First in an occasional series.
The seventh and last of the propositional sentences that form the backbone of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus states, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” ("Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen.")
Read literally, the statement forms a tautology. If one literally cannot speak of something, it follows by logical necessity, inherent in the condition of that first clause, that one is silent on it.
But Wittgenstein does not mean his statement literally. What he means is Whereof one cannot speak intelligibly, thereof one should be silent.
Wittgenstein’s aim is a directive against speaking nonsense, not a command that makes no sense.
That ambiguity, this overdetermination of meaning, is not incidental. It lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s effort to consider the limits of language. What lies beyond those limits, with regard to its nature, not all necessarily agree. Many would say – I would — it is poetry. And a realm of being, some would call it spirit, such that is. As it is. As such.
– intimations of which poetry seeks to call to elusive sense, in words that fail to materialize the unseen element but that beckon us, in vague apprehension, toward it.
But we live every day in this world, too, which requires our sense, the making of which requires words to share it. And if language serves us imperfectly, it hasn’t failed to serve, so how can it serve us better?
Among Wittgenstein’s great influences over Twentieth Century philosophy was the development, subsequent to publication of the Tractatus, of Ordinary Language Philosophy, which takes as its focus in considering reality how words actually are used in common speech — the uses that arise from our regular engagement with reality, such as it is, and that come to be reflected in dictionaries — rather than the inventive conceptualizing, through neologisms or expanded definitions, that intellect often chooses as a kind of overlay to experience.
Continental philosophy and much current academic vocabulary, at the risk of stating the obvious, do not reflect this focus on ordinary language.
I like to pay attention to existent word meanings when considering real-world issues. What exactly are we talking about and what are the normative meanings of the words we use?
I find, often, that people distort definitions, limiting or bending them, so that they conform to the views they prefer to hold. In many cases, this tendency is undoubtedly ill considered and unconscious, but we know though the profound abuse that politics commits against language how often the distortion is knowing and purposeful. Deeply embedded in political practice at its worst, which is its common practice, we see the effort to influence and persuade not by means of reason but rather through the vision-shaping lens of language manipulated, manipulative word choice.
The words I consider here – the concepts – do not climb down into the policy trenches, of what exactly people, society, or government might choose to do in response to a problem or how they would choose to do it. The effort aims at understanding what we’re talking about in the first place and what the words mean that we use to talk about it.
“Responsibility” and “Identity” and associated terms
In the years since my 2008 publication in Tikkun of “Aboriginal Sin,” I have advocated, in light of the history of indigenous conquest and genocide in the Americas, the moral imperative that the United States do something, beginning with an adequate acknowledgment of the “sin” committed.
When I’ve met resistance to this advocacy, and I’ve met a lot, it usually begins with that very notion of a sin that requires acknowledgement and, reasonably, apology. My aim now is not to focus on those particular terms but rather to note the nature of the rejection that idea itself produces, as a foundation for what follows.
Commonly, the rejection is based in a kind of cultural-anthropological adaptation of Darwinian natural selection: by virtue of its victory in geographical expansion and social domination, the conquering culture exhibits, ipso facto, its superiority and inherited right, by nature, to prevail. There may be expression of regret over the price of this civilizational evolution, but this has been the nature of the world and human culture from time immemorial and that’s that.
From this belief usually follows strong expression of resentment at the suggestion that anyone alive today bears any responsibility for the history of conquest. (That is to say, no one alive today committed those acts one, two, or three hundred years ago by others; Americans today cannot be identified, in their place, with the people of the past who committed those acts, and consequently no one today should be held accountable for them. That would be unjust.)
This resistance to any assumption of responsibility for past national behavior thus arises, in part, from a narrowed definition of “responsible” as meaning only cause or as signaling liability or culpability. People who resist the idea of any current responsibility do so in part because they reject any claim that they are personally accountable for the acts of others and, further, that they should feel any guilt over these acts for which they are themselves personally blameless. Resentment against and rejection of any imputation of personal guilt, in my experience, is very strong in those who oppose any sense of responsibility in these matters.
But culpability, as active cause, is only one meaning of “responsible.”
As one example of a different, if not unrelated, meaning, humans universally feel they are responsible for and to their children. Parents believe their children should be responsible for each other. A parent might tell an older sibling to “look after your brother while I’m gone. You’re responsible for him.” In these instances, we mean “responsible” in the manner of a duty, a moral obligation, and the obligation is one of care – to hold the other person in one’s care, a feeling and duty we generally hold that family members should recognize in relation to one another.
Which raises the question of whether citizens of a nation, a society, a community have duties of care for each other. Various political differences are founded in response to that question and even, when responding affirmatively, in consideration of how broadly that duty of care extends.
Does it extend over historical time?
That question implicates further questions of individual versus collective responsibility and of identity – who exactly is being assigned any responsibility and how are they identified as bearers of the responsibility?
