Heidegger Vs Tyson Fury

Tyson Fury Gypsy King 

by Ryan James Wilson 

ryanthedesigner.uk

 

 

As someone who has always admired those brave enough to enter the ring and dedicate themselves to the always brutal, often bloody - sometimes deadly -  art of boxing, I would like to send my congratulations to the self-styled Gypsy King, Tyson Fury, for defeating the American Deontay Wilder and thereby retaining his WBC heavyweight title. 

Boxing - a sport that transcends sport, being as it is about so much more than competitive physical activity - has inspired many great writers and film-makers and even though Fury undoubtedly has his flaws and shortcomings (made much of by critics who seem not merely to take issue with some of his remarks, but object to his very existence), he's a remarkable figure. 

 

Amusingly, however, I've just come across this note by Heidegger which seems to offer a counter-view to my own: "An age in which a boxer can be acclaimed a great man and be deemed worthy of the usual tokens of honour, in which purely physical virility (brutality) counts as the mark of a hero," is an age where there is little or no place for philosophy.*

 

Of course, Wittgenstein would argue that the philosopher must be prepared to fight for a space in which to think and that the philosopher who isn't prepared to regularly engage others in intellectual combat is like a boxer afraid to enter the ring.  

 

 

* See Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 177, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks (1931-1938), trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 134.   

Reincarnation is Making a Comeback: Notes on Chapter 3 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

Cover of the German edition of 

Emanuele Coccia's Métamorphoses (2020) 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Coccia's book is that he makes mundane things - like eating - sound strange. Most people having a sandwich for lunch tend not to think of this as "more like an alchemical mystery than a physiological necessity" [a], no matter what the ingredients. 

 

But Emanuele Coccia does, and I admire him for that. It's precisely such a level of craziness which makes him a writer and philosopher. He wants to remind readers of the fact that when they eat a chicken salad they "literally incorporate the bodies of other living things" [87]. And quite right, too!

 

I think he's wrong, however, to believe that the reason many people choose to overlook or forget this fact is due to a powerful sense of guilt:

 

"We feel so guilty about this common, banal, everyday, yet miraculous and incomprehensible act that we tend to reduce it to a simple exchange of energy that can be described in terms of pure thermodynamics" [88] 

 

Or, in the case of vegetarians and vegans: 

 

"We feel so guilty about the fact that our lives involve the death of other living beings that we prefer to establish an arbitrary limit, an artificial boundary between living beings that suffer (animals) and those that do not (plants)." [88]       

 

Actually, most people are simply indifferent; they just don't care that they are obliged as heterotrophic beings to life off the lives of other organisms. 

 

Coccia's presumption of guilt is the sign of a moralist who cannot conceive of the fact that most people have no such feeling and don't view food from an ethical perspective (that's why, for example, informing them about the terrible cruelty involved in factory farming has very little effect on their behaviour). 

 

Although, having said that - and if I read Coccia correctly - then he really doesn't want anyone to feel guilty about stuffing plants and animals in their face. For eating is not all about death and it's "a misrepresentation to see the act of eating only as a form of sacrifice and violence" [88]. Eating is the enigmatic transmission of (indeterminate) life - a kind of vitalistic game of pass the parcel and food is "the contemplation of life in its most terrifying universality" [89].

The chicken eats the worm; we eat the chicken; the worm eats us - it is, as Elton and Tim would say, the circle of life. Coccia puts it this way:

"Life goes from body to body, from species to species, never entirely satisfied with the form in which it is found. And that is all eating is: proof that there is only one life, common to all living beings [...] Proof that no barrier of nature, species, or personality can enclose it eternally in one single form, one single species, one single body." [90]

       

And death? Death is only a metamorphic threshold, so not something we should fear. Nothing really dies, says Coccia, everything is just transformed, recycled, and reincarnated. Like eating, dying is a "universal multispecies encounter" [91] which forms a kind of posthumous community beyond all difference and all borders. (Which is fine, but I don't want to be there when it happens ...)

 

In sum: as a thanatologist, I'm neither unfamiliar with nor averse to Coccia's line of thinking on the deathly reality of life and the necessity to eat. Indeed, in a post written back in December 2016, entitled Reflections from a Sickbed, I expressed a preference for a traditional Tibetan sky burial when I die. 

 

In other words, I'm quite happy to be fed to the vultures and don't feel it is in any way shameful or degrading for a human corpse to become food. In fact, I don't even think being eaten alive by a pride of lions or a pack of wolves, is the worst way to die - though as I'm not a vore fetishist, I don't erotically desire this to happen. 

