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

 G.: Let us begin with the title, because Paganini had the decency to announce the trouble before inflicting it. S.: Dello spazio: saggio cosmologico. G.: Exactly. A title at once narrow and grandiose. Two words for one anxiety. S.: Narrow because of spazio, grandiose because of cosmologico. G.: Very good. One expects a tract on space and receives the whole universe by subtitle. S.: Perhaps he thought one could not discuss space without dragging the cosmos in by the sleeve. G.: A sensible thought, though not one usually welcomed in Oxford until someone had first sanitised it as “logical form.” S.: And the word itself, spazio. Not merely in the compound spatio-temporal, but naked. G.: Precisely. That is what interests me. Strawson was forever saying “spatio-temporal continuant,” as if one could buy the pair wholesale and never inspect the first item separately. S.: Whereas you preferred the temporal thread. G.: Very much so. In personal identity I was content with interlocking series of mnemonic states, perhaps realised in brain traces if one insists on furniture. S.: A meagre topography. G.: Deliberately meagre. Enough space to keep the cerebrum from floating into pure literature, but not so much as to let metaphysicians start surveying. S.: Yet my own interest was broader. If one asks after categories, one cannot leave space as mere upholstery. G.: Quite. So let us ask the indecent question. What is spatium proper, before one fuses it with time into a respectable modern compound? S.: A form of extension, perhaps. G.: Perhaps. But extension is already a theory dressed as a noun. S.: Then location? G.: Also too quick. Location presupposes a framework. Space may be the framework, or part of what we mean by one. S.: So the phrase spatio-temporal may conceal a marriage one ought first to examine. G.: Exactly. The hyphen is often a cover for philosophical laziness. S.: Then is Paganini discussing anything like Cartesian coordinates? G.: I should rather think not directly. The title and the little external evidence suggest something more metaphysical and cosmological than analytic geometry as such. S.: Because of cosmologico. G.: Yes. A “cosmological essay” in 1862 is not a lecture on axes. It announces a speculation about the status of space in relation to world, extension, reality, perhaps infinity. S.: And perhaps vacuum. G.: Indeed. One useful scrap of evidence says he debates whether space is a “concetto reale vuoto o meno.” S.: So whether space is a real empty concept, or perhaps a real emptiness, or not. G.: Exactly. The phrase is awkward enough to be philosophically promising. S.: Then Paganini may be after the ontological standing of space rather than mere geometrical description. G.: That is the safest conjecture. Space as real or conceptual, empty or non-empty, perhaps given or constituted. S.: Which would at once invite Kant. G.: And Rosmini too, given Paganini’s doctrinal allegiances. S.: So let us separate the possibilities. Newtonian absolute space, Kantian form of intuition, Rosminian phenomenology of feeling and extension, or some hybrid Italian thing. G.: Very likely a hybrid Italian thing. Those are often the most interesting. S.: Then why call it cosmological? G.: Because “space” by itself might sound too psychological or too abstract. “Cosmological” announces that the question concerns the world-order, not merely the mind’s filing system. S.: So one begins with spazio and ends with mondo. G.: Precisely. That is the old temptation. Space becomes the stage of the cosmos, or perhaps one of its conditions, and one calls the inquiry cosmological to prevent it from shrinking into grammar. S.: Yet grammar returns. G.: It always does. We may never defeat it, only inconvenience it. S.: Let us approach from ordinary language, then. “Smith is between Robertson and Mitchell.” G.: A good old friend. “Between” looks spatial at once. S.: But it can be temporal. “Tuesday is between Monday and Wednesday.” G.: Quite. And it can be moral, as in rank or order of merit. S.: Yet you would say the sense remains constant? G.: More nearly constant than people suppose. The preposition keeps a relational structure of interval or intermediate placing. What changes is the field in which the structure is realised. S.: So not ambiguity of sense, but variation of domain. G.: Precisely. Philosophers too readily multiply senses where a decent abstraction would do. S.: Then “between” is spatial first? G.: I should say spatially at home, but extendable. The extension is not metaphorical fluff; it is a disciplined portability. S.: So if Smith stands between Robertson and Mitchell in the order of moral merit, “between” has not changed its sense so much as its application. G.: Exactly. One keeps the ordinal middle, loses mere bodily extension, and the preposition survives the transfer. S.: Which suggests that “spatial” in language may often underwrite more than literal place. G.: Very much so. Ordinary language is full of spatial scaffolding used in non-spatial fields. S.: Above, below, beyond, within, outside, near, far. G.: Yes. And philosophers then behave as if metaphor had occurred, when often what has occurred is structural migration. S.: Then how would Aristotle classify space? G.: With difficulty, which is why he is worth the trouble. Place, topos, is not straightforwardly one of the ten categories. It sits rather under where, the category of place, but as a philosophical issue it exceeds the mere interrogative slot. S.: So “where” is one of the ten, but space itself is not exhausted by that. G.: Precisely. The category where captures locative predication. It does not thereby solve the ontology of space. S.: And in Kant? G.: There the matter becomes both cleaner and