(logo whooshing)
(gentle music)
- Good afternoon, almost good evening.
I'm Paula Varsano, Professor
of East Asian Languages
and cultures, and Chair of the
Foerster Lectures Committee.
We're pleased, along
with the Graduate Council
and Graduate Division
to present Jane Taylor,
this year's speaker in the
Foerster Lecture Series.
As a condition of this bequest,
we're obligated to tell you,
it's really my pleasure to tell you
how the endowment's supporting
the Foerster Lectures
on the immortality of the
soul came to UC Berkeley.
It's a story that
exemplifies the many ways
this campus is linked to
the history of California
and the Bay Area.
In 1928, Miss Edith Zweybruck
established the Foerster lectureship
to honor the memory of Agnes A. Foerster
and Constantine E. A. Foerster.
Edith was a public school
teacher in San Francisco
for many years, and the
teaching profession was to her,
an opportunity to develop a true knowledge
and love of the spiritual values of life
in the young minds entrusted to her care.
Edith's beloved sister, Agnes A. Foerster,
shared her high ideals and hopes,
as did Agnes's husband,
Constantine E. A. Foerster.
A lawyer by profession,
Foerster was a man of high
intellectual achievements
and of rare personal charm.
Although he passed away at the age of 37,
he had achieved an enviable
place at the San Francisco Bar,
and was considered one of its
most highly respected members.
For several years prior to his death,
Foerster was a law partner
of Alexander F. Morrison,
one of the most prominent
of San Francisco attorneys
for whom our Morrison
Memorial Library is named.
In her last days, Miss Edith Zweybruck
expressed her deep and abiding interest
in the spiritual life by
creating this lecture series
on the subject of the
immortality of the soul,
or other similar spiritual subjects.
She believed that through the
medium of a great university
and the words of scholarly lecturers,
she might bring new light upon a subject
that has interested the
world for centuries.
So we all would like to
thank Edith Zweybruck.
And now about our lecturer.
Jane Taylor is a prominent South African
writer, playwright, and academic
whose body of work exhibits
very little concern
for the divide we commonly recognize
between the creative and the scholarly.
As a co-editor of
"Refiguring the Archive,"
we can see her mastery
of academic discourse
as she engages with the archive
to examine the thick web
that binds politics, psychology,
memory, and forgetting.
True.
But, Taylor has also explored
these unrelated subjects
in the plays she has written,
most notably in the multimedia work,
"Ubu and the Truth Commission,"
which was directed by William Kentridge
for the Handspring Puppet Company.
And then there is her novel,
and I've heard a couple
of people in the audience
talking about it, as a matter of fact.
"The Transplant Men,"
about the first heart transplant
performed in Cape Town.
Again we see Taylor's
interest in the archive,
but now novelistically
intertwined with her reflections
on the continuity of the self,
if not the immortality of the soul,
and its entanglements with
the discontinuous body
and the reframing of
documentary representation.
And for her most recent
inquiries into the complexities
of the divided self in the face
of autocratic institutions,
I direct you to her recent
work, "Led by the Nose,"
a performative reflection on
William Kentridge's production
of the nose for the New York
Metropolitan Opera in 2010.
Jane Taylor may be interested
in divided selfhood,
in the revelatory power of obfuscation,
and in the obfuscatory power
of apparent transparency,
but she herself is an incandescent thinker
and the warmest of friends.
And she thinks and acts
with a singular clarity and intention.
I say that she acts
because in seamless harmony
with her intellectual pursuits,
she is also the material
performance convener of LoKO,
that is the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects,
and is also deeply engaged in a project
in rural South Africa to train
the children of local farmers
to make and manipulate puppets.
For myself, in the several years
in which I've had the happy fortune
to count myself among her friends,
since she stayed among us in 2016
as the Avenali Chair in the humanities,
I can say that the greatest
of pleasures is to be found
in watching and hearing Jane Taylor think.
As you are about to discover,
she has brought the practice
of thinking out loud,
about almost anything from a
puppy's sudden rambunctiousness
to a philosopher's recondite ruminations
to the level of a high art.
And so today, unless
she decides to digress
and talk about her friends' pets,
Jane Taylor's lecture considers
Wittgenstein's late paper, "On Certainty."
Taylor notes, in our contemporary context
of the precarious on one hand,
and the political vehements
of conviction on the other,
it seems timely to pay
attention to the faltering
and tentative mode of regard and thought
of one of the 20th century's
most enigmatic thinkers.
And so it is my pleasure to welcome
Professor Jane Taylor back to Berkeley.
(audience applauding)
- What outrageous pleasure that was,
thank you so much, Paula.
And I'd also really like to
thank the Foerster family
and the committee for giving
me the opportunity to be here
in a conversation, again, with people
whom I have really grown to love.
So, my very warmest thanks.
When I came home, I expected a surprise,
and there was no surprise,
so of course I was surprised.
I'm going to be thinking today
about Wittgenstein's curious
and profound intimations
concerning the certain,
as well as uncertainty,
and how these will attach
themselves like hand in glove
to questions about the
immortality of the soul.
My point of departure is
taken from scans of thought
in Wittgenstein's late
writings, "On Certainty."
But I begin with a short preamble.
Some years before
Wittgenstein at mid career
renounced his earlier model
of thought and language,
such as he had puzzled about
in his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,"
a work of idiosyncratic and
elliptical poetic density
that deals with enigmas
such as the surprise.,
that early work has come to be identified
as a picture theory of language,
and the "Tractatus" was
the only book of his
published in his lifetime.
His later major writing was collected
and published posthumously
as "Philosophical Investigations" in 1953,
some two years after his death.
At Cambridge, he had various
significant interlocutors,
some of whom fell away
from him over the years.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell,
the economist Piero Sraffa,
literary and cultural critic F. R. Leavis,
and the philosopher G. E. Moore.
Within the rules of the language game
that one might call Cambridge philosophy,
Wittgenstein in his last months
seemed to be directly engaging with Moore.
When in 1939, Moore had set out
to refute real world skepticism,
that is doubt in the substantial reality
of a knowable material world,
he deployed a gesture or trick
to underscore his rhetorical argument.
He held up his one hand
while asserting the premise,
"Here is a hand,"
He then raised his other
hand while stating,
"And here is another."
With this demonstration,
Moore believed himself
to have shown that the world exists
and is not mind dependent.
Over several years,
Wittgenstein had engaged
in fierce intellectual
discussion with Moore,
and Wittgenstein's comments
may suggest to the reader
that they were antagonists
in an archaic argon.
Wittgenstein comments of Moore,
"He shows you how far a man can go
"who has absolutely no
intelligence whatsoever."
(audience laughing)
I suspect that this
seemingly dismissive comment
is a measure of Wittgenstein's engagement
in their dialogues, the two
men had first met in 1911
when Wittgenstein was the
student and Moore the teacher,
though their roles were
soon enough reversed.
Moore was a close interlocutor,
and the Austrian perhaps could not bear
that they were so far apart
in understanding and method.
Wittgenstein thought
Moore's mode of reasoning
to be a failure of apprehension.