 

Learning to accept ourselves as prey or a potential meal is, as Val Plumwood, realised, crucial to the development of a truly radical ecosophy that rejects the hyperseparation of humans from the natural world [b].     

 

 

II.

 

One of the things I don't like about Coccia's book is that he makes material processes - like death - sound vitalistic. Carbon atoms, for example, may endlessly pass from one body to another, but carbon atoms are not alive, so it's simply not true to say that "the life that animates our body [...] will migrate elsewhere" [99] when we die, like a little bird flying off [c].  

In a sense, I still tend to side with those thinkers who, like Wittgenstein, insist that death is not an event in life and nor is it lived through [d]. Coccia would reject this as a mistaken positing of death as an absolute event and accuse me of dogmatically making a fetish of temporary forms, but there you go. I would rather be accused of doing this - would rather even be guilty of this - than of writing which (at times) veers toward tautological mysticism.  

 

Ultimately, for Coccia even death is just an everyday aspect of the unstoppable dance that is life; whereas for me, following Nietzsche, life is just a rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

And so, whilst I have myself written a post on atomic reincarnation [click here] which concluded that the living house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed - and that it is in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living - I do not see this as a form of spiritual continuity or psychic transmigration. 

 

It is only due to the conservation of mass, that we can legitimately declare ourselves to be all the names in history and Coccia's insistence that the dead think in us, is an ideal misunderstanding of this point. And whilst every self may be multiple, it is not a spiritual reincarnation of the life force and I really don't think it helps matters to borrow the technical terms of theology to discuss this important topic either [e].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 87. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] Val Plumwood (1939-2008) was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist, known for her work deconstructing anthropocentrism. Her posthumously published book The Eye of the Crocodile, ed. Lorraine Shannon, (ANU E-Press, 2012), details her violent and life-changing encounter with a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park, in February 1985. 

      Plumwod first described this incident in the essay 'Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey', in Quadrant, 29 (3), (March, 1995), pp. 29-34. Click here to read online in The Aisling Magazine.       

      Although Coccia mentions Plumwood and the crocodile (pp. 96-98), he informs readers that he primarily developed his idea of reincarnation by way of reflections on the work of the French artist Philippe Parreno. Although he doesn't mention any specific works by the latter, I'm guessing he would have been a big fan of the 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World. Using sound, image, lights, and the spectral presence of objects, Parreno transformed the monumental space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; turning the building itself into a constantly evolving organism.

 

[c] Writing under the influence of Aldo Leopold - whom he describes as "one of the greatest thinkers of the last century" [102] - Coccia seems to believe that atoms are, in a sense, alive and that seeing things from their perspective is philosophically instructive: 

      "Adopting the point of view of the atom [...] is what makes it possible to understand and to demonstrate the absolute continuity, both material and spiritual (subjective), of all life on this planet. [...] Discontinuity is not ontological (death), but purely modal and formal: X and Y - Leopold's atoms - change their mode of being, not their substance." [103]

      See Aldo Leopold, A Sad County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, (Oxford University Press, 1949). 

 

[d] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.4311.  

        

[e] I know how Coccia would reply to this: he would say I'm one of those who, whilst finding it easy "to imagine the material continuity of the universe", remain "troubled by the idea that this continuity might also apply on a spiritual and speculative level" [104]. 

      That's right: and the reason I find this difficult to accept is because I don't believe in the transmigration of the self and don't believe that "every act of thinking is an exchange of spiritual identity" [107]. Coccia suggests that whenever we utter the phrase cogito, ergo sum we are momentarily allowing "the spirit of Descartes to be reincarnated" [104] in our person. This may be figuratively true, but it's not literally true in the way that the recycling of atoms, or the passing on of genes, is true.

 

 

To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter two ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here. 

 

To read notes on chapter five ... click here. 

 

 

On Private Language and Post-Truth (Or How D. H. Lawrence Opens the Way for Donald Trump)

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his 1929 essay on pornography and obscenity by claiming that there is no consensus of opinion regarding a definition of the former: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another". And that, similarly, nobody knows what the word obscene means: "What is obscene to Tom is not obscene to Lucy or Joe" [1].  

 

I suspect it's this line of thinking which lies behind James Walker's claim that "any attempt to define obscenity is itself obscene" [2], by which I think he means that the attempt to impose shared meaning (or common values) on the individual and their lived experience is something he finds offensive.  

 

But I'm not entirely sure that's what he means: for by the logic of his own argument - which seems to subscribe to a solipsistic fantasy of purely personal feeling and, indeed, a purely private language - how could I ever be certain of understanding what he's saying?    

 

 

II.  

