Best Tragedy

In the beginning of Book 12 of Metaphysics, Aristotle affirms substance (ousia) to be the primary category of reality as follows: “The subject of our inquiry is substance; for the principles and the causes we are seeking are those of substances. For if the universe [to pan] is of the nature of a whole [holon], substance is its first part; and if it coheres merely by virtue of serial succession [ephexes], on this view also substance is first, and is succeeded by quality, and then by quantity.” In other words, substance is so fundamental, so unquestionably the ground of things, that it still remains or holds true even if everything lacks integrity, if reality holds together only serially, “like a bad tragedy.” Later in the text, countering the Platonic exaltation of number, Aristotle explicitly rejects the view which “make[s] the substance of the universe a mere series of episodes” as a spurious form of rule, invoking a line from Homer: “they [Seusippus et al.] give us many governing principles; but the world refuses to be governed badly. ‘The rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be.’ “ It makes sense, then, that the philosopher, despite the issue of the serial ordering of the categories themselves, is in no way entertaining the second alternative, but only referring to it “as representative of a certain sort of position” in order to leave zero room to doubt the priority of substance, as the “structure of his argument makes it clear that these two views are meant to be exhaustive alternatives.” Even a fundamentally incoherent world would cohere by way of being the incoherence of something. Like the parchment of the pages which the poet-pilgrim sees in Dante's Paradiso “bound with love in one volume” (33.86), substance is simply too substantial not to survive reality's universal scattering into discrete and unconnected episodes of itself.

This work follows a series of thoughts around the idea of seriality as a fundamental or absolute feature of reality. It begins with a counter-reading of a passage in Aristotle's Metaphysics, where the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, in order to affirm the seriality of everything as the overflowing unity of one and many. Next, in light of the serial basis of counting, I examine the nature of quantification as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. I then assess the principle of quality as the category to which critiques of quantification historically appeal, arguing for a renewed sense of quality as the spiritual core of life's spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Next, I consider seriality per se as the principle that promises a way past the dialectical oscillation between quantity and quality. Lastly, I turn to the topic of measure in order to articulate the poetic nature of seriality as process and activity, the immeasurable reality's never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

The unifying theme or thesis of the text is that the principle of seriality resolves the apparent contradiction between the oneness of everything and the oneness of oneself, spectacularly filling like an infinity mirror the specular space between everyone's individualized being in the universe and the universe's being in all, healing by unfolding the wound opened in the wholeness of everything by our seemingly being only a part or segment of it. Seriality is the constantly manifest sacred threshold or halo between the ONE and the one, just as by “manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself.” This is revealed, paradigmatically, in the experiential spontaneity of creativity, which takes place as the emergence or revelation of serial form, as well as in the nature of the index or sign as “a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else [aliud aliquid] to come into the mind as a consequence of itself.”

Rule of Itself

Seriality is a deceptively simple idea and phenomenon with connections to various interrelated concepts like sequence, succession, repetition, consequentiality, implication, order, iteration, list, coincidence, enumeration, pattern, and so on. To think clearly about seriality requires understanding the distinctions between seriality's proliferating possibilities while staying within sight of the principle of seriality in its simplicity. This is always somewhat difficult because of the way seriality mirrors the movement of thinking as a passage from thought to thought, to the point that the being or existence of a series may appear indistinguishable from the thinking of it. Just as, in thinking, we pass from thought to thought in a manner that makes one focus on the thoughts and forget or elide their passing per se, so in the perception of seriality is there a natural tendency to give attention to the elements of the series and their interrelationships and to disregard seriality as such. We think and talk all the time about series of this or that without properly considering that we are dealing with seriality, no less objectively than subjectively. As many forms of relation and non-relation fall within the general idea of seriality, so do thoughts follow upon each other in all sorts of related and unrelated ways, such that the two are always becoming entangled. Whenever we are perceiving a series, however seemingly random or formally defined, there remains this unshakeable sense of its inseparability from the seriality of experience itself, as if the unity or individuality of one's own being cannot but mark itself indexically across serially salient points of awareness, and vice versa, as if our integrity, the unity of oneself, were somehow inseparable from this indicating of unities, one after another.

Thus, in the case of the random or coincidental series, say a sequence of stars, there remains, despite the evident dependency upon seeing them as a series, the fact of their seriality being objectively or phenomenally there to notice.

One More One

Nothing adds up—everything does not—and yet we keep counting. From the mysterious event of every individual being to the immeasurable reality of the visible and invisible universe, plus all the measurements in between, there is no proper count of things. And even if there were a way to add things up, individually or universally, to count something or everything, what could the sum possibly be—save one more enumeration? One more … one. That we are living in a world irrationally attached to counting things (and the error of identity on which it is based) is clear from the endless array of crises articulated day by day in numerical form as well as the innumerable critiques of quantification altering us to the perils of continuing further down the road of number. With tragicomic circularity, our calculations predict catastrophes caused by humankind's addiction to quantification, our habitual ruling of life with “the regime of governance by numbers [which] loses all contact with reality, and substitutes the map for the territory.”

