Can 'schizophrenic language' be interpreted?:

A 3 part paper on the implications of the work of Louis Sass for 'radical psychology' (and including a Wittgensteinian critique of his work).

"All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already." [Franz Kafka, "On parables"]

Introduction

'Schizophrenia' is a strange and of course highly heterogenous 'psychopathology', if it is allowed to qualify as one at all.^[1] 'It' has tended to resist efforts to interpret it much more strenuously than most.^[2] Karl Jaspers is only one of its more famous analysers to have at times despaired; he declared it "incomprehensible", "psychologically inaccessible" and "closed to empathy";^[3] somewhat unlike, say, depression, and most neuroses. The aim of this paper is as follows: to offer a critique of what is possibly the most important effort in this generation to understand what if anything 'schizophrenia' is, what its form is, how the forms of its language can be comprehended. The effort, in which the goal of comprehending 'schizophrenia' is not given up on, is that of clinical psychologist Louis Sass who, in an ongoing series of works, has boldly endeavoured to overturn the conventional wisdom as to 'the' nature of schizophrenia. Whereas 'schizophrenia' is almost invariably seen, if at all, as a disease or disorder or phenomenon of functional or cognitive deficit, or affective excess, or regression,^[4] Sass reads it instead as centrally involving alienation, cognitive excess, hyper-reflexivity, even 'hyper-rationality'.

Thus Sass does not, as will be seen, escape from assumptions as to the existence of mental illness (specifically, 'schizophrenia') as much as many radical psychologists and anti-psychiatrists might not unreasonably wish, but he does nevertheless offer to them a profound challenge. For the implication of his arguments are that even most of those who have defended 'schizophrenics' against their psychiatrical and psychoanalytical analysers and essentialisers have themselves implicitly or explicitly essentialised 'schizophrenia' and related conditions in a problematic fashion. In short, that we need to break radically with the assumption, shared for example by most psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists, that the thinking of those called 'schizophrenic' is an aberration from or a challenge to our dominant rational modes of thought. According to Sass, much of the most striking thought and speech of 'schizophrenics' is instead an apotheosis of rationality -- albeit, a very telling and self-destructing apotheosis. I will try to explain this. (N.B. In what follows, I will tend to consider Sass in relation to 'mainstream' approaches to 'schizophrenia' first, before bringing in considerations derived from attending to anti-psychiatrical etc. critiques, and from considering whether such critiques do not escape the most basic problematic assumptions of the very mainstream approaches which they mean to undermine.)

Sass draws to some extent on conventional work within psychology (and neurology) to found his interpretation, to some extent on his own and others' clinical experience, and to some considerable extent on biographical and autobiographical materials written on and by 'schizophrenics'.^[5] The efficacious combining of these is rare in the 'literature', but, more originally still, he also draws on a vast and thorough acquaintance with -- and systematic comparisons with -- Modern Art, Literature, and Philosophy. In this regard, his work can be thought of as a systematic re-working of (and thoroughgoing critique of) others' earlier efforts to understand madness through its affinities with and connections with the arts. As I will show, the stereotype of the artist touched with madness, touched with fire, is one of Sass's targets -- he argues instead that insofar as there is an affinity between unusual mentality and art (especially in Modern times), it runs more through the 'schizoid' than through the manic-depressive -- and moreover that 'the schizoid' must, surprisingly, be understood along his 'hyper-rationalistic' lines for this comparison to work. Sass's view is that the character of a great deal (not all -- 'the' condition of 'schizophrenia' is increasingly considered even within much overly-scientistic medicalised thought to be not just one but a reasonably wide spectrum of conditions, and thus very heterogenous) of 'schizophrenic' language and action can be illuminated better by comparing it to Modernism in the Arts and to the same (and to Post-Modernism) in Philosophy than by means of more conventional -- especially cognitivistic medical-model,^[6] and psychoanalytic -- approaches. This is in part because he thinks that Modernism in the Arts etc. is itself to a much greater extent than has been normally understood a phenomenon of hyper-consciousness etc., rather than of 'Dionysian' abandon.

The central forms -- 'the logic' -- of Modernism in Art, in Literature, are held by Sass to be relevantly similar to and thus illuminative of what, for methodological pruposes, we for convenience (if somewhat riskily) refer to as 'the' form of schizophrenia. And the form of much philosophy (e.g. the Early Modern philosophy of the 'way of ideas' from Descartes on; Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy; and even 'Deconstructionism' insofar as it holds within it still the 'trace' of these predecessor philosophies^[7] ) is held to be similarly analogous. More important still, the 'counter-philosophies' of the likes specifically of Heidegger, Foucault, and (above all) Wittgenstein are held by Sass, when suitably applied and extrapolated, to describe and effectively diagnose these 'logics', these forms. It's the form of schizophrenia, not the content of schizophrenic delusions, that Sass takes existing accounts to have failed to master, and that is what he wants to bring into clear focus.

While acknowledging the force of Sass's critique, and the fruitfulness of his alternative, I nevertheless intend to use (chiefly) Wittgenstein to develop a series of closely-connected questions and objections, objections I take to be fundamental (though they are without a doubt philosophically controversial) both to Sass's project and more generally to any attempt to develop a hermeneutic for schizophrenia and similar 'disorders'. My purpose, thus, is systematically to doubt whether schizophrenia can, after all, be interpreted at all; even along Sass's (cogent, intriguing and very 'promising') lines. Supplementary to my use of Wittgenstein will be occasional invocation of Heidegger and Foucault. These, as already mentioned, are the very philosophers Sass himself most relies on -- and, most interestingly, they have been probably the most influential philosophers for radical psychologists and anti-psychiatrists. It is my view that a sound understanding (roughly in ascending order of importance for these purposes) of Heidegger, Foucault, and Wittgenstein makes clear to one that while Sass's approach is markedly superior in key respects to mainstream medical and psychotherapeutic approaches to 'schizophrenia', neither it nor the alternative apparently offered by post-Laingian approaches can, in the final analysis, stand up against a proper understanding of the philosophies and the relevance of these three figures, the very philosophers who both Sass and Szasz/Laing/Guattari find most central for their projects...

In order to mount my definitely sympathetic but ultimately very serious critique, I will need to begin by giving a fairly detailed sketch of Sass's work. That is Section (1) of this paper. Following that, in Section (2), I will detail my criticisms, drawing principally on the writers I consider to be perhaps the foremost 'Wittgensteinians' of our time to question Sass's Wittgensteinian hermeneutic for schizophrenia. In Section (3), I will seek to draw some conclusions, and reflect briefly on what if anything post-metaphysical and post-scientistic thinkers can hope to find by way of insight in all of this as to how to deal in the real world with people suffering severe mental distress.

Can 'schizophrenic language' be interpreted?:

Part 1) Exposition of Louis Sass's work.

Sass's general project is expressed most fully in his 'Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature and thought'.^[8] For ease and brevity of exposition, and because of the importance of Wittgenstein not only in Sass's but also in my thought, I will tend to concentrate in the present paper on the more specific project by means of which he has effected his most detailed exemplification of his general project and thesis: a detailed consideration in the light of the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein of Daniel Paul Schreber, the most famous psychiatric patient in history, in some respects a 'prototypical' schizophrenic, who exhibited severe 'paranoia'. This consideration is effected most fully in Sass's 'The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind'.^[9]

Extended summary of the general project as one finds it specifically exemplified in The Paradoxes of delusion

There have been various powerful accounts offered of the content of (e.g.) paranoid schizophrenic delusions. Thinking of Schreber alone, and restricting ourselves for the moment to the (fairly vast) tranche of accounts broadly in the tradition of psychoanalysis and its psychodynamical etc. offspring, we have for example Freud's highly-influential account of Schreber's condition as an instance of paranoia due to regression to homosexuality; Schatzman's (after Niederland's) powerful, moving and highly-convincing account, of Schreber as a victim of child abuse at the hands of his father, an influential child educator but one with often bizarre and sometimes appalling notions and methods; and Santner's intriguing recent account of Schreber as having internalized the political preoccupations and structure of Germany -- in which he was active but partly unsuccessful, and under stress both real and symbolic -- in a mental persecutory system.^[10]

Sass does not dispute these accounts as such, nor does he see them as simply incompatible with his own. What he takes to be lacking from all of them, and more generally from the truly vast 'literature' on schizophrenia from Bleuler on, is a serious and successful effort to come to grips with the peculiar forms that schizophrenic delusions and discourse take.^[11] As already mentioned, some, such as Jaspers, have at times explicitly despaired of ever being able to come to grips with this at all, of ever being able to interpret schizophrenia -- on the grounds that it was just alien, incomprehensible.^[12] While others have tried to deny that such delusional thought and discourse occurs at all, a no less desperate 'remedy'.

Among those who have not despaired of interpreting 'schizophrenia', again as already mentioned, there has nevetheless tended (generalizing very broadly here) to be a focussing on aspects other than what I am calling the 'form' of schizophrenic language etc., by which I mean the logic of sufferers' utterances, that logic in relation to their behaviour, and the structure of the 'systems' of thought etc. that get built by sufferers. Thus we have various (competing) accounts, some of them very impressive, of the reasons for the 'content' of the delusions (e.g. Freud can 'explain' efficaciously some of Schreber's fears of being 'unmanned', his 'voluptuousness' and fantasies of becoming a woman; Schatzman can in quasi-Freudian fashion 'explain' a great many of the delusions by means of postulating the transmogrification of Schreber's father into (his) 'God', but can go further by means of his specific allegations of the father's cruelty toward the son and of his attempt to have Daniel Paul S. be completely in his power; and so on).^[13] And likewise, many of the things that schizophrenics such as Schreber sometimes have trouble doing (such as interacting effectively with co-conversationalists) or sometimes do in despite of themselves (such as some of Schreber's 'bellowing', or emoting 'inappropriately'), have been successfully explained by various of the different conventional (e.g. cognitive deficit) approaches to interpreting or explaining schizophrenia. But the form of the delusions and utterances in general has not been so successfully handled.

Thus for example the 'phenomenon', first tolerably well-described by Bleuler,^[14] of 'double book-keeping', a phenomenon characteristic of many schizophrenics -- the phenomenon in which there seems to be perfectly good awareness of what is going on in the real world right alongside the sufferer's 'delusions' -- very largely eludes these accounts. Schreber was for long periods a double-bookkeeper par excellence -- like most other 'voice-hearers', he was not impelled to action by his voices except in some very particular cases,^[15] and he was in fact able to successfully keep two 'ledgers' in his mental 'book' even vis-a-vis his persecutory fantasies, which one might have expected him to have acted upon, concerning as they apparently did real people who were close to him. For example, Schreber did not act upon his delusions concerning Flechsig's persecution of him (even though they tormented him appallingly, and were arguably not in any case entirely delusions ^[16] ) -- except by the attenuated means of writing the 'Memoir' and the remarkable open letter to Flechsig which opens it.^[17]

Again, to sum up very briefly the two main perspectives, the two main types of account, broadly-considered, which Sass is in the first instance reacting against, the lines of interpretation/explanation which he differs from, which he rebuts:

In the psychoanalytic tradition (and in most of its therapeutic successors and rivals), schizophrenia is interpreted primarily as regression (to one's lawless and appetitive younger self, to one's 'immature' or perverse sexual self), as drive-driven.

In cognitive psychology and (bio-)psychiatry etc., schizophrenia tends to be seen as involving cognitive deficits, deficits and defects in certain thought-or brain- processes, which are taken to lead to emotional episodes etc. .

(To some extent, Sass's primary point can be argued simply to be a negative one: that schizophrenia cannot be effectively interpreted or explained along (either of) these lines. A well-founded negative point like that can be of considerable force and usefulness, and I shall not dispute it.)

But of course, we are generalizing here, so let us add an important proviso about all such generalisations: It is worth reiterating that (as explained in some detail on p.15f. of 'Paradoxes') Sass's analysis will not apply to anything like all those people who have been 'diagnosed' as schizophrenic, and there may be some sub-categories of schizophrenia to which it barely applies at all. Moreover, it is vital to bear in mind that Sass's approach is intended to cope primarily with the more remarkable and apparently-incomprehensible aspects of and 'moments' in (the likes of) Schreber's life. In a fuller presentation, we should explore in more detail Schreber's not always being at extremes, the large islands of normality within his abnormality, and whether talk of 'double-bookkeeping' ^[18] is really remotely sufficient to account for this peculiarity of the form of schizophrenia; that is, with the respect in which, unlike in many organic disorders and some cases of Autism, there are times when sufferers -- 'schizophrenics' -- are quite indistinguishable from 'normals'.

As already mentioned, the diagnosis of 'schizophrenia' is a broad (and perhaps a poor) one -- and, as Foucault has argued, we must in any case try never to forget that a diagnosis in a human science is a matter of discipline and the subjectivising establishment of order, not just a matter of the organisation of knowledge. Sass thinks his approach will at least cope with some central difficult aspects of a good number of cases, and especially with certain classes of cases which hitherto have been very ill-understood. (Furthermore, I would add what I cannot explore further here, but hope to in future work: that Sass's approach arguably fits important and ill-understood aspects of some other 'mental disorders', especially perhaps 'Autism' (especially Asperger's), some central portions of 'Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder', and perhaps some 'Dissociative Identity Disorder'.^[19] )

It is also important to note specifically that Sass does not prejudge against some of schizophrenia having in part a genetic 'basis'; still less with its being correlated with changes in the brain. In short, Sass, while not unimpressed by socio-cultural elements involved in the formation of schizophrenia, does not place them alone foundationally in his studies. He is not a fanatic of 'social constructivism'; and still less an insane Dualist.

Having absorbed these provisos, we are in a position to say the following without too much risk of being misunderstood:

Schizophrenia is seen by Sass not as involving cognitive deficit, but as involving cognitive 'overwork' (and thus, sometimes, overload). People with schizophrenia suffer, roughly, from thinking too much; they think through things that most people do automatically. (This doesn't just apply to thought, incidentally: 'hyper-reflexivity' can be perceptually-centred too. E.g. An excessive 'concentration' on one's kinaesthetic sensations can be relevantly similar here to an excessive cognitive scrutinisation. To call such 'excessive' concentration a cognitive deficit would be overly expanding the extension of the in any case problematic term "cognitive deficit" -- it would be making anything which led to unusual or abnormal cognitive function a 'deficit'.) 'Hyper-reflexivity' and 'alienation' are arguably Sass's key terms.^[20] According to Sass, schizophrenia is -- to coin Nietzsche's important opposition from 'The Birth of Tragedy' -- more essentially Apollonian (and sometimes even Socratic), than Dionysian...

In short, people with schizophrenia live out philosophy: they 'think things through' that normally get presupposed. When 'philosophers' do this, it's a limited academic exercise; when 'schizophrenics' do it, it's 'deadly serious'. I.e. Schizophrenics LIVE OUT what philosophers merely discuss, pretend to. In inchoate ways: but that's to a significant degree because the (philosophical) attempts to uncover the 'underlying structure' of our experience(s) etc. are, arguably, themselves very largely inchoate. That is -- according to Heidegger, Foucault and Wittgenstein -- the project of Foundationalism, and also Kantianism (and, let us add, the Human Sciences in their own dominant preferred self-images), which would uncover such underlying structure, are impossible projects. We will return to this point, in connection with the argument of Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus',^[21] later.

Schizophrenia involves actually experiencing some of the logical arguments -- and the 'positions' consequent upon them -- of the philosophers, then, rather than merely performing them as theoretical/ mental gymnastics.^[22] I.e. 'Schizophrenics' tend to have experiences akin to the thinking/feeling/experiencing of the logical arguments of philosophy and their consequences. The full incoherency of those arguments is, as we shall see, in a sense dramatically revealed by the detail of this comparison; but more important in the first (Sass's) instance is that the nature of schizophrenic language and experience is thus arguably rendered comprehensible, more than it ever has been before. The claim is that Sass's Wittgensteinian 'hermeneutical description' ^[23] of schizophrenia facilitates our understanding of why it works in the ways that it does, of why Schreber et al speak and act in the ways they do, of how those ways have a certain logic and sense, a certain strong 'rationality', and even a strange kind of 'scientificness' or scientificity, and are not expressions of a mere bizarreness or primitivity or deficit nor even an alternative mode of being or such like.

Like Schatzman, Santner et al, Sass brings in another text (in his case, Wittgenstein's) besides Schreber's for illustration, for clear analogisation and exemplification of his claims; but unlike them, he does not attempt a historical explanation of Schreber's delusions. For example, he does not argue that Schreber had read and internalized particular philosophical narratives (e.g. Fichter or Schopenhauer, who Schreber might well have had the opportunity to read.). One can regard this is a defect, in that Sass is thus lacking a causal-explanatory account of Schreber's delusions, and (by extension of course) of schizophrenia's aetiology. As a genuinely humanistic psychology would, I regard it rather in principle as an advantage of Sass's account, which thus has at least the potential to be a truly Wittgensteinian/Winchian human-'scientific' descriptive account, an account truly establishing and specifying what it is an account of, and why from an 'internal' (motivational-intentional, rather than causal) point of view Schreber thought and spoke as he did. From, we might even say, the point of view of a person... (I will only be asking later whether Sass carries through his endeavour not to 'explain', not to (over-)interpret, far enough.)

Roughly speaking, then, according to Sass, people with schizophrenia live out philosophy; at least, philosophy as Wittgenstein describes and diagnoses (metaphysical) philosophy:

"Wittgenstein's [anti-private-language] argument demonstrates the nonsensicality of a philosophical idea. To demonstrate nonsensicality is not, however, to demonstrate nonexistence. For, not only does "private language" exist as an idea, a widespread notion about linguistic meaning; it also exists as an aspiration, a very real aspiration with specific psychological and linguistic effects." ^[24]

Sass locates that aspiration, those effects, in the life and words of Schreber.

What Daniel P. Schreber did and said -- what he and other schizophrenics, including the well-known 'cases' of 'Renée', A.Artaud, A.Wolfli and V.Nijinsky, have written and said -- can be understood -- can be successfully interpreted -- via Wittgenstein's philosophy. (This claim of Sass's will be the primary focus of my criticism, later.) It is very important to understand this aright, so as not to be immediately confused: the import of Wittgenstein for Sass is in the first instance absolutely not to pathologize him or his thought. Rather Schreber is seen as living out a philosophy,^[25] a philosophy which Wittgenstein diagnosed. Nietzsche once polemically claimed to have suffered philosophical problems as illnesses. Roughly speaking, Sass for present purposes literalizes this claim -- but with regard to Schreber, not with regard to Wittgenstein.^[26]

In particular, the peculiar structure of the committments of one philosophically-inclined toward solipsism -- the supposed belief that one is the only person who exists -- and inclined toward related forms of philosophical scepticism and/or system-building, is importantly and brilliantly dissected by Wittgenstein, and it is this dissection which Sass applies analogically to the case of schizophrenia. To the case of those who utter the likes of the following: "[T]he world must be represented or the world will disappear."^[27]

Sass shows in detail how the pressures upon Schreber's thought, the various powerful and often contradictory directions in which the nature of his delusional system develops, are very similar to those that one would have predicted finding had one begun with the notion that one was looking at someone whose thought-processes were relevantly similar to those of a would-be serious sceptic or solipsist,^[28] and that solipsism in turn is best understood by means of Wittgenstein's diagnosis of it as a disease of the intellect. For it is its form ultimately that is troublesome. Wittgenstein argues (as we shall explore in detail below) that there is no stable position or belief which is solipsism, but that 'it' is in continual internal tension. He thinks that 'the solipsist' is confused by language, and thus finds it 'inadequate' to her purposes, and feels herself under pressure to change it -- and that, according to Wittgenstein, is the most that the solipsist can in the end do.^[29] For example, she can insist (pointlessly) on reserving the word "toothache" for her own toothache, and describe others as "puppets exhibiting behaviour outwardly similar to the behaviour that occurs when there is real ['i.e.' the solipsist's] toothache", or such like. Immediately, readers familiar with Schreber's 'Memoir' may recall Schreber's very peculiar mode(s) of language, and his not-infrequently-expressed frustration with the inadequacies of language to express what he wants to say. And such readers might recall particularly striking coinages of Schreber's own, such as "fleeting-improvised men".^[30] It is terms such as this which are a starting-point for the construal of Schreber as solipsistic. For at times Schreber apparently thought those around him were in some sense not real, but were mere imagos, continually fleetingly constructed and destroyed and recreated as he turned his gaze. Schreber's name for those pseudo-creatures, pure inventions of his imagination or of God's, was "fleeting-improvised men". But more of these matters anon.

What, then, is Sass's aim in his philosophy of psychopathology? To show the form, the character of the fly and the fly-bottle here,^[31] to show that both are relevantly similar to those that philosophers have deliberately (respectively) attempted to be and to inter themselves in.^[32] (And perhaps also, as a spin-off, to offer a few speculations to how or how not to cure or deal with schizophrenia -- and possibly as to how to understand what one's aim in philosophy in general can be.^[33] )

Sass proceeds by means of showing that what schizophrenic delusions ARE has generally been misunderstood; in particular, they are not normally instances of poor reality-testing. Schizophrenics can be quite 'certain' of their delusions ^[34] -- but schizophrenics also frequently have something like an ironic attitude towards other delusions or to the very same delusions. Or at any rate they do not generally appear to mean them in anything like the literal 'hallucinatory' sense in which they are often heard by their interlocutors and pathologizers. Let us take an example from 'Paradoxes':

"[A] central delusion of Schreber's psychosis [is] his "belief" that he is being transformed into a woman: "When the rays approach," writes Schreber, referring to the strange, scrutinizing entities -- rays -- which constitute an important center of consciousness in his delusional world, "my breast gives the impression (Eindruck) of a pretty well- developed female bosom." He continues

this phenomenon (Erscheinung) can be seen by anybody who wants to observe me with his own eyes . . . A brief glance however would not suffice, the observer would have to go to the trouble of spending 10 or 15 minutes near me... Naturally hairs remain under my arms and on my chest; these are by the way sparse in my case; my nipples also remain small as in the male sex. Notwithstanding, I venture to assert flatly that anyone who sees me standing in front of a mirror with the upper part of my body naked would get the undoubted impression of a female trunk -- especially when the illusion (Illusion) is strenghtened by some feminine adornments. [Memoirs, 207]

A careful reading of this passage [[note especially the use of words such as "Naturally" and "illusion"]] makes it clear that Schreber is not describing a delusion as that term is generally used in accordance with the poor reality-testing formula. He does not claim that there has been any actual change in his torso, only that under certain circumstances his breast "gives the impression" of being a female bosom. Schreber even takes care to emphasize that the amount of hair and size of his nipples remain as before, and he refers to the impression of femininity as an illusion. Now it hardly seems surprising that a person preoccupied with the question of whether a torso might conceivably look feminine will, if he continues to stare long enough, be able at moments to experience it in this way, especially when feminine adornments contribute to the impression. Elsewhere in the Memoirs, Schreber refers to having to shave off a moustache "to support my imagination of being a female, . . . a moustache would naturally have been an insurmountable obstacle for this illusion" [Memoirs, 160]. These are not atypical

examples." ^[35]

This example may well have looked at first a difficult one for Sass's case; it may have looked like a classic failure of reality-testing, exhibiting perhaps credulousness toward a very particular hallucination. Thus insofar as Sass's treatment of it works, it is an impressive achievement.

Furthermore, and this is a vital point well-made by Sass, if schizophrenics confuse the real and the unreal, it tends to be in the opposite direction from that typically supposed by conventional psychiatric wisdoms. That is, they do not mistake the unreal for real, but they mistake the real for the unreal.^[36] If these flies are caught in fly-bottles, it is not so much that they take their fly-bottles to be all of reality, as that they take even their fly-bottles to be unreal too! They do not act as if their delusions were reality, they tend rather to act or talk as if everything were a delusion.(This attitude, reminiscent of bizarre philosophical doctrines such as full-blown Idealism or Cartesian Scepticism, in fact dovetails perfectly with Sass's Wittgensteinian account of 'schizophrenia as solipsism', to be considered momentarily):

"Here is how one schizoaffective patient describes the unreality feeling that plagued her during much of her psychosis:

It is more like gray. It is like a constant sliding and shifting that slips away in a jelly-like fashion, leaving nothing substantial and yet enough to be tasted, or like watching a movie based on a play and, having once seen the play, realizing that the movie is a description of it and one that brings back memories and yet isn't real. . . . Even a description of it is unreal and tormenting, for it is horrifying and yet seems mild and vague, although it is acute. It is felt in an unreal way in that it isn't constant torture and yet never seems to leave and everything seems to slip away into impressions. . . . For what is, is, and yet what seems to be is always changing and drifting away into thought and ideas, rather than actualities. The important things have left and the unimportant stay behind, making the loss only more apparent by their presence.

Similarly, the schizophrenic patient Renée, in her Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, speaks of "the pasteboard scenery of Unreality" during her psychosis, saying "even the sea disappointed me a little by its artificiality."" ^[37]

"Even a description of it is unreal and tormenting..." ... Here we have in a nutshell much of what makes this topic so fascinating, and scary, and (above all) hard -- to say the least -- to figure out. Is this phrase supposed to imply that the description is felt to be unreal next to the reality of the phenomena experienced or some such? Possibly -- but surely it looks much more like this: everything that the patient touches turns to unreality. She has become some kind of psycho-conceptual Midas, dread-fully a victim of her own mind. We have 'an impossible situation' that we want to describe in this way: here there is no reality to check an illusion by, here we cannot mount the usual and effective response against (say) a sceptical argument from illusion, that there must be a reality by comparison with which the illusion is shown/known to be such. Here is a lived experience of there only being illusion. Perhaps serious philosophical-ish scepticism is possible, liveable, after all:^[38] under the heading -- under the sign -- of severe mental illness.

There is also an implicit hint here that even realizing this may not actually help anyone in this condition. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a 'meta-move' will help resolve a 'schizophrenic psychosis' -- contra Paul Gibbs, it may rather add to it, simply be putting life at one further remove.^[39] Thus a Wittgensteinian therapeutic attempt to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle will not help if the 'fly' feels the attempt, not to mention the bottle and of course the world, the common life, outside it -- and even themselves, as we shall see -- to be unreal...

