I'm pleased Lionpainter found my little dialogue between Grice and his guardian
angel amusing.
It was, of course, provoked by McEvoy -- in his reply to Helm on Mencken.
Among the few points -- which McEvoy grants may be all wrong -- he mentions a
'dialogue' during a dream -- and he makes the explicit reference to the
unconscious. I chose Grice, because, well, he died of emphysema. It was his
mother, Mabel Fulton Grice, back in the day, in affluent Halborne,
Staffordshire, who instilled on little Grice a love for smoking -- "it makes
you look sophisticated," she would say -- having in mind people like Sir Noel
Coward and such. In later years, Grice managed to quit smoking for good -- his
preference was for Player's Navy Cut cigarettes, and the last package he bought
was left unopened.
In his unpublication on "Happiness" (later reprinted in "Conception of Value"),
Grice plays with the idea that 'eudaimonia', the Greek term for Latin
'felicity', or happiness, should be traced back to its etymology, eudaimon, the
good daemon, who Grice sees as the fairy godmother, almost. He is concerned
with analysis of what it means to say that one is happy. One is happy if one is
carefully guided by one's fairy godmother, as it were.
But I was also influenced by Lacan, in responding to McEvoy. After all, Lacan's
claim to infame is to have said that "the unconscious is structured like a
language". Note that he never EQUATED stuff: "LIKE a language" means, or
implicates that it is NOT a language (but this is an implicature: "A horse is
like a horse" -- or, "This horse is like that horse" -- One of Grice's
favourite essays was Wiggins on "Sameness and Identity".
So what did Lacan mean?
Sigmund Freud discovered that dreams (and, consequently, the unconscious)
operated with two basic mechanisms:
A) condensation
and
B) displacement.
Later, Lacan identified those mechanisms to be the same as
A') metaphor
and
B') metonymy
(Grice prefer to speak of metaphtonymy -- "Do not multiply figures of speech
beyond necessity").
Lacan is reading Freudian psychoanalysis with a new epistemic framework: that
of sciences of language; a movement influenced by structuralism, of course.
McEvoy may be having something different in mind. But psychologists usually
rely on REPORTS of dreams. I will kill the amusing side, but the whole idea of
psychologists is that we need Grice, awoken, and reporting:
"I dreamed that my guardian angel was advising me to quit smoking for good. But
then I look carefully, and I did see that he himself was himself a big cigar.
"You too," I recall were the actual words I uttered to him upon his reprimand,
which, I recall distinctly, went, "You should quit smoking for good."".
Sherrie puts it brilliantly, as she comments on the dialogical version:
"The implication of the overt awareness of the unconscious to the unconscious.
Isn't that what dreams unscrambled do for us?"
I guess they do. But again, then, for the record, hence the subject line, my
motivation was an exploration of McEvoy's initial reference to the language of
the unconscious. I'll see if I can find his exact wording:
McEvoy lists this as point III:
"If there are unconscious mental states,
it is implausible that these are all
linguistically formulated (though some
may be: 'thoughts,' in the form of
dialogue, while asleep."
McEvoy's formulation reminds one (i.e. me -- but then it may also remind R.
Paul) of N. Malcolm's "Dreaming", which Malcolm compares to Descartes's cogito.
i. I am dreaming.
is the object of conceptual analysis by Malcolm. Note that McEvoy's point is
totally conditional:
"IF" there are unconscious mental states" -- implicature: it may well be that
there aren't.
APODOSIS: "it is IMPLAUSIBLE" that they are of the form:
Grice's guardian angel: You should quit smoking for good, Paul.
Grice: And you too.
But since McEvoy has read Popper's propensities, there may not be a fixed rate,
and so McEvoy adds a sort of anti-refutatory caveat: "although some
unsconscious mental states," provided they exist," _may_ be."
It is here that he gives the example or illustration of a 'thought' or a couple
of 'thoughts', "in the form of [a] dialogue", while dreaming.
If Lacan and Freud are right, there's metaphtonymy regardless. It's NOT
linguistic _per se_ but "like" language. One of Lacan's favourite novels was
Finnegan's Wake
-- based on an old Irish ballad -- Finnegan is brought to life by being poured
whisky during the wake --. Lacan thought that Joyce reproduced what this lingo
of the unconscious (with its metaphtonymy -- Lacan's rewrite of Freud's
condensation and displacement -- might look like, and set it to music, too!
Cheers,
Speranza
