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It is not a matter of someone else finding my words hard to understand. It is I as speaker who experience my inability to capture the experience in words. Do those who do not have this experience miss out on something? Or is it merely a matter of what forms of expression we prefer?Įxperiences of the sort hinted at by McDowell seem to be speaker-centred rather than bound up with problems of communication. Here are some things to ponder: I believe some of us are more inclined than others to speak of experiences defeating our capacity to capture reality in language. Do they reveal something about the essence of language? Or are they just one way of reacting to a powerful experience? The question I wish to raise is whether experiences like these actually do throw light on our predicament as speakers. The poem connects with experiences with which we are familiar: the very incomprehensibility of the death of those who matter to us and of the thought of our own non-existence, the senselessness of the slaughter of young men in war, the poignancy of a photograph capturing a moment in time that is almost palpably present and yet forever lost. One's own body from its instant and heat.
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Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out Such contradictory permanent horrors here To regard this photograph might well dement, "The poem", as McDowell expresses it, "is about a kind of impossibility the poet finds in trying to combine that fact, in a single mental embrace, with the vibrant aliveness with which they are present in the photograph" (p. The poem is about a photograph of six young men who were soon after all to be killed in the first world war. It comes from a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six young men". One situation to which McDowell refers is that invoked in Cora Diamond's essay in the book, "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy". That dislodges us from comfortably inhabiting our nature as speaking animals, animals who can make sense of things in the way the capacity to speak enables us" (p. The theme is adumbrated by John McDowell in speaking of situations "when something we encounter defeats our ordinary capacity to get our minds around reality, that is, our capacity to capture reality in language. In my reading, the essays are more centrally concerned with questions about the limitations of language than with animal life. The essays are highly readable and they raise a number of intriguing issues.
CAPTURING REALITY VOLUME MEASURE SERIES
The small volume Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) consists of a series of contributions by Cary Wolfe, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell and Ian Hacking, each of the latter three commenting on those that precede it.