It's not by holding up a pair of hands
while asserting their existence
that one meets the criteria for knowing,
just as it makes no sense to assert,
I know that there is a chair here
and I am able to sit in it.
This is where Wittgenstein distinguishes
between knowledge and certainty.
The existence inside the everyday
is then transacted as an act of belief
rather than one of fact.
One can imagine Buster Keaton
as a kind of Wittgenstein machine
transacting his way through a world
that alternately affirms, at
times betrays such belief.
Moore's well known observations
on the hand from the 1930s
are clearly still in
Wittgenstein's mind's eye
when he is working through
the notes for "On Certainty"
over a decade later.
This implies that the discussion had
for Wittgenstein been unresolved.
"On Certainty" begins as if
in direct response to Moore,
if you do know that here is one hand,
we will grant you all the rest.
That conditional if sets up the ground
upon which the meditation
becomes possible.
What we can ask is whether it
can make sense to doubt it.
And we just do not see
how very specialized
the use of I know is,
for I know seems to
describe a state of affairs
which guarantees what is
known, guarantees it as a fact.
One always forgets the
expression, I thought I knew.
Knowledge and certainty belong
to different categories.
These opening thoughts
situate "On Certainty"
within the particular
rules of the language game
that pertained in Cambridge
philosophical circles
in the first decades of the 20th century.
And at this point,
I'm going to situate those considerations
within a distinct field of meaning.
Another language game, if you will.
It is the First World War.
Three brothers are engaged
on the Eastern Front.
The young men are not
fighting side by side
as one might imagine, rather,
each of them is, we may say,
in a different battle zone.
Each in his own war.
Though they are, all of them,
fighting on the side of the Hapsburgs.
Sons of one of the
richest houses of Vienna,
their father becomes
significant for history
because the youngest of the
three is Ludwig Wittgenstein,
perhaps the most influential
philosopher in England
in the 20th century.
I'm going to give a brief
account of the three brothers
and their encounters with the war.
Let me begin with the eldest of the three.
Toward the last phase of the war in 1918,
Kurt shot and killed himself
because the soldiers under his command
refused to obey his orders.
It seems that his troops,
who were largely made up of Czechs, Poles,
Croats, and Hungarians,
no longer saw themselves as members
of the Austria-Hungarian Empire,
which had begun to disintegrate.
Rather, they had begun to identify
with emerging fragmentary states
already given autonomy by the Emperor.
Disinclined to fight for the Habsburgs,
the soldiers began to wander
off toward their homelands,
abandoning Kurt and their station.
The body of this imperial state
was beginning to disintegrate.
Suicide was the route of least humiliation
for their commanding officer.
Such was Kurt's fate.
He was, though, the third
of Ludwig's brothers to commit suicide.
The other two had died before the war
while Ludwig was just a boy.
And here a brief retrospective
note on family history.
The eldest, Hans, had
been a musical prodigy,
and apparently something of a savant.
He had apparently drowned
himself while abroad.
The second son, Rudi, had in 1902
walked into his favorite bar in Vienna,
ordered a glass of milk,
and laced it with cyanide
before drinking it publicly.
He had reportedly sought help
from the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee,
led by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld,
which was campaigning
against paragraph 175
of the German criminal code
which prohibited homosexual sex.
It seems that Rudi was terrified
that he was identifiable
as a subject of Hirschfeld's research.
What if he were inadvertently
exposed by that work?
Those deaths were family history.
Kurt's suicide, the third.
But let us return to the young brothers
engaged on the Eastern Front.
The second of the three is Paul.
Early in the war, in August 1914,
Paul had been conscripted
and was captured by Russia
during an Austrian assault on Poland.
In the skirmish, he was
shot in the right arm
and lost consciousness.
On coming back to himself,
he discovered that his
arm had been amputated.
This would be grim
catastrophe for any of us,
but for Paul Wittgenstein, distinctly so,
because he was a concert
pianist of some ambition.
That musical ambition was
surely part of a family burden.
The Wittgensteins were all
distinctly oriented toward music.
The household had seven grand pianos.
The firstborn son,
Hans, the first suicide,
had been a musical prodigy, and Ludwig
could whistle entire
movements from several
well known symphonies, and entertainment
that he inflicted on his friends.
Brahms, Mahler, and Richard Strauss
were only the most famous
of the musical visitors
in the Wittgenstein household,
and musical criticism was
part of the family ethos.
Paul is reported as having
wailed at his brother Ludwig,
"I cannot play the piano
when you are in the house
"as I feel your skepticism
"seeping toward me from under the door."
(audience laughing)
The wounded, one-armed Paul
was for some time imprisoned
in the dread Siberian fortress
where Dostoyevsky had set his novel,
"The House of the Dead."
And here he had to begin to reckon
with the fact of his missing limb.
It must have been a kind
of therapeutic mania
that drove him to set himself the task
of rearranging conventional
piano pieces for the left hand.
Using a makeshift drawing of
a keyboard on a wooden crate
in order to imaginatively
think through the placement
of fingers on phantom notes.
With this virtual piano,
he perfected complex
fingering with his left hand
doing all the work, so that the one hand
might create the aural illusion
of a two handed playing.
Paul engaged in this drill
for up to seven hours a day,
and in this process, he began to arrange
Chopin's "Revolutionary
Etude" for the left hand.
Paul Wittgenstein's own transcription
of the Chopin work for
the left handed player
may well have been influenced
by the fact that Leopold Godowsky
had set several arrangements
of Chopin's "Etudes"
for the left hand.
The arrangements are renowned
for their technical difficulty,
and have been called the most
impossibly difficult things
ever written for the piano.
Godowsky is by reputation
cited as possibly
the greatest classical pianist in history.
It's likely that his left
handed transcriptions
were composed in part just
because he could play them,
and they served as a kind of
technical challenge for him.
Godowsky was probably unequalled
in independence of hands,
equality of finger, and his ability
to delineate polyphonic strands.
Horowitz claimed that one needed six hands
to play his "Passacaglia."
Very few people ever saw him play live.
He couldn't bear public performance,
though there are some sound recordings
which you can track down on the internet.
There is some suggestion
that Paul Wittgenstein
must have known of these
Godowsky arrangements,
and that they spurred him
to his own arrangement
of the Chopin "Revolutionary
Etude" for the left hand.
Of course, the textures of
war so brilliantly evoked
by Chopin may also have
influenced this choice.
Chopin's work is a
distraught aural response
to the failed Polish uprising
against Russia in 1831,
and is likely to have
had emotional magnitude
for a young man who had lost an arm
fighting on the Russian front.
The piece had been dedicated
by Chopin to his friend,
Franz Liszt, who interestingly,
had trained the gifted left
handed pianist, Geza Zichy,
who as a youth had lost a
hand in a shooting accident.
The work would have resonated with Paul
for any number of reasons.
I'm going to ask us to watch a fragment
of this astonishing
work, which was composed
as Chopin's meditation on
the bombardment of Warsaw,
in part because it gives us
attention to what the left hand is doing
in the playing of the piece.
Remember it's his right
hand that he has lost.
