The Vocation of Reason.

What makes a philosophical argument convincing? For it to count that you've been convinced of something, you have to find that you've changed your mind. How can you be brought to think an idea surprising enough, new enough that you have the sense that you've been persuaded of something worthwhile, which is to say something you would at first have doubted or resisted? Given the manifest disagreement in all fields of critical humanistic inquiry it's obvious that what makes an argument convincing isn't its apodictic certainty (to use Kant's term). As Fielding said, no person ever convinced anyone by arguing. In the most hackneyed sense of the word there's something deeply subjective about our philosophical opinions, about our sense of what counts as a philosophical argument. And this subjectivity will ultimately make philosophical argument a matter of taste. Opinions vary as tastes do. Robert Nozick suggests that philosophers will tend to prefer those arguments that leave room for hope; Laura Quinney makes the counterargument that our criteria for truth tend to be literary and that we will thus tend to count what is grimmest as most truthful or truthlike. In this she is following a remark of Wittgenstein's (whom she discusses at some length) on the attractiveness of Freudianism. Wittgenstein wrote that Freud's influence comes out of the fact that he asserts things that "we are disinclined to accept. But of course when we are disinclined to accept something we are inclined to accept it as well." Wittgenstein, who called himself a follower of Freud's, here shows his ambiguous allegiance. Where Freud sees resistance and distaste providing recalcitrant confirmation of the theory that has predicted them, Wittgenstein makes a still more intriguing claim: resistance is the very incentive and bait of the theory, which recommends itself to our taste for what we express distaste for, recommends itself to the irresistability of what we resist. For Freud we resist what we're attracted to; for Wittgenstein we're attracted to what we resist.

It's for this reason that Wittgenstein in the Investigations says that the cure for a philosophical malady takes a long time. This interminable cure is again ambiguously like the long time of the psychoanalytic cure. In both it takes a long time to overcome resistance, and even to overcome a kind of addiction to or pleasure in resistance. But for Wittgenstein it's not the truth that is being resisted, but the reverse: the apparent truthfulness of what we call truth is an effect of resistance. We are secretely tempted to think that our reasons for resisting demonstrate the truth of what we resist. The hallmark of truth is its difficulty (the current jargon for this invokes the idea of truth-as-scandal; Wittgenstein's skeptical attitude toward scandal may seem unFreudian, but is perhaps in line with Freud's accounts of transference and of fantasy). For Wittgenstein, there isn't a specific that will change your commitments, because the very problem is a kind of overspecificness masked in generalization: as though there's a single universal truth that might crystallize a surprising and complete explanation for all the contradictory evidence that experience discovers. The Investigations are resolutely plural in their concerns, and they take the form of fragmentary remarks. As Wittgenstein says in the preface, they will treat the same subject from different angles and different subjects from the same angle. Eventually, perhaps, a "totality of judgments will make itself plausible to us, and light will dawn gradually over the whole" (On Certainty). The way you gradually get what Wittgenstein is saying is to live with his ideas just as (according to those ideas) you live in the world with other people.

In a sense it's Wittgenstein's life-project to abjure philosophical argument as already a misguided venture. As he says, his project is to gather reminders of what things are really like. He doesn't explode philosophical errors but tries instead to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. I think that you can see this in his account of Moore's defense of common sense and his proof of the existence of the external world; I want to talk about that proof for a moment, and about the issues that it raises for the nature of philosophical argumentation, and then eventually return to Wittgenstein.

Moore's proof of the external world spends most of its energy making an apparently subsidiary argument that not many people would disagree with: namely that if I know of some physical object that it exists in the external world, say my hand, then I can know this about a very large portion of the external world, and not only my hand. Having proved this not very controversial conditional, Moore then takes only a few sentences to conclude the proof of the external world: he observes his hand, and says, "Well I do know that my hand is there." The question is, what did Moore think he was doing? It's just this point--does he, can he really assert his knowledge that his hand is right there?--which is at issue. It's just this point that Descartes, Hume, and Kant were skeptical of (It may be that Pyrrhonian skepticism is more skeptical still, and wouldn't grant Moore the conditional either; my point here is that Moore hasn't argued against the major claim that skepticism makes.)

