Wittgenstein's criticism of the cultural fall-out of Cartesian dualism

In this paper, I'm going to argue that Cartesian dualism and its progeny impede our understanding of what it is to be human, marshalling some resources from the later Wittgenstein to do so. To a lesser extent, I also use some themes from Hegel and Spinoza.

I'm also going to argue that modernity is practically influenced by Cartesian dualism and I will attempt to show that the criticism easily opens out into a criticism of a number of important features of our 21^st century Western mode of life. But firstly: a brief description of Cartesian dualism.

For Descartes, the human mind and body are two separate things. They are also different kinds of thing in that the mind has no extension in space and is immaterial (res cogitans), whereas the body occupies space and is material, having the same kinds of properties as other physical objects like mass and density and so on (res extensans). Mind and body are (in Descartes words) “primitive ideas or notions” , that is, they are not definable in terms of anything else. Furthermore, the ways of coming to understand mind and body are also different. The former is known through what Descartes calls “metaphysical reflection” and “meditation” by which he means the kind of introspection and speculation he describes in the famous Meditations. The latter is understood through “the study of mathematics” by which Descartes means the newly emerging mathematical physics which enables prediction of the motion of physical objects and which he himself helped to elaborate. Mind and body are further distinguished in that events in a person's mind are private, that is, known immediately only to that person, whereas the body is publicly observable. Though separate, mind and body are clearly intimately connected in a living person and Descartes views this interconnection as being a causal interaction. Thus, an event in the mind such as a desire may cause the body to move: I want an apple so I take it from the tree. Conversely, events in the body, (perhaps caused by the impact of the physical world on the body), may cause events in the mind. For example, I drop a brick on my toe and the mental event of the experience of pain ensues.

This view of the mind/body distinction suffers from profound incoherence. The first problem arises when the common sense view, (that of ordinary “ordinary life and conversation” [Descartes' words]¹), that mind and body are one thing, is taken into consideration and we attempt to reconcile it with the sharp Cartesian distinction between mind and body. Descartes was well aware of this difficulty, noting that such a reconciliation “requires our conceiving them [mind and body] as a single thing and simultaneously conceiving them as two things, which is self-contradictory”. A second problem arises when the exact nature of the interaction between body and mind is considered. This interaction is supposed to be causal, but then the awkward question arises of how an immaterial thing such as the mind is supposed to be able to causally effect a material thing such as the body is supposed to be, and vice versa. Both of these difficulties are evaded by Descartes on the grounds that the issues involved are essentially mysterious and beyond the capacities of the human understanding. Cartesian dualism, then, does not give us a coherent picture of what it is to be human.

What alternative view is possible? One strategy for overcoming the incoherence of Cartesian dualism is to simply deny the reality of one side of the duality or another. Denying the reality of the body and, by extension, of all matter is a position not much favoured in the contemporary West, though Descartes himself passed though this position when he tested the limits of radical doubt. (I don't think Bishop Berkeley has too many fans at the moment!) Denying the reality of mind has found more favour. For example: Watson and Skinner, the originators of psychological behaviourism, claim that only the study of “observable” bodily behaviour rather than mind can enlarge our understanding of human beings. In a similar vein, mind-brain identity theorists claim that all mental events are really brain-states. Both theories fall into the category of mind-denying reductionism. They do, however, remain parasitic on Cartesian dualism since they attempt to rectify its undoubted problems. But mistakenly, they both assume that the mind-body distinction can be dispensed with altogether.

For both Wittgenstein and Descartes' immediate critic Spinoza, the mind-body distinction is meaningful and necessary. For Spinoza, the distinction is conceived wrongly by Descartes. Descartes' mistake, according to Spinoza, is to regard the mind as a thing thereby producing the problem of mind-body interaction. If however, Spinoza asserts, mind and body are treated as two “attributes” or aspects of a single thing, the human being, then the problem of interaction dissolves. There are now no two things to interact. Rather, we have two ways of explicating a single phenomenon. Consider, for example, the case of appetite. “Under the attribute of the mental”, we may speak of appetite in terms of decision or intention or desire to eat: “under the attribute of the material”, we may speak about appetite in terms of the physiological state of the stomach, the electro-chemical state of the vagus nerve, and so on. There is no question here of any interaction between different entities: only one entity is involved. The problem for the enquiry into mind and body is now that of identifying criteria for choice between modes of speaking. Spinoza's theory is clearly superior to Descartes' on the grounds of simplicity, coherence and elegance. But whatever the merits of his theory, (or whatever the possibility of the success of any systematic account of the human being), Spinoza has brought into sharp relief the assumption at the centre of Descartes' theory which is responsible for its incoherence, an incoherence in turn responsible for the modern attempts to render the use of mentalistic terms or “mind-talk” redundant (Young).

For Wittgenstein, attempting to reduce mind-talk to scientifically interesting brain-states is a mistake deriving from a misunderstanding of the nature of language. Language, according to Wittgenstein, is irreducibly a social activity, deeply embedded in culture or a particular “form of life” (Wittgenstein (a) PI 19 & 23). Wittgenstein underscores this point by arguing that the notion of a private language is incoherent. (And this is a notion we are likely to conceive within the Cartesian framework with logical priority ascribed to the private subject rather than the social) (See Dilman: 116 & PI 269 ff.) A private language in which the meaning of the terms were known only to the originator of the language could not be possibly be used to communicate and on this count would hardly be a language at all. Moreover, the originator would not be able to express her own private experiences to herself in the private language either. This is because each sensation is unique and in the absence of outer, public criteria for subsuming a number of unique sensations under a single term like “blue”, each sensation would have its own name. Language would then be nothing but a sequence of meaningless names.

