Machine Animals

For such a straightforward, lucid philosopher, Locke can be really bizarre sometimes. I'm making incredibly slow progress reading him. Sections are tedious, with him stating the obvious at length and getting hung up on ideas like infinity that he finds important enough to necessitate repeating his key argument over and over again. I ought to be reading specifically for passages that will be picked up by Condillac and that can be useful for thinking about the relationship between thought and language, and about language acquisition, but, of course, the passages that catch my attention are often the ones that have nothing to do with my current project.
Animals come up again, this time with the Cartesians mentioned and attacked explicitly. As far as I can tell, the famous Cartesian body/ soul duality - and I don't know where it is spelled out in Descartes, nor can I remember who later referred to his conception of man as 'the ghost in the machine' - but this duality of an immaterial soul inside the body controlling it and giving it orders, leads to animals being purely mechanical, since they don't have souls. ANimals are thus, nothing but pure reaction to stimuli. I believe that part of this distinction is tied to free will: When an animal is confronted with a certain set of stimuli, originating from within or without, it is only possible for them to react on way - responding to the strongest stimulus. Locke, taking a counter position, has a strong case to make (which will lead him into a number of strange side roads), and all the necessary arguments to make it with, but he keeps going too far, or conceding things he doesn't need to and creating these strange passages. First, Locke initially seems to deny the existence of free will. He says that the will is what makes us prefer one thing over another, and freedom is the freedom to act on our will. We can't be free to will or not to will or to choose what our will is going to be, because absent a will, what could possibly give us a preference one way or the other? He even has a nice section where he seems ready to deny that our actions tend toward any good other than what our desires dictate, or that our desires would necessarily change if we had a better understanding of what the Good is - taking the example of the drunk who is very well aware that it is in his best interest to stop drinking, and declares his intention to do so, but is unable to resist when the thirst and uneasiness at not being with friends in the pub lead him to break his vows and knowingly act against his own interest. He then backtracks in order to preserve a Christian world order, where there is justice in the dispensation of reward and punishment for mens actions after death, deciding that we are actually able to decide between acting precipitously for a present good or holding off to consider what actually is for our eventual greatest good - virtue and vice is all about holding off and thinking things through. This seems that much less convincing considering his odd attempt to describe actions as being controlled not by 'desire' but by 'uneasiness' over and absent good. I don't really see a difference between the too, except that, as he spoke at length about pain being more powerful than pleasure and a greater incentive, highlighting the negative emotion of 'uneasiness' does seem to be adding to a sense of compulsion - of a forceable problem that needs to be addressed. Not that this can't be contained in the word 'desire' just as well, but in context the word 'uneasiness' seemed contaminated by talk of pain, sickness and necessity, and I couldn't conceive of any other excuse for insisting on it.
Locke also denies that a person is his soul exactly... sort of. He makes clear that we have no idea what substances are, that we only know things through the accidents attached to them that we are capable of perceiving. We are familiar with our own thoughts, but we can't say what it is that thinks exactly. He doesn't want to give an opinion on whether it is material or immaterial, or whether matter is capable of thought, but he does define persons and self in such a way that animals are not necessarily denied selfhood. He points out that if you take a sapling and then years later take the full grown oak it has turned into, it will still be the same tree, though most of the particles will be different and perhaps none of the same particles remain, and he talks about this as being because of a unity of life. For a person it is not unity of life, but unity of consciousness that determines the self, and the self owns all those actions it can remember, but no others - and whatever substances, material or immaterial, body or soul, that the consciousness is attached to count as the same person and can be held accountable. Should different souls pass through, this would make no difference, just as, should the soul pass out of the body and be reborn without memories of its past life, it could no longer be counted as the same self. Much of the weirdness in this part of the book comes through things like his story of a parrot who was able not only to say human words, but to have a conversation and give witty answers to questions put to it... basically trying to state that it was outward form and not inner experience that makes us a call a man a man or an animal an animal. Presence or absence of cognitive abilities does not change the species a creature belongs to. He also talks about things like - first off, if limbs get cut off and a person is mutilated, he is still the same person, which leads him to a theoretical discussion of consciousness remaining in a cut-off finger and a new consciousness taking hold in the rest of the body (in which case the person could no longer be held accountable for what the other person born into his body did). While refusing to claim knowledge of what thinks and pointing out that the Cartesians have no better proof than their assertions for the soul as seat of self and origin of self, Locke does show a strong preference for an immaterial source of thought, which I suppose is neither here nor there, except that, as with free will, it felt like Locke's entire reason for challenging the Cartesians was partly undone, since an immaterial source could be called a soul, and if it doesn't rely on the body, than why shouldn't memory and consciousness adhere to it? The main difference, I suppose, would be that the thinking substance would be in animals as well (substance once again being according to Locke a meaningless word which simply marks the fact that we don't know what it is that is capable of thinking).
Some of the nicest parts of the texts are those that Locke dedicates to showing the limits of knowledge and his wonder at all the things he is sure he'll never know. When talking about whether thinking necessarily arises out of matter and explaining that it is a mystery either way, he spends some time saying we don't really know how matter holds together at all, and when you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, it always consists of countless disparate particles, and who knows why they don't just fall apart? He talks about the possibility of having senses other than the five we have that could provide just as much information, but which we have no way of even imagining, and he takes a second to imagine what it would be like if our eyes naturally saw things magnified hundreds of thousands of times (praising God for not giving us such impractical vision, which wouldn't help us much in getting around or going about our business, but also showing a kind of excited wistfulness in evoking all that would be revealed and the wonder of things blown up to reveal more secrets).

