Tag Archives: Wittgenstein

Can you be offside in chess?

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the-football-players-1908(The Football Players by Henri Rousseau)

Two people are arguing; one insists that you can score a drop goal in football, the other that you can’t. Eventually it emerges that the first is talking about rugby football, gaelic football and Australian rules; but the other means only association football.

So who is right? Once we know the context, that question no longer makes sense – we can say that if by ‘football’ you mean these particular codes, then it is right to say that you can score a drop goal; but if you mean only association football, then that is not the case. So what about the original question – can you or can’t you score a drop goal in football?

There is no absolute sense of ‘football’ in which the question makes sense, though it can at least be resolved; but if you asked ‘can you score a drop goal in chess?’ or ‘can you be offside in chess?’ it would be clear that you didn’t know anything about chess (you might be a foreigner who knows it is the name of a game and is trying to work out what kind of game it is).

Wittgenstein uses the terms ‘game’ and ‘way of life’ a lot in his discussion of language, and in particular of meaning. His central contention is that words have meaning only in context, only as part of a larger whole in which they stand in relation to other things; hence his dictum that ‘in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.

To get the full force of what Wittgenstein is saying, you need to consider the position he is arguing against, which is that ‘meaning’ is something which the speaker imparts to a word by some kind of mental process, that when I make an utterance like ‘it is raining heavily’ there is some sort of parallel mental process that accompanies (and possibly precedes) my words. I suppose this arises from the idea that language is the expression of thought, which conjures an image of my thoughts forming a sort of mental cloud inside my head and my words having some correspondence to them, as if a line ran from each word to something in my mind.

(It is interesting, in passing, to see the spectre of Cartesian Dualism haunting that particular image)

But Wittgenstein’s argument is that this picture is simply mistaken and misleading and in fact unnecessary – we can explain how words mean perfectly well, indeed rather better, without having recourse to it. Meaning is a property, not of individual words, but of language, and not of some single over-arching language (an absolute ‘football’ in the terms of the argument above) but of a language made up of many different ‘codes’ or ‘games’ or ‘ways of life’.

A good dictionary illustrates this point, though at first sight it might seem to support the idea that words have fixed meanings in themselves. While a cheap dictionary will simply cite a single meaning, or a range of meanings if you are lucky, a dictionary like the OED will furnish a dated quotation to illustrate the earliest known occurrence of each particular meaning in use.

One of the earliest things you learn in studying philosophy is to define your terms; and this generally takes the form of the philosopher’s favourite statement, ‘it depends what you mean by…’ . Thus, in the argument above, one could say ‘It depends what you mean by ‘football’’ and that could quickly bring the argument to a happy resolution – but not necessarily.

This is where another of Wittgenstein’s ideas comes into play. If I was asked what makes Wittgenstein a philosopher of the first rank, I would point to his wonderful ability for quietly upsetting apple-carts – in other words, his breathtaking capacity for demolishing received ideas of central importance without making any fuss about it. In this case, the received idea is the notion of ‘essence’, which goes back to Aristotle.

Again, this is something you learn early in philosophy, and it can be a powerful tool in argument: that whatever is called by a particular name has an essence, some quality or set of qualities that makes it what it is, a defining character which entitles it to that name, and excludes other things from having the same name applied to them.

The whole system of classification from general to specific, which we also owe to Aristotle, depends on this concept: that all the members of a particular class have something in common that makes them members of that class. This is such a powerful and useful tool, with such a wide application, that we can overlook the fact that it is only a tool and (mis)take it for an actual description.

Wittgenstein, without the least fuss, demolishes the concept of essences, offering instead two other ways of looking at it: family resemblances, and strands in a thread. He uses the first in relation to games, then the second as a development of that, in relation to number:

‘Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”… what is common to them all? – Don’t say: ‘there must be something in common, or they would not be called “games”’ but look and see whether there is anything common to all.

[he cites board games, card-games (including patience), ball games (including a child throwing a ball against a wall) and even ring-a-ring-a-roses, then concludes]

And the result of this examination is: we see a  complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a “number”? well, perhaps because it has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.’

