Category Archives: Philosophical Investigations

Hopeful Philosophical Investigations

August 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 2 Comments

I struggle to express a particular way of taking up Philosophical Investigations–it seems like I have been doing this since I first began to read it seriously.  What I want to express is something I rate as cognate with what others have expressed when talking about the “ethics” of PI, or of its “ethical over/undertones”, with responses to it as “a feat of writing” or as “the discovery of the problem of the other”.  I have in the past expressed it (helping myself to Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction) as a “subjective reading” of PI.

Here I go again.  I am going to try yet again:  I want to say something about hopeful philosophical investigations.  Something brief.

Let me prefix Gabriel Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:

I hope in you for us.

We can read the miniature dialogues that constitute PI in a variety of ways.  It is natural enough, I suppose, to understand the voices as antagonistic (Cavell, if I remember correctly, uses that word in “Availability”).  But although that is natural enough, is it best?  Or is it, instead, a vestige of non-Wittgensteinian philosophical practice?  –I will call it an analytic vestige.  We know, don’t we? and what would it be to know it?, that Wittgenstein wanted no part of a conception of philosophy as contest, of any agonistic conception of philosophy.  So, although I do not deny that we can perhaps find moments of agon in PI, such moments are not the stuff of PI.  As I read PI, it is not a series of miniature contests, skirmishes, but instead a series of miniature ameliorations, betterments.  Thinking of the voice of temptation and the voice of correction as in an ameliorative relationship, instead of an antagonistic one, frankly makes better sense of Cavell’s confessional understanding of PI than does thinking of the voices as in an antagonistic relationship–it also makes better sense of ‘temptation’ and ‘correction’ as terminological choices.   In particular, ‘correction’ in an antagonistic relationship has a very different critical valence than it does in an ameliorative one.  The hope of the dialogues is for mutual wholeness:  neither the voice of temptation nor the voice of correction may treat the other voice as alien–anything one voice says may be said, and in a certain sense is said, by the other.  And so the voices respond to each other, each finding itself in the other, working at becoming integral, to achieve agreement (in PI’s difficult sense of that term), to come to a meeting of voices, a time at which the passion of each voice is at one with its life (to borrow another bit of Cavell’s phrasing).  The nisus of each voice I take to be expressed by Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:  each voice speaks from hope, and is constantly saying to the other, sotto voce:  “I hope in you for us.”

I will come back to this.

More on (Plain) Reminders (PI 127)

August 10, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

A couple of excerpts on reminders from a paper of mine gathering dust in a drawer…

Consider the remark (127): “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” Calling his work assembling reminders accents the relationship between the his remarks and his interlocutor. If the interlocutor takes the remarks as reminders, then assessing the remarks involves the interlocutor’s assessment of herself. That is, taking the remarks as reminders requires the interlocutor to be present to herself as she thinks. She must be present to herself to assess herself. Is the remark a reminder? If so, why had she forgotten what she is now reminded of? Was her forgetfulness temporary? When, roughly, did she forget–when she started thinking about the philosophical problem the remark responds to, or before that? Why forget then?  Would she have remembered eventually on her own or not? If so, when and why?  If not, why not?   What, other than Wittgenstein’s remark, might have jogged her memory? For Wittgenstein, these questions on the part of the reader are exactly right: they force her back on herself, and keep her present to herself as she philosophizes. (I am not saying that they are all answerable, or easily answerable.)  For Wittgenstein, it is in part our failure to be present to ourselves as we philosophize that accounts for the apparent intractability of the problems.

