Semiotics of the Beard

Fifty years ago the beard was in the ascendant. I remember as a student everyone had one, plus long hair. I myself was virtually invisible beneath my hairiness—just eyes, nose, and a forehead. In those days a beard signified naturalness, independence, intellectual seriousness, higher aims, and lack of personal vanity. Then the beard gradually became extinct, along with bell-bottoms and long collars. Scalp hair got shorter; faces re-emerged. I was clean-shaven and shorthaired for two decades, signifying nothing. But in the early nineties George Michael grew carefully groomed stubble, giving him a pronounced dark jaw; he also wore an earring. He sang about having faith and wore a leather jacket. His beard signified something new—gay-inflected masculinity, as well as sheer style. I grew one too and called it a George Michael: it was not the norm in philosophical circles. To me it signified removal from academic style or non-style (I later bleached my hair blonde). I kept it for a couple of years and then reverted to the clean-shaven look.

Then the beard staged a general comeback, a renaissance: facial hair was everywhere, of varying length, variously groomed. I doggedly kept shaving, every day, every day. Meanwhile the beard was gaining ground; growing one could only seem like conformity. You stood out by not having one. Then a few weeks ago I happened to miss shaving a couple of days and enjoyed the freedom: it felt good to brush my teeth and jump into the shower with no tedious shaving interlude. I also wanted to see how white it would be if I let it grow. But its meaning eluded me: what was my beard saying? As it happens my beard grows high on the cheek and low on the neck, pretty wild. In my George Michael days I kept the cheeks and neck stubble-free; it was meticulously groomed. Now I just let it have its way, taking up as much facial space as it feels like. I kept my hair short, no longer than an inch. What was my face signifying? It had two parts: one civilized and manicured, the other wild and free. Gradually my beard revealed its true meaning: it has an undeniable duality, a semiotic binary divided thing going on. At last it became clear to me: the top half is civilized man, all forehead and eyes; the bottom half is the animal self with its ravenous mouth and furry-feathery covering. The lower half signifies my solidarity with our animal brethren; the upper half peeks warily out at civilized society. Being a proud member of the animal kingdom (or jungle) and co-habiting with a number of beasts (they do not spurn the epithet), I am happy to affirm my kinship with the scaled, furry, feathery, and slimy. My beard says: I am with you! I intend to leave my neck and cheeks to their natural condition. My beard has meaning.

Appearance, Reality, and the Good

Once we have adopted the simile of the sun, epistemological questions about the good become pressing.[1] If the good is like the sun, is it known in the same way, or to the same extent, as the sun? The sun is both well known and not well known: we see and feel it (but don’t hear or smell it) every day and feel ourselves to be on intimate terms with it, but it presents a false appearance and has a hidden nature. It is that big bright disc in the sky with a characteristic diurnal trajectory, but it is much further away than we imagine, is a sphere not a disc, doesn’t move (the earth moves), is much larger than it looks, and has all sorts of properties not visible to the naked eye. Thus we make errors about the sun and are ignorant of much of its nature (or were till science advanced to the point it is at today—and there is still a lot we don’t know). The appearance of the sun does not exhaust its reality and is in many ways misleading. But we know enough about it to negotiate it quite well and benefit from its presence: we have practical knowledge of the sun that serves our purposes (like many animals). Is our knowledge of the good the same—a complicated mixture of knowledge, error, and ignorance? Now that we have adopted a reistic[2] view of the good, regarding it as a Thing of nature, what should we expect its epistemology to look like, and does it look that way? It is characteristic of natural existing things—matter, space, time, and consciousness—to exhibit this kind of epistemological profile, so does goodness exhibit it too? Is it partly known, sometimes falsely perceived, and largely an area of ignorance? Is reism about the good matched by its actual epistemology?