In any case, language has far more functions than naming, and indeed new functions can be invented. Naming is only one amongst many actual and an infinity of possible “language-games” (ibid: PI 23). Just like real games, language-games have their own aims and purposes within their own sphere of activity and their own rules. Thus besides the language-game of naming, there is the language-game of natural science which is attached to the activity of predicting and controlling the natural world, and the language-game of mind talk, whose sphere of activity I shall presently attempt to elucidate. The analogy also holds good in that the outcome and form of a particular instance of a game is not rule-determined. Within the rules of chess, for example, each game is unique.(The analogy is not so apt in that the rules of a language-game can change, and indeed it is the point of some language-games – such as that of modern art – to change the rules of the game.) Attempting to reduce the language-game of mind-talk, therefore, to the language game of science as in mind-brain identity theory either fails to recognise the purpose of the mind-talk language game as different from that of the science language-game and dispenses with it unconsciously, or does recognise it but assumes that it can be dispensed with.

So far, it might seem that the arguments dealt with are of no practical consequence, and belong to that academic “world of make-believe” which R.G. Collingwood identifies as the natural habitat of much discussion of the mind-body problem (Collingwood: 12). However, if this reading of Wittgenstein is cogent, much is at stake: we ignore or discard the purpose of the mind-talk language-game at our peril. Yet this is precisely what those champions of modernity who seek to abolish or subsume mind-talk are engaged in. What then is the purpose of mind-talk that it is so important? Consider the following passage from Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology:

Do I believe in a soul in someone else, when I look into his eyes with astonishment and delight (Wittgenstein (b): 3)?

What Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to here is the fact that ( at least some) human interactions are not theoretically mediated (by, for instance, hypothesising a soul as cause of behaviour in the other in Cartesian dualist fashion, or by reducing the animation in the other's eyes to brain states or anything else). Instead, interactions like that just given in the example are a spontaneous matter in which we engage with the other as a subject like ourselves. I look into his eyes: I am delighted; he is clearly not the object of my scientific scrutiny. This is, rather, a social activity and a part of it is a particular language-game. Perhaps as I look into the other's eyes, I say something like, “ I adore you more than sky”. I am revealing my feeling about the other to the other. There would be little point in making such a confession to anything other than another subject, since I desire to be understood, and only subjects understand. I give recognition but also seek the recognition only another subject can give. In this way I constitute myself and help the other to constitute himself (Hegel). In keeping with the possibilities of the game, I am hopefully expecting the other to deal with me in turn as a subject, and a response like, “I love you too”, or equally, “ I don't return your feelings”, would fulfil my expectation. The language-game associated with this particular sphere of activity, that of intimate human interaction between subjects, is used to facilitate that activity and, clearly, a language-game enmeshed in some entirely different sphere of activity will not do as well or indeed at all. If we appreciate the unique purpose of this human interaction language-game and value the sphere of activity attached to it, then we will realise that reducing one language-game to another is a mistake. And not only a technical misunderstanding of the nature of language: it is also a devaluation of human mutuality. That in turn, as Wittgenstein's initially mysterious question reveals, is a miserable repudiation of much “delight” and “astonishment”.

The abolition of mind-talk by reduction to some version of the scientific language-game would be a misfortune for any pair of individuals seeking the pleasures or practical advantages of human solidarity. But at the level of culture in general, it is the disaster of scientism. If mind-talk is to be abolished or severely devalued, as it must be to overcome the difficulties of Cartesian dualism through a behaviourist or materialist reduction, then the scientific language-game (in its behaviourist or materialist modes) must be regarded as privileged, that is, nearer to the “truth” than the language game it would replace. In this way the materialist manoeuvre is legitimated.

Again though, the nature of language is being misunderstood. Language consists of language-games which are radically different in purpose from each other, rather than essentially similar attempts to state “the truth” differing only in their success, with the supremely successful language-game, science, acting as adjudicator of all the others. Yet this latter characterisation describes the core of modernity. Science as conceived of scientistically can claim to tell us what “I am in pain” “really “ means. As Wittgenstein notes:

Science: enrichment and impoverishment. One particular method elbows all the others aside. They all seem paltry in comparison, preliminary stages at best (Wittgenstein (b) 15) .

That science has undoubtedly produced an enrichment, particularly of material well-being for many people, partly accounts for the way it has come to occupy a privileged position in our culture. But in what sense is it also an impoverishment? Wittgenstein is clear here: not only is the privileged language-game status of science unwarranted (ibid 14), but it silences other valuable voices and our culture is narrowed and so therefore are we. The effect of this scientism on our culture can be characterised thus:

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians etc., to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – that does not occur (ibid 8).

Wittgenstein here is indicating a gross misunderstanding of what it is to be human, especially of the possibilities of self-understanding open to human beings through the arts, which is logically connected to those reductionisms in turn dependent on Cartesian dualism. To speculate, following Hegel and regarding Cartesian dualism and its descendants as products of specific historical contexts: perhaps saving the Cartesian problematic by sacrificing its dualism was a way of saving the scientism that motivated Cartesian dualism's original formulation. Following Marx, we might then ask, “Who benefits?”