Earlier, I let a list of questions tumble out, all turning on a remark of Wittgenstein’s being a reminder. All the questions forced the reader of the remark back on herself. None forced her back on the remark itself, so to speak. So someone might object: “Look, Wittgenstein may have been aiming at giving reminders, but he may sometimes have missed the mark, failed to provide a reminder.” And so he may. But the important point is that Wittgenstein failed to achieve his aim–giving a reminder. If a remark that is to be a reminder fails to be, then that is that; the remark falls beneath philosophical notice. For the remark had claim to notice only if was indeed a reminder. What I am trying to make clear is that by calling (some of) his remarks reminders, Wittgenstein has rendered a certain structure of critical terms properly applicable to the remarks. If one of Wittgenstein’s remarks is false, then it is not a reminder. (I can remind you of a falsehood in a way–by reminding you of something false that you believed. But this sort of reminder is not what Wittgenstein is interested in giving.) But if one of his remarks is true, that does not make it a reminder.  Reminders share a border with the false, but not with the true, except incidentally. (We cannot assemble reminders for God.) For a remark to be a reminder, it must not only be true, it must be true and true-in-a-certain-relationship (i.e., forgotten (or some relationship roughly cognate)) to the person reminded.  And even more, it must also be accepted by the person as a reminder.  If it is accepted as something else, Wittgenstein has not achieved his aim.  –Assembling reminders turns out to be an extraordinarily delicate occupation.

No Show, Again

August 8, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 20 Comments

I was re-reading today F. R. Leavis’ “Memories of Wittgenstein”, and came across the following story.  Leavis and Wittgenstein hired a boat and, after Wittgenstein had paddled for a while, he stopped and got out, saying that he and Leavis should get out and walk.  The walk takes them a fair distance and quite a bit of time.  Eventually, Leavis reminds Wittgenstein that they hired the boat, have a long trek back (both by foot and by boat) and that the man from whom they hired the boat must still be waiting for them to return.  They go back, arriving at the boathouse at about midnight.

The man came forward and held our canoe as we got out.  Wittgenstein, who insisted imperiously on paying, didn’t, I deduced from the man’s protest, give him any tip.  I, in my effort to get in first with the payment, had my hand on some money in my trousers pocket and pulling it out, I slipped a couple of coins to the man.  As we went away, Wittgenstein asked:  “How much did you give him?”  I told him, and Wittgenstein said:  “I hope that is not going to be a precedent.”  Not, this time, suppressing the impatience I felt [Leavis had been impatient with Wittgenstein for a good part of the evening], I returned:  “The man told you that he had been waiting for us for a couple of hours—for us alone, and there is every reason for believing that he spoke the truth.”  “I, ” said Wittgenstein, “always associate the man with the boathouse.”  “You may, ” I retorted, “but you know that he is separable and has a life apart from it.”  Wittgenstein said nothing.

Wittgenstein on this occasion provides an example of the sort of thing that Marcel is trying to prevent in himself in the remark I quoted a few days ago:  “I am not watching a show.”  What Marcel wants to prevent in himself is, put one way, a failure of moral imagination, a failure of negative capability.  Wittgenstein gives in to the impulse to see the world (to see the man at the boathouse) as (part of) a closed, rational system oriented on his own desires and habits and needs, as two-dimensional.  The man at the boathouse becomes, slightly alarmingly, somewhat like the owner of the house in PI 398c:

Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it.–Someone asks “Whose house is that?”–The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot for example enter his house.

Wittgenstein’s boatman cannot leave the boathouse; he cannot return to his own home, to his life that is separate and apart from the boathouse.  –We all give in to this impulse from time to time.  That is why Marcel calls the no-show-ness of the world in which he finds himself “a fundamental spiritual fact”.  Like all spiritual facts, ignorance of it counts not as being ill-informed, but as a refusal to know.

One reason this story struck me was because I was again re-pondering Marcel’s remark due to reflections Lowe provides on her blog.

