groundlessness to Creativity: The Merits of Astonishment for Lacan

The signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate. Lacan, Écrits

7.1   The Ethics of the Real In the previous chapter, I argued that an experience of astonishment comes with an ethical merit; by bringing us into contact with the groundlessness of meaning, it opens the question of our own involvement in meaning. This call for an individuated, creative assumption of meaning in the face of its groundlessness is what constitutes the ethical character of these experiences. A similar story can be found in Lacan’s work. Lacanian ethics has been characterized as the ethics of the real (Zupančič, 2012), and there are good reasons for this. In his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan states that the question of ethics1 can be articulated only “from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real”: More than once at the time when I was discussing the symbolic and the imaginary and their reciprocal interaction, some of you wondered what after all was “the real.” Well, as odd as it may seem to that superficial opinion which assumes any inquiry into ethics must concern the field of the ideal, if not of the unreal, I, on the contrary, will proceed instead from the other direction by going more deeply into the notion of the real. Insofar as Freud’s

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position constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real. (1986, 11, my emphasis)

Recall that the real refers to what cannot be represented or symbolized, what appears to be a limit in the sense-making capacities of language. As pointed out before, this is not a separate realm of the ineffable (of particular things or experiences that cannot be symbolized), but it is rather an aspect of difficulty that our lives in language can take. Recall that Lacan represents the real with the bar that separates the signifier from the signified in his reversed Saussurean diagram, to remind us that the real aspect of language is a product of the fact that there is no direct connection between the signifier and the signified. As I discuss in this chapter, the Lacanian ethics of the real is an ethics of assuming responsibility for meaning as groundless, namely, for meaning as what is not settled in ways that are a priori or wholly external to the speaker. One of the manifestations of groundlessness is that certain experiences can appear to be cut off from meaning (like the experience of astonishment), or, as Lacan puts it, certain signifiers can be isolated. It is, I have already argued, when one does not deflect from this difficulty with meaning but rather responds with a reflective involvement with meaning that the ethical character of these experiences emerges. In Lacan’s work, this first-personal involvement with meaning is coterminous with the assumption of responsibility for one’s actions and offers a chance for a more integrated and authentic existence. As a psychoanalyst, Lacan offers a richer account of what it means for a human life to be closed to an active involvement with meaning than does the Wittgensteinian account discussed earlier. Psychoanalysis offers a story about how signifiers in isolation can result from and/or become part of a difficulty to relate to ourselves and to others, and how, moreover, bringing these signifiers in relation can promote a more integrated existence. This story is encapsulated in two main ideas that characterize, according to Lacan, the moral nature of the aim and the project of psychoanalysis. I will explore these two ideas here, as supportive of my argument that an experience of astonishment has an ethical merit insofar as it can open one to the groundlessness of meaning, and hence to a question about one’s own involvement in meaning. The first idea is that the ethical aim of psychoanalysis is to become where It was (“Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”), an aim of individuation and self-becoming through appropriating areas of inner and outer life that are in isolation:

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The moral experience involved in psychoanalysis is the one that is summed up in the original imperative proposed in what might be called the Freudian ascetic experience, namely, that Wo Es war, soll Ich werden with which Freud concludes the second part of his Vorlesungen (Introductory Lectures) on psychoanalysis. The root of this is given in an experience that deserves the term “moral experience,” and is found at the very beginning of the entry of the patient into analysis. (1986, 7, my emphasis)

The second idea is Lacan’s idea that there is a moral dimension in psychoanalysis insofar as an analysand is required to return to the meaning of her actions: “Analysis progresses by means of a return to the meaning of an action. That alone justifies the fact that we are interested in the moral dimension” (1986, 312, my emphasis). I will start with the first idea, the aim of psychoanalysis as self-­becoming, and explore the nature of self-alienation and self-becoming, before I attempt to show how the second moral aspect of psychoanalysis (the inquiry about the meaning of one’s actions) is an essential part of the first. I will then argue that inquiring about the meaning of one’s actions involves an assumption of responsibility for one’s actions and opens the possibility and task for creativity with language.

7.2   Where It Was, I Shall Come into Being “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” summarizes, according to Freud, the aim of a psychoanalytic therapy: Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-­ analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.2 (1964a, 80)

There are two main issues to discuss here: what is the nature of the self-­ alienation that psychoanalysis aims to remedy? And what is the nature of the self-becoming or appropriation that psychoanalysis aims at and that the above imperative describes? Let me start with the first issue. Freud’s remark seems to suggest that self-alienation consists in a tension, between something he calls “Es” and something he calls “Ich.” This is a conflict between different parts of the self, which is mainly described in

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­ sychoanalysis as a conflict between conscious and unconscious parts of p the self. Although this is not the place for a theory of the unconscious, there are different ways in which this tension between conscious and unconscious parts of the self has been approached philosophically. One of the most common, but also the most simplistic, accounts3 has been to imagine the unconscious as some hidden entity that always escapes conscious control. This misconception overlaps with a misconception I discussed in Chap. 4, according to which the real is a mysterious realm that cannot be symbolized. Both ideas fall under a reification of the unconscious and of the real, and as such are problematic. The standard translation of “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” as “Where Id was, there shall Ego be” (or “Where the Id was, the Ego shall be”) supports this idea of a conflict between conscious and unconscious parts of the self, whereby the Ego (as the conscious part) should conquer the Id (the unconscious part). Lacan is critical of this idea, and in the essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud” he returns to the Freudian phrase and translates it, instead, as “Where It was, I shall come into being.” This helps to distinguish the Freudian aspiration from ego psychology, namely, from those interpretations that understand psychoanalysis as aiming at a controlling Ego, an Ego that is supposed to supervise, regulate, and oppose the Id through a variety of defences. Second, and most importantly for the present purpose, this translation helps us understand the Freudian aim as orientated towards a unity of the self, rather than a dominance of one single part of the psychical system over the others. Using the first-person pronoun and speaking of “me” instead of some part of the self called “the ego” conveys a completely different kind and degree of ­involvement—first-personal instead of third-personal. As Bruno Bettelheim puts it, to mistranslate Ich as “ego” is to transform it into jargon that completely misses the personal commitment we make when we say “I” or “me” (1983, 53). The prevalent mistaken idea that the unconscious is a collection of hidden truths about oneself that psychoanalysis is supposed to uncover has some valid roots. Psychoanalysis speaks of the meaning of a dream, or the meaning of a slip of the tongue, and so on, and applying the word “meaning” to these phenomena can create a temptation to think that there is a hidden meaning that must come out.4 Lacan himself can also give that impression, when, for example in Seminar VII (Lacan, 1986), he says that the Freudian discovery is that “in what goes on at the level of lived experi-

