A deed Without a Name

33^ In the book on the philosophy of acting already quoted in connection with Macbeth above, Tzachi Zamir gives a very nuanced analysis of how our everyday lives and acting are related, emphasising that acting is “existential amplification”, cf. especially Zamir 2014: 215-218.

34^ There are explicit references to Kierkegaard in what has become known as Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1980: 36, 37, 43, 61). Other references – from conversations, letter, etc. – are collected in Creegan (1997: 16-21) (http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/ccreegan/wk/, reached 31 May, 2015).

35^ Cf. another well-known dictum of Wittgenstein’s: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (PI, §123). To this latter remark, Cavell attaches the following note: “I am naturally attracted by the implication of the German here – Ich kenne mich nicht aus – that the issue here is one of a loss of self-knowledge; of being, so to speak, at a loss” (Cavell 1989: 36). The need for acknowledging the loss and, hence, the urgency of mourning, may lead to finding a way out (“Now I know how to go on” – PI § 151, §179) by becoming responsible for one’s words, for one’s language.

36^ See especially Gibson and Huemer 2004, Hagberg 1994; 1995; 2008, Johannessen and Nordenstam 1981, Lewis 2004, Tilghman 2006, Arbo and Le Du and Plaud (2012).

37^ This is true of Wittgenstein’s wider philosophical impact as well: “Ludwig Wittgenstein was once a towering figure in the philosophy of our time” – Lars Herzberg aptly writes about “the marginalisation” of Wittgenstein. “For non-professionals with an interest in philosophy, this is still true. Among professional philosophers, however, his stature today seems radically diminished. Even though a great deal of what would appear to be original work is carried out along lines inspired by him, it is hardly noted by philosophers of a different bent of mind.” (Lars Hertzberg 2006: 82). There are excellent Wittgenstein-scholars and commentators explaining, besides exegeses, the significance of Wittgenstein both for the Analytic (Anglo-Saxon) and the Continental (German-French) tradition, yet very little (only rather such “catch-words/phrases” as “truth table”, or “language-game”) has organically been absorbed and got into vitalising philosophical circulation, especially if one compares Wittgenstein’s influence to that of Quine or Davidson, Husserl or Derrida. See further, for a useful overview of the most influential and diverse voices in the Wittgenstein-reception of our day, the “Introduction” of Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä in Pichler and Säätelä 2006: 13-71.

38^ In the past thirty years, this topic – owing a lot especially to Deconstruction – has provoked not only intense debates but some comprehensive overviews as well, I just mention the book to which my indebtedness in the present Chapter is the greatest: Skilleås (2001).

39^ Plato himself puns on the word poiein in the 10^th Book of the Republic (Plato 1997: 1202) when he says that the painter, the carpenter, etc., belong to the class of makers (cf. 596e). I give the traditional Henri Estienne (Stephanus)-numbers and letters to refer to the works of Plato.

40^ An alternative translation of the most famous lines – by Paul Shorey – goes like this: “And let us further say to her [to Poetry] that, lest she condemn us for harshness and rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry. For such expressions as ‘the yelping hound barking at his master and mighty in the idle babble of fools,’ and ‘the mob that masters those who are too wise for their own good’, and the subtle thinkers who reason that after all they are poor, and countless others are tokens of this ancient enmity” (Plato 1982: 832). All editions note that the lines Socrates quotes (“the dog yelping…” etc.) are most probably from philosophers attacking Homer long before Plato’s time but the exact sources have not been identified.

41^ A. E. Taylor, in one of the most important classic studies in English on Plato, also insists that Socrates in Book 2 of the Republic “is seriously proposing to censure just what we consider the imperishable contributions of Athens to the art and literature of the world, because he holds that they have tendencies which are unfavourable to the highest development of moral personality. [...] We shall not appreciate his position unless we understand quite clearly that he is in downright earnest with the consideration that the connexion between aesthetic taste and morality is so close that whatever tends to ennoble our aesthetic taste directly tends to elevate our character, and whatever tends to foster a “taste” for the debased in art tends equally to deprave a man’s whole moral being.” Taylor argues that the moral goodness in Plato is “indistinguishable from knowledge”, the latter being the highest goal humans may aspire to reach (Taylor 1936: 279-281).

