In the reading for this week I kept coming back to the idea of knowledge, knowing, and the different types of each. Pascal addresses these concepts most patently. In passages 290 and 292, he directs his attention to the oral tradition and the importance of genealogy it often carried. Before they had “studies, sciences or arts”, topics which Pascal believes fill conversations in his time, people took more care to preserve their genealogy. As one of  Pascal’s main concerns in the Pensées is Christianity and its truth, Pascal connects the tradition to how Moses passed on his teaching. “For it is not the length of the years but the number of the generations which makes things obscure, for truth is only altered when men change” (292) creates the image of Chinese Whispers: the more people it passes through, the more the message changes. Passage 292 reads like a defence of the different practices in Christianity; men have changed over time so their practices have too. It also, I believe, speaks to the idea of communities created around people who share the same understanding (not those with the understanding creating the community). How forgiving Pascal was of those communities different to his is unclear. “This evidence is conclusive among certain people who really understand the matter” suggests that he is part of one group that sees things a certain way, and there is a sense that, he privileges this way of understanding the matter.

Pascal carries this idea of different communities of understanding over to his next collection of passage: “Proofs of Jesus Christ”. He separates out three types of knowledge as being carnal knowledge, intellectual knowledge, and wisdom. It seems Pascal does not believe the three can overlap. “Great geniuses [i.e those with intellectual knowledge] have their power, their splendour, their greatness, their victory and their lustre, and do need carnal greatness”(308). They occupy the realm of the mind and are recognised through it. The carnal knowledge then, is left to the body and to the eyes, although they are unable to see the greatness of intellectual people. It is wisdom though, which is cut off from both. “The greatness of wisdom […] is not visible to carnal or intellectual people.” Perhaps it is more accurate to separate, not types of knowledge but, the types of men who have these types of knowledge. Wisdom, as Pascal describes it, exists on another plane. It is not through the human body — “bodies know nothing” — nor through the human mind but by some other entity.

Emily Dickinson, to a lesser extent, also addresses this concept. She suggests that the eyes are not the only way to see, nor the body the only way to know. In poem 336, she uses the phrase “finite eyes” to describe sight which could not take the vision, or the possession, of the meadows, mountains, stars, birds, etc. Is it that the eyes, physically, are unable to see all of nature in its entirety? Or the movement of nature cause the eyes to miss something? The knowledge received solely by eyes is finite either because the eyes themselves are finite i.e they cannot see everything, or because, even if they do see everything figure in nature, they can not see it in its infinity. The poem ends with the speaker deciding to see “with just [her] soul” and it is then that she can look “incautious” at nature and the sun. The image of the sun if particularly neat to finish on as it is commonly known that the human eye will be blinded by looking directly at the sun. The speaker, however, does not need this caution as she has thrown off her eyes and looks with her soul. Is this the same soul that Pascal’s notion of wisdom comes from? There are certainly similarities yet Dickinson does not add the mind into the equation. In fact, the speaker is the only human figure in the poem; it is only “other creatures [who] put their eyes” cautiously towards the sun.

Pascal, in his discussion — perhaps justification— of the Bible, points to the difference in figurative and literal language; it is the interplay between the two which is the key to understanding scripture and solving the contradictions that exist. For Pascal, it is necessary to solve these contradictions and Christianity is the true faith because it is the only which has succeeded in doing so through figures. Christ, for example, is figuratively a great king; it is his spirit and his eternal kingdom which make him great not what he possesses on Earth. This method of thought is central to Pascal’s work as he tries to balance his mathematical history with his faith. In passage 260, Pascal names the tool for this type on understanding as a “cipher”. For him, “a cipher has two meanings” the literal and the figurative or the spiritual. A cipher is the only way Pascal can envision the Bible with its obscurities and contradictions. The work of the prophets and the apostles was to decode this cipher, or these ciphers, to spread the truth of God to his followers: “they broke the seal, he rent the veil and revealed the spirit.”