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ence there is a deeper meaning that guides that experience, and one can have access to it” (312). Putting it this way can give the impression that there is a specific meaning secretly controlling one’s existence, and that psychoanalysis aims at its discovery, like a detective who is looking to solve a mystery. However, what the symptom points to, its hidden meaning, is in fact the absence of meaning; it points to the fact that something stays in isolation, that some significant use is excluded. Besides, as we saw in the previous chapter on Lacan, the real aspect of the signifier is not nonsense but what Lacan calls “ab-sense.” Lacan clarifies this in Seminar XI: “Interpretation is directed not so much at the meaning as towards reducing the nonmeaning of the signifiers, so that we may discover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior” (1977, 212, my emphasis). Going back to our first question, the nature of self-alienation, Lacan approaches self-alienation through his account of the subject of the signifier. Recall that Lacan places the signifier on top of the signified, reversing the original Saussurean diagram, in order to show that it is the signifier that dominates the signified, rather than the other way around. This dominance of the signifier creates what Lacan calls the alienation of the subject. The subject is subjugated by the signifying chain: That there are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a symptom, this is the whole basis of analytic experience. (n.d.-a, 7) The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not. (1998, 49)

Human beings are always already thrown into language, determined by signifiers in ways they did not choose, did not anticipate, and usually are not aware of. There are various ways to think of this idea: the names that are chosen for us, our first and last names, and the possibilities of meaning they carry; the characterizations that are chosen and projected on us, such as “the strongest,” “the weak,” “a coward like your grandfather”; the words we use to express who we are, and the history that these words carry. Lacan emphasizes that the subject is born in this determination, and the function of the subject is to discover his place in this “discourse which has been unfolding since the beginning of time”:

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I have often underlined that already before his birth the subject is already located not only as sender but as an atom of concrete discourse. He is in the chorus line of this discourse, he himself is, if you prefer, a sender. A message has been written on his head and he is entirely located in the succession of messages. (1988, 283)

Alienation can be understood, then, both as the particular messages that have been written “on one’s head” and as the very fact of there being a message in the first place, namely, as the mere fact that our words carry messages beyond our control or choice. Think of the implications of the words we use that exceed and condition the particular sense we produce, but think also of the mere fact that expression takes place in language, is bound up with language and logic. Language is not just a means of expression, but what determines one’s acting in the world. John Forrester (1990, 148–167) draws a helpful parallel between the way Lacan understands the binding force of words and John L. Austin’s work on speech acts. Why is it that one cannot marry twice?, Austin asks. Although one can of course have a second ceremony, or repeat the words “I am marrying twice” with determination, and so on, this will be an empty, void act that will have no effect. The “cannot” in the expression “one cannot marry twice” is of a logical nature. In this sense, words do determine what we can and cannot do. As Austin puts it: This does not mean, of course, to say that we won’t have done anything: lots of things will have been done—we shall most interestingly have committed the act of bigamy—but we shall not have done the purported act, viz. marrying. Because despite the name, you do not when bigamous marry twice. (1962, 17)

This existence-in-language with others, the effects that the signifier has for who we are and the ways we understand ourselves and the world, establishes right from the start an existence that is to a great extent borrowed, inherited, an existence that appears within an already established and well-running signifying chain.5 However, the subject is also more than an effect of the signifier: “The subject is the consequence of the fact that there is a signifier. And […] the birth of the subject holds good [se tient] only insofar as it can be thought of as excluded6 from the signifier that determines it” (Seminar IX, n.d.-b., unpublished, 1961–1962).

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I want to understand this gap between the subject as a product of language and the subject as excluded from it to open the possibility for relating to language in a way that overcomes alienation,7 namely, for what can lead to self-becoming and to an individuated involvement with meaning. This individuated involvement allows for a more integrated existence through the appropriation of those signifiers (and the reality they carry) that are closed up, isolated, or alien. Lacan uses the word “reconciliation” to describe the Freudian aim to become where it was: The goal Freud’s discovery proposes to man was defined by Freud at the height of his thought in these moving terms: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. Where it was, I must come into being. This goal is one of reintegration and harmony, I might even say of reconciliation (Versohnung). (2000, 524)

The word “reconciliation” implies the existence of two terms, someone is reconciled with something or someone else; if the subject was just an effect of the signifier (as a structuralist account of subjectivity would suggest8), that is, if there was no possibility for a self that is not reduced to the borrowed identity of the signifying chain, then the Freudian aim and the Lacanian return to it would make no sense. What is this subject, then, that can emerge from the reconciliation with isolated signifiers?

7.3   What Kind of Subject? Lacan’s account of self-becoming in terms of reintegration and reconciliation might help avoid a confusing idea I discussed in the previous chapter on Wittgenstein, namely, the idea that appropriating meaning involves some kind of control or ownership through thinking or willing. As pointed out earlier, this is a deep-rooted idea that psychoanalysis often faces and must critically avoid. It involves the idea that there is a part of the psyche, the ego (the rational part of the soul), that must control, or rather occupy, the Id, the source of impulses, emotions, affects, that is usually deemed unpredictable and unreasonable. From this perspective, it is the ego, the rational agent, that must be the source of individuation. Appropriating signifiers in isolation would then look like a case of controlling one’s words, of obsessively looking for words with no ambiguity. One of the ways Lacan criticizes the idea that the ego should, or even can, control the other parts of the psyche is through his distinction between the subject of the enunciated (statement) and the subject of

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enunciation (see Lacan, 1977, 2000, 2008). The subject of the enunciated is the agent of the statements made, of the propositions uttered and the actions done. Lacan associates the emergence of the ego with one’s identification with the subject of the enunciated. Identifying the self with the ego (a thinking, deciding agent) arises from confusing the predicate of what one utters about oneself (such as I am smart, I believe x, I want y) with the source of the utterance. That is, it arises from confusing the level of the enunciated with the level of the enunciation. This confusion also characterizes, according to Lacan, the Cartesian characterization of thinking as the centre of one’s existence. Lacan, responds to the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” with his own “Either I am not thinking or I am not,” to point out that the subject does not emerge in the coincidence of thought and being, but rather in the discontinuity between thinking and being. Prioritizing thinking as a source of individuation creates a false sense of ownership of isolated parts of the self, rather than a reconciliation with them. On the contrary, the subject of the enunciation is “the subject not insofar as it produces discourse but insofar as it is produced […] by discourse” (Lacan, 2008, 36). The subject of the enunciation is what the signifying chain produces. Instead of an agent that controls sense-making, or decides what she means, the subject of enunciation is what is already decided for in the language and the signifiers of one’s utterances. The subject does not only speak but is also spoken, Lacan suggests, and this can make itself manifest not only in what the speaker’s body conveys, the misfires, mispronunciations, and parapraxes, but also in what is inscribed in the Other (what the Other understands). This is where Lacan locates a site of truth; this is the Es where Freud says we should become. The Es (the Id) is not a mysterious entity hidden in the depths of one’s mental contents. It is very much there in front of our eyes, in the ways a body tells more than it thinks or decides or wishes; in the ways in which certain actions are not recognized as one’s own; in the possibilities of meaning that exceed the utterance made; in the ways in which significant communication fails. This is a crucial distinction, and it is often missed even by subtler contemporary accounts of the unconscious that avoid reifying it and regard it instead in terms of a failure of appropriation of one’s words. Examples of such an approach are David Finkelstein’s (1999) understanding of unconscious mental states as mental states that cannot be avowed, or Richard Moran’s (2001) understanding of unconscious mental states as cases where the first-person authority (what he calls the Transparency Condition)