This, then, is Sass's claim: that 'poor reality-testing' is an utterly-inadequate -- and in fact at best largely false -- model for schizophreniform actions and behaviours, linguistic and otherwise.^[40] Rather, the actions of people with schizophrenia are a 'logical' (albeit to us bizarre) array of double-book-keeping exercises, etc. , sometimes escalating into a general sense of the world and of actions etc. as being unreal. Sass details how various phenomena characteristic of schizophrenia (though not always found there -- one more time, schizophrenia is (to a significant extent) a highly heterogeous and very complex phenomenon) can be 'explained' by means of his method of Wittgensteinian analogy, and of hermeneutical-cum-phenomenological interpretation.

For example, the tension in schizophrenia between a sense of the self as all-powerful, all-knowing -- and a sense of the self as nothing at all.

But now: the latter might seem quite obviously to contradict the idea of taking solipsism as an analogy-base, a 'model', for schizophrenia. Because the doctrine of solipsism seems to be all on the side of conceiving of the self as all. So here we appear to have an objection to Sass.

Sass however turns this objection marvellously on its head, to work as a powerful argument in favour of his reading, and in favour of the notion that he can account for the form of schizophrenic discourse etc. It will be worth quoting extensively from Sass to see how he does this, to see his method at work concretely.

Sass on the problem of the apparently self-contradictory nature of 'schizophrenic experience and discourse': Schreber's mind

A notable feature of Schreber's 'Memoirs', as mentioned earlier, is the 'scientific' -- even inductivist -- and in a real sense highly logicalistic character of much of his reasoning. Schreber takes a 'rational'/scientist-like approach to many matters.^[41] But this can sometimes seem to be contravened by his willingness to entertain contradictory thoughts, for surely internal consistency is a very basic mark of rational or scientific thinking. Here is Sass, on the matter:

"Schreber's claims seem...to involve a contradiction -- or at least a continual equivocation -- between two attitudes: one in which he accepts the essential innerness and privacy of his own claims, the other in which he assumes that they have some kind of objectivity and potential consensuality. This duality is hardly unique to Schreber: many schizophrenic patients who seem generally aware of the innerness of their claims also consider their delusions to be revelations of a truth that they assume to be in some sense, both objective and potentially public in nature. On its face, this certainly appears to contradict my interpretation: the tendency to claim a kind of truth value for delusions seems consistent with the poor reality-testing formula I have criticised; and shifting between a solipsistic vision and a kind of poor reality-testing might suggest the tolerance for contradiction so characteristic of primitive primary-process modes of thought."^[42]

So this is the worry: Either Solipsism is simply the belief that oneself is all, in which case it is not a good analogy for most of the features of schizophrenia which Sass wishes to bring out (such as ubiquitous unreality feelings, and systematic delusions of surveillance and persecution). Or Solipsism is both, is the self as all and as nothing, in which case isn't schizophrenia and schizophrenic thinking (if effectively analogised to Solipsism on this construal of Solipsism) primitive or deficit-saturated, irrationally self-contradictory, after all?

Not necessarily. What Sass shows is that Solipsism is indeed not all on the side of 'self as all'. But that, according to Wittgenstein's incisive analysis of it, there is endemic to it an instability, an oscillation, between self-as-all and self-as-nothing, and more besides. The contradictions 'the Solipsist' gets into are not irrational or pre-rational, but are rationality itself -- or at least, an important and influential form of what has come down to us as philosophical rationality -- taken to its logical/rational conclusions:

"Wittgenstein's meditations can, however, offer another way [than that of poor reality-testing etc.] of viewing many such deviations or equivocations of the solipsistic mode -- one that explains them not as contradictions of solipsism but as a playing out of the inherently self-refuting nature of solipsism itself." (Paradoxes, p.55).

The kind of absurdity or self-refutation which occurs, for instance, when a solipsist wants to say 'I have got something which you haven't'. Sass quotes Wittgenstein on the matter:

" "At any rate, only I have got THIS."--What are these words for? They serve no purpose. --Can one not add: "There is here no question of a 'seeing'--and therefore none of a 'having'--nor of a subject, nor therefore of 'I' either? Might I not ask; In what sense have you got what you are talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it? . . . And this too is clear: If as a matter of logic you exclude other people's having something, it loses sense to say that you have it. [Philosophical Investigations para.398]

...The solipsist -- to borrow one of Wittgenstein's many metaphors for the futility of such metaphysical claims -- is like someone who tries to measure his own height not by using an independent reference system but by placing his own hand on top of his head.

Schreber makes precisely this error, and it is an important source of his paranoid-grandiose sense that, as he puts it, "everything that happens is in reference to me" [Memoirs, 197]. Thus he feels he has discovered a surprising empirical fact, that experience happens only here, when in fact his experience could not on principle happen anywhere else anyway. Rather portentously, Schreber writes, "it is by no means impossible that seeing (Sehvermögen) . . . is confined to my person and immediate surroundings" [Memoirs, 232]. "I can no longer doubt that the so-called 'play with human beings' (the effect of miracles) is limited to myself and to whatever constitutes my immediate environment at the time" [Memoirs, 32]. His proof of this discovery is curiously circular, in just the tautologous way Wittgenstein describes. This can be seen in the following passage, in which Schreber seems to be arguing, in essence, that the proof that miracles only happen here is that they only happen here:

In any case miracles occur only on my person or in my immediate vicinity. I have again received striking proof of this in the last few days which I think is worth mentioning here. ...[S]everal gambolling mosquitos were...produced by miracle in front of my face while I sat in the garden of the inn of the neighbouring village of Ebenheit during an excursion; and again they appeared only in my immediate vicinity. [Memoirs, 233]" (Paradoxes, p.57)

The delightful 'parody' of scientific methodology ^[43] here in Schreber's relation to his solipsistic experiences is quite as clear as it is (presumably) unconscious. Crucially, as Sass remarks, "Notice the equivocation inherent in Schreber's phrase "my immediate vicinity": although he may think he is referring to the kind of place that could be objectively defined ("by the bench", for example, as opposed to "over by the wall of the garden"), in actuality "my immediate vicinity"means something more like "wherever I happen to look"." ('Paradoxes', p.57) The lack of an independent reference point is vital to the instability of the 'position' of the solipsistic thinker. Through his very effort to be scientifical and logical, he gets into a position of severe philosophical confusion.

Now, with the same logic and scientific doggedness, albeit in a manner and within a frame that renders it unstable, the solipsistic thinker needs to pursue the question of the existence not just of things he is not looking at etc., but of himself:

"Wittgenstein [argues that] the usual and unrigorous form of solipsism ("the world is my world") reduces by its own intrinsic logic to what might be called a "no-ownership solipsism of the present moment" -- a position that can be expressed as "whenever anything is seen, it is this which is seen." The undeniable reality of the experience one has turns out not to affirm the existence of the self one is...

One might still claim that the self-as-subject exists, but just not in the same way that the objects of experience exist -- that "the subject is not part of the world but a presupposition of its existence" [as Wittgenstein had once put it in his Notebooks]. But for the solipsist who engages in a scrutinizing hyperawareness, insisting on the unreality of all that goes beyond that which is phenomenally present in a direct and almost concrete fashion, such a position would be contradictory. One might as well admit the existence of other minds, for they too can be invoked as presuppositions of observable facts (like facial expressions...). No, the rigorous, hyperscrutinizing solipsist must not assume the existence of the self but only of that which is directly observed: experiences." (Paradoxes, p.69)

Here, then, we have the very transition we did not expect, when we thought of modelling schizophrenia on solipsism initially. A sense of the self as all, and of others as nothing, leads of its own momentum, by its own logic, to a sense of the self as nothing.

This provides the essentials of an answer to the complaint that might be levelled at Sass that his account can hardly be right because Schreber is such an 'inconstant' solipsist, at best. If we look at Schreber's proceedures for validating, questioning and interpreting his own experiences, we do not find the 'pure' self-fulfilling prophecy we might expect of a solipsist -- but this is precisely because even pure solipisism leads logically to its own overturning, its own negation(s).^[44]

Such 'existential self-nihilism' is not even the end of this logic, of this road, however. As hinted earlier, there is a further -- arguably, inexorable -- move in the very same sane and very crazy logic of this situation. As Sass explains:

"It seems that, to remain a solipsist, the solipsist must inevitably waver between two unstable positions. When he concentrates on observing his own experiences, the solipsistic revelation of centrality disappears as the I-sense dissolves (thus denying the existence of the solipsistic self). But if he persists in holding to the solipsistic revelation, insisting on its meaningfulness and importance, he necessarily invokes a contradictory presupposition, a world in which at least one other consciousness exists to serve as an alternative to his own consciousness, or to take his own consciousness as an object. The implication is certainly paradoxical: solipsism, strangely enough, seems to demand an other mind.

...[I]f solipsism leads to a "no-ownership doctrine" or the postulation of an other mind, then the aggrandizement and diminshment of the self are not polar opposites after all: the one naturally transforms into the other. Further, both are embedded in the same experiential stance -- a passive hyperawareness that places the world at a distance and subjectivizes it, while stripping experience of all sense of active engagement." (Paradoxes pp.71-2)

If the solipsist is not to simply shut up, he is committed ^[45] to the existence of another mind. He is caught in an unavoidable tension, given his starting-point, between action and complete inaction.

Let us look at an example of the 'another mind' form of diminshment of the self:

" "Whenever a butterfly appears my gaze is first directed to it as to a being newly created that very moment, and secondly the words 'butterfly -- has been recorded' are spoken into my nerves by the voices; this shows that one thought I could possibly no longer recognize a butterfly and one therefore examines me to find out whether I still know the meaning of the word "butterfly"" [Memoirs, 188]. Here Schreber appears to sense that the world of objects depends on him (the newly-created or "miracled-up" butterfly exists only for him) while simultaneously feeling his own consciousness to be a pawn and object of scrutiny of some other mind -- namely, the "one" who directs his gaze and examines him to find out whether he still knows the meaning of the word "butterfly". Like many schizophrenic patients, Schreber combines a sense of omnipotence with a sense of abject subjugation and powerlessness. His own consciousness plays two seemingly incompatible roles: for he experiences his own mind as the hub around which the universe revolves... but he also feels his own experience to be limited and constrained, like something contemplated and manipulated (perhaps even constituted) by some distant and ever-receding other mind. Thus "seeing"...happens only "here", and Schreber's whims control the weather (though only in the mind's eye; Memoirs, 181); yet Schreber is also totally enslaved, not only under the constant scrutiny of "one", but with his gaze being directed without his will toward those very insects that exist only for him." (Paradoxes, pp.62-3)

Of particular interest in the above quote from Schreber is the peculiar grammar of and around the word "one". Was Schreber 'regressing' to a childhood state of being unable to use the language properly or something similar? More plausible is that this peculiarity is systematic and has something like a 'meaning', a symptomatic or perhaps 'symbolic' (as opposed to straightforwardly communicative) significance. The obvious 'meaning' now, surely, is that this grammatical peculiarity is integral to the logical oscillation between the self as all, the self as nothing [reached through hyper-scrutinization], and the self as related to (e.g. enslaved by) another [because of the perceived meaningfulness of the solipsistic revelation], and back again, which Sass finds in the 'Memoirs'. Schreber is finding it systemically difficult (!) to know whether he has created God, or is God, or is essentially tied to God, or a pawn of God's, or even an imaginary construct of God's -- thus he slips more or less unknowingly at times from the first person to the third, and back, and more.^[46]

And thus we have an account that can in a certain sense explain how Schreber's text came to have the peculiar form it does, and how he could have thought the way he did. Schreber, if Sass is right, lived out the kinds of pathological solipsistic etc. thought-processes that Wittgenstein has slightly more abstractly described and diagnosed for us. And sure enough, a good look at the 'Memoirs' will soon show the reader Schreber on just such a not-very-Merry-Go-Round, moving continually from (for example) quasi-omnipotence through hyper-scrutinization to depersonalization, and then via slavery to another (for whom one is nevertheless terribly important^[47]) back toward quasi-omnipotence.

Schreber's body

Perhaps ironically, we see Schreber's hyper-rationality and hyper-mentality at work most powerfully, perhaps, in his remarkable and too-often ignored remarks not on his mind but on his own body. Schreber, as to an extent we have already seen in passages from his Memoirs, is in fact quite fixated on his body. This might be thought to provide a problem for Sass's reading again -- aren't philosophers, especially solipsistically-inclined ones, notoriously and problematically disinterested in the body? Isn't disembodiment if anything the form of embodiment of 'the philosopher'?^[48] Whereas Schreber doesn't exactly ignore his body or leave it behind; indeed, he obsesses over it and stares at it compulsively.

But, possibly because of this staring, Schreber's body is 'taken away from him' systematically. I am not referring exactly to the allegations he makes (which according to both Niederland and Schatzman we have reason to believe may well be well-founded) of continual invasion and abuse of his body by various parties, including his attendants at Flechsig's asylum. Nor even to the 'miracles' directly connected with / constituting his 'unmanning'. But I am referring directly to some of the most astonishing and perhaps ungraspable passages in the Memoirs:

"The miracles enacted against the organs of the [my, Schreber's] thoracic and abdominal cavities were very multifarious. I know least about those concerning the heart: I only remember that I once had a different heart... . On the other hand my lungs were for a long time the object of violent and very threatening attacks... . A "lung worm" was frequently produced in me by miracles; I cannot say whether it was an animal-like being or a soul-like creature; I can only say that its appearance was connected with a biting pain in the lungs similar to the pains I imagine occur in inflammation of the lungs...

At about the same time some of my ribs were sometimes temporarily smashed, always with the result that what had been destroyed was reformed after a time. One of the most horrifying miracles was the so-called compression-of-the-chest-miracle...

I existed frequently without a stomach; I expressly told the attendant M., as he may remember, that I could not eat because I had no stomach. Sometimes immediately before meals a stomach was so to speak produced ad hoc by miracles. This was done particularly by von W.'s soul, which in at least some of its forms sometimes showed a friendly spirit towards me. Naturally this never lasted long; the stomach which had been produced by miracles, in any case only an inferior stomach, was usually removed again miraculously by v.W.'s soul during the meal "because of a change of mind"... . Food and drink [could be and were] poured into the abdominal cavity and into the thighs, a process which however unbelievable it may sound, was beyond all doubt for me as I distinctly remember the sensation...

Of other organs I will only mention the gullet and the intestines, which were torn or vanished repeatedly, further the pharynx, which I partly ate up several times... . I must mention further a miracle which affected my whole abdomen, the so-called putrifaction of the abdomen. This miracle originated regularly from von W.'s soul in one of its most impure shapes -- in contrast to other parts of von W.'s soul -- hence the name "abdominal putrifaction of von W.". It threw the putrid matter which caused the abdominal putrifaction into my belly with such ruthlessness, that more than once I believed I would have to rot alive..." [49]

And so it goes on. It is worth noting, given our present interests, that:

"Those miracles always appeared most threatening to me [more threatening than the loss of one's stomach, than eating one's own pharynx, etc.!] which were in one way or another directed against my reason. These concerned firstly my head; secondly during a certain period -- of probably several weeks round the autumn of 1894 -- also the spinal cord, which next to the head was considered as the seat of reason. One therefore attempted to pump the spinal column out, which was done by so-called "little men" placed in my feet... . The effect of the pumping out was that the spinal cord left my mouth in considerable quantity in the form of little clouds, particularly when I was walking in the garden." [50]

And on and on it goes, Schreber's little catalogue of bodily horrors.

I hope it will be evident by now that the character of Schreber's focus on his own body supports Sass's interpretation, rather than disconfirming it. So one might after all say that Schreber appears to have lost his body, much more than his mind... .[51] His reason in a sense remains absorbingly intact as he undergoes (with, in a certain sense, understanding) these horrific experiences, (and) as he matter-of-factly recounts these "subjectively certain" events that he experienced happening to his own person -- as he (mostly, though not always) managed yet to carry on eating, walking around, writing, etc. ...

The radicalism of Sass's account of 'schizophrenia'

G.K.Chesterton, in his marvellous, unorthodox and much-neglected work of social criticism and religious commentary, 'Orthodoxy', wrote that "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." ^[52] Sass's heterodox reading of schizophrenia -- in particular, his remarkable re-reading of Schreber in the light of Wittgenstein -- achieves, we might say, a detailed fleshing out of this lovely aphorism of Chesterton's (who, incidentally, has been much admired by a number of people in the train of Wittgenstein). Sass overturns the conventional wisdom in clinical psychology -- that schizophrenia ought to be, MUST be, interpreted primarily as a disease of excess or inappropriateness of affect (and/or of object-choice), of regression, or of cognitive deficit, etc. .^[53] Rather, schizophrenia is comprehensible as involving excessive self-consciousness -- more generally, hyper-reflexivity -- and its peculiar consequences...

...that one all-too-often finds in rarefied philosophical systems;

...that Kafka, and Dostoevsky (see 'Notes from Underground' and 'The Double') and Nabokov (see 'Invitation to a Beheading') have documented in Modern literature;

...that Foucault has dissected in his archaelogising of the human sciences (in his analysis, that is, of the creation of 'the modern human subject' by means of the turning of the human subject into a study-object. See particularly 'Les Mots et les Choses', particularly the segments of that book treating of 'modern man' as a 'transcendental-empirico doublet').

Sass thus 're-specifies' schizophrenia wihout simply re-evaluating it -- which is arguably what some of the Anti-Psychiatrists do. Speaking a little crudely, and generalizing, the Anti-Psychiatrists & co. tend to accept the clinical psychologists' / psychiatrists' / psychoanalysts' descriptions of schizophrenia, insofar that is as they accept any essentialising of schizophrenia/madness at all as a phenomenon, and then tend toward valorising it: valorising the 'primitivity', interpreting positively the denial of reality, the refusal to accept society, the glorying in the 'excess' of emotion, that conventional psychoanalysis in particular finds in schizophrenia. While I wouldn't deny that there is something right about this -- it is true that schizophrenic 'delusions' sometimes contain a troublingly large degree of truth -- nevertheless the danger of romanticisation (and indeed of simple failure to understand how very un-Dionysian much of schizophrenia is) inherent in such valorisation is by now I think well known. Thus Sass's project is in a certain sense more radical, or at least more psycho-philosophically-novel, than that even of the Anti-Psychiatrists. He can account better, I have suggested, for the form of schizophrenic language and delusion, than they or than conventional Psychiatry or Psychoanalysis etc. . Sass's thought runs deeper, it seems to me, than his near-namesake Szasz's ... or indeed, where they disagree, than Laing's. Sass builds on the early Laing and (all but the early) Foucault, but his thought presents a serious challenge to the later Laing, to Foucault's supposed 'followers', and to any who would resist the provocative and, I think, compelling thought that schizophrenia often mirrors the hyper-rationality of solipsism etc. more than it reflects either failure or outsiderness. Schizophrenia, Sass suggests, is not a failure to attain Enlightenment, nor an alternative to it or a rebellion against it, but is instead Modernity and Enlightenment and individualism come home to roost.

Schizophrenia á la Sass involves not a dearth of rationality or a heightened emotionality but rather an excess of self-consciousness and its associated forms of alienation. One might say that, if Sass is right, people suffering with schizophrenia 'perish' not by fire, but by ice.

In the next part of this paper, I shall undertake a full critique of this fascinating reading of 'schizophrenia', and bring into question, though not from a scientistic point of view, whether in some key cases it can actually, ultimately, be read at all.

Can 'schizophrenic language' be interpreted?:

Part 2) Criticism of Sass's interpretation of schizophrenia

In Section 1 of this paper I laid out sympathatically Louis Sass's 'radical', powerful, and thought-provoking philosophical interpretation of the nature of many cases of serious 'schizophrenia' -- as a lived analogue of solipsism. I will now undertake to offer a critique of this account.

My critique will proceed by means of asking a series of questions, leading up to one fundamental question. Let us start with the following:

Does Sass succeed in describing schizophrenia, rather than in interpreting it or 'explaining' it?

I mean to draw here on two distinctions present in Wittgenstein's writings, especially in his 'rule-following considerations', and drawn upon by Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science and its relation to Philosophy.^[54] This might seem far from our central topic -- but I think its relevance will soon become clearly evident. We are looking in the first instance for a handle on the question just raised, and the distinctions I am about to discuss provide us with one. [Before we go further however, a plea: I mean these distinctions to be based in ordinary people's actions and words. I mean to be indexing (and -- for certain present practical purposes only -- somewhat idealizing) distinctions, ways of using words, which are perfectly everyday; and so what I write should be judged and read in that way, and not as a piece of legislation; nor of magic; nor of 'positive science'.]

(a) Distinction between understanding and explaining.

Contra Donald Davidson, I take for granted in what follows that understanding human action is about understanding reasons for action, and understanding practices -- the language of causality is usually irrelevant to it. Describing and understanding human action, for Winch, is what -- at its best -- social study / human 'science' can do.

"O.K.; but we can still interpret, if we want, right?" But it would be better, rather, to ask first: What is it to understand human action? Need it -- and does it normally -- involve interpretation/explanation? Or can it simply involve description and legitimately taken-for-granted understanding(s)?

Winch writes:

"Understanding is the goal of explanation and the end-product of successful explanation. But of course it does not follow that there is understanding only where there has been explanation... // Unless there is a form of understanding that is not the result of explanation, no such thing as explanation would be possible. An explanation is called for only where there is, or is at least thought to be, a deficiency in understanding. But there has to be some standard against which such a deficiency is to be measured: and that standard can only be an understanding that we already have. Furthermore, the understanding we already have is expressed in the concepts which constitute that form of the subject matter we are concerned with. These concepts on the other hand also express certain espects of the life characteristic of those who apply them." ^[55]

This seems to me just right, the closing two sentences being particularly important for our present purposes. What are the implications, so far as we are thinking, as we are, about understanding human beings?

"[E]ven if it is legitimate to speak of one's understanding of a mode of social activity as consisting in a knowledge of regularities, the nature of this knowledge must be very different from the nature of knowledge of physical regularities... . If we are going to compare the social student to an engineer, we shall do better to compare him to an apprentice engineer who is studying what engineering -- that is, the activity of engineering -- is all about. His understanding of social phenomena is more like the engineer's understanding of his colleagues' activities than it is like the engineer's understanding of the mechanical systems which he studies... // I do not wish to maintain that we must stop at the unreflective kind of understanding of which I gave as an instance the engineer's understanding of the activities of his colleagues. But I do want to say that any more reflective understanding must necessarily presuppose, if it is to count as genuine understanding at all, the participant's unreflective understanding. And this in itself makes it misleading to compare it with the natural scientist's understanding of his scientific data." ^[56]

Again, the closing two sentences of the quote are crucial for our purposes. Winch is arguing that, with sufficient effort, and so long as one is not blinded by wrong-headed philosophical ideas (of, say, full-blown Relativist -- or Scientific Rationalist -- hues), social actors can gradually be understood in their actions, without imposition or irony. In understanding -- a less dangerous word than 'explaining' ^[57] -- human being(s), human minds in action, some specific set of human practices, one courts disaster if one doesn't begin by engaging with the order inherent within those practices (as some in 'the human sciences', especially the Ethnomethodologists, in fact do begin, in their field practice), as manifested in the actors' accountings for their practices and otherwise.^[58]

Thus arguably, to do human science well, one needs to begin (and, in a sense, end) by assembling a careful and unimperialistic/ unimpositional description of, roughly speaking, the self-understandings-in-action of the person or people in question.

(b) Distinction between acting-on-a-rule ^[59] and interpreting a rule.

This is the key distinction made in para. 201 of Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations': "[T]here is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases." ^[60] When one acts on a rule, one normally does no interpreting.

Thinking about (b) naturally connects with thinking about (a), above, in the following way: If one is interested in accurately describing human behaviour -- rule-following action -- then one will want, much as Wittgenstein says, to 'grasp' the rule actually being followed by the person(s) one is describing, and will manifest that grasp in (for example) how one goes on to see the rule being applied in new examples of that person's action(s) which one encounters. One will want to avoid interpreting the rule being followed in such action if that can be avoided, on pain of otherwise risking missing just exactly what rule truly was being followed -- acted upon, acted 'from' -- in any given instance. One will want rather just to look,^[61] and see it. And to describe it.

This move, a perhaps-Gibsonian^[62] specifically-targeted form of what some have called 'direct realism', contravenes the 'conventional (philosophical) wisdom' that it cannot be meaningful to speak of a description of some human behaviour which is not already an interpretation of that behaviour. We can see such a dogma in philosophers as different otherwise as Gadamer and Donald Davidson. The likes of Gadamer continually risk over-intellectualizing ordinary human action by means of investing it all within an interpretive horizon. The likes of Davidson assimilates 'understanding' of language to 'radical' intrepretation, which is in turn unfortunately not clearly distinguished from explanation. Such an approach is overly -- narrowly -- scientific and risks mechanicizing the human being.

Similiar risks are run just as commonly among most recent and contemporary philosophers and human scientists.

The 'non-interpretivism' I am recommending here -- which questions why we often seem to want so badly to assimilate so very much, including human action and especially the action of describing and its products, to interpretation -- is not Positivistic, for it does not imagine description as an isolated and purely object-oriented / fact-gathering phenomenon. Rather, after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Garfinkel, it allows indeed that there is what we call description^[63] (which is not best assimilated to interpretation), and allows that it is important, but does not imagine that it prescinds from one's grasp, as a participant in a practice, of that practice as a lived activity.

None of this implies that there is only ever one 'true description' available of any given piece of (e.g.) rule-following -- there can be several or even sometimes very many true descriptions of most things. But it does preserve a role for the notion of descriptions which are not ipso facto interpretations. For example, the description of the object in front of me as a glass is not an interpretation. And the description of the activity I am currently engaged in as writing a paper is not an interpretation either.

A first stab at a slightly more developed example might be this: "She added 2 to 998", as opposed to "She applied the mathematical operation of quaddition of 2 for the 499th successive time." ^[64] If one avoids not only explaining but also interpreting, then one avoids a hermeneutic. One hopes to avoid adding anything to people's practices as they understand them (both explicitly -- if interpretation is actually called for, for example, and -- the usual case --'implicitly', in practice ). One hopes not to change, wittingly or unwittingly, the terms of the rules which they are following.