Here we face the question of historical continuity of identity. There is nothing novel about such a notion. In a nation like the United States itself, and elsewhere, for instance, corporations (collective entities) are held legally responsible for their acts and any crimes they might commit despite changes over time in shareholders, personnel, board membership, and executive leadership. Their corporate nature is a continuing identity.
Similarly, national governments, as a foundation for any kind of diplomatic and international relations, are understood, in terms of treaties and agreements, to continue in identity with previous administrations that constituted them in law, even while the governments may change personalities and policies. The United States is not reconstituted in new national being with each succeeding instant, administration, generation, or even collective of lifespans. The United States, as a national entity, is the same that won its independence from England, that practiced slavery and abolished it, that supported Jim Crow and won World War II, that passed historic civil rights legislation and that continued the Spanish and English genocide of Native Americans. It has changed repeatedly in all the ways noted above, but it maintains that single national, legal, historic identity. The United States Supreme Court, as one example, acknowledge as much in 1980 when it decided that the Sioux Nation should be compensated for the 1877 taking from it of the Black Hills of South Dakota. (To this day, the Sioux continue to reject the financial award — they want their land back.)
Historical national identity entails not only legal responsibility (accountability, liability, culpability) but also cultural inheritance, and the inheritance entails responsibility – and if not, in any case, necessarily legal liability, what of a duty of care?
Before the Trump era (and even, perversely, during it, by his supporters) modern-day Americans might justly take pride in the achievements of the United States. Were modern-day Americans to squander the legacy of those achievements, of liberty passed on to them by the nation’s founders, by those who won the Second World War, would not people believe that a trust had been broken, a responsibility not met – by not only Anglo descendants of the original colonists but by later, even recent immigrants, whose ancestors played no role in the founding, or in slavery or in the Native conquest but who are presumed to have assumed not only a national citizenship but also a cultural inheritance, and to have assumed with it responsibility to it?
Isn’t it the acquisition of citizenship and the assumption of the nation’s cultural legacy – all of it, and in the United States that alone – that makes a person American? No American alive today is individually responsible for the native conquest or slavery or, for that matter, for the intellectual brilliance of the nation’s founding documents or the stealth courage of the soldiers retreating with Washington from the Heights at the Battle of Brooklyn. If there is pride that can glimmer in a mental recess, then there is shame to perceive too, in a collective conscience, a collective called the United States. It isn’t any of us individually who need feel bad about ourselves – or who warrant feeling good, either, unless we actually ourselves did something admirable. It is the nation that bears the pride and the shame of its past, and that pursues the policies to continue on its course, correct, or atone.
Some people, though, reject the idea of a collective identity – any collective notion at all. They recoil from it. I can sympathize. I’m a go my own way kind of person myself. Always have been – not much for getting with the program if I don’t much like the program. I’ll just mosey along down my own path if you don’t mind, and even if you do.
But if we are incapable, ever, of seeing ourselves as part of a whole, then doesn’t that render the idea of nation meaningless – a notion of shared culture constituted in values and ideas and not just ethnic patrimony and unconsidered practice?
We can look to the Britannica Dictionary for a barebones geopolitical definition of nation: “a large area of land that is controlled by its own government.”
Sense 2 in that dictionary offers the essence: “the people who live in a nation.”
They might not, based on 2, even genuinely or at all possess self-determined control over land, like the Sioux Nation.
The Non-Governmental Organization Global Policy Forum, in contrast, introduces all the dynamic complexity of the concept, including, for our purposes:
A nation is a large group of people with strong bonds of identity - an "imagined community," . . . [with] shared culture, religion, history, language or ethnicity . . .. Because of migration, most modern states include within their borders diverse communities that challenge the idea of national homogeneity and give rise to the community of citizenship, rather than membership in the nation. . .. (Emphasis added}
In this “community of citizenship,” not unlike in a family, the diversity of its membership and the wrongs we commit against one another can break the bonds in all kinds of ways. If the family is to persist in a genuine “imagined community” of care, beyond a hobbled dysfunction, then there’s no claiming that was thirty years ago. That wasn’t me. That’s not the person I am now. I’m not responsible for the past. Don’t look to me for an apology, for recompense or reconciliation, a rededication in love.
Get over it.
As always, I welcome your comments.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Jay,
Great distinction between responsible as being guilty of a past misdeed vs. taking ownership of the duty to correct the current effects of that past misdeed. Perhaps we need a word other than responsible to convey singularly that latter meaning.
Jay - I always enjoy reading your articles as they make me think, which I appreciate. The piece that stuck out to me the most was how we often take pride in our national/historical achievements but rarely want to acknowledge our national/historical travesties. None of it is personal, as none of us were there for most of those events. But I agree that you can't selectively choose which parts of your national identity you want to embrace without being hypocritical. It is perfectly fine for us to be proud of what our nation has accomplished, but we must also acknowledge the bad if we are to be honest with ourselves and others.