(Philosophical Investigations I,  nos 66 & 67)

This for me is a very liberating step, though perhaps that is only for those who have been in thrall to philosophy in the first place, in particular philosophy descended from Aristotle and Plato. It seems to me that as long as you have the concept of essence you are driven to the chimerical notion of some single order of reality at the back of everything which it then becomes the task of the philosopher to discover: the equivalent, in the argument we open with, of trying to find a single definition of ‘football’.

To dispense with, at a stroke, a single scheme of things into which everything must fit and replace it with a whole family of such schemes none of which can make an overarching claim seems to me a very healthy development and one that defuses a great deal of argument and eases a lot of tension. And there is another aspect of Wittgenstein’s concept of meaning that strikes me as potent and fruitful.

It occurs to me that there is a strong parallel between the concept of meaning defined by context and that of a character in a story, and that the two point to a third thing about our own ‘meaning’  as individuals in the world.

Meaning is not the property of a word; it is something that a word derives from the context in which it occurs, the language-game of which it forms a part, the way of life in which it is used, to use the Wittgensteinian terms. Similarly, a character in a story does not have a separate existence in his (or her) own right, but is defined in relation to the other characters and the action of the story – the story is the thing, if you like; the character is only a part.

(Of course you can play literary games and have Hamlet put in an appearance as Bertie Wooster’s house guest, but all you are really doing is inventing another form of football, as it were – you now have a third story, which features one character also found in Shakespere and another in Wodehouse; but you don’t reason from that that Hamlet and Bertie exist independently apart from the places where we find them)

Is it too bold a step to see ourselves in the same light? That our ‘meaning’ is derived from being part of a greater whole, rather than something we possess absolutely as of right? How compatible or incompatible would such a position be with other world-views, religious and otherwise? (I sense that the most strenuous objection would come from those who make a cult of individualism and advocate extreme self-reliance; from the wide range of others, not so much)

An interesting consideration, not least for the prospect it opens on the subject of personal boundaries and the limits of the self.
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Why is a raven like a writing desk? The power of abstraction.

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ImageAbstraction is an interesting notion. The word itself is derived from the Latin preposition ‘ab’ meaning ‘from’ or ‘away from’ combined with the verb ‘trahere’ ‘to pull or draw’ (which also gives us our word ‘tractor’) – thus it means, literally, ‘to pull or drag away from’ so that it conveys the sense of separation, something that was embedded being removed from its original surroundings.

The first thing I would like to consider is abstraction in relation to numbers, which strikes me as being fundamental to the discovery of mathematics. To help us here we might imagine, in the style of Wittgenstein, a couple of ‘primitive societies’ whose use of number differs from our own.

In the first, counting is only ever done in the presence of objects: these people have no notion of mental arithmetic or ‘counting in your head’ – to say ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ when there is nothing there to count would seem to them as bizarre as if I were to say ‘monkey hat potato bicycle’ out of the blue, with none of these things being present. For them, numbers are not at all abstract – they are a property of concrete objects, unthinkable apart from them.

The next society takes the view (not unreasonably) that only similar things can be counted: sacks of wheat, say, or earthenware oil jars in a storehouse can be enumerated, but if someone is confronted by a dozen objects all different, he will point to each in turn and say ‘one, one, one…’  on the grounds that they are all different, so don’t amount to anything together. After all, no-one can say that a jar of oil is the same as a sack of wheat, can they? That would be absurd! Then one day someone, in a flash of inspiration, sees that although the objects are different, the ‘ones’ are the same, so a second teller is introduced to count the number of times the first says ‘one’ (perhaps by making marks on a slate). He is then able to say ‘there are twelve ones there’.

This will give rise to a joke, a riddle: ‘why is a monkey like a hat?’ to which the answer will be ‘because they’re both one!’ (at which all laugh heartily). (You might even imagine quick children demonstrating this to their slow parents – monkey = 1; hat = 1; 1=1, so monkey = hat! – and the parents being amazed at their children’s sagacity – ‘the things they learn in school these days!’). (Come to think of it, that might be the solution to the Mad Hatter’s riddle, ‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’ – Lewis Carroll (or rather C L Dodgson) was a mathematician)

But what interests me here is that this is the beginning of abstraction, to see that one of anything is equal to one of anything else, at least as far as counting goes – it is the dawning of the realisation that you can carry out operations with numbers without reference to what they are ‘numbers of’.

