I'm going to take the time to read Cheerskep's entry with care and interest. I hope it doesn't become a lesson. Didactic art almost never works. Art is centered on paradox, not solutions. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, May 22, 2012 12:55:19 PM Subject: WHY BREN LEFT PHILOSOPHY Here's a chancy thing - in fact, doubly chancy. In the first place, it tries to convey some original philosophy. You'll notice that Roy Harris and the "Bren" below agree that a spoken or written "word" or phrase does not, in isolation, "have a meaning". Harris asserts that it "acquires" a meaning from its context. Bren would say this is a mistake; the phrase never acquires/has a meaning. Still, it can be a tool in "communication", and Bren tries to explain how. In the second place, it displays a fragment of my attempt to be theatrically "creative". In this regard it's not unlike what several artists on this forum have done by supplying links to their paintings. Many of their creative works have moved me to awe. I'm not optimistic about my following work's occasioning comparably favorable reactions. This is only in part because in this play I intentionally took on the challenge of trying to make nerdy stuff stageworthy. If Yogi Berra were a theater producer he might say, "In theater, it's really dumb to be really smart." This is an excerpt from a full-length play, INCOMPLETENESS. The title is apt for the play, and for this excerpt: I know Bren's argument here is incomplete. To anticipate a suspicion I should say, no, I don't think of Bren as being me. Though he wears some of my garments, he's much smarter in many ways than I ever was or will be. His name, Brendan, is that of a much younger nephew of mine. About the excerpt: the setting is a studio apartment attached to a large house. The studio is being rented by an academic philosopher who is in seclusion while writing a monograph, "An Incompleteness Theorem for Language". Kurt is the owner of the house, and Kit is his daughter, hostile to this Bren, whom she thinks her parents esteem too highly. WHY BREN LEFT PHILOSOPHY KIT ...So let's hear some philosophy-talk. From the "sure thing". BREN You don't care what the subject is, do you. KIT Whatever you want to philosophy-talk about. BREN While you poise like a lizard with a long, long tongue to flash out and bag the bug. [BREN demonstrates with his tongue.] KIT Well, now, if that bugs the philosopher... [KIT flicks her tongue out and back.] BREN ...The heckler wants the "show" answer. KIT Yeah. Show us. Distort my mind. [BREN sizes-up KIT; his gaze sharpens. KURT smiles, a match-maker succeeding. BREN will rise, prowl, display the command of certain intimidating and theatrical academic stars.] BREN Back in the eighteen-nineties, over a good claret at the high table, one philosopher said to another, (a touch of high Brit:) "I see there's a German chap has his leather knickers in a twist over the way words work. Granted, he's only a muddled Hun. However, 'tis true the Queen's English is a bit untidy. Full of rubbish like vagueness, irony, and double-meanings. Buggers up understanding one another. I suppose it's up to us to put it right." During the next century of "putting it right", they felt they had a Merlinesque power to create new realms of abstractions that would bridge the gaps between language, thought, the world -- and each other -- KIT -- Hold up. Is this going to be one of your canned university lectures? Verbatim? BREN Not much. I keep trying it in different ways, still groping for the most effective. KIT Can't find the best words, Professor? After years of trying? BREN Can't find the best sounds.... Alas, stipulation is not creation. Their abstractions were non-entities, their bridges were mirages, and they wandered into other errors -- like their premise that words, and names, and Hamlet "have meanings". Such things neither "mean" nor "have". KIT Did I just hear you say words don't have meanings? We must lend you a nice little book we have. It's called a 'dictionary'. BREN I've seen those. As a kid I even read a nice little one, all the way through. Didn't find a single meaning. All I found were definitions -- KIT -- Astounding! Professor, here's a clue. Kurt, would you help him write this down?: A definition is a meaning. BREN No. A dictionary-definition is only this: The result of a lexicographer's attempt to write something such that reading it will cause certain notion to rise in the reader's mind -- notion that's commonly, roughly, like what's in minds of people familiar with the word. KIT ...And how could that possibly happen if words don't have meanings? BREN How? When you hear any sound, this pullulating lump of links retrieves its unruly associations with the sound. Let's learn some Swedish. [BREN picks up an apple, displays it.] Apelsin! [AH-pell-see-in] Apelsin! Apelsin! An hour from now, if I say "apelsin", you'll