A, B, C

6

Those discursive structures stabilize our metaphysical assumptions that, as Derrida remarked, we are never outside of and are most deeply enmeshed in precisely when we are critiquing someone else’s.

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was wandering one day over the lawns of Cambridge and looking at the sky, when one of his students saw him. “Professor Wittgenstein, are you all right? What are you doing…?”

The philosopher looked down and saw the student. (The novelist in me at this point always assumes Wittgenstein blinked.) “I’m trying to understand,” said the perplexed philosopher, “why, when the earth is turning and the sun is — relatively — in one place in the sky, it feels and looks as if the earth is still and the sun is moving around it.”

“Well…” said the student, perplexed now by the philosopher’s perplexity, “it’s because, I suppose, it just feels and looks that way when the earth is moving and the sun is standing still.”

“But if that’s the case,” replied the philosopher, “what would it look and feel like if the earth were actually still and the sun was actually moving.” And on that question, Wittgenstein turned, looked up again, and wandered off across the grass, leaving a very perplexed young man, now looking after him, now squinting toward the sun. Your words and mine evoke — rather than carry — approximate meaning, already there at their destination, meanings that the order of words alone will rearrange and that must be interpreted further by probabilistic approximation to mean anything at all. It is only the effect that feels as if they carry actual meanings from speaker or writer to hearer or reader. But if that’s the case, what would be the effect if they felt as if they only evoked meanings already there by probabilistic approximation…?

Life is made up of lots of “experience puns,” with an “obvious explanation” and several “not so obvious ones.” Enlarging on this property was the basis for much of the work of the surrealist artists, such as Pavel Tchelichew, Max Ernst, and M. C. Escher.

Our metaphysics arises from assuming perceived resonances are causal even though we have no evidence for it, but without doing so we would be left with solipsism — itself a limit-case metaphysical assumption, but an assumption nevertheless. In short, we can either assume that stuff is there — or that it isn’t. (Maybe it’s something else, energy, idea, or pure God…) We have no logical proof for any of them. What we have is effects that seem to make us comfortable or uncomfortable, but comfort and discomfort, remember, are also effects. (We can work directly with the brain to change them, both temporarily or permanently.) We seem to be most comfortable assuming the very complex world we live in is there, and that all the complex things that have developed in it over the last five billion years to deal with are, in fact, the case — and many of us feel even more comfortable when we can untangle contradictions in what appears obvious by means of other patterns we have been able to see in other places, with the aid of other techniques. (It’s called science.) Explore it, play, have fun, and try to learn and understand, even adjust — but is it really worth fighting with it to make yourself miserable about the way other folks want to explore, play, and learn? And most of us seem to feel better when we can help people who are suffering — because we all suffer.