 

The idea of a private language was, of course, made famous by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), where he explained it thus: "The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language." [3]

 

However, no sooner does Wittgenstein introduce this idea of a language conceived as ultimately comprehensible only to its individual originator - because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others - than he rejects it as absurd. 

 

Naturally, there has been - and remains - considerable dispute about this idea and its implications for epistemology and theories of mind, etc.

 

Not that the validity or falseness of the idea will bother Lawrentians, for whom inner experience and (their own) singular being is everything. They'll simply repeat after their master: If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be [4] - surely the most intellectually irresponsible lines Lawrence ever wrote, showing disdain for facts, evidence, and reasoned debate and, ironically, opening the way for figures that James Walker certainly doesn't approve of ...

 

 

III. 

 

Arguably, Lawrence anticipates the post-truth world we live in today; one in which shared objective standards and meanings have dissolved into thin air; one in which Tom, Lucy, and Joe all get to define words however they like, à la Humpty Dumpty. Knowledge is confused with opinion and belief; fact is replaced with feeling; intelligence gives way to intutition.

 

It all sounds very liberal, but it isn't. Indeed, historian Timothy Snyder argues, post-truth is pre-fascism:

 

"When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions [...] Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth." [5]  

If it be not true to me / What care I how true it be ... This could so easily have been tweeted by Donald Trump!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence. 'Pornography and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Lawrence appears to think that a shared meaning or commonly accepted definition of a word is inherently inferior and that only the individual meaning of a word has poetic power and rich symbolism. Even the simplest of words, he says, never mind those that are complex or controversial, has both a mob-meaning and an imaginative individual meaning. And these two categories of meaning are, apparently, forever separate. The problem, however, as Lawrence sees it, is that most people are unable to preserve integrity and private thoughts and feelings become corrupted by those which come from outside: "The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside [...] and never from the inside, by its own sincerity." [238] Such thinking is, of course, completely untenable.            

 

[2] James Walker, writing on his Digital Pilgrimage Instagram account: click here. See the post published on 13 April 2021, concerning Peter Hitchens and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

   

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe, (Macmillan, 1953), §243. It's crucial to stress that a private language is not simply a language understood by one person, but a language that, in principle, can only be understood by one person. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. 

[5] Timothy Snyder, 'The American Abyss, The New York Times, (9 Jan 2021): click here. 

Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl: Self-Portrait (1913)

I.

You should probably read more Trakl, says Simon. And, yes, I probably should ...

For even if his work isn't quite my cup of tea, there are elements within his lyrical expressionism to which I'm sympathetic; such as his fascination with the blueness of twilight and his love of silence. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he fully exploits the often uncanny ambiguity of German. 


II. Wer war Georg Trakl? 

Georg Trakl was a typical Romantic figure; a depressed drug fiend, who engaged in an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, Greta, and received generous financial support from wealthy patrons, including the philosopher Wittgenstein, who, like Heidegger, was a huge fan (see section III below).

A pharmacist by profession, Trakl liked to hang around with the avant-garde artists involved with the well-known literary journal Der Brenner, edited by Ludwig von Ficker. The latter was also an avid supporter of the young poet and not only regularly printed his work, but attempted to find a publisher for his first collection.

Unfortunately, Trakl overdosed on cocaine in the autumn of 1914 and became an early member of what is now known as the 27 Club. There's a very strong possibility of suicide. In a letter written in 1913 he confessed:

"I long for the day when my soul shall cease [...] to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century."


III. Philosophical Readings of Trakl

As mentioned above, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger were keen readers of Trakl. But, perhaps not surprisingly, they responded very differently to his poetry ...

The former, for example, wrote that whilst he didn't understand the verses, their tone - one of true genius - made him very happy. The latter, on the other hand, claimed that Trakl's work made perfect sense, once it had been situated and unified as a single rhythmic wave within his own thinking.

Derrida would later question this rather outrageous attempt by Heidegger to co-opt Trakl's work - what we might describe as an act of philosophical Anschluss - though, to be fair, it's something we've all done is it not; to read an author in light of one's own ideas and obsessions (indeed, it might be argued that every reading is an act of violation, as the reader seeks out their textual pleasure).


Thanks to the poet and literary scholar Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

Reflections on Wittgenstein's Rhino

Albrecht Dürer: The Rhinoceros (1515)

Even many non-philosophers know two stories concerning Wittgenstein's time at Cambridge: the first, an amusing confrontation with Karl Popper in October 1946 involving a poker, was the subject of a best-selling book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow; the second, an encounter between Bertrand Russell and his young Austrian student thirty-five years earlier, involving a discussion that centred on the question of whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room ...

