The Seventh Degree of Wisdom — Part Three
‘The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joycity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or, if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and pulicy-pulicy and langtennas and pushpygyddyum and to commence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste, ameng the everlisting, behold a waspering pot’.
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’
This passage is taken from ‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’ episode of the Wake and which is based upon Jean de la Fontaine’s, (1621–1695), fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, itself based upon the fable of Aesop, (c. 620 BCE — 564 BCE), and it is forged around a narrative related by Shaun brother of Shem, sons of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. I have discussed this episode already in my article ‘A Thing Like No Other Thing’, but, there is so much more to be said. Similar to the Grasshopper of la Fontaine’s tale the Gracehoper, the hoper for grace, is a prodigal and negligent character who spends his days squandering his resources without a thought for the morrow; while the Ondt, (Danish for evil), similar to la Fontaines’s Ant, lives a life of greater self-discipline and of frugality; and predictably enough the tale ends with the Gracehoper as penurious and hungry whilst the Ondt is revelling in his material wealth.
The fable is a feeble in the Wake; for its purpose is to serve as an illustration of what often proves to be the inadequacy of discourse concerning certain philosophical matters; in this case the problem of space and time; the Ondt representing space which he heroically defends in this altercation with his antithesis, the Gracehoper, representing time; that is to say, Shaun and Shem respectively. And given that this altercation is one between insects, they are sons of an earwig after all, (Earwicker), multilingual puns abound, yielding insects or their parts; as the Gracehoper has a smetterling (smattering, and German for butterfly) of entymology (etymology as well as entomology); and given the nature of the subject of course the names of philosophers are very much in evidence. Aristotle, (384 BCE — 322 BCE), Mencius, (4th century BCE), Confucius, (551 BCE — 479 BCE), Baruch Spinoza, (1632–1677), Hugo Grotius, (1583–1645), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, (1646–1716), Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788–1860), are all present, for every one of them has dealt with time and space, as well as with process and with ethics; but they also serve to make manifest the Ondt’s socially and aesthetically conventional as well as materialistic philosophy of life. And Freud may well not be named here, but his libido, and his imago, are certainly there, as the Gracehoper frolics with the four houris, Floh, Luse, Bienie and Vespatilla; Flea, Louse, Bee and Wasp; as he wastes his time in good times and keeping time with music and dance, as he scrapes his findlestilts in overrtures to his four girls, whom he urges ‘to commence insects with him, their mouthparts to his orifice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste’.
Within the context of the Wake this particular feeble is not so much a cautionary tale intended to contrast the practical wisdom of foresight and frugality with the short-sighted dissipation and overindulgence of the spindrift; rather, it is more of a narrative that focuses upon the contrast in inclinations and mentality between the artistic Gracehoper and the dull and bourgeois Ondt; although one can discern a degree of corruption and of integrity in both parties. But the Gracehoper as described by Shaun is an individual who is content to pass his days merrily dancing, a most genial companion ready and willing to do very nearly anything to amuse those with whom he consorts; he was ‘always striking up funny funereels with Besterfarther Zeuts, the Aged One’; that is to say, he would fabricate salacious stories concerning the sexual proclivities of Besterfather Zeus (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker). And at this funny funereel or festive funeral old father Saturn is ringed by his sons as old father Chronos, decaying within his coffin, is by his; and Anna Livia Plurabelle, the two girls Dehlia and Peonia, and Shem and Shaun, are kicking time as they join the ‘wheel of the whorl’ around the ‘wormcasket’ of the ‘oldbuoyant’ old boy; and yet these very sorts of festivities for the Gracehoper lead him nowhere.
