Mysticism, Philosophy, and the Womb

In “Mysticism and Logic” Russell lists four characteristics typical of the mystical temperament: a belief in a special way of knowing, a craving for unity in the world, a denial of the reality of time, and a disbelief in evil. The mystic believes that we (some of us) have a special faculty of knowing (“intuition”, “insight”) that transcends sense perception, intellect, and reason—and hence exceeds the possibilities of scientific knowledge. He or she also believes that the world is fundamentally unified, an “organic whole”, so that apparent divisions and distinctions are unreal, illusory (“All is One”). In addition, and related to the unity belief, time and change are unreal, so that reality is permanent and fixed; it only seems to us that things change. Finally, evil and suffering are illusory, so that we need not be concerned by them; we can remain tranquil.[1]Religion clearly exemplifies these conditions. It is supposed that we can know God by revelation or by prayer and ritual, and he can know us by means of his superior cognitive powers. The soul is equipped with more faculties of knowledge than science recognizes (as is God). The world is a unity by virtue of being created by God for a specific purpose; it isn’t just a random collection of unrelated objects. In some religions pantheism ensures a deeper form of unity, because God is a unified being. Moreover, true reality is hidden—another feature of mystical thought. Time is unreal because God does not exist in time; time only seems real to us because we are finite mortal beings with limited knowledge. And evil is unreal because it will be rectified in the afterlife: it too is just an illusory appearance. Accordingly, the mystical impulse (as Russell describes it) is catered to by religious doctrine. Mystical experience, therefore, is natural to the religious life—while the scientific life will not be so conducive to it. Mystical cults will naturally spring up around such beliefs, bolstered by rituals and practices that encourage mystical experience. Architecture and iconography will reinforce the mystical tendency, which seems endemic in the human mind. But mysticism will not be confined to religion, because its core beliefs are not necessarily theistic; we may find mystical strands cropping up elsewhere, not always explicitly acknowledged. Thus, in philosophy we find mystical ideas dotted throughout the history of the subject, as in Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras, Spinoza, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and others. In the Tractatus we find three mentions of mysticism towards the end of the book: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists (6.44); “Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical” (6.45); “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (6.522). As usual, Wittgenstein does not spell out his remarks, but we can see echoes of Russell’s characterization in these cryptic pronouncements. If I say to myself that the world exists, I treat the world as an object of singular reference, i.e., a unitary thing. We don’t usually make such sweeping existential claims, limiting ourselves to things within the world; but apparently, we can ascend to a higher level and make such statements about the world considered as a whole; then we are in mystical territory. This is made explicit in the following section in which Wittgenstein speaks of “feeling” the world as a “limited whole”: we experience it as a unified being. The third quotation expresses the idea that some things are ineffable, indescribable, and yet we have a kind of awareness of them; this awareness transcends the capacities of the intellect (we are in the realm of “intuition”). At a more general level, the whole Tractatus is an exercise in mystical thinking, because of the (alleged) unifying power of logic, its hiddenness, its other-worldliness, and its accessibility only to a faculty of logical intuition. At the time of writing the book, Wittgenstein was steeped in religion, and it shows. The basic conception is not so far removed from the Pythagorean picture of the physical world as constructed from mathematical objects. This is logical mysticism. Mathematicians have often had mystical tendencies (Godel, notoriously, also Russell himself). But I don’t think the tendency in question is limited to those who avow it; in fact, I think it is pretty common. I would say that panpsychism has mystical connotations (it certainly used to), as do idealism and neutral monism—because they all involve the assertion of hidden unity and present themselves as revelations (not science or common sense). I also think that materialism has mystical roots: it seeks to unify reality, and is often more a matter of faith than demonstration. Quine has mystical leanings, because of his belief in the sacred status of (first-order) predicate calculus and his insistence on generalized