Commentaries

It seems easy to say that such-and-such is only an interpretation, or conversely, that everything is an interpretation. But the presupposition of only an interpretation is that there is something available to us which is not an interpretation, relative to which we can say that something is only or merely an interpretation. This view presents the hope of breaking out from the supposed confines of the mind through a pure experience of things without interpretation. But the view is baffling, for we don’t understand what this uninterpreted thing could be that provides the fixed point for our interpretations, and by reference to which, and by comparison with which, we can say something is only an interpretation. On the other hand, the presupposition of everything is an interpretation is that there is no such fixed point by means of which interpretations can be compared – but it is baffling too. For if the first view needed a thing without an interpretation, the second needs an interpretation without a thing it is an interpretation of. There is the limit case of an interpretation of an interpretation – a commentary, for instance – but not all interpretations can be interpretations of interpretations. For if there is no (non-interpretive) reality behind interpretations, or at least none available to us, then the thing to be interpreted drops out of consideration altogether, and there is nothing for the interpretation to be an interpretation of – and what then would it mean to say that anything was an interpretation?

I look but am not really looking, I am thinking instead. So I chastise myself for not being aware. I am now looking and not thinking, but now I chastise myself, asking: why this dumb outward looking, why am I not inward, thinking, examining?

‘My misery is my joy’. I think this, but is this right? And even if it is, do I think it because it’s right, or because it puts my misery into a formula which appears to justify it, which would make altering it seem pointless, and would make the risk of trying to alter it, because I have tied it to my joy, appear to risk the removal of my joy? But even if I do use this formula to justify my status quo, it might nonetheless be true; for my misery might really be my joy – and everyone after all seems to agree that there is some internal relation between them. And it is possibly because it is true that its use goes unnoticed.

What is the opposite of ‘I’m not OK’? I thought it was ‘I’m OK’. But what if the person who is really OK does not think to judge their state? This would make the opposite of ‘I’m not OK’, nothing. These statements to oneself – ‘I’m OK’ or ‘I’m not OK’ – are like spells, but in what conditions do I feel the need to tell myself that I am OK or not OK? Both presuppose the need to narrate oneself to oneself, to tell a story and interpret one’s feelings according to: OK, not OK. But whose OK is this? Is it my own, and if not, whose standard am I applying, and by what criteria do I judge whether it applies? What might it be like to be the person who does not see the need to register their inner state and represent it to themself – that is, interpret themself – in this way?

The polarities of order and chaos come into all questions. Everything – mental and material – is seemingly analysable by their interrelation. For instance, genetic stability versus mutation in evolutionary theory, or states of matter/thermodynamics, or any of the fundamental psychoanalytic notions. If it is true that this is a sort of universal explanation (at some very general level), what is it about reality that makes it possible?

To articulate is to straighten things out which are out of order, but in a way which doesn’t distort their sense of being out of order and project into them a false coherence; but then again, an articulation must not be too out of order, for what is said should be understood by someone who is not me, which means it must be ordered enough for linguistic comprehension. So perhaps a rider should be added to anything we say that matters, to the effect that what is expressed is not as ordered as language makes it seem.

I, looking out of the window, look at the people walking past as if at a moving picture; they, I think, see me as someone staring at them, for I am static and they are not, and see only that they are looked at. But you don’t need a window, you can do this with your own eyes too; and if you look out of them as if at a moving picture, a similar response follows.

A difference between the mindset of the philosopher versus that of the therapist is that when the philosopher asks ‘What do you mean?’ they ask for you to meet a standard of clarity, to think properly about what you say, to make it as coherent as possible, to be your best rational self. While when the therapist asks ‘What do you mean?’ their concern is altogether different, almost opposite. They are prompting you to reveal your own reality, which means not asking for any rational or other standard to be met in the content of what you say, only truthfulness in your saying it.