Full abstraction is the emancipation of number: it is no longer the property of objects, it is something in its own right. Nobody asks ‘what does 1 stand for here?’ or on being told to add five and five, demands ‘five of what?’ And it is when you reach that stage that you begin to discover the amazing things that you can do with numbers, the complex network of relationships that exists between them.

Another interesting thing has happened here: we have extended the meaning of ‘existence’, discovered a new order of reality. Numbers seem to exist just as surely as ravens and writing desks – if not more so – yet not in the same way. We feel sure that the propositions of arithmetic, and all the other properties of numbers, hold good always and everywhere; if all knowledge of them was lost, we feel sure they could be discovered again and that they would be the same – in fact, they seem to be unchanging and imperishable. It is little wonder that Pythagoras and his followers made a religion of them.

Which gives rise to some interesting speculation: what other properties can we abstract from their original setting and treat as things in their own right? will those exist in the same way that numbers seem to? and will they form part of a complex network of relationships that stands to them as mathematics does to number? In particular, is this something that we can do with language and words?

Could be worth investigating further, maybe. But meantime, at least you know why a raven is like a writing desk.

‘With shabby equipment, always deteriorating…’

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We live in an age of infrastructure: we take for granted an underpinning layer of nigh-magical technology, much of it electronic, on which our day-to-day lives rely; occasionally we are visited by anxiety lest it should fail – as the result of a solar storm, perhaps, such as a repeat of the Carrington Event of 1859.

The Carrington Event was noted mainly for its marvellous effects (it produced aurorae so bright that one could read by them, and some people thought it was morning) though it did cause a widespread failure of the telegraph system, which must have resulted in considerable disruption in Europe and North America; but considered against the effect of a similar storm today, its impact was minimal.

The reason is simple, yet striking: though the world of 1859 was (in parts) recognisably modern in a way that the world of a century before was not, it was a world lit by gas, fuelled by coal and powered by steam – electricity had yet to be harnessed, and the main supply of oil was obtained, not by drilling through rock, but by harpooning whales.

Whaling

This brings home to us the astonishing fact that, however transformative our present-day technology may be, the greatest transformation of human society by far – the Industrial Revolution – was wrought with implements of almost primitive simplicity: hand tools, pick and shovel, human muscle and (actual) horsepower.

This thought occurred to me when I was meditating on that most transformative of all things, the human imagination, and its principal instrument, language.

You could probably say that language and humanity are coeval: it is language that makes us human, that has enabled us to do all the marvellous things we have achieved in the brief blip of geological time we have existed for – language underpins it all; it is our ultimate infrastructure, if you like.

Yet it is still pick-and-shovel technology: though capable (in the right hands) of expressing great complexity of thought, the mechanisms it relies on to do so are few and simple, and the chief of them, as I have said elsewhere, is metaphor.

Metaphor works by using a structure or set of relations that is already familiar to give us a way of thinking about something new that we are trying to understand. As I have indicated elsewhere, there is something puzzling in this: if the only way we can come at the unknown is by expressing it in terms of the known, how do we progress? if we describe  what we do not understand in terms of what we do, how is our understanding increased? It can seem like an increasingly elaborate structure built on a narrow foundation that never widens – which is what troubled me when I was young and thought (wrongly, I believe) that all our metaphors relied ultimately on spatial relations, and that a world of objects and space was implied in all our thinking, which must necessarily have a limiting effect on what we could think.

These days I see it from a different perspective: I find it reassuring that language is always being strained to breaking point whenever we try to think of difficult things or big ideas – as Eliot has it in Burnt Norton :

Words strain,

crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

will not stay still.

and, later, in East Coker :

each venture

is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

with shabby equipment always deteriorating

– so that we arrive where we do by a kind of sleight-of-mind trickery, such as Wittgenstein describes in proposition 6.54 of the Tractatus:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

As I say, where once I found this worrying, I now find it reassuring and indeed exciting – it means that our knowledge – particularly of the large and important things – is much less certain, much more provisional than we pretend.

Consider, for instance – as I mean to do in another post – a distinction we probably think clear-cut, between what is real and what is imaginary – is that something we can be sure about?