            I think it would be agreed that the good is partly known: it is not a complete mystery, not like dark matter. We have two kinds of knowledge of it: which things belong to it (participate in or possess it) and what it is in itself—just as we know which things are illuminated by the sun and what the sun is in itself (hot and a source of light). Thus we know that certain traits of humans are good (we call these the virtues), that certain acts are good (they are called right), and that certain states of mind are good (we call these desirable). We also know that the good is connected to things we call obligations or duties, and that we ought to pursue the good; it has an internal connection to action (as well as emotion and desire). We are also cognizant of the fact that good contrasts with evil (as falsity contrasts with truth). So we have a decent working knowledge of the distribution of the good and of its more obvious internal properties (especially as they relate to normativity). This resembles our commonsense knowledge of the sun: just as the sun presents itself in a certain way to our senses and intellect, so does the good—which, remember, is a Thing of nature (a res) not a human construct. And just like the sun we can make mistakes about it, both practical and theoretical: we can be wrong about which things are good and wrong about the intrinsic nature of the good. The good permits of false belief (unlike the conscious mind). We used to think that execution for heresy was good, for example, but now we realize that, sorry, we were wrong about that; and we used to identify the good with various “natural” properties such as evolutionary success or pleasure or obedience to God. The essential nature of the good is by no means apparent to us—just as the essential nature of the sun is not—so it is easy to make mistakes about it. Moore thought the good was indefinable so all attempts to define it were bound to be in error. As to simple ignorance without actual false belief, opinions might differ, but we can surely make sense of the idea that the good has a nature that escapes our cognitive efforts—presently, for the foreseeable future, or permanently. We might not know everything about it: its distribution might be subject to facts that elude us (is it wrong to kill insects?), and its nature might have aspects that defy our methods of knowledge acquisition. It might even be that the most central core facts about the good are not evident to us; the good is an objective natural thing so it might well not present its full nature to our minds. When Moore said it was indefinable did he mean indefinable tout court or indefinable for us? And how strong was the modality in “indefinable”? The good might be indefinable for us as we are now but nevertheless possess an objective essence that another being might grasp, or it might be a natural primitive like the basic constituents of matter. If we insist that the good is a human construct, or a product of the will, we will be closed to this possibility of ignorance; but if we are open to a realist reism about the good, we shall be prepared to countenance all manner of possible areas of ignorance, remediable or otherwise. Plato’s strongly realist view of the Form of the Good certainly envisages deep ignorance about this res—it might be at best glimpsed by the human mind. The sun might be an open book by comparison. In any case, degrees of ignorance will attach to the good construed reistically. We should try to find room for this possibility in our imagination, limited as that faculty is: epistemic humility (itself part of the good) recommends accepting that the good might have a nature that has not been disclosed to us. The universe (Nature) is a big place with some remarkable things in it; the good might be one of these, not reducible to human practices or human constructs. In fact, it seems clear to me that it is thus transcendent, given our limited success in grasping its extension and nature: it has been historically difficult to determine what things are good, and we have not had much success defining what the good itself is (we have done much better with knowledge, say). As Iris Murdoch says: “Good is mysterious because of human frailty, because of the immense distance which is involved. If there were angels they might be able to define the good but we would not understand the definition. We are largely mechanical creatures, the slaves of relentlessly strong selfish forces the nature of which we scarcely comprehend.”[3] Here she is suggesting that our understanding of the good might be limited both by our inherent intellectual capacities and by our innate selfishness: we would need greater virtue to apprehend the good as well as more conceptual firepower. An interesting suggestion, but at any rate the “genuine mysteriousness” of which she speaks seems apt to the case. Of course, this kind of perspective is alien to contemporary moral philosophy, and indeed to all post-Kantian moral philosophy, but it is natural to conceptions closer to Plato’s, in which the good is viewed in a highly reified manner. Suppose he was right that the good is the very foundation of all reality, the ultimate level of being: wouldn’t we then be right to discern enormous ignorance in our conception of it? It is only by reducing the good in the direction of the human, and viewing the human through a limited lens (roughly, classical empiricism), that we can indulge the fantasy that the good is fully open to view—that “nothing is hidden” regarding the good. We really need a radical reimagining of the good, at least as an attempt to enlarge the philosophical possibilities. Here the simile of the sun can help, as a beginning anyway. What is nowadays called “moral realism” is actually rather insipid compared to what Plato had to offer. Even religious morality fails to come to grips with a more radical view of the good (it doesn’t escape the legislative model, which us confiningly human). The good is not just a thing; it is a big thing—capacious, majestic, and oceanic.