Anyway, that's still the main thing I'm reading. I read the first 30 pages of a book called "the decadence of the French Nietzsche", which is the sort of dubious book that you can probably get something out of if you read it with a grain of salt, but which I almost certainly won't finish. It's claiming that philosophy is built on the sacrifice of thinking for truth, taking its cue from a quote in which Nietzsche says something like "we seekers after truth" share a faith with plato and with the Christians, that faith being the belief that Truth is an absolute good. Of course the guy writing this book doesn't seem to realize that it is weird for him to take truth as meaning basically any concrete assertion. He seems to think that whenever you state something is true, you are making a decision not to question that assertion any longer, and the decision "this is where I will halt my train of thought and this is the conclusion I will draw" is what he refers to as the sacrifice of thinking - and I guess he wants to show that Nietzsche and Deleuze make their most bombastic statements provisionally and proceed to contradict themselves, thus refusing to fully sacrifice thinking. The whole thing seemed dubious to me - as I said, implicitly defining 'Truth' as being any assertion whatsoever and imagining that most philosophers DON'T revise and question their own previous assertions seems silly, particularly considering the fact that the guy didn't seem to realize there could be any issue there. Still, the quotes would have been good for something, and I mean, it is a guy who read a lot of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and following his reading couldn't have been utterly useless, but I've got better things to read, and most of it is mandatory.

What were the questions you asked that I wanted to address? You asked what and where I published - it was a revised version of the Louis Wolfson article I showed you a year ago, it just took about a year for the publication to come out (Cabinet magazine)... I don't know whether the interview was already part of it when I showed it to you way back when. It was HUme I was thinking about with not being able to actually live according to what he was writing - and then, you asked, would Anna Karenina be better without the theorizing, which isn't what the point was in the discussion of theory debasing literature - or perhaps it is. I suspect that Proust probably would have included that in the whole, "like an article that still has the price tag on", though he was at least as guilty of it as Tolstoy - the difference perhaps being that rather than the narrator confidently telling how it is, the character is often struggling through theories that aren't necessarily true. At any rate, the main point as far as the Bersani-related discussion is more that writing theory and writing literature are two separate activities, and merely putting theory into application would create something lifeless and hollow. Whatever theory a writer might subscribe to and write before or after his fiction, or even include in his fiction, he needs to disregard and even go against it when composing the fiction, he needs to pay attention to the dictates of his prose, which is something no theory can really encompass or even fully account for. Whether this is true or not, and whether this was Proust's understanding, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure it was what Bersani had in mind.