"But isn't there a huge tension here between what follows from a Wittgensteinian/Winchian/Ethnomethodological approach on the one hand, and Sass's version of schizophrenia and solipsism on the other. For the former emphasizes the importance of the deed, of practice, while the latter involves an excessive interpretivism. The schizophrenic interprets everything, according to Sass -- that's hardly Wittgensteinian!" This 'objection' is very much to the point -- but it is important to note that it may much overdo things. Sass is describing the exception which tests the rule -- it may well be that, contra the interpretivists, Wittgenstein et al are quite right on human beings in general, but that, contra traditional understandings of schizophrenia, sufferers from this complaint (somewhat like most philosophers?!) precisely intellectualize and interpret in the manner which the interpretivists wrongly take to be the norm for humans in general! And we may follow Heidegger in suspecting that the reason philosophers are prone to misunderstand human being is that they are precisely those people prone to over-intellectualize, to think that what is happening is only mentation where actually something rather different -- typically, involving doing -- is going on instead. (And we may suspect that een Heidegger himself as prone to the very problem which he hereabouts pointed up.)

So, in thinking through the 'objection', just offered, the question we may well want now to ask is, just exactly how appropriate is Sass's hermeneutic for the special case (of schizophrenia, analogized to solipsistic etc. philosophy) under consideration? Does Sass still perhaps over-interpret? Does he thereby blind us to aspects of 'schizophrenic' life and talk -- and there are typically many -- which are perfectly ordinary and normal? An important possibility. Or, very differently, and equally importantly: Does he risk interpreting into sense something which is in the final analysis such an apotheosized transmogrification of the interpretive aspects of our mental life that it can be 'successfully' interpreted into terms which we can comprehend only at the cost of radically and violently falsifying it?

Foucault on madness: neither Deleuzian nor Sassian

Michel Foucault, for example as explicated by Dreyfus and Rabinow (in their Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics),^[65] gives us I think an intriguing idea of what all this that I have been asking can mean. In a certain sense, Foucault holds with Nietzsche's über-hermeneutical idea of the absolute ubiquity of interpretation; but in an important sense he recognizes too that if everything is an interpretation, then nothing is either. And all we have left then are descriptions; such as the descriptions (not hermeneuticist 'interpretations') which Foucault gives us of various institutions.

Famously, one of those institutions is the asylum. It is worth noting that, in the wake of the criticisms made by Derrida and others of his project of 'archaelogizing' madness, Foucault decided that one had essentially to stay silent on the experience of madness. One could not hope to have it entering into the texts of rationality as a disruptive Dionysian force. Thus he even suppressed the (admittedly rather lovely) 'Preface' to Madness and Civilization (La folie et la deraison), in which he had written that he wanted to give an "archaelogy of the silence" of (the experience of) madness.^[66]

Foucault's refusal to attempt to make a silence speak -- for it would then be violated, it would speak always in the language of reason, and falsify itself -- is not echoed by by many of his 'followers'; for example, Sass. In Madness and Modernism, especially in its eighth chapter (on Schreber), he endeavours to extract an (austere and properly un-Dionysian) later-Foucaultian analysis/version of madness from The order of things (Les mots et les choses) and -- principally -- from Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir). From -- in particular -- Foucault's discussion there of the genesis of the modern 'soul'. Sass's is an extremely-intriguing -- in fact a brilliantly-carried-off -- project, here, in which the hyper-rationality of the prison leading to its own frustration and to dystopia mirrors the construction of a certain similarly dystopian and frustrated -- 'tested' -- soul in the likes of Schreber; but it is important to note that the later Foucault himself would nevertheless have resisted it steadfastly, on precisely the grounds that (as Sass more or less notes, on p.246 of Madness and Modernism) he moved away from his earlier claims about the 'eruptive' force of madness. He would have resisted any 'psychologization' of the descriptive/genealogical methods and discussions of Discipline and Punish. He might well even have argued indeed that Sass in fact was carrying forward the very project of the psychologization of the public sphere that he (Sass himself) claimed to be diagnosing. Foucault would have deeply resisted, in short, the attempt to make schizophrenia psycho-philosophically interpretable.^[67]

The overall implications of Winch et al for Sass

To recap: What I'm saying here is that the production of descriptions of human action/behaviour which are not interpretations, let alone explanations, is the only way to avoid grossly failing to 'capture' that behaviour, given that that behaviour, rule-following etc. behaviour, is not only utterly unlike what we call the 'behaviour' of inanimate objects, but is largely active and deedlike -- though, again, largely in a non-interpretative fashion. Most human behaviour is not interpretive, so its understanding need not normally be interpretive either. Contra the claims of Charles Taylor, and others of Winch's critics, even self-understanding or self-description is not necessarily self-interpretation! Self-understanding etc. is, again, vital to understanding humans as human animals rather than as material objects or even as (non-human) animals -- but it is not (necessarily) interpretation. We need to think, not of someone treating themselves as another and speculating on why they have done something (a very unusual case), but rather of someone having the capability to alter what they are doing in response to social circumstances, say in response to a failure to make themselves understood, or in response to some surprising change in the physical environment (usual cases).^[68] Then perhaps we will have the chance to see how human action is (understood), more clearly.

Of course, the terms used in all this are not in themselves entirely crucial (i.e.: So long as one understands "explain" or "interpret" in a sound non-scientistic fashion, etc. etc., then one can happily use terms like "explaining / interpreting human action", as Winch in fact on occasion does). I am decidely not seeking to reify any of these words I have been discussing and using into 'technical terms', or encouraging others to do so.^[69] And in a fuller presentation it would also arguably be quite crucial to look more closely at the way in which words such as "description" are in fact used in everyday contexts. For example, am I right in supposing that, whether or not there are in fact multiple true and adequate descriptions available of a piece of one's behaviour, still there is almost always usefully said to be a difference between descriptions and interpretations of that behaviour, the latter treating the former as 'data'? One could not hope to quite settle such questions without a more detailed and probably partly descriptive-empirical investigation of the modes of use of these words, seeing how they tend to be used differently.

But distinctions at least along the lines that I have made are I think usefully correlated with the words (understanding, explaining; acting-on-a-rule, interpreting a rule) discussed in (a) and (b), above -- in common and intuitively useful senses (uses) of those words. Thus I take it that (to take perhaps an easier example) it is useful to say that Winch hopes in his great paper on "Understanding a primitive society" -- his critique of the great anthropologist, Evans-Pritchard -- to be pointing the way toward a description of Azande practices which will not impose upon them.^[70] And imposition will, he thinks, result from (and amount to) interpreting them or (worse) 'explaining' them. Instead, Winch invites us to look at the language-game the Azande are actually playing:

"It might...appear as though we had clear grounds for speaking of the superior rationality of European over Zande thought, in so far as the latter involves a contradiction [over criteria for the attribution of 'witch-hood'] which it makes no attempt to remove and does not even recognize: one, however, which is recognizable as such in the context of European ways of thinking. But does Zande thought on this matter really involve a contradiction? It appears from Evans-Pritchard's account that the Azande do not press their ways of thinking about witches to a point at which they would be involved in contradictions. // Someone may now want to say that the irrationality of the Azande in relation to witchcraft shows itself in the fact that they do not press their thought about it 'to its logical conclusion'. To appraise this point we must consider whether the conclusion we are trying to force on them is indeed a logical one; or perhaps better, whether someone who does press this conclusion is being more rational than the Azande, who do not. Some light is thrown on this question by Wittgenstein's discussion of a game..." ^[71]

Winch goes on to suggest that the Azande are in fact 'playing a different game':

"It is noteworthy...that the Azande, when the possibility of this contradiction about the inheritance of witchcraft is pointed out to them, do not come to regard their old beliefs in witchcraft as obsolete. [According to Evans-Pritchard himself:] 'They have no theoretical interest in the subject.' This suggests strongly that the context from which the suggestion about the contradiction is made, the context of our scientific culture, is not on the same level as the context in which the beliefs about witchcraft operate. Zande notions of witchcraft do not constitute a theoretical system in terms of which Azande try to gain a quasi-scientific understanding of the world. This in turn suggests that it is the European, obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not go -- to a contradiction -- who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande." ^[72]

Winch's primary concern is to avoid misunderstanding a radically different society (or misunderstanding religion; or misunderstanding art, etc.). He is not asserting, 'Here is the truth on what these 'aliens' are', nor even 'Here is how to enter into the positive state of/for understanding them'. Rather, he is attempting to indicate how we can avoid misunderstanding to the still considerable extent that, for example, Evans-Pritchard misunderstands.

Thus here we have an example of someone -- Peter Winch -- arguably being able successfully to 'follow along with' an 'alien' discourse without imposing on it or interpreting it in terms other than its own. (In the worrying sense perhaps in which these latter activities take place for example in much Art Criticism, when violence is done to a work of art (or literature), by means of interpreting it beyond its 'surface', either by reference to its 'symbolism', or its author, or its purely physical qualities, or its socio-historical significance, etc.^[73].) Paraphrasing a Wittgensteinian slogan, then, one might not un-usefully simplify my line here as follows: Don't look for the interpretation, look for an adequate description. 'Description' and 'understanding' are terms less liable to mislead in this domain than 'explanation' and 'interpretation'.

Though it may already be clear to the reader, it is perhaps important to add that my reading of Winch resists -- much more than the standard reading of his work does -- assimilating his view to that of 'Verstehen' theorists of the social sciences, including (for present purposes) Max Weber. It is my view, based upon the letter of the kind of quotations from Winch given above, that Winch is debased and rendered un-unique if one fails to recognize the difference he finds and suggests between descriptions and interpretations /explanations.^[74] That is to say that, rather than as usual assimilating interpretation to the description side of Wittgenstein's famous opposition between description and explanation,^[75] thus risking concealing the important disanalogies between description and interpretation, we might usefully try out assimilating it to the explanation side instead, and notice the similarities there. This is, I think, the moral of thinking about oppositions (a) and (b), above. (If space permitted, I should offer arguments to support my opinion that the assimilation of all three of these concepts under the head of 'interpretation', again, is probably in the main a largely-nefarious product of a too-hegemonic 'textualism' in philosophy and the human sciences in the last two decades or so.)

The best one can do then, one might say, is present (rather, one might say, than re-present) the thought and language of an 'alien'.^[76] But, if it 'hangs together', in the way Winch suggested Azande thought in the final analysis does; if it can be made sense of without being imposed upon; if its character is such that one can come to describe it accurately, in important part through understanding it as they understand it:then one need not thereby falsify it -- and then one really can present it. (And need not necessarily interpret it.)

Of course, the problem my question concerning description vs. interpretation poses is only a problem in the first instance if what Sass takes himself to be doing is Wittgensteinian (as opposed to, e.g., Gadamerian) philosophy, for it is Wittgenstein who demands that we shun all explanation, resist interpreting where interpreting risks misleading us and over-complicating things, and simply describe. (Many other philosophers, in my view wrongly, reject these methodological precepts.) However, it looks to a considerable extent as though Sass does so take himself, and thus the question is pertinent.

An example of Sass's problematic interpretive practice

Let us take an example from Sass, of where we may adjudge his practice to be worrisome, to be un-Wittgensteinian even as he is attempting to use and follow Wittgenstein. I want thus to begin questioning directly Sass's 'Wittgensteinian' reading of Schreber, from a Wittgensteinian perspective:

"Schreber's dream is that spirits should be drawn down toward him and perish therein. For example, he sometimes hears the spirit of his wife saying (more precisely, he hears it "represented as saying") "Let me" -- words which he knew to mean let me "dissolve in my husband's body". Since the spirits of Schreber's cosmos represent potentially rivalrous conscious centres, their perishing in him can be interpreted as a conceding of defeat in the competition of consciousness." (P.120 of Paradoxes, underlining mine)

Well, indeed, it can be interpreted that way. Other somewhat plausible interpretations are available: e.g. that the wish of the spirit of Schreber's wife to dissolve in him is an expression of his wish to have her (womanly) 'voluptuousness' literally become a part of him. But... why ought we to be interpreting here at all? Oughtn't we to start with Schreber's experience simpliciter, i.e. with his experience in his/its own terms? That would surely be what was most appropriate for a 'radical' psychological approach which wished to get things right without imperialism.

Within Schreber's own terms, within that frame, nothing represents anything unless Schreber takes it to do so (As he does take certain words (a little bizarrely) to symbolize certain sentences, as in this example, and he finds his own influence on this symbolisation moreover to be negligible -- he experiences it essentially passively. (Though, as we shall see later, he also quasi-passively judges that all representing is nonsense -- a 'hint' that interpreting what is a nonsense will itself yield only ... a 'nonsense'?!...)). In Schreber's experience (N.B.: "dream", again, is a prejudicial word), spirits are drawn down toward him. This kind of thing has to be our initial and never-to-be-forgotten datum. No matter that we ourselves probably cannot take this remotely seriously. We have nevertheless to (try to) know what if anything it means.

One might argue then that Sass's turn of phrase here betrays that he is palpably offering in a strong sense an interpretation of Schreber's experience, rather than trying as hard as he might to 'let that experience speak for itself'; as for instance it might be argued to get a chance to so speak (so to speak) not only in his Memoirs, but also in his depositions to the court which judged whether he was competent to leave his asylum, and judged in his favour. And one might again take as a partial and comparitively-useful analogy here an anthropologist trying to let (the experiences of) a very different people speak for themselves. I'm trying to put schizophrenia on a 'spectrum' of 'alienness', here. Thus compare (and contrast...) Wittgenstein's attitude (or similarly Peter Winch's approach vis-a-vis the Azande's 'doublebookkeeping', in his "Understanding a Primitve Society")), in his "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough". Apparently deeply-bizarre and/or contradictory beliefs can proceed perfectly happily in tandem with a practical workaday attitude toward growing crops, etc. etc. .

A salient contrast is: Rather unlike Sass, Wittgenstein and Winch do not aim to say, for example, what the Azande are 'really' doing -- 'behind' the appearances -- when they use their poison-oracles etc. . Not at all. Except of course in the (vital) sense that Winch aims at a description which would reasonably well satisfy the Azande (were they to be interested in one's activity of describing them), in giving a version, an account, that could satisfy the criterion of being accepted by those being 'accounted for'. A very important difference of nuance here from the case of 'schizophrenics' now suggests itself: Without, I hope, giving offence, one can I think say that there is a serious question as to whether in serious cases of schizophrenia there can be any question of taking seriously for example any confirmation which a person with schizophrenia were to make with regard to one's interpretation of their condition/feelings or whatever. Because their 'schizophrenia' (launching them as it arguably does on a hyperrational/hyperreflexive journey which issues in nothing consistent) arguably deprives them of the position of being able to be taken seriously in any such confirmation (or denial); unlike, surely, the Azande. This raises a serious general question, for us a quite central question, about what the criteria of correctness of interpretation could possibly be, in the case of Sass or others attempting to hermeneuticise schizophrenia, and ought to make us worry therefore about whether an 'interpretation' could possibly be what we ought to look for here at all. (To say all this is not, I think, to resort to imperialism toward or dehumanisation of sufferers from schizophrenia. It is only to look honestly, much as the early Laing did, at what some of their life and language and epistemic position is like.)

If one is 'hovering', or flip-flopping between alternative ways of expressing oneself, or between different ways of being understood which one is being invited to assent to or deny, there will normally be a resolution to such hovering available. Typically, one will settle on some form or forms of words. Similarly, if one is hovering between different beliefs or practices or aspects of one's life, the same will apply, at worst by means of some kind of partial splitting of one's life into different spheres. There is a qualitative difference between 'hovering' when at least in principle a resolution of the hovering is available in one of these forms -- and when it isn't.^[77] In the latter kind of case, which arguably reflects what is the case in much severe schizophrenia, where any 'resolution' takes at best the form of a terribly absolute 'pathological' splitting, we lack I think a basis for rendering the humans in question genuinely intelligible.^[78]

Perhaps, the locus of the difference between Sass and Winch is in fact then mostly simply a difference in topic, in the following fashion: the Azande way of life, strange to us as it is, and its strangeness needs emphasizing as Winch emphasizes it (this strangeness being, Winch thinks, underplayed even by Evans-Pritchard, as he characterizes the Azande as irrational, as mistaken -- for Winch thinks that the true strangeness of the Azande is that they may be doing and saying the very odd things that they apparently do and say and yet not be accurately characterizable by us as fitting into the convenient boxes marked by us with the labels "irrational" or "mistaken"); this way of life nevertheless can in principle be understood. While the severe schizophrenic cannot. Because while the form of the former can be comprehended provided one takes on board Wittgensteinian lessons about the context-relativity of the meaning of 'logical contradiction' etc., and about this game (of language, of life) being collectively played, the form of the latter goes beyond what can strictly be comprehended, and into what can only (again, after Wittgenstein) at best be diagnosed. While there is, perhaps, something one can reasonably unmisleadingly label a Zande ''belief'-system' in action, albeit by our lights a pretty peculiar 'system', and (thus?) a 'system' usually misunderstood and read scientistically, there is often in schizophrenic individuals by contrast only the illusion of such a system,^[79] almost invariably with no community to sustain or mend it,^[80] and a system furthermore within which one can find no real resting-place (thus witness the unstable scientistical/solipsistical dialectic within Schreber's thought that was discussed in Section (1), above.). And while the Zande do not press their thinking to what others try to impose on them as its 'logical conclusion', Schreber et al do so press their thinking (whether deliberately or non-voluntarily, it is hard -- even impossible -- to say). Thus it is that Schreber continually finds himself in a continually-puzzling circular paralyzing paradoxicality. In an absence of self-understanding, in spite (indeed, perhaps because) of all his efforts at reflection.

All this would have the implication that, in the cases which most interest and puzzle us, there could not be a successful interpretation of schizophrenia, for the simple but profound reason given just above: that there simply aren't any true self-understandings available. That such sufferers from schizophrenia do not exhibit the kind of understanding-in-practice of their own talk, the kind of everyday rule-governedness in that talk and action, which in everyday human contexts we can take for granted -- and thus that, here, they are an exception to the 'rule' which Wittgenstein and Garfinkel have taught us. We might even say that there cannot, logically, be true self-understandings in severe schizophrenics (to facilitate criteria for accurately understanding them, their words and actions).^[81] And without the existence of those, there can be no such thing as production of descriptions -- descriptions that will not evince or evoke failures to meet those one is encountering as they are -- which could be the basis for interpretation(s).^[82]

This is a terribly important possibility -- that we will delay further direct consideration of until later, for reasons which will become apparent. (Again, it should not be held against my presentation of this possibility that qua citizens of the contemporary West etc. we arguably can't as a matter of fact take (e.g.) Azande beliefs and practices (or, likewise, for some of us, religious beliefs of any kind?) seriously; for, as students of society , we can nevertheless make a very serious -- and arguably, successful -- effort to understand them.)

A sub-question (to that with which we began this Section) now, a sub-question the consideration of Sass's interpretation of the spirits perishing within Schreber given above naturally leads us into:

Is Sass 'mixing his own perspective in' with Schreber's?

Again; isn't Schreber's perspective the fundamental one: isnt that the one that we have to describe aright? Doesn't philosophy have to leave Schreber's voice as it is (while e.g. distinguishing between his everyday voice, his bellows, his self-reflecting voice in his writings, etc. ...)? These things may only be possible in a more 'dialogical' perspective than Sass's,^[83] i.e. in a perspective that endeavours simply to describe with great accuracy both the talk Schreber documents between him and Gods proxies etc., and the talk between Schreber and his human interlocutors.

One might suggest in counter-objection that a 'mixing' of perspectives is to some extent unavoidable, given even only that one has to be selective, re-contextualize etc., to some degree. I have attempted, perhaps counter-intuitively, to pre-empt that point by arguing above that it is not essential to interpret Schreber et al. But even if my argument there is judged in some way to be inadequate, one can surely add at least this: that Sass (or whoever) owes his readers a serious effort at explicitness about the 'mixing' -- the co-ordination -- of perspectives in his writing.

I would argue that Sass sometimes makes no attempt to start with the patient's experience: for example when he attributes his own mentalistic etc. interpretations (which Schreber would not accept) to Schreber, as a result of covertly augmenting what Schreber believes with his (Sass's) readings of them. So there is a serious risk of generating wrong conclusions, of falsifying the content and the character of Schreber's experience and 'system'.

This risk is particularly high, one might venture, given that much of Sass's 'data' for his view of schizophrenia comes to him (and us) pre-digested -- already, arguably interpreted. I refer to 'data', 'evidence', garnered from textbooks, from major authors on the subject of psychopathology, and from retrospective accounts by patients and ex-patients. Though all of this material, perhaps particularly the last, can of course be of use, there is a comparitive lack of first-hand data from interactions with patients, analyses of conversations involving them, etc. . Endeavouring to understand materials such as those, endeavouring in short to understand people one encounters in person or at least on video or in transcript, perhaps offers the greatest chance, if chance there is, of avoiding interpreting (as opposed to describing and perhaps understanding) difficult instances of 'schizophrenic language'.

So, a further question:

In Sass's effort to understand/interpret schizophrenia, is there not a very real danger that he goes too far in the opposite direction to the orthodoxy (that schizophrenia, insofar as it is comprehensible at all, is only so under the sign of a Levy-Breuhlian 'primitivity', or of psycho- analyticalish 'regression', or of Cognitivistic 'mental deficit', etc.) which he is overturning -- that, in short, he makes 'schizophrenia' hang together / make rational and intelligible sense more than it in fact does?

One possible promising project then, which Sass pursues to some extent but unfortunately tends to drop when he is endeavouring to draw conclusions or generalize from Schreber's case, would be this: To find the points where Schreber is self-consciously puzzled by his bizarre world and 'dialogically' engage them...

An interlocutor might counter-object against me here: "Do we have then to take Schreber's 'beliefs' at face value? Can we not re-present them / ironicize them in the slightest? You will find avoiding doing so difficult to carry off, to say the least!" Undoubtedly true, and I will not pretend thus far or in what follows to have succeeded, or even to have tried to as completely as I might. "Well then, how can you object to Sass's methods?!?" Well; I will at least make an effort on this count. In particular, I claim that we must take Schreber's beliefs at face-value ^[84] if we can. We must at least present his sentences and paragraphs and then ask ourselves honestly whether we can understand them. We must try to do so -- and then perhaps recognize that we simply can't succeed, and that we'd be wasting our time were we to just press on regardless. My worry is this: that 'interpretation' of them is a dubious half-way house here between the claim to understand and the admittance of incomprehension. It gives the illusion of understanding, while changing the subject.

Let us take another example here to illustrate. This is 'Renée' again:

"...I [complained] bitterly that things were tricking me and [of] how I suffered because of it. // As a matter of fact, these "things" weren't doing anything special; they didn't speak, nor attack me directly. It was their very presence that made me complain. I saw things as metal, so cut off, so detached from one another, so illuminated and tense that they filled me with terror. When, for example, I looked at a chair or a jug, I thought not of their use or function -- a jug not as something to hold water and milk, a chair not as something to sit in -- but as having lost their names, their functions and meaning; they became things and began to take on life, to exist.

This existence accounted for my great fear. In the unreal scene, in the murky quiet of my perception, suddenly "the thing" sprang up. The stone jar, decorated with blue flowers, was there facing me, defying me with its presence, with its existence. To conquer my fear I looked away. My eyes met a chair, then a table; they were alive, too, asserting their presence. I attempted to escape their hold by calling out their names. I said, "chair, jug, table, it is a chair." But the words echoed hollowly, deprived of all meaning: it had left the object, was divorced from it, so much so that on the one hand it was a living mocking thing, on the other, a name, robbed of sense, an envelope emptied of content. Nor was I able to bring the two together, but stood there rooted before them, filled with fear and impotence." ^[85]

Up to this point, it is perhaps very tempting to offer an interpretation of what Renée is saying, to try to give sense to what is evidently scaring and confusing her. One might see what she says next as hardening -- firming up -- such an interpretation: "When I protested, "Things are tricking me; I am afraid," and people asked specifically, "Do you see the jug and chair as alive?" I answered, "Yes, they are alive." " Alternatively one might hear this as herself facilitating our understanding of her self-understanding. We no longer need to ironize -- we can take her word for it. (Though, if we do so, we need not presuppose that she is saying just what we would be saying if we said those words.)

But one should be very wary of doing either, of interpreting, or of perhaps understanding á la Winch. For the kicker is that Renée goes on immediately to undercut our interpretation or understanding: "And they, the doctors, too, thought I saw these things as humans whom I heard speak. But it was not that. Their life consisted uniquely in the fact that they were there, in their existence itself." ^[86]

This, it seems to me, stops one in one's tracks. The chance any well-intentioned humanistic hearer of Renée seemingly had of coming to understand her strange world ('personification', etc.) finally disappears fairly precisely at this moment. She has specifically ruled it out -- so we could only continue to interpret at the cost of ignoring her most fundamental 'self-understanding'.

Any way that she has of expressing her experience is 'inadequate', and so of course she is not understood. Her confusion is irredeemable, irrevocable. For there just isn't anything it can be for the life of objects to consist uniquely in their existence. This inchoate notion is stranger than anything in (say) Zande practices, or pre-modern science. For sure, one can and must look for context to ground one's understanding of something strange -- but I defy anyone to find a context in Renée's text or life for this remark. By which I mean: a context which results in its being able to be made sense of.

Sometimes, one has to give up, one has to stop. We have in the quotation above I think more or less a qualitative change, a gap which cannot be crossed -- for I don't see how there is anything left which we can hear her as saying with those words...

And let us not be under the illusion that we empathically understand Renée's state here by virtue of being confused, like she clearly^[87] was. For, while it is certainly the case that we need to understand understanding as normally nested in a taken-for-granted intersubjectivity (and not as the interaction of two or more essentially isolated entities), and while it may be true that sometimes the closest we can get to understanding a sufferer from schizophrenia is in the 'counter-transference', in noting how they make us feel and so on, this latter is yet very much a second-best understanding of anything (at best). For confusion is not a mode of understanding.

Or, more precisely, a confused understanding is not an understanding of confusion...

To reiterate: like Winch, like any good Wittgensteinian (or indeed any good 'human scientist'), I am interested in understanding other human beings, in understanding what they say, in making sense of it insofar as it's possible. Like Winch, James Conant, and many others, I am convinced that it is often the case that insufficient effort is taken by philosophers and psychiatrists and historians of science (and so on) to understand the strange. (And like Sass, I am impressed by the lucidity and (in a certain sense) logicality -- indeed hyper-logicality -- of the patterns of life and language we surprisingly frequently find in the midst of the 'floridity' of people with schizophrenia.)