worse. Space is not one of the twelve categories at all. S.: Because the categories are under quantity, quality, relation, and modality. G.: Exactly. Space belongs instead to sensibility, as a pure form of intuition. S.: So if one asks which of the twelve specifications houses space, the answer is none. G.: None, and that is the whole critical point. Categories are for thinking objects; space is a condition of their appearing. S.: Then a conversation between Aristotle and Kant on space would begin badly. G.: Most profitable conversations do. S.: And Paganini, if Rosminian, might wish neither the Aristotelian slot nor the Kantian confinement. G.: Very likely. Rosminian atmospheres tend to make room for consciousness, feeling, soul, and reality in ways that neither simple Aristotelian taxonomy nor strict Kantian critique fully accommodate. S.: So if Paganini writes Dello spazio as a cosmological essay, he may be resisting the reduction of space either to mere category or mere form of intuition. G.: That would be an intelligent ambition. Whether he succeeds is another matter, but ambitions are the chief luxury of metaphysicians. S.: You are charitable today. G.: Only because Tuscany encourages it. S.: Let us return to the ordinary phrase “spatio-temporal continuant.” G.: Yes. I have long distrusted it as a phrase that persuades by upholstery. One says “spatio-temporal continuant” and sounds immediately profound while having done almost no work. S.: Yet Strawson did real work with it. G.: Of course. He wanted persistence through time and embodiment in space as conditions of identification in a common world. S.: And you? G.: I wanted the personal case thinned down. Memory, connectedness, rational continuity, interlocking states. Space enters if one must mention brain traces, but almost apologetically. S.: So for you personal identity is temporally articulated with minimal spatial concession. G.: Exactly. Enough location to keep one from becoming a ghost, not enough to make one a surveyor. S.: Whereas Paganini may insist that space itself deserves independent philosophical treatment. G.: Which is why I should like Strawson to have read him, if only to learn that one may say “space” without immediately marrying it to time in church. S.: Then is “spatium” in your mouth the same as “space” in Paganini’s? G.: Not necessarily. My Latinism is often disciplinary. His Italian title suggests a live metaphysical noun within an Italian nineteenth-century system-building climate. S.: Then the old Latin word spatium also matters. G.: Indeed. Spatium is not originally a Cartesian grid. It can mean interval, extent, room, distance, duration even. The Romans were not born plotting points. S.: So even the classical root is wider than modern physics. G.: Much wider. Which is why one must not let the modern mathematical imagination bully the philology. S.: Then if Paganini is discussing spazio as a concept, perhaps he is still hearing interval, extension, capacity, room. G.: And perhaps infinite room, or the question whether room can be empty. S.: Which brings us back to infinity. G.: Yes. A cosmological essay on space in 1862 almost cannot avoid the question whether space is finite, infinite, bounded, unbounded, actual, ideal, or only potentially so. S.: And whether empty space is thinkable. G.: Precisely. The old scandal of the void. If space is real, must it contain things? If empty, is it still something? If only conceptual, why does the world obey it so shamelessly? S.: That is rather good. G.: Keep it and do not attribute the shamelessness to me. S.: Never intentionally. Then what would Kant say here? G.: Kant would say that space is the a priori form of outer intuition, infinite as given magnitude in a certain sense, yet not a property of things in themselves. S.: Which then generates the cosmological antinomies if one mistakes the world as appearance for the world as thing in itself. G.: Exactly. The mind overreaches, asks whether the world in itself is finite or infinite in space, and receives contradictory temptations for its pains. S.: So a “saggio cosmologico” after Kant may well be an essay conducted under the shadow of those aporias. G.: Very much so. One cannot write on space and cosmos in the nineteenth century as if the Critique had never happened. S.: Unless one is very Italian. G.: Which is another way of saying one may write after Kant while pretending to be merely superior to him. S.: You think Paganini does that? G.: I have no right yet to accuse him, but the species exists. S.: And Rosmini? G.: Rosmini complicates space by tying it to feeling, body, consciousness, and the soul’s relation to extension in ways not easily reduced to Newton or Kant. That makes Paganini’s possible Rosminianism highly relevant. S.: So the question becomes not merely “what is space?” but “how is space given to a conscious embodied subject?” G.: Precisely. Which is perhaps why Speranza’s juxtaposition with soul and immortality is not accidental. The same man writes on the immortality of the soul and on space. S.: Hence domma and spazio are neighbours. G.: Quite. One might almost say that for Paganini the soul survives doctrinally while space embarrasses ontologically. S.: Let us ask about categories again. If “where” is Aristotelian and space is pre-categorial for Kant, what becomes of “spatio-temporal” as a philosophical composite? G.: It becomes a convenience term with two very different ancestries awkwardly yoked. Space comes from sensibility in Kant; time too. But when later philosophers say “spatio-temporal,” they often pretend they have thereby solved both ontology and identification. S.: Whereas they have only produced a respectable adjective. G.: Exactly. A very successful adjective, but still an adjective. S.: Then how is “spatio” realised in ordinary language? G.: Mostly by prepositions, adverbs, demonstratives, and locative constructions rather than by the noun “space” itself. We live space more often than name it. S.: Here, there, near, far, above, below, between, within, outside. G.: Yes. Ordinary language spatialises relations before philosophers abstract “space” as a noun. S.: So perhaps Paganini’s title already marks a move from lived locative grammar to philosophical substantivisation. G.: Very good. “Dello spazio” makes a substance, or at least a topic, of what ordinary language usually disperses among little words. S.: And little words, as usual, do most of the work. G.: They always have. Philosophers arrive later and invoice the noun. S.: Then perhaps your tutorial on “between” belongs precisely here. The categorial study of space begins not with diagrams but with the life of prepositions. G.: Yes, though one must not become so linguistic as to think the prepositions generate the cosmos. S.: Only half-linguistic, then. G.: That is the tolerable amount. S.: Let us imagine Paganini saying that space is a real empty concept. G.: Or a real empty reality, depending on how charitable one is to the phrasing. S.: If real, then perhaps something like receptacle. G.: Dangerous. Receptacles breed metaphysics faster than rabbits. S.: If conceptual, then perhaps only the mind’s way of arranging outer appearances. G.: Which would lean Kantian. S.: If neither purely real nor purely conceptual, then perhaps relational. G.: Or phenomenological before phenomenology became a railway station. S.: Then why “qualità” of space, as that bookseller note suggests? G.: Because once one has asked whether space is real, one must also ask what sort of thing it is if real: continuous, divisible, homogeneous, infinite, empty, finite, receptive, necessary. S.: So “quality” there means not colour or texture but determinate philosophical traits. G.: Exactly. It is an old-fashioned word for ontological character. S.: Then Paganini may be discussing whether space is homogeneous and whether emptiness is a positive or privative condition. G.: That would fit the evidence rather well. S.: And all this under the heading cosmological because the world must be somewhere, or at least appear under somewhere-like conditions. G.: Nicely put. Cosmology often begins when metaphysics becomes impatient with the mere room in which things stand and wants the whole standing of the world. S.: That sounds almost German. G.: Tuscany has its moments. S.: Let us return once more to personal identity. If I say a person is a spatio-temporal continuant, do I commit myself to a Cartesian coordinate representation of the person? G.: Not in the least. You commit yourself only to persistence under both locative and temporal description, unless you are being more doctrinaire than the phrase demands. S.: So “spatio-temporal” there is a modest reminder that persons are not pure timelines. G.: Precisely. But the trouble is that many readers hear more than is warranted. They hear field equations, worldlines, bodies in grids, and all sorts of respectable modern scenery. S.: Whereas the phrase may need only that the person is somewhere and somewhen. G.: Exactly. Philosophers often over-equip their nouns. S.: Then Paganini’s decision to write on spazio proper may be read as a protest against under-analysis at the first term. G.: I should like that to be so. Before you pronounce the compound, inspect the first member. It is almost an Oxonian moral. S.: One of your better ones. G.: I have a few. S.: And if one asks whether space is primary or derived in ordinary language? G.: Ordinary language does not answer in the philosopher’s manner. It simply disperses spatial order through its syntax and lexicon. Priority there is lived, not theorised. S.: Which may be why philosophers later reify it. G.: Precisely. They gather the many little locative habits into one great noun and then quarrel over its reality. S.: That would make Dello spazio the quarrel after the grammar. G.: Excellent. Keep that too. S.: Thank you. Then should we say that “between” in temporal and moral contexts is still, in some abstract sense, spatial? G.: I should say it preserves a form first at home in spatial order and then portable into other ordered manifolds. S.: “Manifolds” is rather too grand. G.: Yes, but one occasionally needs a grand word to discourage the commoner. S.: I shall continue anyway. G.: I never doubted it. S.: Then perhaps the best way to place Paganini is this. He is not simply giving a physical theory of space, nor merely a grammatical survey of locatives, but asking how space as such stands with respect to world, emptiness, reality, and perhaps consciousness. G.: That is exactly the prudent summary. And the cosmological label suggests that for him space is not a mere item among categories, but one of the conditions under which the world can be thought as world. S.: Which would make him a useful foil for both Strawson and you. G.: Yes. For Strawson, because he takes space seriously before hiding it in the compound. For me, because he reminds one that the temporal economy of identity sits within a broader categorial field than memory alone. S.: So the final moral? G.: That “spatio-temporal” is often too quickly uttered, that ordinary language realises the spatial through little relational words before philosophers reify it, that Aristotle and Kant place space in quite different architectural positions, and that Paganini’s cosmological essay seems to ask, with commendable Tuscan breadth, whether space is real, empty, conceptual, worldly, or some inconvenient combination thereof. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Lucchese, with one foot in Pisa and the other, reluctantly, in Oxford.