Contemplating Bulldogface

- with or without Freud

    I lie awake thinking about Bulldogface. His rejection of me or let’s say his grand indifference towards me seems a bit like Nature itself: a force majeure of apathy is staring in my general direction and it’s clear that I can never establish a mutual connection (like Nature, he does not care for me). For background information I will state that this male human being is, according to some metrics at least, a somewhat normal person: he has a job, a wife, a few friends and not any personality disorder that I am aware of. So, what have I been doing? I have turned myself inside and out in order to find his approval and endorsement. I have traveled to distant imaginative realms in pursuance of a flowing conversation and only losing my self-preservation in the process. You could say that I have tried to remodel and reshape inner cognitive maps so that I could find a fruitful point of contact with this person, but I have simply exhausted my resources and encountered the self-disgust that comes from too much pandering. What I keep running into, despite these efforts, is the dead-end stare of a disinterested face. And why do I do it ? Why bother? Why do I need to humiliate myself in this way? Is there a deeper pattern to this?  
     I was sitting under the parasol at café Les Granotes and discussing these experiences with mister Smith and mister Jones and suggesting to them that I was under the influence of Freud´s idea of ‘repetition compulsion’ i.e “the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat arrangements of behavior which were difficult or distressing in earlier life”. I was merely voicing that perhaps I have been repeating, since childhood, this pattern of trying to reach and befriend supremely uninterested individuals. However, I was not making the simultaneous case that all of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is true. But a concerned mister Smith and a chagrined mister Jones were disapprovingly eyeballing me and seemed to interpret me as endorsing that view – that psychoanalytic theory is true. An increasing snappiness and hostility permeated the conversation. It was as if I was caught in the act of exercising fraudulent thinking or something that needed firm debunking. At one point Jones cut me off in mid-sentence and snapped,  
- ‘But I do not believe in it!’, he proclaimed vehemently.  
Mister Smith had a few moments earlier made a somewhat calmer account where he explained to me that psychoanalytic theory amounts to religious thinking.  
Clearly, our focus was different from one another. I only wanted to talk about Bulldogface but the conversation had encountered a hitch when I entertained a Freudian idea – which was something my well-read friends apparently couldn’t tolerate. In broad-stroke generalizing terms it appeared that Smith and Jones could only talk of ideas if these have certain truth-tracking qualities whereas I keep returning to ideas if they have what we might call use-value. For William James, these two branches  - truth and utility - seem to coincide to a certain extent, and the validity of a belief is ”determined by its tangible impact on or usefulness for human beings, rather than by some external standard of Truth”. True ideas are for William James like tools which help us do things that need to get done. In the book “Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking” from 1907 he phrases it like this:  
 
     “Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us                 prosperously from any part of our experience to any other part, linking things           satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labour; is true for just so much,  true in so far forth, true instrumentally. This is the ‘instrumental’ view of truth”.    
 
   Further theorizing the exchange unfolding at the café we could schematically say that Smith and Jones adhere to a perspective that might be called representationalism which is the idea that we humans can accurately represent, mirror, the world with our thought and talk – we can get things right. I, for my part, seem to glide towards an antirepresentationalist position which hold that we can merely use thought and talk to (mostly) cope with reality, (but I think Donald Davidson is onto something when he points out that belief is by its nature veridical and most of what we talk about we get more or less right). Consequently, I am only using Freud’s idea of ‘repetition compulsion’ to cope with reality, I am not even following James and saying that it is a “true idea” because of its utility, and I am not saying it is an accurate description of the way the world is or of the intrinsic nature of reality, I am merely coping – telling a story as it were - and going for use rather than truth. Still, I am here, as a kind of premonition, reminded of what Bob Dylan sings “With truth so far off, what good will it do?”.  
     The early pragmatists born in the nineteenth century (Peirce, James and Dewey etc. ) had a focus on experience whereas many of the neo-pragmatists (Rorty, Brandom etc ) place an emphasis on language and Rorty in the latter group was inspired by Wittgenstein who gave him “the idea that language was instrumental rather than representational; therefore the core of language could not be reduced to propositions mapping the world”. “Language has no downtown” said Wittgenstein and claimed that what we have instead is a series of various language games – tools – for different practices and purposes. As someone wrote “language games are not just games: they are tools for coping with reality” – here we see the similarity with the antirepresentationalist stance  – and they can also be understood as “vocabularies, as linguistic ways to organize, transform, and improve social practices to better cope with our problems and lives”. There are as many games as there are purposes, and “with language we can ask questions, give directions, pray, count objects, swear, give orders, marry someone, and many other things” (Pietro Salis, 2019). For Wittgenstein this entails that the meaning of a word isn’t fixed, it is defined by the use in different language games (“Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use”). The theme of usefulness is also a prevalent theme in Richard Rorty’s writings, he even ponders that “no vocabulary cuts reality at its joints, reality has no joints it only has descriptions, some more useful than others”. On a related note Rorty insists on being antiessentialist as far as it goes and view descriptions of ourselves which we find in the natural sciences as on par with alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, sculptors and even mystics. These descriptions are useful in different and particular contexts: for example the vocabulary of electrical engineering is of course more suitable for testing electronic components than for making a hermeneutic analysis of a literary text. To Rorty, the question "are we describing things as they really are?" seems pointless, he is instead intent on saying "all we need to know is whether some competing description might be more useful for some of our purposes".   
      So, with all that said one can postulate that I, in order to cope with problems related to Bulldogface, was trying to use a Freudian language game when speaking with Smith and Jones at Les Granotes but they simply refused to participate, they didn’t find the game useful and it didn’t clear any space – the game wasn’t “linking things satisfactorily”. It left me with a feeling of being stranded. But in any case, as time wore on and conversation commenced, and we were leaving Freud aside, Smith and Jones were still able to shore me up and offered what I gathered to be some really sound advice regarding Bulldogface which boiled down to, I guess, that I simply shouldn’t bother about trying to get an answer from an indifferent universe. There’s a major loneliness embedded in the realization that reality is mute in the sense that it cannot enter into a rational conversation with us - it cannot play the "game of giving and asking for reasons" - and neither will Bulldogface. Reviewing the case in hindsight I can conclude with the remark that I should simply just leave the universe and Bulldogface alone, and perhaps they will induce in me a healthy and stoic dose of indifference down the line. That could prove to be useful in similar encounters in the future and keep me from getting trapped in damaging repetitive loops.   

PS. The person nicknamed “Bulldogface” might take offense with such a label (but if he did, he would not be so indifferent after all). If it’s any consolation the concept is equally fitting on me, I suppose. Waking up and looking in the bathroom mirror, the sour curmudgeon staring back at me from across the sink can easily be dubbed “Bulldogface”. Nevertheless, some people find bulldogs cute.   

Further readings: 

 - Philosophical investigations (1953)- Ludwig Wittgenstein

-  Does language have a downtown? Wittgenstein, Brandom and "the game of giving and asking for reasons" (2019) - Pietro Salis