H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RIGOBELLO

 G.: Rigobello again, and I cannot think why Cedam allowed Soggetto e coscienza into print in 1964 unless they wished to keep the public in productive confusion. S.: That is, after all, one of publishing’s less advertised services. G.: You may laugh; you have published books. S.: A stain I carry with more resignation than pride. G.: I have not, which is perhaps why I still feel entitled to object to other people’s. S.: Or why you object so well. G.: This one especially. Subject and consciousness are not two words one ought to print together unless one is prepared to keep them from reproducing. S.: You think the book should not have been published at all. G.: Or at least not under so free a title, since it can only confuse, and it is not free. S.: “Not free” in what sense? G.: In the ordinary sense first. A title that promises subject and consciousness offers more than any reader can safely carry back from Padua. S.: And in the less ordinary sense? G.: It promises interior architecture where one often finds only upholstered ambiguity. S.: You sound severe before we have even crossed High Street. G.: That is because we are walking toward Examinations Hall, where one ought to arrive already sharpened. S.: We are meant to give a joint class, not a trial. G.: In Oxford the difference is a matter of gown and audience. S.: Very well. Let us start with “subject.” We have discussed subject before, though chiefly in connection with predicate. G.: Exactly. Subject at least behaved then. It knew it was grammatical. S.: Whereas in Rigobello it becomes metaphysical. G.: Or anthropological, or ethical, or personalist, or perhaps merely ambitious. S.: You suspect ambition in a noun. G.: I always do. Nouns rise socially before they deserve to. S.: Yet subject has a genuine philosophical career. G.: Certainly. Subject of predication, subject of consciousness, subject of rights, subject of law, subject to a sovereign, subject as agent, subject as bearer of properties, subject as inward centre, subject as what survives the predicate’s adventures. S.: So you object not to the noun, but to the traffic among its uses. G.: Precisely. One should put toll-gates between them. S.: That sounds less like personalism than municipal planning. G.: A philosopher must begin somewhere. Rigobello, by contrast, wishes the roads all to meet in the person. S.: Which is perhaps where I am less alarmed than you are. G.: Naturally. You have published books. S.: That cannot be the sole explanation. G.: It is at least a condition. Once a man has published a book he begins to believe in the possibility of connecting several grand terms under one cover. S.: And you, having not done so, retain tutorial caution. G.: Precisely. The tutorial teaches economy. A book teaches confidence and often overconfidence. S.: Then what about “coscienza”? G.: Consciousness is worse. It enters a room and immediately expects all the furniture to move inward. S.: A nice image for a thing you claim not to understand. G.: I understand enough to distrust it. Subject I can still connect to predicate, law, and logical form. Consciousness slips too quickly into lamp-lit interiors. S.: Yet you have never been indifferent to mind. G.: No, but mind and consciousness are not coextensive, and “mind” is at least an older English nuisance with some public manners left. S.: Whereas “consciousness” is too upholstered. G.: Exactly. It comes with mirrors. S.: Then why say it is beyond your consciousness but not your subconsciousness? G.: Because that is the only civil way to register a limit without sounding merely stupid. S.: You do not fear sounding stupid. G.: Only in public classes. S.: Which this will be. G.: Exactly my point. S.: Then perhaps the way through is person. G.: Ah, your rescue noun. S.: Not rescue perhaps, but mediation. Subject and consciousness may both become less theatrical if treated through the concept of a person. G.: Strawson has corrupted you. S.: Better him than the merely pious. A person is not a ghostly subject nor a beam of consciousness, but a public concept joining bodily criteria, psychological predicates, and normative standing. G.: That is the textbook form, yes. S.: More than textbook. It allows us to ask what sort of thing Rigobello might actually be after. G.: You mean that his personalism is trying to humanise both subject and consciousness by making them answerable through interpersonal reason. S.: Exactly. G.: You have been reading the prospectus more sympathetically than I. S.: I have been reading you as well. G.: A dangerous mixed method. S.: Still, the passage gives one a clue. “L’allargamento interpersonale del razionale.” He is widening rationality through the relation to another person. G.: Which already sounds like a title too far. S.: But not empty. If the subject is not merely a logical placeholder and consciousness not merely private glow, then both may acquire sense only in the person-to-person field. G.: “Field” is another word publishers should tax. S.: Very likely. Yet the thought is intelligible. My rational life may be enlarged by the fact that another person is not merely an object of my consciousness but someone before whom I answer. G.: That is the ethical turn. S.: Yes, and it explains why subject and consciousness get bound together at all. The subject is no longer just that which predicates attach to, nor merely that which is aware; it becomes