But sometimes, occasionally, one ends up judging that it's not possible to do what Winch et al would want us to; in which case one ends up instead noting the interesting patterns in a discourse but concluding that nevertheless there is an irrevocable incoherence in that discourse.^[88] An incoherence that cannot be understood -- for there is nothing to understand in incoherence, in nonsense. When there is no-thing to understand, then the Winchian project of avoiding theoretistic misunderstandings is not open to us. There's no such thing as succeeding in not misunderstanding nonsense, except through -- unless we mean -- recognising it as nonsense. (The likes of this, it is perhaps becoming obvious, is itself only a grammatical remark -- a transitional remark -- which is itself highly-susceptible of misunderstanding.)

The dimension along which I shall here chiefly explore the concern that I have just raised, which is in fact my fundamental concern about

Sass's work, is as follows:

Doesn't an accurate understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy raise some questions as to whether it can possibly be right for schizophrenia to turn out to make sense, truly to BE interpretable, if it is indeed 'best interpreted' as a lived analogue of solipsism?

For, arguably, a right understanding of Wittgenstein on solipsism etc. has at its centre Wittgenstein's careful and crucial use of the term 'nonsense' as a term of criticism. I.e. Wittgenstein is anxious to ensure that, besides (and as a means of) figuring out the phenomenology of philosophical illusion and mythology, and besides (and as a means of) persuading those subject to such illusion(s) of the better things to say than the things their theoretical inclinations encourage them to say, one must be sure that one is fomenting a therapeutic and not a merely theoretical diagnosis (Michael Williams's terms, from his 'Unnatural Doubts'^[89]) of the illusionary system one is dealing with. That is, one must not concede that it gets as far as being a system. No philosophic system is statable. Or, better: One must persuade others that they have only a desire for a system, a desire that they can be gotten to give up.

Some will find this an objectionable characterization of philosophy. In the present context, the best that I can do is point them to the best and clearest defence of it.

The Conant/Diamond reading of Wittgenstein

The clearest extant exemplification of these points is the reading of (the early) Wittgenstein due to James Conant and Cora Diamond. This might seem surprising, for isn't it only in the later Wittgenstein that we find Wittgenstein critiquing 'systems' and 'views' on the grounds that, considered as philosophy, they are simply nonsensical? And, more importantly, didn't the early Wittgenstein in fact himself build a philosophical system?

Roughly: no. "No", to both questions. The 'early' Wittgenstein was no more a philosophical systematizer than the 'later'. For both, following Cavell, temptations to lose a grip on one's concepts, to speak nonsensically, are at the heart of philosophy, even of philosophy which itself tries to lead us from latent to patent nonsense. Or at least so Conant and Diamond have been on the forefront, among recent philosophers and scholars, of cogently arguing. It will be worth extensively quoting from one detailed instance in Diamond, to show how, in particular, she thinks that we are deeply mistaken if we imagine that Wittgenstein's early work is a 'system' which enables us to -- or even tries to -- build a philosophical system (rather than to 'build' the illusion of a system), or to 'show' a number of philosophical things which 'unfortunately' cannot be said:

"When Wittgenstein says that we cannot say [e.g.] "There are objects," ^[90] he does not mean "There are, all right, only that there are has to get expressed another way." That the sentence means nothing at all and is not illegitimate for any other reason, we do not see. We are so convinced that we understand what we are trying to say that we see only the two possibilities: it is sayable, it is not sayable. But Wittgenstein's aim is to allow us to see that there is no 'it'." ^[91]

It's not that one cannot assign a meaning to (e.g.) "There are objects". It is that one has strong grounds for thinking that no assignment of meaning will be satisfying to one.^[92]

"[A]nd so you see that there is no coherent understanding to be reached of what you wanted to say. It dissolves: you are left with the sentence-structure "A is an object," standing there, as it were, innocently meaning nothing at all, not any longer thought of as illegitimate because of a violation of the principles of what can be put into words and what goes beyond them. Really to grasp that what you were trying to say shows itself in language is to cease to think of it as an inexpressible content: that which you were trying to say.

Take Wittgenstein's remark that there is only logical necessity [T L-P 6.37 and 6.375]. It is a wonderful remark. Logical necessity is that of tautologies. It is not that they are true because their truth conditions are met in all possible worlds, but because they have none. "True in all possible worlds" does not describe one special case of truth conditions being met but specifies the logical character of certain sentence-like constructions formulable from sentences. But the remark that there is only logical necessity is itself ironically self-destructive. It has the form, the syntactic form, of "There is only this sort of thing," i.e. it uses the linguistic forms in which we say that there are only thises rather than thises and thats. It belongs to its syntax that it itself says something the other side of which can be represented too. If there is only squiggledy wiggle, the langauge allows wiggles that are not squiggledy as well. But whatever the sentence aims to do for us, it is not to place the kind of necessity there is as this sort rather than that. It does not convey to us the philosophical but unsayable fact that there is only tautology not genuinely substantial necessity. In so far as we grasp what Wittgenstein aims at, we see that the sentence-form he uses comes apart from his philosophical aim. If he succeeds, we shall not imagine necessities as states of affairs at all. We throw away the sentences about necessity; they really are, at the end, entirely empty. But we shall be aware at the end that when we go in for philosophical thinking, the characteristic form of such thought is precisely that the sentence-forms we use come apart from what we have taken to be our aims. Not because we have chosen the wrong forms.^[93]

Diamond et al seek to understand the 'logic' of the 'Tractatus' -- while leading up to the conclusion that it has in a certain important sense no logic whatsoever. (Something like this is just what Sass wants to show of Schreber's 'system', his 'logic' -- but can Sass do this and yet still be producing an interpretation of Schreber's 'system'? Can he justifiably have it make (a certain) sense to us, as he often appears to be doing?) T L-P's logic is a logic of illusion, of what we are inclined to believe, of a set of psychologically-attractive but ultimately empty pseudo-claims (One is in an unstable 'position' -- an oscillatory non-position -- as one reads it, in something like the way that one is in an unstable 'position' if one is caught in the 'dialectic' of solipsism, described in Section 1 of this paper). Among other things, T L-P lures one into thinking that one has finally found a satisfactory philosophical system, and then progressively undercuts that thought completely.

It is important to realize that if Diamond and Conant are right, then these points about the nonsensicality ultimately of our philosophical urgings are surprisingly general. As Wittgenstein said, in a related context:

"Though it is nonsense to say "I feel his pain", this is different from inserting into an English sentence a meaningless word, say "abracadabra" . . . and from saying a string of nonsense words. Every word in this sentence is English, and we shall be inclined to say that the sentence has a meaning. The sentence with the nonsense word or the string of nonsense words can be discarded from our language, but if we discard from our language "I feel Smith's toothache" that is quite different. The second seems nonsense, we are tempted to say, because of some truth about the nature of the things or the nature of the world. We have discovered in some way that pains and personality do not fit together in such a way that I can feel his pain. The task will be to show that there is in fact no difference between these two cases of nonsense, though there is a psychological distinction in that we are inclined to say the one and be puzzled by it and not the other. We constantly hover between regarding it as sense and nonsense, and hence the trouble arises." ^[94]

In a certain sense, there are not different kinds of nonsense, Wittgenstein wants to persuade us; there are only nonsenses which are more psychologically attractive than others, more difficult to recognise as simply nonsense, more tempting at least to describe as 'profound' nonsense, because of some important 'discovery' we have purportedly made about how things are by means of them.

Most importantly, the notion that there is such a thing as 'profound nonsense' is not the doctrine of the 'Tractatus' -- it is its ultimate target. (And the saying of that shoud not be read assertorically / doctrinally, either.)

So then, an important corollary: Ironically, to take seriously the 'Tractatus', and Wittgenstein's notion that there can be no philosophical theses, we need to take absolutely seriously his own claim that, insofar as his own work embodies 'propositions' or 'theses' (as T L-P does through and through, and PI increasingly looks to on close and subtle inspection too...) it also is, strictly speaking, quite literally nonsense, as explicated in the quotations from Diamond above. Famously, this is point is explicit in the early work, in T L-P, if one is only ready to 'understand' it: it, T L-P, is not meaningful nonsense, or 'special' nonsense, or nonsense gesturing at some profound truth -- it is not clear that we actually succeed in having any use for those notions, here or elsewhere.^[95] It (T L-P) is mostly, perhaps entirely, plain nonsense, albeit nonsense that may prove useful to us in a dialectical/dialogical process of coming to be less tempted to utter nonsense in the future.^[96] A little bit like the meta-move which may work in clinical practice too; in part through making one tired of meta-moves, making one lose one's faith in them. But only a little bit -- because strictly speaking the end of the 'Tractatus' only appears to involve a meta-move, it does not actually do so. For Conant, the notion of throwing away the ladder is itself just one more temptation. We throw away even the sentences with which the 'Tractatus' ends. It is 'flat', with no second-orderness -- just like PI (see e.g. para.s 121-2 of PI).We see here how one might imagine a Sassian psycho-philosophico-therapy for schizophrenia.^[97] One could explore the patient's delusions, and treat them as Wittgenstein treats philosophical delusions (somewhat as some 'Philosophical Counsellors' are now doing).^[98] But again, one would have to be alive to the danger that one might just be entrenching a tendency toward further distanciation from / derealization of one's everyday experiences, by means of focussing on the abstract matter of the 'double-bookkeeping' etc. . Arguably, one does not have to agonize as much in clinical work as in philosophy over 'leaving everything as it is'; but one will sometimes want, rightly, to acheive an 'end of philosophising' more desperately than Wittgenstein ever did; and a correct understanding of the close of the Tractatus (and of PI para.133) implies that one can never guarantee that one will do so...^[99]

The 'Tractatus' (and 'also' Wittgenstein's later philosophy) plays potentially a vital role in bringing certain traditions/hopes in philosophy to a close, and 'from the inside'. Fully understanding Wittgenstein's purpose in it aright is no longer to have those hopes. If one fully understands Wittgenstein's purpose in writing the 'Tractatus' (which, again, cannot be the same as understanding the 'Tractatus' itself, if Diamond / Conant are right -- for there is no such thing as understanding nonsense) then one comes to see that not only the body of thought conventionally regarded as the 'Tractatus''s target -- Russell-Frege-based Analytic philosophy considered as a constructive discipline -- but also the German Kantian /Idealist tradition, are decisively closed.^[100] This latter claim might seem ridiculously extravagant. But it clearly follows from the Conant/Diamond reading, applied to Tractarian propositions such as that "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (T L-P 5.6) There can be no talk of -- nor gesturing at, nor thinking beneath or beyond the level of speech -- conditions of possibility, noumena, etc. . For, on the Conant/Diamond understanding of T L-P, and of the way it sets us up for Wittgenstein's later work, which is highly continuous with it, the ideas that there could possibly be such a thing as expressing the form of our language, or of our forms of thought and their presuppositions, are nonsensical. They do not amount to anything. Nor do they 'gesture' at anything -- this is what the 'Tractatus' invites us to realize, in ourselves. There's no such thing as creeping up indirectly on 'profound truths' which cannot be expressed 'directly'. (Of course, these remarks must be understood also to be transitional,^[101] to 'empty' themselves just insofar as they embody 'theses' or even elucidations. The 'paradox' of my own 'position' here, if I have one, is what one might risk calling a 'dual aspect philosophy' of philosophy -- its self-admission of nonsensicality, while one goes on 'Apollo-style' all the same. A little like 'double-book-keeping' in schizophrenia according to Sass, in fact...)

One might even say: This (the above) is all that is actually 'gestured at' by the Tractatus.

The Tractatus on solipsism

Let us return directly to our concern with Sass by means then of looking again at the Tractatus on solipsism. Wittgenstein speaks of the subject as being 'invisible' in, i.e. 'at the edge of', at the 'limit' of, the world. But when Wittgenstein says "the world is my world", this doesn't literally mean "not yours". To think of possession here, or of the centrality of the self (e.g. "I am the most important being", or "Everything that happens happens in reference to me"), is not quite solipsism, or rather, at least it is not solipsism as Wittgenstein temporarily sees solipsism as in a certain sense 'gesturing at' a truth. We thus need to qualify somewhat our rendition of Sass in Section 1, above, as yielding for us a coherent notion of schizophrenia as consistent solipsism. The invisibility of the self / the subject, which may yield the feeing that I am nothing and the world is what I apprehend, need not actually clash with the inclination to say that I alone am the world. This is what Wittgenstein means when he writes that "[S]olipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it." (T L-P 5.64) Schizophrenical '(per-)versions' of solipsism fail to recognize this. They fail to realize that, insofar as we can actually get a temporary coherence/sense out of T L-P 5.64- 5.641, it includes an appreciation that the "sense in which...we can talk of a non-psychological I", the 'I' occurring in philosophy "through the fact that the "world is my world", can be put thus: we are talking of a non-psychological 'I' -- the 'I' "occurs"

-- when we say, for instance, "There are four chairs in this room". The 'I' has shrunk to an extensionless point -- and there, 'depicted' linguistically, is the reality co-ordinated with it. (This often ungrasped point again ties T L-P closer to PI than is usually recognised.)

Moreover, and more crucially still, drawing the consequences we must from our Diamondian arguments above: When we have truly understood the Tractatus, when we have read right to its end, then the 'feelings' mentioned above are reread, and understood somewhat differently. Then, T L-P 5.62 ^[102] is not to be read as stating that there is a (thinkable?) statable truth to solipsism, only unfortunately we simply can't state it, as all attempts to state it end in nonsense. Once the whole of T L-P has been read and 'understood', our insights cooncerning solipsism can be left behind. 5.62 then rather becomes, retrospectively, 'merely' what we are (were) inclined to 'believe' about 'solipsism' -- we are inclined to believe that it is something that retains a certain ineffable truth, even if we as it were simply happen to be unable to state it. In fact, though, there is no 'it'. 'Solipsism' is merely a name for a certain set of logical temptations, temptations from which we can -- albeit most likely with serious difficulty (for these temptations are not shallow) -- be delivered, once we cease to think of 'it' as retaining a truth at all behind its 'front' of nonsense. One needs if anything only to be persuaded that 'it' is in fact plain nonsense -- something with which nothing can be done -- once it is 'understood' aright. So: there is no truth behind the 'front' of nonsense -- it is simply a matter of describing this 'front', which is all there actually is, correctly.^[103]

Laing used to say that language fails you, and that language especially fails 'schizophrenics'. We noted earlier that the sense of language's 'inadequacy' is certainly integral to much of Schreber's discourse (see p.53 and p.28 of Paradoxes, for instance), and to its Tractarian echoes. But if language 'fails' you, that doesn't imply directly that there is any thing that you -- that it -- truly fail(s) to express...

The nonsensicality of 'schizophrenic discourse': Wittgensteinian

perspectives on an example

Now, someone might object at this point that schizophrenia, whatever it is, IS lived. Even if one cannot simply claim with regard to metaphysical/assertoric philosophy, to consideration of the strengths and implications of solipsistic philosophy (for example), that it is lived, that this game is played genuinely, and thus that it is owed respect by Wittgensteinians as a language-game, then surely one can claim this of schizophrenia. That game is played, is it not?

But something^[104] that is lived, is experienced, is not necessarily any more sensical, any more open to being understood on its own terms or coherently interpreted, than something that can arguably (as philosophy can) be described as not really lived (-- as at most the coldest, the palest of pale 'fire'). We can imaginitively endeavour to understand schizophrenia as (say) the lived embodiment of what philosophy (solipsism etc.) would be if it were lived; but if we do so, we must be sure not to surreptitiously smuggle back in a suggestion or a sense that the philosophy in question can be a gesturing at profound ineffable truths etc., and thereby sensical, or even thereby profound even thought strictly-speaking incoherent. In 'Paradoxes', Sass makes plain that he is interpreting something that is in some central respects incoherent. But what is it to interpret something incoherent? (Do we know?) Can an interpretation do anything other than give or render a certain coherence to something?^[105]

Thinking though these questions brings us, among other things, to the point of being able to bring together more fully the arguments and suggestions made earlier, in connection with Winch, and the post-Winchian and post-Cavellian arguments of Conant and Diamond just considered. For: If certain forms of 'mental illness' are usefully read as reflections of 'philosophical systems' etc. in the mirror of lived compulsions and thoughts, we must yet not overemphasize the degree to which we have succeeded in understanding the 'mental illnesses' in question. There is an important sense in which, if Conant/Diamond are right on Wittgenstein etc., as well as Sass being right on the salience of the analogy between Wittgenstein on solipsism on the one hand and Schreber 'on' (and as) solipsism on the other, then there can be no such thing as understanding 'schizophrenia'. It will not be the kind of 'thing' for which a hermeneutic can, strictly, be appropriate.^[106]

Let me illustrate THIS vital point, by means of a consideration of the phenomenon of phantom concreteness, the importance and strangeness of which has been emphasized by Laing, among others. This particular example is quite important to Sass's general case. (Note, in passing, his 'interpretive stance' in what follows:)

"[P]atients may be using concrete imagery to describe what is in essence the sort of epistemic oscillation discussed above -- a shift from experiencing one's own subjectivity as an all-constituting force to experiencing it as a merely constituted entity.

The following passage from...Artaud, is an especially striking example of physicalistic language being used to describe something whose nature is, in a sense, mental and inner. It is also a hair-raising description of how the world catastrophe which many schizophrenics dread may be brought on by their hyperreflexivity or quasi-solipsism.

Yes, space was yielding its whole mental padding in which no thought was yet clear or had replenished its load of objects. But little by little the mass turned like a slimy and powerful nausea, a sort of vast influx of blood, vegetal and thundering. And the rootlets which were trembling at the corners of my mind's eye detached themselves with vertiginous speed from the wind-contracted mass. And all space trembled like a vagina being pillaged by the globe of the burning sky. And something like the beak of a real dove pierced the confused mass of states, all profound thinking at this moment formed layers, resolved itself, became transparent and reduced. . . . And two or three more times the whole vegetable mass heaved, and each time my eye shifted to a more precise position. The very darkness became profuse and without object. The total frost gained clarity.^[107]

Like so much of Artaud's writings (and the speech of many schizophrenics), this passage may seem difficult at first [[!!]]. On careful reading, however, it seems to concern a kind of epistemic oscillation between self-as-constituting-consciousness and consciousness-as-object-of-experience. Like Schreber's nerves and rays, the rootlets Artaud describes as trembling at the corner s of his mind's eye symbolize his own consciousness -- a consciousness that has somehow managed the impossible feat of seeing itself from within, as if subjectivity could perceive itself in the very act of constituting the world before it. Artaud's account is a highly atypical but neverthelss profoundly disconcerting counterexample or exception -- albeit fleeting and ultimately self-destructing -- to Wittgenstein's (and Schopenhauer's) point about the necessary invisibility of the eye in its visual field or of the subject in its world.

In these lines, the supposedly imperceptible...representing self -- symbolized by the phantom-concrete image of rootlets of blood at the corners of Artaud's eyes -- seems to flow out into its objects, become visible there, and then dissolve, a process that results in a horrifying ontological catastrophe ([ending in] the nothingness implied by the homogeneous image of objectless darkness and total frost)... . The normally taken-for-granted foundation or horizon of awareness is scrutinized, and this renders...concrete something whose very nature it is to be implicit and within. Inevitably, this process undermines, then dissolves, the normally unseen structures undergirding the possibility of a stable or meaningful experiential world. And so...we have the climactic experience of the most severe schizophrenic psychosis: the world catastrophe feared by the subject who cannot forget that the world must be represented or the world will disappear." (Paradoxes, pp.96-7).

This is a brave, gripping, rather glorious piece of interpretation, even if the early portion of it in particular manifests clear signs of over-interpretation. It concerns what Sass, following others, characterizes as the 'world catastrophe experience' -- a major recurring element in (e.g.) Schreber's delusions. In Artaud's horrifying self-recalling writing (Artaud being a much better writer than Schreber...! (and like Schreber, of course, of schizophreniform delusional bent)), Sass actually finds among other things "a profoundly disconcerting counterexample...to Wittgenstein's...point about the necessary invisibility of the eye in its visual field or of the subject in the world... . [Artaud's] passage appears to describe what happens when the inconceivable occurs: when self-as-constituting-conscioueness enters its own field as an object of awareness (while simultaneously retaining, in some fashion, its being-as-subjectivity)." ^[108] But -- in fact, of course -- there cannot be any such thing as what happens when the inconceivable occurs, etc. . (That is a grammatical remark). It cannot be a "counterexample or exception", even an "ultimately self-destructing one" -- all "ultimately" can mean here is, 'once we have thought things through' ^[109] -- to Wittgenstein's point; for there is no such thing. It can perhaps be an image of same. In the following sense: it can render vivid a temptation which in philosophical prose may be relatively dull and lifeless. (An irony here: that schizophrenics often experience any language as somehow lifeless, meaningless. Perhaps that not infrequently prompts them further, desperately, to colour and vivacity? ^[110])

The danger in Sass's approach here is that it will lead us to think the following: we understand (even if only through Wittgenstein's diagnosis of it) the philosophy which Artaud's writing is being analogised to. So that we are able to understand Artaud's writing; and so we now know what schizophrenia is like (to experience).^[111] But solipsism etc. has no substance which if we were to know it would analogically enable us to understand what happens in severe instances of schizophrenia. In truth, all we know that we didn't know before is some more perhaps-thought-provocative ways of setting out the description of what schizophrenia is 'like'. Or rather, and much more safely: we are perhaps in a better position now to avoid mischaracterizing its nature.

We do not learn what it is for 'the world' to be tied to oneself, nor even what 'the world catastrophe experience' is nor even what it is like -- nor what it is like to see one's consciousness from within, etc.etc. -- through Sass's reading of schizophrenia. Why? We might try putting it this way: Because there is no such thing as what these things are (like). Even though -- and this is what makes things here so very difficult -- it can seem strongly as though there must be such as thing as what these things are like, if we are not to falsify the nature of the sufferer's experience. And even though these various remarks I am making here, which naturally are intended to be helpful in some way, again continually and inevitably risk being also be part of a self-cancelling dialectic, after the fashion of the 'Tractatus'. Such that I am not to be read literally as asserting the incomprehensibility of the stronger moments of 'schizophrenical language', nor as simply stating that there is no such thing as such-and-such. My own remarks, just insofar as they are assertoric, must themselves be nonsensical, self-undermining. My way of putting things is intended rather therapeutically, as an intervention in the form of 'reminders', as a dramatization, as a way of attempting to help the reader (and the writer!) stop wanting to say certain things.)

An important sub-point: the world catastrophe experience, 'so called' (by us), is not an experience of world catastrophe, any more than a decoy duck is a duck; an experience-as-if-of-world-catastrophe, where the mode of the feared catastrophe must moreover be understood to be itself inherently paradoxical/nonsensical -- that is what we get actually to understand, at best (though any actual best is quite good enough). In the phrase "world catastrophe experience", the last word doesn't simply effect a modification of the previous two.

Artaud might even be usefully described as having himself undergone an 'experience-of-world-catastrophe' -- simply because that's an obviously-attractive way of characterizing the words which he himself uses. That does not contradict what I have been writing. We may for example wish to remark on the attractiveness within a certain psycho-logic of the idea of the end of the world -- e.g. because it would render solipsism true 'as a matter of fact', thus increasing dramatically a hoped-for possible consistency of one's self-destructive (chronically unstable) system of thought. One can risk talking of 'the world catastrophe experience' happily enough -- providing one does not think that one is effecting an explanation or even a well-founded interpretation of some thing perhaps-aptly so-called by means of so doing.

What we in fact have now, after reading Sass, is, then -- and this is very important, a very good thing -- a much better chance of not hearing Artaud's or Schreber's writings as simply an eruption of formless garbage, 'word salad', or some such.^[112] They are that, but not phenomenologically. I.e not immediately, but, we might say, ultimately (i.e. after we have thought things through), for they also have a certain phenomenologically-apparent 'logic' to them -- a 'logic', actually, of what is psychologically appealing/effective (to them, at least (and not only)^[113] ), or some such. A 'psycho-logic', a 'patho-logic'. The same kind of ultra-rational and self-defeating 'logic' that grips us when in the grips of a philosophical illusion.^[114] (As one is in fact in, for instance, until one has 'finished' reading T L-P ^[115] ). Insofar as Sass's project is on target, the language of schizophrenics will be understood to have much of the logic of the language of the solipsistic philosopher. But we must not lose sight of the crucial sense in which this is no logic at all.^[116] (Because it doesn't add up to anything. Because 'it' turns in on itself and ultimately, entirely, and (as made clear above) in a strong sense immediately consumes itself.)

It is very hard for a radically-minded psychologist or philosopher to accept all this. It seems a denial of the humanity of people suffering from schizophrenia. It seems a striping away of the tempting thought that behind their tortured talk lies a deeper insight than we sane people manage to have. It is to some extent the latter. But not the former. It need not be a denial of 'humanity', whatever that is, only a denial of the sensicality of some apparently-important portions of speech. I am saying this: that we ought to face up to the hard truth that when we can't attribute sense to something without falsifying it, that we then have on our hands, in our ears, is not something that makes sense.

