The Myth of the 'Philosophical Investigations'

1.  The World (language) is a Labyrinth in which the Lover and the Beloved continuously approach one another upon labyrinthine ways which equally continuously move them apart. 

The Purpose of the Investigations is to create a labyrinth of the “We” (‘language is a labyrinth of ways’) into which the ‘you’ is guided – conducted – seduced.  Every ‘you’ is a potential beloved of the lover waiting in his labyrinth. 
The lover=the Minotaur=the monster of the labyrinth.

Out of the ruins (of disciples) one builds a labyrinth – the centreless universe – the all-devouring monad – the plural monad.

Only by losing oneself in the labyrinth can one be found by the lover – you have to want to get lost before the lover can find you in the labyrinth.  Wanting to be lost creates in the potential beloved a vertigo of self-abandonment, surpassing any other sort of betrayal.  One places one’s own genetic uniqueness in the service of the genetic destroyer.  Is that a manifestation of the ‘death instinct’?  

The labyrinth is dark – darkest of all is the lover.
The Beloved is the light in the labyrinth.

The “We” is a labyrinth of (disembodied) voices – not necessarily in unison – but occasionally punctuating the darkness with a chorus-refrain or an amen – spoken as ‘we’ and at once in “Übereinstimmung”; the intimation, attuned and coinciding, coaxing and chiding the ‘you’ – the beloved – to ‘go on’. 

The voices of the labyrinth were once ‘you’.  They are now ‘we’ – the voices of the damned – the ghosts of the previous beloveds.  Once ‘you’ becomes a voice of ‘we’ – he becomes a previous beloved – no longer the present beloved.  These are the voices of the remembered loves.  The ‘We’ is the chorus of dead loves.

When the ‘you’ of the beloved becomes a voice of the ‘we’ in the labyrinth, the ‘you’ dies as a beloved but the lover=philosophy dies for the ‘you’ as well.  Or the ‘you’ does not know itself anymore.  It is an atom of the ‘we’ of the seducing chorus.  Which is the same thing as saying – the lover has died for the ‘you’.  Only the next ‘you’ will revive the lover for the time in which the ‘you’ still resists becoming a ‘we’.

For the lover is also the hunter of the beloved – and what the lover hunts is the Will.
This leads to Bruno – the myth of Actaeon.  The chorus of dead loves are those who have received the mystical ‘mors osculi’ – death of the kiss. 

2.  In the negative cosmology of Bruno, Hell is part of God.  His ideas finally entered English thought some 50 years after his death during the time of the English Revolution via the ‘teutonick philosophy’ of Jakob Böhme.  The annihilation of the soul – as portrayed in the drama of Faust – is a desired end.  Mystical enlightenment comes only in the deepest darkness.  Divine grace is to be found in the depths of hell because that is where “God shall retire himself within his own Center, to be truly Hell.” (“An Introduction to the Teutonick Philosophie”, C. Hotham, March 3, 1646 – Dispute at Commencement in Cambridge)

Ludwig Wittgenstein revived certain aspects of the ‘teutonick philosophy’ when he began his teaching career at Cambridge in the 1930’s.  He found many young disciples willing to follow him along the ‘via negationis’, entrusting him with their malleable souls.   “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II)
In the drama of their souls Wittgenstein’s role is never perfectly fixed.  Sometimes he appears to be Faust, sometimes Faust’s tactless crude apprentice Wagner, but more often Mephistopheles.  Wittgenstein is not evil, but he sees with the eyes of the Evil One – very far.  Who is really in charge of the obedience of ‘bare life’ if not the Master of Hell – where and by whom are the damned punished?  God may write the Law, but Satan enforces it.  Wittgenstein is the mystical personality – he transmutes evil into good and good into evil until the question of good and evil collapses into absurdity.  One of Wittgenstein’s sources for his ‘negative political theology’ is the vision of Church jurisdiction expressed by Ivan Fyodorovich in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”.  In a discussion in the cell of the holy man Starez, the simple monk Vasij sketches the utopia of the Church-State:  “It’s not the Church which will turn into the State (…)that’s Rome and its dream.  That is the third temptation of the devil!  On the contrary, the state turns into the Church, advances itself to Churchhood, and becomes a Church covering the whole earth.  This World Church is completely opposed to the ultramontanism of Rome and is reserved for the Orthodoxy on earth.  Light will come to the world from the east.” (Dostoyevsky, Die Brüder Karamasow, München, 1978, p. 93)