And so here's a short clip
from Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude"
as originally written for two hands,
played by Evgeny Kissin,
and here you'll observe that
what is going on in the hands
seems to be mapped onto
what is going on in the head
as you glimpse Kissin's
face now and again.
(upbeat music)
I always feel something of a cheat
for having sort of tried to
steal the glamor from Kissin
in the middle of a paper of mine.
Because Paul Wittgenstein was heir
to one of the largest fortunes in Europe,
he commissioned several
composers of his generation
to write works for the
left handed pianist.
These include works by Revelle, Hindemith,
Briton, Richard Strauss, and Precothiath.
None of these pieces ultimately
satisfied Wittgenstein.
It's difficult to tell
whether the work sounded too
much like they were performed
with one hand, or too
little as if they were.
This is profoundly complex
psychological terrain.
The artist is, as it were, passing.
He's caught between wanting
to seem a two handed virtuoso,
while he does not want the extremity
of his situation to be overlooked.
Nicolas McAfee has a
strong presence on YouTube,
and his performances of
Gadowski's arrangements
of Chopin is very instructive viewing.
Several years ago, I had a
conversation with Luis Magalesh,
a Portuguese South African pianist
who plays several works from
the one handed repertoire.
He indicated that in many ways,
the left handed compositions
are satisfying to play
because every pianist would
like to have two left hands.
As he explained, in the left hand,
the strongest digit, the thumb,
carries the melodic line.
While in the right hand,
this is done with the weakest
digit, the pinky finger.
So let me return then to the
youngest of the three brothers,
the philosopher, Ludwig.
Ludwig had been in Cambridge from 1911
studying philosophy with Bertrand Russell.
When the war broke out,
Ludwig was with his family in Austria,
and he tried to leave Austria for Norway.
But on being prevented from doing so,
he volunteered for civilian duties.
By August he had signed
up for military service
in the Austrian-Hungarian army.
Bertrand Russell back in Cambridge
was an earnest pacifist
opposed to conscription,
and was in fact dismissed
from Trinity College
following his conviction
under the Defense of
the Realm Act of 1914,
and went to prison for his
pacifism during the war.
He later described these processes in 1922
in his free thought and
official propaganda.
It was surely then something
of a puzzle for Russell
that Wittgenstein, his protege,
and someone whom he admired
with an almost total adoration,
had signed up to fight for Austria.
While Ludwig was manning an
anti aircraft search light
on a gunboat near Krakow,
his diaries record
that he was reading
Nietzsche's "Antichrist."
Promoted to lieutenant,
Ludwig was sent to the Italian front,
where he was captured and
spent the end of the war
as a prisoner, apparently
writing up the notes
of his early major work, the "Tractatus."
This work has disquieted
generations of readers
largely because of its enigmatic
forms and unlikely idioms,
and that do not adhere to
known philosophical procedures.
Badiou has classified him as
one of the antiphilosophers,
along with Nietzsche,
Lacan, and Saint Paul.
While Ludwig was engaged in
war on the Austrian front,
his dear companion, David Hume Pinsent,
incidentally named after
Pinsent's celebrated ancestor,
the skeptical philosopher, David Hume,
had gone to fly test planes
in England at Farnborough.
A biplane bomber which Pinsent was flying
spontaneously ripped into five pieces,
killing Pinsent and his copilot.
No trace of Pinsent's
body was ever recovered,
despite a presumably extraordinary
search by 1200 soldiers
and the dragging of the canal.
Wittgenstein was desolate at the death,
and three years later,
dedicated his philosophical
Tractatus to him.
The Tractatus swerves
between contesting idioms
for representation, at times activating
(speaking in foreign language).
Wittgenstein also uses the term
(speaking in foreign language),
to mean, to stand for,
to signify, for the ways in which a name
refers to an object and for
the way in which philosophy
obliquely indicates the unsayable.
Wittgenstein demonstrates a
quite extraordinary apprehension
of the complex ordering of worlds
that are simultaneously active.
He notes that, quote, the
description of a wish is
the description of its fulfillment.
This suggests that the material world
and its representations
are mutually entangled.
And here I allude expressly to that term
in order to remember that
entanglement is a concept
within a philosophical tradition
arising from the community of ideas
associated with quantum theory
and the uncertainty principle
in the years after the war.
In a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein,
Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen,
a paradox was described,
known as the EPR paradox,
named after the three surnames.
That sought to demonstrate that pairs
or groups of particles at times
behave in such a way that
they cannot be described
independent from one another,
even at times when the particles
are some distance apart.
This is the basis of quantum mechanics.
A property can thus be acted upon
by something related to
it, even if not visible
from a particular point of view.
The scientists attested to this
even while considering
it to be impossible.
Einstein referred to it as
spooky action at a distance.
Erwin Schrodinger subsequently
wrote several papers
in which he examined these propositions
and referred to entanglement to explain
that a perception that is
mine is not always true,
that in fact, my observations
are necessarily influencing
what it is that I'm able to observe.
In other words, he
challenges what is known
as the local realist view of the world,
such as Moore had committed himself to.
The common sense horizons of personhood
are by convention
associated with the skin,
which is its threshold.
That assertion of course understates
what we also know about the ways in which
sensory information penetrates
us in an endless riot
of oral, visual, and
olfactory information,
as sensory thrills or
revulsions from outside
strike us to the core.
Freud was increasingly
aware of this contradiction.
Similarly, Freud notes the ways
in which material extensions of the self
have a prosthetic function,
projecting one's body beyond the skin.
In his meta psychological supplement
to the theory of dreams, he notes,
we are not in the habit
of devoting much thought
to the fact that every night,
human beings lay aside the wrappings
in which they have enveloped their skin,
as well as anything which
they may use as a supplement
to their bodily organs,
so far as they have
succeeded in making good use
of those organs
deficiencies by substitutes.
For instance, their spectacles,
their false hair and teeth, and so on.
I'm going to show you
several images of prostheses.
The first two melancholy images
are early facial prostheses
from the First World War,
used to conceal shattered bone and flesh.
And such cases were integral
to Freud's meditations on trauma.
The third image is of the oral prostheses
that Freud had to wear
once the cancer had begun
eating away inside his mouth.
Only his daughter Anna
was allowed to help him
with the grim task of managing these.
Okay, so let's return, then,
to Wittgenstein's paper, "On Certainty."
The philosopher distinguishes
between facts which we know
that can and must be subjected
to verification and testing,
and those things of which we are certain,
and which maintain the conditions
necessary for existence
and in which we believe.
These certainties are propositions
for which the principle
of testing makes no sense.
Wittgenstein's first words in
the text "On Certainty" are,
if I do know that here is one hand,
we'll grant you all the rest.
And he follows this up with,
now, do I in the course of my life
make sure I know that here is a hand,
my own hand, that is.
This is at one level a
direct response to Moore,
yet how uncanny these lines become
in light of the narrative disclosure
of the family catastrophe.
If any of you are prompted
to read Wittgenstein
"On Certainty" after hearing this paper,
you'll be astonished to discover
how often the philosopher
returns to the hand as
his exemplary question.
