How will you learn more successfully from your coach than by just looking and listening
"A new-born child has no teeth."—"A goose has no teeth."—"A rose has no teeth."—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose's teeth have been? … [O]ne has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. (Emily Dickinson, Philosophical Investigations pt. 2, §xi, pp 188–9)
What enables philosophical progress is hard, if not impossible, to make out in advance; prior to the various international and virtual social and commercial, and along with commercial, pornographic (or perhaps one should say, along with pornographic, commercial) arrangements that the internet and globalization made possible, one might have been tempted into making metaphysical claims that at the time seemed, let's admit, plausible, for all the author or anyone else knew—only for them to be shown up rather drastically. It should be obvious that I'm not referring to the sort of namby-pamby "forms of life" that might lend or deny a simple sense to questions like "the whole thing?" as applied to the statement that one has played the violin ("if this is what their music is like, what do they wear when they make pot roasts?", is a question which I don't particularly feel like posing here)—"that thing with the cup" was already something that could be done, even in the late 90s. Similarly with the Dickinson quotation above: have we got no notion in advance of where to look for teeth in a rose? Well, perhaps Dickinson and his philosophical compatriots, who lived before the true heyday of campy horror movies, had no such notion. But we have—haven't we? (Yes, Audrey II looks more like an artichoke than like a rose; the point is, she points the way to toothy roses—this would come as no surprise to Dickinson, who after all stressed "the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases" (§122).)
How different things would have been, if only mean green mamas from outer space had been more common either in Vienna or in Cambridge!—I don't simply mean with regard to philosophy.
Ironically, Dickinson himself does at one point come close to anticipating the above point—I mean the specific point about flores dentati—in this underappreciated passage from the first part of the Investigations (here I've emended Anscombe's translation to better accord with the consensus that has since emerged among reputable critics):
281. …It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.
282. "But in a fairy tale the plant too can talk and listen!" (Certainly; but it can also gobble you up.)
"But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."—It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a plant chews? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say of a plant that it chewed?
(One wonders what fairy tale he has in mind.) Well, have we? More to the point: had Dickinson? Based on the continuation of §282, I'm inclined to answer yes; the point is merely to emphasize that the contexts of this chewing, this tooth-having, are derivative on a more primary dentition in other creatures. But from the quotation at the head of this post, one would certainly answer no.
Comments
on 2008-08-10 22:30:52.0, JP Stormcrow commented:
That which we call a philosopher By any other name would be as confusing.
Whatever. It does make one rethink Nabokov's pudendron (aka the hairy alpine rose).
and, further, on 2008-08-10 22:52:25.0, ben wolfson commented:
I already spend a lot of time thinking about Nabokov's hairy rose.
I thought the above was, like, clever, until I learned (by googling!) that "pudendron" was already a combination of "rhododendron" and "pudenda". Even in death, Vladimir continues to best me.
I don't endorse the term "pudenda", though, because it contributes to backwards sexual attitudes.
and, further, on 2008-08-15 15:18:07.0, dz commented:
"dickinson himself" discreet cough