connect the sound with the apple-image you just stored in your head. You'd say you've learned a Swedish word. More specifically, you might say you've learned "the meaning of" a Swedish word. Lingo-learning is always like that. Say "Milk!" to a girl every time you give her a glass of the white stuff, and she'll link that sound to her memory of the white stuff -- and recall it whenever she hears "Milk". KIT That's your profound Theorem? That made the Brits go weak in the knees? That is embarrassingly obvious! BREN Good. You agree. What's less obvious is this: You've just explained the "learning of a word" entirely in terms of a sound and an associated memory. No alleged mind-independent "real meanings" are required -- to account for what's gone on in the girl's mind. Ockham would cut off your "meaning", and other appendages, at the first syllable. KIT "Ockham"? BREN Ockham. KIT Who's Ockham? BREN A philosopher with a famous razor. Would have made a good editor. Now a confession. I tricked you: When you say "Apelsin!" to most Swedes, the image that comes to their minds is not of an apple; it's the image of an orange. I misled -- not about imaginary entities called "meanings", only about the conditioned workings of most Swedish minds. KIT Our Professor?! Misled us?! BREN Damn. I'm just like those other guys after all. You've been misled about this all your life. You've been told you learn "meanings". You don't. You've been told a definition is a "statement of a meaning". It isn't. Wittgenstein said the meaning of a word is "its use" by the people in a given language-community, implying they all associate the same notions with a given word or phrase. They can't. Their notions are as dissimilar as their varying brain powers and assorted experiences. KIT You believe this stuff. BREN I believe this stuff. KIT But it's so blinkered! You've never noticed how much we understand one another when we talk? BREN We never completely understand one another. Oh, I agree our talk-sounds are often very serviceable -- in the kitchen, on a ball field or a battlefield. Because all of us learn simple words in similar daily situations. Milk! Run! Shoot! But when we take in the talk-sounds of philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, they don't involve simple visual images like milk and oranges. Those verbal psychedelics are the occasion for ideas -- fuzzy, various, and abstract. J'you know before Rorschach used ink-blots for his test, he tried sounds? "Vhat comes to mynt vhen I say 'Art'!" Some said Garfunkel, some said Picasso, some said a Hail Mary. In fact, Kit, contrary to what you no doubt think, not only are there no meanings, there are no words out there. KIT Excuse me?! Now you're saying words don't exist? I do believe I saw words printed on paper this very day! BREN No. You saw ink on paper; you've never seen a "word" in your life. Or heard one. "Foopgoom!" Did you just hear a word? How would you tell? Run to your little dictionary? The latest ones have lots of "new words". But they're only sounds they've at last decided to call "words". What was their "is-ness" before? KIT Their "is-ness"? BREN Yuh. The fictitious attribute that's said to make an object not just what you call it, but what it "really IS". Problem: "is-nesses" -- including "wordness" -- are mental inventions, solely notional, like unicorns. And "souls". KIT No -- some sounds are words, and some just aren't -- BREN -- Did you ever wonder how some lucky sounds get to have a "real meaning" and become "words", while other sounds have to remain "sounds-second-class" until a bell rings? I'll tell you. One summer in Switzerland, I had a thing in my room that I called a 'foopgoom'. I thought it was so apt a label, I got in touch with Plato and his word-and-thing-certification committee way up there. In their meeting last Thursday, they officially declared "foopgoom" to be the sound of a real word! And they made it official by ringing a big piece of metal they call the verbell ! That Swiss thing now really is a foopgoom! The heavenly room where words are created and real meanings are stuffed inside them -- don't ask how I got access to it. It's a secret...Get the point, Kit? KIT That's a bad joke. BREN Isn't it! You -- and some philosophers -- are like children who believe in tree-spirits. You think inside every "word" dwells an abstract imp: the word's "meaning". On yonder shelves, you assume there are a million inky imps carrying out motionless, abstract actions twenty-four-seven-- actions you label "meaning", "naming", "referring", "picking out". The imps are as mythical as angels, and what you call "words": audible or inky, they are inert. After a writer puts ink on paper, the ink just lies there. It doesn't "pick out", "refer", "name", "denote", "designate", "signify" or "mean". KIT Now you're trying too hard. BREN That's a weakness of mine. KIT I mean, you