From Vancouver, many months late

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As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.

a genealogical myth of philosophy

I read something by my supervisor that struck me as problematic, but I can't quite put my finger on what I find wrong with it, so it might not be a bad idea to air some of the grievances.

He begins the paper with a Heidegger-inspired "genealogical myth of philosophy." Heidegger-inspired in the sense that it draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic sciences, regional ontologies, and fundamental ontology. The idea is that there are various ontic sciences that go about interrogating particular kinds of beings: living beings in the case of biology, rocks in the case of geology, and so on. We're driven to interrogate entities because we want to understand their nature better: we want to know what kinds of entities there are. These ontic sciences all operate within a particular framework, a set of assumptions about what questions there are, how we should go about asking them, what basis of knowledge we all agree on, and so on. In Kuhnian terms, normal science operates within a paradigm. Call this paradigm a regional ontology. Occasionally, problems will arise that will make people start questioning the regional ontology. That's largely what philosophers do: philosophers of science aren't doing science but are doing regional ontology, where they question the framework within which the ontic science takes place. The Heideggerian step is then to ask what we're presupposing in doing our regional ontologies. This question then leads us back to fundamental ontology and Heidegger's beloved Question of Being.

Now, there are a few things that trouble me about this. Perhaps the central concern is that he calls this a "genealogical myth" because obviously it's not meant to be a rigorous description of how knowledge or science or philosophy or inquiry actually work, but rather a framework for thinking about it. A regional ontology for philosophy, if you will. But I can't help but think it's a bit sloppy and lazy to introduce something while granting it's far from rigorous, but then move on to other things without returning to question its assumptions. And my suspicion isn't just that it's drawing neat lines where things are far messier, but that it actually is a bad myth, it distorts matters in a number of important ways. Though I'm not sure I'm quite succeeding in putting my finger on how.

One simple objection is just that lines are far fuzzier than this myth suggests, though I suspect the use of "myth" was meant to grant that point. It can only have bite if I can show that these fuzzy lines are too fuzzy to make the distinctions worth drawing. But, for instance, it's not like scientists never question their paradigms. "What is life?" is as much a biological question as a philosophical one. And indeed, many of the people working in the "regional ontologies" of philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics are scientists first and foremost rather than philosophers. My uncle, a chemistry professor, once remarked to me that philosophers tend to come up with very simplistic notions of what it means to do science because they've never really done it themselves, and it takes many years of working in the sciences to really have a clear notion of what goes on in the sciences.

Not just do I think the hierarchical distinctions are problematic, I also think that a three-tiered hierarchy groups together things that don't really belong together. Mulhall talks about different regional ontologies, giving the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science as two examples. But are they really the same sorts of things, and more important, are science and religion really two commensurable "ontic sciences"? The myth I gave above--recapitulating his own--gives a scientific example, where it's easier to operate within the simple assumption that scientists are in the business of accumulating knowledge and that this accumulation can then be interrupted by questioning the overall framework. I'm not sure the same accumulation of knowledge occurs in any non-scientific field. What's the "ontic science" of religion in the business of doing? Science isn't one way of answering our curiosity about the world; it's the way of doing so. My interest in art or religion isn't provoked by a question of "what sorts of entities are there in the world?" but by entirely different kinds of question altogether.

This problem become more acute when we consider various ontic sciences deal with different kinds of entities, so that regional ontologies are asking the question of what it means for something to be an entity of that nature. He writes that philosophy of science asks what it is for something to be material, philosophy of mind asks what it is for something to be mental, philosophy of religion for something to be divine, and so on. That strikes me as bizarre on a number of levels. Firstly, I haven't done much philosophy of science, but I've done enough to know that "what is it for something to be material?" isn't a question they ask. That's a question for the metaphysicians. And also, it further reinforces this suggestion that the material, the mental, and the divine are just three different kinds of entities, which sounds all right if you're Descartes, but sounds very odd to a more contemporary ear. It takes some unnecessary reification and grouping together of apples and oranges to insist that there are divine or aesthetic entities just like there are material entities.

I also think this genealogical myth would be inimical to Wittgenstein, who's one of Mulhall's other great heroes. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the notion of a "second-order philosophy," which is what fundamental ontology sounds like on this picture. And he was also very clear that he wasn't doing anything connected to science. Nor did he take himself to be interrogating entities. This might be Heidegger's genealogical myth of philosophy, but I don't know how much we can extend it beyond Heidegger.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this sounds like sound criticism to you. I don't feel I've quite put my finger on what troubles me about this genealogical myth, but I do find it problematic.