And in the background and foreground of this crowded, inversely panoptic world-theatre, behind and ahead of the day's reckonings, we point to the collective shadow of all the ones counting, a global mass projection of human numerousness onto the screen of life (a.k.a. “the Anthropocene”), as if the destiny of the human were to fill the cosmos with its own quantity. Indeed our very dubious unthinking assumption that there is a world, in the sense of a single total sum of all things, is itself an ironic shadow of Homo numerans: “the postulated domain of unified total overall reality corresponds to the idea of unrestricted quantification.”

This book is called Wittgenstein on Other Minds, but it could have also been called Wittgenstein on Understanding or perhaps Wittgenstein on Understanding Others. In philosophy, the so-called problem of other minds is often understood as a problem in epistemology about how we can know what anybody else is thinking or feeling, although as Anita Avramides states, ‘there is little agreement either about the problem or the solution to it’ (Avramides 2019, § 1).

At its solipsistic extreme, the alleged problem is that of knowing that other minds exist at all. How can I know that other ‘people’ are not actually automata or even mere figments of my imagination, perhaps the work of some Cartesian demon who can deceive me about anything except for the fact that I, myself, exist? While the young Wittgenstein may have fallen prey to such doubt, in his later work, Wittgenstein showed all of these worries to be spurious, not because we can know that other minds exist but because it ordinarily makes no sense to doubt such things. ‘Other people have minds’ is neither true nor false but, rather, a rule of grammar or ‘hinge’ that enables us to make truth-apt statements about the mental lives of others, claims that need to proceed by way of interpretation.

So, while there is no genuine philosophical problem of other minds, for the later Wittgenstein, this does not entail that there are no real-life difficulties in understanding others and, indeed, even ourselves (for self-understanding is not a matter of introspecting an inner theatre of the mind to which we have privileged access). In his private life, Wittgenstein's pessimism regarding the possibility of understanding others was unmatched. This was not on the grounds of its being in principle impossible to understand anybody but because it is in practice very difficult to do so, arguably even in our own case. The difficulty is not an abstract metaphysical or even epistemological one but rather an everyday psychological and sociological one. This is what Marie McGinn refers to as ‘the real problem of others’ (McGinn 2022, 19–48). As McGinn puts it, ‘Wittgenstein is deeply opposed to the idea that our everyday doubts about others amount to a way of “living scepticism” or reveal a truth in the sceptic's image of our metaphysical separation’ (McGinn 2022, viii).

Prologue

In his book of interviews with the documentary maker Nick Broomfield, Jason Wood describes the following scene from Broomfield's 1975 film Juvenile Liaison, a case study of the questionable ‘no-nonsense’ methods employed by the officers of a police unit in Blackburn, Lancashire (UK) focused on young offenders from ‘impoverished working-class backgrounds’:

Broomfield responds as follows:

Broomfield isn't offering a general answer to the perennial question of why good people do bad things, let alone an account of how our evaluations of them relate to our evaluations of their deeds (see Sandis 2017a).

As a prospective undergraduate, I had wanted to apply for Oxford's now defunct Psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology (PPP) degree, but lacking the maths A Level required for the statistics component, I came to St Anne's College to read Philosophy and Theology instead (apparently no maths is required to contemplate the infinite). In late 1996, I began my final year somewhat disillusioned with the direction that contemporary analytic philosophy had taken, never mind analytic theology. My wonderful tutor, Alison Denham, sent me to Peter Hacker at St John's College for the Philosophy of Mind paper, with the words ‘he won't be as forgiving as me if you write a poor essay’. Peter's weekly tutorials introduced me to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, as well as that of G. E. M. Anscombe, Norman Malcolm, Gilbert Ryle, P. F. Strawson, G. H. von Wright, Alan R. White and many other greats of that bygone era.

At the end of the eight-week term, Peter generously asked whether instead of parting ways, I should like to return for four additional tutorials in the philosophy of action to supplement the topics we had covered in the philosophy of mind. Intrigued by the sound of a subject that seemed to resemble PPP in its interests and scope, I accepted and returned the following term to discuss such things as the nature of action, intention, reasons and causes, voluntariness, and the will. So not only did he introduce me to Wittgenstein, Peter also introduced me to the philosophy of action. For better or worse, he is the reason I did not give up philosophy.

The philosophy of action was to largely preoccupy me during my graduate studies at the University of Reading and subsequent decade lecturing at Oxford Brookes University. While Wittgenstein's later philosophy has deeply influenced me, I did not explicitly engage with his work during this period. By the time I left Brookes for the University of Hertfordshire, I had become interested in the fact that there is much more to understanding a person than knowing the reasons for which they acted. My philosophical interests accordingly shifted from classic issues in action explanation to the philosophy of understanding, particularly as it applies to sentient beings.