In brief, Russell wanted Wittgenstein to concede that we can have empirical knowledge of the world by admitting that there was, in fact, no rhino present. But the latter refused to do so - even after Russell amusingly began looking for the beast under the desk to no avail. Whilst Wittgenstein may have had a point, one can't help thinking he was, in this instance (as in others), being a bit of a dick.

Indeed, I'm not sure I understand the point he's trying to make or why he can't simply accept the factual non-presence of the rhino, given that in his early work he maintains that only such propositions can legitimately be asserted. But then, my understanding of Wittgenstein's thinking is limited (and probably inaccurate) due to its having been shaped primarily by drunken discussions in the Barley Mow pub many years ago.        

At this very early stage in their relationship, Russell worried that Wittgenstein was a crank, rather than a philosophical genius. I can imagine how he felt, for I experience the same concern whenever I correspond with a friend of mine, let's call him Mr X, who also likes to deny - or at least contest - the propositions of natural science and refuse to accept that there is a mind-independent reality about which we can speak with confidence.

For Mr X, the world consists neither of facts nor of things, but only of interpretations and all descriptions are essentially metaphorical. He thus posits a daemonic ontology that is mytho-poetic rather than material-scientific in character. Rather than agree there was no rhino in the room, Mr X would sooner insist on its invisibility, or point out that imaginary objects are also real even if physically not present as actual entities; thus his (psycho) logical belief also in supernatural beings.

For Mr X, as for Wittgenstein (though for different reasons), Russell's seemingly commonsensical proposition is questionable on the grounds that it doesn't meaningfully assert anything about the world - certainly nothing upon which we can ever be completely certain - and is, therefore, what Wittgenstein terms in the Tractatus a 'nonsensical pseudo-proposition' [4.1272] (i.e. one that refers us only to the logic of language by which we talk about the world and not to things in themselves). 

And so, perhaps Wittgenstein wasn't being a dick after all ... Perhaps, as J. F. Macdonald argues, it was Russell who profoundly misunderstood matters and who, by attempting to ridicule the younger man, was the one acting like a dick. Wittgenstein, says MacDonald, wasn't rejecting empirical propositions; rather, he was rejecting propositions that posed as such, but were not, and discreetly "making a point about what can be meaningfully said, not about what we don't know".

And perhaps I too should learn to listen more carefully to what it is Mr X is saying and not be so quick to dismiss it as absurd, or him as foolish ... For I fear this reveals merely my own philosophical arrogance and limitations. 


Notes

Details of the conversation between Russell and Wittgenstein on the rhinoceros can be found in Russell's letters from the period to Lady Ottoline Morell (reprinted in Ray Monk's biography, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, (Vintage, 1990), pp. 38-40), and in Russell's article in Mind Vol. 60, issue 239 (July 1951), pp. 297-98, which served as an obituary notice for Wittgenstein who died in April of that year.

Click here to read the above article online, noting how Russell misremembers the conversation concerning a hippo, not a rhino.

The essay by J. F. MacDonald from which I quote, 'Russell, Wittgenstein and the problem of the rhinoceros', is in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31 (4), (1993), pp. 409-24, but can also be found in full online at the Rhino Resource Center (the world's largest rhino information website): click here.   

The book by Edmonds and Eidinow that I mention at the beginning of the post - Wittgenstein's Poker: the story of a 10-minute argument between two great philosophers - was published by Faber in 2001.

Finally, readers interested in directly engaging with the early Wittgenstein should either get hold of a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), or click here to read the original 1922 edition as an ebook trans. C. K. Ogden, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This post is for Mr X and Andy G.

Falling in Love Again

 Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt

First we fall in love, then we fall into language, says Roland Barthes, referring us to the fact that even the most personal or private of emotions is inevitably articulated within a shared code and culture.

For some people, however, this raises a real concern; for if the language of love is entirely secondhand, then does it not lack authenticity and is the lover not, at some level, always insincere?

Perhaps: but I'm not convinced we should let this worry us too much (if at all). 

Besides, it would be absurd to expect individual lovers to be able to create unique ways of expressing how they feel. Even if it were possible, what would be the point? For we would no more be able to understand their sweet nothings whispered into our ears, than we could comprehend Wittgenstein's speaking lion. A private language - be it of love or anything else - would be essentially meaningless (i.e. a non-language). 

Ultimately, the words I love you delight and reassure us precisely because of their familiarity and the fact that we understand them as the repetition of an ancient litany; they invite us to participate in a game wherein we all have a vague idea of the rules, even if we cannot all expect to be winners. 