materialism: he levels plurality; he denies ordinary distinctions (the “desert landscape” is a mystical vision). Oddly enough, dualism is not really mystical, because it doesn’t attempt to force metaphysical unity on the world; it seems commonsensical. The idea of a “singularity”, as in big bang cosmology, has mystical overtones, and inspires religious awe, because it squeezes the entire universe into a single unified dot. Frege’s system has mystical elements too, because it seeks to impose a monolithic order onto apparent variety, and it deals in occult objects: thus, the generalized notion of a function, and the claim that truth-values are objects. Accordingly, Frege inspires a cult-like following: you have to swallow some pretty weird propositions in order to join it, which requires special insight on the part of cult members. Mystical cults are seductive, entrancing, because they offer simplified visions and esoteric knowledge. Hence, the dreamy look in the eye, the serene confidence, the disdain for outsiders. But all this leaves us with a question, a psychological question: whence the appeal of mysticism? Why are we susceptible to its charms? Why do its characteristic claims resonate with us? This is where the womb comes in, or where we come into the womb. For consider what it’s like to be inside the womb: the fetus’s world is a unified world, an undifferentiated world, an unchanging world. There is not a multiplicity of objects ranged around but just one—and it is barely distinguishable from the fetus itself. No self-other distinction has yet been drawn; it is as if the fetus is absorbed into the mother (as believers have dreamt of being at one with God). Moreover, at this stage of human life no intellect has yet formed, so all awareness is non-intellectual. Nor is it really sensory, or only primitively so; the fetus simply feels the mother—but not as a mother but as a kind of nebulous warm presence. Time has no real meaning for the fetus, since nothing much changes, and memory and expectation are non-existent at this stage. There isn’t much of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion” but rather a state of steady unchanging tranquility—a kind of dream state but without any world-directed content to the dream. Time begins for the infant when she is propelled into the outside world and experiences the chaos and mutability of that world. And, of course, there is no evil in the womb, no suffering, no deprivation. So, the state of consciousness of the fetus in the womb is rather like the consciousness of the convinced mystic: a unified homogeneous world, non-intellectual apprehension, no passage of time, no evil. The yearning for mystical enlightenment (or immersion) is really a yearning to return to the womb (an idea familiar from the psychological literature). That, at any rate, is a hypothesis to be pondered.[2] Confirmation of it might be found in the connection between mysticism and drug experience: for it is commonly reported that certain drugs induce a feeling of enhanced perception, a sense of oneness with reality, intimations of a unitary transcendent world, distortions of time perception, and an access of feelings of well-being, as if all is well with the world. So, adult mysticism might be seen as an expression of womb nostalgia, possibly abetted by suitable drug-induced experience. This would mean that mystically inclined philosophers (and scientists and mathematicians) are subject to influences from early life, as early as pre-natal life. Imagine if you were born at a more mature stage than you actually were (rather like many other mammals), so that you had a clear memory of life in the womb. You might nostalgically remember those halcyon days and seek to recreate them. Religion would then be a natural way to go, given its characteristic doctrines and practices. But so would certain philosophical (or scientific) systems: they might satisfy your mystical cravings, partially at least, spurred by your memories of life in the womb. Really, many animals, including us, live two lives, each quite different from the other: pre-natal womb-life, with its characteristic features, and post-natal life with its pluralities, cognitive burdens, the relentless passage of time, and ever-present suffering and deprivation. Surely, a yearning to return to the earlier life would be natural, even inevitable, though the mystical life-style might be only a pale simulacrum of the womb-ensconced life-style. Some part of our brain retains an impression (let’s not call it a memory) of life inside the womb and this reverberates throughout our life, making us susceptible to mystical enticements. Of course, there might be sound intellectual reasons for accepting doctrines with a mystical aura, but there could be a more basic mystical impetus lurking in us too. Fetal phenomenology might lie behind adult ideology. Mysticism might have its roots in primitive pre-natal existence.[3]