‘we are only doing philosophy’

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Esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived. That is Berkeley’s great insight, that the world as we know it exists only for us and beings similarly equipped. It is an observation widely misunderstood because the truth of it is difficult to express, hence the famous exchange between my countryman Boswell (whom I could never take to) and Dr Johnson (whom I much admire):

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

This is typically tendentious from Boswell, who has plainly made up his mind – ‘ingenious sophistry’ ‘merely ideal’ and ‘we are satisfied [by what means, one may ask?] his doctrine is not true’ and of course Johnson’s response proves only that he had no more idea than Boswell did what Berkeley was talking about.

The good Doctor’s error is excusable, however, since the problem lies with language and what happens to it when we start to use it for philosophy: words are twisted out of their usual meaning, pushed to their limit till they crack. This must happen, since philosophy is about clarifying our ideas, which in turn involves trying to clarify the language in which we express them – when I was young, I used to think that language could be ‘improved’ and ‘purified’ by philosophy, so making it a fitter vehicle for thought, but now I see that the very murkiness of language, its openness to a range of meanings, its vagueness and ambiguity, are strengths rather than weaknesses.

(Wittgenstein was aware of how odd philosophical discussion could seem to the outsider:

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that’s a tree”, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” (On Certainty, 467))

Johnson’s error is repeated by those who think that what Berkeley is saying is that when you leave a room, all the furniture ceases to exist. This seems absurd and impossible to them because they continue to imagine the room, but see it as suddenly empty when the person leaves – something you might illustrate amusingly in an animated film, maybe. ‘But how can the furniture disappear from the room?’ they demand. But the furniture doesn’t disappear from the room: the room is as much dependent on our perception as what is in it. In one sense, Berkeley is saying something we all believe but find unremarkable: you can only see a thing when you’re looking at it.

When you put that in the passive – ‘a thing can only be seen when there is an observer’ you edge towards the real truth of Berkeley’s insight, which is that there is an element in all our observations which we take for granted, namely the observer. You cannot think yourself out of the picture: if you assert, ‘but I know perfectly well what my room looks like when I’m not there – I can picture it now’ then all you are saying is ‘I can imagine what it looks like when I am there.’

A modern-day Johnson might rig a camera with an automatic switch and triumphantly flourish the resultant picture of an empty room, complete with furnishings, exactly as we would expect, saying ‘I refute it thus!’ But to get at what Berkeley meant, you must try to imagine the room (or anything at all) as it appears from no particular point of view. It is impossible, of course, though you might have fun trying to simulate it with a battery of cameras in the same way that a single camera simulates our being in the room when we aren’t. The resultant picture would be a curious one: you would have a simultaneous view of the room and its contents from all four, or rather all six, sides. Perhaps the nearest thing to it might be a cubist painting, such as Georges Braque’s Violin and Candlestick:

Violin-and-Candlestick-1910-Oil-on-canvas

Another way of coming at this is to imagine some improvement in the eye, so that our visual spectrum is extended – things that presently seem to us empty space would perhaps be intriguingly shaded and coloured, as described by Old Mathers in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman:

‘There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. the north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers. The sub-winds had colours of indescribable delicacy, a reddish-yellow halfway between silver and purple, a greyish-green that was equally related to black and brown. What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze?’

The thing that Berkeley wants us to grasp is that if you think yourself out of the picture, it ceases to be a picture: it is no longer seen from any particular viewpoint, there is no cunning apparatus, be it eye or camera, to detect the visible spectrum of light and give objects in the room shape and colour; if the bonsai tree on the desk keels over, there is no ear to convert the compressions and rarefactions of the air that result into sound; without a nose, the pungent aroma of yesterday’s kipper is no more than particles in the atmosphere.

Picture this: the last man in the world and his dog are gazing out through a triple-glazed window at some apocalyptic scene – meteorites raining down on the earth, perhaps. The last man keels over and dies; since his dog sees in black and white (though he inhabits a rich world of scent and sound of which his late master was almost wholly ignorant) has all colour now gone out of the world?

Put this way, it sounds like something amazing (again, we could illustrate it in animation – as the man is dying, the colours slowly fade to sepia) but that is because of what we have chosen to focus on: say instead that when the last man dies, the world as we have known it dies with him – that brings home to us how much more there is to our world than just the single element of colour: there is memory, emotion, the record of all that small section of sensory data which we are equipped to process, together with the feelings it evokes, the ideas it gives us, the art and poetry and music it inspired, the stories we told about it and our interaction with it; none of this exists in its familiar form without us: when we are gone, it is gone too (and even the books we leave cease to be books with none to read them).