the person who can be questioned, responsible, and transformed in dialogue. G.: “Dialogue” is another toll-worthy noun. S.: We are on our way to a hall full of them. G.: Quite right. Still, this does help. If I am to say anything civil about Rigobello in public, I may say that his error, if it is one, lies not in multiplying grand nouns but in trying to bind them too quickly through person. S.: Why call that an error? G.: Because one must distinguish before one integrates. Subject in grammar, subject in law, subject in metaphysics, subject in phenomenology, all these are not the same item merely because a humane book wishes them onto the same page. S.: Yet a concept of person may explain some of the crossings. G.: Some, yes. Not all. That is my complaint. The concept of a person is a very good umbrella. It is not the weather. S.: Also good. G.: Keep that if you must. S.: Then perhaps the real issue is publication again. You think the publishers were too quick to put a large claim into the market. G.: Exactly. One can discuss subject and consciousness in a faculty with the proper local caveats. Print makes caveats social suicides. S.: Since a book must appear to have a view. G.: Precisely. A tutorial may wander toward precision. A book must stride toward a title. S.: You make publication sound vulgar. G.: Only slightly more vulgar than the book jacket deserves. S.: Still, you will soon be giving public classes yourself, which is a sort of oral publication. G.: A dreadful thought. But the public class at least dies at the end of the hour unless some criminal takes notes. S.: Your class on Meaning may yet survive in memory. G.: Memory is less binding than a publisher. S.: Unless one of your hearers becomes devoted and writes it all down. G.: In that case the blame shifts to devotion, which is fairer. S.: Then perhaps you are really envying Rigobello the confidence of print. G.: Not at all. I envy only the possibility of refusing it. S.: That is a very Oxford form of envy. G.: Oxford has refined reluctance to a discipline. S.: We should perhaps be fair to the date. 1964 in Padua is not 1947 in Oxford. G.: True. The postwar Italian philosophical world still has room for large titles under personalist and phenomenological pressure. S.: Whereas Oxford in 1947 prefers dry nouns and modest damage. G.: Exactly. If I called a class “Subject and Consciousness,” the room would expect smoke or conversion. S.: So you call it Meaning instead. G.: A title no less ambitious in truth, but with better manners. S.: Then let us connect this to your own concerns. In personal identity you are suspicious of reducing the person to a flow of consciousness. G.: Yes. One must preserve public criteria, bodily continuity, memory-conditions, practical identity, and the rest. S.: Which again makes “person” your better mediator. G.: Better than pure consciousness, certainly. Consciousness alone is too pointilliste for the work. A person is someone to whom we attribute actions, rights, responsibilities, memories, intentions, and perhaps a troublesome moral style. S.: Such as Rigobello’s. G.: Precisely. And if you ask me what I mean by “the concept of the person of Rigobello,” I should say: not an abstract person, but the specific way in which this particular man tries to personify reason. S.: That is rather good. G.: It had better be; we are almost at the Hall. S.: Then the phrase “intenzionalità rovesciata” in the passage may help. G.: “Inverted intentionality.” A very publishable phrase. S.: Cynicism aside, it suggests that instead of meaning being primarily a matter of my intending something toward an object, it becomes a matter of the other person turning my rational life back upon me. G.: As a question. S.: Exactly. The other is not merely the terminus of an intention but the occasion of my answerability. G.: Which is how personalism hopes to deepen rationality. S.: By making reason less solitary. G.: Or less merely inferential. I can see the attraction. It also risks moral inflation. S.: Because every encounter becomes a scene of ethical enlargement. G.: Exactly. One may end by making breakfast answerable to metaphysics. S.: Which in some colleges it nearly is. G.: Only the worse ones. S.: Then if we are to speak jointly, perhaps we can divide labour. You can keep the distinctions sharp. I can say that personalism is not sheer confusion if understood as a way of asking how subject and consciousness receive their public shape in persons. G.: That sounds tolerable. S.: High praise from you. G.: Take it while it circulates. But we must still address the title. I cannot wholly forgive Soggetto e coscienza. S.: Why exactly? G.: Because it promises the reader that the subject can be reached through consciousness, or consciousness through the subject, without first separating the several senses of each. It is like advertising “Body and Bread” and expecting no theology. S.: Very nice. G.: Keep that too. The point is simple enough. If one says “subject,” some hear grammar, some metaphysics, some legal standing, some phenomenological interiority. If one says “consciousness,” some hear wakefulness, some intentionality, some self-awareness, some subjectivity, some inward light. Put them together and you have not clarified, you have arranged a reception. S.: A reception needs guests. G.: A book has them whether it deserves them or not. S.: Yet the Italian philosophical scene may have understood the shared code better than