Prologue

Interpreters of different spots and stripes all agree that the later Wittgenstein is an enemy of the idea that the thoughts and feelings of other people – and by extension of animals – are hidden from us in any sense that might raise a serious philosophical problem of other minds. Whatever the precise details of his view, it seems clear that Wittgenstein doesn't think that there is any general epistemic worry to be had about others:

On this view, there is no metaphysical barrier to knowledge of others, the overcoming of which would require some kind of argument from analogy à la Russell (PI, § 420 ff. – which forms a bridge to the remarks on seeing-as in PPF, xi). In the Philosophical Investigations, this stance is primarily expressed in relation to knowledge of sensations, inner speech, beliefs and intentions. Following Norman Malcolm (1986), we may see it as part of a much wider attack on the traditional philosophical assumption that all sorts of interesting things are systematically hidden from us (i.e. necessarily ‘private’), be they the essences of things, the functions of words or the minds of people (PI, §§ 92, 133, 155, 293, 301, 307, 323–4, 435, 559).

Prologue

What it takes to understand radically different others lies at the heart of the philosophies developed by Collingwood and Wittgenstein at roughly the same time. Their approaches differ in three ways that are prima facie significant but ultimately prove to be little more than a divergence in emphasis. This is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that the two thinkers are frequently thought to stand at opposite ends of the methodological spectrum with respect to the value of metaphysics.

First, there is the difference between period and place. Whereas Wittgenstein typically considers examples of (chiefly fictional) people from geographically distant strange lands, Collingwood concentrates specifically on the thought and action of past figures from the history of Western civilization. This relates to the second difference between them, which is that Collingwood is primarily interested in individuals, whereas Wittgenstein focuses on collectives of people. The third, arguably greatest, difference is in their conceptions of what understanding involves. For Collingwood, this is a matter of re-enacting the practical reasoning of those concerned; Wittgenstein, by contrast, seems to think that it requires a serious immersion in the other's form of life, a feat more – on some views only – feasible with one's contemporaries.

We must nonetheless view their approaches to understanding others as complementary rather than opposed. For one thing, it is plausible to expect parallel conditions for understanding the foreign present and the local past (as in historical understanding). As the famous opening line of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between contends, ‘the past is another country, they do things differently there’ (Hartley 1953, 1). We must also take care not to exaggerate the differences between their interests. Wittgenstein does not focus solely on understanding one's contemporaries, and Collingwood was certainly interested in cultural beliefs and practices, as exemplified in his historical works as well as in his doctrine of absolute presuppositions (arguably inspired by Evans-Pritchard but connected to the ‘hinge propositions’ of Wittgenstein's On Certainty) and in his critique of anthropology. Pari passu, not all of Collingwood's pronouncements are about individuals, and, as we shall see, Wittgenstein's more personal worries about understanding others focus explicitly on the thought of individuals.

Prologue

Donald Davidson begins his landmark paper ‘Action, Reasons and Causes’ by contrasting his so-called causalist account of reason-giving explanations of action with the views of a large number of then-prominent philosophers, all of whom were writing from within a loosely Wittgensteinian tradition. These are dismissed in one fell swoop:

In a later essay, Davidson acknowledges Carl Hempel's deep influence on his views while re-affirming the contrast to the volumes in Holland's series:

The contrast is not imaginary, although we shall come to see in due course that it is subtler than Davidson lets on. As we shall see, numerous books in Holland's series defend the view that the relation between an agent's reason(s) and her action(s) should be understood not causally but logically, normatively, conceptually and/or hermeneutically. In this they are united by various forms of what might reasonably be termed anti-scientism. The books do not have a clearly articulated and specific target here – certainly no definition of scientism is ever provided – but there is a general suspicion of any philosophy that attempts to answer questions relating to human minds and actions by appeal to models stemming from natural science, such as physical mechanisms.

Prologue

Disclaimer: I have never been on safari with Professor Glock. His work on Wittgenstein, however, is the main reason I made the journey from the parklands of Oxford to the habitat of the Reading floodplains. I spent many – on some accounts, too many – happy years there as a graduate student in the University's philosophy department. Ever since those salad days, I have learned more from Hanjo than I could possibly express here; my gratitude to him is immense. Whatever criticism follows is intended to honour him, both as the author of some of my favourite philosophical texts and as the spirited conversationalist who can pull an argument apart while simultaneously scanning the restaurant table for any untouched desserts.

In 1996, my undergraduate self stepped into the basement of Blackwell's flagship bookshop on Broad St in Oxford and came out with a copy of Glock's A Wittgenstein Dictionary (1996a), priced at £10.99. It was within its pages that I first encountered the ideas I discuss in this essay. Towards the end of his entry for ‘form of life (Lebensform)’, Glock offers a brief exegesis of Wittgenstein's ‘puzzling remark’ that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (PI, 223). At the time, I assumed that Glock's treatment of it was an undisputable orthodoxy. This was a dictionary after all, and I intended to use it to get through my final examinations. Some years later, I read his masterful paper ‘On Safari with Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson’ (1996b), which was published around the same time as the Dictionary. The paper is a model of what philosophical writing can and should be: learned yet original, resolute but judicious, significant while light-hearted, its insights always perspicuous and its reprovals constructive. Upon reading it, I also realized that far from being standard, Glock's account of Wittgenstein was novel and important, both as an act of Wittgensteinian exegesis and as a piece of contemporary philosophical criticism.