can't blind me with your special terms. BREN I don't want to. Just the opposite. I want you to see those action-labels clearly: They are facade words, as familiar -- and as empty -- as the storefronts on the set of a Hollywood western. What I'll say now has implications that are important -- and hard to reel in. I can only offer it. It's up to you to grasp it. KIT Try me. BREN Inert ink doesn't do anything, it doesn't act. It can't act. When you read, all the action is by your brain -- (lightly taps Kit's head) -- recalling memories connected with those sounds and inky shapes. And piecing together new notions you've never had before. Don't ask how "words" work. Ask how the mind works. Suppose I say "hypostatize" to you. What notion rises? KIT ..."Hypostatize"? Everyone knows that. It's a kinky sex position from the Kama Sutra. You made the word up. To me, it's meaningless. BREN Right. 'It's "meaningless" to you.' And what do you have in mind with that response? Only that the sound connects with nothing in your memory. If you believed that it "is" a "real word", you'd unthinkingly accept that it must have a "real meaning", you just don't know that meaning, you haven't "learned" it. Wrong. No talk-sound has an intrinsic "real meaning". KIT You're trying to tell me 'justice', 'beauty', 'art' -- even 'hot' and 'milk' -- are meaningless? BREN Not to you. Because if something comes to your mind when you hear my talk-sound, you'd say: There! That's obviously the sound's "meaning for me". But where are these "meanings for you" going to come from except your own personal memory as your brain processes the familiar sound? KIT ..."Where do they come from"? I'm not sure what you're -- BREN -- When I say "apelsin", do you think what comes into your head is from a bolt shafted down by Plato or Zeus conveying what the sound "REALLY means"? No. What comes are solely bits of memory retrieved and mosaicked by your racy brain. Totally notional, exclusively mental. You have no argument whatever for believing there are such entities as mind-independent "real meanings". KIT -- Wait. Slow down. KURT But don't stop. I know Kit is fascinated. Which fascinates me. BREN "Genius", "Truth", "Existence", "Categories", "Moral, "Life" - - I'm sure you'd insist those sounds are meaningful to you. You'd insist it because when you hear them, notions readily come to mind, yes? ....Yes? KIT ...Yes. Of course. So? BREN I'll bet they're not the notions that come to my mind...Go ahead, say those idiosyncratic "meanings for you" prove my sounds are "meaningful". For you. Just don't claim they in some mysterious way replicate entries in a "Big Book of Real Meanings" on a shelf up in Plato's heaven. KIT ...But that's...you're saying...you seem to be saying no one can be wrong about the meaning of a word. BREN No. I'm saying everyone is wrong. There is no "the" meaning of any word. People will come up with stipulative standards -- usually involving a well-known dictionary -- and that may settle disputes. But stipulation can't create heavens, angels, words, or non-notional "correct" meanings. KIT ....Okay...okay, maybe I see where you're going... (new energy:) One meaning I don't believe exists is "the meaning of life". The witless "Why are we here?" question. BREN ...That's a different use of 'meaning'. When people use it that way, they usually have in mind some ragged notion they'd call "purpose". KIT -- Well that's what I don't believe -- that there's a purpose, or a purposer, behind any of us. BREN ...That's a subject, but it's not this subject. KIT I just wanted you to know that. BREN Why do I believe I already did know that -- about you? On the other hand, if you think of "meanings" as notions in your mind, your life has a headful of meaning. KIT You know what I'm saying. BREN Back to the "meanings" you do believe in -- KIT I haven't taken any position on that. I'm just listening. BREN This is you "just listening"? ...Then listen to these: "That drawing is obscene!" "This painting is only okay; the one over there is art!" "All Muslims want all non-Muslims dead!" "He's just a cheap kike, a greasy spic, a bog-Irish mick who's the dumbest white man I've ever known." Say such things in front of a child enough, and no "real meanings" will be created, but she'll conjure fuzzy notions roughly like what's on your mind. And in a blurry way, she'll think those "meanings for her" are the "real" thing. KIT I never exactly said I think "meanings" are what you call "mind-independent" things. KURT Brendan does have a nimble mind, wouldn't you say, Kit? KIT ...Very nimble. Very adroit. BREN Is that good or bad? Every teacher has to be nimble. I used lots of kitchen-words in the classroom. I used 'is', I used 'word'. Because I wanted to put the audience in at least the same vicinity as this new stuff they'd hear. Then someone would ask, "Are you saying a tiger is the same as a