A deed Without a Name

120^ Here I am referring to Gilbert Ryle’s famous paper entitled “Imaginary Objects”, Ryle 1971: 63-81.

121^ “Im Anfang war die Tat” is, of course, from Goethe’s Faust. Wittgenstein’s remark can be found in Wittgenstein 1993: 395. See also Peter Winch’s excellent article entitled “Im Anfang war die Tat”, Winch 1983: 159-178, especially 171-177.

122^ The etymological data come from Collins Dictionary of the English Language (Collins 1984).

123^ Cf. Macbeth’s words with respect to Banquo’s assassination: 3.2.140.

124^ Allusion to Hamlet’s famous line: “The readiness is all” (5.2.218); cf. also Edgar’s “ripeness” in King Lear: “Ripeness is all” (5.3.11). Macbeth’s key-word is rather dare: “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares more is none” (1.7.46-47) and “What man dare, I dare” (3.4.98).

125^ Hungarian fogalom is an artificial word, made up in the 19th century in the great movement of the ‘reform of the Hungarian language’, full of ‘Germanisms’ and ‘Latinisms’ at that time. Though fogalom is now in wide circulation both in ordinary and in philosophical registers, native speakers still feel the metaphor behind the concept. The other data come from Collins (1984).

126^ A characteristic sentence from Hegel: “The force of its truth thus lies now in the ‘I’, in the immediacy of my seeing, hearing, and so on; the vanishing of the single Now and Here that we mean is presented by the fact that I hold them fast” (Hegel 1977: 61). The noteworthy phrase is “and so on”. See further Hegel 1977: 61-103.

127^ On the “father-and mother-tongue” see Cavell 1990: 20.

128^ A serious reflection on this problem can be found in Jacques Derrida’s White Mythology, not insignificantly with respect to metaphor: “Outside the mathematical text – which is difficult to conceive as providing metaphors in the strict sense, since it is attached to no determined ontic region and has no empirical sensory content – all regional discourses, to the extent that they are not purely formal, procure for philosophical discourse metaphorical contents of the sensory type. Thus one does actually speak of visual, auditory, and tactile metaphors, (where the problem of knowledge is in its element), and even, more rarely, which is not insignificant, olfactory or gustatory ones”. In a footnote to the word “olfactory” Derrida adds, without comment, a highly revealing quotation from Condillac’s Traité des sensations: “We thought it necessary to begin with the sense of smell, because of all senses it is the one which appears to contribute least to the knowledge of the human mind” (Derrida 1982: 227).

129^ Cf. the title of John Dover Wilson’s famous book, What Happens in Hamlet? (Wilson 1959).

130^ The idea that we may think of Horatio’s story as a ‘bad quarto’ version of the ‘original’ play, comes from J. L. Calderwood (Calderwood 1983: xii).

131^ Cf. for example, the XVIIth Volume of Midwest Studies in Philosophy (French, et. al. 1992).

132^ Some of the most detailed critical evaluation of Kripke’s book is McGinn (1984) and Baker and Hacker (1984), both arguing against a sceptical Wittgenstein. McGinn says: “It is important for Wittgenstein that my ultimate lack of reasons is not an occasion for genuine doubt: that my rule-following inclinations do not rest on a bedrock of reasons does not imply that I can or should entertain doubt about those inclinations” (McGinn 1984: 22). Baker and Hacker write: “And it was evident that Kripke’s interpretation flew flagrantly against Wittgenstein’s manifest intentions in these important passages, misconstruing their meaning, misidentifying their target, and misrepresenting their thrust” (Baker and Hacker 1984: vii).

The most detailed critical discussion of Cavell’s position I know is Richard Rorty’s “Cavell on Scepticism” (Rorty 1982: 176-190).

133^ The “milk of human kindness” is, according to Braunmuller, “compassion characteristic of human persons” (123) but it is also noted that “kindness” at that time principally meant ‘kinship’ but “kind” is also connectable to ‘category’ (‘what kind of...?’) and ‘naturalness’” (ibid.). The Annotated Shakespeare edition also suggests that – especially because the Folio spells “human” as “humane” – we should read the phrase as “milk of humankind(-)ness”: ‘that (soft and nourishing) mother’s milk which makes someone human/humane (‘gentle’) / a member of the race of gentle humankind, is too much in you’ (cf. Burton 2005: 28).