Pure Philosophical Theses, Plain Reminders

August 4, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Uncategorized, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something–because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Thompson Clarke has been much on my mind, particularly his distinction between the plain and the pure (the philosophical).  According to Clarke, a sentence like “I am awake, not dreaming” has a plain use that can be exhibited thus:  Imagine a scientist experimenting with soporifics.  He has been using himself as subject.  As he tests the various soporifics, he makes notes to himself in his journal.  At one point, after awakening and shaking off his druggy lethargy, he begins a journal entry by writing, “I am awake, not dreaming.”  For Clarke, in the situation as so described, “I am awake, not dreaming” is something that the experimenter knows; in the situation, the written sentence is “implained”, and the experimenter’s knowledge is plain knowledge.  Clarke believes that the sentence, so situated, is an example of what Moore is defending when he defends common sense. (I am muting certain details in saying that.) But the obvious problem here is that the implained sentence, regarded as expressing knowledge, seems to express knowledge that is impure, too dependent on its situation to be such that, in expressing knowledge, it expresses something genuinely philosophically substantial, independent, something that could satisfy the deep intellectual need displayed in the problem of the external world.  But the sentence that could express that is a twin of the plain sentence, i.e., “I am awake, not dreaming”.  On this pure understanding of the sentence, it means whatever its constituent words make it mean, wholly independent of any non-semantic practices.  The experimenter in soporifics does not know the sentence on that understanding; he knows plainly–not purely.  The experimenter’s plain knowledge, compared to the promise of pure knowledge, looks restricted, or, as Clarke’s puts it in memorable phrase, there is a “relative ‘non-objectivity'” about the experimenter’s knowledge.  If he knew that he was awake, not dreaming, and knew it purely, then his knowledge would be absolutely objective.

I present all of this not because I want to trace the mazeways of Clarke’s paper.  I present it because I hope it offers an orientation on PI 127-9.  Here’s a sketch.

Start in the middle, with 128.  Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that the theses advanced in philosophy cannot be debated because everyone agrees to them.  Rather, he is saying that we cannot really advance theses in philosophy.  When we try, we fail, because what we “advance” never turns out to have the (grammatical) features internal to a thesis–it would not be debate-apt, it would not be controversial.  But that creates at least two questions:  (1) Why might we take ourselves or be taken to be advancing theses?  (2) What might we actually be doing? It is important to bear in mind as I answer that I judge Wittgenstein here to be thinking about someone who is concerned to philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, not just in any old way.

(1) I reckon that the words we call on as we philosophize  can be understood either plainly or purely.  And it is a standing temptation to understand those words purely, not plainly.  So understood, of course, our calling on those words would be our advancing theses, we would be saying something debatable, controversial.  Some will say “Yea”, others “Nay”.  But when we philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, our contribution to our engagement with our interlocutor will take the form of plain words.  So understood, the words will not say anything debatable, controversial.  They will simply not be theses.  Again, so understood, everyone will agree with them.  –Still, there is the danger, since the pure saying of the words is, at the level of the words themselves, indistinguishable from the plain saying (they are twins), it will always be possible both for us and our interlocutor (undeliberately) to “gestalt shift” into the pure.  If we do so, however, we leave Wittgenstein’s way of philosophizing.  This sort of reading of 128 seems to me to help with 127–as indeed I believe it was intended to do.  A reminder is plain.  Nothing pure can function as a reminder, as Wittgenstein is thinking of it.  If what I assembled, taking myself to be assembling reminders, were pure, I would instead have assembled theses, advance them.  But reminders are matters of recall, not of advance.  If what I offer you as a reminder is debatable, I have failed in the task assigned in 127.  Wittgenstein once said that nothing he wrote in PI was hard to understand—what was hard to understand was why he wrote it.  Right.  There is going to be a difficulty of staying in the plain, both for ourselves and our interlocutors.  What we are doing will, from one familiar angle, only seem worth doing in the name of ‘philosophy’ if we migrate to the pure.  It is hard to see why anyone would assemble reminders of the sort Wittgenstein has in mind, hard to see how so doing could have any relevance to philosophy.  (As if I tried to settle the debate about the external world by producing my grocery list.)  That bring us to (2).