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breaks down. However, understanding the unconscious requires more than a purely epistemological approach. The unappropriated signifiers, the signifiers in isolation, the Id where one will become, are not just systems of beliefs (or mental contents) with a weird epistemic status. To grasp it, one needs to consider more facts about the human being and its place in language with others. One should consider the space of shared understanding, namely, the intersubjective, relational dimension of speech, because it is in this space of shared understanding and communication that the unconscious manifests itself. Coming to appropriate the areas that are in isolation cannot happen successfully as a merely epistemic quest but presupposes an attentiveness to how these areas manifest themselves in the shared understanding, as well as in a practice of relating to others and being in dialogue. It is important that what does the job, so to speak, in the psychoanalytic process is transference, namely, the living relation between the analysand and the analyst, and the way this relating is processed in the actual “there and then,” not just inside the analysand’s head. The desideratum of the Freudian aim of reconciliation and appropriation is not the subject of the enunciated (a controlling agency, like the ego), nor is it the subject of the enunciation (a subject of the unconscious). Rather, it is the product of the appropriation of the second from the first, a product of the two. This is an ongoing process rather than one particular moment or a finalized structure of subjectivity that one can point to or describe. It is in my involvement with meaning as groundless and in the reconciliation with the signifiers in isolation that I become me. As in Wittgenstein’s case, individuation has a perfectionist flavour; there is no point at which one can stop and say, “I have now become me,” but rather one can say, “I am now more myself than I used to be.” This is why Lacan introduces a specific kind of temporality, the future anterior tense: the subject of enunciation “will have been,” he says, thereby stressing that subjectivity is not something one is supposed to discover once and for all but is a continuous process. I have characterized this involvement with meaning that remedies self-­ alienation as an attentiveness to signifiers in isolation and an effort to bring them in relation. However, this carries once again the risk of imagining self-becoming as a matter of sitting in an armchair and looking at one’s utterances with a magnifying glass, trying to find signifiers in isolation. There are three reasons why this is not the case. First, it should be clear by now that the subject of enunciation, the Es that one is supposed to appropriate, is inscribed “in the field of the Other”;

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it is in the dialogue, in significant communication that the Es appears. It is important to recall that psychoanalysis is a talking cure, that is, it is talking, not thinking, that does the curing, and by “talking” one should not understand “talking to oneself ” or “mumbling.” For talking is essentially addressed to another being, as an attempt to communicate, to understand and be understood, and is subject to the logical/normative conditions of language. Hence, psychoanalysis cannot work as a mere self-analysis, as Freud also characteristically warns us: If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger. (1964b, 225)

Second, given the Lacanian account of meaning I have presented, meaning is not a matter of finding the right referential relation between a signifier and a signified, but rather it is recovered through an attentiveness to the multiple practices or contexts in which a signifier appears, namely, through a recovery of contexts of use, and therefore of an active engagement with human practices. Third, as I am about to show, self-becoming through an appropriation of signifiers in isolation is tied up with the inquiry about the meaning of one’s actions and the responsibility that penetrates one’s actions.

7.4   Returning to the Meaning of One’s Actions: Desire and Responsibility I have introduced two ideas that describe, according to Lacan, the moral nature of the aim of psychoanalysis, the aim of “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” and the task to return to the meaning of one’s actions. The second is, I argue, an essential part of the first. What does someone ask about when they ask about the meaning of their actions? One could draw a distinction between meaning qua intention (what was my intention when I performed an action?) and meaning qua the semantic value of the action (what sense can be made of this action, irrespective of the intention?). But Lacan, I think, asks us to think of these two questions together, given that in his work action and (what he calls) desire are closely related.9

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In Seminar XI, Lacan distinguishes between acting and behaving, and identifies the first as uniquely human, “since to our knowledge there is no other act but the human one” (1977, 50). The human action is characterized by what Lacan calls desire, which is distinct from wishing and intending, since desire is an essential part of acting rather than a contingent accompaniment. The fact that there is desire (as opposed to mere wishing) is for Lacan internally related to the fact that it is possible to ask about the meaning of one’s actions, thus blurring the distinction between meaning qua intention and meaning qua effects or significance of an action: The reason why there is human desire, that the field can exist, depends on the assumption that everything real that happens may be accounted for somewhere. […] It is insofar as the subject is situated and is constituted with relation to the signifier that the break, splitting or ambivalence is produced in him at the point where the tension of desire is located. (1986, 317)

As pointed out, the Lacanian concept of desire10 is different from wanting or wishing. Freud uses the term Wunsch, best translated as “wish” in English, but Lacan uses the French word désir to translate the Freudian Wunsch, and, in so doing, takes a very different approach. In Lacan’s work, “desire” is not just “wish” but is tied up with the fact that we are speaking beings. Asking about one’s action where desire manifests itself is distinct from asking about a wish that precedes the action. Actions, as opposed to mere happenings, are necessarily subjective (belong to a subject) and have meaning; they are inscribed in the normativity that being-­ in-­language and speaking a language involves. Notice that in the above passage Lacan connects desire with the existence of the signifier and with the fact that acts can be accounted for. Accountability is another name for responsibility. Asking about the meaning of one’s action is, then, coterminous with an assumption of responsibility for it. Calum Neill remarks on this tight connection between the Lacanian concept of desire, the recovery of meaning, and the responsibility for the action: That the subject does act is to indicate the existence and the insistence of desire. This is what would define the act as an act as opposed to mere behaviour or happening. An apple may fall from a tree, but it is not understood to have acted. It is only in the act, which is always and necessarily a subjective act, that desire manifests itself. This is then to suggest that the subject is always responsible for the act in which it is implicated. In assuming this responsibility upon itself, in assuming its own subjectivity in this act, the subject

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inscribes meaning to the act. The assumption of responsibility can thus be seen to be coterminous with the assumption of desire as ‘one’s desire.’ (2011, 120, my emphasis)

