VI. Reflections, Aporia. The Unnamable’s Dialectic of Nothing, a Journey going Nowhere, by Pamela Dickson

The artistic expression in The Unnamable is an inversion of Plato’s Republic: what experience is, what life is like, to know nothing (The Unnamable) versus what experience and life are when one can know much (the Republic). (See also Post V.) It is an odd inversion, or mirroring: in one (the Republic) one can know so much, but in the other (The Unnamable) one knows so much what one doesn’t know, perhaps the latter is even more boundless.

In the Republic, according to Socrates one might journey to the end of the intelligible realm, beyond what is visible, by means of words used in dialectic exploration – i.e., by traveling (by necessity) without the aid of sense-perceptions. Socrates says, whenever someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself, and does not give up until he grasps what good itself is, with understanding, he reaches the end of the intelligible realm. (Republic, Book 7, 532a, translated by Reeve) Traveling in this way one reaches “what is” – one sees as far as one can, if not to fully understand, if never to know the “good” in full, one can know truths, one can know a world, the best way of life of man, the best city, or civilization. One can know how to live.

This (no sense-perception) journey is itself the dialectic, and the dialectic is the means to work through aporia. Aporia, a word used in the first paragraph of The Unnamable, is a blockage on one’s journey forward. Dialectic in the Republic breaks through aporia – Then the release from bonds and turning around from shadows to statues and the light; and then the ascent out of the cave to the sun (Republic, Book 7, 532b5) – but in I’s case in The Unnamable, I fails to break through, and so I is stuck in a dialectic of nothing going nowhere. In inverse to Socrates in the Republic – I’s understanding and knowledge in The Unnamable only reveal the depths of what he doesn’t know or understand. Is this difference between I and Socrates a fault in I? is it due to different given natures, is it, rather, due to the time (I’s modern dilemma)? Does one have a choice? – between living in all-light versus all-dark? It may not be a choice if one is sincere, if one does not have the experience of a revelation, or even if one has this experience (from God!) but fails or can’t believe; in the life today, one might not be capable of believing even in an experience of revelation.

I, in many ways living like Socrates, experiencing the same mystical-experiential speaking I of Socrates, looking on, attempting to engage in a dialectic, in his failure to see knows a vastly different world and so has a vastly different experience and life from Socrates – because I can’t break-through aporia, I is blocked by or stuck in aporia. I is in purgatory. If Socrates and I of The Unnamable share the mystical quality of words, of speaking, of a dialectic, the experience in the moment of being: yet, one sees and so knows the vast world and even aspects beyond, the other sees and only knows a darker vast. The consequences to a life of I revealed in this difference might be, must be, shattering.

I – in a cave-like darkness, seeing shadows, not even of real men or things but of those characters I created in imagination – he is still I, still embodying what Socrates describes as the inner-eye worth more than 10,000 eyes. (Republic, Book 7, 527e5 – see Post V on The Unnamable.) I speaks, or engages in a “dialectic” argument, but has no truth to speak about, knows nothing and knows that he knows nothing (“Questions, hypotheses, call them that,” The Unnamable, page 286; see discussion in Posts II and IV on The Unnamable).

I states: “I speak without ceasing, that I long to cease, that I can’t cease, I indicate the principal divisions, it’s more synoptic…” (The Unnamable, page 382.) Plato’s dialectic in the Republic is “synoptic,” a view of many parts, an argument that builds on itself in parts until there is a whole. In The Unnamable, the use of the term is humorous, a kind of building of nothing, parts of arguments on nothing building on nothing to reach nothing, nothing out of nothing to reach nothing.

Socrates describes the journey, the path of dialectic. The intelligible, through thought, through the power of dialectical discussion, treating its hypotheses not as first principles but as genuine hypotheses (that is, stepping stones and links in a chain) in order to arrive at what is un-hypothetical and the first principle of everything, having grasped this principle, comes down to a conclusion, making no use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on through forms to forms and ending in forms. (Republic, Book 6, 511b)

