Metaphysical comforts

Perhaps there is a very old confusion about what can be done with argument: we expect reassurance as well as demonstration. But the relevant 'sort' of phenomenological reassurance is not a semantic category, even though we might think we know what 'phenomenolgoical reassurance' means (beetles in boxes ...).

What would an argument for realism (or God, or Unicorns) achieve? It would show that our language game would only be intelligible if there were real things (or Gods, or Unicorns) out there; or that the real things had to be organised in a certain way; or that they would have to have certain properties. But the phenomenological reassurance we need cannot be supplied by such an argument because the argument cannot address our anxieties about the possibility of intelligiblity itself - about the possibility of producing arguments.

This is a 'nonsensical' anxiety, but only in the sense that as as soon as it is articulated it is shown to be unintelligible - because articulating it is unintelligible. But how do we privately reassure ourselves about this?

Wittgenstein is correct - the need for such a reassurance is pathological, it is a kind of mental illness.

But some of us are mentally ill - we have drifted beyond the scope of interlocutorship, to coin an ugly word. It is also clear that some 'illnesses' of this kind can be ameliorated, or abated, by 'talking cures' - counselling, psychotherapy - which clearly lead the subject back into the realm of the sane, back within the scope of our comforting shared conversation. In extreme cases, these therapies must work by showing, in the Wittgensteinian sense, since the capacity for 'reason' (the capacity to participate in the conversation) has lapsed in some way.

Whether there must always be an island of intelligibility at the centre of a therapeutic exploration, the possibility of this not being the case has to be entertained. A child learns language without first of all knowing how to speak - there is no prima facie reason why a seriously deranged person might not be in this situation, though their behaviours and interactions would not be child-like in other ways.

Do we think of learning/re-learning language as being like acquiring/re-acquiring (?) a comforting pattern of (complex) behaviour? Does playing this game soothe us?

Perhaps, because of the kind of animals that we are, it does. We can tell all sorts of stories about why it might - why, even, it makes sense that it might - but these are only going to be intelligible (in any sense) to those who can already play; the comfort comes before the intelligibility.

If we have a story that says 'And now, of course, I can explain why I should be comforted by this', we are missing the point. We have already forgotten too much to be able to understand the initial problem - we have not addressed the terror, we have just learned a way to dance around the campfire that allows us to ignore it. An argument for a fundamental ontological category, or condition, can only be a story like this.

We might think we can comfort ourselves by demonstrating the existence of God, or substance, or their co-extension, but none of these can demonstrate the reliability of the game of intelligibility within which our demonstrations work - only an unreflective, unselfconscious, probably instinctive, language user would even think that they might.

Note the odd frustration one feels attempting to persuade someone who is insane or otherwise irrational: their imperviousness to argument can seem threatening. They are doing the impossible, we think. But only because walking out of the light of the campfire is as good as impossible to us. There is no 'out-there' beyond the light of what can be discussed - we prove this to ourselves, and remark knowingly on the unsayability of the unsayable.

But once the game stops being comforting - when the models of intelligibility on offer are more terrifying than the darkness, or the familial campfire represents cognitive dissolution - then madness becomes intelligible practice, however unintelligible its utterances.

When a philosopher needs comfort, he or she should apply to a therapist, not to an argument. The argument will only show that it can work as an argument - it won't show you that you have; or will always be able; or can require someone else; to play the game.

And this problem is more than theoretically interesting, because it inspires errors. The right answer is not necessarly metaphysically comforting - unless one makes a metaphysical fundamental of argument, and this would be as much a mistake as anything else. An ontological 'rationalist' is as wrong as an ontological materialist, in this context.

If our game is only intelligible on the presumption of God's existence, or the grammatical structure of physical reality, then we may have a demonstration of these metaphysical fundamentals but at the cost of rendering them irrelevant to the psychological problem.

If you want the comfort of God's existence, an existential argument will only convince you if you already get at least as much comfort from the reliability of argument. Even to be convinced by miracles, one would need a language of miracles within which arguments from miracles could be constructed. Without this language, how would we know a miracle from anything else?

Would a cat become devout if it saw an angel? If we believe it would, it is only because we can tell an intelligible story about why it would be so, or because such a picture pre-figures any intelligible exchange we might imagine having.

We can either have comforting metaphyscial presuppositions or we can demonstrate them from the possibility of intelligible conversation. We can't do both. An argument for ontological realism cannot underpin the reliability of empirical argument because it is already an empirical argument. A scientist whose ontological realism is an indispensible heuristic can only articulate that realism 'metaphysically' (or 'nonsensically', in the Wittgensteinian sense - i.e. as a hinge, for which it is incoherent to require an argument).

When normal people talk this way - when they do things like articulating hinges - they often believe that they are talking 'philosophically'. 'Real' philosophers indulgently point out to them that philosophy is about constructing arguments, while, of course, surreptitiously seeking comfort where it cannot be found ...