To use a very basic and simple example, think of what psychoanalysis calls a slip of the tongue (a lapsus linguae); imagine a woman in analysis—call her X—who reports that she accidentally responded to her friend’s invitation to a housewarming party with the phrase “What a horror!” instead of “What an honor!” What this woman is asked to do in her analysis is not to try and find what she really wanted to say. In fact, it is more likely that, if anything, there is some ambivalence: it is likely that X loves her friend, she is happy for her new beginning, but she is also envious of her and her beautiful new place. Rather, the process of analysis consists in an attentiveness to what X did say, to the meaning of her utterance or action (What a horror!), and the assumption of responsibility for it. The meaning of an action is not a hidden purpose nor a mental content (at least not only). To grasp it, one needs to look at the possibilities of meaning that surround an action, namely, how an action is or can be understood. For X to ask what her action of saying “What a horror!” meant is not, according to Lacan, an exclusively inward-looking process but primarily an outward-looking one. For Lacan, mental contents are signifiers, therefore to find those signifiers in isolation one needs to look at the actual context in which an utterance was made, the normative implications of what one has said, what the other person understood, and so on. It is in this sense that the aim of self-becoming (the aim to become where it was, to appropriate areas of life and (uses of) concepts that have been alien, to bring isolated signifiers in relation) is coterminous with asking about one’s desire and assuming responsibility for one’s actions. As Lacan puts it: That “I” which is supposed to come to be where “it” was, and which analysis has taught us to evaluate, is nothing more than that whose root we already found in the “I” which asks itself what it wants.11 It is not only questioned, but as it progresses in its experience, it asks itself that question and asks it precisely in the place where strange, paradoxical, and cruel commands are suggested to it by its morbid experience. (1986, 7)

The strange paradoxical commands are the commands of the signifiers in isolation, the alienation that the signifier brings, and therefore the traps

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into which a person finds herself falling repeatedly—the symptoms, the familiar problematic patterns in relationships, and so on. It is from this place, or rather in these cases, that things break down and the question of the meaning of one’s actions becomes pressing. Lacan identifies this form of understanding as vital for his method: It is often what appears to be harmonious and comprehensible which harbours some opacity. And inversely it is in the antinomy, in the gap, in the difficulty, that we happen upon opportunities for transparency. This is the point of view on which our method is founded, and so, I hope, is our ­progress. (1991, 108)

Cases of failure, cases when things do not work as expected are chances for questioning, for re-examining what one means. The starting point for this book—the experience of astonishment—is one such case of failing to make sense.

7.5   A Creative Involvement with Meaning As with my previous discussion of these issues from Wittgenstein’s perspective, one could think that it goes without saying that one knows what one means, or one could think that people ask themselves all the time what they want. But, according to Lacan, for the question of desire and the meaning of one’s actions to be asked, an acknowledgement of one’s alienation by the signifier is presupposed. For of course we might ask questions such as, “What did I want to achieve when I told my sister about this?” or “What do I really want in life?,” but insofar as these questions come from some agency that can supposedly determine their actions and utterances, it is not what Lacan (or psychoanalysis) invites us to do. This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan explains the task of asking about one’s desire as a creative task: What’s important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring this desire into existence, this desire which, quite literally, is on the side of existence which is why it insists. If desire doesn’t dare to speak its name, it’s because the subject hasn’t yet caused this name to come forth. That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. (1988, 228–229)

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Lacan repeats here that when asking about the meaning of one’s actions, one does not just discover a meaning that is, as it were, already there. Being attentive to what one means allows for desire to be brought into existence. The words and actions become one’s own words and actions. It is important to stress the creative potential that an attentiveness to meaning has, otherwise an objection can be mooted here: if signifiers in isolation are merely an absence of meaning, what is it that is recovered when one brings certain isolated signifiers in relation to others? The reply here is that recovering meaning is different from discovering or giving meaning. By paying attention to the breakdown of significant communication (the absence or failure of meaning), the signifiers in isolation emerge, and can enter into the symbolic and obtain a content. This is what the talking cure is about; through talking (speaking one’s mind), connections are drawn, and the resistance to drawing certain connections becomes clearer. In his Rome discourse, Lacan speaks of a possibility of creativity with one’s words that can help remedy the original state of alienation: We analysts deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language—whose mission is universal—support for their servitude in the bonds of its ambiguity. So much so that one might humorously say that our goal is to restore in them the sovereign freedom displayed by Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice that he is, after all, master of the signifier, even if he is not master of the signified from which his being derived its shape. (2000, 79–80)

Note that the word “humorously” in the above passage has to be taken with a generous pinch of salt. For when Humpty Dumpty acts as a master of the signifier, this dangerously brings forward an illusion of privacy of meaning, which Lacan would reject given that for him the meaning of words is determined by the linguistic system, by the Other of language, not by an agent or by a private decision. However, Lacan does learn something from Humpty Dumpty, and draws our attention to it: he learns the importance of a creative, playful engagement with signifiers. Lacan himself often used puns or wordplay to bring out the creative potential in language that arises in virtue of its groundlessness. As Gordon Bearn discusses, the pun’s creative potential lies in the fact that it brings out the contingency that characterizes meaning: “wordplay […] addresses itself to an accidental feature of language” (1997, 122).

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The goal of psychoanalysis, which I also take to be the goal of philosophy as Wittgenstein understands it, is to free us from our servitude in the bonds of language, of signifiers that are in isolation, of uses of language that we are blind to, of pictures or signifiers that hold us captive. This does not take place by offering us an illusion of mastery (through a thinking or willing agency), but rather by helping us see that it is in the recognition of servitude that the possibility for freedom becomes available. We are not masters of the signified, but there is still a possibility for being creative with words. This is what I earlier called a “stance of reflection”: it is an attentive, active, personal involvement with meaning. As Pluth also puts it, in commenting on the above passage from Lacan: In other words, we are always slaves to certain significations, yet despite this determination there is a possible use of signifiers that could be described as a “so sovereign freedom” with signifiers, in the sense that such a use of signifiers is not bound up with our heavy destinies. (2007, 113)

This more creative, appropriated, and individuated use of language has a name in Lacan’s work, which is inspired by Heidegger’s rede. Lacan draws a distinction between full speech and empty speech, and empty speech, influenced by Heidegger’s gerede, is very close to what I discussed in the previous chapter as the Tractarian “rumbling and roaring.” Speaking in a full way is, according to Lacan, a way of speaking that is open to the Other, that is born within dialogue, from caring to understand and be understood. As he puts it in his first seminar: Full speech is speech which aims at, which forms, the truth such as it becomes established in the recognition of one person by another. Full speech is speech which performs [qui fait acte]. One of the subjects finds himself, afterwards, other than he was before. That is why this dimension cannot be evaded in the analytic experience. (1991, 107)