(2) So what are we doing.  Well, we are implaining ourselves and (we hope) our interlocutor.  We are assembling reminders for the purpose of implaining our interlocutor.  We remind so as to reveal to the interlocutor the distance between where he believes himself to be and where he actually is.  In the face of the twin sentences, with their divergent understandings, the interlocutor can see that he or sh has a forked understanding, divided between the pure and the plain.  To bring his or her understanding back into agreement with itself, the interlocutor needs to integrate either plainly or philosophically.  But to do so philosophically, he or she must be able to stabilize the pure understanding, to make clear what the words he or she calls on them say given their clinical isolation from the entire range of non-semantic practices.  Maybe that can be done; maybe not:  at any rate, each attempt must be met in its particular straits of exigency; there are, I suspect, too many too various strategies for attempting to make clear what the words called on mean purely for there to be any ahead-of-the-moment response to them all.  To integrate plainly is to renounce the pure and to want from the words called on nothing that their relation to the assembled reminders cannot allow them to have, nothing that cannot be intelligibly projected from the assembled reminders.  But that is not all:  fully to integrate plainly is to come to rest, to peace, even if only momentarily, in the plain.  It is to come to struck by the very plainness of the plain, by our own plainness.  It is to see how the very homeliness and familiarity of the plain allow it to be the foundations of our inquiries, despite our inability normally to see it functioning so.  It is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful.  But that is still not all:  fully to integrate philosophically is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful, all the while still seeing it as plain, all the while refusing to transfigure the plain into the pure. Doing this would not be a matter of quickly and gestaltly shifting back and forth but would instead be the actualizing of a specific (cultivated) capacity to be awed by the humble, to find the sublime in the everyday.  If we could do this, the plain could satisfy our deep intellectual need.  But we would have made it so by rotating the axis of our examination.

I recall Chesterton’s words from Orthodoxy:

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

Depsychologizing (the Erotic)

August 3, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 12 Comments

I have spent the better part of the last twelve years or so worrying about what it is to psychologize and to depsychologize something.  This has provided a specific focus for much of what I have written on Wittgenstein, who is, I believe, the master of masters of depsychologizing, master even of Frege.  I take very seriously Cavell’s notion that PI’s business is depsychologizing psychology, both one’s own  and others’.

A focus on Frege-influenced forms of depsychologism (re:  mathematics, logic) can hide the ubiquity of what Martin Buber, in a fascinating little essay, “On the Psychologizing of the World”, calls Naive Psychologism.  What he gives this title could be regarded as a form of egotism (where that is a moral failure) but that is not quite what or at any rate quite all that he is talking about.  What he is talking about rather is what we might call a common picture of oneself as beginning and ending at the skin, at the edge of the body.  What matters, all that could matter, is what happens on or under our skin.  That is all we’ve got.  Now, the Naive Psychologizer does not understand what happens on or under our skin in a clearly physical way; he is not clearly thinking of surface irritations or stimulations, or of sub-epidermal electrochemical events.  (If he were, he’d perhaps be moving in the direction of what Buber calls Scientific Psychologism.)  He is thinking of what happens “in his head”, of what he feels “inside”.  (Think of Naive Psychologism as a coarse empirical idealism.)  This is  what matters. And if anything outside the skin matters, that is only really a function of something on or under the skin mattering.

Buber asserts this Naive Psychologism has affected even the erotic.  Our erotic lives have become about nothing more than successive, differentiated “inside” feelings; the erotic partner’s role is to excite those feelings, and if the partner’s “inside” feelings matter, it is only for the sake of insuring more or future “inside feelings” for us.  (And of course we may have good “inside” feelings because they are having good “inside” feelings.) The possibility that the erotic could be a form of conversation–dialogue, a meeting of persons–and not merely a causal transaction (a hook up) is barely, if at all, imaginable. That it could edify the persons, well, that is unimaginable.  The erotic can satisfy, perhaps, on an “inside” model of that; but it cannot upbuild.

I mention this, and I mention Naive Psychologism, because I want to indicate just how easily psychologism comes to us, even in areas of our lives unlikely as locations for psychologism to disport itself.  Naive Psychologism is also important because it reveals that Philosophical Psychologism—about mathematics, logic, psychology—is aided and abetted by a common picture of who and what we are.