Now I think this thing is a parable. Moore's point is the strangeness of preferring skeptical doubt to common sense. It's not that common sense is somehow more "likely" to be true than skepticism. It's just that you really do know when your hand is in front of your face, and it's only a taste, let us say, for a certain kind of language, or for a certain kind of frisson, or both--a literary taste, then--that could issue in your denying such knowledge. (Both Descartes and Hume, and more recently Stanley Cavell, in their reconstructions of the itinerary of doubt, describe the pleasing anxious sense of uncertainty that they manage to awaken in themselves. )

Moore's is a parable, I want to say, about sniping. Refuting Moore may feel more like shooting fish in a barrel than like sniping, but that's part of his point. He's making an argument that will feel deeply unphilosophical: if it's a true argument (and it is, isn't it?), then so much the worse for philosophy. Moore is really interested in showing just this artificial relationship of philosophy to the way things really are. (Artificial in the full sense of the term: something that can also give us what art and artifice provide.) The standard way philosophical arguments proceed, we are made to see, is by showing certain weaknesses in a heretofore unexamined position or unexamined articulation of a position. But how significant are such weaknesses? A taste for philosophy, like any taste, is only conspicious by its perversity, by its departure from the things that go without saying. It will then be unsurprising that a taste for philosophy should elevate unexamined assumptions--what go without saying--into potentially fatal errors. Because I have sometimes dreamed of sitting at my table and writing, I cannot know that I am sitting at my table and writing (was doing so when I wrote this)--even though, really, off the record now, I do know it. I can snipe at that knowledge, but philosophy will somehow raise that sniping to the level of a fatality within epistemology itself, and it will do so because it likes a certain magnificence. (Stanley Cavell has argued that there is a gender component to these preferences.) We're disinclined to be skeptical of the ordinary (since the ordinary is defined just by our tacit inclinations), and if we're disinclined to be skeptical of the ordinary we (critics, philosophers) are then inclined to be skeptical of it as well. Sniping is so effective because though it seems nit-picking it plays into our desire, and that desire is for wonder. It is part of our more general taste for counterintuitive ideas. We like such ideas for the same reason that we like all anomaly--we entertain belief in UFOs or conspiracy theories, or cold fusion, or life on Mars, as long as in good conscience we can because anomaly diversifies experience itself, whereas the uniformity of experience threatens to render tedious any of its individual objects; we have a taste for difficulty because to master a difficulty is to overcome a resistance and to achieve something.

It is thus, I think, that we are so quick to be persuaded to thrilling arguments. The thrill is exalting, and so we feel the argument must be true. Here's a quick and partial catalogue of the unlikelihoods that (some of them) those with a taste for such things can be brought with surprising speed to believe: that we're not sure of the external world; that language doesn't really primarily say how things are but is exclusively performative; that difference is prior to presence; that we can't be conscious of our own consciousness; that consciousness does not exist; that there is no unitary subject; that there's no difference between analytic and synthetic; that translation is indeterminate; that reference is unscrutable; that our wills aren't free; that subjectivity is a historical invention of grammar, or of the enlightenment, and so on; that natives don't think like us; that natives do think just like us; that man, so-called, was invented in the eighteenth century. These are marvels; they are passing strange: and so we are apt to credit them, not in spite of their wonderful novelty but because of it. Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder, but this means also that it begins with a bias toward wonder.

Well so far I've just wanted to sketch what could almost be called a habit in philosophy. The question is whether what I'm calling Moore's parable (on my exegesis) leaves any room whatever for the marvelous; or must we always prefer the drabbest explanation of phenomena? In a way this argument is similar to Hume's argument about miracles: we can never rationally believe that something is miraculous, because by definition any other explanation is more plausible than that it is a miracle and should therefore more authoritatively command rational assent. Similarly any philosophical result that has the thrilling effect of turning our minds as with the might of waters against everything we accepted before is unlikely to be true--just because it is so thrilling. Its likelihood is almost tautologously in inverse proportion to its thrillingness. And so it would seem that there can be nothing in thought that is both true and thrilling. One is a matter of mundane fact; the other a matter of the more or less decadent tastes for novelty of a jaded intellectual palate.