Notice once again that in the creative way of talking, individuation does not come from being different from others or being special; it is rather in understanding others, in enabling communication that I become myself. Ultimately, the acceptance of groundlessness is the acceptance that, to find the meaning of words, we need to turn to our human practices. Hence, Lacan remarks that full speech is a kind of speech that makes one act (that performs). It is interesting that the translation of the above-quoted ­passage

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makes use of the Austinian language of performatives to convey what Lacan says: full speech is speech that carries on its face the fact that it is tied up with responsibility. Speaking is acting and it carries the accountability for that acting. We speak fully and we can be creative only when we speak in a way that pays justice to this.12 Full speech is speech within the practice of dialogue, and in the psychoanalytic setting, the possibility for this kind of speech comes up in the possibility for a shared understanding that transference involves: In the transference situation […] what is at issue is the value of speech, no longer this time insofar as it creates the fundamental ambiguity, but insofar as it is a function of the symbolic, of the pact which links the subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts. (1991, 230)

When I first presented Lacan’s own description of experience of astonishment, the “peace of the evening,” the reader will recall perhaps that we were dealing with “a fundamental ambiguity.” As cited in Chap. 2 about the experience of the peace of the evening: “We have now come to the limit at which discourse, if it opens onto anything beyond meaning, opens into the signifier in the real. We shall never know, in the perfect ambiguity in which it dwells, what it owes to this marriage with discourse” (1997, 139). Responding to this difficulty with meaning in a reflective way, namely, in a way that does not deflect from the “signifier in the real,” but takes it on, can allow for a different view of language’s sense-making capacities, beyond that “fundamental ambiguity.”

Notes 1. Lacan critically distances his account of ethics from ethics as an object of human sciences, calling the latter the service of goods: “The fields of inquiry that are being outlined as necessarily belonging to the human sciences have in my eyes no other function than to form a branch of the service of goods, which is no doubt advantageous though of limited value” (1986, 324). 2. Later, I object to Strachey’s translation “Where Id was, there Ego shall be.”

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3. Wittgenstein offers a critique of this account which he, mistakenly, takes to be the only available account of the unconscious in Freud’s work. See Bouveresse (1995). 4. See Lear (1990, 71–72). 5. Stanley Cavell (1994) also discusses this idea when he says that an autobiographical exercise requires acknowledging that one’s identity is borrowed or determined from others, and recognizing that while the self is one’s own, at the same time it is not fully one’s own but is always already determined by others. 6. Lacan’s idea that the subject is excluded from the signifier has sometimes been approached in the Lacanian literature as an argument for the existence of a non-linguistic part of the subject. Candidate notions for this non-­linguistic part of the subject have included body, jouissance, sexuality. For example, Pluth interprets the above-cited passage in terms of sexuality not being reducible to language. As he says: “Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language. This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers, but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something non-linguistic: sexuality” (2007, 12). I think this is a misguided interpretation, because it is based on a simplistic juxtaposition of two poles, language and body, language and sexuality, the symbolic and the real, and so on. As Lacan also warns us, distinguishing between, on the one hand, the subject qua pure organism and, on the other hand, the subject qua effect of the signifier is insufficient for a proper understanding of subjectivity: “Where is the subject in all of that? Is it in the radical, real individuality, in the pure sufferer of this capture, in the organism which henceforward is sucked in by the effects of the ‘it speaks’ [ça parle], by the fact that one living being among others has been called upon to become what Mr. Heidegger calls the ‘shepherd of being,’ having been taken up into the mechanisms of the signifier? Is it, at the other extreme, identifiable with the very play of the signifier? Is the subject only the subject of discourse, in some way torn out of its vital immanence, condemned to soar over it, to live in this sort of mirage […] making it the case that everything s/he lives is not only spoken, but, in living it, s/he lives it by speaking it, and that already what s/he lives is inscribed in an epos, a saga woven throughout the length of his or her very act? Our effort this year, if it has a meaning, is to show, precisely, how the function of the subject, playing between the two, is articulated elsewhere than in one or the other of these poles” (Lacan, n.d.-b, unpublished, 1962). Both poles can have symbolic and real aspects; for example, Lacan often reminds us that sexuality and the body are always “overwritten” and “overridden” by language (see Fink, 1995, 12). The

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subject emerges, according to my interpretation, in this very movement of appropriating the real through the symbolic. 7. “Alienation” as understood by Lacan can never be completely overcome. However, acknowledging its presence can create the possibility for freedom, not by undoing alienation but by recognizing it and acting ­ accordingly. This is also the main difference between the Lacanian alienation and the notion of Entfremdung as it features in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx. The Lacanian concept of alienation is not a historical product that can be completely undone (as in Hegelian and Marxist thought) but a constitutive trait of the human subject. As Evans emphasizes: “For Lacan, alienation is not an accident that befalls the subject and which can be transcended, but an essential constitutive feature of the subject. The subject is fundamentally split, alienated from himself, and there is no escape from this division, no possibility of ‘wholeness’ or synthesis” (1996, 9). 8. This is where Lacan parts ways with structuralism, and with the idea that a subject is merely the effect of symbolic structures. For a view that regards the Lacanian subject as one with language, see Borch-Jacobsen: “To say that the subject is language is also to say that language is the subject ­‘himself’—or, if you will, that the two are the same” (1991, 195). 9. Desiring and acting are so closely related that the concept of act ends up replacing the concept of desire in the 1960s (see Pluth, 2007, 63). 10. Desire is a complex notion in Lacan’s work, and I am here leaving out a lot about how desire works and the development of the concept throughout Lacan’s work. For my purposes, however, it is worth saying a bit more about the connection between desire and the realm of meaning as groundless. One of the main characteristics of the Lacanian concept of desire is that its object is essentially linked to impossibility, to the real; as Lacan puts it, desire is always desire of the Thing (I will come back to this). Let me briefly show what the nature of this impossibility is. As we saw, the Lacanian concept of desire is a product of the fact that there is meaning, and furthermore that the signifier (not the signified) plays the fundamental role for the production of sense. Recall the discussion in a previous chapter, according to which in Lacan’s work every word (the signifier) represents the lack of the signified (Lacan’s version of the Hegelian idea that “the word is the murder of the thing”). In Lacan’s theory of meaning, the signifier takes an autonomous existence, it remains there even when the signified is absent (as discussed in Chap. 4, this is what distinguishes a signifier from a trace; the signifier is tied up with the absence of a signified). This autonomous character of the signifier influences the way human beings desire. The fact that the signifier persists in the absence of the actual object creates a metonymic remainder that mobilizes desire: “Desire is situated in dependence

