Remora

"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.

Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.

However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.

However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."

LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:

"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.

(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."

This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.

After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:

"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."

Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:

"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."

What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:

"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."

We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.