This is a melancholy conclusion--melancholy for me, since I think, to anticipate, that literary or philosophical vocation itself is something of a secular conversion, a persuasion to the side of the marvelous and thrilling. Why engage in philosophy or theory or speculative thinking if the height of speculation is ipso facto self-refuting on probabilistic grounds? (Even in the hard sciences current physics seems to run up against this wall: the odds against the initial conditions of the big bang being such that the universe would eventually be able to support life, according to current theory, must have been a trillion to one. Some would like to make this a good argument for the existence of God, but it's a far better argument for the inadequacy of the current theory, since the odds that the theory is wrong must be orders of magnitude greater than one in a trillion.) Is the experience of vocation then somehow wrong? (By way of reminder or registration of such experience, I will say that I myself felt it most strongly and eerily when I first read Blanchot; a version of it that might show the aesthetic stakes of a sudden and breathtaking change of mind is Rilke's reaction to the archaic torso of Apollo: you must change your life, which is what I felt and still feel reading Blanchot.) But many might think the Humean conclusion healthy and natural instead. If it is melancholy, though, I think there may still be a way out of it.

Indeed, Hume's essay on miracles is one example of such a way out: Hume's demonstration of the impossibility of miracles is itself thrilling. The argument against the very coherence of reasonable belief in the counterintuitive (when intuition means something like "conforming to the large scale structures of our reasonable beliefs") recommends itself through its counterintuitiveness. Here truth is stranger than fiction because it is strange indeed that the vividness of an idea or experience should tell not for but against its truth. We may think that reality is more vivid than fiction, but to be vivid is to stand out against the background of the world, and it's that background that is true and not what clashes with it. (Thus by a strange and natural antithesis does truth's very drabness transfigure itself into a vividness brighter than the vivid fictions it opposes.) Truth has a strangeness of a different order from that of fiction: the strange truth is that fiction's strangeness pales before the demonstration of the true impossibility of what mere fiction thinks of as merely strange.

I think it's really in Kant, though, that the thrillingness of the argument becomes thematized as part of the argument itself. The Critique of Pure Reason's first sentence describes the vocation of reason in somewhat despairing terms: "Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions that, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but that, transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." Kant's argument takes us to the limits that human reason can attain to, and shows what those limits are. The thrill in Kant derives from the consequences of the establishment of those limits, especially in his exposition of the antinomies of reason, not from their transcendence. We simply cannot know certain things, and all arguments about them are futile. Indeed we cannot know what might seem to us to go without saying, and in this sense we are burdened by questions that we cannot answer.

I take it that Kant's invention of the transcendental argument is a thrilling one. It recommends itself to our thirst for intellectual novelty by the way that it poses or acknowledges skeptical problems (as set forth by Hume) and then partially overcomes them (through analysis of the very coherence of the problems). Yet Kant, in a nicely ironic moment, says at the end that the Critique has achieved almost nothing that "the most ordinary understanding" doesn't already know. Indeed, he says the only extraordinary thing he does achieve is to demonstrate that the most ordinary understanding knows all that it needs. The thrill is factitious then--the thrill of a suspense narrative and not of further insight, since we find ourselves returned to the happy ending of the pre-philosophical ordinary.