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on demand—which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it.” This metonymic remainder is the gap between the need and the demand; the need is biological and instinctual, but through the signifier it becomes articulated as a demand (a demand for love, Lacan says). This gap between the need and the demand mobilizes desire: “Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very ­phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung)” (2000, 691–692). Lacan further argues that this dominance of the signifier (and the distance it introduces from the signified) introduces in the objects of desire the dimension of what he calls the Thing, namely, an aspect of the object that is forever lost, and thus forever desirable but unattainable. In a way, the object we desire is always different from the actual object to which we were initially attached. Lacan regards the maternal figure (our first caregiver) as the first object of desire that is always already lost. There are various ways to understand this loss: the mother is not always physically there; the mother is not an extension of the baby’s body although the baby experiences her in that way; the mother’s desire is directed not only to the baby but also to the father of her child (or/and her work, a friend, an idea, etc.); but also, most importantly, the mother is an incestuous object, an object that comes with a fundamental prohibition. For a broader discussion on Lacanian desire, and an argument on why the concept remains central throughout his work, see Balaska (2018). 11. The original text says qui s’interroge sur ce qu’il veut, so the translation “what it wants” is correct. However, given the distinction between wanting and desiring that Lacan draws, and given that he explicitly links the psychoanalytic task with a question on one’s desire and not ceding on one’s desire, I think this would be better given as “which asks itself what it desires.” 12. Lacan also discusses the issue of creativity and of “what man does when he makes a signifier” (1986, 119) through his notion of sublimation, a stance of creating in a way that accepts and reconciles us with the real. The Lacanian sublimation is different from the Freudian sublimation as a defence mechanism. For an account of sublimation see Balaska (2018).

References Austin, J.-L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. London and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Balaska, M. (2018). Can There Be Happiness in Psychoanalysis? Creon and Antigone in Lacan’s Seminar VII.  Special issue, Happiness and Hedonism. College Literature 45(2), 308–329.

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Bearn, G. C. F. (1997). Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations. SUNY Press. Bettelheim, B. (1983). Freud and Man’s Soul. New York: Knopf. Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1991). Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bouveresse, J.  (1995). Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (C. Cosman, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cavell, S. (1994). A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject, Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Finkelstein, D. (1999). On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind. American Philosophical Quarterly, 36(2), 79–100. Forrester, J. (1990). The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, S. (1964a). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XXII). London: Hogarth Press (originally published in 1933). Freud, S. (1964b). Two Concepts of Mental Functioning. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XI). London: Hogarth Press (originally published in 1911). Lacan, J. (n.d.-a). Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–1958 (C. Gallagher, Trans.). Private publication. Retrieved August 24, 2018, from http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ Book-05-the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf Lacan, J. (n.d.-b). Seminar IX, Identification, 1961–1962. Private publication. Retrieved November 2, 2018, from http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/ wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Seminar-IX-Amended-Iby-MCL-7. NOV_.20111.pdf Lacan, J. (1961–1962). Seminar IX, Identification. Unpublished. Lacan, J. (1977). The Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Lacan, J. (1986). Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (J.-A. Miller, Ed. and D. Porter, Trans.). London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1988). Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (S. Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1991). Seminar I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. (1997). Seminar III, The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Lacan, J. (1998). On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (B.  Fink, Trans.). New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. (2000). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. (2008). My Teaching. London and New York: Verso. Lear, J. (1990). Love and Its Place in Nature. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Moran, R. (2001). Authority and Estrangement: Essays on Self-Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neill, C. (2011). Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pluth, E. (2007). Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press. Zupančič, A. (2012). Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London and New York: Verso.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

A prayer [εὐχή] is a form of speech [λόγος], but it is neither true nor false. Aristotle, De Interpretatione The sheer naming of things, the creation of words, is the human way of appropriating and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all, each of us in born as a new comer and a stranger. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind Having finished our story it might be useful to look back and remark that it began with astonishment and also ended in astonishment; but whereas in the beginning of the book, astonishment played the role of what generates a difficulty of expression and challenges the sense-making capacities of language, in the end of the book we found the possibility of astonishment at the sense-making capacities of language itself, at how much can be done with language. An example of this transition is the case of the earlier-­ discussed Dostoyevskian description where prince Muishkin’s hesitation “but how am I to describe it?” gives place to a creatively rich description that can also leave the reader in awe of language. A similar transition from an experience of astonishment as what evokes a sense that there is something language cannot do to the astonishment at language itself was also witnessed in the Lecture on Ethics when Wittgenstein describes that the only appropriate way to express the miracle that the world exists is through the miracle that language exists. © The Author(s) 2019 M. Balaska, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_8

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In this transition from limitation (language having limited capacities) to language having capacities that can surprise us one must not lose sight of the difficulty of meaning, related as I have shown to its groundlessness. What I have argued for is not that there was no difficulty to begin with; this would be one of the forms that the temptation to deflect takes. Being a speaker, assuming one’s role as speaker, comes with the realization of this difficulty. In the experience of astonishment, one can turn that difficulty into a dissatisfaction with language, as if there were something language could not do. This can manifest itself in one’s looking for facts that can, as it were, reduce the multiplicity of meanings and resolve the fundamental ambiguity of the experience. It is then that dissatisfaction prevails; it is then that these experiences look essentially nonsensical. In that sense, and perhaps contrary to what Wittgenstein seems to suggest in the Lecture on Ethics, it is not true that any attempt to express astonishment or absolute value necessarily fails, but rather that a certain way of expressing it fails and that a certain set of expectations from language are bound to not be met. This is the kind of expression through facts, which looks for a description to settle the ambiguity of an experience and fails to take on the creative potential of language. However, as I have shown, there are other forms of expression that invite us to turn the ambiguity into a chance for creativity. These reflective forms of expression that leave meaning open and call for an imaginative engagement with it presuppose, however, one’s personal involvement in meaning, an appropriation of words and thoughts. In a discussion on what thinking is, Heidegger discusses this difficulty as inherent to the very possibility for thinking: For all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation and this by reason of its nature. Nor is this multiplicity of possible interpretations merely the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity which we properly ought to strive for but did not attain. Rather, multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought. To use an image: to a fish, the depths and expanses of its waters, the currents and quiet pools, warm and cold layers are the element of its multiple mobility. If the fish is deprived of the fullness of its element, if it is dragged on the dry sand, then it can only wriggle, twitch, and die. Therefore, we always must seek out thinking, and its burden of thought, in the element of its multiple meanings, else everything will remain closed to us. (1976, 71)