The mystical personality is a person who has a general reputation for being very virtuous, self-sacrificing, almost unnaturally good, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.  Anything he does or is no matter how remote from the conventional notion of good will always be interpreted in a positive or logical light.  This is the very essence of his negative influence.  The ‘essence of negation’ which eluded Wittgenstein in his philosophical writings – is captured in his life.  He speaks through his interpreters and they declare his words to be oracular.  The first sacrifice required of Wittgenstein readers is sacrificium intellectus.  As Cavell writes in “The Claim of Reason”: “(…) Wittgenstein’s writing is, as certain of his readers had shrewdly suspected from the beginning, beyond rational criticism.” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford, 1979, p.20)
His personality is a paradox because his kind of dialectical harm, which is generally recognized as good, is a cause of holiness in others.

The proof of true love is the breaking of the will of the other.  Through his ability to break the will of others, without necessarily imposing his own will in its stead; the mystical personality is a prime mover of fate.  He is the embodiment of the negative principle.  He nullifies his ‘victims’, he does not posses them.  The negative principle is not the essence of the mystical personality – it is his prestabilized fate.  He may try to evade it in his youth when it is less obvious – being simply disguised by youth and its excessive vigour.  When the lethargy and solitude of age set in, the true mystical personality begins to shine through.  The mystical personality can no longer hide behind the living, it is reclaimed by the worlds beyond. 

The ‘riddle of evil’ is very close to the ‘riddle of holiness’.  To measure their nearness one must first familiarize oneself with certain principles and methods derived from a negative theology of coincidentia oppositorum (Nikolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme) 

Negative Theology:  God is not redemption.  The Anti-Messiah.  Why shouldn’t there be a separate anti-force, which brings the Anti-Redemption.  With all the magnificence of the Redeemer?  Not Lucifer – he isn’t the expected one.  But a figure about whom prophecies have been uttered – a figure of the future.  As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says: “Oh that someone would save them from their Saviour!”.  The characteristics of the Not Redeemer should be equally recognizable as those of the Redeemer.  The first axiom of negative theology – God is the Not-Redeemer, the star of not-redemption.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fraudulent Philosophy - Stanley Cavell on the Modern in Art

Why is it that certain ideas become outdated more quickly than others – even if they are especially designed to show what it is to be ‘up to date’ as in Stanley Cavell’s writings on modernism in art?  Does this have to do with the general wasting away of  ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of which Cavell is a major proponent? (see T.P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy”, 2002, online)  Could it be that those ‘methods’ applied to art naturally share the same fate?  Or are there more general laws of obsolescence at work?  How do ‘logics die’ even when they are not logical?

A consequence of Cavell’s imposing sincerity of intention or meaning upon the artist and the work of art is his claim to expose certain works as fraudulent. (in: “Music Discomposed”, Must we mean what we say?, Cambridge 2003)  He describes this claim as “empirical”, arrived at by his experience with works of art and artists of his time – ‘contemporary with the claim’.  He thus applies it only to what he judges to be modern art  – not to the past history of art, nor art in an atemporal plane.  Cavell’s criteria are not transcendental in the Kantian sense, meaning the apriori conditions of the possibility of aesthetic experience; he seems to be demanding of modern art that it make it possible for him to ‘believe’ it.   

His case for sincerity or fraudulence in art, something in itself intangible, not perceivable in the work,– rests on his particular use of  ‘intending’ or ‘meaning’ in a work of art.  He borrows this idea of art and sincerity from Tolstoy’s “What is Art?”.  The writings of Krenek on certain theoretical aspects of the “new music” are his main ‘exhibit’.  Cavell dismisses these writings as ‘fraudulent’ and by a vertiginous leap in his argument concludes that Krenek’s music is also fraudulent.  It is Krenek’s “philosophizing” which annoys Cavell – composers should compose and leave ‘philosophizing’ and magazine articles to the ‘professionals’.  But Cavell has nothing to say about Krenek’s music – or even how it reflects his ‘fraudulent’ theories.  This does not prevent him though from appropriating Krenek’s themes of “composition, improvisation and chance” as the structure for his own musings on composition and the modern.  (“But I was discussing some writing now current about the new music.  Perhaps I can say more clearly why it leads, or has led me, to these various considerations by looking at three concepts which recur in it over and over – the concepts of composition, improvisation and chance.”
“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p. 193)