In the previous paragraphs, I have concentrated on the misunderstandings of what it is to be human that arise from the attempts to abolish the mind-body distinction. But it is also interesting that Wittgenstein was alert to the consequences of misconceiving that distinction. Particularly, Wittgenstein arrives at a similar insight to Spinoza regarding the incoherence of the Cartesian reification of the mind. Thus when Wittgenstein reminds us that “The human body is the best picture of the human soul”, he is emphasising the connection between the human body and mind that proves so conceptually awkward for the notion that the mind is a thing (Wittgenstein (a): PI 178). Furthermore, he is questioning the nature of the privacy of the mind as conceived by Cartesian dualism. We get a “picture” of a specific “human soul” by interacting with another. In this interaction, mouths move to utter sentences, faces are alive with expressions, bodies gesticulate and adopt communicative stances: we are not battling theoretically with the problem of the privacy of the other. It seems indeed that this sphere of activity provides the means which render the soul almost visible and palpable. On the Cartesian view, by contrast, the soul is utterly private, and best known, (with the most certain knowledge possible), by introspection. Wittgenstein counters this latter point also: introspective knowledge is not particularly privileged for, “Nothing is so difficult than not deceiving oneself” (Wittgenstein (b): 6).

None of this is to say that the public-private distinction has no basis, and indeed Wittgenstein pays it considerable attention. He refines the distinction by considering “psychological verbs” (Anscombe: 60). For this class of verb, the third and first person singular of the present indicative are “asymmetrical”. So for example, the grounds for believing “He's got a headache” or “He believes that story” are observational, that is, public (ibid: 61). But this is not the case for “I've got a headache” which requires no grounds for belief; one simply has a headache. Nor is it the case for “I believe that story” which though there are grounds for belief in the story, is not judged by me to be a true assertion on the basis of (publicly available) observation. Indeed, there is no need for me to judge it at all. To make this point clear, note the symmetry between “I have a wart on my wrist” and “ He has a wart on his wrist” (ibid: 61). The upshot here is that the Wittgensteinian subject is private, but not necessarily condemned to a solipstistic hell, at least so long as people can still master the sphere of activity of human interaction as between subjects and play its language-game.

The fact that we can engage in this activity has ramifications for how we understand the human subject. The Cartesian subject as an ahistorical, asocial entity which exists prior to everything else, has to struggle (on a metaphysical “plane”) to renounce solipsism: its existence is affirmed by doubting not only the reports of others' subjectivity, but the very existence of others. If this is what it is to be human, then we may indeed meaningfully ask of another “Is he an automaton?”, but we cannot engage in the trusting and spontaneous interaction in which the body pictures the soul (Wittgenstein (b): 38). Instead, the soul causes the movements of the body and is known to us only in the most leaden fashion through inference; inference, moreover, the conclusions of which are always dubious. The Wittgensteinian subject, by contrast, is constituted in interaction; her existence is not given but arises out of interaction with others; she understands herself through language which is intersubjective; she finds solipsism absurd because the very manner of her constitution depends on the recognition of (and by) others as subjects. This characterisation is much closer to the ordinary experience of mutuality that Wittgenstein repeatedly points to. It is true that this subject can doubt the pain of another, though not her own pain; but through pain-talk and pain behaviour, she is often well aware of others' pain and others of her own pain (ibid: 20). This is an ordinary part of ordinary social interaction which Cartesian dualism cannot theoretically encompass without the implausible suggestion that we know that another is in pain by inferring a cause for the behaviour we observe on the basis of our own utterly private experience. This suggestion is incoherent, not least because the supposedly private and self-contained inference cannot possibly take place without the “external” support of shared language which enables inference and the categorisation of experience (Wittgenstein (b): 23).

Again, this is not merely a matter of academic debate. When the subject is conceived of as utterly private, rather than constituted through interaction with other subjects, doubt about the feelings of the other is the inevitable starting point for all interactions; at the outset we have no information on which to base our inferences. Doubt is always likely to persist as the interaction continues because the behaviour we observe is caused, that is, controlled, by the other from the fastness of his privacy. How easy then, since the eyes are not after all the windows of the soul, nor the body its picture, for us to be deceived and manipulated! And in this fearful situation, how necessary to deceive and manipulate. Interaction is now a matter of calculation. We cannot extend our trust to the other or accept the trust of another on the basis of such a conception of human beings. And as Bruce Young points out, the corollary of this generalised doubt is the reification of others. What then would a form of life look like whose mode of interaction was determined entirely by the Cartesian conception of the human being? Wittgenstein imagines it:

(Imagine) a tribe: the people often pretend, they lie in the road looking ill and in pain; if someone comes to their aid, they attack him. For this behaviour the tribe has a particular word.

Instead of 'it is uncertain whether he is in pain' one might say 'Be mistrustful in the face of his manifestation of pain'. - And how does one do that (Wittgenstein (b): 3)?

It is not too fanciful to suggest that that the tribe described by Wittgenstein is to some extent our own as it was just after World War II, and as it continues to be. The confidence trick described in the first paragraph is paradigmatic of the deception found in much modern commerce and politics, and probably private life too. The rhetorical question at the end of the second paragraph can be answered thus: “One cannot trust his manifestation of pain, so one ignores him in the interests of self-preservation. Or to be really safe, one attacks”. In this culture of Cartesian suspicion, we withdraw from solidarity with others. Real calls for help go unheard. In the absence of the mutuality which enables us to relate to others as subjects, by now corroded by the mistrust natural to terribly isolated souls, others are treated as mere objects. “And how does one do that?” Writing in 1946-7, Wittgenstein must have been well aware that very many ordinary people had found the answer to this question in the immediately preceding years, and not only those who manned the ovens at Auschwitz.

