Born 1832, Lewis Carroll
taught mathematics and logic at Christ Church College at Oxford from college
there (1851) to his death (1898). He wrote the Alice books for Alice and
her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having
conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and
chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent
and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.
He was especially fond
of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter
how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in
America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a
pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time,
and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his
relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of
Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family
broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble
enough.
Many have tried to crack
his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath.
Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say
it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that
there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things
there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his
nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find
some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.
There are repeated
themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took
Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in
conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious
consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught,
hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having
ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way
that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and
ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.
Carroll was fascinated
by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on
its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked
but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example:
Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example
from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then
stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being
upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she
could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be
deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something
from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting
something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception.
Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from
two different and opposite perspectives.
In many ways, the
imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider
the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern
thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a
unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one
thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one
wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas
if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just
have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the Red
Queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can
just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are,
while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in
ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world
compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things
themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.
There are many quotes
from the books on logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of
logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes
life itself less than the ideal:
Studying Logic, “will
give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle –
the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and,
more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces
the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books,
in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude
those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p
xvii)
“And so you think, do
you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from
workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by
other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be
much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially
would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that
are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the
other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that
lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or
magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and,
even when the Premises are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a
correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p
32)
“The Logicians…speak of
the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living,
conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and
that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign
will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the
beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall
always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I
meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)
“You will find these
seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular,
universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have
ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and
your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”
If you go through the
answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that
interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament
is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write
poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug
reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims,
“Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.
Sylvie and Bruno
Limerick (note the many types of non-being)
He thought he saw a
rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and
found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he
sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.
THE ALICE BOOKS
Alice travels to
wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she
encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such
that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them.
The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and
dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in
order that they appear in the two books.
Alice in Wonderland
This was first called
Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this
book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In
the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror.
Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and
imagination together as thought. Alice is thinking about whether or not
to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end)
falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is
both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind
with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until
she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she
fell asleep and into a dream world.
Alice passes all sorts
of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls.
All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason
and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks
that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who
walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by
reason and imagination.
She falls into an
underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the
small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is
somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and
particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table.
When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’
we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but
when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only
have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the
slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of
these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is
easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being
ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments.
Alice will get to
this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps
screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court
game of croquet.
Throughout this, Alice
is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the
things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that
philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s
floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought
experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but
self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be
denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel
now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks
that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian
England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the
house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real
Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.
When she encounters the
Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then
she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest.
Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which
the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must
be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic,
deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and
simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make
sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at
the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.
Meeting the Duchess in
her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and
sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes
the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice
says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with
you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.
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Alice at the Mad Tea
Party and Wittgenstein’s Later Thought
There is an interesting
bridge between Lewis Carroll and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand
Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of
the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians
who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met
Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his
successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of
types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity
college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun
by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that
it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with
the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also
pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness
to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio
resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.
Russell famously stated:
“Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about,
nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to
illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form.
The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but
it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things.
Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in
advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a
position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue.
The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a
close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that
lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.
Among scholars there is
consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a
debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s
nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed
writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi).
Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s
work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky.
Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of
(Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a
philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays,
Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense,
and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll
investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself,
as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight.
In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of
the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:
I shall try to show that
the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were
deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show
that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein
attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.
Pitcher presents several
points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are
preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use
of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like
English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss
giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly
demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both
play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the
incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose
alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than
our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.
Now a forgotten
psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to
inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland,
Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules
of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of
Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even
though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion,
the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by
calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we
later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The
passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.
“…I believe I can guess
that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you
think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said
Alice.
“Then you should say
what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily
replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you
know.”
“Not the same thing a
bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what
I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well
say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get
what I like’!”
“You might just as well
say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I
breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to
you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat
silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about
ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
This dialogue is short,
but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then
show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s
turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The
dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of
substitution.
Alice guesses that she
can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself
but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not
exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing.
Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we
cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used
correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.
Substituting his own
expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions.
He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the
answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly
what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s
‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare
acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed
expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence,
such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the
same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two
expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception,
the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her
expression, not an equivalent substitution.
This reveals something
interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with
others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in
both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections.
We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words,
seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing
by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to
correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they
mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution
for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how
often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s
‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side,
that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.
It is important to note
for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the
conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still
discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is
abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative
substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance.
The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards
generalization.
Now Alice becomes the
one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists
that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’.
What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word
‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’
and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or
providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions.
She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what
she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in
the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”.
Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this
instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the
thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this
case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to
be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:
The use of the word
“rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of
“proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)
If we agree with
Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can
agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually
supportive when she equates the two expressions.
These two expressions do
not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one
fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying,
when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up
to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying.
Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his
typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she
means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical
right as a speaker to confirm.
The Mad Hatter disagrees
with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against
Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what
she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that
‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in
Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad
Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x
then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He
does this by offering a counterexample to this general form: ‘I see what
I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally
true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly
the set of things one sees and vice versa.
Alice started towards
generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare
lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should
do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her
particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by
the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument
that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our
expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms,
it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.
The Hatter gives us an
excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by
generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to
argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many
things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express
ourselves adequately.
Regardless of this
confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another
counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get
what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for
Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The
Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the
same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep
when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal
validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by
presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or
use as ‘I y what I x’.
If we wanted to attack
Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say
what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter
does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples
that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate
examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as
‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal
analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted
form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves
witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.
The Hatter, the March
Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of
thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice,
but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the
series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position
against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping
when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case.
Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and
‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice
does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he
himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was
open all the while.
The dialogue presents us
with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a
contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the
Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction
found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree
with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find one’s
self getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases,
but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups
of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to
Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her
expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction
through the course of an argument.
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Alice leaves the Tea
Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to
from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds
that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing
a game of croquet with animals (flamingos and groundhogs) as the game pieces
(like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as
games).
Cheshire cat shows up,
causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about
whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the
‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body,
effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be
beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that
anything with a head can be beheaded.
The Duchess is now nice
to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden.
This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and
decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too)
simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and
causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice
and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which
annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).
Now, Alice attends the
trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme
setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial,
which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in
the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and
puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror
either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice
tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very
important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the
king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds
best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant.
Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the
evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is
thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.
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Through the Looking
Glass
In the beginning, Alice
is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying
to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten
out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she
thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be.
Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s
vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and
forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to
be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but
they are sitting at her sides.
Alice passes through the
mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into
a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her
to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’
is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who
they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen
now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the Red Queen replies
‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he
wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).
Alice points to a hill,
and the Red Queen says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a
valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how
small, for this is nonsense. The queen replies, ‘I have heard nonsense
compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.
The Red Queen tells
Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To
get going, they both run, but end up not moving. The queen remarks,
“Here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place”.
Much later, Alice meets
the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind
vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t
believe that. The White Queen says close your eyes and try very hard.
Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things.
The queen replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes
believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction,
thus impossible ideals). The White Queen turns into a sheep knitting with
seven pairs of needles (sheep is woolly, knitting wool). They are now in
a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for
things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again).
Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest
rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her
hands.
Humpty Dumpty – Read pg
168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have
noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument
for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what
the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to
mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right
to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged
positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true
right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have
overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.
Alice meets the White
Knight, who has stuff from the whole book on his horse. He falls off on
either side of his horse like human judgement falling to one side or the other
on an issue. He invents things when he is upside down, saying the blood
rushes to his head and helps him to think. His song, “A Sittin’ on a
Gate”, refers to a suspension of judgement and logic, being undecided with
one’s feet in both worlds.