Speaking of Chronos, Old Father Time, insects are ephemeral creatures; and the Ondt, disapproving of such inzanzarity (Italian for mosquito), declines to attend the party because the Gracehoper has fallen in his social standing; go to the ant thou sloghard proves to be a somewhat ironic invitation, for after a life of doubts, of loves, of debts, of bilking (that is to say, creating works of art) the Gracehoper is left exhausted, penniless, and positively contrite. ‘I am heartily hungry’, he complains; a hunger that impels him to produce ‘mundballs of the ephemerids’, mouth and world forms of the ephemeral, or consuming short-lived insects. ‘Artsaccord’ delivers neither money nor food, as the imprudent Gracehoper discovers, this journeying derelict is well on his way to ‘ragnowrock’ (see my article ‘The Metaphysics of Memory’ — Part 8); but upon encountering the Ondt, the dejected Gracehoper, still hopeful for grace, is overcome with envy; for there his rival sits, puffing away on a ‘spatial brunt of Hosana cigals’; and it is the Ondt having his libido well and truly taken care of, surrounded by the four houris who are delighted by his comfortumble phullupsuppy, philosophy and supper:
‘… with Floh biting his leg thigh and Luse his luff leg and Bieni bussing him under his bonnet and Vespatilla blowing cosy fond tutties up the allabroad length of the large of his smalls’.
Having abandoned the loser Gracehoper to his chronic despair, (chronos, Greek for time), in favour of his flourishing rival, the Ondt, the spatial one, the situation of the Gracehoper is now: ‘Artalone … with his parasites’, an exiled artist in Paris amongst his followers, and wasting time ‘writing off his phoney’, the cancelling of a debt with that which has no real existence.
Still, the volumes and spaces of the Ondt may be vast and prodigious and his ‘genus … worldwide’, but how much more commendable if, having ‘song sense’ or literary sensibility, the Ondt could ‘beat time’. Within the context of the narrative of the Wake as a whole, alternative, yet equally comprehensible interpretive viewpoints, are once again introduced at various levels; the contrast between Shem and Shaun is apparent enough, but their mutual attraction and their mutual repulsion are also presented as themes of interest; for the Ondt can hardly bear to look upon the pitiable Gracehoper, not for reasons of sympathy but of disgust; in the mind of the Ondt, the Gracehoper is himself solely responsible for bringing his ruination upon his own head; whereas the Ondt owes his present material comforts to his own diligence and prudence. The Gracehoper responds to such denunciation in characteristically artistic fashion, with a lengthy poem wherein he expresses forgiveness for the Ondt, although he neglects to clarify what exactly is being forgiven, and he assures the Ondt that he holds no ill feelings against him, and indeed accepts his fate with an attitude of grace and equanimity; but nonetheless, he maintains a sharp eye upon the situation, closing with an extended laudatory poem upon the Ondt’s material success with a question: ‘But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?’ And the episode concludes with an elegant reversal, for instead of the anticipated moral, there is an expatiation upon the complexity of the relations between the Ondt and the Gracehoper; while the general improvidence of artists is openly conceded, barbed queries emerge upon the matter of purpose; for if all there is to life is the ardent accumulation of material goods, then the commercially motivated Ondt is most clearly the successful one; but if one aspires to a type of immortality then the artistically motivated Gracehoper is the triumphant one. (And as we all know poetry always triumphs).
‘The Old Stoic’
by Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848)
Riches I hold in light esteem;
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn:
And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, ‘Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!’
Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
’Tis all that I implore;
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.
Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!
But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?
‘… hoppy on akkant of his joycity … ’ evokes Kant of course; and so to continue with my review of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, having thought himself to have previously demonstrated the dependency of human knowledge upon conditions prior to immediate sense experience, Kant then proceeds to a consideration of the a priori conditions of human understanding; for in Kant’s opinion all knowledge is the product of human understanding applied to sense-experience; but a question arises as to whether the understanding organises the contents of sense-experience according to its own rules, rules that must originate elsewhere than in sense-experience if their function is to categorise the contents of sense-experience. Such rules do indeed exist, for Kant, and he termed them the categories of the understanding; contending that there are twelve such categories and that they can be discovered and classified by careful scrutiny of the logical forms of the judgements we characteristically make concerning the world. For instance, were we to examine our categorical judgements we would observe that they contain a referring expression which we identify as the grammatical subject, together with a characterising expression which we identify as the predicate. As William Wordsworth, (1770 -1850), wrote, concerning butterfies:
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!
Float near me; do not yet depart!
Dead times revive in thee:
Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art!
A solemn image to my heart.