In conclusion: Cartesian dualism and the reductionisms which are parasitic upon it impede our understanding of what it is to be human in a number of ways. Firstly, the theory itself is incoherent leading to a misconception of the mind-body distinction. Secondly, it leads to a false understanding of the nature and purposes of human interaction. Thirdly, it leads to scientism. Fourthly, it leads to a misunderstanding of the nature and origins of the human subject. None of this would matter if the language-games which use Cartesian dualism were not attached to a ubiquitous form of life. As I hope I have shown, the practical results deriving logically from these misunderstandings are a narrowing of culture with an attenuation of the possibilities for human joy, and a reification of people. Moreover, these consequences are to some extent actually manifest within modernity. Our impeded understanding is on the way to becoming our total understanding, and in that event, “what it is to be human” as we are now able to understand it will be at most a dim nostalgia or a utopian dream. None of this would matter either, except “what it is to be human” as Wittgenstein recommends it to us, is of inestimable value. Fortunately, despite the encroachment of modernity that I have described, we are still in possession of that good, or else we could not recognise Wittgenstein's description of it. Do we then develop a form of life that cherishes, nurtures and uses the possibilities of human interaction as between subjects, or do we perfect those reductionist projects that feature so large in modernity? The former option entails dropping the Cartesian problematic in all its manifestations, and very much more besides.

Bibliography [Apologies for the poor references]

Anscombe, G. E. M. Events in the Mind

Collingwood, R.G. (1942) 'The Relation between Body and Mind', The New Leviathan. Oxford: The Calrendon Press

Descartes, René Letter to Princess Elizabeth

Descartes, René Meditations

Dilman, Ilham Can Philosophy Speak about Life?

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology

1We happily use the terms “I”, “me” and “mine” to refer as much to our limbs and organs as to our thoughts and feelings. This notion of the unity of mind and body is also “primitive”.

Metaphysics

But we've always got some myth to live in - we don't stay out at night, under the great emptiness of the sky (Frayn,1974: 246).

And what a static universe the question [What exists?] suggests! (ibid: 283).

On several occasions, we have discussed “metaphysics” at PH campfire. These discussions have been diffuse, even by PH standards, and probably because we all have different ideas as to what is meant by the term “metaphysics”.

P.H. Strawson identified a number of ways in which the term is used and I have summarised them below in the hope that they will help us have further discussions in which we are all talking about the same thing!

It will be apparent to the reader that this piece is an extract from a much longer piece but I trust that due allowance for that can be easily made. (It was written 15 years ago and embarrasses me now!) I have included the full bibliography since it might be of interest.

________________________

P. F. Strawson (1989) offers a particularly cogent account of the usages of the term “metaphysics”. As well as summarising it below, I have also attempted to identify some "general connections" between the various usages (ibid: 203). However, the substratum that I identify is dissimilar from Stawson's, and, no doubt, rather more idiosyncratic.

The first characteristic of metaphysics identified by Strawson is the area of concern found in Aristotle's Metaphysics, the very title of which is revealing! This title, given to the text by Aristotle's editors, is the first ever use of the term, and it is not unreasonable to expect some semiotic clarity to emerge from the investigation of its original meaning. However, even such a sensible course runs into ambiguity. We may, on the one hand, take seriously R.G. Collingwood's (1940) determinedly sober suggestion that the title means nothing more than the manuscript written chronologically after (meta) the Physics; or, on the other hand, we may prefer H. Skolomowski's (1992) interpretation that the title indicates a subject matter that is beyond (meta) physics. Personally, I like to imagine Aristotle's editors enjoying the ambiguity. Whatever the intentions of its editors though, the Metaphysics (1961) is certainly concerned with what is purportedly more fundamental than physics. As Strawson puts it, "[Aristotelian] Metaphysics is a comprehensive study of what is fundamental in the order of knowledge, explanation and existence (Strawson op cit: 203)." Thus we find in the Metaphysics (1961) an extended analysis of "substance", the fundamental (imperishable) aspect of being, and necessitated by that, the elucidation of the laws of logic, "the principles about which it is impossible to be mistaken " (ibid: 123).

The second usage of "metaphysics" noted by Strawson denotes "the study of reality as opposed to mere appearance " (Strawson op cit: 203). This usage is, as Strawson points out, linked to the Aristotelian usage, in that what is thought to be fundamental, (that is, revealed by rational enquiry), may be honoured as "the real", with what is immediately "apparent" (as the starting point of enquiry) being relegated to the secondary. Indeed, "the apparent", the world as given to us by the senses, (as it appears), is identified by Aristotle as being in opposition to "the real", for example, when he criticises Anaxagoras for having "identified reality with the sensible world " (Aristotle op cit: 136). Metaphysics, on this account, presupposes, then, that the real is distinguished from what is immediately obvious in our experience: like the inhabitants of Plato's cave we only perceive shadows. The business of metaphysics is to study the origin of those shadows.

The next usage identified by Strawson takes it that the subject of metaphysics "is, or has been, what transcends experience " (Strawson op cit). The connection is clear with the first two usages: the real (i.e. the fundamental), in being distinct from the apparent, is not immediately available to the senses. The method of investigating the real is therefore "a priori rather than empirical " (ibid).

So far, the various meanings seem logically connected. The quest for the fundamental will inevitably give rise to a real/apparent distinction and the real will be thought to transcend experience (the God's eye view is seen with the mind's eye) and its investigation will involve a priori method. But the real/apparent distinction can be seen as resulting from the enthusiasm of the metaphysician who is really (!) (only!) offering a new way of looking at the world. A new metaphysics "proposes a revision of the set of ideas in terms of which we think about the world, a change in our conceptual scheme, a new way of talking (ibid)," and the metaphysician claims that this new way of looking uncovers the real. What he or she wants us to regard as the fundamental is honoured as "reality" and concomitantly our previous or ordinary conceptions have to be seen as delusions. This characterisation of "metaphysics", which Strawson attributes to Wittgenstein and Wisdom, somewhat undermines the metaphysicians' claim to identify and deal with the "real" by placing their efforts in a historical and cultural context, a manoeuvre which makes those claims seem grandiose. And here, something of the pejorative, modern, sense of the term is evident. For Strawson, though, the admitted grandiosity of the "revisionary" kind of metaphysics described above does not preclude the legitimacy of a more modest "descriptive" metaphysics which confines itself to clarifying the general structure of our common sense thinking and its scientific extensions (Strawson, 1959).