And that, if you think about it, is the other side of the Jewish teaching (Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a) commonly rendered in English ‘who saves one life, saves the world entire.’ (It is interesting to find that this is the lesson drawn from the tale of Adam’s creation in Genesis, rather than any suggestion that it is some sort of rival to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: the value of stories is that they teach us how to live in the world).

Not waving…

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Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I first read Stevie Smith’s poem at school and could make neither head nor tail of it, yet this morning, lying in the dark, the lines above came to me and resonated. They seem to me to capture perfectly that sense of being trapped in a despair that is impossible to communicate. It is a commonplace now to observe that we say ‘I’m fine’ when the opposite is true, and yet the psychology of it is complex – it is not that we could just say instead ‘actually, I’m not fine’ and make all well – because one aspect of the despair is that you cannot say how you feel; you cannot in fact act to save yourself at all – you can only wave as you drown.

I was going to add  ‘ – and hope that your conventional gesture is understood as a cry for help’ but the point is that you do not hope for anything – that is what despair consists of. You hold two thoughts in parallel but can do nothing to bring them about: you think, ‘if only someone would come and rescue me, say kind words, simply touch me, all would be well’ yet at the same time it seems quite impossible for you to initiate such an act: you cannot say, ‘hold me, touch me’ – because somehow the asking would alter it, turn it from a gesture of love to – what? – one of pity, perhaps, or indulgence – ‘You are only doing this because I asked, not because you feel like it.’

How puritanical and ungenerous despair makes us! ‘What I want is a spontaneous gesture of affection which I have done nothing to elicit.’ And not only do you not hope, you almost relish the fact that you know the gesture will not be forthcoming, because that will prove that you were right to despair in the first place, that you are not loved, that no-one cares that you are drowning. It is easy to see the strong link that exists between pride and despair.

(At the back of my mind I wonder if there is not also a link between reason and despair: it seems to me that when I am at my bleakest, I also feel that I am being at my most rational: it is reason that persuades me there is no way out, reason that persuades me that action is futile – yet I do not say this to condemn reason (which seems to me a most valuable thing) but only perhaps to be wary of the use we can make of it – it is the perversity of despair that it uses our strongest tools against us, a point I will come back to).

It is little wonder that I did not understand Stevie Smith’s poem as a boy, though I was accounted good at English, and I’m sure I grasped intellectually whatever explanation we were given, at least sufficiently to reproduce it for an examiner (one of the great exercises in futility that we have allowed ourselves to mistake for education – by all means encourage young people to read poetry and make of it what they will and can, but don’t examine them on it; just let it do its work. Literature, Art, Music need no supporting structure: exposure and opportunity is the thing. Then, when people are enthralled, they will learn about it because they want to).

As a boy, I simply lacked the experience of life to – do what? – I am conscious of avoiding what seems the obvious choice of words, ‘to know what that poem meant’, because I am wary of ascribing meaning to something as if that was definitive (though, as a matter of fact, it is exactly that clarity we seek when we are young – ‘but what does it mean? How can he be dead yet still moaning?’).

When we are young our feelings are enormously powerful but without any subtlety (which is hardly to be wondered at): we really do feel we might die of a broken heart, and equally that we might soar to the heavens if only the right person would look at us the right way; in the same way, we want all our causes to be black and white – we are impatient with any suggestion of shading, any hint that there might be something to be said on both sides of the argument. We want to know the right answer (and not hear there isn’t one, or that perhaps there is more than one).

It is only with the unfolding of life that our feeling, like our palate, becomes more refined and we acquire a taste for the subtle rather than the strong (ask a young man to make you a curry if you have any doubt on this). But this is scarcely news. However, what interests me about my experience with the Stevie Smith example is the mechanism involved, because it strikes me as one that is of fundamental importance.

Rather than say ‘I knew exactly what Stevie Smith meant’ I would sooner say ‘that line resonated with me’. Now, this is no mere pretentious dressing-up of a plain concept in fancy language to make it (or the writer) sound more impressive – rather it has to do with that difference alluded to above, between the youthful desire for clarity and the more mature realisation that there is a lot to be said for vagueness, for being open to interpretation (Wittgenstein somewhere speaks of the error of ‘making the vague precise’ which is something else I shall return to).