In ‘Butterfies are gay creatures’ the referring or subject term is ‘Butterflies’, and the characterising or predicate term is ‘gay creatures’, and an enormous number of the factual claims that are normally made are of this same basic form, substance and predicated property, and so it is for Kant that the concept of substance deserves the status of a category of knowledge; and underneath it are subsumed all the substance terms in our conceptual scheme of things, such as insect, together with flea, louse, bee, wasp, and so on, that denote material objects in our surroundings; and it is thereby a family-like concept denoting all those objects that have substantiality in common, something that none of the individual terms within the category does.
Concerning the concept of causality, another of Kant’s categories, much the same can be said; for he derives it from the form of hypothetical or conditional judgements; that is to say, ‘if … then’ judgements. As William Cullen Bryant, (1794–1878), wrote, concerning a mosquito (these examples I am providing to illustrate Kant’s points are not in Kant by the way, I am keeping up with the insect theme):
Fair insect! that, with threadlike legs spread out,
And blood-extracting bill and filmy wing,
Dost murmur, as thou slowly sail’st about,
In pitiless ears full many a plaintive thing,
And tell how little our large veins would bleed,
Would we but yield them to thy bitter need.
And so, ‘if our large veins were yielded to the bitter need of the mosquito then they will bleed’ would be a hypothetical judgement that asserts a causal connection between the states of affairs mentioned by the antecedent and consequent of such a judgement; the kind of judgement that appears frequently in our factual reports on the world and suggests that the concept of causality is an important and fundamental concept in our way of recording experience. It is a concept that embraces numerous words in our language, such as create, produce, bring about, make, and so forth, all of which are causal terms; and by virtue of designing such a large family of terms the concept of causality must be regarded as one of the relatively few root concepts or categories at the basis of our conceptual scheme which give this scheme its particular texture by influencing it throughout; and the importance of causality is something which Kant very clearly saw, even though it had been overlooked by the British phenomenalists (concerning phenomenalism, see the previous part of this series).
Many philosophers have disagreed with Kant over his number and selection of categories as well as his method of arriving at them, but they have not taken issue with him as to the existence of categories in our conceptual framework and their importance in any account of human knowledge; and yet others have rejected Kant’s primary contention that human knowledge is dependent upon such categories as substance and causality and so have sided with Hume, who, not finding anything answering to such categories in immediate sense experience, proceeded to dismiss them as mere fictions (it is worth noting that Continental especially French philosophers are often denigrated for the extravagance and implausibility of their ideas, such a departure from common sense it is asserted, but the equally implausible and extravagant is to be found amongst British empiricism, although it takes a different form). Kant, of course, concurred with Hume that substance and causality are not to be found in sense experience, but he insisted that nevertheless they are necessary ingredients in a world about which we can hope to have knowledge; Kant’s point is at times made by stating that unless one assumes that the general features referred by one’s judgements persist in time and are public entities independent of any particular percipient, there can be no confirmation judgements and consequently no knowledge at all; and Kant recognised this simple but essential point when he stated that the categories are necessary conditions for our having any knowledge whatsoever.
Kant also recognised that categories such as substance and causality are by no means arbitrary impositions upon sense-experience, as is sometimes implied by Hume and his followers, but are useful concepts since sense-experience testifies to a great amount of orderliness in the world rather than to a blooming, buzzing confusion, as William James, (1842–1910), described a baby’s first experience of the world; a bewildering chaos, and it is the very presence of order observable by all which vindicates the use of such ordering principles as substance and causality, for they would have no utility whatever in a chaotic world.
It is chiefly as ordering principles that Kant viewed the categories, and what they order or synthesize in his partly phenomenalistic theory of knowledge are the items of experience, colours, shapes, sizes, sounds, tactile impressions, odours, and so on; and yet Kant believed that there is a problem in showing how such a priori principles can be applied to empirical data, and he thought the answer to this problem is to be found in the mediatory power of time (the Gracehoper comes out on top) which is an a priori ordering form that is a necessary condition of sense-experience. Kant then proceeds to relate the categories to the concept of time, and it was this merger of the concepts of substance, causality, and time that paved the way to his discoveries of the presuppositions of Newtonian science. Kant was of the opinion that there are three such presuppositions; namely, the principles of the conversation of matter, of universal causality, and of the universal inter-relation of all things making up the natural world. And remember that in the Newtonian view of the universe all objects are considered to be made up of material particles governed in their behaviour by the universal laws of motion and attraction.
