14 March 2008
Newton GarverBruce Jackson's philosophic entanglements
Readers of Bruce Jackson’s new book, The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple University Press, 2007), may be excused for thinking that he is another one of those familiar literary relativists. The very title gives away at first glance that the truth in question is not truth to the facts, and once we cut loose from our anchor in facts, we are, it seems, adrift in a sea of subjectivism. Browsing through the book repeatedly reinforces this judgment. Time and again Bruce shows the value of a story to lie in the telling of the story, and the context of the telling, rather than its conformity to facts. In so far as there is any reality involved, it is not factual reality but rather what appears as reality to the storyteller and the audience.
At the end of the volume, when he touches on the winding down of life, that time when activity is curtailed but stories and memories go on, he becomes more explicitly philosophical. He identifies life with time, saying that life does not end when activity and achievement end but when stories and memories end, and he identifies time as the essential common element is all stories. So the end of life and the end of a subjective sense of time are one and the same thing. Here we seem to have an unmistakable echo of Heidegger’s main theme, conveyed in the title of his masterwork, Being and Time. Heidegger’s identification of life with time, of reality with time, comes from a central theme of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and becomes the root of modern Existentialism. It was imported into France and morphed into various forms of subjectivism, culminating in the “critical theory” associated with Jacques Derrida. To say that stories are true even though they are completely unsupported by facts (perhaps because there really are no facts) sounds like another version of this subjective relativism. Is that Bruce Jackson’s underlying philosophy?
I don’t think so. Certainly one of Bruce’s goals is to argue that the stories we tell nearly always have a subjective motive, even when we cannot see what that motive is. When he writes about the O.J. Simpson trial, it is clear enough what the subjective motive is for the two competing legal teams, and it is entirely clear that the goal of the arguments is persuasion rather than discovery of the facts. The way Bruce writes about the trial, it is further evident that he takes it as a given that there is a fact of the matter about who committed the murders. It is just that it was not the job of the court, nor of either defense or prosecution, to determine the fact, and in the end we do not know that fact. That we do not know the fact, and perhaps cannot ever know the fact, does not, however, entail that there was no fact -- and Bruce insists there was.
In debunking the legend of why Bob Dylan remained absent from the Newport Folk Festival for nearly forty years, it is even more evident that Bruce believes in facts. He was at Newport, backstage. He tells us a number of the facts, based on his own personal familiarity with them. His point, again, is that a legend grows quite independent of the facts. A legend may even be a wonderful legend independent of the facts.
Bruce writes as a folklorist rather than as a historian, and he does not write about the stories historians tell in order to explain events. Historians might be thought to be more dedicated to facts than are storytellers. Perhaps they are. But I doubt that Bruce would exempt their tales from his general theme. Nor should he. Historians are just like any other storytellers, marshaling fragments that support their themes. Every so often we have what are called “revisionist” histories, in which a scholar writes about a familiar event in a way that challenges or even overthrows the prevailing account of that event. Bruce’s insistence on the difference between facts and stories provides us with as good an account as any of the phenomenon of revisionist history.
So I believe that the metaphysics underlying Bruce’s theme is that the facts are really there all right, but the stories about them are never entirely reliable. The leads me to conclude that he is a crypto-Wittgensteinian. One of Wittgenstein’s central themes, through both his early and his late work, is to allow no doubt about facts themselves, and no certainty about any account of the facts. This is a daunting combination of thoughts. I will make no attempt to argue for it but only to cite texts that show Wittgenstein’s commitment to the combination - - or, if you like, to the disjunction (as he later put it) between knowledge and certainty.
In his early work Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, the first two sentences stake out an extraordinary commitment to facts: “The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Here there is no beating about the bush. There is nothing subjective or idealist about reality; reality consists of facts. Wittgenstein adds that reality does not consist of things, thereby rejecting a static common-sense view, but in the context of the history of philosophy the contrast is with those who take reality to consist first and foremost of ideas, such as Descartes (thinking) and Hume (impressions).
Following this strong clear beginning Wittgenstein spends some pages trying (without much success) to tell us what a fact is, while studiously avoiding giving us even one example. He then moves on to the next main point, which introduces the subject of the remainder of the book: “We make pictures of facts for ourselves.” In his original German, “Wir machen uns Bilder der Tatsachen.” The official translation reads, “We make ourselves pictures of facts,” but there is no need to suppose that the pictures are subjective. Making pictures of facts for ourselves can just as well be social as solipsistic. What determines that the pictures are not subjective is that each picture is a logical picture (a proposition) rather than a graphic image. In Bruce’s terms, we might just as well understand Wittgenstein to say that we tell ourselves stories about facts -- though he then goes to make much more than Bruce about the logical structure of pictures.
Another point that Bruce and Ludwig share is that no story, no picture of a fact, can ever be conclusive. If the picture corresponds to the fact we can call it true (in the sense of uncovering the world rather than uncovering the person), but no such correspondence is ever guaranteed. To the storyteller who insists, “But it MUST be that way,” Wittgenstein gives a terse answer towards the end of his book: “There is only logical necessity.”
In the two principal works of his later period, Philosophical Investigations (PI) and On Certainty (OC), Wittgenstein expresses his commitment to facts not being subject to doubt in rather different terms. In PI there are several references to natural history, some of them explicit and some implicit. For example in §25 he writes, “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” The natural history Wittgenstein invokes usually concerns uses of language, and in the passage just cited it is evident that the later Wittgenstein sees many uses of language other than making ourselves pictures of facts.
Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a ‘proto-phenomenon’. That is, where we ought to have said: this language-game is played. The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experience but of noting a language-game. (PI 654-655)
Since scientists normally occupy themselves with explanations, Wittgenstein seems implicitly to contrast natural history with natural science. The facts of natural history are not doubted (Wittgenstein does not say “cannot be” but “are not.’), whereas the explanations of natural science are never valid unless they can be doubted; that is, unless it is clear to other scientists how retest and refute the explanation. That is why natural history is static but natural science advances. In OC 308 Wittgenstein punctuates this thought with one of his most pregnant remarks: “‘Knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ belong to different categories.” This is because knowledge always involves a story (“How do you know that? is always a reasonable question.), whereas facts are just there.
I am happy to conclude that Bruce Jackson shares the robust sense of reality that characterizes Wittgenstein’s work, rather than the subjectivism with which his title threatens us.
Newton Garver is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at University at Buffalo. His most recent books are Wittgenstein & Approachest to Clarity (Humanity Books, 2006) and Limits of Power: Some Friendly Reminders (Center Working Papers, revised edition 2007)
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