Locke, Descartes, animals

I started to read your two new posts, but decided I should first write what I opened this up to write. Not that I have anything particularly well planned out in mind, but I'm reading Locke's "essay concerning human understanding", and I've been thinking vaguely about the fact that you recently mentioned a philosophical interest in animals (thus the pork trilogy... by the way, I'm currently writing 'Notes from the underground' - not like the Borges character who writes Don Quixote, but maybe I'll explain elsewhere at some point) - I will react to your most recent posts next time - probably tomorrow.
Anyway, animals is an incredibly popular theme at the moment (and kind of always has been I guess - which is not to accuse you of trendiness, but rather to say over the past few years I've encountered the theme often, so there is a lot of reading and writing that will necessarily get mixed into anything I say (complicating and confusing the issue rather than making it clearer or more carefully thought out I fear). At any rate, who Locke is arguing against much of the time (and this won't be my only Locke entry... I'm not going to make this a one book = one post thing), who he is arguing against in certain cases isn't entirely clear to me, though I know that his stress on there being no such thing as innate ideas and the issue he takes with an image of animals as machines is targeted at the 'cartesians'... and of course, having only read the two things everybody reads by Descartes, I have no idea where a lot of what is attributed to 'cartesians' comes from, and whether it accurately presents what Desartes thought and wrote. And then, was it the Cartesians or someone else who insisted, for example, that the soul always thinks? I should have an edition with decent annotations and footnotes, but that's neither here nor there. I kind of love John Locke, both in terms of the content of his reflections and his dry way of ridiculing the ideas he disagrees with... I feel like Victorian nonsense is already present in the nonsense he makes to refute (pages and pages on the pointlessness of imagining the soul can think separately from the mind, that thought is possible without memory or consciousness, etc, or similar pages on innate ideas - God and Worship, the fact that something cannot simultaneously be and not be [once again, I have a vague interest in who initially argued this]). Of course, while reading, you periodically think that certain examples are poorly chosen, and you look ahead to Kant and psychoanalysis for complications and counters, but I sat down to write about those passages where he mentions animals... and combine them with more interesting thoughts on animals, because what I object to in Locke probably won't be particularly revelatory.
At any rate, Locke objects to the supposition that animals don't have ideas, and wants to insist that they do have ideas gained by perception and that the difference lies in their inability to further reason beyond the gathering and remembering of ideas. I think I'm sort of nitpicking when I read and, though it isn't his main argument, though he doesn't really develop it, I keep adamantly objecting to wayward comments of his (especially knowing that others have actually studied animal behavior and neurology and have a competence I don't), but Locke seems to try to attribute to animals only simple ideas, which following his own descriptions would be absolutely useless. Perhaps it is nitpicking and perhaps it is a serious internal contradiction in what he writes, but simple ideas are basically nothing but sensory impressions, not yet subject to any reworking or processing into complex or abstract ideas - it is precisely abstraction that Locke says animals lack, and yet, I'm sure he wouldn't deny that my cat knows what packages contain her treats, even when the packages are slightly different in size and color, and sealed so that no smell comes out of them. How would this be possible if she hadn't formed some abstract notion of 'package', which is something more than the vague association of door with outside and dish with food? How could animals get by if they couldn't identify a 'type' despite variations, or combine sensory impressions and recognize a certain visual impression as matching olfactory and auditory impressions and thus comprising a single complex unity? An 'Idea', basically meaning a sensory impression that is added to memory, has no value whatsoever if it is not abstracted, if it is not removed from its context and made to fit a 'more or less' pattern so that different trees, for instance, can be seen as having something in common, so that various cans of food in spite of their differences can be grouped into a single category of 'cans of food'. Without abstraction, it is impossible to imagine what possible purpose sensory impressions could serve. If every impression were self-contained and without relation to other impressions, if shades of green couldn't be seen as having a certain similarity, which suggests a process of comparison.
And to go off subject a bit, speaking of innate ideas, I remember when I was a kid being told that the yellow and black on bees was a natural warning sign and meant danger, and I had trouble believing that, thinking, how would animals know that those colors meant that, especially if I don't? As a kid I already had a notion of symbols being conventionally determined, and so I wondered how symbols could possibly arise in nature and what their point would be if they weren't universally recognized (man being a possible threat who coexisted in the same environment, if black and yellow meant 'back off', shouldn't he be born with that knowledge, rather than having to learn from his experience with bees that they could, in fact cause pain).