I has no dialectic path but must speak; it is speaking, or words, that journey nowhere. “Where now? Who now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that.” (286, first sentences) “[I]t’s about him who knows nothing, wants nothing…. who cannot hear, cannot speak, who is I, who cannot be I, of whom I can’t speak, of whom I must speak, that’s all hypotheses, I said nothing, someone said nothing, it’s not a question of hypotheses, it’s a question of going on, it goes on, hypotheses are like everything else, they help you on….” (397) Hypotheses, it turns out for I, help him go on with words but extend no further, help no further. I’s doubt extends out and out – he doesn’t believe he has lived in the ‘light’ above or even that he was born. (See other posts on The Unnamable, specifically Post VII (a way an inner I is born).) As seen in the discussion of plot in Post II, in I’s dialectic, or argument, which counters Mahood’s stories or argument(s) that I has lived above in the light, I fails, continues to fail to believe in life above, in Mahood’s claim that it is I’s life, fails even to believe in Worm’s stories told by the words (Worm who, in the story, or stories, is never properly born, an attempt, I believes, by the words to sound “closer to I” and so to trick him into believing it is him). The words – dialectic without aid of sense perception – do not reach anywhere or anything (no place, no space, no time), and are not even I’s words. He can’t believe. He has lost everything – an entire world, even words – he is left entirely in the dark.

Socrates, in the Republic, questions the nature of poetry and, as to the matter of style in a deeper sense, wonders whether it is right to imitate another or, rather, whether it is best to speak in one’s own voice. Socrates claims that the moral poet speaks and does not try to make us think that the speaker is anyone but himself. Guardians must not imitate anyone. The stakes are high: one’s soul and the good of the city itself. The stakes could not be higher (for Plato): one must not imitate, this is part of a training to experience the impossible, to have (the possibility of) contact with reality, to reach that path at the end of the intelligible and so know, experience a bit of reality, the good. In The Unnamable, it is as if I has the task of attempting to speak without imitating others, not inventing characters (this time), if others intrude, if others and the words invent characters that are meant to be I (so he still doesn’t violate the injunctive to speak only about himself), but the words themselves are never and can’t be his. Words in The Unnamable are, can only be, imitation, false, lies – trying to make one like I believe they “speak” truth. (Of course, one might note, both Socrates and I might be called fictional characters in the Republic and The Unnamable, respectively, speaking in their own voice, so “an imitation” by the “poet” or author of Socrates and I, respectively – and yet I of The Unnamable might speak directly as himself, as much that is that he can, and he is not Beckett exactly, see Posts I, III, and IV on The Unnamable; and the I of Socrates too might be himself, because he is not Socrates the man, he is the I.)

I of The Unnamable attempts to tell his own story: but on the threshold of his own story at last the novel ends. Like a Tristram Shandy comedy, I who sets out to speak of himself fails to say a word that is his own; I fails to tell his story, I has nothing to say (still).

In a sense, there is a big laugh – I must speak in his own voice, with his own words, about himself – about “I” – but even the words are not his, he has nothing he can say, nothing he knows, I doesn’t even believe in the I of I. (“I say, I. Unbelieving.”) The novel ends – not in silence, as some say, but in a pause, like the pauses of silence noted by I all along in The Unnamable. I will speak as he (always) must – he goes on in Texts for Nothing, for instance, and on. I will keep on saying nothing, as deeply as he can, the nothing so full of knowledge, insight, wisdom, so full of the deep on-going human experience, life, to call it life, and, one might say, the nothing so full of the great big spiritual journey or the tragic way of life for the one stuck in or by aporia, a failure on the journey’s (possible) path. And whose fault? – I say it is not I’s fault.

V. Beckett’s Darkness in The Unnamable: an inversion of Plato’s Light in the Republic, by Pamela Dickson

Socrates states that there is an instrument that is like an inner eye, an instrument more important than 10,000 eyes, since only with it can the truth be seen. (Plato’s Republic, Book 7, 527e5, translated by C.D.C. Reeve (2004)) The instrument like an inner eye radiates truth and informs everything in the Republic.