However, Pascal does not investigate the nature of ciphers. They can be understood in two ways. Firstly, by being cracked and the true meaning being extracted and secondly, by a predetermined system between the author of the cipher and its reader or recipient. The duality attached to ciphers is complicated further by the nature of scripture. Were the ciphers first created in the Old or New Testament? Or did Christ teach in ciphers delivered to the apostles? Did they then keep the ciphered message when they wrote the scripture? Or were they in the latter type of cipher-breakers and already had the means to crack it? It is interesting to note that Pascal does little to resolve them. In 268 he claims “the letter kills […] This is the cipher St Paul gives us.” It follows that the apostles created the ciphers and it is for followers to unravel. This result is slightly unsatisfying as it just raises the question of why write contradictory scripture? Later (276) the whole of the Old Testament is labelled a cipher. Are we to presume then that the New Testament is not?

Pascal is somewhat contradictory in his guide of how to unravel contradictions. He is caught in a world of ciphers and needs to use them to escape it. This situation is one Wittgenstein believes language ties us all into. In his passage 120, Wittgenstein poses an imaginary conversation in which an unknown figure asks him to further explain his language-games and their function in our language system, and the system in which our language functions. (By this qualification I refer to Wittgenstein’s questioning of the importance of language to us as a species and our use of it to raise ourselves above the rest of the animal kingdom as he discusses in 25.) Twice in a short passage Wittgenstein notes the problem with using the tool— in this case language— being examined for the examination:“Well, your very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask!” and “Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.” Wittgenstein, in comparison to Pascal, appears to be more aware of the limitations of his chosen tools. The difficulty of separating a word, its meaning, and, to a lesser extent, the use of  the word in the system in which they only function as a combination is an area Wittgenstein is deeply concerned with. Unlike Pascal, he does not seem to be moving towards a final truth, or to resolve the contradictions but, rather, to look at how these contradictions function in showing the limits of the system they emerge from.

Briefly, there is one significant stylistic difference between the two that is of interest to me. Opening Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations on almost any page one would find frequent use of the third person plural, i.e we and us. Even page 54, where we can find the imagined conversation, has multiple uses of this address. As readers, we allow him to lead us through the steps of his logic as if he was working through them with us; his goal is “how can these observations satisfy us?” no how can they satisfy him. Reading Pascal, with his strong faith and belief in the universal truth of God, is, at least for me, more difficult. Regardless of one’s personal faith or lack thereof, the resolution of contradictions through ciphers is not as inclusive as Wittgenstein’s line of questioning. Pascal does not think of himself as one who has “unaided knowledge”(199); it is clear he has found the truth he believes we all must do.

As Dickinson writes poetry one must always read her texts as one would a cipher. The literal meaning of her poem and its figurative one, to borrow Pascal’s terms, may rarely be the same. Although, I do not believe that in poetry is something “is false literally, so it is true spiritually”(BP 272). In much of her work Dickinson makes great use of the layers of meaning this type of dual reading allows. To keep with the theme of ciphers, Dickinson’s poem 303 discusses ghostly visitors “who baffle Key”. Key here could simply be the key to the door; these visiting hosts could arrive even though the door is locked. (Even naming her visitors as hosts is playing with double meanings.) In the following stanza Dickinson states that “They have no Robes, nor Names – / No Almanacs – nor Climes – “ i.e without those items which state something about their rank, identity, customs etc. The use of key now takes another meaning. There is nothing to give a hint of who, or what, these hosts are; they cannot be read against a key for understanding. The capitalisation of the first letter of “key” helps to align the word with robes, names, almanacs and climes, all of which are similarly capitalised.

The second half of this poem is still more allusive. In what way these hosts are like gnomes is still something that alludes me. However there is certainly a strong religious slant to poem 303. “Their Coming, may be known / By Couriers within – “ is possible a reference to Christ’s coming to the Earth which is known by some (Christians) and not others (Jews). The couriers within harkens back to the use of ciphers; things can only be known to those within the predetermine system or those who break their way in. Are these couriers some reference to the apostles? It was the word of God that they were to deliver? “Their going – is not – / For they’re never gone – “ refers back to the hosts. They do not leave but what position does this ending leave the couriers in? They do not seem to have full knowledge of the movements of the hosts whereas the speaker of the poem does. Dickinson gives us no key to help our understanding, we are excluded like the couriers in the closing two lines of the poem as those with unaided knowledge.