[1] Evidently, mysticism, as so understood, is something of a hodge-podge of loosely connected ideas, though one knows it when one sees it. It is a kind of detachment from ordinary reality, a bracketing of sharply individuated objects, a distancing from the senses and discursive thought, in favor of something more primitive, more elusive, harder to put into words. Music can produce the state in question, pictorial art too (as in William Blake).It aspires towards the holistic, the interconnected. It can be ecstatic, or at least heightened, sometimes transformational. Yet it is often associated with youth, with naïve apprehension of nature; adolescence is a time for mysticism. It is often seen as a recovery of something lost, before civilization has done its work.

[2] We should not intellectualize the mystical experience just because intellectuals talk about it. I had my first mystical experience when a child of 5 or 6 (I still remember it), as a response to nature, and I don’t think I am an exception. This was only a few years out from my womb-life with its distinctive phenomenology. The universality of mystical experience across cultures suggests a common biological basis, as predicted by the womb theory.

[3] Of course, I am well aware that this is a fantastically speculative piece of developmental psychology, and very difficult to test. However, most infant psychology is highly speculative and difficult to test; and in the case of the fetus, experiments are pretty much excluded. Still, the hypothesis is perfectly meaningful and we can have indirect evidence that bears on it. It should not be rejected out of hand simply because it is hard to test. I actually think it is very plausible, because I think we can have a clear idea of life inside the womb and it maps neatly onto the established picture of the mystical state of mind. Any other ideas?

False to Facts

We have grown accustomed to a philosophical use of the word “fact”, mainly from the writings of Wittgenstein and Russell in their logical atomism period. Roughly, this is the idea of a fact as a “combination of objects”—a sort of complex of objects, properties, and relations. This conception is what allows Wittgenstein to write, “The world is the totality of facts, not things” and “The world divides into facts”. Call this an “ontological use” of “fact”: facts are entities belonging to ontology in that they are constituents of reality existing independently of human knowledge. This use has become entrenched, even though there has always been difficulty explaining what a fact in this sense is (it’s certainly not a “combination of objects”). Some have thought that facts are just true propositions: this is still an ontological use (allegedly) though it rejects the idea of a separate realm of facts alongside propositions. The concept is then used in a variety of areas to formulate philosophical doctrines, or to reject them (see below). But it is not at all clear that the notion can bear this kind of weight, or that it is even coherent. Is there an ontological sense to the word “fact”? What does the word really mean? Is this what it means in ordinary speech? As always, the dictionary provides a salutary starting point: the Concise OED gives us “a thing that is indisputably the case” and “information used as evidence or as part of a report”; the Shorter OED has “A thing known for certain to have occurred or known to be true; a datum of experience”. These definitions are clearly epistemic not ontological: a fact is something indisputable, evidential, certainly known, a datum of experience. In this sense a fact is opposed to an interpretation, a theory, a hypothesis—not a falsehood. Interpretations, theories, and hypotheses can be true and yet not facts, i.e., things indisputable, evidential, datum-like. If we ask “What are the facts of the case?” we mean to be asking after the evidence, the known information—not the truth-value of theories about the case. It would be quite wrong to say that the world is the totality of facts in this sense, since reality contains more than what we indisputably know. We could say that the world is the totality of objects and their properties and relations, but that goes well beyond what is known to have occurred etc. In the dictionary definition, then, logical atomism is simply false, even bizarre. So, is there another sense? Or has the word been snatched from ordinary language and stretched beyond endurance, giving an illusion of intelligibility? I fear the latter is the case. A fact is a truth that is known, to put it simply—and nothing else. That is why all attempts to explain the ontological sense have failed miserably: facts are not a type a type of entity; they are just truths that stand in a certain