In Schopenhauer, the eye opens, the understanding transforms dull, meaningless sensation – and in one fell swoop a visible world is formed. (See The World as Will and Representation, V.1, 33 translated by Norman, Welchman and Janaway (2010)). The existence of the whole world is dependent on the opening of a first eye. (WWR, V.1, 52, 53) But Schopenhauer, too, speaks of something like an “inner eye”: in the first paragraph of WWR, Schopenhauer states: “‘The world is my representation’… if [a human being actually brings this to abstract, reflective consciousness] he has become philosophically sound. It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees the sun….” In Schopenhauer, a human being – perhaps with an instrument like Plato’s inner eye – can come to know that he is not acquainted with the sun but only with an eye that sees a sun; the I can “look” as if from a distance and understand that an eye sees a sun, that an eye (sensation with understanding) creates a world.

It may be that if one comes to be “philosophically sound,” in Schopenhauer’s view, the entire world falls away; one might no longer believe or trust in a world that is formed by senses and a mind (like a dream), it might be one would feel as if there is something more essential to seek than what is in a visible world, or it might be that there is a different way to see, to approach seeing, to approach looking.

Beckett shifts the center of “I” from the I who sees a visible world to something like Socrates’ inner eye in the Republic, or like this “philosophically sound” Schopenhauerian. The “I” is no longer Schopenhauer’s “eye opening on a world, forming a world,” but is an I or an inner eye acquainted with an eye that sees a sun, with eyes (and an understanding) that (might) form a world. And yet, Beckett’s I, unlike Socrates’ inner eye, is in the dark, he loses a world, but fails to believe in or know the expansive truth that Socrates’ inner eye reveals.

I note: here I, that is me, or this I that I am or might be, write reflections – reflections of reflections of light and dark, light versus dark, dark versus light – illuminating an inverted experience, the way different worlds might be formed when an inner-I is in the dark versus in the light, each I making or inhabiting a world that is the best one he can make or inhabit.

An experience like this – Socrates’ inner eye, able to know and grasp truth, informs the entire life and work, the entire discussion of how to live and how to structure a city, even how to limit words of poetry; the experience informs and is crucial to every act of being. (See for instance the first line of Book 7 of the Republic, Socrates says, “Next, then, compare the effect of education and that of the lack of it on our nature to an experience like this.”) It is an experience obtained by effort that radiates like the sun over the Republic, backward and forward; the Republic is concerned with how to seek an experience like this, how to discover and engage in the difficult path to experience an experience like this. You would devote your life – hours, days, years, to have an experience like this. Society, culture, civilization – would be structured to give the best chance for human creatures to have an experience like this.

But in The Unnamable, I’s experience, if I is still an “inner-eye,” is in inverse to the “experience like this” of Socrates’ inner eye. In Republic, all that which is seen and so known “in the light,” and/or “in the dark” by way of the analogy of the sun – city, man, god – is heard about or studied by “I” in The Unnamable (because I has undoubtedly read the Republic, for instance) but not known, not believed and so not lived. I remains in the dark and his life – every way of his life, of ‘looking,’ thinking, is profoundly informed by his inability to believe or know or see in the dark. What Socrates sees and so knows enables him to engage in a dialectic to arrive at truth, enables him “to know” all that he seems to know, all that he can or might know, but in The Unnamable, I – if he must speak, engage in dialectic, assert hypotheses, he cannot arrive at truth, has nothing to speak about but must speak. This is I’s predicament. Both books are about an experience, a core experience which is a way of looking, an entire way of life, everything for Socrates and for I.

A great mystery hangs between these two books, a mystery or dilemma which has profound consequences to a life – each book grapples with the one question we need an answer to in order to best live our lives, the ultimate unanswerable question. It is a question or dilemma which still, even if unanswered, can send us on a journey, a dive into depths, is still the question that matters.

Plato’s Inner Eye in the Light

Socrates says: in everyone’s soul there is an instrument that is like an inner eye, an instrument more important to preserve than 10,000 eyes, since only with it can the truth be seen. (Republic, Book 7, 527e5.) This inner eye can “see” and so know unintelligible things. It can see beyond mere hypothesis, beyond what is made visible by the sun.