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Heidegger recognizes the burdensome character of the multiplicity of meaning: it can be hard to live with, and, as a result, it can be very tempting to avoid it and look for super-meanings, as it were, that would presumably work as explanantia. For example, as Heidegger suggests, one might think that the multiplicity of meaning is just a result of the fact that we have not yet achieved the formal-logical univocity required, or to go back to the Lecture on Ethics, one might think that we have not yet found the right logical form for certain cases that seem to resist meaning (like the experience I have discussed in the book). In fact, Wittgenstein kept an interest in these temptations to avoid the difficulty throughout his work: in his later work he keeps going back to them as some of the pictures that hold us captive, such as that there are ultimate rules or explanations that guide our activities (see, e.g., 2009, 232–234), or that there is an ultimate meaning of a word beyond its multiple usages (see, e.g., 2009, 138–140), and so on. This difficulty that I called groundlessness or contingency of meaning and that appears in an experience of astonishment through a worry that language has limited sensemaking capacities is, however, according to Heidegger, an essential part of our being-in-language. Recall our discussion earlier that the encounter with groundlessness can be one’s way into philosophy, into the adventures of thinking, and into a more creative relation to language. This level of contingency and indeterminacy, what Lacan would call the real aspect of discourse, is what keeps thinking alive. The task of keeping meaning and thinking alive is not important just for their own sake. According to Heidegger’s analogy we are the fish and the potential for thinking is the water that keeps us alive. As I have tried to show in the chapters on the ethical character of these experiences, assuming one’s involvement in meaning qua groundless is part of what it means to become oneself. And although individuation can take different historical forms, more or less distinct and sharp, individuation is arguably a general and central trait of being a speaker insofar as it is connected to being accountable for one’s words and responsible for one’s actions. This combination between individuation and creativity is what both Lacan and Wittgenstein explore as the ethical character of one’s relation to groundlessness.

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Bringing together Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s stories on astonishment, limitation, groundlessness, and meaning has hopefully contributed to understanding better the difficulty of groundlessness, the tempting force of deflection, the possibility for what I have called reflection, and the merits of being involved in meaning.

References Heidegger, M. (1976). What is Called Thinking (J. Glenn Gray, Trans.). New York: Harper Perennial. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J, Schulte, Trans.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Index1

A Acquaintance, 63–64n14, 127, 138n7 Action, 19, 21, 62n4, 70, 86, 109, 113, 129–133, 138n8, 142, 143, 148, 150–154, 156, 165 Aesthetics, 97–99, 101, 122 See also Value Alienation, 146, 147, 152–154, 158n7 See also Self-alienation A priori, 25, 37, 39, 44–46, 48, 52–58, 60, 61n2, 67, 69, 72, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 95, 103, 107, 122, 128, 142 Arbitrariness of grammar/autonomy of language, 44, 54, 77 Argument private language, 126 for simples, 48 Aristotle, 99 Astonishment, ix, x, 1–7, 9–11, 12n1, 12n3, 12n4, 15–30, 33, 34, 60, 67–69, 76, 78, 89, 95–98, 100, 105, 107, 112, 121–137, 141–156, 163–166

Augustine, Saint, 30n1, 82, 122 Austin, J.L., 146 B Bedeutung (meaning/reference/ significance), 47, 64n14, 101–105, 131 Behavior/behaviorism, 9, 15, 74, 145 Borromean knot, 73 Bounds of sense, see Limit, of language/sense/thought C Cartesianism, 12n1, 148 See also Descartes R.; Inner/outer Cavell, S., 18, 20, 21, 23, 29, 30n3, 157n5 Code, 70, 71 Complex, see Logical constant; Object (Gegenstand), simple

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

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INDEX

D De Saussure, F., 70, 90n1 Deflection, 24–29, 74, 89, 95–114, 123, 166 Demand, 20, 23, 26, 45, 68, 159n10 See also Need Derrida, J., x, 81, 83, 84 Descartes, R., 103 See also Cartesianism; Inner/outer Desire, ix, 21, 22, 79, 91n7, 124, 150–154, 158n9, 158–159n10, 159n11 Determinacy of sense, 36, 47, 55, 72, 81, 83 Dialogue, 23, 149, 150, 155, 156 Socratic/Platonic, 2, 8, 12n1, 21, 28 Diamond, C., x, 3, 4, 6, 18, 24, 27–29, 103, 106, 127 Difficulty of reality, 3, 18, 29 Dogmatism, 135 Dostoyevsky, F., 108, 111, 112, 125 Dream/dreaming, 8, 144 Drive, 13n5, 19, 47, 68, 90n2 E Ego, 90n2, 143, 144, 147–149 See also Ego psychology Ego psychology, ix, 144 See also Ego Ethics, 5, 6, 25, 78, 96, 97, 99, 103, 121–125, 129, 141–143, 156n1 See also Aesthetics; Significance; Value F Fact, 6, 10, 52, 53, 56, 98, 106 atomic, 52 See also State of affairs (Sachverhalt) Fink, B., 74, 77, 79, 157n6

First person (I/my), 125, 144 First-person, 127, 128, 142, 144, 148 Form of the object, 50, 54, 56, 57, 95 See also General propositional form (allgemeine Sattform); Logical form Freedom, 154, 155, 158n7 Frege, G., 35, 36, 40, 61n4, 62n6, 137n2 Freud, S., 91n7, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 157n3 G Game, 25, 27, 28, 107, 114 See also Language game General propositional form (allgemeine Sattform), 42, 44, 45, 62n9, 128 See also Form of the object; Logical form Grammar, 7, 12n1, 24, 25, 27, 78, 84, 88, 89, 100, 103 Groundlessness, ix, x, 18–27, 29, 30, 33, 67–89, 95, 107, 121–137, 141–156, 164–166 H Heidegger, M., 6, 12n1, 29, 99, 105, 121, 155, 157n6, 164, 165 Heraclitus, 97–101, 105 Hintikka, J., 126, 138n7 Human being, 91n5, 145, 149, 158n10 Humpty Dumpty, 22, 154 I Id, 143, 144, 147–149 Imaginary (the), 22, 73, 89, 90n2, 91n5, 141 See also Real (the); Symbolic (the)

 INDEX 

Imagination, 108, 109, 112, 113 Ineffable, 17, 25, 78, 89, 96, 97, 99, 114, 123, 142 Inference, 39 logical, 40 Inner/outer, 54, 68, 87, 88, 126, 129, 131, 132, 134, 142 Interlocutor, 19, 20, 71, 87 Internal property, 55 See also Relation, internal/external Intuition, 104 Ionesco, E., 135 J Jouissance, 68, 90n2, 157n6 Judgement of absolute-relative value, 5, 6 K Kant, I., 101 Kierkegaard, S., 121, 122 L Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 81 Language, ix, 1, 15, 33, 68, 95, 121–125, 142, 163 Language game, 25, 27, 28, 107, 114 Letter, 35, 74, 78–82, 88, 91n6, 144 Limit of language/sense/thought, 3, 5, 15, 17, 24, 36, 47, 76, 88, 106, 121–127, 138n7, 142, 164, 165 of the world, 126, 127, 137n6, 138n7 Logic, 3, 30n2, 33, 34, 37, 39, 42, 44, 47, 54–56, 60, 61n4, 81, 95, 126–128, 133, 139n10, 146 Logical analysis, 16, 23, 57 Logical constant, 38–43, 45, 53, 62n6 Logical form, 58, 59, 165