relation to knowledge. We could say they are known truths, known events, known states of affairs, known instances of objects having properties. But they are not a category of being that exists independently of any reference to knowledge: that is a philosophical fiction. True, we sometimes speak of “unknown facts”, but this odd locution appears to mean either “unknown to a certain person or group” or “unknown truth”. In general, talk of facts is always talk of what is known or perceived or otherwise registered by the mind—as opposed to what is objectively real. The theory of evolution, say, was not a fact until it was placed beyond serious doubt, not when it was merely a theory awaiting confirmation (though perfectly true then). The words “fact” and “true” are not coextensive or correlative, let alone synonymous. One way to see this is to note that “true” is redundant in a way that “fact” is not: compare “The heliocentric theory of the universe is true” and “The heliocentric theory of the universe is a fact”, said at the time of Copernicus; the latter is not equivalent to “The sun is the center of the universe” but the former is. To state a fact, a proposition has to be both true and beyond dispute. It is distinctly odd to say “The facts might never be known by anyone” (for how can facts be so hidden?), but perfectly okay to say “The truth might never be known by anyone”. The former is like saying “The evidence might never be known by anyone”—or the information, data, signs, clues, and indications. For all these words suggest availability to knowledge, whereas “true” does not. And to say that someone believes it’s a fact that p is not at all like saying that someone believes that p. What has happened is that philosophers have slid from the legitimate epistemic use of “fact” to an ill-defined ontological use.[1] This slide has a bearing on three philosophical issues in which the word “fact” has been theoretically deployed. The first is the correspondence theory of truth: a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts. But this has to be wrong given that facts are always known, since there are many truths that are not known. And what might true statements correspond to if not to facts? If facts won’t do, there is nothing for truths (whole propositions) to correspond to, and hence there is no correspondence. The theory sounds plausible when we know what the facts are (e.g., the fact that snow is white), but it founders when we don’t know. Second, people ask whether ethical statements are “fact-stating” as a way of asking whether ethics is concerned with objective truth. But if we hear the phrase “fact-stating” as implying “indisputably the case”, we will be biased against ethical objectivism, because ethics is an area of frequent dispute. What is really intended is the idea that ethical propositions state objective truths (whether disputed or not) not whether they say things that no one will dispute. Many kinds of statements can be objectively true without stating facts in the dictionary sense, so the “fact-stating” formulation is wide of the mark. Third, the positivists tended to view meaningfulness as equivalent to being fact-stating, but this makes verifiability sound like a decent criterion for meaningfulness only if you take “fact” in the ontological sense. Otherwise, you are merely saying that a statement states something known only if it is verifiable—a straight tautology. But if you interpret “fact” in the ontological sense, it looks as if failure to state a fact really is tantamount to lack of meaning. Once it is admitted that “fact” can only mean something known it looks hopelessly procrustean to insist that all meaningful statements must be verifiable. Tying meaning to facts in the (alleged) ontological sense doesn’t seem so arbitrarily exclusive, but tying meaning to facts in the epistemic sense looks preposterously narrow—the only meaningful statements will be ones already verified. So, the concept of a fact can lead us astray once we try to detach it from the sense it ordinarily has. It should really be banned from philosophical discourse when used in the way initiated by Wittgenstein and Russell. The only facts there are are facts that are known to be so—and they are only facts in relation to what is known. It is a kind of category mistake to speak of facts as if they are things that can exist independently of human knowledge, as objects, events, and properties can. Facts don’t constitute the world; they are what we indisputably know of the world, as opposed to speculate about or are ignorant of. For the description of reality, we must stick with the concepts of truth, proposition, object and property, event and process; there are no facts out there in addition to these.[2]