134^ “And yet you would wrongly win” is heavily ambiguous; it may mean, indeed, that ‘in the end you have to resort to illegal means anyway’, or “wrongly” may refer to the “ambition” of Macbeth, which taints the whole ‘winning enterprise’ from the start (cf. Braunmuller 2008: 123), and it can even imply that Macbeth in such a situations should not win at all. Choosing one of these alternatives – and there may be many more – changes, of course, much else in the content of the extract.

135^ As Kenneth Muir notes, it is not clear when the ‘voice’ Lady Macbeth quotes – ‘Thus thou must do’ – stops talking (Muir 1964: 28); the interpretation would be easier if the quote ran to the end of the sentence. But since it is not clear where the quoted voice comes from (it may come from the Lady, it may be an inner voice in Macbeth, even a ‘supernatural agent’, etc.), a ‘change of voices’ is equally possible (Braunmuller 2008: 123.)

136^ http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/lectures/john_locke_lectures (accessed 2013-08-07).

137^ A classic definition of attention is provided by William James, who says: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German” (James 1890: 404-405, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm, accessed 2013-08-10. William James (1890) The Principles of Psychology, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm, accessed 2013-08-10.

138^ See, for example: Ned Block and Susanna Siegel “Attention and Perceptual Adaptation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming; Ned Block (2012) “The Grain of Vision and the Grain of Attention,” Thought: A Journal of Philosophy. Volume 1, Issue 3, September, 2012, 170-184 (http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/, accessed 2013-08-09)

139^ An example of establishing such correlations would be to claim that “impressively robust correlations” can be found “between the experience of faces and activation at the bottom of the temporal lobe, usually in the subject’s right hemisphere” (cf. Block 2007: 482). In this article, Block’s main claim is that it is possible to exhibit “a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility.” He argues “that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if we assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified (other things being equal) by the explanations it allows” (481).

140^ Block, Ned (1995) "An Argument for Holism", in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. XCIV, 151-169. (http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Ruritania.pdf, accessed 2013-08-10.

141^ For example, see a to my mind telling sentence from the Review Block has written on Alva Noë’s book (to be discussed immediately below): “Indeed, the upshot of evidence on the brain basis of experience is that effects of the endocrine system of experience are mediated by effects on the brain itself and therefore do not challenge the orthodoxy that says that the brain is the minimal constitutive supervenience base for experience” (Block 2005: 5) http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Shortened_Noe_Review_JoP.pdf), accessed 2013-08-08.

142^ Cf. another article by Alva Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan where one of their conclusions is: “our view rejects the idea that neural activity could be sufficient, as a matter of law, to produce visual consciousness. For this reason, we think a good deal of research on the so-called neural correlates of visual consciousness is misdirected” (Noë and O’Regan 2004: 582-586).

143^ See further Petitot, Varela, and J.-M. Roy 1999: 24-32.

144^ Cf. especially Edmund Husserl (1997) Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. by Richard Rojcewicz, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

145^ This – no doubt sketchy – account of Merleau-Ponty on meaning and language is indebted to the discussion of these topics in Tengelyi 2004: 28-42. See also the chapter on Merleau-Ponty in Tamás Ullmann–Csaba Olay (2011) Kontinentális filozófia a XX. században [Continental Philosophy in the 20^th Century], Budapest: L’Harmattan, 203-221 [by Tamás Ullmann], especially, 217-221.