tree?" "No, but you're the same as a tree stump!" ...I never actually said that. Not to a student. Did you know that all of modern philosophy of language began with the muddled chap in Germany puzzling over the notion of "sameness"? He couldn't resolve the problem by coming up with 'same's "real" meaning -- because it doesn't have any. ...So in the classroom I decided to add some different sounds, to occasion different notion-burps. Like this: Non-notional "meanings" are an anxious fiction, like non-corporeal "souls". We invented them to impute authority to our talk, and durability to our lives. KIT And we invented a "Creator" to give "meaning" to our existence. BREN Oh, lucky Kit: You escaped your calling. KIT Meaning? I mean, what are you saying? BREN That you may have a flair for philosophizing... So picture this. You go to a house on Lexicon Avenue and knock on the door. A woman answers. You say, "A Word told me this is his address. May I speak to his mate, the 'meaning for me', please?" And the woman replies, "Will I do? There are many of us here. Mr. Word is a bigamist." Here's a bemusing corollary: You can't "learn a language". Not just because it's too multiplex, but because there's no such entity as "a language", no integrated single thing in the mind-independent world that -- as the innocent would say -- "corresponds to" the phrase "the English language". Which we maybe shouldn't call a "facade phrase"; it's more like a chaotic "warehouse phrase". I wrote an article about a facade verb, "The Amazing Act of 'Having'". Said "having" isn't just an invisible event, it's imaginary, a verbal dodge, "having" never happens. I sent it to the Reader's Digest, but they claim they don't have it. KIT Do you lecture like this? Say these things to students? BREN I did if the students were bright. And nimble. And adroit. ...The bigamy of "language" is what makes possible its inexhaustible company. A bad philosopher would pave over the poet's garden with ontofactive stipulations. "What?! Is 'ontofactive' a word?" Ah-ah: Careful: Philosopher General's Warning: All questions of the form "Is X a Y?" are hazardous to your thinking. I tell you nothing is anything. Nothing has "is-ness". Nothing has "has-ness". In fact there are no "nesses" out there. J'ever notice when Hamlet wanted to sound insane he talked like a philosopher? (to KURT:) You met Heidegger. His head defied a law of physics: It produced sonorities in a vacuum. As did his girlfriend Hannah Arendt [HAHN-ah AHR-rendt]. "All thinking is in words," she said. "Speechless thought cannot exist." Imagine how impoverished her thinking was. At judging the utility of talk-sounds, I'll take Shakespeare over any philosopher going. For your homework tonight, I want you to think for twenty minutes on the belief that the term 'New York City' "has" a "referent" -- a fixed entity that it "names". Spend the full twenty minutes. Don't, in the first three minutes, defend that belief by coming up with a stipulative definition, either of 'That Wonderful Town', or of 'refer', and assume you've settled the matter. Spend the next seventeen minutes trying to think what my response would be. That's enough lizard-tongue for this session. In tomorrow's class we'll continue with the "embarrassingly obvious" by examining the error of believing any term "has" either intention or extension, and we'll show the implications of the fact that all notions are non-determinate, non-discrete, multiplex, and non-stable -- constantly morphing like a writhing cloud. Devious little suckers, our notions. Three suggestions: One, don't work solely to find something wrong in what you just heard. Two, as you conjure rebuttals, be slow to assume I don't have rebuttals to your rebuttals. Three: to paraphrase Andri Gide: "Please don't understand me too quickly." (modulates; less lecture-mode:) See? You were on pitch, Kit: Putting aside the text, how'd you like the tone you were just subjected to? The callously unveiled contempt, arrogance. The weary assumption this is all far too recondite for you to grasp. The unshakable surety I have it all right, and isn't it too bad no more than a hundred others on this globe are capable of seeing why. And all philosophers of the past had only a superficial glimpse of how -- and how profoundly -- "language" and human "communication" fall short. That tone, that odious, self-important, deluded tone, is what philosophy can do to a susceptible mind. The distortion for those at risk -- like me -- isn't primarily of beliefs; it's of attitude, of tone. Last November I finally heard how I'd been sounding since I was nineteen, and I decided I never, ever, want to hear it again. [BREN drops heavily into his chair.] Thus spake Sara's rooster. [Stunned silence. KURT finally stirs...] Link to the full length play, INCOMPLETENESS: http://www.tommccormackplays.com/pdfs/INCOMPLETENESS-May-2012-final.pdf
