foundations are immanent and transcendent at the same time, both given and facultative. I have argued that this radically paralogical picture of human conduct necessarily committed both scholars to a counter-ontology, one that grasps what there is in terms of basic ambiguity and therewith processually as discretionary becoming or ethics, as I use the latter term here. I confess that the ethical implications of this ontology did not become transparent to me until I became familiar with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of otherness. Hence, when I dwell on ethics in the present work, more often than not I am drawing directly on Levinas for inspiration. At any rate, before leaving off this discussion of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, I want to point once more to the ethical force and heavy anthropological bearing of their work by citing their deep appreciation of what in Western thought tends to get dismissed as mere mysticism and magic.
Wittgenstein deleted (as “bad,” i.e., “S” for schlecht) the following lines from his original manuscript of his remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough (cited in Klagge and Nordmann 1993: 116–17):
I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic.
But in doing this I must not make a case for magic nor may I make fun of it. The depth of magic should be preserved.—
Indeed, here the elimination of magic has itself the character of magic.
For, back then, when I began talking about the ‘world’ (and not about this tree or table), what else did I want but to keep something higher spellbound in my words?
Wittgenstein is suggesting here that, like magic, metaphysical questions tend to evoke in us a sense of something deep and mysterious, something fundamental but also unfathomable. Hence, like magic, metaphysical philosophy—take, for example, the proposition that everything serves a purpose or that the universe is a vast mechanism or that what really exists are not trees or tables but monads—can be consequentially misleading, but not for that reason frivolous. On the one hand, since it makes logical nonsense, he does not wish to speak in favor of such ‘magical’ thought; on the other, since its depth needs to be preserved, neither does he wish to make fun of it. In effect, although he is far from uncritical of it, he takes magic very seriously.
The following quotation, which serves to link magic with ethics and religion, makes plain the respect in which Wittgenstein (in Monk 1990: 277) held such thought:
My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
Merleau-Ponty too takes magical thought seriously (1968: 24):
It was…evident to the man brought up in the objective cognition of the West that magic or myth has no intrinsic truth, that magical effects and the mythical and ritual life are to be explained by “objective” causes and what is left over ascribed to the illusions of Subjectivity…[T]he ethnologist in the face of societies called archaic cannot presuppose that, for example, those societies have a lived experience of time like ours [i.e., the experience of time as simply linear]…and [he] must describe a mythical time where certain events “in the beginning” maintain a continued efficacity…To be sure, we have repressed the magical into the subjectivity, but there is no guarantee that the relationship between men does not inevitably involve magical and oneiric components.
In point of fact, Merleau-Ponty is quite certain that “the relationship between men” does inevitably involve such components (1962: 365):
It will perhaps be maintained that a philosophy cannot be centred round a contradiction, and that all our descriptions, since they ultimately defy thought, are quite meaningless. The objection would be valid if we were content to lay bare, under the term phenomenon or phenomenal field, a layer of prelogical or magical experiences. For in that case we should have to choose between believing the descriptions and abandoning thought, or knowing what we are talking about and abandoning our descriptions. These descriptions must become an opportunity for defining a variety of comprehension and reflection altogether more radical than objective thought…We must return to the cogito, in search of a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one which endows the latter with its relative validity, and at the same time assigns to it its place.
The philosophy “centred round a contradiction” is of course his own, keyed as it is to the body-subject or subject-object regarded not as a relationship between two autonomous principles but as opposing principles, each of which integrally defines the other—that is, as a fundamental ambiguity. The distinction between ‘thought’ and ‘description’, in which the latter concept denotes what ultimately ‘defies’ the former, seems identical in essence to Wittgenstein's between what can be said (i.e., thought) and what can only be shown (because when we try to say it, we cannot really know “what we are talking about”). And like Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualism, choosing instead to privilege the descriptional pole as more fundamental, not because it replaces logical thought, but because it founds it (endows it “with its relative validity” and “assigns to it its place”). In this connection, recall that for Wittgenstein, ultimately practice can be described but not explained, and far from refuting thought, it serves as its scaffolding. Practice is the “substratum of all my enquiring and asserting,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 162). “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness” of this substratum (ibid.: § 166). Or as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1962: 365), once we discover this paradoxical layer of bodily or pre-logical reflection, “we shall understand that beyond [it] there is nothing to understand.”
This groundless ground, which is altogether more radical than objective thought and beyond which there is nothing to understand, forms of course the land of the synthetic a priori, and both scholars, as we have just seen, use the word ‘magic’ to describe it. When they do, as is also plain from the quotations, they have in mind a kind of thinking that is usually associated with so-called primitive peoples. In anthropological literature, perhaps the key diagnostic of such thought has been apparent indifference to logical contradiction. It is especially in view of the logical law of non-contradiction that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty find the word ‘magic’ appropriate to the sort of ground to which they are laboring to (re)turn the mind's eye. As this ground is also groundless, a foundation that is not a foundation, it basically flouts the law of non-contradiction and cannot be logically determined. Merleau-Ponty, again evoking the anthropological concern with thought that runs contrary to logical logic, speaks of this ground—on which objective reflection is said by him to rest—as “brute” or “wild” being (1968: 110).10
Wild being and the synthetic a priori implicate nondualism, and nondualism—since it can be shown but not said, that is, since it ultimately defies thought—is magical. Using an example from Wittgenstein, perhaps I can point more transparently to what these two thinkers are driving at when they speak of magic. With his inimitable genius for lighting up an issue at a stroke, Wittgenstein (1972: § 621) poses the following question: “[W]hat is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” In effect, he is posing the body-mind problem in an effort to clear up misleading expressions concerning willful or voluntary movement. To take an example of my own, if I were to ask a student to please close the classroom door (as I have done on occasion to make the present point), and she obliged, there would appear to be no mystery about what happened: the student took the meaning of my request, and, imparting physical energy to the door, closed it. But when I ask myself to raise my arm, and my arm goes up, a mystery immediately emerges. It seems that we know what caused the door to close; but what ‘caused’ my arm