“Objects of Comparison”: St. John the Evangelist’s Method

August 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, William Temple, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

One marked characteristic of the mind of the Evangelist, or of the Beloved Disciple, is worth mention.  He often records argument in debate, but he does not argue from premises to conclusions as a method of apprehending truth.  Rather he puts together the various constituent parts of truth and contemplates them in their relations to one another.  Thus he seems to say “look at A; now look at B; now at C; now at B C; now at A C; now at D and E; now at A B E;  now at C E”, and so on in any variety of combination that facilitates new insight.  It is the method of artistic, as distinct from scientific, apprehension, and is appropriate to truth which is in no way dependent on, or derived from, other truth, but makes its own appeal to reason, heart and conscience.

William Temple, Readings In St. John’s Gospel, xxi-xxii

The Structure of Philosophical Investigations (and the Tractatus)

July 28, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

Here are a couple of paragraphs from a current draft of a paper of mine.  It touches on a point I have been concerned to make in more than one place of late, a point about the structural similarity of TLP and PI.

In TLP and PI, the concentration of metaphilosophical remarks occurs in the dialectical middle (a middle not necessarily the same as its paginal middle): the 4s in the TLP and in 89-133 in PI. Rhetorically, each of the books is a large epanados, a chiasmus. That is, each of the books is organized spatially around a center or middle. Each book has the structure, roughly, of a large ‘x’, with the metaphilosophical remarks stationed at the crux of the ‘x’. (A handy example of a small epanados is Unamuno’s false but memorable sentence, “Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”) The similar chiastic structures of the two books has not been stressed as it should be.

Placing the remarks as Wittgenstein does is a broad hint about how not to understand them. It is a broad hint not to think, among other things, that the remarks can be understood in isolation from the other non-metaphilosophical remarks that stand to the left of them and to the right of them. I like to think of PI as unified by both a centripetal and a centrifugal energy, the first the movement of the left-hand and right-hand remarks inward toward the center, and the second the movement of the center outward toward both the left-hand and right-hand remarks.

Wittgensteinian Clarity and Silence

July 26, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

In PI 133, Wittgenstein talks of “complete clarity”. It is a clarity in which the philosophical problems completely disappear.  Wittgenstein’s notion of clarity is connected with the notion of silence. Let me now say something brief about that. To do so, I distinguish between transitive and intransitive silence.

Think of transitive silence as a silence that involves the silencing of something or other, of something that has more to say but is cut off, shut up. (“Her unexpected laughter silenced his protestation of love.”) Transitive silence gags the problems. Intransitive silence is simple silence, a quiet in which nothing is forceably quieted, an untaut stillness.  Peace.  Genuine peace, not a detente with the problems, in which they hold their peace.

Wittgenstein does not aim at transitive silence; he aims at intransitive silence.  He aims at a silence in which the philosophical problems have been played out, utterly exhausted, at a silence unbroken by problems. The problems have had their say, said their piece; they do not even murmur.  Noiselessly, they dissipate.  They go to their rest.  To be completely clear in philosophy, to have made the problems disappear, is to have achieved intransitive silence.

How can intransitive silence be achieved?  PI is the answer to that.  But let me isolate one central theme:  We can only achieve it by deeply sympathizing with the philosophical problems.  We must, as it were, become the problems; we must hear the words of the problem as if each of the words comes urgently from the depths of our own consciousness. And whatever words we speak to the problem must themselves come from us just as urgently and from just the same depth. The problems take possession of us and then we must exorcise them. So we can only cause the problems to disappear on pain of risking that the problems will take lifelong possession of us, that they will resist exorcism, that our heads will spin permanently.

“I Will Teach You Differences!”

July 16, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

Resemblance does not make things as much alike as difference makes them unlike.  –Montaigne

Wittgenstein considered using “I will teach you differences” from King Lear as a motto for Philosophical Investigations. It is not entirely clear why Wittgenstein was drawn to it.  Commentators have sometimes understood the line as an Anti-Essentialist slogan.  Philosophers snub particulars; they crave generality and trust it.  Differences do not matter; differences bury the essential.  Wittgenstein will teach that differences matter.  Generality should be mistrusted.  Philosophers must grace particulars, attend to them, stop excavating the essential.