Socrates says, what gives truth to things known and the power to know to the knower, is the form of the good. Like the sun which enables one to see in the light, the good enables the inner eye (very much the inner I) to see that which is dark, is in the dark. Socrates says, As the cause of knowledge and truth, one must think of it [the good] too as an object of knowledge [like the sun itself]. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly thought to be sunlike, but wrongly thought to be the sun. So, here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike, but wrong to think that either of them is the good – for the status of the good is yet more honorable. (Republic, Book 6, 509a)

In the Republic, the path to see with the inner eye involves a long education, and, more, a kind of learning which goes beyond sense perceptions (i.e., such as mathematics), a practice in seeing with the inner eye. But, ultimately, it is dialectical discussion which “sings” this theme. (See Post on Dialectic: Republic vs. The Unnamable) Sight tries to look at animals themselves, the stars themselves, and, in the end, at the sun itself. In the same way, Socrates says, whenever someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself, and does not give up until he grasps what good itself is, with understanding itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible realm, just as the other reached the end of the visible one. (Republic, Book 7, 532a)

This journey is dialectic. Then the release from bonds and turning around from shadows to statues and the light; and then the ascent out of the cave to the sun…. (Republic, Book 7, 532b5)

The Republic is joyful. Understanding and knowledge enable one to understand the mirroring of man and city, the best and worst of each, and how one should live, the very details in the movement on the path of life. But I of The Unnamable only weeps, the eye (Socrates’ inner eye) weeps – I sees and knows deeply and clearly only the vastness of what he doesn’t know.

Beckett’s Inner I in the Dark

In The Unnamable, there is an implicit and explicit sense that I has read, studied, heard (vastly) the books or words of human knowledge. But the I in The Unnamable is a black hole of human knowledge or ideas, absorbing them only to reflect them back in a dark mirror. In the inversion, knowing or ideas disappear in the dark, if they hover there, invert to an unknown, a magician’s disappearing act – and yet, still, as a result of this inversion, the nature of human ideas/knowledge and a vast failure to know are each illuminated.

I (the character) has swallowed and digested worldly knowledge and ideas, force fed perhaps, with the result (in his case) that he understands ever more deeply what he doesn’t know, acquires (in life, to call it life) a depth of unknowing, a rare understanding of what he doesn’t know. It is from this, out of this, long experience that I speaks, and I must speak, he doesn’t know why. I finds himself in a predicament: he must speak, but fails to believe even words are his, must use words, tools for speaking, when words not only seem to belong to a world above but to those with knowledge, or to voices who say they know things. But (I say) I exists in this sense: he knows what he doesn’t know; he can’t believe what words or his long education (his pensum) or even stories (of others or of the words themselves) try to force him to believe; I wants to believe, to know something, but something in him, he struggles, he can’t believe, fails to know, knows he fails to know, knows what he doesn’t know. It is about knowing. In his knowing of not knowing – his seeing and knowing deeply what he doesn’t know – in his predicament, I exists. In any event, worldly knowledge and ideas (in the light) hover in the dark in The Unnamable, knowledge and ideas in the light only serve to reveal and uncover an experience of being in an unknown vast or in a vast unknowabilty. One can find reflected in the dark (i.e., in I’s spaceless timeless existence) besides ideas or inverted ideas of Plato, those of Descartes, Schopenhauer, Buddhism, etc. (on and on).

I is (still) there somehow, relegated to an endless in-between state, existing in a sense (an inner eye-sense) to see, to look, but failing to understand, having to ‘speak’ or use words nonetheless, when he doesn’t believe even the words are his. Glaucon asks Socrates:

“So, tell us then, in what way the power of dialectical discussion works, into what kinds it is divided, and what roads it follows. I mean, it is these, it seems, that would lead us at last to that place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, for the one who reaches it, and an end of his journey.” (Republic, Book 7, 532d5)

No end to the journey, no rest from the road, stuck in the dark, in the cave of I, never to reach understanding: I will never come out into the sun, nor reach beyond what is dark, what is pure dark, never see the sunlike rays over everything.

And this – moreover – due to faults of I himself, apparently, failures, lack in I’s understanding, I fails the “test” or pensum (see Post IV on the Pensum of the The Unnamable), if he strives on, if he must – he still fails to believe, to understand, to say the right word. He is not fully “born” (See Post on the Way an Inner I is Born: Republic vs. The Unnamable), does not reach the potential of the inner-eye; he is forced, because he must speak, must go on, to speak, to engage in a dialectic of nothing.

You can’t see anything – the world of men, in the dark, beyond, one’s self. But one experiences ever more clearly what I is not – what is not mine, what is nothing. And yet – I is there. I is something.