            It is hard to find an appealing analogy for the case of the good in another area of philosophy, though space and time have their attractions; the best I can find is the case of necessity. We have a decent working knowledge of necessity: we can make a fair stab at its distribution and we have theories of its nature (truth in all possible worlds, a higher-order primitive property). But it is easy to make mistakes about it (witness positivism) and it strikes us as remarkably elusive. What exactly are we thinking of when we think about necessity? Where is the impression (as Hume would ask)? Is it somehow an aspect of meaning? Is it an objective feature of reality or a mental projection? Maybe it has a nature that exceeds its appearance; maybe we grasp it only glancingly. What would Plato say about necessity—about the Form of the Necessary? What if we boldly reified it and became modal reists, regarding it as a Thing? We might then invent the Simile of the Earth: the Necessary is like the Earth in that it possesses the analogue of a crust and a molten core—a calm exterior but a raging interior. On the surface the Necessary holds objects rigidly, so that they can’t swap properties, but this results from an underlying force that compels objects to obey its commands—“You must be an even number!” Necessity looks static but underneath it might be dynamic (after all it necessitates). Who knows what such similes might suggest to us? Then we would start to think of necessity as a Thing with a hidden reality, not just as a human projection. We might become not just modal realists in the manner of possible worlds realism but realist reists insisting that necessity is a Thing with a deep hidden nature. It has no more to do with language (or even thought) than the good—just like matter, space, and time. The necessary and the good would be mind-independent realities, thing-like, substantial, not exhausted by human conceptions of them—much like the earth and the sun. Can such ideas be ruled out? Isn’t their invisibility in the philosophical landscape a result of a relentless and insidious humanism, a prejudice in favor of the human way of seeing things? Real realists want to know why the necessary and the good shouldn’t be viewed a la Plato, or some modern descendant of Plato—as mind-independent things equipped with a mode of being of their own. Doesn’t this give a better picture of the true epistemological situation?

            Every reality has an appearance (at least potentially), which may or may not correspond to the full extent of the reality. The appearance is a function of an interaction between the reality and the viewpoint of an observer, and is therefore relative to that observer. We should not think of it as the real face of the reality, as if it has that face no matter who looks at it. It is always tempting to collapse the reality into the appearance. This applies also to the case of the good: the good is how the good appears (to us). But we should make a firm distinction between reality and appearance even in the case of the good (perhaps especially in that case). The good far exceeds its appearance to us, unless (per impossibile) we miraculously grasp the full nature of what seems so elusive. We do know a fair bit about the good but we easily make mistakes about it, and in all probability are deeply ignorant of its real nature. Its appearance tells us something, to be sure, though this appearance can be misleading; but its appearance doesn’t reveal its complete reality—just like the sun, in fact.

[1] See my “The Sun and the Good”.

[2] The term does already exist in philosophy: the doctrine called “reism” holds that everything is a thing (an individual, a concrete particular). I am adopting the term not the doctrine: reism about the good is the view that the good is a thing, i.e. an entity with a nature of which predications may be made. It is the view that is generally rejected with the pejorative term “reify”: the good is what is truly reified, according to reism. Plato then is a reifying realist reist about the good. Subsequent Western philosophy is a reaction against this.

[3] The Sovereignty of Good (1970), pp.96-7. I think many readers of Murdoch’s book have not appreciated its metaphysical extravagance (which I do, in both senses of “appreciate”). And remember she was writing in an Oxford context in which ordinary language philosophy (especially in ethics) was not yet dead. Gutsy! She even toys with mysterianism about the good. The book was way beyond what people were thinking then, or even now. 