Such principles are not analytic truths, according to Kant, for their denials are not self-contradictory, nor are they empirical generalizations, for we know them to be necessarily true, and no empirical generalization is ever necessarily true. And so they must therefore be genuine synthetic a priori truths, and their possibility arises from the fact that they utilize a priori concepts whose use is indispensible to human knowledge and yet whose only warranted cognitive use is in relation to the objects of sense experience in the manner dictated by the principles in question themselves.
And yet, may it not be objected that the argument in this respect is somewhat circular, howsoever much it may have been defended as enlightening by thinkers who believe that any examination of basic principles must inevitably be circular in that they must be elucidated in terms of one another. And yet for many others the argument fails to convince. for they may allow that Kant has indeed isolated the main presuppositions of the scientific thinking of his day, but, they claim, he has not demonstrated that the presuppositions are synthetic a priori. They argue that it is one thing to show that certain concepts are not empirical in origin but quite another to show that the judgements in which they figure are a priori; and concepts such as substance and causality may indeed underlie our factual discourse about the world and so be necessary and ineradicable concepts for intelligible and informative discourse, but it is not by any means evident that the principles in which they occur, such as that the quantity of substance remains invariable throughout all physical transformations, are necessarily true; for such principles may be indeed fruitful guideposts in scientific inquiry, and yet not be true or false judgements at all, merely heuristic rules, regulative principles, in the way that Kant himself was to regard certain metaphysical concepts; about which I will leave until the next part.
Hegel has such a lot to say upon this subject of categories but this article is already too long and so I will be brief. Kant has in effect presented us with a theory of universals, for his categories are universals, though he did not conceive of his categories as objective as Plato, (428 BCE — 328 BCE), conceived of his Ideas or Forms as objective. I neglected to mention that Plato also features in the feeble of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, being present during the Ondt’s comfortable philosophy and supper, as the Ondt is
‘… sated before his comfortumble phullupsduppy of plate o’monkeynous’.
(Nous (Greek) = mind, and so monkeynous =, monkeymind. Anthony Burgess, (1917–1993), once said of ‘Finnegans Wake’ that it is one of the most entertaining books ever written, and he was correct. It is funny). And so, as I was saying, for Kant the categories are simply subjective categories of the human mind, they are in no sense objectively real entities; and consequently Kant did not endeavour to use his categories as a first principle for the explanation of the world, and what is the purpose of philosophy if not to explain the world? The categories, that is to say, are not ontological principles of being but simply epistemological principles of knowing, and yet Kant’s doctrine suggests that the categories form a special class of universals distinct from all other universals in that they are non-sensuous a priori whereas universals such as blue beetle are sensuous a posteriori and are acquired from experience, but the categories are prior to all experience because they are the conditions upon which experience depends. Hegel, however, was searching for an explanation of the universe, and I follow him in that; and so it is we may take from Plato the belief that the first explanatory principle of the world consists of objective universals; and we may take from Kant the distinction between sensuous and non-sensuous universals, the latter being the categories or pure concepts, pure in that they contain no sensuous admixture; for the first principle of the world is not all universals, as Plato supposed, but a system of pure non-sensuous universals.
Formal logic achieves a separation of things from thought. For example, Robert Burns, (1759–1796), said to one of the Ondt’s houris, Luse, that is, a louse that he spotted upon a lady’s bonnet:
Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
Your impudence protects you sairly;
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her-
Sae fine a lady?
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
On some poor body.
