otobiographies

Among the things I ought to know and don't... as 'spurs' is Derrida largely reacting to Heidegger's book on Nietzsche, and taking as his central subject Nietzsche's conception of truth or the philosopher's relation to truth, 'otobiographies' is mainly a reaction to Ecce Homo, and takes as its main topic Nietzsche's relation to the proper name (sort of). What I don't know and should is how, exactly, Derrida reads the eternal return. The lecture was first prepared for a bicentennial conference in Virginia, and the organizer would have liked for him to talk about the declaration of independence in relation to the French declaration of the rights of Man. Derrida declared himself unqualified and unprepared to do so. He does look over the beginning of the declaration, written by Jefferson and signed exclusively by people who weren't Jefferson, and he opens a questioning of signatures - signing in whose name and under whose authority... is this a performative or a constatative act - is it through the act of signing that independence is declared or is this officially acknowledging a declaration that has already been made? The civil authority that guarantees that signature comes into being through that signature, it is the 'good people' of America who are represented, etc. Ultimately authorization is passed back through the people to nature and natural law, which is referred back to the God who created nature, who is in the last instance the guarantor of the signatures in the constitution. All this is a preamble to a discussion of Nietzsche, which is a discussion of signatures, of biography, of education and of the co-opting of Nietzsche's name by the Nazis. Derrida makes a good deal of Nietzsche claiming to be the dead father and the living mother, alive and dead simultaneously... under mention of the living feminine, there are echoes of 'spurs', or all the positive feminine associations that Derrida has previously emphasized in talking about Nietzsche's misogyny and non-misogyny (Nietzsche is himself pregnant with thought - positive and negative images of femininity and of masculinity co-exist in Derrida's reading, but when woman is denounced, it is usually as a man-woman, negative insofar as imperfectly woman... though there is no essential femininity or masculinity, no eternal principal for either gender, etc. etc.) If I remember Ecce Homo correctly, Nietzsche has mostly praise for his gentle father and mostly condemnation for his shrewish mother, but there is none of this in otobiographies, and I'll have to go back and check whenever I get a chance (which won't be before this exam). Anyone, there's a Blanchotian death inscribed in life inscribed in death dynamic. Te line from Zarathustra is brought up about the reverse cripple, the tiny, feeble little stalk of a man attached to a giant ear, who the crowd hails as a genius. Derrida brings this together with a lot of the passages where Nietzsche talks about 'those who have the right ears to hear me' to open the theme of reception, and to the line in Ecce Homo where Nietzsche states "I am telling myself my life story' to open up a split between Nietzsche recounting and Nietzsche listening, the man/ life and his name. There are passages where Nietzsche separates his name from himself and recognizes that the two do not necessarily have the same destiny, the same future to look forward to. (The ear passage has quite a lot of ideas attached to it actually, not all of which Derrida develops or even references - the giant ear represents both an imbalance between the faculties - one being overdeveloped, but in the overdeveloped faculty it also represents a lack of subtlety. Derrida is, of course, attracted to the labyrinthine structure of the ear, and at the end of the book he presents Nietzsche's critique of the university system, pretend autonomy in the service of the state, with the image of many ears attached by umbilical cord to a single mouth, and half as many hands... lecturer and listeners. Most important in his reading through ears, quite apart from rough or nuanced big or small is simply the idea of the right ears, very few being properly attuned to the particular harmony of the body of work in question). Anyhow, the passage in the book that would be most worth understanding, and which I can't really claim to understand, leads back to who the guarantor is behind Nietzsche's signature, and the answer beyond Nietzsche's own statement "I live on my own credit, and perhaps it is only a prejudice that I live", is that the signature is guaranteed by the eternal return of the same - which is not the same. The dead father and living mother, decadence and rebirth, are combined in the image of the phoenix. What returns is affirmation, is only that which is capable of being affirmed, which is active and not reactive (this is a theme that runs throughout the French reading of Nietzsche, and if there is one idea I absolutely have to have a strong mastery of this, it is this... but I can't say I do have a strong mastery of it). Nietzsche begins Ecce Homo explaining that it is his 45th birthday "it is not for nothing that I have just buried my 44th year, that which in it was life is saved."