Locke brings up the subject of anthropomorphizing only in his discussion with God (where he assumes that only idiots could imagine God as being person-like), though if anyone were to object that attributing ideas to animals is anthropomorphizing, beyond his dismissal of innate ideas which sort of cuts off the only other possible explanation for animal behavior (given the admitted vagueness of what is meant by saying animals have ideas). Nevertheless, Locke does talk about experience as being the only reliable guide for establishing principles, and of course, a process very similar to anthropomorphism is necessary in dealing with other people. I have to 'Kevinize' everyone I deal with to some extent, project my own way of thinking and feeling as a sort of template on which to construct my image of the person I'm dealing with, alterations are made accordingly, some are generally assumed based on past experience of other people, and yes, purely formal rules can be applied that don't require any sympathy or empathy, but for the most part an assumption of similarity is vital for social interaction. That this should be a starting point in dealing with other animals is logical. 'Infants, foreigners and animals' would be a nice title for something or other, grouping together those whose opacity is assured for lack of a common language and whose behavior isn't necessarily subject to all the same cultural conditioning and codes as ours. I'm trying to think back to a discussion I had a year ago - about a book on animals and humans (I don't remember the author or even the title), I remember talking about the way we experience lunatics on a subway platform, the danger inherent in not understanding how or what he is thinking or being able to predict their actions. It is generally unlikely they are going to do anything violent, even the ones screaming and gesticulating violently, though with those, suspicion of violence is actually connected to codes being used which normally signify intended violence. But there's fear even with the harmless ones that just mutter and talk at people or to themselves, merely because we no longer have any way of predicting what they will say or do. I'm getting a bit incoherent myself, off the subject of animals in thinking about the mixture between formal rules and projection of self as how we deal with others and animals. On seeing an animal in the woods, one may think to oneself according to rules learned from others "X does not attack humans", or "X only attacks humans under such and such conditions", but it is testing the limits of our ability to project and imagine some sort of subjective experience of the world that makes animals interesting.
I remember being in a class on 'primate behavior' more than a decade ago. For some reason we one day saw a bit of a documentary... A snake bit a lioness and her cubs, I think, and the cubs died. The narrator talked about how after the lioness recovered, you could see her being particularly fierce in attacking the jackals or whatever, jackals having eaten her cubs after they had been poisoned, when she was still too weak to intervene. A kid in the back of the class objected saying, "how do you know she was really remembering the murder of her cubs - maybe she was just particularly hungry because she had been lain up and hadn't eaten much during her illness". I remember the kid was a swaggering jock who I particularly disliked, but when he asked that, I do remember thinking "we don't" and he was right for asking.
Why am I reminiscing about all this? I don't know. Have you read Derrida's "The animal that therefore I am"? (The title in French is "l'animal que donc je suis", and the 'suis' can be read as "I am" or "I follow" - typical French word play). Me being a kind of worshipper of cats, it is kind of nice to read Derrida's philosophical confrontation with his cat.

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.