169

See also Form of the object; General propositional form (allgemeine Sattform) Logical relation, 53, 103 Logical space, 40, 41, 53, 62n9, 101–105 Logical syntax, 39, 44, 51, 57, 59, 77 Love, 8, 21–23, 87, 104, 152, 159n10 M McDowell, J., 3, 5, 15 Meaning of life (Sinn des Lebens), 124 Meaning is use, 56, 58, 60, 83, 89, 95, 145 Meaningless, 58, 60, 137n2 See also Nonsense; Senseless (sinnlos) Metaphor, 86, 91n8, 102, 103, 108, 137n6 See also Metonymy Metaphysics, 25–27, 34, 54, 60, 69, 74, 79–84, 95 Metonymy, 86 See also Metaphor Mystical, 96, 102 N Name, 39, 44–47, 55, 58, 63n9, 63n12, 79–81, 83, 153, 155 Necessity, 51, 54, 60 logical, 126 Need, 59, 77, 103 See also Demand Negation, 38, 40–44, 53, 62n9 Nonsense, 16, 17, 25, 49, 50, 56, 76, 105, 106, 108, 111, 121–125, 128, 136, 145 non-sense, 85 N operator, 43, 77 Normativity, 131, 151 Notation, 38, 40

170 

INDEX

O Object (Gegenstand) logical, 30n2, 40, 50, 51, 53, 62n6 simple, 26, 46, 51 Operation, 38, 39, 41–44, 53, 56, 57, 62–63n9, 76 Ordinary language, 18, 19 Other minds, 126 P Picture (Bild), 3, 28, 45, 48, 54, 55, 98, 108, 109, 112, 155, 165 Plato, 8, 21, 23, 28, 29, 53 Possibility (ies), 6, 8, 20, 24, 26, 30, 34, 37, 38, 41–43, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53–58, 63n9, 63n12, 72, 77, 79, 80, 83–85, 89, 97, 99, 103–105, 108, 112, 113, 123, 126, 127, 132–135, 137, 138n7, 143, 145, 147, 148, 152, 154–156, 158n7, 163, 164, 166 Post-symbolic real, 76, 79 Practice(s), 18, 29, 49, 58, 60, 84, 87, 95, 104, 129, 132, 134, 135, 150, 155, 156 Pre-symbolic real, 74, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86 Private language argument, see Argument, private language Property, internal/external, see Relation, internal/external Proposition (Satz), 5, 16, 34, 87, 96, 126 elementary/atomic, 37, 40–44, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55–58, 60, 62–63n9, 63n10, 103, 128, 129 Propositional sign (Satzzeichen), 37, 38, 45, 57 Psychoanalysis, 142–145, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155 See also Freud, S. Psychosis, 68, 87

R Real (the), 15, 18, 39, 68, 141–143, 165 See also Imaginary (the); Symbolic (the) Reference, 19, 29, 36, 60, 70, 76, 81, 90n2, 96 See also Bedeutung (meaning/ reference/significance) Reflection, 24, 26, 28–30, 84, 89, 95–114, 125, 166 See also Deflection Relation internal/external, 50, 126 logical, 53, 103 Religion, 97, 99, 122, 124 Representation (Vorsteltung), 25, 54, 55, 60, 61n4, 74, 83, 90n4, 129, 133 Robinson Crusoe, 70, 71 Rumbling and roaring, ix, 134–136, 155 Russell, B., 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 62n6, 63–64n14, 127, 137n2 S Schreber, D.P., 9, 10, 13n7 Self, 8, 131, 137, 143, 144, 147, 148, 157n5 Self-alienation, 143, 145, 149 Self-becoming, 142, 143, 147, 149, 150, 152 Semantics, 21, 39, 81, 105, 131, 133, 150 Sense, 1–5, 7–11, 12n4, 15–17, 24, 25, 27–29, 33, 35, 36, 38–41, 44–48, 51, 54–61, 62n9, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 83–88, 97, 98, 100–104, 106–108, 111–114, 116n6, 117n10, 123–126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 137, 138n8, 146 determinacy of, 36, 47, 55, 72, 81, 83, 84 See also Sinn (sense/meaning)

 INDEX 

Sense data, 36, 48, 50 Senseless (sinnlos), 87 See also Meaningless; Nonsense Sign, ix, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 45, 49, 57–60, 70, 71, 103 See also Propositional sign (Satzzeichen); Symbol Significance, ix, 3, 4, 6, 9, 16, 23, 35, 98, 100–106, 114, 122, 131, 151 See also Aesthetics; Bedeutung (meaning/reference/ significance); Ethics; Value Signified, ix, 39, 68, 70–72, 82, 85, 87, 89, 91n5, 142, 145, 150, 154, 155, 158n10 Signifier -in-isolation, 86–89, 91n8 -in-relation, 86, 89 in the Real, 15, 17, 18, 96, 156 Simple, see Object (Gegenstand), simple Sinn (sense/meaning), 35, 101, 102 See also Bedeutung (meaning/ reference/significance) Socrates, 8, 23, 28–30 Solipsism, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 138n6, 138n7 See also Ego; Self Speech empty, ix, 155 full, 155, 156 Speech act, 20, 146 State of affairs (Sachverhalt), 5, 6, 19, 52, 54, 63n9, 77, 87 See also Fact Stove, 23, 97–104, 108, 111, 113, 131, 132 Symbol, ix, 37–41, 44–50, 52–54, 56, 58, 60, 78, 103, 156 See also Sign

171

Symbolic (the), 17, 23, 72–81, 83, 85–88, 90n2, 90n3, 91n5, 91n7, 141, 154, 156, 157–158n6, 158n8 See also Imaginary (the); Real (the) Symptom, 68, 91n8, 145, 150, 153 Syntax, see Logical syntax T Tautology, 43–45 Trace, 38, 70–72, 79, 158n10 Trauma, 86 Truth function, 42, 43, 62n6, 63n10, 77 Truth table, 41 Truth value, 41, 43, 87 U Unconscious, 68, 144, 145, 148–150, 157n3 V Value absolute, 5, 6, 12n2, 12n3, 27, 97–99, 101, 105–107, 113, 115, 164 aesthetics, 98, 101 relative, 6, 12n3, 96–99 truth (see Truth value) See also Ethics; Judgement, of absolute-relative value W Will, 130 Wo Es war, Soll Ich Werden, 142–144, 147, 150 Wonder, 2, 3, 6, 7, 12n1, 12n3, 16, 23, 24, 28, 29, 35, 62n7