Wolf man

One would be entirely justified in asking why I waste my time with books like this. It would have been better spent on any number of other texts I'm supposed to be familiar with. The book has a pretty well-known introduction by Derrida that I expected to write on, but I don't really have anything to say about it. I should probably try to find something to say about it, but I feel a strong need to move on to other things.

In their analysis of Freud's old patient the wolf man, Abraham and Torok go to elaborate lengths to decode messages hidden primarily in the Wolf Man's dreams, or the symptoms of his hypochondria. The wolf man, though analyzed in German grew up speaking Russian and had contact with English through his childhood nanny. It is therefore presumed that all three languages played a part in building up the web of associations encoded in his dreams. When he speaks of white wolves sitting in a tree, wolves sitting can be connected to the Russian word goulfik, which means both 'wolfing' and 'fly' (as in the fly of a pair of trousers), and white can be connected to the English and rhymed with 'wide' so that 'white wolves sitting' become 'wide open fly'. There are six wolves (corrected to seven and drawn as five), and a certain Russian word meaning 'group of six' sounds similar to a diminutive form of the word for 'sister'. So the open fly is related to the sister and leads to a traumatic childhood scene of father seducing sister. To give one example that makes use of German, when a dream involves a skyscraper, the beginning of the German Wolkenkratzer, sounds similar to the German word Volk, which can be translated into the Russian Buka, which is a homonym for Wolf. Rhymes also pass between languages, so though the fact that it is nighttime is mentioned in German, the Russian word Notchu should be heard and through its sound should evoke the English 'not you'. The problem with the use of this sort of metonymy of words should be clear. Beyond the fact that two Hungarians writing in French and not fluent in Russian can't possibly be expected to reconstitute the linguistic associations of a native speaker of Russian living in a German speaking environment (to attempt to do this for someone who shares a linguistic community is already impossible), an almost infinite number of associations are possible with every word and image when synonyms and 'rhymes' are available from three languages, and there is no criteria to establish which of those associations are legitimate. The authors do not attempt to hide the fact that they have searched for words that fit a hypothetic narrative they have constructed (granted with the aid of a large amount of already published material, by the wolf man himself, his therapists - including Freud himself, and numerous psychoanalysts responding to the famous case). Though the narrative they have constructed may seem plausible and the linguistic associations at least possible, there is no necessity in either that makes it preferable to countless potential alternative readings. Without strict rules or the authority of the patient analyzing himself (and therefore in some sense able to vouch for a particular reading), the game remains sterile.

spurs

Nietzsche or reveal what he was secretly up to. Derrida proceeds as though this carefully constructed web of loosely connected words and meanings were fortuitous, and just happened to correspond remarkably well with what Derrida wished to say about Nietzsche's style. Technically, his argument doesn't depend on any of these chance associations, and if they cannot be said to be merely ornamental or secondary in the text it is because they are bent into the service of an implicit metaphor of the truth as an ocean and style as that which cuts through and moves along her surface. Though the rock that breaks the waves is the only meaning attached to éperon, Derrida ensures that nautical imagery contaminates the entire lot. The rock is linked to the prow of a ship, which like a spur moves the boat forward, while like the rock it divides the oncoming waves. Derrida sets up an allegorical space that isn't quite Nietzsche's, and when he finally arrives at Nietzsche's metaphor of Truth as a woman truth will necessarily appear as a siren, and it will become both dangerous and foolhardy rushing straight toward her, as is done by philosophers and scientists without style, who lack any appreciation of distance and the play of surfaces. The veil that conceals, which was previously attached to 'sail', and the verb 'to spurn', which was attached to 'spur', have already been used to inscribe ideas of femininity and seduction into the association cluster built around éperon and voile. As new sets of associations are added, the old ones are not abandoned, but become more heavily motivated. The density of connection between the words and images Derrida chooses to bring together (the style/ stiletto that cuts the waves and dances like them, the veiled/ sailing woman truth, who glides along the surface and beckons forward with what she hides and promises, etc) and the astounding correspondence between the entire nexus and the vision of truth and philosophy presented by Nietzsche's writing all seem to belie the idea that their encounter is fortuitous. Through cross contamination and the folding of images into one another, not to mention a choice of objects (woman and ocean) that already present inexhaustible sets of associations, Derrida makes what is arbitrary seem necessary. Though the basic coherence of the image of the philosopher and his relation to truth is never abandoned, and the strong connection to Nietzsche's original texts is never lost, the number of ideas and images present in that one idea of the truth as woman/ siren proliferates to the point that they cannot all be held in mind at the same time, though they are all present in one another and do all work together to create a single tonality. Ideally, as with Kant's sublime, comprehension should break down, not because of the difficulty or obscurity of the ideas involved, but because of the number of parts that need to resonate all at once for the whole to function.