But it is just this insufficiency of pure reason that becomes thrilling in Kant, and not an occasion to despair. Reason discovers its own insufficiency to achieve apodictic certainty, and in making this discovery it discovers the sublimity of the moral law over against the undiscovered realm of fact and knowledge. (This is a considerable refinement of Pascal's probabilistic argument for belief: Pascal believes that the probabilities favor Christianity, but that they're not decisive because decisive proof would leave no room for free human response. For Kant, that free response is stronger and more sublime than for Pascal.) The sublimity of moral law depends on the priority of law to being, the priority of the moral law to God himself. Pure reason is burdened by questions that it cannot answer, but it is just its own insufficiency that is its vocation: "Pure reason," he says, "is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. It can have no other vocation." At the end of the the first Critique Kant reposes the question with which he began: "Why has Providence placed many things that are closely bound up with our highest interests so far beyond our reach that we are only permitted to apprehend them in a manner lacking in clearness and subject to doubt--in such fashion that our enquiring gaze is more excited than satisfied?" The answer is that only thus can reason have itself as a vocation: its vocation is to achieve only the negative knowledge that there are questions to which it cannot know the answers. Its restless vocation is to discover that it can never overcome its own "restlessness": "we have no right to ignore the[] problems" that reason poses itself, as though they are intractable factual questions, for their "source [is] not in experience, but exclusively in reason itself." No factual solution is possible. The thrillingness of the discovery of the borders of reason and of its own restlessness is part of that discovery. It is reason's vocation to discover its own limitations and its simultaneous aspiration beyond those limitations: its vocation for the impossible. Kant's argument for the sublimity of the moral law, then, comes down to the thrilling idea that reason's self-examination should be thrilling, that it should find itself burdened and exalted by the impossible. For Kant it's the very thrill of the discovery that shows the "wisdom" of the nature or providence that made reason's self-discovery so thrilling. The thrill may indeed be an incentive to think this way (especially since nothing proves or disproves it), but such an incentive ought not to be understood as potentially misleading, since what is thrilling is just that such an incentive is given to us.

For Kant and those who follow (in the first instance, Hegel) the thrillingness of the result is no longer officially regarded as a neutral consequence, a bonus for those who like that sort of thing; neither is it seen as seducing to error. The thrillingness of the result is made into the guarantee of its truth. But the meaning of truth changes so that this is a practical or moral truth, a truth required by the human subject as a moral or human being. Truth now has a literary resonance: it is no longer an affair of knowledge but of drama. (This isn't hopelessly relativist, however: good drama isn't easy and must respect the Aristotelian probabilities.) Arguments about truth will partly be more primordial arguments about literary quality. It seems to me that this claim is almost trivially obvious about such powerful writers as Freud, Blanchot, Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, and Derrida; less obvious but just as true of Rawls or Quine and Davidson, among many others. (Ronald Dworkin tends I think to make a similar claim.)

I think that such an argument is present in Wittgenstein's disagreement with Moore. Moore's certainty about the existence of his hand--"I know that this is my hand"--continues or returns to truth-as-knowledge. But Wittgenstein has a more literary sense of both truth and knowledge, as the intensely elegiac tone of On Certainty (and indeed all the later Wittgenstein) makes manifest. There is a hand there, but this isn't something you may be said to know; knowledge names a very weak relation to life. For Wittgenstein you live with the world as you live with literature, and your relation to it isn't one of knowledge. It is rather one of a certain kind of love, what Wallace Stevens called love of the real, which is also love of the literary, the vanishing--the vanishing of the difference between the real and the unreal. I end with an anecdote about Wittgenstein's own literary taste (Wittgenstein who loved Kierkegaard, but thought--or rather, and thus thought--that a few words at a time were enough). He and a friend were walking past a church and entered to hear the announced sermon on the text from John (16:7): "It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you." Wittgenstein thought the sermon nonsense, but the verse itself of astonishing literary power. Which is in a sense the point of the verse. I think it encapsulates the attractiveness and power of Wittgenstein's own philosophy: knowledge--the presence of the divine--is replaced by solace: an account of its absence, which is a literary account, and which is better than the supposed reality whose failure it compensates.

WILLIAM FLESCH teaches English at Brandeis University. He is the author of Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, and is currently working on a book on literary quotation.

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Title Annotation:	Wittgenstein
Author:	FLESCH, WILLIAM
Publication:	Southwest Review
Date:	Sep 22, 1998
Words:	3448
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Topics:	Philosophy Analysis Reason Beliefs, opinions and attitudes