Meaning, Use, and Existentialism

Wittgenstein writes in the Philosophical Investigations: “How can he know how he is to continue a pattern by himself—whatever instruction you give him?—Well, how do I know?—If that means ‘Have I reasons?’ the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.” (211) “When someone whom I am afraid of orders me to continue the series, I act quickly, with perfect certainty, and the lack of reasons doesn’t trouble me.” (212) “If I have exhausted the justifications, I reach bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’. (217) “I obey the rule blindly.” (219) To anyone familiar with existentialist thought this must sound eerily familiar: actions don’t issue from reasons, justifications, character, upbringing, genes, or any other determinative factor; they come from pure spontaneous free will.[1] Nothing determines our actions but free action itself. So action cannot find a basis in reason or psychological state or logic; it must occur in a vacuum. Wittgenstein is saying that following a rule is not based on any “interpretation”, any inner or outer state or process or symbol that fixes what has to be done at any point in the application of the rule; rather, the will itself must step in to apply the rule. As he says: “It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.” (186) The rule-follower is free from every antecedent fact and must act anyway. The will is primary in producing action, not reason or perception or consciousness. This conception is rightly associated with existentialism and is opposed to rationalist conceptions of action and will construed as the slaves of reason. We could say that Wittgenstein is a semantic existentialist: the use of words is radically free, not dictated by logic, interpretations, subjective states, or anything of the kind. The existentialist holds that action in general, especially moral action, is likewise not grounded in anything perceived by the mind, whether in the empirical world or in platonic heaven. We don’t apprehend the Good and act accordingly, just as we don’t apprehend a Fregean sense and use words accordingly. Instead we simply act—blindly, without guidance, without reasons. Whatever is going on in consciousness cannot determine our actions; we must act from pure will. The deed has no foundation in antecedent facts about the mind—not in what we call personality, and not in mental states preceding or accompanying linguistic use. The will is an autonomous agency.

            Given this analogy, it makes sense to investigate further possible analogies between Wittgenstein and Sartre (taking him to be representative of existentialist thought). In particular, can we find an analogue of Sartre’s notion of Nothingness in Wittgenstein? I will assume familiarity with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, simply reminding the reader of some salient points. Consciousness (the for-itself) is nothingness because its being is exhausted by its intentional objects—what it is conscious of. It has no more being than that conferred by its objects, but it doesn’t collapse into those objects. Decision thus arises from nothingness, because that’s what consciousness (the mind) is. The essence of the human being is non-being—a kind of structural emptiness. Future actions are not in any way contained in or predetermined by the contents of mind at a given time; the faculty of will steps in to take up the slack, i.e. to make action possible. The will is an autonomous faculty not an obedient servant of reason or even emotion. We are condemned to be free, as Sartre puts it. We exist in time and must act in time, but the past doesn’t determine how we act; every act is really a new decision, a leap in the dark. Values arise from these free acts; the acts are not determined by values. We could say that the human agent is conceived as a pure potentiality, a kind of unconditioned spontaneity, not a collection of actual empirical facts—an empty vessel, a vacuum, a non-being (yet very real). We may try to conceal our freedom from ourselves (bad faith), but it is an undeniable reality. At our heart we are nothing but the bare possibility of acting.

I have reported Sartre’s position so as to bring out the analogy with Wittgenstein’s: for he too thinks that meaning (rule following, understanding) is essentially a form of emptiness, a mere potentiality. Nothing in my current state of understanding contains or predetermines future use, though we are tempted to think otherwise; it is the potentiality of future use not the guarantor of it. Its being is not like the being of a sensation or an image; in so far as it has being this consists in a capacity to act in certain ways in the future, where this capacity is not grounded in any further psychological fact. That is why the next stage in developing the series is more like a decision than an intuition: it is an act of autonomous free will. The Tractatus tried to find a cognizable fact to constitute meaning (a picturing relation), but this quest turned up nothing, so the Investigations settles for an active potentiality—a bare ability to use words over time. The empirical psychologist tries to identify a set of mental elements that constitute the psyche and determine action (Freud is the obvious example), but Sartre thinks this underestimates human freedom, which is better pictured as an empty spontaneity. Both Sartre and Wittgenstein think that cause and effect should be reversed: use causes or creates meaning; action causes or creates personality. Meaning rests ultimately on a vanishing point of pure will (the unconditioned deed); the self likewise rests upon a pure volitional assertion (the self-created self). Action emerges as foundational in the formation of both meaning and the self—action that springs from pure potentiality. No doubt this notion of the volitional tabula rasa is difficult to comprehend, and is indeed rather mysterious, but we are driven to it by honest reflection on how reason and the will connect, i.e. not very closely. Reason alone cannot dictate action, especially moral action (or so it is thought), and neither can it dictate how to follow a rule or use words. The rationalist view of action must give way to the existentialist view in both ethics and semantics. If this calls for a radical rethinking of metaphysics, in which nothingness and pure potentiality are included in what there is, then so much the better, given that rejection of such ideas leads to distorted pictures of meaning and the self. So, at any rate, these two thinkers might suppose (I am describing not endorsing)—Wittgenstein with some misgivings (see sections 193 and 194 on the potentialities of machines), Sartre with something more like gleeful abandon. Certainly some serious revision of traditional philosophical ideas is called for by both thinkers. One wonders whether followers of either of them realized quite how serious the metaphysical stakes were (I am thinking of analytical philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein and humanists excited by Sartre’s vision of limitless freedom). In point of fact, both are advocating ideas that are deeply mysterious and bordering on the miraculous—the pure will as an agent of semantic and personal construction. For how can an empty will create meanings and selves? The idea seems romantic and far-fetched—that is, guaranteed to appeal to the fantasy driven and thrill seeking. But I digress: my aim is only to investigate the history of ideas not pronounce on their merits. I certainly found Sartre’s ideas about freedom exhilarating in my youth, and Wittgenstein’s voluntaristic view of meaning strangely gripping in my middle age; and I can’t be the only one. The notion of pure creativity is bound to resonate.[2]