The latter is the last of Strawson's usages and it coheres the least well with the others. It identifies metaphysics as the activity which "is, or ought to be, the study of the intellectual equipment and limitations of human beings " (Strawson, 1989 op cit: 203). This is the project which arose out of Hume's exasperation with the endless, empirically undecidable quarrels between rival metaphysical systems, and which was modified and developed by Kant. What coherence there is between this and the other characterisations of metaphysics relies on the fact that Kant and Hume regard the study of human understanding as necessary for "the determination of what is fundamental in the order of knowledge and explanation " (ibid: 204); that is, they still have the metaphysicians' concern "to get to the bottom of things". We could, perhaps, also meaningfully attach the term metaphysics to the Humean/Kantian project in that it grows out of the tradition which is metaphysical in the other senses, albeit as a criticism of that tradition.

However, as Strawson points out, the criticisms made by both Hume and Kant contain features of the very metaphysics they criticise, (and on this count alone can be characterised as metaphysical). Strawson's reading of the Kantian criticism of metaphysics has it that metaphysicians inevitably use the concepts of our ordinary understanding in ways which stand outside of "the empirical conditions of their employment " (ibid: 205), and that this is illegitimate. But, Strawson continues, both Hume and Kant do this same kind of violence to certain concepts. Kant's doctrine that only the unknowable in-itself is "real", for instance, violates the concepts of knowledge and reality as they are actually used. Similarly, Hume's doctrine that imagination causes us to believe in physical things violates the ordinary usage of the concept imagination.

Bibliography

Aristotle (1961,1st. ed. 1956) Metaphysics. (Warrington J. ed. & translator) London: Everyman's Library (Dent)

Burrt, E.A. (2nd. ed. 1932, 1st. ed. 1924) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Campbell, K. (1976) Metaphysics an Introduction. Encino: Dickenson Publishing Co.

Collingwood, R.G. (1940) An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Frayn, Michael (1974) Constructions. London: Wildwood House

Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Plato (1973) Theaetetus. (McDowell, J., translator) Oxford: Clarendon Press

Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Russell, B. (1984) A History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge

Skolimowski, H. (1992) Living Philosophy. London: Arcana

Stcherbatsky, T. (1993) Buddhist Logic Volume I. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers

Strawson, P.F. (new edn.1989) "Metaphysics" in The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy & Philosophers. (Urmson & Ree eds.) London: Routledge

Strawson, P.F. (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

Nietzsche's taxonomy of raptures and its uses for life

Introduction

 

In this paper I ask if Nietzsche’s accounts of art can give us any purchase on the nature and value of creativity.

 

I attempt at the outset to give an account of the connection Nietzsche makes between rapture, creativity and the roles these might play in “the countermovement to nihilism” (e.g. WP §794).

 

I identify a tension between early and late formulations of creativity (as given in The Birth of Tragedy and in notes from 1888 and The Twilight of the Idols respectively), particularly with regard to the nature of Dionysian and Apollonian “energies” and I take this as the locus of my investigation.

 

The early formulations emphasise ego-dissolution into the “primal oneness” (BT: §1) as the defining feature of Dionysian rapture. The later emphasise heightened feelings of power, abundance and life-affirmation and ego-loss is much less emphasised (e.g. WP §811, TI ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, §4). It might seem that this change is made partly to distance Nietzsche from what he himself admitted in his 1886 preface was the embarrassingly Schopenhauerian flavour of his BT account. The case for discounting a role for ego-dissolution in creative rapture which is seemingly implicit in Nietzsche’s twisting free of Schopenhauer looks even stronger when Nietzsche (in ‘The Third Essay’ of On the Genealogy of Morals) identifies a certain type of ascetic unselfing as implicated in nihilism and speaks strongly against it.

 

Against this I place Nietzsche’s account of his own experience of inspiration as given in Ecce Homo (‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ §3). Clearly, something like ego-dissolution is involved here.  I add further weight to this side of the scale with a consideration of Nietzsche’s late “deconstructions” of the subject/ego.

 

This tension might be taken to indicate that Nietzsche had not succeeded in completely casting off Schopenhauer and with him, asceticism, nihilism and life-negation. However, I argue, we should not be too quick to draw this conclusion. Instead the question ought to be investigated by clarifying Nietzsche’s taxonomy of raptures.  This taxonomy of raptures includes ascetic raptures, hypnotic and narcotic raptures, raptures manufactured for purposes of dominance, as well as the will to form of the Apollonian and the affirmative and abundant Dionysian.

 

I suggest that all of these involve some lability of the boundary around the subject/ego, including the type of raptures which can function as the well-spring of an art (and philosophy) capable of countering nihilism.

 

The countermovement to nihilism

 

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes himself as engaging in the “great task” (EH, “Why I Am So Clever”: #10) of performing a “revaluation of values”, both existing values and “value” itself. His aim, and this for him is the truly philosophical task, is to “legislate” so as to create the conditions for a kind of cultural revolution which will in time replace the purportedly life-negating, Christian-Platonic, other-worldly values of Western culture with alternative ones which will allow, at least some people, to fully affirm life.