146^ “Ethics as First Philosophy” (EFPh) (originally published in French in 1984) in Levinas 1989: 75-87. Of course, Levinas considerably reworked the idea of transcendence, making it a significant ‘philosophical category’; for example, his second magnum opus, towards the end of his career, Otherwise Than Being begins with the famous sentence: “If transcendence has meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of being, the esse, the essence, passes over to what is other than being”. And in the next paragraph: “Transcendence is passing over to being’s other, otherwise than being. Not to be otherwise, but otherwise than being” (Levinas 1978: 3, emphasis original). These are not easily interpretable sentences, and since this chapter is very far from aspiring to give an overview of Levinas’ philosophy, I resist the temptation to deal with them. But it should never be forgotten that for Levinas the Other and the duty towards the Other always remained a very concrete and “worldly” obligation, so it is not even at loci like the above that the level of “generality and abstraction” would exceed that “transcendental level” which treats the “subject” (me) and the Other as ‘representatives, examples’ of humankind. Neither the subject, nor the Other should become an abstraction if they wish to remain alive and their encounter meaningful.

147^ One would like to say instead of German Wesen: ‘essence’, but it is 20th century philosophy in general which refrains from using this word, lest it should give rise to misunderstandings about a ‘something’ which has been squeezed out of several particulars to contain, through abstraction, their ‘connecting inner spirit’, an ‘eidos’ (‘idea, form’) somehow ‘summarizing’ what the particulars ‘really are’.

148^ Cf. the note in Seán Hand’s Introduction to EFPh, 75.

149^ The two most important, major works of Levinas (1906-1995) – who did not publish much and became influential only towards the end of his life (from the early- and mid-1980s, cf. Critchley and Bernasconi 2004: 2. – are Levinas (1969[1961]), Totality and Infinity, an Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press; and the already mentioned Otherwise than Being, Levinas (1978 [1974]). See further Critchley 2004: 1-32.

150^ Originally Levinas (1946) De l’existence à l’existant, Paris: Fontaine, in English Levinas (1978).

151^ See the Introduction of Seán Hand to the article in Levinas 1989: 29.

152^ “The other in Proust” in Levinas 1989: 160-165. The number one – unduly neglected – book on Levinas and literary criticism is Robert Eaglestone 1997, especially 10-34 and 98-128.

153^ There is only a rough correspondence between French il y a and English “there is”. The translation of e.g. Il y a un élève dans l’école would indeed be : ‘There is a kid at school’. But whereas in French il is also used in such sentences with an ‘impersonal subject’ as Il pleaut, in English a sentence like this is constructed not with ‘there is’ but with ‘it’: ‘It is raining’. Similarly, in French we can say: Il y a long temps, which does not translate into English as: *There is a long time’ but ‘(it was) a long time ago’. In Hungarian, there is no corresponding equivalent to il y a, or there is, or it is; for example, It is raining is expressed as: Esik az eső ‘falls/is falling the rain’; and we precisely use the third person form of be: ‘van’ to express e.g. that there is a child at school: ‘egy gyerek van az iskolában’. It is here that I would like to thank my son-in-law, Damien Picard for helping me with my French.

154^ Cf. “That despair, this sickness in the self, is the sickness unto death. The despairing man is mortally ill. In an entirely different sense that can appropriately be said of any disease, we may say that the sickness has attacked the noblest part; and yet the man cannot die. Death is the last phase of the sickness, but death is continually the last. To be delivered from this sickness by death is an impossibility, for the sickness and its torment […] and death consists in not being able to die” (Kierkeggard 1951: 30).

155^ Yet for Levinas private existence only emerges if, as an existential stance, as a basic attitude, I take up the (truly) infinite, total and unconditional obligation towards the Other, in whose Face I can see the need, the hunger just as much as the traces of infinity.

156^ Not exclusively: there are references in “There is: Existence without Existents” to Rimbaud, Zola, Maupassant, Racine’s Phaedra; there is even one sentence on Hamlet, etc., cf. 31-34.

157^ I quote the English text in my own translation; it is based on the following Hungarian edition: Tamás Vekerdy (ed.) (1986: 255-258). I know of two other translations: one was done by Peter Zollman under the title “Mistress Aggie”, the other by William N. Lowe and Adam Makkai: “Mistress Agnes”. Both can be found in the anthology In Quest of the Miracle Stag: the Poetry of Hungary: from the Thirteenth Century to the Present in English Translation (Makkai 1996: 344–348 and 349–353, respectively). I would like to thank my friend, Brett Bourbon for his very kind help with my translation.