For example,
if I don't know whether
someone has two hands,
say whether they've been amputated or not,
I shall believe his assurance
that he has two hands
if he is trustworthy.
Or, the idealist's questions
would be something like,
what right have I not to doubt,
what right have I not to doubt
the existence of my hands?
Or, upon I know that here is my hand,
they may follow the
question, how do I know?
And the answer to that
presupposes that this can be known
in that way.
So instead of, I know
that here is my hand,
one might say, here is my hand.
And then add, how one knows.
I know that I am feeling pain.
I know that I feel it here is as wrong as
I know that I'm in pain,
but I know where you
touched my arm is right.
Late in the collection he notes,
there are countless general
empirical propositions
that count as certain for us.
One such is that if
someone's arm is cut off,
it will not grow again.
Another, if someone's head is cut off,
he is dead and will never live again.
Experience can be said to
teach us these propositions.
However, it does not teach
us them in isolation.
Rather, it teaches us a host
of interdependent propositions.
If they were isolated, I
might perhaps doubt them,
for I have no experience relating to them.
And then, I, L. W., believe, am sure,
that my friend hasn't sawdust
in his body or in his head,
even though I have no direct evidence
of my senses to the contrary.
I've worked for some years
with Handspring Puppet Company,
the makers of the puppets for "War Horse,"
and aware how readily we embrace
the liveness of the fabricated body,
that friend that has sawdust in his body.
The boundaries of persons
have been profoundly altered
through a vast range of
material interventions
such as transplant,
and biotechnical interventions
such as pacemakers.
The instances are exponentially
amplified in range
and number if we consider
also the metaphysics
of recent physics and the
explosion of photography,
telegraphy, and digital duplication.
Such meditations at the
level of the abstract
and general have ceased to amaze us.
Wittgenstein's early great love,
David Hume Pinsent was, as I have noted,
a descendant of the Scottish philosopher
for whom he is named, David Hume.
The original, from whom Pinsent
was a transgenerational
copy, had suggested
that there was only an internal
claim about the external.
And a quote from Hume,
"What causes induce us
"to believe in the existence of body?"
He posed the query, "Why do we attribute
"a continued existence to objects
"even when they are not
present to the senses?"
This is very much the sort of question
addressed by Wittgenstein,
perhaps these Humean questions
had been shared by the
two men at Cambridge
before David disappeared
literally without a trace.
After the war, Ludwig's brother Paul,
for whom money was no object,
commissioned a spectrum of
the era's great composers
to write works for the
left handed piano player.
Korngold is the first, Ravel, Prokofiev,
Hindemith, Briton, and Strauss
all received commissions, as I note.
Generally, he wasn't happy with these.
And once again, I'm going to take our mind
back to the question of passing.
Piano playing is, for Paul, role playing.
And in the 20th century Vienna,
the role had become a
question of life and death.
Paul is, in all likelihood,
named at least in some measure
after the most famous
converso in western history,
Saint Paul, one of
Badiou's antiphilosophers.
What's in a name?
The Wittgenstein grandfather,
Hermann Charles, had converted.
Why is it that a family
with Jewish ancestry
that has assimilated through marriage
into a Catholic Viennese aristocracy
would manifest a conspicuous trace
in the name of the converso Paul,
that seems to declare that
the family is passing?
Originally known as Saul of Tarsus,
Saint Paul was a Jew
and also a Roman citizen
who spent his early career as
a persecutor of Christians.
In chapter nine of the Book
of Acts in the New Testament,
there's an account of Saul's conversion.
He's on the road to Damascus
when he is thrown to the ground
by a burst of sunlight which accompanies
a great voice which demands to know,
why persecutus thou me?
We must imagine.
Paul is rendered helpless, blind,
and is effectively
without sensory stimulus.
We are told that he neither ate nor drank
during this traumatic period.
When he finally came back
to himself, so to speak,
he was no longer himself,
he'd become his enemy.
Paul became the rock
upon which the Christian
church was founded.
Declared that henceforth there
was neither Greek nor Jew,
and asserted that
circumcision should cease,
and that henceforth, all circumcision
should be circumcision in
the soul, not in the flesh.
By the way, if you search the internet now
for images of the road to Damascus,
as I did several months ago,
you'll be given some
insight into the catastrophe
that is ongoing now in contemporary Syria.
There are one or two images
of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
but the whole is overwhelmed
by appalling scenes
of parents wailing in
the shattered streets
with the sundered corpses
of infants in their arms,
with walls of fire around them.
Paul Wittgenstein in the
1930s was a one armed pianist
who now could no longer move
through his beloved Vienna
because of the signs declaring
(speaking in foreign language).
He tried at first to get
assurances that the family would,
as good assimilated citizens,
be treated as Aryans.
Paul was astonished to discover
that the family was not secure.
"We count as Jews" was his cry
on reading the Nazi legislation
on genealogy and race.
He antagonized several family members
by trying to negotiate with the Nazis,
offering to pay for their rehabilitation
within German culture.
Ultimately he fled to New York
at the start of the Angelus.
Decades later, and a
world away in New York,
Erna Otten wrote to Oliver Sacks
of her youthful encounter with
Paul as her piano teacher.
We are reminded again of the
extraordinary entanglement
of mind and flesh through
her recollections of Paul.
And I quote, "As a very young student
"of the Viennese pianist,
Paul Wittgenstein,
"I had many occasions to see how involved
"his right stump was whenever
he went over the fingering
"of a new composition.
"He told me many times that I should trust
"his choice of fingering
"because he felt every
finger in his right hand.
"At times I had to sit very quietly
"while he would close his eyes,
"and his stump would move
constantly in an agitated manner."
This was many years after
the loss of his arm.
As we know, Freud's meditations
in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
prompted a series of
subsequent considerations
on the fantasmatic,
the symptom and trauma.
Recent research involving what
are named as mirror neurons,
which are engaged to trick the mind
in order to persuade the self
of what it does not want to know,
In some cases, individuals
with persistent pain
caused by a phantom limb,
in other words, a limb which is not there
due to some kind of catastrophe,
can meaningfully be
treated through observing
the limb in a mirror so
that the subject observes
a mirror image of the existing limb
in the place where the missing
limb would cognitively exist.
And by sending a message to
that limb can fool the mind
into believing that a
non-existing limb has moved,
say, unclenching a phantom hand
that has been frozen in a
rictis for several years.
Enigmatically, the brain can unlearn
and relearn what it knows to be true.
And here's an interesting
set of considerations
that has come to my attention
through studying the left
handed concerto compositions.
Many of the pianists today
who plays such compositions
are two handed.
They've undertaken the
performances as virtuosic displays,
as well as expressive interpretations.
A few of them perform the
left handed Godowski studies
on Chopin's etudes as part
of their standard repertoire.
It's a demonstration of
left handed dexterity,
a left handed, or
sinister, right handedness.
There is another group of pianists
to engage with these compositions
and have both hands but are
functionally left handed.
These pianists are afflicted
with focal dystonia,
a neurological condition due
to the misfiring of neurons
in the sensory motor cortex,
the layer of neural
tissue covering the brain.
In such cases, the
prolonged and practiced use
of the hand in performance gives rise
to a distorted map of
the hand in the mind.
How do these emerging
neurological models of mind
with their metaphors of a map of the hand
that is located in the
sensory motor cortex
take us back to the dualistic
riddles of early modernity?
What is the hand at the end of my arm,
and how does that relate
to the hand in my mind?
I recently was made aware
of a curious commission
from Ludwig to a celebrated
Viennese puppeteer.
A fact that obviously was
of no small interest to me.
Richard Teschner had
studied art in Prague,
and having examined the
Javanese rod puppets
brought back to Europe by Dutch travelers,
he adapted these to engage with the tastes
of a European audience.
His public company, Figuren Spiegel,
showed a dualistic model
of the world of illusion,
he had a female figure
whose quite chalky face
transforms into a scowl,
and a gorilla whose lips retract
to bear the animal's fangs.
His engagement with the rod puppets
certainly had a significant impact
on the art form in the West.
What Wittgenstein commissioned from him
was a handheld looking glass.
This is from a photograph
in the Wittgenstein archive,
which is my only exposure to the object.
And it seems to be a convex glass
mounted on a carved handle.
The handle is covered in gnomish figures
in contorted shapes,
while the glass itself
has an image of a hyper modern
architectural design in it.
The incongruent pairing
of the brutish figures
and the austere modernity
captured in the glass
seem to refer to one another.
What might be implicit in this form?
Obviously, for Teschner,
the mirror and the
puppet are in a dialogue.
His theater is, after all,
named Figuren Spiegel, figure mirror.
Though of course, Spiegel
also catches rather nicely
the additional idea of games.
And Wittgenstein's even significant place,
sorry, only significant
place in theorizing
the language game comes to mind here.
It's evident that in some ways,
the image in the glass is resonant
with the celebrated Haus Wittgenstein,
commissioned by Ludwig's sister,
Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein,
from the architect, Paul Engelmann,
with the assistance of her brother
who focused with characteristically
exacting precision
on the design of the details.
Wittgenstein had as a young man
spent a period of voluntary
exile at Skoden in Norway,
where he described his ascetic lifestyle,
believing that renunciation
was a principle to pursue
in his drive toward the
ultimate goal of life.
Recently, while I was in Oslo
for a workshop on animism in Japan,
I became aware of what
seemed to have prompted
some elements of the
design for the handle.
This artifact is in the
Viking Museum in Oslo,
and is an example of what
is referred to as tlingit,
the decorative wood carving
associated with Viking culture.
This piece would have
decorated the area above
and behind the chief oarsmen
who handled the steering oar.
Something in this piece
must have resonated
with Wittgenstein sufficiently profoundly
for him to commission
Teschner to contrive a work
that incongruously brought together
the mirrored scene of the modernist house,
and the elusively primordial
emblem of Viking artifacture.
Perhaps we get a sense here
of the deeply contradictory
young philosopher
with clearly ascetic
tastes, who had been raised
in one of the most
affluent homes in Europe.
And here again is that
mirror for you to see.
And you'll note in
particular the large sort of
staring, bulging eyes in
those contorted figures.
And here, by contrast, is
the Wittgenstein family home
in which Ludwig and his
brothers had been raised.
After Rudi's death by
cyanide in the Viennese bar,
his father forbade the family
to ever mention his name.
This is a mode of magical thinking,
as if the person resides in
and is activated by its name.
Wittgenstein is acutely aware
of the magical properties
implicit in ordinary habits of thought.
I've suggested that his
conception of the certain
is more akin to belief than knowledge.
Another of his late papers,
"Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough,"
is destabilizing to read
because so counter intuitive,
his language ventriloquizes the idioms
of those he seeks to critique.
And here he mimics the
rhetoric of the Scotsman,
Sir James George Frazer, whose
work he addresses explicitly.
Wittgenstein's thoughts are
characteristically enigmatic
and epigrammatic in style.
He contemplates,
the same savage who apparently
in order to kill his enemy
sticks his knife through a picture of him
really does build his hut of wood
and cuts his arrow with
skill and not in effigy.
This compressed cluster
of thoughts compels us
to acknowledge that human
lives are composites
of complex and simultaneous
modes of analysis.
Wittgenstein asserts that
knowledge may well be grounded
in material culture and practical fact,
and yet are not inimical to
fancy, longing, imagination.
The instances described
above might seem remote
from the world view of
the Viennese philosopher,
but in the following passage,
he sketches a mysticism such
as he himself surely knows
as his life experience of profound
and multiple losses testifies.
And I quote, burning in effigy,
kissing the picture of one's beloved.
That is obviously not based on the belief
that it will have some
specific effect on the object
which the picture represents,
it aims at satisfaction and achieves it,
or rather, it aims at nothing at all.
We just behave this way
and then we feel satisfied.
The idea that one can beckon
a lifeless object to come
just as one would beckon a person.
In standard scholarship,
magical and scientific thinking
are often imagined as stations
on a teleological chain,
with science superseding magic.
Keith Thomas's magisterial
"Religion and the Decline of Magic"
examines the containment and
extinction of magical thinking
with the rise of new
Protestant orthodoxies,
which had to test and police
the boundaries between
true faith and heresy.
Miracles, in particular, he
suggests come under scrutiny.
The special place of the
miracle as a validation of faith
provides a valuable discursive chain
for anyone interested in exploring
the managing of contradictions
in the early modern era.
By 1919, Freud, in his
essay on the uncanny,
suggests that there is a
simultaneity of these mental habits.
The magical and the rationalist thinking,
and that this double vision
is what gives rise to the
feelings of the uncanny,
and here is his marvelous formulation.
As soon as something
actually happens in our lives
which seems to confirm
the old discarded beliefs,
we get a feeling of the uncanny.
It is as though we were making a judgment
something like this.
So, it's true, then,
you can kill another man
just by wishing him dead.
That the dead really do go on
living and manifest themselves
at the scene of their former activities.
In part because of my interest
in the counter intuitive arts
of puppetry and illusionism,
I have for some while
explored the Cartesian model
of the person from various perspectives.
Martin A. Mills in his paper,
"The Opposite of Witchcraft,"
considers the logic of material and agency
inherent in the Cartesian inheritance
where actions are embodied
and cannot arise purely from intention.
And here's a quote from that paper.
Of course the parameters
of intentional reality
for Descartes stretched at their furthest
to the tips of the fingers,
and maybe not even that.
Intention was bounded by extension.
What Mills is asserting here
is that in a rationalist understanding,
cause and effect are linked
through embodied action.
I could not just wish a man to be dead,
as in Freud's understanding.
The grim Wittgenstein family saga
has the brooding sense of
the inevitable that we know
from dramatic form.
Somehow, the excess of
the family narrative
is itself counter intuitive,
almost implausible.
The kind of fatal compulsion Freud notes
in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."
Ludwig had observed the
suicide of three brothers,
each of whom would in turn
have been a lost continent
in the family atlas.