Against this idea of an artist or work of art meaning or intending something ‘x’ which he has to convey outside of the work itself to Cavell or any other interrogator, I would suggest the work of art has the form of an axiom and of a fact or as Badiou would say – an event.  Cavell or any other critic is only an adjunct of the art event – in this case of Krenek’s music and his reflexive process of composition.
 Cavell’s ‘meaning’ follows art and not the other way around. The art axiom creates a disruption or a voiding of received meaning, what time or history do in other ways.  The intention of the artist is that the work exist – nothing more or less.  If it exists it is not fraudulent.  Something always happens.

Maurice Blanchot who like Krenek questions the traditional romantic idea of ‘inspiration’ - says about the literary work of art in “The Space of Literature”: “However, the work – the work of art, the literary work – is neither finished nor unfinished: it is.  What it says is exclusively this: that it is – and nothing more.  Beyond that it is nothing.(…)The work is without any proof, just as it is without any use.  It can’t be verified.” (University of Nebraska Press, 1982, p. 22)

Cavell insists on some other meaning, not expressed by the work itself, which must satisfy his demand for sincerity.  But he only demands that ‘modern art’ pass his sincerity test.  ‘Traditional’ or established art is exempt.  Amongst the moderns – John Cage and Anthony Caro belong to Cavell’s protected species – perhaps on advice from the art critic Michael Fried.  Although certainly Cavell would not deny that even the judgements of ‘traditional art’ are in a constant state of flux.  What do Wordsworth’s effusions mean today even for the diehards of English romantic poetry or Ruskin’s condemnations of ‘the pestilential art of the Renaissance’ for neo-Victorians?  And why is it that only “(…)the experience of the modern is one which itself raises the question of fraudulence and genuineness(…)”? (“A Matter of Meaning It”, op. cit. p.214) Something Cavell takes to be “an obvious but unappreciated fact” (ibid.) – how is something both ‘obvious’ and ‘unappreciated’?  But if it were an obvious fact (and perhaps it is) - then the “experience of the modern” in philosophy is also overshadowed by questions of the fraudulent and the genuine…

Cavell is a Beckmesser who says what I cannot ‘hear’ or ‘see’ does not exist.  Lurking in the background of his not ‘hearing’ and not ‘seeing’ of certain modern art is Cavell’s presumption that art and religion are closely related if not identical – and that they are both exposed to belief or disbelief.  He expresses this negatively: “For religious experience is subject to distrust on the same grounds as aesthetic experience is (…)”(“Music Discomposed”, op. cit. p.191)  He thus transfers the ‘tests’ of his ‘empirical’ claims to the religious sphere, deftly evading verifiability. Once safely ensconced in religious sensibilities he then claims that modern art with all the emotions it arouses (especially hostility and disgust) must be treated as one does persons not objects.  “In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in effect claiming that the answer to the question “What is art?” will in part be an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons.”(op. cit. p. 189)

Paradoxically, although the universal tendency of modern art is towards abstraction or the ‘unhuman’ (especially music – the subject of his remarks) Cavell in his claims about fraudulence and genuineness (sincerity) in art retreats in the opposite direction - further into anthropomorphism.  (Cavell has imperceptibly widened his net to include all of art without further justifications.) 

His “aesthetic experiences” interrogate the ‘conscience’ of the artist.  Avant-garde art though defines itself as an ‘experimental’ production of new existences (art bodies).  His rules for modern art are mere private evaluations originating in incommunicable quasi-religious experiences – they have no hold on what art is.

One could say that Cavell is himself a victim of his desire to name everything at any price, a drive or obsession which Badiou calls ‘evil’.  How else is one to regard his insatiable lust for meaning of meaning of meaning and so on endlessly from a work of art?  Is this a Wittgensteinian stance?  Wittgenstein saw all meaning rather as indeterminate and necessarily admixed with elusive degrees of falsehood (fiction, myth).  In a similar spirit Wittgenstein confided to his publisher von Ficker that the most essential part of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus is what he had not written.  Would Cavell ‘the new Wittgensteinian’ have demanded that he spell it all out for him?