Tolstoy, fiction, and history

I've now finished War and Peace, which did not disappoint. Besides my disapproval of Natasha's susceptibility to Anatole Kuragin's charms, my only other major reservation is the way that the Nikolai Rostov-Princess Marya-Sonya triangle was resolved by basically silencing Sonya from the last several hundred pages of the book and having some other characters reflect that it's all right since she's a "sterile blossom" anyway. Marya, if anything, is more of a sterile blossom than Sonya, but it suited the narrative so much more to have her marry Nikolai that I think Tolstoy had to basically annihilate Sonya in order to avoid the uncomfortable cruelty of this decision on the author's part.

This criticism ties into a broader concern that I might someday want to write about in more considered detail. It's the question, essentially, of what moral obligation we have to fictional characters. I think this question isn't normally addressed in aesthetics because aesthetics is normally written from the point of view of the audience rather than the creator of a work of art. I think an author does enter into some sort of ethical relationship with his characters, though sorting out just what this relationship is is rather complicated. You can certainly put your characters through difficulties that would be unethical to put real human beings through. However, I think there's some connection between the way we should treat real people and the way we should treat fictional characters, which is, to borrow Kant's maxim, that we should treat them as ends in themselves and not simply as means to other ends. In other words, we shouldn't use fictional characters any more than we should use real live people. One of the things I love about Chekhov is that he gives all of his characters, even the minor ones, an autonomous life that one feels extends beyond the story. His plots are less tidy than, say, Ibsen's, because his characters are more important to him than the story he wants to fit them into. One of the reasons Tolstoy's novels are so rich is that his characters, too, normally seem to extend beyond the stories in which they occur. Which makes it particularly striking and odious when the author suddenly seems to mistreat them for the sake of the story.

Since writing my last post, it's come to my attention that a lot of what I was saying had some similarity to Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which I didn't realize until a couple days ago was centrally concerned with Tolstoy and War and Peace. I still haven't read it, so it might be a bit foolish of me to venture further words on Tolstoy's theory of history, but I feel I should put something down, however ignorant.

The main thought is that Tolstoy's view on history parallels the view he aims at in his fiction, which is essentially a God's eye view. I wrote last time about the bemusement with which he looks on various human endeavours, and the sense that the most truthful perspective (perhaps the only truthful perspective) is the one sub specie aeternitatus, which both Tolstoy and his characters seem to achieve only by glimpses and intimations. He seems to disparage historians too for lacking this perspective. Any account of causes and effects in history relies on gross over-simplification and an obtuse arbitrariness as to when to start and end the causal chain one deems relevant. Truly seen, i.e. divinely seen, everything is interconnected, and there is no beginning or end to human affairs, so that singling out any historical narrative is essentially an act of falsification.

How, then, are we to tell history? It seems Tolstoy's answer is that we should tell it something in the manner of War and Peace. That is, rather than look at the isolated actions of the grands hommes of history, we should zoom in and out, sometimes looking at the words and deeds of generals, sometimes at peasants, sometimes at masses of people in huge movements, sometimes at the intimate moments of individuals. Tolstoy's process of selection is ultimately as arbitrary and over-simplified as a historian's, but with two additional virtues. The first is that he has the authorial irony to acknowledge the limitations of his account within the account itself (hence the necessity of the historiographical digressions), and the second is that he has the authorial irony to present each perspective as limited in its way, and through the constant shifts and contrasts to present each perspective as contingent as well. He might not give us the full picture any better than the historians, but at least he helps us see how much we're missing.