            Stepping back, we might bring in developments in physics roughly contemporaneous with the work of Sartre and Wittgenstein—developments that also appeal to the human imagination. I mean the quantum revolution. In Newtonian physics everything is determined by the antecedent state of the world, conceived as a set of hard fixed facts, with nothing “funny” going on. But in quantum theory (under some interpretations) the basic constituents of matter have no determinate nature until their properties are measured; before that they are mere potentialities. Nor do their properties determine what will happen in the future; their future behavior is not “contained” in their present state. So we should adopt an existentialist view of elementary particles: how they behave over time is not fixed by their internal state, which is best viewed as a type of potentiality. They are “free” from anything that precedes them, as if they have a will that permits different possibilities of action. Thus we have what may be called “physical existentialism” to be set beside semantic existentialism and personal existentialism. All three views reject ideas of determinism and determinate nature, replacing these with a new metaphysics of potentiality and openness. The particle too emerges as a kind of nothingness only given determinate reality by freely “chosen” acts. It would be rash to speculate on intellectual influences, but such ideas were in the air when Sartre and Wittgenstein were forging their radical theories; at least there is a common pattern at work here. No longer is the world a totality of well-defined facts, construed as determinate elements of reality, but rather a sea of potentialities waiting to become concretized by free action. The world becomes performance, a freely constructed artifact, not unlike a fictional work: the unconstrained will creates reality from nothing. A performative utterance is one that creates a fact from an act; in this sense the existentialist holds that parts of reality are performatively constructed, i.e. brought about by the will. It’s a bit like God’s ability to create the universe: by pure will alone he can produce realities. Uses create meanings, actions create selves, and measurements create particles: free action is the root of these realities (note that the concept of action is commonly employed in physics). Each is a type of behaviorism in that action is invoked to account for being; there is no essence that is prior to behavior and productive of it. Existence precedes essence—though the existence is of a wispy and elusive nature. It might be more apt to say that non-existence (Nothingness) precedes both existence and essence. The will conceived in the existentialist manner (which is not compulsory) is a remarkably etiolated and elusive thing, yet it is regarded as capable of astonishing feats of construction. It tends to be characterized negatively with little said to explain its productive power.[3]

[1] This paper was stimulated by reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good (1970), especially the first chapter. Here she draws a connection between Continental existentialism and Oxford-based views of moral conduct, suggesting that they too are existentialist. Both base morality on the will not on perception of the Good or any other rational foundation. She remarks en passant that the Oxford existentialists were influenced by Wittgenstein. This led me to think more systematically about the relation between Sartre’s existentialism and Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning.    