158^ This grammar has been lost, cf. Abafáy 1993: 89–102.

159^ In his “Széptani jegyzetek” [Aesthetic Notes] which he prepared for the students of the grammar school, in paragraph 30, discussing the genres of plays, Arany gives the example of Macduff exclaiming “He has no children” (4.3.218) as a typical instance of “the language of passion,” i.e. “pathos in the good sense” of the word (Arany 1998: 283). Unfortunately, we do not know exactly when this work was written; most probably over the years he spent in Nagykőrös, so between 1851 and 1859 (cf. Varga: 565).

160^ In the January of 1945, the villa in Ménesi street, Budapest, owned first by János Arany’s son, László Arany and later by Géza Voinovits, was hit by a bomb and many of Arany’s original manuscripts, as well as several letters and part of his private library (some books with valuable marginal glosses) were consumed by the ensuing fire. Most probably the English Grammar mentioned above was destroyed then, too (cf. Pál Gergely, “Jegyzetek Szász Károly “Macbeth”-fordításához”, in Kovács, et al., 73–83).

161^ “Canonical” here means that Szász’s translation can be found in the edition of the Kisfaludy Society, which first published the Complete Works of Shakespeare in Hungarian (1864–1878). However, Gábor Döbrentei had translated Macbeth much earlier, first into prose in 1812 (he consigned this translation to the flames), and then in iambic pentameter in 1825 (published in 1830), cf. Maller and Ruttkay (eds.) 1984: 30.

162^ As other sources of inspiration, the Hungarian folk ballads, the English and Scottish ballads, circulating widely in Hungary at that time, and the German ballads especially those of Goethe, Schiller and Bürger are usually mentioned. For overview of those surveying Arany the ballad-writer, starting with Ágost Greguss, Pál Gyulai and Frigyes Riedl, always a favourite topic among literary critics, see Kerényi (ed.) 1993: 14–16, 188–189, and Imre 1988.

163^ For a significant alternative opinion, interpreting, similarly to my reading, the figure of Agnes not so much as a sinner but as a victim, a “sacrificial lamb,” whose words should not be taken as “mad gibberish”, cf. Róbert Milbacher 2009: 214-223. Milbacher summarises the critical reception of the ballad from Arany’s time to the present day as well. It is here that I would like to thank Péter Dávidházi for calling my attention to Milbacher’s article and for further very helpful comments.

164^ Milbacher rightfully remarks that the interpretative tradition of the poem tends to mirror this attitude, and is inclined to repeat the verdict (sentence) of the elders; although the ballad is enthymematic on several layers, i.e. the text of the poem demands that the reader hunt out the “missing links” and “dark spots” in Agnes’s story, interpreters approach the ballad taking the guiltiness of the woman for granted (cf. Milbacher 2009: 215).

165^ Cf. Knights’ epoch-making and already mentiond article: “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933: 33-49).

166^ Especially in sayings: “Többet akar tudni a csibe, mint a tyúk”: “the chicken wants to know more than the hen” i.e. the child wants to know better than the grown-ups; cf. Éva B. Lőrinczy et al. (ed.), 1979: 813, see also 859–860.

167^ It is at this point that Milbacher ( 222) refers to an article I wrote in Hungarian (Géza Kállay 2004: 56–68). Milbacher’s only remark about my reading is that I also interpret the bloodstain as menstrual blood. In fact in this article I already interpret the bloodstain as a spot where the (long repressed) shame of childlessness (symbolised by menstrual blood, and also used as an excuse in response to the inquiring children) and the blood of the husband (as an “immediate” result of the crime, in which Agnes’s precise role remains hopelessly obscure) “flow together” and merge in Agnes’s “doubly guilty” mind.

168^ For a powerful argument making this point cf. Balázs Szigeti, Metaphorical and meta-theatrical patterns in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Szigeti 2010: 63). This MA thesis also contains a very helpful summary of recent criticism on Macbeth.

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