I'm not saying that Schreber (or whoever of his ilk) is talking nonsense simply because his talk 'violates the rules of our language', for, prima facie, that would rule out the language of the Azande etc. as well. . I'm talking about the so-called 'double-bookkeeping',^[117] about 'the impossible' occuring in his speech (like in Renée's), and so on. My judgement is that, at least at the present time (!), we have no grounds for thinking that we will be able to render this into discourse which we could start using or converse intelligibly in, without violating its apparent 'rules' and 'motivations'. Any interpretation here not only apparently leaves a residue of something missed -- or falsified -- but staticises and reifies something whose internal dynamic leads into a wish to change the way we talk, a wish that we have no room for accomodating without trivializing it. Schreber lived his language maybe, but idiolectically, and thus (at least 'provisionally') absurdly. (As Conant has argued, we must be careful to note that judgements that "x is nonsense" are always in a sense provisional; we have to be open to the possibility that it might be shown to us that we are wrong. But sometimes, as I think here, we have no sufficient grounds yet for taking that possibility seriously -- no more than for doubting various things which would-be sceptics would have us doubt.^[118] )

We also presumably wish to avoid finding ourselves pushed to the (presumably) absurd conclusion that schizophrenia, because lived, is more sensical than (e.g.) solipsistic/scepticalistic philosophy. Both are / are intimately and utterly involved -- mired -- in plain nonsense;^[119] the latter, less stridently and bizarrely than the former, but not really in any difference of degree of nonsensicality, certainly not in favour of the rationality of schizophrenia over philosophy. More important: there are according to Diamond's cogent argument no degrees of nonsense. There is simply nonsense: i.e. sentences, 'theses' etc. for which we have not as yet found a use, and cannot imagine doing so.^[120]

One can of course treat solipsism as situated in dialogues rather than as a philosophical thesis alongside other possible philosophical theses. The thing is that arguably Sass, after Wittgenstein, has admirably shown where this gets one, where this gets the would-be solipsist -- nowhere, in the most salient and indeed drastic sense. Into an undending 'dialectical' oscillation. (Perhaps in part because of the unfortunate degree to which the 'dialogue' of/with a solipsist can only be a monologue. A discourse just not constrained by the usual 'rules' of parlance, and instead running away with itself, in something like the manner of Beckett's Lucky, or Conrad's Marlow's Kurtz.)

One cannot simply say that solipsism -- Schreber's or others -- is logically a nonsense but not pragmatically or dialectically so. One can indeed perhaps come to see why 'solipsism' has the form it has, the 'logic' that it does; but it is a nonsense (one needn't attach the modifier "logically" -- as Diamond would have it, it is philosophically therapeutic to insist that there is only nonsense-logically-speaking), all the same. 'Solipsism' is nothing, is not anything. And thus, ironically, if Sass is notionally right, then there must be a real sense in which 'schizophrenia' is not anything either. What is it like to be 'schizophrenic'? It's not like anything. It's like nothing at all.

And even when one adds in an acknowledgement that to speak of stable 'positions' being acheived even in ordinary everyday dialogue, contrariwise to in the schizophrenic world of quasi-solipsism, is in an important sense itself an idealisation, for the reason that lingustic acts are always parts of ongoing dialogical sequences, unless they are isolated in just the kinds of peculiar ways that 'philosophical assertions' are (e.g. ""That's a tree" "This is a hand", "The present exists now"), and poems are --, then that still doesn't save the solipsist. For, again, mightn't we reasonably say that the whole speech of the solipsist is in an important sense isolated, a monologue? Would it even be unreasonable to press the point by saying 'the solipsist' never really manages to interact with others and to come up with genuinely meaningful claims that one can even temporarily pin down, clarify, and comprehend at all? ^[121] Again, solipsism merely gives the appearance of being, of yielding, something rather than nothing.

A taxonomy of interpretive options

Let us stop for a moment and take stock. Let me lay out what have emerged as the 'interpretive options' facing the reader of (say) Schreber. They may be taxonomised roughly, I think, as follows:

0) Non-interpretation, and explanation simpliciter.

At one extreme end of the spectrum of available options, here, we have the pure 'word-salad' take on schizophrenia, suggesting that any apparent order here is utterly illusory, and that only scientific explanation based on there being a deficit, a brain malfunction etc. can help us to give any kind of account of the phenomena in question. [We have seen I think how this approach manifestly and disastrously fails to attend to most of what is interesting and 'unexpected' about schizophrenia; though of course, there is also a respect in which my own view on these matters bears some relation to (0); see below.]

1) Literalist 'interpretation'. Taking the patient at his word.

This approach [which is potentially attractive on the grounds of its endeavours to avoid (over-)interpretation] splits into two further (very much opposed) options:

i) 'Error theory.' The classic 'poor-reality-testing' version of schizophrenia; Schreber is simply making massive and horrible mistakes in his reasoning all over the place. [Again, Sass has I think shown effectively the massive limitations of this option, which usually shades into (0), above.^[122] ]

ii) A'Credulous' approach. In which no ironizing of Schreber's words is undertaken, but at the cost of our being committed to believing in what Schreber believes in. [The drastic consequences of this option cannot be finessed by appeal to Relativism -- for detail as to why, see my discussion of Kuhn and Sass, below. I have tried to show already why this approach is normally less useful and trouble-free than (4), below.]

2) The patient is sane. And merely engaging in role-playing. One has to say nonsensical things in order to appear a good patient, etc. .

This 'interpretation' appeals to some who are Anti-Psychiatriacally inclined, and has some affinities with (1(ii)), above. [There may be some truth in this option (as indeed with all of these options) -- but it is extremely implausible that (2) could be anything like a complete account of the phenomena in question.]

3) (Strong) Interpretation. As manifested prototypically by psychoanalytic approaches ('regression', etc.), but also by various other psychological readings (see e.g. Schatzman, some Anti-Psychiatry). [Sass usually takes his main opponents to be following either option (0), option (1(i)), or (perhaps most ubiquitously) this option ((3)), that of interpretation proper. But the burden of my paper to date has been the putting forth of an argument to the effect that Sass himself does not escape from engaging in just such (impositional) interpretation, more than he admits. And a substantial part of that argument has involved setting out my worry that, if Sass is roughly right, as I think he is, in taking the word 'delusion' if applied to difficult cases of schizophrenia to be possessed of a grammar quite unlike that of 'mistake', then the problem emerges that there is no longer a criterion available to distinguish an adequate interpretation of such language and action from an inadequate one.^[123] If we can't know when someone is making a mistake (because they could plausibly be delusional in any given instance), we cannot I think understand them. We can't, if you like, trust their 'testimony'.]

4) Winchian description.

One attempts to avoid interpretation, so as to avoid imposing, and avoid making the patient appear either just like oneself after all, or so radically different that imposition upon them will be unavoidable if one is to say anything about them. One attempts, that is, to understand a strange system or practice by understanding it as a strange and different system (unlike (1) or (2), above), but not one so different that it simply cannot be understood, and, in an important sense, if one works hard and is fortunate, simply understood. One might then attempt (e.g.) to avoid ironizing Schreber's talk of the supernatural (via talk of solipsism, etc.), but not through credulousness ((1(ii)), above); rather one would not assume too quickly that one understands what 'the supernatural' is, and one would attempt to find out through facilitating for oneself and others the understanding of the rules and norms and nature of the language-game being played, of the practices being engaged in. [I have argued that this is genuinely the most attractive option on offer for most apparently-strange practices; but I have suggested reasons why Winchian description and understanding does not do for us with regard to some 'schizophrenic language' what it does for us with regard to much other apparently 'alien' language and life (such as that of the Azande, who at least engage in dialogue, and have a shared world; or that of completely outmoded sciences or scientists, who at least had something like a 'research tradition', to use Kuhn's valuable term.). I have suggested, in short, that in the central subject-matter of this paper we may not after all find a language-game that can be understood.]

5) It's nonsense.

...Thus one is reluctantly pushed, having worked through the 'sequence' of options listed above, toward this one, (5), toward the surprising and at first very unattractive view that the upshot of a careful consideration of Sass et al is that sometimes we will simply have to conclude that certain of the phenomena we are interested in (in this paper) are in the end not open to option (3), but are only in appearance (not in reality) interpretable; and that describing them does not (unlike in option (4)) issue in understanding. That sometimes (one should not say too often -- (5) is an option of last resort) Schreber et al exhibit language which, in spite of its having a certain kind of systematicity, is (latently) plain nonsense. This is my provisional conclusion.^[124]

Wittgenstein on the need for an 'everyday' perspective

I have noted that in the first instance we understand only the 'ordinary' or 'everyday' things that others do. Unusual, 'extraordinary' things -- perhaps some of what happened in the Holocaust, or in Milgram's experiments, and certainly much religion, and much of what is done and thought in 'primitive' societies -- can, if we try and are fortunate, be understood through instances of social or socio-historical study ((4), in the taxonomy above). There is no task for a general social science here, merely particular tasks of repairing breaches in our ability to 'grasp' or meet others. The utterly bizarre, the irreparably Other, the residuum which unfortunately cannot be understood at all, there are arbitrarily many ways we can describe (or 'interpret') -- and thus, unmisleadingly, none ((This is 5), in the taxonomy above). In fact -- as I explain in greater detail below -- when we really understand this, we may well find it most useful, least misleading, least confusing, to say: There's nothing there to understand. We are faced with nonsense.

I want at this point to attempt a brief exposition of just how to understand this perhaps-surprising, disconcerting or painful 'provisional conclusion' that I have now reached. I intend to do so by means of illustrating how one ought to understand Wittgenstein's important remarks on dreams and altered states of consciousness, in On Certainty.

For Wittgenstein, it is very important to note that veridical accounts of dreams can only be given from outside the dream context, back in everyday language. This is a conceptual/grammatical point, not an empirical one. It is in essence what renders the whole proceedure of Cartesian doubt so pointless and logically-awry:

" If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake. [For that would be 'too big' to be a mistake.] // And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a table and writing.

"But even if in such cases I can't be mistaken, isn't it possible that I am drugged?" If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining" while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain. " (OC 675-6)

These are the last lines of philosophy which Wittgensteinever wrote. They condense a whole epistemological tradition into 'a drop of grammar'.

If we think now of (say) Schreber or Wolfli, how would they look? Are we to say, for example, that we should be credulous of their claims concerning themselves? Or simply that they have made mistakes, errors?

A Wittgensteinian view, if we are to work with this vital passage from OC, would appear to involve not just a remarking of the analogies between their 'testimonies' concerning themselves and (say) solipsistical philosophic moments, but also a clear noticing of the limited degree which we can take seriously, comprehend, what they say, at all. As Wittgenstein once remarked, in discussing 'private language': "I cannot accept his testimony because it is not testimony. It only tells me what he is inclined to say." (PI 386) As I have been arguing for some time now, we must be wary of taking seriously -- of thinking we can interpret -- what there is/are no clear criteria for the evaluation of. An account of a dream can be given only from outside a dream. But with severe schizophrenia, there is no outside. To be outside delusions (outside the fly-bottle) is ipso facto no longer to be a first-personal authority on this condition. A retrospective account, one prescinding from the form of the condition, of the delusions, is thus not authoritative. But an 'internal' account is an account without authority either. It's like the account Wittgenstein's dreamer gives of what is happening to him while he is dreaming. Schreber is no more in a position to say "I'm dead", or "I'm God", or "I'm a pawn" than a dreamer is to say "I'm dreaming". His remarks are not false -- they just (paradoxical as this might sound) haven't a use.

Ergo, there can be no authoritative account of what severe 'schizophrenic experience' is like. And any such accounts cannot be anything more than nonsense.

A further analogy: The nonsensicality of 'relativism'

But the resistances to understanding and clarity hereabouts are deep-seated. So perhaps to some readers it is still not as yet quite clear what I mean to be saying here. Perhaps it is not yet quite evident what I mean by putting pressure on the various 'hermeneutics' (in a broad sense of that word) of the alien discussed above, by means of questioning whether some severe 'mental illness' can be 'interpreted' as issuing in anything other than nonsense.

If it is not clear, then there is reasonably close at hand one further analogy, of my own, which may help. That is: it is perhaps worth noting by way of an illuminatory comparison that the problem of solipsism -- which I have expounded as it is handled by Sass, after Wittgenstein, in the first section of this paper -- is, ultimately, directly parallel to the endlessly-fascinating and recently much-discussed problem of 'Relativism':

If one imagines oneself to be a Relativist, does one imagine that one is somewhere -- or potentially everywhere; or nowhere? Relativism sometimes seems to lean toward the ‘everywhere’ option: one imagines that one can be ‘on the inside’ of whoever and whatever, can come to be empathetic with anyone or everyone, etc. . But then it sometimes oscillates directly over to the ‘nowhere’ option: one imagines that one can synoptically observe -- simultaneously -- all the particular places people are, and one could be, but from 'outside' of them all.

Or again; one hopes to be able to be 'inside' one's own subjectivity, and assert the truth of relativism only relatively, only for oneself, only subjectively; but one hopes also that one can say quite 'objectively' that a relativistic attitude (toward the 'places', the 'insides' described above) is the only tenable one, that relativism is simply true.

But as is perhaps now reasonably widely-understood, these ‘options’ just are not stable. In trying to make sense of any one option, one finds oneself led naturally from one to the next.

Being ‘nowhere’ is impossible -- one is still somewhere. And being ‘everywhere’ is impossible too -- it just amounts itself to a desperate oscillation. More important still however is the oscillation between being ‘nowhere’ and being ‘everywhere’. ^[125] And -- like the relativist --the solipsist who would be ‘everywhere’ ends up being in a very drastic sense ‘nowhere’.

And there is a further and more precise parallel one might draw between Sass’s treatment of the problem, of schizophrenia, of solipsism, and the attempts of those countenancing some form of Relativism to account for their own proceedures (E.g. Feyerabendian and Kuhnian 'relativisms' concerning scientific progress and rationality, and in particular the rather severe problematic that Kuhn finds himself in when he alleges that paradigms are incommensurable with one another but yet tells us with great perspicacity the story of the change from one to another such that we are able to make sense of it). This further parallel is of particular interest, in that Sass may ultimately find himself caught in a very similar dilemma to that which (e.g.) Kuhn is embroiled in. Because Sass’s hermeneutical approach finds a new way of making sense of much schizophrenia -- but yet we may ultimately have to allow that schizophrenia cannot be made sense of, cannot be interpreted, at least by one who has not themselves entered fully into it... (And in that case ...). Sass may confront a similar problem to that that has been shown^[126] to confront Kuhn, in that there are arguably severe limits to the extent to which we can understand 'alien science' (as science), without literally becoming 'aliens'. Likewise, there may be severe limits to the extent to which 'schizophrenia' can be comprehensible at all, if it issues in what a sane person cannot help regarding as nonsense, albeit nonsense with a certain 'psycho-logic' of its own.

Thus, while we might want to say that Sass -- like Kuhn -- has apparently given us a "partial understanding" of what previously seemed simply irrational or some such, we should be wary of what can possibly be meant by a "partial understanding" which in principle must remain partial. This is a strange and perhaps dangerously-misleading grammar.^[127] For any ordinary use of the word "partial" gains its sense by its opposition to use of the word "total". But not here.

Again, I'm trying to place 'schizophrenia' on a 'spectrum'; and it looks like we're if anything even worse off with it than we are with alien science. Because it is only according to a strong reading of Kuhn that the latter is purportedly both interpretable and incomprehensible -- a weaker and surely ultimately more plausible Kuhn yields no such paradox. Whereas the 'strong' reading of Wittgenstein which emerges from the tradition of Cavell, Winch, Diamond and Conant is, I have suggested, ominously plausible... And that strong reading leaves no room for the idea of the incomprehensible being interpretable. Thus severe schizophrenic language would have to be reckoned to be un-understandable.

In fact, much the same difficulty arguably confronts all these hermeneutics of the 'alien', as a structural danger: that, just insofar as they coherently insist there is something truly alien here, so we have grounds for doubting that we can understand 'it', grounds for doubting that 'it 'is coherent (this problem arises equally starkly for the would-be 'position' of Relativism as it does for the would-be Solipsist). Just insofar as they (often brilliantly) describe how we can (and cannot) understand it, we have grounds for doubting that it is truly alien. ^[128]

One can’t switch one’s point of view routinely; nor can one magisterially survey. I think it is important to stress, as Pragmatist-Wittgensteinians do, that, roughly, one has to be somewhere. One can’t get away from where one is, from one’s 'hermeneutical situation', if you wish. The most one can do is do the kinds of things ordinary people do and that good 'human scientists' etc. (following Winch etc.) train themselves to do a little more: to try to understand things that are strange, by temporarily bracketing certain ordinary assumptions, etc. etc. .

But the danger in Sass's work is in the end that of almost work on severe psychopathology -- that the alien, the other, is rendered comprehensible, robbed of its alienness by this work -- but we still want and need to insist that in some important respects it bloody-well is alien...

This brings to an end my critique of Sass. I believe that I have established effectively that the light Wittgensteinian etc. philosophy can shed on the nature of 'schizophrenia' is rather different from that that he imagines. Sass's radical psychology is, philosophically-speaking, still not radical enough. A truly Wittgensteinian line here, I have suggested, has consequences more drastic even than Sass imagined.

In the next and final part of this paper, I shall examine the implications of this fact.

Can 'schizophrenic language' be interpreted?:

Part 3) Conclusions

In Section (1) of this paper, I set out Louis Sass's interpretation of 'schizophrenic language'. In Section (2), I presented a set of arguments which to my mind established securely the claim that 'schizophrenic language' cannot in many cases be interpreted at all. I seek now to detail the meaning of this, and what further implications it may have.

Is 'schizophrenic language' perhaps interpretable in some quite

different -- e.g. literary -- manner?

Before I can rest easy with the task envisaged for this third and final part of my paper, however, I must deal with one last substantive objection, a vital objection to my claims, and which is best imaginable, perhaps, along the following lines: "Perhaps you have in mind the wrong model of what "understanding" must be; perhaps the language of schizophrenics might safely be said to give us a way of speaking about the nature of schizophrenic experience in something like the way that the language of the stream-of-consciousness writers gave us a way of understanding/ characterizing/representing/speaking about the nature of thinking. (A way which has since become popular in English classes (e.g. in 'intensive writing'), sometimes in certain forms of therapy, and so on.) Is 'schizophrenic language', in short, perhaps interpretable in some quite different manner to that which you have hitherto imagined?"

But: It would be a deep mistake to say that stream-of-consciousness writing, even when successful, and even when efficaciously popularized beyond the avant-garde, gave us a way of capturing the form of thinking. It would be a mistake too to say that this genre enables us to say what thinking is like, and what it was like before the stream of consciousness genre came onto the scene. We ought to be careful to avoid similar mistakes in the case of 'schizophrenic language'. I am concerned that at times Sass doesn't guard successfully against that danger.

I wish then to question the idea that one can validly get an interpretation of a pre-existing psychological phenomenon by means of finding a new 'apposite' way of 'describing' -- of verbally 'depicting' -- it. Let me illustrate my contentions here by reference to William Faulkner's superb use of a so-called 'stream of consciousness' method, especially in the opening part of his 'The sound and the fury'. It is an example peculiarly appropriate for our present purposes, as will shortly become plain, in virtue of the strictly limited (and not to be over-estimated^[129]) but nevertheless very intriguing affinities between Faulkner's protagonist and Daniel Paul Schreber. At this point let me quote extensively from a literary critic, James Guetti, in his exemplary treatment of the key sections of Faulkner's text:

"I want to take a case...of recognizing a text as "another language"...in which it may seem self-evident that a way of speaking is locally, personally, and "psychologically identifiable", and therefore apparently controlled by its connections with a reader's own intelligible vocabularies from beyond the text, when in fact as a language it takes much more dominion than that. The best single example I can give of this linguistic condition is from Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury', Benjy's narrative:

I could hear them talking. I went out the door and I couldn't hear them, and I went down to the gate, where the girls passed with their booksatchels. They looked at me, walking fast, with their heads turned. I tried to say, but they went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and they went faster. Then they were running and I came to the corner of the fence and I couldn't go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and trying to say.

What Benjy is "trying to say", as we know from the rest of his section of the novel, is that he thinks he sees, or expects to see, or, more certainly, that he wants to see his sister Caddy, whom he used to meet on her way home from school; and he is trying as well to do something that he can never do, to talk to another human being. But what his "trying to say" amounts to, we also know, is a continuous loud and horrible bellowing. And along these same lines we know as well that Benjy now, at the age of thirty-three, is large, shambling, fat, drooling, and an "idiot"." ^[130]

But, as Guetti goes on to observe of this "idiot", Benjy, who "bellows", and who yet seems somehow to be the centre of a slightly solipsistic (and odd, allegedly 'under-developed', sensitive), intelligence:

"[What] seems most interesting is the way that Benjy's comparative incapacity, and his very vulnerability, becomes his individual capacity and power. As may be observed in the quotation I have just given, his inability to conceive of causal sequences enables him to notice a very great deal as it happens. ...And his failures at "trying to say"...become his "saying" to a reader.

This effect depends, of course, upon Benjy's continuousness to a reader over a time... . What I am suggesting is that, sooner or later, a reader ceases to depend upon one's regarding it as the language of an "idiot", when that language possesses an authority and resonance beyond that of an locally identifiable human language: "Father went to the door and looked at us again. Then the dark came back, and he stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again. Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell... . Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep." ...

[T]o understand the emotional force of Benjy's language, is to say that it somehow generalizes his case, and that his appeal is the appeal, and his language the words, of a "child". His vulnerability, which is equivalent to the fact that his wonderful imaginings must remain frustrated and potential, his perpetual innocence that will be hurt again and again... all underwrite his image as a child. And so one might say that Benjy's text is "locally" identifiable after all, and that if it moves us it does so by connecting with what we already know about children.

Or by connecting with what we think we know. For what in fact do we know about such childhood? How do we know that experiences for children are so beautifully discrete and yet so synchronizable, or that a child [could] feel that "the trees were buzzing", or that -- when a child slept -- "the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes"?... I would suggest, then, that we do not recognize that Benjy is a "child" by extension from what we know about other children. If there is such a "recognition" here, it probably goes in the other direction: we know about other children by Benjy; he sets a standard; he is the child. Indeed, he so moves us because probably he is somehow more a "child" than any particular child could be." ^[131]

The last two sentences are crucial. Benjy is perhaps a 'paradigm', a prototype. In his language something is exemplified more perhaps than it is ever found in the real world;^[132] and it is described in such a way that we now have a way for describing 'better' that real world. As Guetti writes:

"What happens as Benjy's narrative develops, I think, is rather like what Wittgenstein describes, in quite another context, when he says that "the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing" (OC, 15). Benjy's language ceases to be dominated by the rules of the grammars we bring to it; it becomes, for its duration, itself the dominating language. And the reason why this seems so remarkable is that it amounts, again, to a reversal of what we think we are doing with such narratives. For we at least begin by feeling that we "understand" them by placing them in some sort of comparitive relation with rules and vocabularies of which we are assured; and yet, sooner or later, these narratives come to exceed such presumptions and to achieve a different kind of status. The character in question...becomes "right" to say what he says not because we can explain his speech "psychologically", not because we can be right about him, but because through the appeal of its sustained presence his language is transformed from a sort of "dialect" or merely local grammar into the only way of talking, into a ['language'] a reader must speak as he reads." ^[133]

We must come to 'speak' Benjy's 'language', rather than to continue to 'translate' it from 'idiot-talk' into our own talk, if we are to be able to get anywhere with this text; if, for instance, and we must be very careful here, we are to be able to use it to 'represent' some form of experience. Maybe this can be done with 'schizophrenia' (and maybe with 'Autism' too -- as for instance Donna Williams's books ^[134] may bring us to think). But I think we should be extremely wary of the thought that any of this can amount to getting us inside the head of another, if the mental life of that other is sufficiently drastically different from our own for us to be unsure even whether to call it a mental life except analogically. If we think of Benjy's talk as like 'another language' we must not think of it as a fully decodable, interpretable language.^[135] And that makes all the difference. We may hear or even 'speak' Benjy's 'language' -- but we still, I want to say, don't exactly understand it.

As Guetti holds, it is experiences of language that are truly -- for us -- in question here, experiences of 'grammatical' effects and associative effects; not simply communications, not just meaning and signifying. "[A]ll sorts of sharply felt but mysteriously untraceable "experiences"...", of the kind that Faulkner facilitates our regarding Benjy and (through him) 'idiots', or children, or even ourselves, as having "...appear to be entwined with the "possibilities" of language, to be produced by languages presented in their autonomous authority and substance...".^[136] Everyday language, and things (e.g. ordinary communicative and performative utterances in foreign languages) that we can translate into it without violence, without loss of meaning and expression, involve sensical significations. Whereas, like poetry -- insofar as it is poetry which exposes to our view the form of language, rather than allowing itself to be translated into everyday prose, into (e.g.) a 'moral' or 'the poem's meaning' --, discourse which must remain 'another language', such as Benjy's -- does not for us involve signification (at least, not centrally, in terms of the features of it which are of interest, which are distinctive). Contrary to appearances, it does not 'make sense'; any more than do the propositions of the Tractatus, even in context. And nor, ultimately, I am claiming, does the interesting and difficult portion of Schreber's (or Artaud's or Renée's) discourse, even in context.

We are led by Faulkner's 'empathy' and erudition -- and perhaps by the decoding 'game' he sometimes encourages the reader to engage in, to identify 'what Benjy is actually talking about' -- to believe that we understand now the psychology of someone with a serious mental disturbance, or of "the child". But, as Guetti asks: What do we really know of these things; or rather, what does it mean to know of these things? I am not making the point that this is fiction -- indeed, I have no doubt that in its way Faulkner's writing is signally more illuminating about real human beings than many a shelf's load of psychology textbooks. But all we in fact have here is a 'language' which we can now use to 'represent' abnormal -- or child -- psychology; or, better, to give instances of it. Strictly, that language signifies nothing. We must do violence to that language in order to render its sentences into our own, into sentences that signify /make sense, in(to) our sensical language. Insofar as we translate Benjy's sentences into our own, we are stripping away their 'literariness', their particularity, transforming them into our own pale reflections of them, finding ways of making sense of them such that they are no longer nonsensical, alien.^[137] We want to have it both ways, but really we can have it neither -- if Benjy's language is responsible to reality, if that is how coming to grips with it supposedly enables us to understand his abnormal psychology, then any translation of it into our language will eliminate that 'responsibility' to reality, and ensure that the project of understanding the reality of this abnormal psychology fails. But if we can straightforwardly translate Benjy's language into our own and understand it and him thereby, then we didn't need to understand his language 'on its own terms', in order to 'capture' what it 'depicts', in the first place.

One might in fact better say, then, that -- when most successful -- 'the stream of consciousness novel' actually succeeded in generating a new paradigm for what we would come to regard as / count as expressing thoughts.^[138] I.e. When most successful, it actually succeeded in generating the illusion that it was accurately expressing a previously-existing-but-as-yet-ineffable phenomenon.^[139] That there could in an important sense be no such thing as doing that in this case or in others like it (for grammar/ language is not responsible to reality; only (some) statements are), we do not see. 'Capturing' and turning the forms of our thought ^[140] into a content -- even one simply 'to be gestured at'-- is not a possible project.