He observed, too, the reparations ongoing
in his brother Paul, the pianist
who had lost a right arm.
I'm struck when I read "On Certainty"
at some of the melancholy speculations
about the unverifiability
of observed event.
It is haunted work.
So, for example, and I quote,
I know has a primitive meaning similar to,
and related to, I see.
(speaking in foreign language)
And I knew he was in the room,
but he wasn't in the room, is like,
I saw him in the room but he wasn't there.
I know is supposed to express a relation,
not between me and the
sense of a proposition like
I believe, but between me and a fact.
So that the fact is taken
into my consciousness.
Here is the reason why
one wants to say that
nothing that goes on in the
outer world is rarely known,
but only what happens in the domain
of what are called sense data.
In a notebook from 1917,
Wittgenstein writes of Dostoyevsky,
if suicide is allowed,
then everything is allowed.
If anything is not allowed,
then suicide is not allowed.
These thoughts are constructed
in the conditional tense,
as are the opening lines of
the "On Certainty" volume.
If you do know that here is one hand,
we'll grant you all the rest.
Such is the framing of a
question about certainty,
from a man who observed
the death of brothers
and the loss of his brother's hand.
Badiou considers this as illustrative
of Wittgenstein's confessional writing.
However, I think of it as a
kind of catastrophic writing
that is grounded in autobiographical fact,
yet which also works a shift
in philosophical thought,
pursuing the conceptual distinction
between knowledge and certainty.
William James in 1896
had delivered a paper to
the philosophical circle
of Yale and Brown universities.
That essay, "The Will to Believe,"
the author describes as, quote,
"Something like a sermon
on the justification
"of faith to read to you.
"I mean, an essay in
justification by faith,
"a defense of our right to
adopt a believing attitude
"in religious matters,
"in spite of the fact that
our merely logical intellect
"may not have been coerced.
"'The Will to Believe,' accordingly,
"is the title of my paper.
"I've long defended to my own students
"the lawfulness of
voluntary adopted faith.
"But as soon as they have got well imbued
"with the logical spirit,
they have as a rule
"refused to admit my contention
"to be lawful philosophically.
"Even though in point of fact,
"they were personally all the time
"chock full of some faith
or other themselves."
James's rather blithe comments
about voluntarism here
seem to miss the mark.
And this is where Wittgenstein's
insights are so powerful.
We do not choose between
knowledge and certainty.
In fact, we often cover the one operation
through the rhetorics
that pertain to the other.
Such is the complexity of mental habits
that knowing and believing operations
are perpetually intertwined and tangled.
They are both core habits of mind,
now reinforcing one another in processes
such as Altizer would call ideology,
or in observances through
which ritual and repetition
would make action possible.
Say, in such practices
as playing the piano,
even with two hands.
At times, as Freud locates
in his work on the uncanny,
we are given a glimpse of
the two standing side by side
as a shadow might mimic the object
or the object might mimic a shadow.
Quote, "I know that a
sick man is lying here.
"Nonsense.
"I'm sitting at his bedside.
"I'm looking attentively into his face.
"So I don't know, then, that
a sick man is lying here.
"Neither the question nor
the assertion makes sense."
Wittgenstein's
considerations suggest to me
that artificial intelligence
does not approach
the complexity of mind until it can engage
with a simultaneity of
knowing and believing.
Before concluding, and
these are my last comments,
I'd like to return briefly
to the idea of passing,
which I've referred to earlier.
Wittgenstein in "On Certainty" notes,
that I am a man and not
a woman can be verified.
But if I were to say I was a woman,
and then try to explain the error
by saying I hadn't checked the statement,
the explanation would not be accepted.
That rather enigmatic
meditation calls to mind
the Turing test, in which Paul Turing,
the British mathematical
genius responsible
for breaking the code of
the Nazi Enigma machine,
is seeking a way of identifying human
from artificial intelligence.
He posits the version
of an old parlor game,
the imitation game, in which a man,
player A, and a woman, player B,
are positioned in separate
rooms, each with a typewriter.
In the original version,
they are asked a series of questions,
and both try to convince their audience
that each is the other.
In Turing's alternative
version, player A is a machine,
and the interrogator is to test
which player is the machine.
And that paper was
published in Mind in 1950.
Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures
on the foundations of mathematics in 1939.
From the archive of these events,
it seems that the two men disagreed
on a fundamental question.
Wittgenstein was in favor
of tolerating contradiction
within mathematics.
Turing argued against
Wittgenstein about contradiction,
positing that the toleration
of a contradiction
would in application lead
to the collapse of bridges.
I recall to mind here
my considerations above
on the Wittgenstein family and passing,
while I have suggested
that the Teschner mirror
commissioned by Wittgenstein is suggestive
of a profound sense of a
contradictory understanding
of semblance and reality.
Turing died of cyanide poisoning in 1952.
Ludwig's brother Rudi had killed himself
by taking cyanide in a Viennese bar.
Turing had been convicted
of acts of gross indecency and sodomy.
Wittgenstein, in "On Certainty,"
invokes the law court
as the exemplary context
in which I am certain could replace I know
in every piece of testimony.
(audience applauding)
- [Audience Member] When
reading the announcement,
I was wondering if you
were going to go to the,
I believe Breitbart,
take off on, I think
it's deconstructionism
about the relativity of truth.
And I think you hinged
on the predecessors,
but if you can,
I don't know if it's Foucault,
I'm a just a physicist, so.
- I've got a mic here,
I think I can be heard.
So, I mean, I think that
part of what this set of puzzling around
a radical understanding of relativism
has precipitated a deep anxiety,
and we are now having
to come to terms with
a kind of reckoning and
understanding of the implications
of our kind of philosophical skepticism,
because we are trapped in a logic
where someone is asserting
that there are no facts.
And that puts us in an
extremely precarious
situation politically,
but I don't think that
we can allow that kind of
bad faith appropriation of
a philosophical complexity
allow us to retreat from the
philosophical complexity.
I think we need to find a way of engaging
in a direct and meaningful way,
the fact that we now apprehend
the profundity of meaning
and the fact that we are
in this condition in which we,
there are facts to be known,
there are faiths and
beliefs which we hold,
and there have always been
systems of interrogation
of those as separate spheres.
So I mean, I absolutely take the anxiety,
and I know that this is
very difficult thinking
that we have to do,
because we have to come
to terms with the fact
that people will violate the contract
of generous and meaningful thought.
- [Eileen] My name is
Eileen, and I'm an alumni,
and I was an English major,
and I ended up being a drama therapist.
I was just interested
in the talk you gave,
I always wanted to read Wittgenstein,
but I was always afraid to
because I figured I
wouldn't understand him.
So I was following along
as best I could here,
and so much of it seemed to be about
this liminal space that we're in around,
at least, as I was hearing,
the fact that he was
a Jew who wasn't a Jew,
and he talked about,
you had at the very end there said,
because once a Jew, you're
always a Jew kind of
in the way these things are thought of.