No doubt there is truth in this understanding of the line.  But it seems to me to that there is looseness in it:  a 7/16 wrench on a 3/8 nut.  Taking the motto as an Anti-Essentialist slogan makes the book too metaphysical, metaphysical in a rather too up-front way. Wittgenstein’s challenge to philosophy looks too fraternal.  Wittgenstein looks like a placard bearer for a minority position in metaphysics.

When Wittgenstein teaches differences he teaches the significance of logical differences, not metaphysical differences.  Part of assessing the significance of logical differences is recognizing that the difference between logical differences and metaphysical differences is itself a logical difference.  From the beginning of his work until the end, Wittgenstein cleaved to the idea that “logic must take care of itself”.  Teaching differences is teaching logical differences.  Learning to read PI is largely a matter seeing that and how Wittgenstein teaches the significance of logical differences–and that means seeing how Wittgenstein understood philosophical problems and proper responsiveness to them.

In an important moment of “Art and Sacrament”, David Jones remarks that understanding a painter correctly involves understanding how the painter can acknowledge his own making and yet insist on its identity with, say, some object or type of object he encounters.  Jones’ point is that, for a painter, what is painted is not so much a painting of a mountain as it is mountain–under the form of paint.  Similarly, when Wittgenstein takes up a philosophical problem–say, Essentialism, since I have mentioned it–he is not taking up the metaphysical problem of Essentialism; he is taking up Essentialism–under the form of logic.  For Wittgenstein that is not a change of topic.  He in effect insists on the identity of the traditional metaphysical problem and what he is taking up.  But he does radically reorient himself on Essentialism.  (The trick of course is reckoning with ‘under the form of logic’.)

The Ocean of Illusion–A Few Thoughts

July 15, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

I was struck again a couple of days ago by the remarkable extended metaphor that Kant uses to open his “Phenomena and Noumena” chapter of CPR.  Here is a bit:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.

Kant advises that, before setting sail on the ocean of illusion, we should take on last look at our map of the land of truth, asking two questions:  (1) Can we be satisfied with what the map discloses, indeed, are we not in fact compelled to be satisfied with it, since there may be nowhere else to settle?; and, (2) By what title do we possess even the land of truth, are we in fact secure against all opposing claims?  Kant takes the “Analytic” to effectually have answered these questions, but he thinks that reviewing a summary answer to them is worthwhile.

The summary is not so much of interest to me now.  I am more interested in the extended metaphor itself.  It is an icon of CPR.  Up to this point in the text, Kant and his reader have been mapping the land of truth, exploring it, surveying it and measuring it.  But now it is time to go down to the ship, to set keel to breakers–to go forth on the ungodly sea.  Now it is time to face illusion.  And we have no choice.  –What mesmerizes me is Kant combining the ideas that we are compelled to be satisfied with our island, that we do possess a clear title to it, and that we are nonetheless gripped again and again by hopes (empty and delusive though they will prove to be) of farther shores out across the enshadowed ocean, tempted by (ultimately idle) adventures.  To be compelled to be satisfied does not guarantee satisfaction.  (The peculiar fate of human reason!)  Against what I take to be the ground on which CPR is figure, namely against the prioritizing of the practical over the theoretical, we can see CPR as thematizing the Church-Man’s skepticism.  Reason provides only conclusions in which nothing is concluded.  That is a topic I will return to in subsequent posts.

(Kant’s extended metaphor also provides an icon of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  But in PI, Wittgenstein and his reader are almost always sitting amidships, wind jamming the tiller, sailing into and then out of fog banks, up to and then away from swiftly melting icebergs.  He and his reader spend scant time on the land of truth.  They spend their days on deepest water, longing for shore leave, for a dry and homely ingle.  But real needs keep them at sea.  Being at sea and occasionally coming back home:  the rhythm of their lives.)