No more in the case of 'schizophrenia' than in that of literature, or of philosophy.

Can 'schizophrenic language' be interpreted?

If the question can be allowed at all -- and we have seen very good reasons along the way to be concerned and suspicious over some aspects of it -- then in a certain sense we should admit that the answer is that it can be. The question is: should it be? And the "should" there is primarily methodological, rather than ethical, in its purport.

For there is another sense to the question in which the answer, at least in my opinion, is plainly that it cannot -- that precisely what is hard to understand in schizophrenia cannot be interpreted without doing quite radical violence specifically to 'it'. That there cannot be a successful interpretation of such schizophrenia, because there cannot be true self-understandings of people with schizophrenia ^[141] there to facilitate the production of descriptions which could be the basis, the potential criteria of correctness, for such interpretations. That any interpretation will fail to present effectively the central aspects of the phenomenon, which are best regarded as nonsensical, as literally incomprehensible.

And so: A key aspect of what I want to say, a final 'answer' to some of the questions to Sass which I raised in the early portions of Section (2), above, might, in the aftermath of my argument in the latter portions of Section (2), be put as follows: Interpretations can in very specific circumstances be apposite, and more generally they can be fun, and sometimes of course they can even be useful -- but arguably we should say that what they can't (again, except in certain really quite specific cases) be, vis-a-vis human action, is true (or false) (And of course, if what Sass is saying is actually better understood along the lines of, "DON'T see it like that or that; try looking at it like this", then fine; but no-one would think of saying that a suggestion could itself be true, or false!). Rather, following Winch, only descriptions can be true or false.

And even if this is not accepted as a general principle of the philosophy of the human sciences, it still ought to be accepted in the specific case of schizophrenia. Why? Because we have seen particular reason, in this case, to suppose that much of the tricky stuff that people are attempting to interpret cannot be made sense of.

Wittgenstein once wrote, "I do not interpret [when] I feel at home in the present picture. When I interpret, I step from one level of thought to another." ^[142] One interprets if one is not 'at home' and has some decent hope of genuinely being able to get (at least closer to) 'home' by means of interpreting (and no hope of being able to do so simply by, e.g, describing). If there is some distinction between better and worse interpretations, some criteria for establishing that one's interpretation has sent one happily 'homeward bound'. But what if these conditionals are not fulfilled? If there is no chance of getting home, and not even any clear sense of being closer to or farther from home? Then interpretation will be pointless and hopeless, however much 'fun' it might sometimes be.

Though that something (e.g. much 'schizophrenic discourse') is in significant part uninterpretable, or nonsensical, must always, again, be adjudged only provisionally, nevertheless, that it is is sometimes the wisest judgement to make...

Summary of this paper

In Section (2) of this paper, I used chiefly Wittgensteinian methods, including application of the work of Winch, Diamond and Conant, and the Wittgensteinian literary critic, Guetti, to challenge Louis Sass's 'Wittgensteinian' interpretation of schizophrenia. I have considered possible positive analogies each of these offer which may help us understand hard cases of schizophrenia, or at least to understand its non-understandability. I latterly used Guetti to deal with an objection to the morals I endeavoured to draw from my consideration of Diamond/Conant, and to provide an analogy for schizophrenia supplementary to that which I drew from them. That is, having raised serious doubts via Winch as to whether, logically, 'schizophrenic language' can be interpreted, I offered an austere 'reading' of this 'language' as nonsense via Diamond/Conant, and followed that up with a supplementary 'reading' of it as akin to non-decodable literature. If my approach is along roughly the right track, then Sassian hopes (in Madness and Modernism, particularly) of interpreting schizophrenia via (decoded) literature are in their essentials in vain. The best available 'models' for interpreting the truly alien are themselves uninterpretable, remain alien. (Like a reading of a good poem with a 'strong' grammar -- such a reading is either just the poem again, or is, as Harold Bloom would have it, at most another poem.)

Mine remains, however, very much a sympathetic critique; for it is not as if I think a better hermeneutic than Sass's is available to take its place. I have questioned, rather -- on grounds which might be described as coming first and foremost from the philosophy of language, while aiming throughout to be responsive to the real situations faced by 'human scientists', such as psychologists and anthropologists -- to question whether one can hope to interpret schizophrenia at all, whether any interpretation can itself issue in anything other than misleading nonsense. Sass is the object of my critique precisely because in looking afresh at Schreber and schizophrenia he offers us something fresh, brilliant and even beautiful (And he does at least avoid 'explanation', unlike the Cognitivists and Bio-Psychiatrists of schizophrenia, instead staying nothing worse than rigorously hermeneutical;^[143] while his negative points against the interpretations he is displacing are I think very effective, raising serious doubts as to whether even the Anti-Psychiatrists have really taken a radical enough approach to their topic.). The reader will have to judge finally whether, in the light of my critique, Sass's thought-experiment and his juxtaposition of texts has cast a sufficiently substantial degree of illumination to have been worth its hazards. Or whether, rather, Sass has not quite managed to follow the track laid out by the quotation from Wittgenstein which he used as the epigraph for the Preface to his book, The paradoxes of delusion: "You must always be puzzled by [schizophrenic] mental illness"...^[144]

Schreber & co. as aware of their nonsense

The irony, though, is that Sass himself actually helps show us, unprecedentedly if arguably slightly unconsciously, that there appears to be a sense in which 'schizophrenics' themselves sometimes implicitly 'know' all this.^[145] I.e. Unlike "Benjy",^[146] Schreber & co. go so far as to know in many cases that there is something quite extraordinarily paradoxical about the language they are using, that there are reasons why they cannot say what they are 'trying to say'; they know that much of what they are saying, and of what they are 'hearing', IS nonsense.^[147] (These moments, when patients themselves express endemic confusion about their own worlds, these moments flip, before our eyes, between offering perhaps the strongest evidentiary support there could be for my take on schizophrenics' talk and experience (as nonsense), and simultaneously evidencing in a sense a quasi-Laingian understanding on their part of their own condition which makes our own efforts to understand seem paltry or unnecessary...!) There are in fact passages in the Memoirs where this knowledge becomes extraordinarily -- even philosophically -- evident:

"These phrases [following] were of great interest to me as they permitted me to see that God after all was not so devoid of all understanding for the necessities arising from the order of the world... There were various ways of expressing the thought that the whole policy God was pursuing against me aimed at destroying my reason had failed. Some phrases were of a general nature without any personal implication, as for instance: "Knowledge and capabilities can in any case never be lost", and "All nonsense cancels itself out."" ^[148]

As Sass would say, his reason had indeed not been destroyed, except in a certain sense by itself -- it had been transfigured, turned in upon itself and multiplied indefinitely. But when we find Schreber going further, and echoing (in 'God's' voice) the close of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, of nonsense that knows what it is ... For him to say that all nonsense (even -- especially? -- that that he finds in himself, through 'God') cancels itself out ... This ought to really make us think.

"Other phrases were in part adressed to me personally, in part -- spoken through my head as it were: "Don't forget that all representing is nonsense", or "Don't forget that the end of the world is a contradiction in itself." // On a very few occasions one went so far as to make a kind of confession of one's own guilt, for instance: "If only I had not put you among the fleeting-improvised men..."" ^[149]

Again, the Tractatus's concluding dialectic -- all that has come before is nonsense; 'solipsism' (and 'the world-catastrophe-experience' too) included. (And yet still, immediately thereafter, the impossible shift of/into 'solipsism' again, immediately self-refuting. One(self) -- God -- has thrown Schreber (oneself) into a condition where one is the only being existing...)

These passages add a further wheel within wheels. To stretch the point just slightly: If in a certain sense folks such as Schreber (via his voices...) have sometimes already in fact existentially grasped, know, not just solipsism but the Wittgensteinian critique of it, even á la Conant and Diamond, then in a certain sense truly what is left for others, such as philosophers and those using philosophers' words, to do? Other than, perhaps, carefully ethnograph/describe 'schizophrenic' linguistic and non-linguistic actions, insofar as it is possible to do so, and guard against any interpretation of them (given that any interpretation, even a 'sympathetic' / decently-complex and non-reductive one will tend of necessity to echo the features of traditional impositional interpretations).^[150] Thus this argues again, I think, for the general importance of letting Schreber, Artaud et al speak for themselves as much as possible, for 'leaving 'schizophrenia' as it is' (except, of course, in the sense that those who have it may in a few cases be a danger to others; or may of course in many cases want therapy, 'cure', friendship or whatever -- which we might be able to help with; or we might not). Let us not be un-humble about our understanding, through over-intellectualisation -- let us not be too quick, that is, to think that clever use of (for example) philosophy can enable us to understand, to speak for, the deeply-strange...

The problem for 'radical psychology'

There remains a problem, of course: how then to engage (the talk of) these folks.^[151] For if they just speak for themselves then they will frequently fail to be understood, or, perhaps worse still, be impositionally interpreted. But I have argued that this is in an important sense inevitable. In the end, Karl Jaspers is half-right on the language of madness. 'Full-blown' schizophrenical discourse is not best regarded as comprehensible, or even as interpretable -- though for different grounds from those which Jaspers gave. We cannot understand it, though not because it is allegedly 'ill-formed', or 'childish' to such as degree that it is alien to us adults, or 'irrational'. Nor even because it is a mystery beyond the reach of ordinary human concepts, or an expression of 'an alternative reality'. We 'cannot' understand it, because there is in the end no thing there for us to understand, not even a world.^[152] (There is only a mass of contradictions, which is as much (and as little) as to say: nothing.)

We can only at best describe it; or, sometimes better, let it stand there, shining, exposed to view:

"Objects are stage trappings, placed here and there, geometric cubes without meaning. // People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite plain, crushed by the pitiless electric light. And I -- I am lost in it, isolated, cold, stripped, purposeless under the light... Madness was finding oneself permanently in an all-embracing Unreality. I called it the "Land of Light" because of the brilliant illumination, dazzling, astral, cold, and the state of extreme tension in which everything was, including myself." ^[153]

I would attempt no 'translation'.^[154] This is a paradigm for describing a certain lived experience, we say. But that doesn't mean that sense can be made of it.^[155]

One may feel -- one should feel -- a sense a loss at the alienness, or even the nothingness, of some schizophrenics. Unless they recover, they are lost to us 'normals'. But to make sense of words such as these of Renée's would be a fake way of re-establishing connection or community. It would be to violate them, even perhaps to violate their sense of 'the senselessness of things' -- though to say that is already to have said too much.

Philosophy, perhaps (at best), best truly leaves schizophrenic language as it is.^[156]

And so, a last thought, concerning the application of what I have written here. I think Section 3 of this paper strengthens the notion, intimated earlier, that one ought to be extremely wary of concluding that Sass -- or I -- may have created or stumbled upon a possible distinctive 'philosophical therapy' for schizophrenia. For there is no particular reason vis-a-vis 'schizophrenic' language and life -- unlike 'ordinary' (merely theoretical) philosophic language and 'life' -- for supposing that the safety, or distance, is available to the sufferer to be able to re-vision the 'riverbed' of their delusions in the light of a 'diagnosis' of them, of whatever kind. 'Philosophical therapy' will often probably be just futile, occasionally be helpful -- and sometimes make things worse. Because it may be felt simply as yet another level of thought on top of all the reflectivity and reflexivity that's already there. It may precisely have the opposite effect to that intended, by further derealizing, rather than exposing and assisting in a retreat from and reconfiguration of delusion -- of unreality.

So: We can try engaging with purveyors of nonsense intellectually, try effecting a philosophical talking cure. It's one thing which might be worth trying to do. But I think I can end this paper on a point of agreement with Sass: Perhaps a key difference between people with philosophy and people with schizophrenia, is that it is only with the former that such engagement is likely to be, if not usually successful, at least usually relatively harmless, relatively risk-free.^[157]

---

^[1] In using these terms, as will become evident, I do not mean to pre-judge for or against either Anti-Psychiatry or the Bio-Medical Model, and I intend to a considerable extent to try to finesse any decision between them. For, though my 'political' sympathies are very strongly with radical psychology against the mainstream, some portions of this paper may raise some serious questions in the reader's mind about both. (See also n.2, below.)

^[2] I will eventually parenthetically consider the question of whether in fact the very label "schizophrenia" can itself be regarded as other than already a (rather dubious) interpretation, already presupposing the medical model etc. . (See also notes 5 and 18, below.).

^[3] Quotes taken from p.87 of Louis Sass's "Civilized Madness: schizophrenia, self-consciousness and the modern mind" (History of the human sciences 7:2 (1994), 83-120.).

^[4] For more detail, consult Sass, "The Consciousness Machine: Self and subjectivity in schizophrenia and modern culture", in Neisser and Jopling (eds.), The conceptual self in context (Cambridge: C. U. Press, 1997), p.203f. . As we shall see, the 'regression' or 'arrested (sexual) development' model of Freud and his followers is just as vulnerable to Sass's critique (and possibly to replacement by his alternative) as are the other ways of seeing the 'disorder'.

^[5] See pp.84-5 of "Civilized Madness" (op.cit.) for some of the precursors to Sass's interpretation, notably G.Devereux. (On the term "schizophrenic" [also the terms "paranoid", "Autist", etc.], I might remark that the locution "person with schizophrenia", at a minimum, may be preferable, to avoid a misleading sense of the 'disease' eclipsing at all times the person -- only the locution is rather unwieldy, and so I shall often stick with "schizophrenic", for brevity.)

^[6] The modifying adjective "cognitivistic" leaves open the possibility that Sass's approach is compatible with some (other) aspects of medicalistic approaches to schizophrenia: see below.

^[7] See p.199-205 of Sass's Madness and Modernism (New York: HarperCollins, 1992.) for his critique of Derrida, whom he sees as needing, like traditional philosophy, to be diagnosed by the (counter-)philosophy emerging from Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Foucault.

^[8] Op.cit. . One might well find an inspiration for this work in Laing's The Divided Self (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), especially in the third chapter of that book, "Ontological insecurity", which begins with a quotation from Lionel Trilling on the difference between the world-views 'of' Shakespeare and Kafka, and goes on to 'apply' that thought with regard to psychiatric case-studies etc. . See also Sass's "Schizophrenia, Modernism and the "Creative Imagination"" (forthcoming).

^[9] New York: Cornell, 1994. (Henceforth 'Paradoxes)

^[10] My own private Germany: D.P.Schreber's secret history of modernity (Princeton U.Press: Princeton, 1996).

^[11] Is this talk of the 'form' of schizophrenic language not already an over-intellectualization of it, and indeed an interpretation of it, in precisely the sense that I have already promised to question in Section 2, below? An important question, to which I ask the reader to wait for Section 2 to provide, in practice, an answer. But to anticipate briefly : To some extent, I think that this term, 'form' can be read as simply a tool in an available harmless accurate description (not interpretation) of this language. But going beyond that, my vocabulary here is in any case 'transitional'. I use it to explain what Sass is saying (is, like Schreber and others, "trying to say", a phrase that deserves our careful attention...); but there are important respects in which I think ultimately that it has to be abandoned. [In future work, I hope to expand on the importance and limitations of the locution "trying to say", in contexts such as these (see also my discussion of Faulkner's Benjy, at the end of Section 2, below). "Trying to say", philosophically-speaking, can only be a 'transitional' moment, not a secure 'resting-place' (See n.101, below, for a cautionary note with regard to this notion of "transitionality", too.)] The 'form' of 'schizophrenic language' turns out in an important sense to be ... no form at all, I shall claim. I traffic in talk of "the form of schizophrenic language", but ultimately this will be talk recognized to be in important part simply nonsensical, and the 'ladder' of this language, this talk, this vocabulary, will be thrown away.

^[12] These adjectives should be distinguished from (e.g.) , 'primitive', or 'child-like', descriptors of 'schizophrenia' generally used by those who think that schizophrenia can be successfully interpreted -- as expressing infantile yearnings and fears, etc. . (It should further be borne in mind that I am not myself actually expressing or asserting agreement with the notion that there can be such a thing as a genuine dignosis of 'schizophrenia' in the sense in which there is such a thing as genuine diagnosis of (e.g.) flu, or sickle-cell aneamia, etc. etc. . On this, I am in accord with Mary Boyle's paper, "Schizophrenia: The fallacy of diagnosis", Changes: An international journal of psychology and psychotherapy 14:1 (March 1996), pp.5-13.)

^[13]It seems to me that Schatzman especially DOES have some claim to be able to explain the form of Schreber's delusions. Cf. the following passages (from p.23 of his (op.cit.)): "Dr. Schreber's [Daniel Paul's father's] system implies a contradiction, which he does not seem to see, between where it trains a child to look for his programmes and where it trains him to think he looks. It teaches the child to expect an external authority to programme him ('the habit of subordinating his will to the will of his parents or teachers' must be 'imutably implanted' in him'), but also teaches him to see himself as 'self-reliant' and 'self-determined', i.e. as the origin of his programming." Here, in this contradiction, we have the origins, possibly, of the 'dialectic' Sass will depict (and will analogize to the contradictions within modern subjectivising humanism according to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (NY: Vintage, 1979; transl. A.Sheridan) and The Order of Things (NY: Random House, 1970; transl. A.Sheridan), the 'dialectic' of overwhelming external power vs. solipsism, the irrevocable tension between an irresistible 'external' force and one's immovable 'internal' object -- oneself. Schatzman goes on: "Certain experiences of the son in his 'nervous illness' can be seen as an ingenious attempt to deal with the contradiction. This view of his experiences is radically different from the view that they are signs and symptoms of an illness... . // Through rays, the son's God watches, dictates, or condemns his every move, all day every day, much as, it seems, his father had done. The son feels God and the 'rays' to be at once outside and inside himself...". Thus Schreber: "God himself was on my side in His fight against me"... (Memoirs, p.79).

(Let me add that the content of both Freud's and Schatzman's accounts of Schreber's delusions (as based in homosexual fantasy and actual parental abuse, respectively) have been disputed by Zvi Lothane ("Schreber, Freud, Flechsig, and Weber revisited: An inquiry into methods of interpretation", Psychoanalytic Review 76 (2), 1989).)

^[14] Pp.110-1 of his Textbook of Psychiatry (New York: Dover, 1951 (1924)). We will however raise questions later which will amount to challenging whether Bleulerian/Sassian "double-bookkeeping" can be intelligibly regarded as other than already an interpretation, as opposed to a description simply capturing a pre-existing phenomenon.

^[15] In his successful depositions to the court, Schreber went so far as to claim (Memoirs, p.301) that his delusions could "...never in any way influence my behaviour in any worldly matter...", with the one exception of his cross-dressing.

^[16] One particularly interesting interpretation on this point is offered in Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks, transl. Metteer and Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1990). Kittler argues that Flechsig's depersonalizing language of nerves, the brain, etc., when combined with various associated very concrete non-linguistic practices such as his lack of interest in patients he could not experiment on (cf. also p.70ff. of Santner), was actually and correctly perceived by Schreber as a threat to his integrity as a person.

^[17] See pp.40-41 of Freud ("The case of Schreber", Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XII (London: Hogarth, 1958); cf. also pp.14-15, on Schreber's competence on the practical 'being-in-the-world' side of the ledger). Schreber goes so far as explicitly to consider the likelihood that the 'soul' Flechsig which he understands to be tormenting him may have little connection with the real Flechsig whom he encounters in flesh and blood. This is a doubling of a particularly clear kind.

^[18] And, indeed, talk of "schizophrenic language" at all. Use of this term of course may risk reifying something not only heterogenous but also fluid, context-dependent (vitally), etc. . I hope and intend in what follows concretely to very largely avoid such risks (and hope this declaration of intent can be pursued further by the reader). I think of 'schizopohrenia' as in the first place referring to conduct, to a set of actions and interactions, not necessarily to something 'inner'. This deflates to some extent the very question of understanding 'schizophrenic people' (by means of rendering the question one which is to do with human interaction as much as it is to do with an 'internal' realm), and reduces the danger of my being hoist on my petard, in virtue of having arguably already effected an interpretation of the actions, the phenomena, in question by means of my employing the concept -- the category -- of 'schizophrenia' at all. (If the reader is still caught up on the basic question of why one would focus so much on language in the first place, a somewhat more straightforward double answer is available: because its form and content offer and indeed constitute many of the central manifestations of 'psychopathology' , and because one of the very few things which gives one any hope at all of understanding 'psychopathology' is close attention to language. It perhaps yields, after Wittgenstein, both the 'disease' and the 'therapeutic diagnosis'.)

^[19] 'The Apollonian illnesses', we might call these -- see below. (I have no space here to assess directly the 'ontological validity' or otherwise of these (especially of the particularly-controversial M.P.D./D.I.D.). It would be very valuable, further, to have to hand at least a Hackingian historico-'genealogical' account of (say) 'Autism' -- and of 'schizophrenia'.)

^[20] Here one might also speculate on whether Sass's idea could shed some light on the still little-understood fact that 'schizophrenia', this very Modern 'illness', has an onset 'coinciding' in most cases with adolescence and yound adulthood. On this and on the interaction of developmental and socio-historical factors more generally, see the Conclusion of his "Schizophrenia, disembedding and the Modern age" (forthcoming), and the Epilogue to Madness and Modernism (op.cit.).

^[21] London: Routledge, 1922; transl. Ogden. (Henceforth T L-P.)

^[22] Cf. the fine quotation from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea which Sass uses as an epigraph for his book; "[Solipsism] can never be demonstrably refuted, yet in philosophy it has never been used otherwise than as a sceptical sophism, i.e. a pretence. As a serious conviction, on the other hand, it could be found only in a madhouse, and as such it stands in need of a cure rather than a refutation." My own view is that taking scepticism and solipsism to be 'purely theoretical' matters, as philosophers typically do, and thus naturally treating the dramatic scenarios through which they are introduced (in pedagogical contexts etc.) as mere window-dressing, results in any remotely substantial scepticism or solipsism, anything more than an arbitrary reform of the way we talk, being utterly impossible to arrive at. Actually trying to take the dramatic scenarios seriously is the minimum that is essential to even potentially arriving at a sceptical or solipsistic 'position'. (Though if one were to manage to arrive at a serious scepticism, it would be utterly unanswerable. For argument on these points, see my "Kripke's Conjuring Trick" (joint with Wes Sharrock, forthcoming).) Furthermore, though, I believe that a paradigmatically 'theoretical' approach to scepticism tends among other things to be a (quite understandable) defensive reaction-formation against the real risk or fear of insanity on the part of most epistemologists etc. .

I appreciate that these thoughts will not endear me to my more Analytic readers -- but these ideas do at least have something of an imprimatur from a major work of a major Analytic and 'post-Analytic' philosopher. I am thinking of Stanley Cavell's instructive and serious engagement with (the link between) scepticism and madness in his The Claim of Reason (Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: O.U.P., 1979).

^[23] If that isn't an oxymoron -- a question implicitly addressed throughout Section 2, below.

^[24] Sass, "Antonin Artaud, modernism and the Yearning for a "Private Language" (Papers of the 18th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 1995; pp. 255-260; p.257). I will later question whether one can truly claim that nonsensicality does not entail nonexistence; and whether one can usefully say that private language (without scare quotes) actually exists even as an idea . 'It' may be an (inchoate) aspiration, for sure, but that is rather different, and less.

^[25] For interesting (though problematic) discussion of abstract philosophy 'versus' actual 'living out', see A.Giddens's Modernity and self-identity (Oxford: Polity (Blackwell), 1991), p.37f. .

^[26] Though this claim of mine may have to be revised when Sass publishes his follow-up book to Paradoxes, for the it contains a treatment of the topic of "Wittgenstein as schizothymic".

^[27] A patient diagnosed as schizophrenic quoted on p.303 of Sass's Madness and Modernism. Some of Schreber's delusions, as we shall see, were very similar.

^[28] For the strong intellectual pressure to move in the 'dialectic' from a seemingly-reasonable scepticism re. other minds to a seemingly-unattractive solipsism, see p.8 of S. Glendinning's On being with others: Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1998).

^[29] See p.39f. of Paradoxes.

^[30] A frustration often felt too by philosophers, and mystical writers... . Cf. my footnotes on "trying to say", above (and toward the close of Section 2 / the opening of Section 3, below).

^[31] See Philosophical Investigations (London: MacMillan, 1958 (1953); henceforth PI) para. 309; and para.119: "The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery." Cf. p.121 and especially p.136 of Renée's Autobiography of a schizophrenic girl (New York: Meridian, 1951): "Only those who have lost reality and lived for years in the Land of cruel, inhuman Enlightenment can truly taste the joy in living and prize the transcendent significance of being a part of humanity."

^[32] On the sometimes analogous quasi-deliberate self-interring of schizophrenics, compare the following striking (and paradoxical) quotation: "I felt as though I were in a bottle. I could feel that everything was outside and couldn't touch me. // I had to die to keep from dying. I know that sounds crazy but one time a boy hurt my feelings very much and I wanted to jump in front of a subway. Instead I went a little catatonic so I wouldn't feel anything." (Quote from Laing's The divided self (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965, p.176; itals. added.).

^[33] Cf. also the provocative (if rather eccentric) alternative quasi-Batesonian account (of Schreber etc.) offered by A.Wilden in his System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1980 (1972). E.g. on p.110: "[The theory of the double-bind] is a logico-mathematical construction through which we may discover the explanation of the delusions of the philosopher in the communicational processes of the schizophrenic relation."

^[34] "Subjectively certain", to use Schreber's intriguing phrase, a phrase self-consciously already suggesting that others need not be as impressed by his conclusions as he himself is?

^[35] Paradoxes, pp.25-6. Cf. also p.32.

^[36] For discussion and references, see e.g. pp.44ff. of Madness and Modernism.

^[37] Paradoxes, p.23. See also pp.43-5; and Madness and Modernism p.44f, p.50f, and p.354.

^[38] Cf. p.50 of Paul Gibbs's "Schizophrenia as Solipsism: A grouding for philosophical counselling" (Contemporary Philosophy XIX:1&2 (1997), 47-52); and my "There is no good reason to think that Philosophical Counselling can cure schizophrenia: A Reply to Gibbs" (Contemporary Philosophy XX: 5&6 (1998), 59-62), a paper on which I briefly draw here.