From these lines of Burns we can construct the following argument:
All lice are detested
Some lice are impudent
Therefore some impudent things are detested
The entire reasoning here may be preserved in tact in the form:
All M is P
Some M is S
Therefore some S is P
What has dropped out in this latter form is not any part of the reasoning process, every part of which is retained; what has dropped out though is the element of sense; and we are in search of the principle which shall be the reason of things, but the principle that reason is the explanation of things obviously involves the separation of the things from the reason; if reason is to explain things we must not have in the reason the thing to be explained, we must be rid of the sensuous element, the thing to be explained; it is of no use to adduce as explanation of a thing the thing itself. Rather, what will satisfy us is pure reason, reason as it is in itself, thereby ridding ourselves completely of the sensuous element, for the sensuous element is the element of things, the very things we are wanting to explain, and formal logic to a certain extent achieves such a separation, it abstracts altogether from the things about which we reason; it excludes the sensuous element, the detestability of the louse, and so on, and retains only the reasoning process itself.
The first principle that explains the world is a reason for the world and not a cause; a logical reason; for that which explains the world must be prior to the world, but not in the sense of time priority, but of logical priority. The Kantian categories are prior to the world in such a sense, although Kant would not have said they are prior to the world, he said they were prior to experience, but experience is the world. Kant viewed things from a subjective, epistemological point of view, whereas what is needed is a an objective, ontological point of view. Metaphysics rather than epistemology in the explanation of things. Hegel recognised that any genuine explanation requires two conditions, of which Kant provides only one, that the categories are the logical condition of the world. The second condition is that the world must be deducible from the categories as their logical consequent; and this is Hegel’s special discovery, the secret of his dialectic method; just as a conclusion is deduceable from the premises of an argument, Hegel employed the first principle of reason, a principle that relates to the world not as cause to effect but as reason to consequent, so that from the categories he could then deduce the world ….
‘The June snows was flocking in thuckflues on the hegelstomes, millipedes of it and myriopods …. ‘
- ‘Finnegans Wake’
To be continued ….
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. jig = to dance (a jig or other lively dance); to move up and down or to and fro with a rapid jerky motion.
2. ajog = on the jog, jogging; and along.
3. hoppy = characterized by, or predisposed to, hopping; lively, full of movement; and happy on account.
4. joycity = joyeusity, the quality or state of being joyous; and Joyce.
5. findlestilts = fiddlestick, the bow strung with horsehair with which the fiddle is played.
6. supplant = to dispossess and take the place of (another), especially by treacherous or dishonourable means; and support.
7. overture = an opening of negotiations with another person or party with a view to some proceeding or settlement; a formal proposal, proposition, or offer.
8. Floh (German) = flea.
9. luse = louse; and (Danish), luse (Old English), louse.
10. Beanie = Biene (German), bee.
11. Vespatilla = Vespa (German), vespa (Italian), wasp; and vespatilla (Latin), little wasp.
12. pupa = an insect in the third and usually quiescent state (of complete metamorphosis), preceding that of the imago or perfect insect; and pupa (Latin), girl; and Upa-upa (song).
13. policy = pulex (pulicis) (Latin), flea (of a flea); and pula (Italian Dialect), flea.
14. lang (German) = long; and lawn tennis, and antennae.
15. pygyddyum = pygidium (Latin), a little rump, little buttocks, terminal segment of insect.
16. commence = to begin to do anything; and commit incest; and (ants and bees are incestuous, as all originate from one queen).
17. mouthparts = Entymology, the organs surrounding the mouth of an insect or other arthropod, specially adapted to the particular method of feeding of the animal concerned.
18. orefice = orifice, an opening or aperture, which serves as, or has the form of a mouth, as of a tube, of the stomach, bladder or other bodily organ, of a wound, etc.
19. gambills = gambol, a leap or spring in dancing or sporting, a caper, frisk; pl. Frolicsome movements or proceedings; and gambilles (French slang), legs.
20. airy = flimsy, superficial, flippant; and hairy (Esau).
21. processes = process, a natural protuberance or process, arising from, and forming a continuous part of, a bone; a natural protuberance or process, arising from, and forming a continuous part of, a bone.
22. chaste = haste; and jest; and unchaste (Latin incestus: unchaste).
23. everlisting = everlasting. everlasting flower, a name given to some species of cudweed (Gnaphalium), but more commonly to various species of Helichrysum.
24. waspering pot = watering pot, a portable vessel for watering plants; now usually of tinned iron, and furnished with a long tubular spout, often ending with a rose for scattering the water.