And then he said that, but if
I was to say I was a woman,
but if I was to say, I
am a man and not a woman,
but then if I was to say I was a woman,
and that would not be accepted,
I didn't know the exact line,
but what it seemed to suggest
was how coded everything
is in the fact that
people are Jewish but
not really allowed to be,
people are homosexual then,
but it wasn't really
talked of in good company,
and you could lose your
life for being Jewish,
you could lose your life
for being homosexual.
And then you said something
about suicide is either,
could you go back to that piece?
- Yeah, he says basically
that if everything is allowed,
then suicide is allowed,
and if anything is not allowed,
then suicide is not allowed.
So the work is very complex,
because Wittgenstein is
always thinking about things
that he is profoundly
committed to interrogating.
Very often, philosophy
kind of detaches itself
from the active, affective
arena of the thinker,
and it loses itself in a
kind of cerebral bliss.
But Wittgenstein always
seems to be drained back into
trying to explain his knowable universe.
His philosophy for him is in
a very profound way, I think,
an act of trying to console himself
for the misery of his condition.
So one always feels a kind of a surcharge
of emotional meaning.
And so when he makes these
observations about suicide,
yes, they are intellectual reflections,
but they're also trying to understand
in what condition are
my siblings now placed?
And of course he's asking
it about himself, too,
because he would very often
profoundly despairing,
and there was kind of proliferation
of suicides in Vienna,
and what would have
persuaded him to stay alive?
What is that kind of threshold?
And I think the fact
that he was so interested
in asking questions that he stayed inside
the business of asking questions
and didn't foreclose
the question to himself.
- [Eileen] But didn't he die young?
- Yes, he died of prostate
cancer, though, yeah.
- [Audience Member]
Thank you for the talk,
it was so exciting and provocative.
I was wondering about
the idea of humiliation,
which seems kind of adjacent to the topics
that you're covering.
Along the lines of the prosthetics,
the potential exposure of
Jewishness and homosexuality.
But I was wondering about if
you had any thoughts about
how it related to certainty,
because it seems like exposure
is not the same as knowledge.
And I was just wondering your
thoughts in general on this.
- Gosh, that's a very rich
and interesting thing to think with,
because he quite clearly is demonstrating
that knowing something
can't be taken at face value.
So I think your suggestion there
that one needs to have a kind
of an asymmetrical pairing
between certainty and
humiliation and knowing,
that there's something
very interesting in that,
the deflection of that one
question into the other.
And I think particularly if
one looks at the case of Paul,
the anxiety about being exposed
is something obviously that
Ludwig and his brothers,
they spent their whole lives,
the father was an incredibly vehement man,
and they lived inside the
vehemence of a father,
and they obviously lived in
a kind of fugitive relation
to themselves because of the
absolute law of the father.
So I think all of that set off,
in the most intimate of spaces,
inside the family arena,
that's probably the place where we do
the most creative work
of misrepresentation.
(audience laughing)
And that's a really
horrifying thing to realize,
that it's in our most intimate space
that we are least candid.
Much easier to dissemble
who you are in an elsewhere.
But in that kind of grounded place,
that's where we learn so brilliantly
and achieve so brilliantly to be liars.
Absolutely.
And it's marvelous for me,
the willingness with which
we will deceive ourselves.
- [Audience Member] Hi
there, thank you so much.
I have a question which
maybe takes us a little bit
slightly beyond what you
talked about explicitly,
but which has to do with the
productive contradictions
of a theatrical experience.
In the way that, so I'm a theater maker,
and when I think about
writing or producing theater,
there's this constant
contradiction between,
you have people on stage,
they're simultaneously actors,
and they are their real selves.
And with something like puppetry,
that's even more pronounced,
you have these materials
that everybody knows are
materials, filled with sawdust.
And we also are meant to
believe and want to believe,
and believe they are real in some way.
And so I wonder if there's
something from your experiences
making theater that has, you know,
like with the cross pollination
between those experiences
and some of these academic
ideas, how that works for you.
- I mean, I think that's very
thrilling and complex terrain,
and I sort of nibble around
the edges of it all the time.
Particularly with puppetry,
one understands that there is
all witnesses, all observers
of a puppet performance
are watching themselves, observing
something that they know
has no cognitive capacity,
has no internal world.
Knows absolutely that anything
that appears to emanate
from that device is being
projected from an outside.
So I think there must be
something enormously profound
in the way that we are constructed,
that we apprehend from the get go
that we are receivers.
I think that we have been, in a way,
one of the reasons why we embrace
the puppet so meaningfully
is that the human infant
is effectively a puppet.
It has no mode of self expression,
it has no capacity to
reciprocate in the world,
it's just a little bundle
of sticks and cloth
that lies in a corner on the floor,
until it gets caught in
that projective relation
with its puppeteer.
And the adult responds to that little one,
and that little one in
turn responds to the adult.
So, oh, you clever child,
and the child then gurgles
and ooh's and realizes
that that gets a degree
of affirmation, and that goes
back into the child and so on.
So there's a kind of a circuit.
And this is the only way that
our species reproduces itself.
The animal in us can
cope with other things,
but there's something
about the human being
that is constituted by
that dialogical circuit.
So I think that we are actually hardwired
to believe in puppets
because our species
can't exist without it.
And I think the same
process happens with actors,
that we are aware that,
and this is extremely subterranean,
when you have a live performer there,
you don't have to be as
attentive to the fact
of you're being duped.
Because you can always
believe that the impulse
is being generated
spontaneously and suggestively
from inside the actor,
even though we know,
because we observe puppetry,
that it's come from elsewhere,
it comes from the outside.
So I think that these are
all kind of allegories
of one another, and I think it is really
constitutive of the human species.
- [Audience Member] And it's also as if.
- Exactly, yeah.
I've written a paper on the as
if world of puppetry theater.
As if.
We live in that provisional,
knowing and not knowing at the same time.
- [Audience Member] Hi, thank you--
- Where are you?
- [Audience Member]
Thank you for the talk.
- Disembodied.
- Exactly, hi, there you are.
- [Audience Member] Hi, I'm a PhD student
in genetics here at UC Berkeley.
And my question was more related on
what would be the views of Wittgenstein on
the certainty of scientific facts
that have experimentation
and discussion behind?
But we always have to keep in mind that
nevertheless they might be wrong.
How can I fit this idea into
this duriance of knowledge and certainty?
- Well, it is interesting
because Wittgenstein
started out as an engineer,
and he designed an
aircraft engine and so on.
And he went to Cambridge
specifically to work with Russell
because he wanted to work on mathematics.
So there is something
in him that is impelled
in a real commitment to that kind of,
the intellectual discipline
of a kind of scientific
mathematical inquiry.
But I think that the more
that he immerses himself
in that and he keeps on
reframing the question
that he's asking, because
there's a sort of a surplus
and a residue of a world
that's not addressed by that paradigm.
So I think that this is a
problem for Wittgenstein,
and I think he varies, even though
at a certain point he decides
to stay in philosophy,
but inside philosophy he
changes careers in a way.
So I think he changes
careers a number of times
trying to find an instrument
that will be able to address
the unforgiving relentlessness
of his attempt to find
a truth for himself.
- [Audience Member] Changed
his careers from what to what?
- Well, from an engineer to a philosopher,
and then he comes to the
first model of philosophy
to the second model of philosophy.
And I think in a way that the uncertainty,
the moment of writing "On Certainty"
is almost a third model of philosophy
where belief is something
that he begins to talk about,
although he doesn't call it
belief, I think that they're--
- [Audience Member]
And what were the names
of the first two models?
- So the first model is a
kind of a picture theory
of language, where he
thinks that the world
is in a kind of reciprocal relation
to the description of the world.
And then he decides that's inadequate
to understand what's going on,
and then he just decides
to use a kind of a
language game in which everyone who is
inside a specific set
of codes will apprehend
the way of representing the world.
But you have to be inside the game,
you have to be a rule player
in order to understand what's going on.
And then I think in this last,
kind of as he's in decline
and reinterpreting the world,
he has this much more
metaphysical understanding.
- [Audience Member] I've found
this notion of catastrophic
writing that you set up as
kind of opposed to the
non-philosophy epithet.
Fascinating, and there's
something I wanted,
what I found strike, or
what I always find striking
with Wittgenstein trying
to read with concern,
I must say, not really ever succeeding,
are these exemplary scenes that he builds.
He moves through these scenes,
and you connected this
catastrophic writing to
the simultaneity of knowledge
and belief or certainty.
Now, I just wanted to hear you--
- Damn!
- [Audience Member] More
about that how you see that
as kind of playing through
these exemplary scenes
that he builds, what replaces the image,
but it's another thing,
you could also call it,
it's the language games as
they're performed by him
in a somewhat experimental
way time and again.
- It's very complex and kind
of addictive to think about
what this mind is and
what mind is generally.
A rather frivolous response is to
recollect that for Wittgenstein,
probably his greatest
pleasure was to go to
see Western movies.
He loved to lose himself in this kind of
easeful, playful terrain, where everything
would be mapped out and
you would apprehend,
but I think part of what is vexing for him
is that he has to constantly wrestle
with a circumstance in which
the inputs and the outputs
are asymmetrical with one another,
and one doesn't know
where the narrative form
is leading and so on, so I think
that even though he takes his release
from those sorts of dimensions,
that's what why I like, in a way,
the idea of the Buster Keaton figure
who's constantly operationalizing a world
that he knows is going to
betray him, but that's not
going to stop him
operationalizing that world.
So he sets things in place
knowing that that's only
always going to confound him,
and he's setting up the
terms of his own betrayal.
But that's not going to stop him doing it.
None of that even begins
to get at the question.
- [Audience Member]
Fascinating that then this
moment of abandonment is like enacting
the receiving aspect that
you emphasized at the end,
time and again.
I would have to go back
to these exemplary things,
and I found also fascinating
that there is something
just for me to, who has
been unable to understand
with consent, really,
there is this haunted,
this haunted, it gives me a different take
on the reading of these scenes.
- I'm wary of reading the
Wittgenstein philosophy
as if it's the equivalent of
biography or autobiography,
or if one can explain Wittgenstein
and his incredible complexity of thought
by understanding his
world place in Vienna,
and the catastrophe of the family romance.
I don't think those things
are symmetrical to one another,
and I don't think one solves
Wittgenstein's philosophy
by getting Wittgenstein life.
So I'm very cautious of not doing that,
but I'm trying to think about how these,
the profundity of this, most of us live
in a kind of split way with
those as separate spheres.
What's so profoundly
moving about Wittgenstein
is that he can't separate those fears,
and that may have to do
with him being in a kind of
particular kind of psychic condition,
that the way that he
lives and has his being
is the way that he represents
the living of that being,
and he's aware of both of
those things all the time.
That there's an insider
outsiderness in Wittgenstein.
And that's why I think these
paradigms of the puppet
and so on and why when
he commissioned something
from Teschner, he commissions a mirror
which has this kind of hyper modernist
and this incredible primitive formulation
that are holding each other in place.
I think it's that thinking
inside and outside the system
simultaneously that's so
compelling in the work.
Yeah.
- [Audience Member] Along these lines,
and that's so interesting, I think of
the mirror on the one hand,
and then I think of the villa
that he worked so hard on,
and his father's villa on the other,
which is a super fluidity and a profusion
of kind of hyper civilized meaning,
compared to the kind of pared down, spare
modernism of the building
that he helped to create.
But that's not what I was gonna ask about,
I was gonna ask about,
you started by talking
about, I mean, obviously,
he wrote an essay on
certainty, and you're writing,
you're giving a talk on "On Certainty".
And you talked about the I
know versus I thought I knew,
which is a more--
- Which is a marvelous observation,
that we forget the I knew
we would forget about.
What that sentence actually
means is I thought I knew.
- [Audience Member] Right, right, right.
And so I'm curious, 'cause
you say that he was moving,
he didn't use the word
believe in his book,
in his essay.
- Right.
- [Audience Member] But
you're pointing at it.
And I'm wondering if you
could loop back to that
initial phrasing of,
I know versus I thought I knew,
and that concept of belief.
- Well, let's see if we
can find it on the screen,
and we can think this together.
And it's quite interesting
just to skim back
through these images and hold all of these
different dimensions in
place at the same time.
There's so many different key
signifiers in that sentence,
for I know seems to,
all these prevarications.
It doesn't describe, for
I know seems to describe
a state of affairs which
guarantees what is known.
All of these are such freighted terms
that there's such a kind of resonance
in each moment in the formulation.
Guarantees what is known,
guarantees it as a fact.
So knowing and facticity,
those things are not absolutely
equivalent to one another
because he has to say them both.
And then this rather marvelous,
one always forgets the
expression, I thought I knew.
And I think that's all
too little used in life,
because the certitude
is what one has to have
in order to act.
And so there's the hesitation.
One thinks of Hamlet or someone like that,
that one can only ever be in the condition
of thinking that you knew.
Because on what you found
the fact that you knew,
there is always only
the, I thought I knew.
And it's something that we as a species
are very reluctant to
embrace about ourselves.
- [Audience Member] Perhaps we
have done that all the time.
- Absolutely, yeah.
- [Audience Member] Why
isn't it, I think I know?
- One always forgets
the expression, I think.
Well, I think in this moment,
he's looking back on past
behaviors, he's saying--
- [Audience Member] So
he was disappointed?
- I think that's conditional love is being
from beginning to end.
- So there's two things.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- [Audience Member] Reflexiveness
and then as a mistake.
- Yes.
- [Audience Member] So why
doesn't he channel them
independently, do they come
together, are they linked?
- This is a very late essay,
these are in the last months of his life,
and he didn't actually
put this together himself,
these are kind of thoughts and meditations
that his students then
cohere together as a volume
and try to precipitate something
that's a coherent argument
across what were the
meditations of an ailing man.
So these are all kind of
fragmentary considerations.
So I think that there's
something of the nature of that,
the constellation of a
self that is foundering
through holding onto a little lozenge
rather than formulating an argument.
- I think it's a moment, again,
to thank Professor Taylor.
- Thank you very much, everyone.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)