 

In all phases of his thought, Nietzsche places great hope in art and this is central to his self-appointed “great task”. As early as The Birth of Tragedy,  Dionysiac art is seen to promise the possibility of life-affirmation in despite of  “all our pity and terror” (BT §17). By 1888 Nietzsche is assigning to art the broader role of “the countermovement” to decadent philosophy, morality and religion (WP §794). Both of these may be seen as attempts to find some armament in the war on nihilism and some basis on which to rebuild culture after its defeat.

 

If this is right, Nietzsche’s deliberations on art are of the utmost importance to his project. So what is the character of those deliberations? As Heidegger points out, they focus most often on the artist (somewhat broadly conceived) rather than on the reception of art or on art as such (Vol. I: 70). In part, this emphasis arises in order to address the question of what the character of  the “artist philosopher” who can think in new ways appropriate to the “great task” will be like (WP §795).This in turn becomes a concern with “physiology”, with the “states” experienced by the artist (WP §811).

 

In both early and late formulations we find that the creativity experienced by the artist is considered by Nietzsche to be essentially rapturous, where “rapture” is understood as a state of being strongly moved “out of oneself” or beyond the limits of ordinary consciousness. Within this very general characterisation of “rapture”, Nietzsche explores various more nuanced ways of understanding it, but always with one eye on deriving an understanding that will facilitate his great task. Let’s examine some of these.

 

Rapture in The Birth of Tragedy

 

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduces the notion that there are two fundamental and opposite modes of artistic creativity, the Apollonian mode of dream and the Dionysian mode of intoxication:

 

We have so far considered the Apolline, and its opposite, the Dionysiac,   as artistic powers which spring from nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist, and in which nature’s artistic urges are immediately satisfied; on the one hand as the world of dream images, whose perfection is not at all dependent on the intellectual accomplishments or artistic culture of the individual; on the other hand as an ecstatic reality, which again pays no heed to the individual, but even seeks to destroy individuality and redeem it with a mystical sense of unity. Faced with these immediate artistic states in nature, every artist is an ‘imitator’ – either an Apolline dream artist or a Dionysiac ecstatic artist or else – as for example in Greek tragedy – a dream artist and an ecstatic artist at one and the same time (BT §2).

 

Here we should note that though “mystical self-negation” is most obviously a feature of this conception of the Dionysian, the ego (or “individuality”) is pushed to one side even in the Apollonian where the artist is overtaken by a force of nature as he submits to the dream state. The Greek tragic artist, the quintessentially affirmative artist, combines these two states and apprehends “his unity with the innermost core of the world” as a dream image and thus gives form to insights gained through an ecstatic experience of ego-loss in which the creation and destruction of the world process is affirmed.

 

Rapture in 1888

 

In a late formulation of the Apollonian-Dionysian antithesis found in WP §798, Nietzsche reiterates much of what he has said in BT. There is a difference, however.  Though “art appears in man like a force of nature and disposes of him whether he will or no…” the Dionysian here is no longer described specifically in terms of ego-dissolution into the primal Oneness (WP §798). Also, we should note that by now the Apollonian and the Dionysian have become less antithetical: both are now unequivocally intoxications with a sexual and “voluptuous” character with the Apollonian being understood as a rapturous feeling of great power (WP §799). In yet another aphorism of this period the Apollonian and Dionysian seem to slide into each other more or less completely. Here Nietzsche does not mention them by name, but talks only of intoxication as essential to creativity. This intoxication has a strong sexual character like the Dionysian and an urge to simplify forms like the Apollonian. But what is essential to the artist’s intoxication in this formulation is that “The condition of pleasure called intoxication is precisely an exalted feeling of power” (WP §800).

 

In The Twilight of the Idols (‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ §4) it is the Dionysian itself (rather than the Apollonian) which is “explicable only in terms of an excess of force” and the term “Dionysian” now seems to be synonymous with (affirmative) creative rapture as such (ibid).

 

The shift in Nietzsche’s thinking

 

The rapture of creativity, then, clearly occupies a crucial place in the architectonic of Nietzsche’s thought. Hence we see Nietzsche attempting again and again to understand and characterise it. And always it is associated with the notion of life-affirmation which is continuously explored and clarified alongside it.

 

There is clearly a shift over time in Nietzsche’s thinking regarding the natures of both creative rapture and life-affirmation with early formulations emphasising ego-dissolution and later formulations emphasising great feelings of power and abundance.

 

Three reasons for this shift suggest themselves. Firstly, the emphasis on feelings of power which characterises the 1888 formulations is probably a corollary of Nietzsche’s renewed interest of the same period in the concept of the will to power and his thought that a great abundance of the will to power in an individual was a sign of supreme life-affirmation and greatness.

 

Secondly, his rejection of Schopenhauer, already germinating in BT, was by 1888 vehement and total. The ground for this rejection is that Schopenhauer is seen as having a life-negating attitude: for him “…the will to nothingness has the upper hand over the will to life…” to the extent that “it is better not to be than to be” (WP §685). His strategy for dealing with the painful character of life is to become will-less, that is, to be resigned to the point of sacrificing the ego. Because he adopts this strategy he misunderstands art: he takes “...art for a bridge to the denial of life” (WP §812). Clearly Nietzsche must reject Schopenhauer (as he reads him) if he is to champion life-affirmation and theorise art as the antidote to life-negation. Even though in BT Nietzsche chastises Schopenhauer for actually downplaying the will-lessness behind the inspiration of the lyric poet, for only seeing it as partially due to a mergence with the “only truly existent subject” (i.e. “the primal Oneness”), he must by 1888 drop this talk of ego-dissolution. It is too close for comfort to Schopenhauer’s advocacy of an ascetic unselfing and life-denial.

 

The shift in Nietzsche’s thinking is also clearly related to the far-reaching consideration he has given to the ascetic ideal in ‘The Third Essay’ of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Here Kant, deemed partly responsible for Schopenhauer’s mistake, is the whipping-boy. On this view, Kant and indeed all philosophers have made the mistakes of failing to consider “the aesthetic problem from the experience of the artist (the creator)” and of giving us “…definitions within which, as in each of Kant’s famous definitions of the beautiful, the lack of a more differentiated experience of the self sits like a fat worm of fundamental error” (‘Third Essay’ §6).

 

To summarise thus far: as Nietzsche developed his conceptions of life-affirmation and life-negation, especially as he did so through his considerations of the ascetic ideal, he became suspicious of projects of negating the ego, seeing into their ascetic, life-negating heart. Formulations of rapture emphasising ego-dissolution were not going to fare well in this climate, especially as rapture was still considered central to art and art was still full of possibility for the overcoming of life-negation in despite of its vulnerability to the ascetic corruption of a Wagner.

 

Nietzsche the artist

 

Thus far it seems that we have to examine the cogency of what appears to be a development in Nietzsche’s thought on aesthetics if we are to use it as a resource for our own deliberations on the nature of creativity. But the Nietzschean oeuvre offers us another resource. Nietzsche was himself an artist and it is inevitable that his aesthetic formulations are profoundly informed by his own experience of creativity. Fortunately, Nietzsche gives us some reports of his own experience and this is obviously a vital resource for this enquiry. Let’s consider, then, the remarkable account of his inspiration given in EH ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ §3 in the hope of getting some purchase on the conundrum of the nature of creativity.

 

When gripped by inspiration, Nietzsche tells us, one feels to be merely the “medium of overwhelming forces”; something is revealed to one which “shakes and overturns one to the depths”; there is a “a complete being outside of oneself”; and “everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity” (ibid).

 

How should we take this? Has Nietzsche at this late stage reverted to a Schopenhauerian understanding of rapture? Though perhaps we do not quite have a language of melting into the One here, and feelings of power are still emphasised, there is certainly a sense that ego-loss and will-lessness or something very near to them is essential to creative rapture. This autobiographical detail makes it much more difficult to understand the shift in Nietzsche’s thought as simply a matter of development or a change of mind.

 

The taxonomy of raptures

 

How then can this contradictory tangle of Nietzsche’s thought on creativity help us to clarify its nature? It seems to me that some clarity can be had if we realise that Nietzsche considered many types of rapture throughout his career and actually taxonomised them.

 

In  GM ‘The Third Essay’, for instance, Nietzsche distinguishes the following raptures: there is the rapture in which the sick “intoxicate themselves with their own malicious poison” (§15); there is the self-hypnotic rapture of the ascetic who equates deep sleep with the unio mystica (§17); then there is “the lascivious outpourings and ecstasies” of saints who deny themselves everything (§17); there is “the pleasure of giving pleasure” which is really the indulgence in a small dose of the will to power by the giver (§18); there is the rapture of an excess of emotion (§19), and this is at its most powerful and dangerous when a sense of guilt is exploited (§20); and there is the rapture induced by demagoguery (§26). And of course, we should not overlook the Dionysian and Apollonian raptures. This list is not exhaustive, but enough has been said to indicate the highly nuanced nature of Nietzsche’s considerations of rapture.

 

But what is the basis of this taxonomising of raptures? Consider the contrast between the raptures essential to a fully affirmative art with those raptures delineated in detail in GM. Raptures which can serve art and in serving art serve the counter-movement to nihilism must of necessity be non-ascetic, at least if there is something exemplary in such art. The raptures delineated in GM, on the other hand, are mostly ascetic raptures and the concern there is to expose them and pour suspicion on them thereby loosening their grip on culture. There is then a crucial distinction between ascetic and non-ascetic raptures, i.e. between mostly life-affirmative raptures and mostly life-negating raptures.

 

What in turn does that distinction itself depend on? Firstly, the ascetic raptures are all means of dealing with pain which attempt to escape from it in some way or other, (even if this involves incurring it in order to learn to take some pleasure in it or become indifferent to it). They all in a sense are driven by pain. They clearly reach their apogee in the will to nothingness wherein that entity which suffers attempts to escape suffering by negating itself. All this is underpinned by an evaluation of life which takes it to be flawed or even worthless on account of the inevitability that it will inflict suffering upon us. By contrast, Nietzsche’s non-ascetic inspiration embraces suffering and is able to do so out of an abundance of energy.  As Nietzsche tells us, this rapture is characterised by “… a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light…” (EH ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ § 3). Here, life is far from worthless, in despite of its painful side.

 

Secondly, the ascetic raptures are the goal and reward of ascetic projects which are actively engaged in. But Nietzsche’s inspiration seems to be the product of something ironically akin to grace, and, indeed, Nietzsche tells us he would speak the language of grace without restraint were he not devoid of “superstition” (ibid). Creative rapture can be invited by an arrangement of the artist’s living conditions and a certain inner comportment to his life on the artists’ part: hence Nietzsche’s concern with diet, location and so forth as well as with the artist’s character. But on this formulation, there are no crudely ascetic manipulations of the organism or magical invocations as though rapture could be forced to bless the artist.

 

Thirdly, Nietzsche’s  emphasis on the abundance of energy which characterises non-ascetic creative rapture contrasts sharply with the sedative effect of many ascetic raptures and the enervation which motivates their cultivation.

 

Concluding remarks and speculations

 

Nietzsche’s considerations of creativity, then, furnish us with a highly nuanced taxonomy of raptures which relates raptures to attitudes of life-affirmation and life-negation and to concrete practices.

 

It is not only non-ascetic raptures, however, which are creative. The account given in The Genealogy makes it abundantly clear that the ascetic ideal with its associated raptures has been the creative force par excellence for millennia. So Nietzsche’s taxonomy of raptures does not ask us to accept a persuasive definition of creativity. Instead, it asks us to evaluate raptures and their associated modes of creativity. It asks us to question them and weigh them in order to determine the degree with which they are embroiled with life-negation and the degree with which they arise from and serve life-affirmation. If we are philosophers or artists, or even artist-philosophers, we owe Nietzsche an immense debt for bringing the necessity to evaluate our raptures, both actual and desired, into the light of consciousness and for suggesting a way of doing so. (It forces us to ask ourselves, “What is the use of our art for life?”)

 

But what of the connection between ego-dissolution and rapture? I think we can safely say that its move back into the shadows in Nietzsche’s later considerations happened for rhetorical reasons – to distance Nietzsche from Schopenhauer, to expose asceticism which often attempts to unseat the ego by pathological acts of willed self-torture, to emphasise the role of abundance of energy in what Nietzsche took to be healthy raptures capable of being marshalled against nihilism, to contrast this latter with the enervation characteristic of much ascetic rapture, and to point out the need to be able to evaluate raptures and not take them all to be the same.

 

The autobiographical evidence suggests that ego-dissolution was not, after all, out of the picture at the end of Nietzsche’s thought-trajectory on rapture and creativity.

 

But the ego-dissolution that Nietzsche talks about is spontaneous and in no wise the result of self-torture. It is not the result of a violent manipulation of soma and psyche and there is unlikely to be attraction towards such manipulation from one who loves his fate. It is certainly connected with a certain comportment on Nietzsche’s part towards his own life and we might account for his frequent autobiographical disclosures as an attempt to show how crucial this is, rather than seeing them as a Nietzschean idiosyncrasy that we have to put up with.

 

A part of that comportment, I want to suggest, is to regard ego as not in need of dissolution but of seeing through.. For the late Nietzsche, ego never had any substance. It never existed in the first place and there is no need, therefore, of ascetic effort to unseat it in the service of rapture. This is at least part of the significance, it seems to me, of the late deconstructions of ego as found for example in WP §481, §485, and §488 where ego is regarded as an interpretation under the imperative of the will to power. To so regard ego as a useful fiction is to invite rapture but not to demand it. (And if we love our fate we will not need to demand it.)

 

Nevertheless, ego-loss of some type, at least some lability of the ego-boundary, seems to be involved in all rapture and we need therefore to think how this might be so.

 

At this point, I can only offer some sketchy speculations on how this line of enquiry might be followed. If we take it that rapture is in some measure a matter of physiological change, the prominence of impacts on the body in ascetic practices which aim to produce rapture is understandable. The intimate connection between the body and the ego means that such practices, in interfering with the sense of the body, will cause the ego-boundary to seem at the very least to be labile and it is this affect which is sought.

 

But if rapture is inherently physiological, a healthy, non-ascetic rapture must be as physiological as its ascetic counterpart. Nietzsche seems to suggest just this, and there is no doubt about the physiological character of Nietzsche’s inspiration which we have not long ago considered. If the connection I have made between seeing ego as illusion and inviting creative rapture is cogent, then clearly a non-ascetic rapture can occur in virtue of our seeing through the illusion of ego, i.e. through seeing the productive role of interpretation in our sense of self. But how is this likely to manifest physiologically? How can it be more than a rather coldly intellectual and abstract “insight” lacking all the thrills and shudders of real rapture? Here, like Nietzsche, we must speak a language of energy, perhaps a language of libido.

 

Maintaining the illusion of ego, indeed maintaining any illusion, consumes energy. If we take both Nietzschean and Freudian formulations seriously, if we consider that the modern ego is maintained against a sense of guilt, and against the demands of instinct, and against the claims of social reality, then the fatigue and depression that both authors remark on as a concomitant of such a libidinal economy makes sense. Then neither is it surprising that the collapse of this economy will release all the energy formerly bound up by it, and the abundance of energy reported by Nietzsche as a main feature of non-ascetic creative rapture is explicable as a corollary of seeing through the illusion of ego. We might, incidentally, find that Nietzsche’s immoralism and his strong stand against the denigration of sexuality become quite transparent if they are understood as aimed against the libidinal economy of the ascetic ideal.

 

By contrast, the ascetic project remains captured by the illusion of ego insofar as any attempt to wilfully unseat ego remains an egoic project. Rapture interpreted as a sign of success in such an endeavour will actually confirm the strength of the ego to itself and the energy required to maintain ego will quickly be recaptured. Hence the possibility of soporific raptures which do not boast the abundant energy of non-ascetic raptures.

 

So what is Nietzsche’s ideal life-affirmative, anti-nihilistic creativity like? It must visit physiologically, as excitation, as arousal, as energy. It is only slightly excessive to call it the grace of Dionysius. It is invited by an openeness of spirit and a love of one’s fate, and it is just such rapture which caused Nietzsche to rhapsodise thus in 1885:

 

This world is will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are will to power – and nothing besides (WP §1067).

 

So again we have feelings of mergence with the primal oneness only now the latter has a new and more apposite name: the will to power. The new name captures the dynamic face both the world and self now present as well as the abundance of creative energy that the life-affirmative artist will experience.  This rapturous experience, I want to suggest, is the basis for and well-spring of Nietzsche’s artistic philosophising or philosophic art.