Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit

Meaning and Astonishment

Maria Balaska

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030169398
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

This book brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of 'astonishment, ' an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. Maria Balaska argues that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –namely, their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language's sense-making capacities, Balaska argues that Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning's groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

© The Author(s) 2019

Maria BalaskaWittgenstein and Lacan at the Limithttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maria Balaska¹

(1)

University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK

Maria Balaska

Aesthetic wonder is: that the world exists. That what exists does exist.

Wittgenstein, Notebooks

End Abstract

1.1 The Experience of Astonishment

This is a story about certain times or cases in the human life when expression through language seems inescapably inadequate, when words seem bound to fail us, and meaning to escape. Such a case is the experience of astonishment . I use the word “astonishment” to describe the experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant and which can have a positive emotional tone or a negative emotional tone. Dating back to 1300, the word “astonishment” comes from the old French word estoner that means “to stun, daze, deafen, astound,” which originates from the Latin verb attonare or extonare that literally means to leave someone thunderstruck, to strike with lightning. In its root, then, the word “astonishment” is neutral: it can be positive or negative, but in both cases, it has a profoundly unsettling, dazing effect. Examples of positive astonishment may include an experience of overwhelming beauty, or kindness. Examples of negative astonishment may include an experience of the absurdity of death, of a terrifying evil, or of absolute guilt; in the face of these, one feels anxious and saddened, and perhaps left with a sense of despair. Although I offer here examples of cases in the face of which one might experience astonishment, positive or negative, the principal aim of this book is not to examine what triggers an experience of astonishment; hence I will not address questions such as: “are there certain things in life that are more likely to astonish us?,” or “can anything appear to be astonishing?” These are not my questions. Rather, the book focuses on a central trait of that experience, namely, the way it appears to resist expression in language.

What interests me primarily is the fact that the experience herein described is tied up with a difficulty of expression, along with a sense of dissatisfaction with meaning or language. In the question “what is it that makes x astonishing?” no satisfying answer can be given, for it is not any new fact about x that can account for the experience. This is what differentiates the experience I focus on from other experiences that could be regarded as its conceptual siblings, such as wonder , bewilderment, and surprise. Most usually in the everyday discourse, these words appear to be synonymous with “astonishment”: we often speak of “being astonished” interchangeably with “wondering” at something or “being bewildered” by something. Indeed, there are things in common between these experiences and the experience of astonishment, and because of the overlapping features, I will myself sometimes use those terms too (for example, I will refer to the case of wondering at the existence of the world as a case of astonishment—Wittgenstein uses both the terms “wonder ” and “astonishment” without drawing a distinction). The main overlapping traits include being struck by something, the presence of very positive or negative emotions, and the presence of puzzlement. However, as it will become clear in the course of the book, the nature of puzzlement can differ from case to case, because puzzlement does not always take the form of a difficulty of expression, nor is the difficulty always an essential part of the experience (whereas I claim that this is the case in an experience of astonishment). Philip Fischer, for example, defines wonder as “a sudden experience of an extraordinary phenomenon that produces delight” (2003, 55) and connects it primarily to the response to a novelty or a rare experience (such as the phenomenon of a rainbow). To the extent that wonder ,¹ bewilderment, surprise come as a response to novelty, to a rare experience, or to an aporia, they are different from the experience I introduce here. What makes these distinct from astonishment is that they are linked to the knowledge of a new and perhaps curious fact , for example, to a new scientific discovery, to something that has proven to be possible when we believed it not to be possible, to an apparent contradiction . A rainbow, the quantum world, a ghost, Zeno’s paradox, the Platonic thought in Parmenides that the same thing is many and one, Scheffer’s stroke in logic are all candidates for marvelling, and despite their differences, they share one trait: they are, in principle, meaningful questions which can be answered by stating a particular set of (previously unknown or not fully understood) facts that make them wonderful, something we did not know or thought we knew and proved to be mistaken. In that sense, those experiences do not involve a sense that we must “run up against the limits of language.” If we go back to Fischer’s definition of wonder as “a sudden experience of an extraordinary phenomenon that produces delight” and try to rephrase it to fit an experience of astonishment, the definition would change into: “a sudden experience of significance that looks extraordinary and produces a difficulty with meaning, a sense that language fails us.”