[1] One symptom of this is the problem of individuating facts: when are facts the same and when different? Does “The morning star is bright” report the same fact as “The evening star is bright”? Also: can facts be perceived (seen, touched)? Can they be referred to by singular terms? Can they cause anything? Are there general facts, negative facts, disjunctive facts? Do they weigh anything (objects do)? Do they have the same constituents as propositions? Are they denoted by sentences? Are there fictional facts? Are there possible facts or are all facts actual? Can facts be quantified over? Are there facts about facts? Were there facts before the world was created, such as the fact that the world does not yet exist?

[2] Use of the word “fact” in an ontological sense encourages idealism, because it suggests the idea, always tempting, that unknown reality is necessarily like known reality. We know what known facts are like and then we project this conception onto reality as a whole, but then we are thinking of the unknown by analogy with the known. If the world consists of facts and facts are epistemically defined, then so is the world—hence idealism. The cure is not to contrive a non-epistemic notion of fact (a hopeless task) but to abandon the idea that reality consists of facts many of which transcend our knowledge. Reality does not consist of data, information, evidence, etc.

An A Priori Order

In his Private Notebooks 1914-1916 Wittgenstein writes: “The great question around which everything I write revolves is: Is there an a priori order in the world, and if so, of what does it consist?” The question is a good one (and highly metaphysical). In the Tractatus we read what looks like a reply: “There is no a priori order of things”. (5.634) This appears to imply that the order of things is entirely a posteriori. What we know of the world is derived exclusively from experience; otherwise, our knowledge of the world is a total blank. How this is consistent with the opening propositions of the Tractatus is not explained: “The world is all that is the case” (1), “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1.), “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts” (1.11), and so on. For these propositions are presumably intended as a priori necessary truths: it isn’t that we merely empirically discover that the world is all that is the case (etc.), as we discover that it contains hydrogen and walruses; or that it is just contingent that the world is made up of facts, as it is contingent that it contains London and denim jeans. No, the idea is presumably that these are a priorinecessities arrived at by pure reason (perhaps they are even analytic truths, if that’s the way you think of necessity and the a priori). Wittgenstein doesn’t say as much, but it is a natural interpretation of his words. In any case, I wish to discuss Wittgenstein’s question in its own right, not issues of Wittgenstein exegesis. So: is there an a priori order in the world, in things, in reality? Are there things we can know about the world without examining it, without observing it, without living in it? Notice that we are not asking whether there is an a prioriorder in propositions or sentences or in mathematics; we are talking about the world as a whole, including (and especially) what might be called concrete reality—material bodies, biological organisms, the weather. We can readily allow that an a priori order exists in logic, language, and number theory (I don’t think Wittgenstein would disagree—hence his use of “world” and “things”), but it is another question whether an a priori order might hold in the ordinary world of physical and psychological things. The question concerns whether there is such an order in all of reality, including the things we know by ordinary sensory perception. It is surely clear that much of the world is not knowable a priori: most of we know of the world is known empirically. But is any of it knowable (or actually known) a priori, and here we include the world of empirical concrete objects? Imagine standing outside the world, having had no experience of the world: is there anything you can still know about its make-up? We can start with Wittgenstein’s own proclamations: can we know a priori that the world is everything that is the case, the totality of facts not things? These words are not pellucid, despite their resonance. Does the first sentence not mean “everything that is true”, which must then mean “every proposition that is true”? But the world is not made of propositions. The second sentence speaks of a “totality of facts”: but what kind of totality (a set, an aggregate, a list?), and what is a fact? Wittgenstein goes on to introduce the idea of a “combination of objects” as constituting a fact, but that is a faulty conception of facts, and the notion of object here is highly theoretical and abstract. Still, the general drift of Wittgenstein’s words does not seem mistaken: we know a priori that the world must contain certain ontological categories, however difficult it may be to characterize them. We might venture the suggestion that the world consists of particulars and universals, objects and properties, individuals and general characteristics. We don’t know a priori what kinds of entity fall into these categories, but we do know a priori that the world (any world) must divide into them. Thus, there is an a priori order of things, of what there is, of reality. Admittedly, we have to be careful how we formulate the precise nature of what there must be: we don’t want to say that the existence of matter is known a priori, or persisting objects, or even space and time. The world might consist of immaterial stuff, or only of events, or be devoid of space and time: we can’t rule these epistemic possibilities out a priori. Empirically, we know these not to be the case, but they don’t seem like things we could exclude a priori. We can’t just excogitate the existence of matter, enduring objects, and space and time from the concept of a world. So, we should limit ourselves to only the most schematic description of the order we have discerned. I think the best and most convenient way to do this is to say that the world must contain instantiation: any world must have the property that instantiation occurs in it—there must be individual instances of general features or forms or characters or types. This we know a priori—though of course in fact we are confronted with it at every waking moment of our lives (and even in dreams). You can’t make a world without installing instantiation in it. The empty world in which nothing instantiates anything is not a world at all. Nor can particular things exist without instantiation, since every individual must have properties of some kind, as a matter of metaphysical necessity (no individuals without facts about them). But is that all we can know a priori about the world? Not quite, perhaps, because we can add logical laws if we accept that they apply to objects and properties and not just to propositions. We can say that no property can be instantiated and not instantiated in the same object at the same time, and that an object either instantiates a given property or it does not, and that objects and properties are always self-identical. So, any world obeys logical laws; and we know this a priori. We can also say that properties, being general, are shareable (even if not actually shared): this is in the nature of properties (hence the term “universals”). And if they are shareable there ought to be generalizations about them—laws of some sort. More adventurously, if instantiation must be present, then predication cannot be far behind: that is, if language and thought exist in the world, then they must contain predication, because instantiation is just the worldly counterpart to predication. We therefore know something about how the world must be represented in language and thought (if they exist in the world), given its ontological structure of instantiation. We can’t know a priori that they do exist in the world, but if they do they have to contain predication. Still, this is thin gruel compared to the vast number of things that are known a posteriori about the world: it is purely structural rather than substantial. But what is remarkable is that anything can be known a priori about the world: how can we know the form of the world without even looking at it? And isn’t it amazing that the world divides into an a prioripart and an a posteriori part? That is, each object partakes of an a priori order and an a posteriori order. Why should this be—why shouldn’t it all be a posteriori? Not all of an object’s nature has to be known by means of the senses, though most of it is. We have a kind of global cosmic rationalism: everything has a nature that is partially knowable by pure reason. Wittgenstein never asks whether there is an a posteriori order in the world, because it is obvious that there is, but it is not at all obvious that there is also an a priori order—and that these coexist. There is something startling about the fact that the world harbors an a priori order. We don’t learn from experience that instantiation (and associated structures) is a fact about the world; it just follows from being a world of any kind. No doubt this is a rather mysterious type of knowledge (not that a posteriori knowledge is entirely unmysterious), but it evidently exists and is philosophically important.[1]