All this also led me to reflect on Nietzsche. I think there's a fair amount in Tolstoy that Nietzsche would find sympathetic (I write this in ignorance of whether Nietzsche ever wrote anything about Tolstoy). In his middle period in particular (I'm thinking primarily of Human, All-Too-Human), Nietzsche seems keen to demolish the notion of free will, and to present a conception of human agency as inextricably caught up in causes and processes that are far too large for us to comprehend, and certainly far too large for us to arrogate to ourselves any claim to be acting autonomously or freely. Nietzsche also shares Tolstoy's perspectivism, his sense that we can't present the absolute truth of a matter, but at best can only offer varying perspectives.

Given these similarities, I'm struck by their very different takes on the figure of Napoleon. Tolstoy is witheringly dismissive of Napoleon's role in history, presenting at each point a person swept up in the events--less free to make his own decisions even than the people he was commanding--who nevertheless has the arrogance to think that all of his good fortune is due to his own genius and his misfortune is due to chance, and to persuade historians of this fact as well. Nietzsche, on the other hand, often talks up Napoleon as one of the political manifestations of his free spirits who make their own laws, etc. I can't help but feel Tolstoy's characterization of Napoleon is perhaps closer to the truth, and even closer to Nietzsche's own conception of will and causality. In fact, it's something I'm not entirely clear on within Nietzsche's work, how on one hand we seem not to have free will and on the other hand, history and character are determined by a struggle of wills.

I suppose the solution is that the will Nietzsche writes of isn't the same thing that most people would think of as personal agency. I don't have a single will that I direct at whatever purposes I adopt, but rather am a bundle of competing wills, both creator and creature, and I must first submit my own wills to some guiding law before I can impose that will on the rest of the world. Which is one of the reasons Nietzsche has a complicated admiration for asceticism. But by that criterion, was Napoleon really a Nietzschean free spirit? I don't see any reason to think that Napoleon's success came from some successful inner struggle. Was it that Nietzsche admired him because he was less burdened by conscience, was more an embodiment of the cheerful blond beasts of yore, who did what they wanted without worrying about the consequences? If so, should this admiration be at all qualified by Tolstoy's sense that Napoleon wasn't actually the agent of his many actions and successes? I suppose the best you can say for Napoleon is that, unlike most modern people, the competing wills within him didn't choke one another, and he exhibited an unusual clarity of purpose as a result. But this clarity of purpose surely wasn't due to the sort of liberation of spirit that Nietzsche most admires.

I guess really I ought to have re-read some Nietzsche before writing all that.

I'm a Tolstoy

I'm doing a lot of travelling this month, and rather than try to take several books with me, I decided to take just one: War and Peace. This isn't just to save luggage space; it's also a rare opportunity to try to read such a large book in a relatively short span of time.

I'm 650 pages (of about 1220) into it so far, and loving it. For all the normal reasons one might find a big fat novel engrossing: it's fun to get caught up in the soap opera and to know that there's still lots more to read about all these characters and what happens to them. But I'm also struck by how much I'm finding myself identifying with Tolstoy as author. Let me try to explain and qualify that.

A nice anecdote I've heard at third hand: an Oxford philosopher remarking that he's had a good career and is well aware of his abilities as a philosopher. And while he's never written a book as good as Hume's Treatise or Enquiries, he believes he's written a few paragraphs over the course of his career that are as good as almost anything in Hume. By contrast, he claims, were he to live a thousand years and write non-stop, he'd never come up with a single sentence that matches anything in Wittgenstein.

I don't think this anecdote is meant to illustrate Wittgenstein's superior genius to Hume's. The point is rather to distinguish between two different kinds of genius. Hume was great because he accepted the problems and framework of his day, and had thoughts about them that were more original, penetrating, and revolutionary than most of his contemporaries. Hume's intelligence impresses me, but it's also recognizable. He had ideas that I myself might have had in those circumstances, if only I were more brilliant than I am. By contrast, Wittgenstein is like an alien: what makes his work revolutionary isn't simply the keenness of its insight, but the fact that he thinks in a manner that's entirely different from anyone else. That's one reason why it's impossible to imitate his style without seeming obtusely sycophantic, far more so than if you were to try imitating the style of someone less distinctive.