Blaise Pascal, Emily Dickinson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein all performed acts of curation on their works. Whether with thread, bundles, or experiments in assembly, the three writers had unusual ways they wanted their works to be collected. Consequently, it has been difficult, for me, to read these texts without engaging with the methods of their collections, or thinking of others who had similar acts of collection. I do not wish to use this blog post to theorise on why Pascal, Dickinson, and Wittgenstein worked in such a way, but rather, to explore how their methods effect the knowing reader, and how the reader then experiences their work.

However, before turning to the three writers who make up the course I would like to take a moment to discuss another artist who works and thinks in pieces: Henri Matisse. During his later years, Matisse, suffering from ill health, lost the ability to paint in the way he once had. Matisse needed a new method of creating his art and began working with “cut-outs”. The method was simple, he has lost his ability to paint precisely so cut pieces out of pre-painted pages and, then, bundled them together to create collage style paintings. The 2014 exhibition, at the Tate Modern in London, showed the different stages and versions of composition. It is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s experiments in the assembly of his pieces. The “cut-outs”, as the art world has named them, are also in a similar style to Matisse’s earlier work even though their crafting and presentation are different. The reclining and dancing figures are gone but what they were against remains.  Matisse has used the cut-outs to bring the background into the foreground.

During the week’s reading I have been thinking about why I was thinking of Matisse. It is, I believe, how knowing the collection method effects the understanding of the work. The different ways the same pieces are collected creates different emphases. Reading Emily Dickinson offers similar possibilities. Her poems are collected in two ways: chronologically and by fascicle. There is some overlap, of course, but reading them in these two orders offers a different overall experience. Dickinson uses pronouns ambiguously, without real clarity as to who, or what, they stand in for. I found myself following different figures through her poems depending on whether I was reading them in chronological order or in the order dictated by fascicle.

The poem numbered 131, for example, has two figures the speaker and an unspecified she. Reading this poem chronologically, one may carry over the female “mama” figure, or perhaps the sparrow in the previous poem, 130. However, 131 appears in Fascicle 10 following a series of poems featuring only inanimate objects (244-47). There is then, an added mystery to the she in 131; even more so when the figures increase and a direct address of “you” is made. Dickinson plays with the relationship of the speaker of her poems with the other, often ambiguous figures in it, and the reader. They oscillate between inviting a reader in to an private world and excluding one from it. The poems, at times, feel intrusive to read however, it is when Dickinson is experimenting with punctuate that this dual movement exists most.  The dashes in poem 80 make it unclear whether it is the “you” or the “I” of the poem which is “unsuspecting” or whether the feeling is “almost- a loneliness” or whether the feeling is “almost” in existence. The frequency with which Dickinson has an unexpected turn, or word at the end of her poem causes a similar effect: in her own words “perplexity”(99).

Pascal in his Pensées has a similarly convoluted relationship between writer and reader. His, however, is more informed by the history of the crafting and production of his work than Dickinson’s. Not all of the pieces in Pensées were collected, and what Pascal intended the work to be in unclear. It has elements of both a rhetorical piece and elements that are more immediate and appear personal to Pascal. It is these more internally inflected pieces that show similarities to Dickinson and Matisse. To take “Vanity” as one example, Pascal makes statements without offering much in the way of explanation. “An inch or two of cowl can put 25,000 monks up in arms” (18) has no direct relevance to the statements on either side of it nor is it clear whether Pascal means it to be a criticism or whether it is purely an observation. Similarly with “we do not choose as captain of a ship the most highly born of those aboard” (30). The logic of the statement is easy to follow— that is not a reasonable way to choose a captain— but Pascal offers no other possibility. Readers are left to puzzle what they would do, and what Pascal means by it.

With Wittgenstein, too, the knowledge of the way he crafted his work effects how it is read. In his preface he claims “until recently I had really given up the idea of publishing my work in my lifetime.” What then did Wittgenstein make of his work? And how much did it change once he knew it was to be published in his lifetime? The answers to these questions I have not (yet[?]) found in his work but it leads me to another which I am sure will follow me through his Philosophical Investigations, Pascal’s Pensées, and Dickinson’s oeuvre. How much should this knowledge of collection, curation, experimentation in assembly, or intention effect the way these texts are read? Is it the same for each of the three writers? Or for Wittgenstein, with his more complete work, does it matter more?