42^ “Thus the dialogues are to be read as fragments of Plato’s philosophy with a propensity to encourage the reader and at the same time to point beyond themselves. But the form must be regarded as essential for the content. The dialogues are thus to be read as dramas: as plays with a continuous plot and a carefully thought-out constellation of characters. Again and again the plot shows that philosophical instruction is not randomly available, ready like wares for any purchaser, but is imparted only in accordance with the intellectual and moral maturity of the recipient; the plot shows, second, that, for raising the level of argumentation in the sequence of ‘cases of support’, and thus for passing the philosophers’ test, only one figure is competent, namely the representative of the philosophy of Ideas” (Szlezák 1999: 88). Rudolph H. Weingartner (1973: 4) even recalls John Keat’s “negative capability” and draws a parallels between the Platonic dialogue and Hamlet.

43^ Such a view is voiced early on by no lesser a philosopher and an orator as Cicero: “The sceptical Academy is called the New Academy, but it seems to me we can also call it the Old Academy, if we ascribe Plato to the New as well as the Old Academy. In his works nothing is stated firmly, and there are many arguments on both sides of a question. Everything is subject to enquiry, and nothing is stated as certain”, (qtd. in a Annas 2003: 36).

44^ The debate is, of course, on the extent of ‘self-deconstruction’ but, more importantly, to what extent a reader of Plato can utilize the knowledge, while reading him, that he is a dramatic, ironic, detached, perspectival author, sometimes maybe elusive. Where does one go with that knowledge and what consequences does she draw from it? (see further Annas 2003: 25-31). For a view that within the oeuvre of Plato and among the ‘many voices’ he uses there are basically two forceful but always conflicting ones, the voice of the ‘scientist’ with affirmations and solid logical reasoning, followed later by Aristotle especially, and the voice of the more ‘poetic’ sceptic, see Hare 1982: 26-29.

45^ The quotation is from “Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations”. Here Cavell presents his lecture-notes in italic type (from the beginning of the quotation to “to defeat skepticism”), his later afterthoughts in upright type. In my quotation above I have omitted this distinction, since they have real significance only in a larger context.

46^ With respect to Schelling, I have especially the following passages in mind: “If aesthetic intuition is merely transcendental intuition become objective, it is self-evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, here burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder and in life and action no less than in thought, must forever fly apart” (Schelling 1978: 231).

“But now if it is art alone which can succeed in objectifying with universal validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion, there is one more conclusion yet to be drawn. Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with all those sciences it was guided toward perfection; we may thus expect them, on completion, to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source” (232).

“Philosophy attains, indeed, to the highest, but it brings to this summit only, so to say, the fraction of man. Art brings the whole man, as he is to that point, namely to a knowledge of the highest, and this is what underlies the eternal difference and the marvel of art” (233).

Schelling’s views on the supremacy of drama and tragedy, among the three traditional literary genres (and, we might add, among all other forms of art), are also worth quoting:

“There is only one possible portrayal in which what is portrayed is just as objective as in the epic poem, and yet in which the subject is just as moved as in the lyric poem. It is that mode in which the action is not portrayed in the narrative, but rather is itself actually presented (the subjective is portrayed objectively). The presupposed genre that should be the final synthesis of all poesy is thus drama” (Schelling 1989: 250).

“... drama as such can emerge only from a genuine and actual conflict between freedom and necessity, difference and indifference. This says nothing, admittedly, concerning on which side freedom, and on which side necessity resides. The original an absolute manifestation of this conflict, however, is that in which necessity is the objective, freedom the subjective element. This is the state of affairs in tragedy. Tragedy is the first form, comedy the second, since it arises as a result of a mere reversal of tragedy” (Schelling 1989: 251).

47^ Literature on Deconstruction is (or, rather, especially in the 1980s, was) endless, here I only refer to Culler (1981).

48^ The classics of speech-act theory are, of course, J. L. Austin and John Searle, see especially Austin (1962) and Searle (1969).

49^ The Tractatus even considers, from one point of view, itself to be a failure: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them” (6.54). This paragraph will come up in this book several times.