It's a very rough distinction, but I think you can draw it more broadly: there's the kind of genius who sees more sharply than others, and there's the kind of genius who sees in a way that's totally different from others. In the latter group you have not just Wittgenstein but also Nietzsche, Kafka, Gogol, Van Gogh, and Blake. In the former you have not just Hume but also Dickens, Wordsworth, Aristotle, and, of course, Tolstoy. My enthusiasm has always been more for the ones who think totally differently. But I have to acknowledge that my own talents, such as they are, lie more in the camp of the sharp thinkers than the original thinkers.

This acknowledgment has been forced on me with particular clarity reading Tolstoy because I feel I'm reading someone who is more like me than almost any great writer I've read. I'm obviously very different from Tolstoy in very many ways (not least of which being writing talent), but in reading War and Peace I've been struck on numerous occasions by the feeling that someone I don't know is managing to express much of my own perspective about the world far better than I could hope to.

Part of it, I think, is that Tolstoy writes from a somewhat religious point of view without himself being deeply religious at this stage of his career (what does this presage for myself?). There isn't the deep religious yearning you find in Dostoevsky, but rather a sense hovering in the background that, of all the ways one might look on the world and other people, viewing it all sub specie aeternitatus is the most truthful, but that this perspective is one we catch only by glimpses and intimations. I should have bookmarked particular instances--if I don't have them at the tips of my fingers now, I never will. But it leads, first of all, to a rather bemused narrative voice whenever we're considering affairs that seem so crucial in the here and now, whether it's advancement in society or military matters, and this bemusement is occasionally accompanied by a brief allusion to someone's soul and the eternity that soul is struggling to see.

This bemusement leads Tolstoy to show gentle humour in dealing with his characters, but also great affection. (The one major exception so far is Natasha's near-fling with Anatole Kuragin, which struck me as out of character and imposed on her simply to complicate the plot, and it outraged me that he'd resort to such expedience with a character he's built up so lovingly.) It also leads him to write protagonists who are largely autobiographical, and I'm struck by what of myself I recognize in them too. I'm thinking here above all of Pierre Bezukhov, but also Andrei Bolkonsky. And I could say the same of Levin in Anna Karenina, and maybe even Vronsky. What strikes me about these characters most of all is their restlessness. Pierre and Andrei are both eager to lead meaningful lives, and sufficiently sincere in this eagerness that neither of them are particularly interested in the normal routes of advancement that their circumstances make very open for them. But neither of them seems able to settle on a course. Every six months, it seems, they'll throw themselves into some new endeavour--be it Freemasonry, modernizing Russia's bureaucracy, or tending a country estate--with a profound belief that now they've found themselves and are on the right path and that all that occupied them before was mere distraction. And then they'll change course six months later and consider this occupation also a distraction.

I find this a much more believable portrait of existential angst. I don't spend my life at a loss, wondering what to do, and just moping the whole time like some character out of Sartre. My problem is I'm not sure what path to follow. Sometimes I think I should be a philosopher. Sometimes I think I should be a playwright. Sometimes I think these are both distractions from the ascetic religious life I ought to be leading. Or ways of hiding from the life of political engagement that is the only decent way to live. And so on. One reason I think I've made so little progress in any of these directions is that I keep changing my mind and am unable to commit fully to any of them. I lack the clarity (or maybe the narrowness) to have a consistent vision of the good life. (On the other hand, it's only thanks to this restlessness that I've managed to do good work in more than one area.)

I don't feel like Tolstoy is writing primarily about Pierre or Andrei, let alone me. I feel he's writing about himself. I think this also comes through in the narrative voice that has this detached sense that there are deeper things that lie just beyond the fanfare that's distracting us. I don't think Tolstoy (at the time of War and Peace, at least) was writing as someone who could see beyond this fanfare and was writing from the perspective of an ironic knower. Rather, I think he was himself very much distracted by this fanfare and struggling with his sense that everything he did--including writing one of the world's greatest novels--was just further distraction. He was a man torn between a profound love of life and an ascetic conscience. I feel the same way, stuck somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Wittgenstein, deeply admiring of both, but unable to follow either wholeheartedly.