The earlier classical tradition considers what we want and then gives it to us: melody, sensuousness etc. It likes to please us and flatter us. While in the later part of that tradition we are given less of what we want, and now, rather than being given what we want, we must accept what we are given, as if there were an independent thing there, which no longer wants to please us but wants to be recognised as such. It wants us to see that we are in a relationship, and so it resists giving us what we want, and sometimes gives us what we don’t want. People may reject it, saying they don’t like it. But what if it is not intended to be liked, what if it does not want to please, but instead, for instance, to test?

Even if there were an objective hierarchy of goods or people, or a moral order or real obligations, you would still have to accept or acknowledge them as such for them to matter to you. And even if a rational order was attached to this moral order, which bound us rationally to accept the evaluations of the moral order – you could still just ignore those demands, and, as it were, walk past them as we do paintings in a gallery that have taken lifetimes to make.

Physicalism in the philosophy of mind is a theory connecting, it is said, the mental and the physical. But however robustly ‘physical’ the theory is, what it actually connects is ideas and ideas: ideas of the mental and ideas of the physical. For a theory is a mental phenomenon. The physicalists – at least the non-reluctant ones – hope that their theory is true, and so hope the things the theory is about are connected in the way the theory states, but this hope lies outside of the theory.

We know there is more to life and thought than the schemas we impose on it. To honour that, we theorise about the unconscious, or theorise about God and such like. But these are ways of bringing the big uncontrollable thing back into the categories of thought and back into theory. Even if that thought or theory says it is setting the limits of thought, it always has the last word. For the theory brings the uncontrollable thing which is outside of our schemas, into the thinking which it is meant to disturb. By the very fact of mentioning it, the theory appears to provide some grip on it (even if that grip is negative or boundary setting), and so tame it.

As a child, we think there are people who know and run the world – and it is true that the world around us as a child is often like that. As an adult, we learn that while there are people who influence the world, it is not run at all. When, as adults, we reflexively blame a group for running things badly, we usually behave like children, who need to think of the world as guided by powerful authorities, whom we can blame. We all know, as adults, that the world is really a spinning top, that it floats like the prices in the market, tied down by nothing. But this knowledge is unpleasant, and we do not want to dwell on it.

She said something to me about a contemporary political topic, and I thought to myself that I will not consider it, nor reply to her, because my mind has bigger fish to fry. And I thought of myself at this moment, thinking that what is going on in my mind, which contains these supposedly bigger fish, is more important than replying to what she – a flesh and blood person in the real world outside of my mind – has to say.

It doesn’t follow that the worst thing we see (and perhaps have ever seen) is the worst thing that is happening. It’s just the worst thing, passive as we are, presented to us. But if we are not interested in this fact, we cannot really be as interested and concerned as we claim to be about the world and the people in it.

He found everything interesting. But what then was he curious about? Was it, as he said, ‘the world’ itself, or was it himself in the world, or the world through his own self, in the way, for instance, that for Kant, an interest in the world cannot not also be an interest in oneself?

You make the routine, and it seems to hold you, and give you comfort – you disappear into its pure soporific comfort – and that comfort you then despise because it seems to hold you too tight; you resent the routine (and yourself), feeling a victim of its power, a power which you have given it and established only because you wanted to hide from something, such as your thoughts of your life as such. Everything seems then to shrink to the size of the routine, or the routine expands its grip over the whole of your life, and the two become indistinguishable.

There are, I think, also routines that allow life to flourish within them, the way that a sleeping routine allows dream life to flourish, the way a parent’s routine allows their children’s lives to flourish, or the way an artist’s discipline is that inside of which their art can be made. The rigidity of such routines might even be a condition of something living growing inside of it.

We need artistic works which are performed over and over in their long history, and which are open enough to be read in many ways. Then, in times of tyranny, such works will still be performed – and must be – and will take on meanings which weren’t imagined before and wouldn’t now be commissioned or performed if the work were contemporary, for it wouldn’t be allowed. But its status, and so its ongoing repeated performances, means that were the tyrant to prevent its performance, he would accuse himself, and so he is forced into a dilemma.

The rules were ridiculous, but I was nonetheless outraged by the audacity of those who thought they did not apply to them. Or: the rules were ridiculous, but we resented how they excluded us, and we wanted not to be left out of the scope of these ridiculous rules.