[1] Wittgenstein was evidently a metaphysician in the grand style in his Tractatus days (ironically given his influence on the logical positivists), but nothing of this survives in his Investigations years. I have always thought this is a pity because he has a genuine talent for metaphysics. It is really not possible to be interested in logic without straying into metaphysical territory. The Investigations is pretty much devoid of logic.

Linguistic Phenomenology

J.L. Austin described his method as “linguistic phenomenology”. It is highly likely that this is an allusion to Husserl’s phenomenology: Husserl’s work was well known in Oxford in Austin’s time and Gilbert Ryle had a special interest in Husserl (he was a colleague of Austin’s). A cheeky allusion, perhaps, but an allusion nonetheless. However, there is no evidence that I know of that Austin ever studied Husserl, and if he did it made no discernible impact on him. Is Austin’s linguistic phenomenology at all like Husserl’s phenomenology? Do any of Husserl’s concepts show up in Austin’s work? Is Austin’s linguistic phenomenology phenomenological? Husserl’s phenomenology emphasizes consciousness, the first-person perspective, intentionality, noesis and noema, the epoche, suspension of the natural standpoint, and other concepts of the phenomenological tradition (going back to Descartes, Hume, Brentano, and others).[1] No trace of this is to be found in Austin’s writings; he is not doing the phenomenology of language at all, i.e., the way language manifests itself in consciousness. The notion of consciousness does not appear in Austin’s work on language. Nor does the notion of intentionality. There is no suspending of the natural standpoint in order to focus on the contents of consciousness as such. What Austin appears to mean by “phenomenology” is simply careful description as opposed to premature theory and spurious explanation, which is not a natural or normal interpretation of that word. Austin is surveying the phenomena of language but not doing the phenomenology of language. One would think that he might, after appropriating Husserl’s use of the word, make a point of investigating what Husserl has to say, but apparently, he did not (or it didn’t have any impact). In point of fact, Husserl does a good deal of linguistic phenomenology in his sense, investigating meanings, predication, propositions, indexicality, and other linguistic phenomena. But none of this seems to have influenced Austin’s work. Pity: it would have been interesting if Austin had produced a comparative study of himself and Husserl; and it might have enriched his own efforts. Actually, there is really no phenomenology in the analytic tradition devoted to language: what we call philosophy of language includes no phenomenology of language in Husserl’s sense. Frege discusses thought, but his philosophy of language makes no reference to consciousness, or even intentionality. Russell talks a lot about sense-data, but he never tries to describe what it is like to speak or understand speech. Wittgenstein is all logic and no consciousness in the Tractatus; and the Investigations, though avowedly descriptive, never examines language from the first-person point of view, preferring to look at it from the outside. Nor do we find any phenomenology in Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, Kripke, Montague, Searle, Kaplan, and numerous others. You might think that for this tradition meaning and consciousness have nothing to do with each other.[2] It is noteworthy that Husserl studied with Wundt as well as Brentano: so, he was steeped in introspectionist methodology, as opposed to the behaviorism that influenced later thinkers. In any case, there is no such thing as linguistic phenomenology in the analytic tradition. And this despite the fact that Husserl intended to found a school of philosophy that could claim to be a rigorous science (he was also a mathematician and physicist)—as analytic philosophy in some of its forms also aspired to be. What Husserl called “transcendental phenomenology” is not that different methodologically from the school of thought known as “ordinary language philosophy”, in that both seek to study the human creature as abstracted from the world of natural science: that is, consciousness as it is in itself independently of the natural world and language as a system of communication divorced from the reality outside of it—consciousness as such and speech as such. Ordinary language philosophy also had its epoche. Even speech act theory, which stresses the psychological aspects of speech behavior (Grice in particular), avoided consciousness and its inherent structures; so, real phenomenology never found a place in analytic philosophy of language. It is also interesting that what we might call “linguistic existentialism” never took off (except perhaps subliminally): I mean the application of concepts drawn from existentialism to speech. Sartre’s views derive from Husserl and deliver a distinctive approach to human existence, which might be carried over to language. Thus, is there any room for the contrast between Being and Nothingness and the idea of radical freedom in the philosophy of language? Is meaning an example of the intentionality of consciousness with its negative essence? Certainly, a Sartrean view of intentionality is opposed to a Fregean theory of sense and reference, since the conscious mental act has no nature not conferred by its reference—its essence is nothingness (compare the idea of direct reference, which also dispenses with mediating senses). And the idea that speech acts are instances of free action comports well with certain strains of thought concerning the nature of human action in general (I am thinking of Chomsky’s views on linguistic performance). So, we can see parallels between ideas found in existentialism and ideas familiar from the (so-called) analytic tradition. Sartre’s conception of consciousness as nothingness is redolent of Mill’s view of names (also Russell and Kripke), and his view of action as radically unconstrained is like Chomsky’s view of performance (and other libertarian views familiar from the analytic tradition). Accordingly, we can envisage linguistic existentialism as we can envisage linguistic phenomenology; and both have their counterparts in strands of the intellectual tradition more familiar to most of us (the “analytic”).[3] Austin could easily have become a phenomenologist and existentialist! He just needed to open up about consciousness and read some Husserl and Sartre. I suspect it was a deep-seated hostility to Descartes in the English-speaking world that inhibited that delightful rapprochement. Might it be because Descartes was a Frenchman, est-ce possible?[4]

[1] In case readers are wondering, my first published paper was on Mach and Husserl (1972).

[2] In all the literature on proper names and definite descriptions is there anything on the phenomenology of using names and descriptions? Don’t different kinds of meaning inhabit consciousness differently?

[3] I don’t believe there is any serious intellectual distinction between what are called “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. The difference is purely geographical and linguistic (i.e., what language the philosophy is written in).

[4] I’m joking, of course, but I do find the hostility to Descartes hard to understand. Ryle had it in spades, and Wittgenstein nourished it, and Quine embodied it.  There is a clear line leading from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley and Hume, up through Russell, Brentano, and Husserl; but the twentieth century saw a determined effort to expunge his legacy from the canon. It’s quite puzzling but should not be underestimated. I do wonder whether, if he were an Englishman, the hostility would be quite so marked. No Englishman wants to be labeled a Cartesian. Something similar is true of Sartre.