50^ Wittgenstein, having studied engineering (“aviation” or “aeronautics”) in Manchester, and having read Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, almost burst into Russell’s room in Trinity College, Cambridge, England in the afternoon of the 18^th of October, 1911. Since it seems that Wittgenstein made no prior arrangements with Professor Russell – in fact Russell was in the middle of having tea with C. K. Ogden, who eventually became the first translator of the Tractatus – we do not know why Wittgenstein chose that day. It was a Wednesday and the Michaelmas term in Cambridge had already been running for almost two weeks. Wittgenstein started to attend Russell’s lectures on mathematical logic and had several – highly passionate, sometime stormy – discussions with him. Russell was sometimes amused, sometimes irritated but, on the whole deeply impressed “by his ex-engineer”, whom he for a while thought to be German and not Austrian. In the January of 1912, Wittgenstein gave a manuscript to Russell which he had written during the vacation-time. Russell found it “very good” and on the 1^st of February Wittgenstein “was admitted as a member of Trinity College, with Russell as his supervisor”. What can really be called Wittgenstein’s ‘first philosophical work’ is a typescript under the title Notes on Logic, which was partly taken down by a secretary in shorthand, partly dictated by Wittgenstein before he left for Norway in the October of 1913 (cf. Monk 1990: 38-42, 91-93).

51^ The last entry into the bunch of notes which later became known as On Certainty was made on the 27^th of April, 1951, one day after his 62^nd birthday and one day before Wittgenstein lost consciousness, which he sadly never regained until his death on April the 29^th (cf. Monk 1990: 579).

52^ This is sometimes called the “therapeutic” bent/goal in Wittgenstein’s philosophy but this, in many ways, misleading: it may suggest that Wittgenstein’s single goal was to show us that sound philosophizing is out of our reach forever. But Wittgenstein, as it will hopefully turn out on these pages, was not a ‘deflationist’.

53^ On the history of Wittgenstein reception see especially Kahane, Kanterian and Kuusela 2007.

54^ These data are from Monk (1990). A highly reliable introduction to Wittgenstein’s thought is Fogelin (1987). A useful reference-book is Glock (1996).

55^ The best book I know on the Tractatus is Friedlander (2001).

56^ The works Diamond refers to are G. E(lizabeth) M. Anscombe (1963: 165) James Conant (1989: 242-283), but see Conant’s numerous articles on the Tractatus since then, especially Conant 2000: 174-217, Conant 2004: 167-192, and Conant 2006: 172-204.

57^ “Can the austere reader [like Diamond] justify the charge of nonsense without some (implicit) theory of meaning of language? I do not see how” (Williams 2004: 18); and: “The need for a theory of meaning is avoided only by running into the second horn of the dilemma [holding up consistently that the Tractatus is utter nonsense] , which turns the [nonsense-] thesis into something ineffable [which is the loop-hole of the standard view] but recognized by those who successfully manoeuvre the Tractatus.” (Williams 2004: 24).

58^ It must be noted that the interpretation of 5.4733 is not without problems, since, in the context of Frege, the original “Bedeutung” cannot just be taken as meaning ‘meaning’, since, as it is well-known, the Bedeutung of a “constituent” (word) is the word’s referent, and its Sinn is the way this referent is given to us (through name or description), while the Bedeutung of a sentence is the True or the False, its Sinn being the thought it expresses. Thus with Wittgenstein’s reliance on Frege, and in spite of his obvious dissent from him, we inherit all the difficulties that has been, from Russell through Dummett to Kripke, long debated in the secondary literature on Frege, and this heritage might be more complicated than as Diamond interprets it on page 159 of EIM. See also Williams 2004: 10-11 and passim.

59^ The “whole” might be understood as a world that does not “divide (zerfällt, literally: ‘fall apart’) into facts (in Tatsachen)” (TLP 1.2).

60^ It is here I would like to thank Professor Paul Roth at UCSC for calling my attention to my previous neglect of the implied author and reader in the second half of my paper, and also for other very useful commentary.

61^ The very but obscurely trivial and the obscurely mystical, mysterious, also coincide, or at least converge in/around one point, on a certain level. Logical form does have the power of levelling values, and this is no surprise: without that, language would not be a public institution.

62^ For the understanding of the personal, I am throughout greatly indebted to Cavell 1987: 133-135.

63^ “I am my world. (The microcosm.)” (TLP 5.63). “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.

If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being the method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book –” (TLP 5.63).

64^ This is, of course, the way the ’personal I’ finds ’my’ way into the “Author’s Preface” as well: e.g. “Here I am conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible.” “I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points the final solution of the problems”, etc. (TLP, page 5).

65^ The best, relatively easy introduction to Philosophical Investigations I know is McGinn (1997), the to my mind most insightful, but more difficult is the many times mentioned Cavell (1979).