When I say ‘resonated’ I am trying to pin down the feeling it gave me – a sense of recognition (what someone else of my acquaintance terms an ‘aha!’ – meaning the moment when something comes to you and makes you exclaim). What interests me particularly is what it is that you are recognising –  and it is notable that another exclamation we use in these circumstances is ‘that’s right!’ We sense a rightness, an aptness, in whatever it is – it rings true.

That ‘ringing true’ is, I think, our sharing in the artist’s intuition – it is the instant of seeing or sensing something like she did when she made the line – whether it is a line of poetry or music or in a drawing. (and it resonates rather than means because this is something the artist did and felt rather than set out to say) In similar circumstances we speak of  ‘seeing the truth of something’ and it is generally accompanied by a desire, not to explain whatever it is (which is often impossible), but to draw others’ attention to it – ‘just look at/read/listen to that’ we say, with the firm conviction that the same thing that has become apparent to us will become apparent to others (it doesn’t always work, of course – some people ‘get it’ while others don’t).

(In this connection, consider Eliot’s response on being asked what he meant by the line “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree” –  ‘I meant, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”.’)

It seems to me that I am approaching, by a circuitous route, something I spoke of the other day, namely St Patrick and the shamrock, and the mystery of what it is we understand when we grasp an explanation that is couched in metaphorical terms – but that is matter for another day.

More on Metaphor: St Patrick and the Queen of Tropes

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If we are to rescue metaphor from the charge of disrepute, of being essentially dishonest, saying something is what it is not, then we have to look at it differently.

For a start, considering metaphor as a figure of speech is not helpful, for then it it is ranked with a host of others, most with uncouth-looking Greek-derived names, such as anacoluthon, syllepsis and zeugma (the terrible non-identical twins), metonymy, meiosis, synecdoche, aposiopesis and hypallage.  Being able to say which is which is seen as cleverness and commended (as I know – it used to be my stock-in-trade) while all the time the far greater game being played out under our noses is overlooked.

Even as a figure of speech or literary device, metaphor could be taught better. It is remarkable how many examples still use nouns – that sadly threadbare and moth-eaten old lion, who is forever ‘in the fray’ or ‘in the fight’ and for whom even Chambers can do no better than substitute a tiger. As Aristotle observed long ago, the real power of metaphor as a literary device lies in the choice of verbs: ‘this ulcer feeds on the flesh of my foot’ is the rather disgusting but effective instance he quotes, if I recall. Even the dear old lion gets a little breath of life if we say of someone that he mauled his opponent. Likewise if we speak of a crowd ‘surging’ we are likening it to a wave, with a suggestion of unified, fluid and powerful motion, though to be sure, familiarity has probably blinded us to that particular image.

Unexpectedness is certainly part of the effect of metaphor when it is used as a literary device: it is an implied comparison that works by substitution – we expect one word – ‘the chancellor spoke’ – but are given another – ‘he bleated’ – and by implication we are invited to compare the chancellor to a sheep. Put another way, a metaphor is an invitation to ‘see it like this.’ The masters of the unexpected in this respect were those same metaphysical poets that Vita Sackville-West refers to in her definition of metaphor. For them, it is all about wit and ingenuity, taking the most unlikely pairing and contriving to show a resemblance: Donne’s The Flea is a prime example –

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.

But the startling or ingenious comparison, though it may be what brings metaphor to most people’s attention, is only a small part of what it does, and not the most important. Where metaphor comes into its own is as a tool of thought, a way of understanding – that simple invitation, ‘see it like this’, will, if we follow it, lead us into some strange and remarkable places.

When I first started thinking of this seriously, some thirty six years ago, I was an eager student of philosophy, and that coloured my approach strongly. I was much under the influence of early Wittgenstein – his ‘picture theory’ of language – and wrestling with his somewhat later concept, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ But what now enthralled me was another kind of use: the distinction between literal and figurative.