The Joy of Hypertext

Hypertext Book Sculpture by Stephen Doyle

Why is it that people enjoy surfing between channels on TV and endlessly playing with the remote? The answer is because they are not concerned with what's on - but only with what's on next. 

Similarly, when reading online the pleasure is no longer in the content as such, but in the euphoric process of following and creating links. For whilst one rarely bothers looking at footnotes or checking references when reading a conventional work that exists in a traditional format, when reading a text online these things often matter more than the main body of writing; they certainly matter more than authorial intent. Indeed, the best ideas are frequently born not through loyalty, but through thinking of another when reading the one you love. Or, as Roland Barthes once said, the pleasure of the text is infidelity.

But what is text? Text is something outside of language even though it consists of language; something which exteriorizes the world's jargons "without taking refuge in an ultimate jargon" [1]. In fact, text liquidates the very idea of a primal metalanguage behind which booms the voice of God. For text has no soul or mystique and often undermines even its own canonical structures, such as lexicon and syntax. We engage with text like a fly buzzing around the room - suddenly zipping here, there, and everywhere in a kind of promiscuous frenzy.     

Radically democratic, text breaks down traditional boundaries and thereby enables greater intellectual contact and cooperation. As genre distinctions become meaningless, we are left only with text as a signifying practice; one that can be demonstrated and displayed on-screen as a movement of discourse that cuts across and links up an infinite number of works and is experienced as a shared activity of production.

For Barthes, text thus takes thinking to the limits of its own rationality. It doesn’t mark a dumbing-down, as some critics suggest, so much as the becoming paradoxical of language and the deferral of meaning. Text is played – like a pinball machine, or a musical instrument – beyond filiation or the search for origins. For the text is an orphan. And the text grows not by vital expansion or organic development, like a living thing, but rather as a network of temporary alliances and artificial constructions which extend as a result of a combinatory systematic. 

In other words, the text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any division between a field of reality and its digital or virtual recreation.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, this Barthesian notion of text-as-network has been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it. No more so than within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Ted Nelson in 1963 to refer to a non-sequential way of organizing information, may not be Barthes's, but many commentators see hypertext as the digital embodiment of the latter's theory. For it too allows the individual to exercise choice and to find his or her pleasure by being playful with units of information (including images and sounds and not just the written word), chasing from link to link not in search of some final meaning or ultimate Truth, but simply for the sheer fun of it.

Of course, it might be asked - and raised as a concern - if this doesn’t result in a certain solipsism; for if each body is unique and has its own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, how can we ever communicate with others? Isn't the joy of hypertext a masturbatory and profoundly anti-social pleasure?

The answer, of course, is that even the most creative and self-contained individuals do not form their own private languages expressive only of unique individual experiences. Communication with others remains (even in a virtual realm) a shared act, shaped by history. For as Wittgenstein once pointed out, even when describing our most personal and private of feelings our language is tied to social phenomena at every point.

And so hypertextual joy does not spell the end of society. In fact, perhaps it marks the birth of a new type of society, based upon a non-essential solidarity; a society in which members have very little in common but consent to "remain silent and polite when confronted  by pleasures or rejections which they do not share"

Barthes names this immanent utopia the Society of the Friends of the Text, but perhaps we might also think of it as a democracy of virtual touch. 

Notes: 

1: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 30.

2: Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, (Papermac, 1995), p. 117. 

Proposition 7

Wovon man nicht spechen kann, 

darüber muß man schweigen 

 

Many years ago, when I used to be harangued on a weekly basis at a pub in Chiswick by an ardent  Wittgensteinian, I used to believe that the aphoristic-sounding proposition 7 of the Tractatus was profoundly true. If any logical tautology came close to the beauty of poetry, this was surely it.

But now I feel very differently and I view proposition 7 as a religious prohibition which is no more subtle than a hand placed over the mouth. Wittgenstein attempted not only to close his own work with this line, but shut down any further philosophical investigation into the manifest 'mystery' of the world. 

In other words, like Kant before him, Wittgenstein sought to preserve a space for faith. As Ray Brassier argues, his attempt to identify and enforce the limits of language and knowledge is ultimately nothing more than a thinly veiled exaltation of mystico-religious illumination over conceptual rationality.

Like Heidegger, that other great crypto-theologian of twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein makes so much unthinkable, unspeakable, unquestionable, and hence unanswerable - except to those who receive divine inspiration in such matters - that we can read proposition 7 as no more than a succinct rephrasing of something found in an ancient Hebrew text, the Wisdom of Sirach:  

Do not seek knowledge of the sublime; do not look into things that are hidden from you and are not of your concern; pay heed only to that which is taught unto you by the law-givers.  

- Sirach 3: 21-2