And in that respect, I'm unsure whether to call Tolstoy's religious conversion later in life a fulfillment or a betrayal of the restless man who wrote War and Peace. On one hand, he seems to have achieved what his characters aspired to. On the other, it all feels a little phony from what I know of it, more a decision to deny a part of himself that was still very much alive rather than an acceptance of who he truly was. But I really don't know much about Tolstoy. Maybe I should read a biography. As long as I can find one that's shorter than the novels he wrote...

some thoughts on Derrida and Heidegger

Hm, I just finished a paper on Derrida where I end up being a bit critical. And I'm afraid of doing that because (a) I really don't feel confident enough with Derrida to be certain I know what he's saying, and (b) he's far too slippery to be able to get a solid grip on, and whatever I say about him is almost guaranteed to mischaracterize him. I think I might send you a copy of the paper, but I'll say a few words here because this is where we get to share our thoughts and because I can't really expect you to read a long paper now or anytime soon, especially considering how negligent I've been in replying to you.

So the short version of my concern with Derrida is, effectively, that he seems to assume that ordinary language is inescapably metaphysical, and I don't buy that. And his own language seems only to engage with a metaphysical tradition. For instance, for Derrida, a proper name is an impossible ideal of univocity, a word that takes up its meaning into itself, and this ideal is impossible because the iterable structure of language means that every word can be repeated in ever new contexts, and so can never be fully "proper." Sure, good point, and I think that the iterability of language is something that's worth exploring and insufficiently explored in the analytic tradition. But for all that, we still have proper names. "David" is one. "Kevin" is another. In calling "David" a proper name, I'm not latching myself on to some sort of metaphysics of presence, I'm just distinguishing the way this word is used from the way a word like "horse" is used. That distinction has its ordinary uses, and I'm not sure I see how it's ineluctably metaphysical.

I guess what I'm saying is that ordinary language isn't always already caught up in metaphysics, but rather that metaphysics arises naturally from ordinary language. If a Socratic questioner were to push an ordinary person to explain just what he meant by a "proper name," that questioner might push our ordinary person into a position of making claims about univocity and all the rest. But that's not the same thing as saying that those claims about univocity were always already implicit in the way that person was using language.

Sorry, I'm short on time as usual, and I don't think I'm going to be able to flesh these thoughts out in detail. But maybe I will send you my paper, and you can feel free to respond to either the long paper or these shorter thoughts.

In other news, I just yesterday read Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" I have to confess to having limited patience for later Heidegger, all the while knowing that I should be finding this stuff more interesting and that lots of people I respect (Derrida not least of all) think it's terrific stuff. I think part of the barrier for me is that Heidegger's writings are like these vacuum tubes that suck even the slightest breath of humour from the air, and I can't help but think, if this guy is trying to get at the meaning of life, how can he approach it without a sense of humour? Despite the difficulties I find with Derrida's writing, I'm able to persevere because he makes me smile.

But that's maybe beside the point. The thing that I found most astonishing was the context for the piece. He first wrote it in 1946, and opens by characterizing ours as a "destitute time." In what way is 1946 Europe destitute? Could it have anything to do with a genocidal fascist German regime that devastated the continent through war and slaughtered millions in unspeakably cruel ways? Well, not in so many words. The real problem, it seems, is technology. And while of course a few million dead isn't a great thing, the underlying root cause is a technological mindset that's most closely linked to the bourgeois capitalists who defeated this genocidal fascist German regime that Heidegger was uncomfortably closely allied with. And the solution to all our problems, it seems, is to get rid of these bourgeois capitalists and get back in touch with our roots the way that Heidegger is trying to.

He wrote all this in 1946. The gall!

Besides which, I think this techno-phobia that a lot of European intellectuals of Heidegger's generation share (Wittgenstein not least of all) is a bit short-sighted. It feels like grandparents complaining about how they didn't need iPods back in their day, and that vinyl worked just fine. I mean, I grant that there are a lot of things about the modern world that concern me, but I also feel a clear-headed critique of the modern world can't come from a place of totally not understanding it, and not wanting to. It reminds me of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, in which he launches an ill-advised and somewhat comical rant about Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson that shows that he's really unable to find anything interesting about pop culture, and so is unable to find anything interesting or intelligent to say about it.

thought, language, and Austin

One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything. I mean, I feel like tell you that I've really enjoyed your thoughts on John Locke, but I worry you'll reply "John who?" while digging back through hazy memories of how you spent your summer.

But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.

So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.

It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.

I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.

I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.

I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.

Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.

And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.

As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.

Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.

And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.

As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.