[2] I studied Being and Nothingness closely as an undergraduate and later gave a graduate seminar on it (as well as writing an encyclopedia entry on Sartre); and I wrote a book on Wittgenstein in the early 1980s (Wittgenstein on Meaning). At both periods I felt the force of their positions. Now I am more reluctant to go along with them. Existentialism is a young person’s philosophy.

[3] Creativity is of course a psychological mystery: we have very little understanding of how the human mind generates anything novel. A mysterian view of how the will creates meaning and the self is not to be lightly dismissed, and gives Sartre and Wittgenstein some needed wiggle room. Existentialist mysterianism might be the indicated position.

Is Referring Opaque?

If I refer to Hesperus with “Hesperus” am I also referring to Phosphorus? If I refer to Clark Kent with “Clark Kent” am I also referring to Superman? Suppose I disbelieve that Hesperus is Phosphorus and that Clark Kent is Superman: is it still true that I am referring to Phosphorus and Superman when I use “Hesperus” and “Clark Kent”? It is generally held that such inferences go through, but I am doubtful: that is, I doubt whether “A refers to x” generates a transparent context at “x”. Compare the verbs “allude to”, “advert to”, “mention”, “mean”, and “list”: if I allude to Clark Kent, do I also allude to Superman, and so on for the other verbs? That sounds wrong: I might protest the imputation and I would be right to do so. In other words, these verbs create an intensional context: we can’t substitute co-denoting terms within it salva veritate. We might be able to report concerning Superman that I referred to him (de re), but we can’t say that I referred to Superman (de dicto). Or consider “A intentionally referred to x”: surely that is an opaque context—I did not intentionally refer to Superman by saying “Clark Kent” if I disbelieve that Clark Kent is Superman. Referring is a mental act and it inherits the opacity common to mental acts (same for “alludes” etc.). Speaker reference thus exhibits referential opacity.

            But isn’t semantic reference ultimately dependent on speaker reference? Isn’t speaker reference the basic concept? If so, semantic reference must inherit the logical behavior of speaker reference: the construction “w refers to x” is also an opaque context. So it doesn’t follow from the truth of “’Hesperus’ refers to Hesperus” and “Hesperus is Phosphorus” that “’Hesperus’ refers to Phosphorus” is true. Indeed, we might conclude that it is simply false, given that speakers don’t use “Hesperus” when they want to refer to Phosphorus—they use “Phosphorus”. If we know the identity, we won’t object to using the names indiscriminately, but strictly speaking “Hesperus” refers to Hesperus and “Phosphorus” to Phosphorus, but not contrariwise. To repeat, “refers” generates an intensional context, like “believes” and other psychological verbs. This is a rather startling result, given how the notion of reference (denoting, designating) has been employed in analytical philosophy, yet it seems intuitively correct. But there is a still more startling consequence of accepting the opacity point: reference is not a relation. For genuine relations don’t generate opaque contexts: they hold between things however those things are designated (e.g. “to the left of”). But reference does not hold between things no matter how those things are designated (the subject position of the sentence is transparent, however). So we should not speak of the “reference relation” or model reference on genuine relations; it is no such thing. If there are relations between words and the world (and there undoubtedly are), they are not relations of reference. For example, Phosphorus may indeed cause utterances of “Hesperus”, but it is not denoted by “Hesperus”; and it is not possible to analyze denotation in terms of causal relations, since that would be false to its logical character. No relation could constitute reference. The whole picture of reference as some sort of real relation between words and things has to be wrong. We picture language as over here and the world as over there, with all sorts of relations holding between the two; but the concept of reference doesn’t correspond to any of these relations, because reference is not a relation at all. It is a kind of pseudo-relation.[1]               

[1] It is much the same as with the verb “thinks of”: if I am thinking of Clark Kent, I am not thereby thinking of Superman, and might strongly the reject the suggestion that I am. It may yet be true that I am thinking of someone (Clark Kent) who happens to be identical to Superman, but it doesn’t follow from this that I am thinking of Superman. I think the same is true of perceptual verbs, though here the intuition doesn’t seem so robust: if I see Clark Kent in the office, does it follow that I see Superman in the office? That is, is there a reading of this sentence under which it doesn’t follow? I think there is, but you have to think hard to find it. If so, “sees” doesn’t express a genuine relation either (ditto “remembers”).