I had been thinking about Time, and was struck by the fact that there seemed to be no language proper to it – all the words we used were borrowed from Space, or spatial relations – Time had length, it was before and after, and so on. We could not speak of Time directly, but only in terms of other things: a clear instance of what Vita Sackville-West had described as ‘expressing the unknown… in terms of the known concrete.’ My excitement at this was soon swallowed up in a greater one: it seemed to me that I had discovered the firm bank from which the bridge of metaphor sprang before it vanished midway in the fog.

It appeared to me that the literal meaning of all the terms which were applied figuratively to Time could all be explained, illustrated indeed, with reference to Space – in fact, I recall essaying an OHP presentation (don’t smile, it was cutting-edge in those days) to demonstrate this very point. What interested and excited me was the realisation that figurative use did not alter meaning; on the contrary, it relied on retaining the same meaning, but transferring it to a new context (and of course ‘transfer’ in Latin is etymologically identical to ‘metaphor’ in Greek). The meaning was not altered, but extended, from its original, literal context, where we understood it plainly, and applied to a new context, with the invitation, ‘think of it like this.’

There were two things in particular that excited me about this discovery. The first was the revelation that perhaps the most important words in the language were also the most overlooked: prepositions, the (literal) meaning of which could be demonstrated clearly and unambiguously using objects in space (I envisaged myself making my OHP presentation to a Martian). Prepositions, it seemed to me, denoted spatial relations: that is what they meant, how we understood them.

And prepositions were everywhere.

I was struck by just how many words had, as a key component, some preposition, though often in classical guise – substance, that which stands under (and compare the English ‘understand’ which literally means the same – how exciting is that?!) circumstances, what stands around, synthesis (putting together) analysis (literally, loosening up) symbolism (throwing together) preventing (coming before), the delightful adumbration, shadowing forth, metaphor itself, of course, a carrying over or across – the list seemed endless, and the presence of spatial relations as metaphorical components of words so ubiquitous, that as a young man I actually did envisage, as a piece of research, reading my way through the dictionary and making a note of all the etymologies that involved it.

It will seem a huge leap from that to speaking of St Patrick, the shamrock and the Trinity, but I recall making it at the time, because it seemed to me to illustrate very neatly the other thing that excited me about this discovery, namely that if all our metaphors were ultimately derived from spatial relations, then a three-dimensional world was implied in our language and, hence, our thought (implied, by the way, is another metaphor – ‘folded up’ – and I recall getting rather excited by the distinction between explication – unfolding – and explanation – smoothing out); but if all the imagery we used to understand what we could not come at directly (like Time) was drawn from the world of objects and space, did that not exert some kind of limit on thought itself? Were we really understanding new things at all, or only seeing them in terms of what we already understood?

Hence St Patrick, who famously explained the concept of the Trinity to the Irish king by using the shamrock: three leaves, three persons; but only one stalk, so one God. (It was a witty Irishman* who neatly embodied the counterargument to this, when a friend suggested that three men travelling in the one carriage provided a perfect illustration of the  doctrine of the Trinity – ‘ah no,’ says our man, ‘for that I would need to see one man travelling in three separate carriages.’)

The point is, of course, that the King goes away thinking he has grasped the concept of the Triune God, but in reality has only understood the structure of the shamrock. What had me near gibbering with excitement as a young man was the possibility that perhaps, in everything we thought, we were all being similarly duped.

*it was in fact an Englishman, Richard Porson – my apologies.

The Cartography of Childhood 2: a recanting

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‘Blog in haste, repent at leisure.’ (old proverb, probably attributed to Albert Einstein/Dr Seuss/Abraham Lincoln)

When I said ‘the fantasy element in fantasy literature is the embodiment of the child’s expectations of the grown-up world’ I felt I had pinned down an idea that I have been moving towards for some time – years, in fact, though it has been in the forefront of my mind again these past two months. (Since reading Alan Garner’s Boneland, as it happens, a subject I shall deal with separately) However, now I come to explain it, I find it is not quite what I meant to say (a familiar feeling, I may add).

The gist of it was going to be this: a child’s world is like a mediaeval map, with a small known portion surrounded by vast spaces filled in from the imagination; hence, for children, the resonance of literature that is similarly structured, involving people they can identify with crossing from the security of their known world into a mysterious Beyond at once exciting and daunting.

The problem arises when we consider the nature of that Beyond – what the writer chooses to put in it, and why that, too, resonates with children. My original thought was this: what the writer generally puts into it is (first and foremost) something marvellous – it is a world of powerful and dangerous beings with remarkable powers, who are generally engaged in some sort of struggle, for a high and noble purpose, against an implacable (and wicked) foe. (Cf. Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Elidor, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, and of course Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (though not, I think, The Hobbit, for reasons I will discuss elsewhere – for all its more overtly childish clothing, The Hobbit strikes me as being in many ways an adult book))

Now we come to the crucial point: the reason why such a vision of high and noble strife resonates with children, I was going to say, is because that is their expectation of what grown-up life must be like – something big and important, something grand, in a word. And I wanted that to be a rebuke to all those adults who would pile in at once, saying ‘but adult life isn’t like that! it is mean and petty and squalid and ignoble and dull, for the most part.’

And it was at this point that I realised that what I had said originally was not accurate: I had spoken of the ‘child’s expectations of the grown-up world’ when what I should have said (I think) is that the fantasy element in children’s literature offers them a vision of life – or, indeed, Life.

Here is where I think I was going wrong: the child’s expectation of the grown-up world is a fantasy formed from privation – the standard adult formula for thwarting children’s desires is ‘when you’re grown-up, you can do what you like, but for now you have to do what you’re told’ – so that the world of the grown-up is imagined as one where you don’t have to do what anyone tells you: you can wear your pyjamas all day, eat ice-cream for breakfast and never go to bed. (And I have to say that for many of us, this model remains alive in adulthood – look how we spend our leisure time).

On the other hand, a child’s expectation of Life is something quite different. For a start, the very word ‘expectation’ is wrong, and its wrongness goes to the heart of what we are talking about here. Life is, precisely, what you experience at every moment: living is what you do, what you cannot help doing; it is not a matter of expectation, of waiting for it to happen, it is now. Children, generally speaking – especially young children – are very good at living, just as birds and beasts are: it is a matter of instinct, not reflection; in that respect, they are better at it than most adults. The problems arise when it comes to living in a particular world, by which I mean not the one actual world that we all share but rather the myriad constructs that we have made to inhabit, which often overlap and have labels such as ‘the Western World’ ‘the modern world’ ‘European civilisation’ ‘the British way of life’ ‘middle-class-life’ ‘working-class-life’ ‘Scotland’ and so on. These are the worlds for which one must learn rules, conventions of behaviour, ways of speaking and thinking. (For instance, here in Scotland, with the impending independence referendum, we can expect much ink to be spilled on the subject of ‘what it means to be Scottish.’)

So now I feel the need to change my metaphor: it is not maps and map-making I want, it is the image of the book as a doorway (and its covers as doors, which they much resemble). Books are doors that open into other worlds, parallel universes, if you like. These worlds are imaginary, not just in the sense that they are ‘made up’ as opposed to ‘real’, but in the sense that they are products of the human imagination, which is always (whether it is conscious of it or not) engaging with the same material, namely Life itself.

[I have been careful to avoid saying ‘engaging with the same problem’ or referring to ‘the meaning of life’ because that is to take the viewpoint of the philosopher rather than the artist – though it is interesting to recall what one of the greatest philosophers has said on the matter:

‘The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)’

(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521)]

I use the term ‘artist’ in its broadest sense, to include the painter, the musician, the writer, the poet – all who engage in that kind of activity which is neither a means to an end nor even an end in itself, because it cannot be analysed in those terms – it is at once the highest form of human activity (because it is the most characteristically human) and the most pointless (in the best sense, as it is not subordinated to any aim or goal, it is not even its own justification because it does not seek to justify itself).

( Another philosopher, Benedetto Croce, said that ‘art is intuition’ – and if we take intuition to mean, as the Chambers dictionary defines it, ‘the power of the mind by which it immediately perceives the truth of things without reasoning or analysis’ then I think that is not wide of the mark, though to be sure ‘the truth of things’ is still a phrase to trouble the mind.)

So (draws deep breath, returns to the original path) what the fantasy element of children’s literature offers is not, as I said before, ‘an embodiment of the child’s expectations of the grown-up world’ but rather a vision of Life couched in terms that the child can understand and engage with – it is, on the one hand, saying ‘think of it like this’ and on the other, stripping away the top layer to reveal the working mechanism underneath.

But this is a subject to which I will return.