John McDowell addresses the difficulty of expression that is crucial to the experience I describe, when he says that in such experiences “one is losing the capacity to instantiate one’s allotted life form as a speaking animal,” or else one is “losing one’s capacity to capture reality in language,” which offers us a “perception, say of our finitude and dependence as empirical knowers” (2008, 137). McDowell’s words are offered in reply to a type of experience that Cora Diamond calls a “difficulty of reality”: “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability” (2008, 45–46). Even though Diamond seems to reserve astonishment for positive experiences only, whereas I choose to use the term in a neutral way that applies to both positive and negative experiences, Diamond’s examples of positive astonishment at beauty and kindness, but also of dread towards the absurdity of death, and evil are examples of the experience I have in mind.

In the first of her examples, Diamond focuses on a poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men,” in which the speaker of the poem looks at a picture of six smiling young men and then finds out that within six months of the picture’s being taken all were dead. The impossibility that the poet, the speaker, or the reader of the poem faces is the impossibility of simultaneously embracing the aliveness of the six men and their deadness, the impossibility of the simultaneous awareness of death and life. The speaker is astonished at the unavoidability and the absurdity of death: how can these six young living bodies and minds that smell the bilberries, hear the sound of the rushing water, and stand in front of a camera and smile be deprived of their life? How can something (so) alive become dead? Notice that Ted Hughes is not astonished as a result of having learnt a new fact . He already knew that we, humans, are mortal, we live for a while and sooner or later die, either of ageing or of other causes; rather, this fact took on a certain significance (I will come back to this in the next chapter).

Another example Diamond uses is that of astonishment in front of goodness, through Ruth Kluger’s memoir of Auschwitz (2001, 103–109). Kluger describes that she has never ceased to wonder at the incomparable and inexplicable goodness a young girl showed when she stood up for her in the camp. Diamond connects the astonishment at kindness to what one would feel towards a miracle, what is “at one and the same time empirically certain and conceptually impossible” (2008, 63), also following here Simone Weil when she says that compassion can be “a more astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the sick or raising the dead” (Weil, 1977, 441). The conceptual difficulty with seeing an act of kindness as astonishing is that this does not seem to fit in with our ordinary ways of understanding the value of an act as informed by particular interests or characterized by particular facts . What struck Kluger about this act of kindness is that it seems to transcend the realm of instincts and partial interests. Why would a young girl risk her life to save a stranger? “Because she likes to help,” one could reply, and this would transform the astonishing or miraculous character of the act into something ordinary or trivial. This sense of mystery can also be experienced in relation to the existence of beauty, and Diamond brings in an example of astonishing beauty from Czeslaw Milosz, who speaks of the mystery in the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green, or the voices of birds outside the window greeting the morning. Their beauty “should not exist,” Milosz says, and although I am unsure what Milosz means when he further says that “there is not only no reason for it but an argument against” (Diamond , 2008, 60, my emphasis), I would agree that it is part of the experience of astonishment that what astonishes does not have to be the way it is; for example, the beauty Milosz describes need not exist, in the sense that someone could just as well look at what Milosz is astonished by and see just a simple green tree and a bunch of birds producing bird noises, instead of the mystery of the tree and the birds greeting the morning.

Astonishment is then, according to the present book, the positive or negative emotional state accompanying or accompanied by a difficulty of expression and a sense of mystery around the importance that something comes to have. In fact, the emotion and the difficulty of expression are internally connected, so that in expressing the emotion one is also expressing the difficulty. This sense of mystery can give rise to a question about the sense-making capacities of language, a kind of doubting guided by what McDowell earlier described as the loss of one’s capacity to capture reality in language. McDowell’s formulation might, however, appear too strong. For how can the capacity to capture reality in language, a capacity so characteristic of the human animal, get lost? Does it get lost? This is one of the questions that this book attempts to answer through an examination of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan.

As I show, both Wittgenstein and Lacan have a place for the experience of astonishment in their work. Furthermore, and more importantly for my purposes, they are interested in such experiences insofar as they present a difficulty of intelligible expression, insofar as they can lead to a question about the “limits of language.” To the best of my knowledge, neither Wittgenstein nor Lacan has so far been examined in relation to the difficulty of intelligible expression in such experiences, and it is part of the original contribution of this study to highlight this aspect of their work and to explore what the two authors can offer. In the rest of this...