Catherine, the
heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
(her parody of Gothic novels) is impatiently waiting for the incoming Wednesday,
when Henry, the object of her ardent love, is due to return: “If Wednesday
should ever come!”
The narrator comments: “It did come, and exactly when it might be
reasonably looked for.”
We understand this sentence, but how can we understand it? What would
it mean for the sentence to be false? “That week Wednesday came right after
Monday”? “There was no Wednesday that week”? What the sentence excludes seems
not to make sense, then how can it be used to make a point? The whole idea of
waiting for a certain day of the week the way you may impatiently wait for a
letter or the return of your loved one seems obvious nonsense.
This, any way, seems to have been the position Wittgenstein took in
the Tractatus: “to say of one thing
that it is identical with itself is to say nothing” (5.5303); ”one cannot, e.g. say ’There are objects’”; ”Expressions like ’1 is a number’ ... are
senseless” (4.1272); ”If I cannot give elementary propositions a priori then it must lead to obvious
nonsense to try to give them” (5.5571).
Wittgenstein makes a similar point in Philosophical Investigations (§ 50): “There is one thing of which one can
state neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and
that is the standard metre in Paris. – But this is, of course, not to ascribe
any remarkable property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the game
of measuring with a metre-rule.”
So there is a line of thought that would suggest that “Wednesday
came when it was to be expected” should not make sense since it is hard to see
what “Wednesday didn’t come when it
was expected” might mean. The problem with this line of thought is that it is
taken for granted that the sense of an utterance can be adjudicated on the basis
of the words of which it is made up. (This assumption is shared by adherents of
the traditional – “substantive” – view of nonsense; and mostly, it seems, by adherents
of the “austere” view formulated by Cora Diamond in “What Nonsense Might Be”
and attributed by her to Frege and Wittgenstein, early and late.)
Yet we have no difficulty understanding the sentence. The narrator
is making gentle fun of the heroine’s impatience. Hers is a familiar feeling:
we know what it’s like to wish to hurry on time itself, although there is nothing
we or anyone else can do about it.
I believe two lessons can be derived from this. For one thing, it
seems pointless to pass judgment on the meaningfulness or otherwise of a chain
of words without regard to the actual situation of utterance or context of
writing. A larger lesson is this: the idea that it’s a philosophers’ task to go
around diagnosing nonsense in the ways people speak seems misguided. People may
misspeak, they may have deficient command of the language, they may fail to
make themselves understood because they’re under a misapprehension concerning relevant
circumstances, etc. These problems will have to be sorted out before we can get
clear what the speaker is trying to say. But the idea that – pathologies aside –
a speaker may, in spite of her effort to say something significant, unwittingly
end up producing an utterance that carries no meaning – where there’s nothing even to sort out – seems to me problematic.
(Nonsense as a literary genre is another matter. For instance, Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or the
plays of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, contain passages that are
deliberately engineered in such a way that their unintelligibility will stand
out – here we recognize the authors’ intention to produce nonsense; their aim, perhaps,
is to draw attention to the vicissitudes of linguistic form.)
But here I seem to be up against a dilemma: I want to say that the philosophers’
idea that people may inadvertently speak nonsense doesn’t make sense. But then am
I claiming that philosophers speak nonsense?
Is the risk of producing nonsense a feature of this peculiar form of language use?
My inclination is to answer yes. But I’m not sure how to defend this position.
Reference: Cora Diamond, “What Nonsense Might Be”, in The Realistic Spirit (MIT Press, 1991).