^[39] See n.38, above. This point, to which we shall return severally, is especially important when one considers the virtual impossibility of the badly-suffering person with schizophrenia finding a place of safety. If there is no riverbed, no anchor, then there is nothing to work with, no rational chance of succeeding in breaking the spell of the delusional system by means of some combination of rationality and empathy, nor by deep efforts at empathetic sympathy and "simply being" with the sufferer. This lack of connection, and of safety, is not an accidental feature of 'schizophrenia', we are suggesting; it follows from the ubiquity of unreality that Sass has drawn our attention to in severe cases.

^[40] Saying this should not of course lead us to neglect the very substantial proportion of their time spent by 'schizophrenics' in mundane proceedures of 'reality-testing'; any more than one should neglect the amount of time spent by, say, the Azande or the 'savages' discussed by Frazer in irrigating their land, checking on their crops, battling their enemies,etc. (see the discussion of Winch and Wittgenstein, below). The whole point of the 'double-book-keeping' idea is that the person with schizophrenia will maintain their ordinary involvement in the world in its essentials much as anyone else will, even when 'in the grip of' various delusions. It will only be at certain (usually brief) extremes of psychosis that the side of the ledger dealing with one's involvement with mundane reality is simply eclipsed by the other, pathological, side. But such extremes are unnecessary for the condition to manifest the peculiar features which Sass is in the business of attempting to comprehend.

^[41] Cf. Schreber's treatment of the 'miracle of the birds'; cf. e.g. chapters XV and VII of the Memoirs. See also his various claims to be overcoming "hazy pantheism" etc. in favour of a solidly-grounded theology (grounded, that is, in his repeatedly 'observed' experiences etc.). Sass's view is that one can see in Schreber's not infrequent 'radical empiricist' (!) orientation an important clue to the sense in which (on one side of his book-keeping) he takes solipsism seriously. Given certain initial premises, Schreber constructs a system which leads 'logically' into ... the most obscure and (literally) absurd contradictions in his thought; which leads, that is, the form of his thought to be very peculiar. This is quite literally rationality running amuck, gone mad of its own accord. (Cf. n.72, below; and see pp.25-7 of Freud (op.cit.), for more detail on Schreber's 'inductivism' and 'hyper-rationality' -- e.g. his inability to defecate without engaging in certain rationalistic mental processes. See p.52, footnote 3, of Freud's account, for Schreber's alleged superiority to God in his reasoning powers, God being poor at induction, even uneducatable . For further support on the logical powers of 'schizophrenics', see Fried & Agassi, Paranoia: A study in diagnosis (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), pp.4-5, & p.9f.)

^[42] Paradoxes, p.55. It is important to realize, in understanding Sass's meaning here, that "inner" and "outer", "private" and "intersubjective"/"public", are terms understood somewhat idiosyncratically by Schreber. For example, as at one stage of his illness Schreber progressively withdraws into his own body, he finds (at least on one side of the 'ledger') more and more of his body external to himself, 'outer', beyond his control. Then he can't be a solipsist -- because much of his body, and even of his mind, his soul, his self (cf. Laing), is external to his 'true' self, whereas a solipsistic outlook would have the world be 'part of' the self. But Schreber is at this point well on the road to becoming nothing -- exactly the consequence which, as we shall see in more detail below, Sass predicted would eventually eventuate from a quasi-solipsist starting-point... (For more on Schreber's body becoming 'external' to him, as it would to a consistent sceptic who looked for what he could rely on absolutely, see the close of this Section, where I discuss Schreber's body, not his reason, actually being taken away from him; and cf. note 5 on p.148 of Santner (op.cit.).)

^[43] Though the kind of thought-provoking and disturbing question Sass invites us to reflect upon in this connection is the following: What is the difference between a parody of scientific reasoning and an apotheosis of it? Compare, for instance, the trauma of contemporary 'Rational Choice Theory' (e.g. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (eds. Green and Shapiro; New Haven: Yale U. Pr., 1994)); and see n.72, below.

^[44] "But some of Schreber's 'solipsistic' moments, such as that quoted above from p.233 of the Memoirs, in fact presuppose the existence of real public spaces in which they (e.g. the 'miracles' of the mosquitos or of the butterflies) occur, and thus are not really solipsistic." But this objection too is easily disposed of: firstly, again, the logic of solipsism leading directly to its negation(s), these moments may in fact simply be combining incompatible 'moments' in the 'dialectic' of solipsism; and secondly, we must recall in any case that the Memoirs were composed when Schreber had quite substantially (though not fully!) recovered from his delusions, and furthermore was endeavouring to prove to the courts of Saxony that he was 'competent' and not dangerously insane. In some of his descriptions, we must realize that we face a composite of what he was experiencing at the time and his new-found (and perhaps prejudicially-rendered) re-interpretations of that experience. (In a fuller presentation, I should pursue this point, neglected in most readings of the Memoirs, much more fully. It may provide a further clue toward understanding how Sass can find Schreber to be in a sense hyper-rational, when we have grounds nevertheless for finding him to be uttering sheer nonsense. (See my discussions of Schreber's and Renée's puzzlements about their 'worlds', below.))

In fact, a composite of these two points is best: By the time of his publishing the Memoirs, and still more so when actually defending himself in court, Schreber had ceased to 'be' (!) a solipsist; but the structure of many of his thoughts -- the system of delusions he still had (see e.g. Santner (op.cit.), p.57) -- was very much still a response to the 'dialectic' of solipsism, including to the experiences(-as)-of-world-catastrophe, which he had earlier undergone.

^[45] Actually, logically committed -- at least, if logic is inextricably linked to, intertwined with, the pragmatics of language and conversation -- as, as a Pragmatist-Wittgensteinian, I believe it to be. This point cannot be gainsaid by arguing that when solipsism is completely self-effacing then it need not "assert nor imply any empirical falsehood", such as the non-existence of other persons (p. 158 of D.Bell, "Solipsism and Subjectivity", European Journal of Philosophy 4:2 (Aug. '96), pp.155-174); for any such coherent self-effacing 'solipsism' is simply a bizarre terminological variant of our ordinary talk, and as such is philosophically uninteresting (contra what Bell implies toward his paper's end).

^[46] Cf. also pp.87-8 of Sass's "Civilized Madness" (op.cit.): "[It] is not merely that [schizophrenics] tend to shift very readily between what seem to be opposite claims; they may even maintain both positions at the same moment, often without being troubled by the apparent inconsistency. Thus, while the schizophrenic is as liable to identify himself with God as with a machine [under the complete control of others], perhaps the most emblematic delusion of this illness is of being a sort of God-machine, a kind of all-seeing, all-constituting camera eye or copying mechanism." And cf. pp.60-65 of Paradoxes, especially on Schreber's identifications of himself as the centre of all experience, and as God Himself. (Cf. Freud's peculiarly laid-back attitude, in note 2 on page 27 of his account, to Schreber's proclamation that God, (like) Schreber, allows himself to be fucked.)

^[47] Echoes also, of course, of Hegel here.

^[48] See for instance Nietzsche's masterly satire on the nature of 'la bete philosophe' in Section 8 of Essay 3 of The Genealogy of Morals (Cambridge: C.U.P, 1887, 1994); and the work of Feminist philosophers (such as S.Bordo) on embodiment and philosophy.

^[49] Memoirs, pp.132-5.

^[50] Ibid. . Consult Sass's ""The Catastrophes of Heaven": Modernism, Primitivism and the Madness of Antonin Artaud' (Modernism/Modernity 3:2 (1996), 73-92) for the deep similarities between Schreber and Artaud on the body.

^[51] Like a philosopher willing to entertain that he is a brain in a vat?...

^[52] New York: Doubleday, 1908,1959; p.19.

^[53] In a fuller presentation, we should here explore how the widespread focus on the so-called 'negative symptoms' of schizophrenia has arguably often been unhelpful. Indeed, the very idea of 'negative' versus 'positive' symptoms is arguably deeply flawed -- the idea presupposes something like deficit, rather than difference.

^[54] London: Routledge, 1958, 1990. I make no apology for appealing here to Winch. I believe he has been much-misunderstood in philosophy and beyond, and I seek here to use his work in a way I think stands far closer to his intentions than in many such cases. For a useful defence of roughly my manner of using Winch, see William Brandon's ""Fact" and "Value" in the thought of Peter Winch", Political Theory 10:2 (1982), 215-244.

^[55] P.x of the Preface to the revised (1990) edition of ibid. .

^[56] Ibid., pp.88-9. See also the detail of the example (especially interesting for our purposes) with which Winch follows up these general comments -- a discussion of the manner in which a psychoanalyst's technical terms must be cash-out-able in terms of concepts (e.g. 'fatherhood' -- Winch's example) accessible to the individual in question, in the culture in question.

^[57] See e.g. p.32 of Laing (op.cit.), on Dilthey.

^[58] For detail, see the work of Harold Garfinkel, Wes Sharrock, Dave Francis, and many others.

^[59] For detail, see my "Acting from rules" (jointly-written with James Guetti), International Studies in Philosophy XXVIII:2 (1996), 43-62.

^[60] Op.cit. .

^[61] Though not, as explained in a little more detail below, to look as a phantasized Empiricist 'pure observer' would, but rather as a real embodied human observer.

^[62] "Perhaps", for I won't attempt to decide whether an analysis based on the 'affordances' of an organism in its environment is best called 'realist', 'pragmatist', 'mutualist', or what. I should say, contra Loveland and Landry ("Joint attention and language in autism and developmental language delay" (J. of Autism & Developmental Disorders 16 (1986), 335-349)), that I do not believe, re. 'the Apollonian disorders', that one has a chance of understanding the 'psychopathology' through understanding deficits in normal affordances alone.

^[63] And understanding.

^[64] See S.Kripke's Wittgenstein on rules and private language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard,1982), and my critique of it, in Practices without foundations?: Sceptical readings of Wittgenstein and Goodman (Ph.D, Rutgers U., 1995). I differ from Davidson here, again, in that I would deny that "She added 2 to 998" is welldescribed as an interpretation, for participants in a practice.

^[65] Chicago: U.Chicago Pr., 1983.

^[66] For detail, see p.76ff. of Roy Boyne's Foucault and Derrida: The other side of reason (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). (As implied at the close of Section 1, above, many of Foucault's 'followers' have signally failed to notice or to understand his virtually turning away from 'Dionysian' hopes for madness; even sometimes, I fear, Deleuze and Guattari.)

^[67] The question is going to be whether Sass's interpretation is meant as more than simply a quasi-Wittgensteinian 'language-game', functioning merely as an object of comparison, but rather as being an account of what's 'really' going on here, in the minds of schizophrenics.

^[68] We need to think, that is, in the kind of ways suggested by Garfinkelian Ethnomethodology, as explicated by M.Lynch on pp.14-17 of Scientific practice and ordinary action (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1993). Lynch and Winch are thus happier than (say) Taylor, Weber, or Jaspers. (Though Jaspers's General Psychopathology (Transl. Hoenig & Hamilton; Manchester: Manchester U. Pr., 1963 (1923)) is at times perspicaciously pertinent to our discussion. For example, on p.313: "...[T]he two basic properties of what is understandable...are: (1) All that is understandable, understands itself; it is in particular an operation of self-reflection, for example the attitude of the patient to his illness; (2) Everything understandable has its own coherence within the individual. The concrete total of meaningful or understandable connections constitutes what we call the personality or character of a person." Just reduce a little the emphasis on self-reflection (as 'opposed' to self-understanding as manifested in various phenomena of reflexivity) while continuing to recognize its status as a criterion for comprehensibility, and the dispute between Jaspers and me vanishes.)

^[69] Again, I am not, for instance, suggesting that one should understand Winch as showing us how one ought in all circumstances to use the word "understanding"; nor as showing us what it 'actually' means, no matter what we might think about it, for us to call something a "partial" understanding or a "complete" understanding. These words and phrases have perfectly good homes in everyday use -- they do not need philosophers to legislate over them. (Rather, philosophers should keep their own house in order; and avoid using such phrases in misleading fashions, as is sometimes the case with Kuhn -- see e.g. p.149 of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U.Chicago, 1962), and below.)

^[70] (Reprinted in Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 78-111.) Specifically: Winch thinks that anthropology will misunderstand (e.g.) the Azande in some important ways, so long as it fails to describe their activities in a manner which does not ironize them, and so long as it describes them in a manner which does not comprehend how they can intelligibly see themselves as playing a language-game which is not fatally flawed.

One should note that Winch is by normal academic standards fairly 'liberal' on the question of understanding -- he is suggesting that much that seems irrational or incomprehensible is in fact only so on a poor reading of it. In a sense, my whole question in this paper is: Can Winch's convincing 'liberality' concerning understanding the 'alien' effectively be used with regard to a particular set of cases, namely, certain philosophical illusions and (especially) 'psychopathological' delusions? I am in the business of suggesting and investigating reasons for doubting whether it can.

^[71] Ibid., p.92.

^[72] Ibid., p.93. (Underlining mine.) This point of Winch's is worth juxtaposing closely with Sass's analysis (e.g. on p.55f. of Paradoxes) of why schizophrenia often involves apparent irrationality as the result of rationality. Wittgenstein would I think agree with them both in suggesting that a great delusion of Modern 'Man' is that taking things 'to their logical conclusion' is always intellectually right, that for instance it must always be rational to attempt to make a rational choice as to what to do. Thus the Azande could be argued to exhibit a type of good sense that many Modern schizophrenics and scientists (and economists, and philosophers too) lack. (Cf. also T L-P 6.372.)

^[73] See Heidegger's essay on "The origin of the work of art" for the violence done to both works of art and things by Aesthetics's theorisations, reifications and over-interpretations; and cf. Wittgenstein's Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, and my discussion of Guetti below. Zvi Lothane intriguingly argues -- obviously analogously, in one respect, to my critique of Sass here -- that, "Analysis-work, and the method of interpreting dreams (Traumdeutung) was revolutionary in this sense: it dispensed with the ready-made symbolic reading of the dream, according to a predetermined dictionary of symbols...and relied on the dreamer's own activity of free association to the dream to yield the key which was to break the dream code. The interpretive authority was thus vested in the dreamer: This is the foundation of the psychoanalytic method. Freud often lapsed from this method of interpretation, falling prey to the temptation of symbolic (hermeneutic) interpretation, as happened in the Schreber analysis. He thus repeatedly abandoned the psychoanalytic method in favour of the hermeneutic method." (Op.cit., p.225; cf. also pp.253-6.) This point could be argued still to be over-charitable to Freud (it represents certain moments in Freud's work prior to 1911, but would arguably be more apposite if made of (say) Ferenczi, who became increasingly clear on the authority of the dreamer (e.g.), an authority at worst exercsied jointly with the 'expert' analyst); but in any case it certainly puts Lothane on Winch's side in the struggle against impositional and 'authoritarian' methods in the human sciences. It makes clear, for example, the stakes in the debate between unapologetically interpretivistic psychoanalysts (e.g. Kleinians) on the one hand and those psychodynamical approaches (e.g. Gestalt) which resolutely endeavour to avoid interpretation on the other. And it touches furthermore on the importance, not recognized in the abstract philosophy of language of Quine and Davidson, of participating in (or at least noting carefully, as a context both global and in specific cases local) the life of those one is trying to understand, and not only treating of their "language". (Though see also n.18, above.)

^[74] Salient support for thinking that I am right in distinguishing not just between description and explanation, but between description (and understanding) on the one hand and interpretation on the other, can be found on p.692ff. of Jeff Coulter's "Is contextualizing necessarily interpretive?" (Journal of Pragmatics 21 (1994)): "It is undoubtedly true that some readings of texts...are best construed as 'interpretive', as (involving) the making of 'interpretations', but this is not true for each and every facet of a reading of -- or of reading-and-understanding -- a text [, for example] a psychiatric clinic record." See also p.442 of his "A logic for 'context'" (J. of Pragmatics 25 (1996)): "[One] ought to distinguish between 'reading' a text and 'having (or arriving at, etc.) a reading of a text', between ordinary cases of 'understanding' what a text says or what it means and cases in which 'interpreting' may be involved."

^[75] See PI para.109, and para.654.

^[76] Of course, in a trivial sense even this must be a recontextualisation -- but the point is it needn't be anything like a translation or an interpretation. Translation -- Quine's term; interpretation -- Davidson's term. Both directly risk leaving quite out of account the aspects of language, which Jim Guetti calls 'grammatical effects', which make all the difference between one simply extracting one's own version of what someone is saying on the one hand, and one doing what can justly be called 'understanding what they are saying' on the other, or at least understanding what one can of it and 'letting be' the rest. Distinctions such as those I am putting forward in this note must not be allowed to be collapsed. (See also n.73, above.)

^[77] See discussion below of the 'hovering' perhaps endemic to philosophy which Wittgenstein -- as understood by Diamond, Conant et al -- sought to portray and uncover.

^[78] Arguably, much more than 'consistency' in logic, belief and visible action are required, for a person to be intelligible to us. The full panoply of human expression and action, including perception, desire and affect, are I think necessary. Where one or more of these are wholly lacking, as in some 'Autism' and 'Schizophrenia', I think we ultimately just don't know what to say about the lives of these folks, about their experience. What we can unmisleadingly be said to understand, is I think (ordinary) human psychology, no less or more -- just as Wittgenstein says, on p.77 of Culture and Value (ed. von Wright, transl. Winch; Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (posthumous)): "Man's greatest happiness is love. Suppose you say of the schizophrenic: he does not love, he cannot love, he refuses to love -- what is the difference?!" I can understand my friend, or (sometimes) not. But my failure to understand Schreber is more 'absolute'.

^[79] Laing suggests what may appear to be such a 'position' (as I am advocating here) briefly on pp.33-34 of his (op.cit., italics mine): "Of course, as Dilthey says, the expositor of a text has a right to presume that, despite the passage of time, and the wide divergence of world view between him and the ancient author, he stands in a not entirely different context of living experience from the original writer. He exists, in the world, like the other, as a permanent object in time and place,with others like himself. It is just this presupposition that one cannot make with the psychotic. In this respect, there may be a greater difficulty in understanding the psychotic in whose presence we are here and now, than there is in understanding the writer of a hieroglyphic dead for thousands of years." (I return below to suggest that we may, surprisingly, be better placed to understand (say) even the Azande than to understand our neighbour or child who 'is' schizophrenic or psychotic.)

^[80] Should we regret the lack of such a community to sustain a schizophrenic's world-view? This ethical/practical question may be moot, because in serious cases we have good grounds for thinking that there could not be a community to sustain it. Thus, using the term 'form of life' somewhat metaphorically, we might try saying that 'schizophrenics' arguably don't have a form of life -- they do not form the right kind of category (or collectivity) to do so (See also n.82, below.). Here is Jaspers on this: "Schizophrenics...are not surrounded by a single schizophrenic world, but by a number of such worlds. If there were a single, uniform world-formation schizophrenics would understand each other and form their own community. But we find just the opposite. They hardly ever understand each other; if anything, a healthy person understands them better. ...A community of schizophrenics is almost certainly an impossibility, since in every case it has to grow artificially and is not there naturally, as with all communities of healthy people. In acute psychoses lack of awareness excludes any communal life anyway." (Op.cit.,pp.282-3.)

(Cf. also paragraph 957 of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol.1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)), where he asks rhetorically (though with serious interest and intent) what a society that consisted entirely "of 'mental defectives' " would look like -- "a society that never played a lot of our ordinary language-games".) Thus I cannot endorse W.Blankenburg's (brilliant) account in his Der Verlust der Naturlichen Selbstvertaendichkeit: Ein Betrag zur Psychopathologie Symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1971); for while (like Sass) he convincingly argues that schizophrenia constitutes more a different than a deficient way of being-in-the-world, he does not adequately consider a third possibility: that 'it' perhaps rather 'constitutes' or connotes various ways of not being-in-the-world at all.

^[81] For severe schizophrenia is in practice quite largely defined by the absence of same.

^[82] We might then risk the following quasi-Wittgensteinian remark: "If a severe schizophrenic were to speak, we could not understand them." (Cf. p.54, p.65 and p.67 of Glendinning (op.cit.).) On occasions, it may be just as reasonable to say that people with schizophrenia have no world as to say what Jaspers says about their 'worlds' (quoted in n.80, above).

^[83] See Ivan Leudar's forthcoming work on Schreber, especially his The Sign of Socrates: Pragmatics of verbal hallucinations.

^[84] Which, incidentally, certainly does not require us to be credulous about them -- see my 'taxonomy' of interpretive options, later.

^[85] Op.cit., p.56. 'Renée's' 'world' here bears striking resemblances to the 'world' of the philosopher as depicted critically by the early Heidegger, and to the 'world(s)' brilliantly (bizarrely) dramatized in some of Wallace Stevens's poetry. (Cf. n.114, below)

^[86] Op.cit., p.55-6. (Italics mine) Cf. also p.42, & p.121.

^[87] At least, it's quite clear to us -- she is I think not entirely clear herself about whether she is confused or not...

^[88] Here I am presupposing a Cavellian rather than a Rortian reading of Wittgenstein. That is, a non-absolute distinction for certain 'practical' purposes between speaking 'inside' and 'outside' language-games. For detail, see the papers by Crary, Cavell, and Conant in Read and Crary (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1999); and on the non-absoluteness of the distinction, see Naomi Scheman's paper in the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (eds. Sluga and Stern, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1996).

^[89] Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

^[90] Or, similarly, "The world is my world", or "I know I'm in pain", or "I am here", etc.; unless one has actually found a genuine context for the use of the sentence in question (e.g. one of us has dropped the torch in the cave we are exploring together).

^[91] "Throwing away the ladder" (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), pp.197-8. See also Wittgenstein's On Certainty (henceforth 'OC'; New York: Blackwell, 1969 (posthumous)), para. 35f.

^[92] Relevant to note, this is somewhat like: there being no assignment of meaning to the schizophrenic's words which will be both satisfying to her and convincing to us. (In the case of a philosopher or of a schizophrenic, the Diamondian line is not contradicted by (e.g.) PI 282. My point here, after Diamond, is not to insist on the dogmatic -- nonsensical!, for "There is only one kind of nonsense" is as self-deconstructing as T L-P 6.37 -- assertion that there really is only one kind of nonsense, but rather that nothing under the heading of 'profound nonsense' or 'nonsense in virtue of trying to say something in particular but failing to say it due to an incompatibility between the component words of what is being uttered' will, to use Diamond's words, ultimately be found satisfactory by one.)

^[93] Not, that is, because the real / the right forms are available 'somewhere', only not speakable. "Throwing away the ladder", pp.197-9. (Underlining mine)

^[94] Early on in (unpublished) Lectures in 1934, quoted by Diamond on p.106 of The Realistic Spirit (italics mine). Cf. also Conant's and E.Witherspoon's essays in Read and Crary (op.cit.). And cf. PI para.499f., and Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge 1932-5 (ed. Ambrose, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Pr., 1979; pp.63-63).

^[95] Crucially, because, contrary to popular belief, there is just no role in T L-P for the showing of anything by means of nonsense. 'Showing', in Wittgenstein's sense, is effected only by non-nonsensical (i.e. by senseful and 'senseless' -- not nonsensical) propositions. For detail and exposition, see especially Conant's "The method of the Tractatus" (in the Reck volume).

^[96] That process is the import for Conant and Diamond of 6.54. (See for instance Conant's "Throwing away the top of the ladder", The Yale Review79:3 (1991), pp.328-364.) The process makes use of pseudo-propositions and 'elucidations' which are ultimately to be 'thrown away'. Whether some of T L-P (e.g. some of the logic it contains) is not nonsensical because senseless, and some of it (e.g. some of the 'frame' (e.g. the Preface) which contains 'it', which explains its -- T L-P's -- purpose) is not nonsensical because 'non-assertoric' or 'non-propositional', are vexed questions on which I shall attempt not to pronounce definitivistically, in the present context. My own view, for which I argue elsewhere (see e.g. note 99, below, and my "Wittgenstein and Marx on 'philosophical language'" (forthcoming)), is in fact that one should not chicken out from what Conant and Diamond have (especially in their work of five to ten years ago) claimed: that, while we can talk of the 'frame' thus, there is yet simultaneously an important sense in which every single sentence of the Tractatus ought to be read as nonsense, and the work will have succeeded fully only when we have appreciated that such as to be able to leave the work entirely behind. (For more on these and related matters, the reader is referred to Lynette Reid's powerful and yet sympathetic Winchian critique of Conant and Diamond ("Wittgenstein's ladder: The Tractatus and Nonsense", Philosophical Investigations 21:2 (April 1998), pp.97-151), in the course of which, incidentally, the not-insignificantextent of the support which Winch can offer to the Conant/Diamond reading of Wittgenstein is also made clear (On this, see also Winch's "Language, Thought and World in Wittgenstein's Tractatus", in his Trying to make sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), and his "Persuasion", in The Wittgenstein Legacy, eds. French, Uehling and Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), pp.123-137).). I have used Winch in this paper more in a 'softening up' operation, prior to providing, via Conant and Diamond, my central Wittgensteinian response to Sass.)

^[97] Sass confirms (personal communication) that sometimes such an approach in a clinical situation works; though sometimes it looks unwise to risk even trying it.

^[98] Cf. Paul Gibbs (op.cit.). I address more fully Gibbs's bold (!) argument that schizophrenia may be in general treatable through Philosophical Counselling, which I strongly doubt for the reasons given here in my paper, in my "There is no good reason to think that Philosophical Counseling will be effective in curing schizophrenia: a reply to Gibbs", forthcoming in Contemporary Philosophy.

^[99] See my ""The real philosophical discovery"", Philosophical Investigations 18:4 (1995), pp. 362-9; and also Conant's work (op.cit.).

^[100] Understanding the notion of 'closure' here not quite 'at face-value', but at least as strongly as Glendinning indicates on p.85 of his (op.cit.): "[T]he writings of...Wittgenstein effect what might be called the 'closure' of a tradition. Closure does not aim to bring a tradition...to an end by fulfilling its aims. Indeed, it resists the assumption that it can ever 'end' in that sense. Rather, it aims to identify the basic structural figure which characterizes the tradition as such." And diagnoses it, seeking to show not only how it works and what is fatally wrong with it, but how it invariably inclines to stay with us, within us. This is very different from an end of (some) philosophy envisaged as a solution of its problems.