66^ It seems that Shakespeare relied on the second edition but Arthur Kinney makes a very strong case for the supposition that Shakespeare may well have used the first edition as well, since there are signs in the play that he was familiar with some illustrations (of the “nymphs” and the two riders, Macbeth and Banquo confronting them) that can only be found in the first edition (cf. Kinney 1993: 18-53).

67^ Since this chapter involves Muir heavily, exceptionally I use his (Arden) edition of Macbeth for act-, scene- and line-numbering.

68^ Buchanan was a great Latin scholar besides being the tutor of King James, and it has also been established that Edward Alleyn, once the famous tragic actor in Marlowe’s plays, possessed a copy of this expensive book (cf. Braunmuller 14-15).

69^ That teach is emphasised may suggest that one should pay very careful attention to meaning and, to some extent, “surrender” to it, at least respect it. For Wittgenstein teaching, or, more precisely, being taught, is a practical and always dynamic process.

70^ The German original suggests something like this: “we feel that we have to see through and thereby fix what gives us a mere shining only, what just flares up, what only seems to look so-and-so.”

71^ http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/source.html, accessed 25 Sept., 2011.

72^ Horatio: “And this, I take it, // Is the main motive of our preparations, // The source of this our watch, and the chief head // Of this post-haste and rummage in the land” (1.1.107-10; Jenkins ed. 172).

73^ Holinshed words here refer to King Kenneth after he has slain his nephew but this description corresponds to a possible, explanatory description of someone who is between the murdering of his king (Duncan) and his friend, Banquo (qtd. in Muir 1964:166).

74^ Cf. e.g.: “Ask yourself: On what occasion, for what purpose, do we say this? What kinds of actions accompany these words? (Think of a greeting.) In what scenes will they be used; and what for?” (PI § 489).

75^ Throughout this chapter I quote Macbeth again according to Muir (1964) because I also follow Muir (who follows the Folio of 1623) in calling the Weïrd Sisters “Witches” in the above speech-headings, but only there. The term “witch” must be handled with caution because it decides about the “ontological status” of these obscure creatures too soon: cf. Nicholas Brooke’s interpretation in the Introduction to the Oxford edition of Macbeth: “They call themselves the Weïrd [sic!] Sisters, and Banquo and Macbeth refer to them as such; the only time the word ‘witch’ is heard in the theatre is in l[ine] 6 of this scene [in Act 1, Scene 3], when the First Witch quotes the words of the sailor’s wife as the supreme insult for which her husband must be tortured. ‘Weird’ did not come to its loose modern usage before the early nineteenth century; it meant Destiny or Fate, and foreknowledge is clearly the Sisters’ main function. But the nature of their powers is still ambiguous” (Brooke 1990: 3).

76^ Cf. for example the words Brabantio addresses to Othello: “O thou foul thief, where has thou stow’s my daughter? […] Whether a maid […] Would ever have […] Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou?” (1.2.62-71) and, in turn, the words of the Duke of Venice to Brabantio: “… noble signior, / If virtue no delight in beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.288-290); quoted according to Ridley (1986). Cf. also Brooke (1990: 95).

77^ I again give the references to Plato’s works according to the so-called “Estienne” (or “Stephanus”)-pagination, which is internationally used.

78^ I again follow the international practice of giving references to Kant’s work by using the pagination of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (originally from 1787), widely called as the “B-text”. The standard English translation of the Kritik der reinen Vernuft is Kant (1933), the quote above can be found on page 66.

79^ It was Paul Ricoeur, who, in his Time and Narrative, introduced, the respective terms “cosmological conceptions of time” (such as e.g. Aristotle’s) versus “psychological theories of time” (such as e.g. Augustine’s). The first is concerned – in Ricoeur’s words – with “the time of the world”, the second with “the time of the soul” (cf. Ricoeur 1988: 12-22). I think this distinction can be applied to theories of space as well.

80^ See further Sklar (2009: 569-574) and: “Space is, in Newton’s famous remark in the Opticks [sic!] ‘God’s sensorium’, the organ through which God is omnipresent in the world” (Rutherford 1999: 436).

81^ “We remember and have records of the past, but not of the future. We take causal influence to proceed from earlier to later events. We think of the past as ‘fixed’ and unchangeable, but of the future as ‘open’ and indeterminate in nature” (Sklar 2009, 573).

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