To
return: When I said α I did not mean by
‘I’:
Wittgenstein.
For W. is chara
cterized by his body,
or by his memories or by his chara
cter
etc. but I wasn
't concerned with
any such thing. I did not mean to state that mostly
when I see there are near to the
geometric
eye parts of a body which people call
W
.'s. This may be so but it is just as
easily imaginable that the body round the
geometric eye disappears for good or changes
its shape & properties constantly
etc. I did not want to state α as a
proposition of experience. –
Imagine that the upper half of my head vanished without my
noticing it but the
geometric eye
would still lie in the same position with respect to my mouth, say,
as before. I should then talk about
what I see just as usual. One might say:
this is exactly the case as
feeling || having pains
in your amput
ated
leg || foot. All right, but let us ask the
analogous question in this case: with
what right does the
man say that
he has pains in the foot which belongs no more to
him than to his neighbour? Well with
what right does he
i.e. that particular mouth
shout
? || , or make a gesture of
pain? But isn't that just the connection which
pain has to him. (We are
not talking of the
hypothetical connection through nerves & brains).
We can imagine a man to have pain in a sixth finger although he
never had one. In which case should we say
this? Imagine him touching the
sixth || imaginary finger with his other hand.
What is the criteri
on for the place in which the pain is.
In what sense does he know where the pain is before he touches the
painful spot. You ask the man with the amputated foot
“where do you feel pain?” & he points
to a point in space. It is his pointing that
fixes the place of pain. Compare this to seeing a spot
& pointing to it. – Now back to the question
“with what right does he say ‘I see’ if his
eyes have been removed & the
geometric eye isn't on any part
of his body?” Let us ask: With what
right does his body shrink from an approaching danger or his mouth
shout; even if he has never learnt any language? Let us
talk about ‘the mouth
¤ that
sees’ meaning the mouth of the man who
sees. Now which mouth do we call the mouth which sees if
the
geometric eye is not in a human
eye? Do I cho
ose the mouth with which I say
“I see …”? Or doesn't
the mouth which says it determine the meaning of the word
‘I’? What meaning would the word
‘I’ have if it came from a
microphone? But you say:
“It would perhaps have no meaning to anybody
else but the person who sees would know that
he
saw”. But what would he know?
(Note the queer idea of meaning when you say it has a meaning to
him. The idea of a private meaning is obviously that of a
picture
he sees & no one else does. Now
what would this picture of
himself be like?
Would it not be that of his body in the ordinary
sense?) Knowing is something like saying & the
sense of what you say depends on the use that's made of
your words || the
words you say. Now if he says to himself
‘I’ that's no use if he cann
ot
distinguish the person which says it from other
people. The man who says
‘α’
falls || tumbles from one language into
another as the man who says ‘I am here’.
Here too people might
say || think that this
proposition has no sense
for anyone else but that it has for the man who
thinks it.