you admit. G.: Very likely. That is why I attack the publishers rather than the local conversation. In a department, among readers trained by Stefanini, Padovani, personalism, existentialism, and the Catholic moral atmosphere, such a title might guide rather than mislead. S.: But in print more widely? G.: It begins recruiting vagueness. S.: Then perhaps your deeper point is that publication universalises local shorthand. G.: Exactly. A title that works as a faculty nod becomes dangerous once it enters the catalogues. S.: Again, a good line. G.: You are welcome to a few. Now, let us think how this bears on Examinations Hall. We cannot spend an hour denouncing a book neither of us has been asked to teach. S.: No, but we can use it to contrast two models. One model begins from what is said, what is meant, the inferential norms of conversation. The other begins from the person as the site where rationality is enlarged through ethical relation. G.: Yes. And we can say that both are anti-solipsist, though by different routes. S.: You through cooperative inferentiality. G.: He through interpersonal answerability. S.: Exactly. G.: That is almost charitable enough to survive in public. S.: We are improving. G.: Or decaying. But let us continue. Where does your concept of person save him? S.: It keeps subject from dissolving into bare grammaticality and consciousness from dissolving into private immediacy. A person is someone who is both publicly identifiable and psychologically attributable. G.: You do sound like Strawson. S.: I can do worse voices. The point matters. If Rigobello’s personalism insists that the other person is constitutive of reason’s full scope, then “subject” is no longer merely the pole of consciousness but the bearer of responsibility. G.: And “consciousness” no longer a lantern in a cellar, but a condition of personhood exposed to others. S.: Nicely put. G.: I am trying to be fair by stealth. S.: Then one might say that his “allargamento interpersonale del razionale” names a shift from rationality as inferential apparatus to rationality as ethically answerable life. G.: That I can tolerate. S.: Almost. G.: The trouble is that such widening often proceeds by verbal annexation. One says “reason” and then invites every good thing to sit inside it. S.: A danger personalism certainly runs. G.: Exactly. Soon patience, hospitality, responsibility, dialogue, mutuality, finitude, transcendence, all begin wearing the same overcoat. S.: Yet perhaps your own “reasonable” has similar tendencies. G.: “Reasonable” is safer because it concedes human fallibility. “Rational” is too often a title claim. “Reasonable” is still in shirtsleeves. S.: Then perhaps your better criticism of Rigobello is not that he enlarges reason, but that he dignifies it too quickly. G.: Excellent. That is exactly what I should like to say. S.: And I may then add that his concept of person is a way of resisting both sterile formal rationalism and private inwardism. G.: Yes. You see, this is why men who publish books are occasionally useful. S.: I am glad the trade has some dignity left. G.: A little, though I do not promise permanence. S.: We have not yet touched the phrase “it is beyond your consciousness but not your subconsciousness.” G.: Ah yes. I meant only that the book’s own overt programme escapes my active sympathy, but its subterranean pressure does not. I can see why such a book appears in Italy then. I simply do not wish to write it. S.: Because your own route to person is through analysis of meaning, intention, action, and identity, not through a thick personalist metaphysics. G.: Precisely. I arrive at the person reluctantly and from several smaller rooms. Rigobello seems to begin there and invite the other rooms to follow. S.: That is an excellent spatial image. G.: You are collecting too much from this walk. S.: It is what one does before a joint class. G.: True enough. Now, what of publication again? You know I have not published a book. S.: Yet. G.: Spare me the prophecy. The point is that the book-form itself encourages compositional confidence, the supposition that one may gather a region under a title and lead the reader through it by the hand. S.: Whereas your preferred form has been paper, seminar, joint class, tutorial, exchange. G.: Exactly. Smaller vehicles, better suited to distinctions one is prepared to abandon or refine next week. S.: A book survives its author’s revisions. G.: Worse, it survives his moods. S.: Then perhaps your hostility to Soggetto e coscienza is also a hostility to philosophical monumentality. G.: Very likely. Subjects and consciousnesses make poor monuments and tolerable conversations. S.: That, too, is very good. G.: Keep that one for after the Hall. S.: Happily. Then let us settle our line for the class. We may say: Rigobello represents a personalist attempt to widen rationality by locating subject and consciousness within the interpersonal life of the person. G.: Yes. S.: And you may add: one must distinguish this from the analysis of meaning, where the relevant anti-solipsism lies in publicly assessable inferential norms, not in a prior metaphysical thickening of the person. G.: Excellent. S.: Then the contradiction between us becomes productive rather than merely temperamental. G.: That is the usual hope before Examinations Hall. S.: And after? G.: One settles for survival. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with Oxford reservations intact.