^[101] And the opposition of 'transitional' vs. 'solid/permanent' is in turn itself both founded originally in everyday use and ... transitional, unstable, not able to carry any weight for long... (This itself is again an 'ultimately' nonsensical -- and so at best transitional -- remark... ! A number of my remarks, like a number of Diamond's and Conant's, after Wittgenstein's 'Sätze', may 'flip' before the reader's eyes roughly from appearing to be quasi-positivistic contributions to a theory of language, to attempts to say the unsayable, to helpful ways of giving therapy to the philosophically-deluded, to plain nonsense, to simply senseless (and thus unobjectionable -- because not saying anything).)

^[102] 5.61: "What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. [As it stands, this remark is ambiguous. I take Wittgenstein's main point to be: We can't [grammatical] delimit what we can't think and then point to it verbally.] 5.62: "This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth. // In fact, what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. // That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world." It is worth comparing the words of the gifted Autist, Donna Williams, in her Somebody Somewhere (op.cit.), on the concept of "my world" and "the world". What is especially interesting is her eventual fragile recognition (on p.113), in the course of her gradual recovery, that, "The distinction between 'my world' and 'the world' implied that I had a choice to be in 'the world' or not." Whereas acutally in some strong sense one can only be in 'the world'? Well, but this is how Williams goes on: "The realization that autism stole this choice from me [in the sense roughly of apparently barring access to 'the world'] became the linchpin for the final shattering truce that would bring my world-under-glass crumbling to the ground. I learned that there never was and never had been a 'my world'." (My emphasis.)

^[103] In fact then, "I'm the only person to exist" only superficially resembles an assertoric sentence of English, and fails to gesture at anything beyond itself.

Whereas Sass's reading of solipsism would still apparently have it gesture at the ineffable truth that it can appear to express. Sass's reading of Wittgenstein inclines us toward the popular 'ineffability' reading of T L-P (Along with Man Cheung Chung and F.A. Jenner's "Understanding schizophrenia through Wittgenstein's early metaphysics and later pragmatism" (Changes: An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy 14:1 (March 1996), pp. 14-24), a paper whose argument I reject completely).

But Conant and Diamond have I think shown, with their 'austere' reading of T L-P, of Wittgenstein, that we cannot hang anything on the idea of showing or 'indirectly expressing' what cannot be said. (Thus they undermine thoroughgoingly almost all current readings of Wittgenstein on solipsism. For example, if we take the recent special issue of the European Journal of Philosophy on 'Solipsism' (4:2 (Aug. 1986)), we find that all of the papers look to find the true assertion or 'insight' that solipsism is in some sense 'onto' or 'gesturing at', and that all are ineffabilistic in their reading of T L-P -- even those (such as Pears's and to some extent Child's) which explicitly claim not to be! All of them find Wittgenstein holding the solipsist as having some version of "a genuine insight about experience" (Child discussing Pears, on p.139).) Rather, whereof we cannot speak, thereof we cannot speak... . My use of T L-P on solipsism thus parallels Sass's use of the later Wittgenstein on solipsism, except in that I urge that we must take more seriously that the results of the parallel are that what we are looking at makes no sense. The 'structure' of Sass's discussion and the 'logicality' it finds in Schreber etc. must be understood by a serious Wittgensteinian as illustrative 'ultimately' only of incoherence. (Thus I claim 'schizophrenic discourse' to be ununderstandable and uninterpretable, nonsensical; somewhat likewise, pre-Wittgensteinian philosophy; somewhat likewise, Laing, and Sass; and somewhat likewise, even my writing, and Wittgenstein's. These are all, one might risk saying, successive rungs on a ladder.)

^[104] Is even the word "something" here misleading? It implies perhaps that 'schizophrenia' phenomenologically and logically truly is some thing, in which case surely it must be (coherently) interpretable? Whereas perhaps it is truly 'something' 'moodlike', rather than 'thinglike', 'something' which we must endlessly attempt to understand 'ontologically' rather than 'ontically'. I hope in future work to take on the question of the interpretability of 'psychopathology' in these Heideggerian terms.

^[105] My line of thought here bears some real affinities to Donald Davidson's view that interpretation necessarily involves attributing a familiar, coherent framework to that being interpreted, as does my thinking below in my critical discussion of Kuhn. But it should be borne in mind that this affinity with Davidson only goes so far -- e.g., when one can live with 'the natives', as arguably one can live with 'alien' peoples (e.g. the Azande), then I think that Davidsonian interpretation (and/or Quinean translation) is not only not always necessary (because there can be both actions and descriptions which are not and do not involve interpretations, as argued at the opening of this Section), but exaggeratedly distanciated, for in its abstraction and 'purity' it fails to take into account the profoundly-important possibility of learning through immersion and interaction. As well as failing to take into account important issues of how, as feminists and post-colonial critics among others have argued, one's own status and attitude etc. may differentially affect one's possibilities of such learning!

Why I largely concur with Davidson on the case under consideration is that it is not clear that in hard cases of 'schizophrenia' there can be anything worth calling living with the sufferer (see n.72 & n.73, above), yet Sass nevertheless claims that interpretation is possible here.

^[106] You can't interpret nonsense. Nonsense is what is ununderstandable and uninterpretable, that to which we can't succeed in attributing an interpretive frame.

^[107] The passage is from "The Umbilicus of Limbo". Compare Sass's notes on p.p.162-3 of Paradoxes. It is also worth comparing the following from the alternative translation in Antonin Artaud: Complete Works (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968; p.50): "Great thinking, overpopulated ardour bore my ego like a full abyss... The air was measurable and grinding, but had no penetrable form. And its eye was a mosaic of bursts, a sort of hard cosmic hammer distorted by weight, ceaselessly dropping like a brow in space, with a seemingly distilled sound." (Italics mine) The grammatical peculiarities here mirror Schreber's closely, and thus offer an instance of support for some of Sass's central claims, examined earlier.

^[108] Paradoxes, pp.96-7.

^[109] Once we have thought things through -- and then immediately, simultaneously self-destructing, non-existent. Non-existent, just as solipsism is non-existent, is nothing, is only something in imagination. (Likewise Scepticism, Idealism, Representationalism, Realism, etc.)

^[110] We see this, I think, in Artaud still more than in Schreber. There is a similarity between the two here which transcends the vast difference in (e.g.) their writing styles. (This is one reason why the loose talk I have engaged in in this paper of 'schizophrenic language' is, I think, not hopelessly vague, nor a disastrous over-generalization. 'Schzophrenic language' is very heterogenous; but so is (e.g.) 'mathematical language', and yet we still talk of that.) Schreber's "voluptuousness" is an escape from his persecution and pain perhaps as much as Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty' is an escape from his. (Cf. pp.238-9 of Sass's Madness and Modernism.)

^[111] See the discussion of Guetti, below, for more on the risks of thinking that we have genuinely been shown how to understand something here, and on how to respond to those risks.

^[112] Unlike the simple verbal garbage which, for instance, Renée was on occasion reduced to -- see e.g. (op.cit.) pp.154-5. (And it is important to bear in mind that we are not arguing that 'schizophrenic discourse' is simply word salad, except in odd instances such as that just referred to in Renée's case. We are arguing rather that it ultimately comes down to the same thing; that the respectable-looking sentences of the Memoirs -- as of Descartes or Kant, even of the Tractatus -- do not amount to anything (coherent, anything other than plain nonsense).)

^[113] Perhaps, after reading Sass, we will at least be ready to take 'schizophrenic discourse' more seriously, in the following sense -- 'schizophrenia' may present us with some real philosophical examples, and even possibly lessons (see Section 3, below). (Let me add that my expression in the text here -- "after we have thought things through" -- is not meant to be read as equivalent to the philosopher's formulation, "pushing things to their logical conclusion". My own view is that truly thinking things through -- looking, looking for sense -- is often antithetical to the intellectualistic pretensions and hazards of "logical conclusion" talk such as that of Evans-Pritchard (or of, say, Analytical applied ethicists).

^[114] The deep similarity here is often made evident at by Sass -- such as, for example, on p.49 of Madness and Modernism, where he efficaciously compares Renée's sense of the being of things as a horrible mystery and a tremendous fact with the same theme as discussed and partially diagnosed by Heidegger and Sartre. From a certain perspective, Renée's delusional 'world-view' here is hyper-rational; even, has a philosophical 'point' to it (cf. n.113, above).

^[115] The reader should keep bearing in mind here, lest I seem merely critical, that I consider the Tractatus to be one of the very greatest philosophical works of all time. It however, of course, was fairly carefully-designed nonsense. This does at least complicate a little the crucial sense in which I hold (see n.103 & n.112, above) that it cannot be interpreted.

^[116] I should mention that the reader may judge that Sass himself has not lost sight of it either. In which case my 'critique' hereabouts would be simply a warning against misreadings of Sass.

^[117] "So-called", because perhaps by now it is clear that and why terms such as "double-bookkeeping" and even "delusion" should be used hereabouts only with the utmost care. For they continually risk one prejudging the phenomena, interpreting them before one has made a good faith Winchian effort to understand them; that is, not to misunderstand them.

^[118] See On Certainty, passim, on doubts requiring grounds; and Conant's essay "The method of the Tractatus" (op.cit.) for detail on both the availability and necessary quasi-tentativeness of the judgement that "That's nonsense".

^[119] 'Schizophrenic experience' is actual (so must be possible), schizophrenia is in some sense lived -- but this doesn't ensure that 'schizophrenic language' must be interpretable. (Unlike in the Zande case, say, it is not clear that a game is being played in hard cases of 'schizophrenia', not clear that a game has been 'defined' yet. This has to do in part with the actual community ofdiscourse that exists in the former case, as compared with the monologicity of the latter.) Schizoid talk gives us a possible context for solipsism and the rest of the philosophic dialectic -- but it does not change that 'solipsism' (as with all the other 'positions' on the dialectic) is nothing. In going around the philosophical dialectic, we can in some sense see how schizoid thinking could go round and round -- but we don't get to experience solipsism or any of the other 'positions', so nor do we get to experience 'schizophrenia' vicariously. Not, e.g., by looking at the ridges around our eyes. For we're seeing something real, if we focus on those!!

^[120] Cf. her "What nonsense might be", in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), especially p.106: "[T]here is no kind of nonsense which is nonsense on account of what the terms composing it mean -- there is as it were no 'positive' nonsense. Anything that is nonsense is so merely because some determination of meaning has not been made..."

^[121] For explication, see my "Acting from rules" (jointly written with James Guetti), Internat. Studies in Philosophy XXVIII/2 (1996), pp.43-62, especially n.28 on Bakhtin etc. on dia-logic.

^[122] Though a worry here is that Sass sometimes uses the potentially misleading vocabulary of 'error' and 'mistake' etc. to characterise (e.g.) Schreber's delusions -- e.g. on p.57 of Paradoxes. The worry is that there is a danger of this occluding Sass's otherwise impressive clarification of the grammar of 'delusion', his showing precisely that 'schizophrenic' delusions need not be what we would normally call errors or mistakes (Cf. also the closing pages of Wittgenstein's On Certainty (op.cit.) for further clarification of this.).

^[123] This reflects back on some of Section 1, above. See for e.g. n.44 -- one starts to realize that it is too easy for Sass's take on 'schizophrenia' to deal with almost any objections to it.

^[124] Again, this 'conclusion', option (5), bears certain resemblances to option (0) etc. -- but I trust I have made clear also the differences between my view and a scientistic non-interpretivism. My view is not for instance Kraepelinian or Bleulerian: because I think that sometimes silence (or Schreberian speech, or even word salad) is (as Laing held) in fact an eloquent means of communication; because I think that it must be shown case-by-case that schizophrenic utterances are nonsensical, not assumed (as in practice Kraepelin or Bleuler assume it); and because I think that it is not just some important portion of schizophrenic language that is best judged to be nonsensical, but also, truly, most philosophy!

^[125] I explore this oscillation in the segments of my Thomas Kuhn: The philosopher of scientific revolution (with W.Sharrock; Oxford: Polity, 1999) on Kuhn's 'Relativism'; and in my "Is Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'scepticism' a scepticism? -- The opposition between its epistemic and metaphysical aspects" (De Philosophia 12, 1995 (pp.117-132)).

^[126] E.g. In Read and Sharrock, ibid. . It is worth noting that Kuhn is arguably more modestly/ charitably interpretable than this -- as we in fact largely do interpret him in our book.

^[127] It raises a question, which we cannot investigate further here, of whether in fact it is possible, by their own lights, for us to successfully interpret what Kuhn or Sass are saying...

^[128] Here again I am to some degree in agreement with Davidson, and sceptical of the more full-blooded critiques of his work (See e.g., Michael Forster's "On the very idea of denying the existence of radically different conceptual schemes" (Inquiry 41 (pp.133-185).). How can one have one's Davidson and yet eat one's Winch? Easy, if one is appropriately selective in one's use of Davidson. And after all, Davidson was significantly influenced by Anscombe, and by others close to Wittgenstein, like Winch himself. A strong non-hermeneutical Winch is compatible with what is salvageable from Davidson, whereas only a relatively modest Kuhn is.

^[129] The case of Faulkner's protagonist -- the "child" or "idiot", Benjy -- is arguably rather more suitable for psychoanalytic versions of how to interpret schizophrenia than is the case of the "schizophrenic". However, it still fits somewhat poorly. And the defender of psychoanalytic models can take cold comfort indeed from it, even if it fits somewhat; for if some of what I, going beyond Sass, am saying about schizophrenic language applies even to Benjy's language, then how much better it will (and does) apply to Schreber's!

^[130] Wittgenstein and the grammar of literary experience (Athens: U. Georgia Press, 1993), p.86. It is worth noting in passing that Benjy, like his brothers (neither of whom are called 'idiots' by those around them!), systematically (and admittedly somewhat more frequently than they) finds himself in confusion concerning the identity, the names (and the times), of those who he is thinking of, of those who are around him. Like Schreber, who, as we discussed earlier, oscillates between himself and 'one' and God(s) and his physicians and his father almost seamlessly,Benjy runs together these people. Though, like Schreber again, not for no good reason -- this is much of the burden of Faulkner's novel, that these names, lives and persons are horribly interchangeable. See for instance p.48, pp.88-9, p.95, p.180, p.200, p207, p.304 of The Sound and the Fury (corrected text; New York: Vintage, 1984 (1929)); and see also the segments early on in the novel wherein some of the black characters explicitly recognize the patternedness and intelligence of Benjy's particular sensitivities (to names, etc.), and even of his confusions. For the vital importance specifically of names to Schreber, see for instance pp.48-49 of Santner (op.cit.).(It is terribly interesting that in Faulkner's novel Benjy's 'normal' siblings Quentin and Jason (and Caddy) are in their ways, as a Laingian might say, just as crazy as -- if not more so than -- Benjy. For Quentin as Benjyesque, see p.88, p.93, pp.100-1, p.161, p.170 (the last a very schizoid passage). For Jason as crazy, as uttering nonsense, as only pseudo-logical, see pp.229-233.)

^[131] Ibid., pp. 87-88. The turning of the direction of understanding "in the other direction" here is reminiscent of Kripke's (slightly more extreme) strategy vis-a-vis rule-following, which he attributes to Hume, under the name of "inversion" or "reversal". See e.g. p.93ff. of Kripke's Wittgenstein on rules and private language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993). We might think, for another example, of the immensely appealing notion that we are given an account of how someone (a woman?) thinks by means of Joyce's justly-famous Molly Bloom monologue -- and then consider 'reversing' that notion, instead...

^[132] One might compare Schreber's discourse in his Memoirs, emerging out of a self-conscious hyper-'rationality'? (And let us note again that Schreber still more than Benjy can literally be said to be both an 'idiot' and not an idiot in the slightest. In his bellowing etc. perhaps, in the course of the attacks upon him from God (cf. pp.25-6 of Freud (op.cit.)) perhaps, and ultimately in our assessment of his nonsense, he is; in his capacity by and large to continue a normal life, in his multifarious resistance to the assaults upon him, in his piecemeal (and 'excessive'!) and written logic and rationality, he decidedly is not.)

^[133] Guetti, pp.88-89 (italics mine). As with Benjy, similarly with Schreber or Artaud: Do we really understand them, by extension from things we do understand (e.g. solipsism, supposedly)? Or is it just that eventually we perhaps hear what they are saying as perhaps 'sufficient unto itself'? Like with much strong 'Modernist' literature (especially 'L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E.' poetry)... Much more obviously than in the case of Benjy or of some of Beckett's protagonists, we surely don't really understand extreme Modernist poetry -- however good it is.

^[134] Her extraordinary literary achievement of a first person account of Autism etc., in Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere (London: Doubleday, 1994).

^[135] See for instance the very opening pages of The Sound and the Fury. If one insists on 'translating' (e.g.) "curling flower spaces" and the like into English, one loses the power of this 'language', its metaphoricity, its ability, we would like to say, to 'represent' a different form of experience. We should think of the metaphoricity of this 'language' as strong, as live, as untranslatable without losing most or all of its 'grammatical' -- literary -- 'representational' effect(s). (Cf. "Gambling with language: metaphor", from Guetti (op.cit.).) I hold that the very same is true of the 'metaphors' of 'schizophrenic language'.And this takes us back to the discussion, earlier, about Winch, impositional interpretation, and the frequent practice of such interpretation in Art Crit and Lit Crit.

^[136] Ibid., p.89.

^[137] Thus, to use Heideggerian terminology (which carries with it still some of the very risks I have been pointing to!), we don't get understanding of something 'ontological' -- a 'different world', such as, someone might hold, Benjy has -- through treating it as 'ontic', as 'translatable', as psychologists tend to. My point here is in part that the interpretation of language which is other than sensical communicative discourse is usually just not a good idea -- it strips away what is special about that language, and thus falsifies it. This point has been implicit in the discourse of many madmen and modernists, and is explicit in Guetti and more popularly in the work of Susan Sontag. Insofar as one can 'understand' something alien, such as much 'literary' and 'schizophrenic' language, one does not look 'beneath' its 'surface'.

^[138] My thought here is obviously somewhat akin to that of Kuhn (there are no criteria beyond the (instituted) paradigm); to Hacking both on regimes of truth-and-falsity and on the emergence of new possibilities for human being (e.g. being a 'multiple', someone with M.P.D.); and to Hacker (in his Analytical Commentaries)on the topic of thinking in the PI. But the closest connection is with Guetti's writings of the last twenty years. To the objection to it that something becomes a new paradigm precisely because we feel that it gets things right somehow, I should reply that this is true, but is no philosophical explanation. Because a brave new metaphor 'gets it right' somehow, does it follow that metaphors are always translatable? (In taking the answer to this question to be "No", I follow Davidson and Guetti again.)

^[139] Very roughly, in the manner of Roland Barthes's 'reality effect', which also concerns the generation of an effective appearance of 'realism' by means of subtle textual techniques. See p.141ff. of his The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). It is worth noting in passing the strong 'reality effect' at work in Adolf Wolfli's writing; e.g., the wealth of statistical detail offered by him in his accounts of his interstellar voyages.

^[140] And likewise, it follows from the above, the forms of reality too. The reason why capturing the form of language or of thought is likely to strike us as a more exciting project is I think simply that it is a newer one. I will explore these matters in future work on V.Woolf and others, wherein I will hope to demonstrate the absurdity of the very idea that things can literally be captured by language. To think, for example, that Woolf in The Waves could capture the nature either of reality (or of the mind). There's only reality, and our language, the grammar of which is autonomous, as Wittgenstein (and Hacker) have described. There is no such thing as 'capturing the form(s) of our thought' in language; likewise, with 'capturing the form of reality'. That is the point of the Tractatus: all this form-capturing stuff, whether imagined as occuring in (the form of?!) language or by creeping up behind language, is incoherent. (For intriguing further discussion, in partial agreement with what I am saying here, see also Koethe's work.)

^[141] Again, let me stress that the model of 'self-understanding' here is not necessarily anything to do with self-consciousness, with accurate reflection in consciousness. It is rather to do with what Ethnomethodologists call the mundane accountability, reflexivity and indexicality of human actions (normally). (See again Lynch, op.cit., and note 68, above. Lynch & co. give us the chance to see clearly how human action is (understood), and what 'self-understanding' in a non-intellectualist sense amounts to.)

Have I opened myself up to an objection, in (partly after Sass) modelling 'understanding' of so-called schizophrenic language upon 'understanding' of Modern Art/Poetry, omitting to note that, while works of art can surely be understood, they even more surely do not have self-understanding, of whatever kind!? But the scare quotes above are important -- for again, I do not think it is usually at all helpful to suggest that the striking and properly aesthetic aspects of Art (especially say of Modernist poetry) can be understood. They cannot, except insofar as they are genuinely communications (in which case, of course, they are productions which demonstrate a meaning and, as a consequence, someone's self-understanding). But great Art, and in fact most Modern Art, has I think little or no purely communicative sense.

^[142] Zettel (eds. Anscombe & von Wright, transl. Anscombe; Berkeley: U. Cal., 1967), para. 234.

^[143] Like with the hermenauts of psychoanalysis (e.g. Habermas), there is a continual danger of his backsliding. Not merely of interpreting overly, but of holding out hope, impossibly, that one's interpretation is a half-way house to both understanding and explanation.

^[144] P.ix. (Emphasis mine; the quotation is taken from Recollections of Wittgenstein (ed. Rhees; Oxford: O.U.P., 1984.)

^[145] One is reminded of the respects in which Freud was anxious that Schreber himself had already alarmingly well anticipated Freud's analysis of him... See p.20f. of Santner (op.cit.).

^[146] Unless we (implausibly) take Benjy to have a fully rich and rational-sensitive mental life, and his problems to be 'merely' problems of expression. The problem is that we would have to take the problem of expression as one which means that Benjy's narrative in The Sound and the Fury is an inadequate expression of another mental life, further back, that it only gestures at. Surely this is a hopeless move, for it would launch us on an infinite regress. Benjy is not a counter-example to the anti-private-language argument. In any case, we probably ought, in line with Schreber's courtroom depositions (see e.g. p.379 of the Memoirs), to 'read' many of Schreber's furious bellowing sounds as an attempt to drown out his voices, as a path toward achieving voluptuousness and diminishing hyper-reflexivity. They would then, analogously to Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty', be a desperate attempt at escaping Apollonian 'iciness' (Cf. Sass's ""The Catastrophes of Heaven" (op.cit.)). Not a furious outpouring of some inner Dionysianism (On which, see p.285, p.316, & pp.319-320 of Faulkner's text).

^[147] See Sass's Paradoxes, p.78. See also p.211 of his "The Consciousness Machine" (op.cit.): "In the Memoirs [Schreber] characterizes his relationship to God and centrality in the universe as "this completely absurd conception"...as "a tangle of contradictions which cannot be unravelled." " Cf. the similar moments in Renée's account (e.g. on p.56) alluded to earlier.

^[148] Schreber's Memoirs, p.151f.. (Underlining mine)

^[149] Ibid.(Underlining mine.)

[150] One could usefully aim to gloss Schreber's (utterly self-destructing) self-referential awareness of the nonsensicality of his 'world'. I do not see how this can quite be Sass's project, for it is inconsistent with his deep-set interpretivism. But if this is Sass's project, then we are after all pretty close. Would I dispute that schizophrenics in some sense experience themselves as at the centre of everything, even as controlling or creating it? No. Would I deny that this has some affinities with the philosophic 'position' of solipsism? No. It's just a question of 'interpreting' and interrogating what exactly these Sassian questions (can) mean...

^[151] If not interpretation, then what? I am saying that we should stop wasting our time trying to interpret something uninterpretable. And instead? Perhaps just attempt gently to offer our presence in whatever manner is found helpful by the person suffering from 'schizophrenia'.

^[152] My thought here bears some relationship to some of Laing's ideas on the matter. See for instance p.38 of The Divided Self: "The kernel of the schizophrenic's experience of himself must remain incomprehensible to us." But a key difference is that Laing appears to think that the experience is always in principle 'inwardly' comprehensible. Thus he does imagine something like a successful private language, and there I must part company with him. I.e. The above quote would be just fine by me -- but rather different in content -- if it did not close with the words "..for us". Recall the discussion above, in connection initially with Winch, of whether there can be stable self-understandings in (certain cases/aspects of) 'schizophrenia': arguably, it is just not stably comprehensible, not translatable into something which anybody can understand, even the person themselves. (Though recall also n.124, above.) Sufferers from schizophrenia might be said to have 'a private language' after all -- but if so, what they have is something neither they nor we can understand...

^[153] This is Renée, accounting retrospectively (and one should allow that this may be important) for her experiences; quoted on p.47 of Sass's Madness and Modernism. What she 'says' cannot be said, and no more can it be shown -- not by us, nor by her, nor by language 'itself'.

^[154] Any interpretation here, it seems to me, would indeed be violent, still more so than in the (somewhat analogous) case of avant-garde Modernist poetry, which is often effective precisely in its emptiness or nonsensicality.

^[155] Again, to say this is not to say that one cannot present useful objects of comparison to it, nor that one cannot pointfully say what it is not.

^[156] Cf. PI para.124.

^[157] Thanks to audiences at Bolton Institute (U.K); at the Centre for Ethics and Social Policy at Manchester University (U.K.); at the University of Illinois, Chicago; at the University of East Anglia, Norwich (U.K.); at the N.E.H. Summer Institute on Philosophy and Psychopathology, Cornell, July 10 1998; and at the 'Author [Sass] Meets Critics' session at the Pacific APA, Berkeley, March 28 1997 -- especially to my co-symposiasts there, Ian Hacking, Anne Jacobson, and (especially) Louis Sass. Thanks to Jim Guetti for his thoughts on monologicity and literature. And thanks also to George Downing, Lisa Shapiro, Aaron Zimmermann, Jonathan Smith, Wil Coleman, Jeff Coulter, Jim Guetti, Tobyn De Marco, Martin Batchelor, Michael Gorski, Alan Malachowski, Wes Sharrock, Dave Francis, Emma Willmer, and (heartily) to Ivan Leudar and Jim Conant.

This essay draws on papers of mine published elsewhere, particularly on my "The New Hume's new antagonists", in my The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2000), my "On approaching schizophrenia via Wittgenstein", in Philosophical Psychology 2001 914:4), and on my paper on the philosophy of psychopathology with special reference to Faulkner's Benjy, forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry.