I asked no other thing,

No other was denied.

I offered Being for it;

The mighty merchant smiled.

 

Brazil? He twirled a button

Without a glance my way:

But, madam, is there nothing else

That we can show today?

The allegory of spiritual conversion as a commercial exchange with a “mighty merchant” highlights and vulgarizes the role of interest in an imagination of God as one who confers things upon the subject who seeks him. But Dickinson does not by any means discount the speaker’s sincerity. The “I” of the first four lines introduces the allegory of exchange between the self and God after the possibility of mutuality has been denied. The poem is about a knowledge that comes in the wake of an imagination of conversion as mercantile transaction; a trade of “Being” for some obscure, yet all-important “thing.”

The “thing” that the speaker asks for remains unnamed.The speaker’s account of the request–“I asked no other thing / no other was denied” takes the form of two negative statements; the “thing” cannot be substituted for any other thing. Itself denied, it seems to negate the value and singularity of everything else on offer–the “no other.” Perhaps, then, the “thing” is anti-conceptual and pre-linguistic; an affective state—“happiness,” “joy,” “pleasure” “love”—or a spiritual one—“blessedness,” “grace.”

The merchant’s question “Brazil?”  is a condescending translation of the indeterminate “thing” that was asked for. Brazil is an absurd “thing” to ask for in the context of an empirical, or even a more abstract, commercial exchange. If we were to imaginatively entertain the notion of “buying a nation,” we might observe that nations are not bought and sold in one fell swoop, but built through violent and ongoing political struggles. If we were to think about a more concrete and everyday instance of exchange over a counter, we might ask: how would a merchant empirically “show” a thing that is so vast and over-determined as “Brazil”?

The merchant’s smiling attempt to conceptualize the speaker’s request hints at the impossibility of its realization. The merchant himself is indifferent, aloof;–an impersonal God who is an agent of disappointment rather than a positive presence. Dickinson here presents us with the scenario of a subject who is, to borrow from Pascal, seeking a knowledge of the heart but who is denied. Dickinson shows us how the idea of a God who has what we need corresponds to a deeply felt human desire–the speaker is not unsympathetically represented. Narrating this poem in the past tense, however, Dickinson opens the way for a more challenging spiritual optics, one where ethical action begins with an awareness of the asymmetrical relation between the God and the self. In the now of the speaker’s present, “Being” may be offered for some other reason than the hope of reward.

Wittgenstein writes, ““It’s as if we could grasp the whole use of a word at a stroke.” — Well, that is just what we say we do” (§191). Can the mind actually summon all of the uses to which a word might be put at a stroke? When do we imagine that this is so? Pivoting from the question of how “a word” could contain all its possible uses to how “a machine” could contain all of its possible motions, Wittgenstein insists that we talk this way when we are “doing philosophy” (§194).

While it’s unclear to me whether Wittgenstein has particular philosophies in mind, I find it interesting to think about the “possibility of a machine’s  motion” as an idea of metaphysics—the discourse of philosophy concerned with the first causes of “machines” like physical systems and human bodies. If we accept the premise that the “machine seems already to contain its own mode of operation,” (§193) then the initial picture of the machine that the philosopher gives becomes the basis of “a series of pictures.” Hobbes’ picture of the human driven by means-ends logic contains within it the possibility of a whole series of pictures of humans acting out of self-interest. Alternatively, we can derive from the theological picture of a machine run by a God given moral sense a whole series of pictures of humans acting benevolently.

Wittgenstein insists that this kind of talk is figurative—“the movement of the machine qua symbol is predetermined in a different way from how the movement of any given actual machine is” (§193). We would not insist that the motions of a human being that we have some actual experience with are pre-determined, because we know that, however predictable that person may be, s/he is liable to move in all sorts of unforeseeable ways. To present a picture of human nature as a machine that contains all of its possible motions ahead of time (as was common in the Enlightenment) is to present a symbol that bears no necessary relation to our everyday experience of others. Wittgenstein carves out a space here for poetic thinking, but insists that the use of symbols in philosophy leads to “misinterpretations.” Philosophical discourses that aspire to holistically describe how the world works fail to understand their own grounding in the potentially wayward imagination. 

When Wittgenstein indulges his own imagination that “infinitely long rails correspond to the unlimited application of a rule” (§218), he notes, “I should say: This is how it strikes me.” The image giving expression to this infinite process may only “strike” the “I” who offers it. In this philosophy, one cannot assume that symbols are shared. If the modern discourse of metaphysics is grounded in symbolical propositions guised as truth claims, then who is to say that it does what it says that it does; that is, speak objectively about the world? When we adequately account for symbolic status of metaphysical claims, they may come to look like the arbitrary conjectures that happen to strike the philosopher as he sits alone in his study. Or, alternatively, the “false interpretation[s]” and “odd conclusions” of “primitive people” about civilized talk (§194). By turning attention to “language-games” observable in everyday life, Wittgenstein seeks to write a philosophy grounded in shared rules, rather than in symbols and false interpretations imposed from an ‘outside.’

David Hume shares Wittgenstein’s conviction that philosophy must speak of customary rules. There are very obvious differences between them: for Hume, the passions are what people share; for Wittgenstein, it’s language. But Hume’s thinking on promises converges with Wittgenstein’s on intention. Hume argues that it makes no sense to say that the obligation to keep a promise originates with a self-constituted intention. Instead, promises entail a sense of duty because of “the conventions of men”—our shared institution of “symbols and signs, by which we might give each other security of our conduct in any particular incident.” When Wittgenstein asks, “what kind of super-rigid connection obtains between the act of intending and the thing intended?” he turns to the example of a kind of promise—the statement “Let’s play a game of chess”—and insists that the connection between these words and the act can only lie “in the list of rules of the game, in the teaching of it, in the everyday practice of playing” (§197).

I bring up Hume because I think he makes a good foil for Wittgenstein. Whereas Hume and Wittgenstein share a weariness of certain solipsistic tendencies in Western philosophy, Hume’s turn to social convention involves an extensive delineation of the rules governing the occupation, prescription, accession and succession of property. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, turns to seemingly trivial practices of everyday life—to the game of chess, for example—and thus presents a philosophical optics is finer grained and less interested in serving the interests of power. Last class, Josh noted that the contingency of language games opens up the possibility that they can be other. By avoiding the kinds of generalities that Hume falls into, Wittgenstein seems also to avoid placing a stake in the conservation of any particular institution–like that of property, the family, or the state. Is this an evasion on Wittgenstein’s part?