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DESCRIBING OURSELVES

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DescribingOurselves
Wittgenstein and Autobiographical
Consciousness
GARRY L. HAGBERG
CLARENDON PRESS·OXFORD

1
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For Julia

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vii
What is good and evil is essentially the I, not the world. The I, the I is what is
deeply mysterious!
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Notebooks, 1916
The total speech act in the total speech situation is theonly actualphenomenon
which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating. Stating, describing, &c.,
arejust twonames among a very great many others for illocutionary acts; they
have no unique position.
J. L. Austin
How to Do Things with Words
There is a picture of the mind which has become so ingrained in our
philosophical tradition that it is almost impossibleto escape its inﬂuence even
when its worst faults are recognized and repudiated.
Donald Davidson
‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’

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Acknowledgements
Ata time when the idea for this book had already been in the
back of my mind for some years, a most welcome opportunity to
return to St John’s College, Cambridge, arose. I am grateful to that
institution for once again having provided an ideal context for work
on Wittgenstein, and it was there that I drafted the initial core of this
study: the material examining that part of Wittgenstein’s philosophy
particularly concerned with self-referential and self-revelatory language.
As if providentially from the point of view of the development of this
book, a succession of invitations to write for various collections and to
present material at conferences, colloquia, and philosophical and literary
meetings followed. These projects and occasions allowed me—well, as
any academically peripatetic, deadline-fearing author knows, this also
carries in its connotative substrate more than a whisper of the words
‘forced me’—to extend the material from that core manuscript into each
of the subjects explored in the chapters now reunited in this volume. I
am deeply grateful to all of the scholars named here for their sustained
efforts in bringing about these events. (Readers less concerned with the
process behind the product may safely turn to p. 1!)
I had wanted for some time to bring together a reconsideration of
Wittgenstein’s remarks on consciousness with particular cases of auto-
biographical writing, and Chapter 1 emerged as my response to John
Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer’s invitation to write for their edited
volumeThe Literary Wittgenstein(London: Routledge, 2004). Parts of
my chapter for them, ‘Autobiographical Consciousness: Wittgenstein,
Private Experience, and the ‘‘Inner Picture’’ ’, enjoyed (as did I, to say
the least) the beneﬁt of public presentation, in a visiting speaker series
at the University of Erfurt, where Thomas Glaser provided an acute and
helpful commentary.
The title of Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost’s edited collectionOr-
dinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgen-
stein(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003) accorded
perfectly with a desire I had to reconsider a frequently misunderstood
idiom of philosophical work in connection with autobiographical issues.
My piece for them was ‘The Self, Reﬂected: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and

x Acknowledgements
the Autobiographical Situation’, and it provided much of the content
of Chapter 2.
Strong encouragement for the work leading to Chapter 3 was provided
by Jean-Pierre Cometti, who invited a piece for a special issue ofRevue
Internationale de Philosophie(1 (2002), no. 219) entitledWittgenstein
and the Philosophy of Mind. My project for him, also presented in draft
form at an unforgettable conference he organized entitled ‘Wittgenstein,
Language, and Perception’ at the University of Aix-en-Provence, was
published as ‘The Self, Speaking: Wittgenstein, Introspective Utterances,
and the Arts of Self-Representation’.
Seeing throughout the history of philosophy a number of misconstru-
als and simpliﬁcations—misleading pictures—the mind has made of
its own workings, and seeing the force of Wittgenstein’s undercuttings
of those pictures, I wanted to reexamine some carefully selected remarks
in connection with a particular dualistic picture of autobiographical
self-investigation. Peter Lewis was kind enough to ask for a contribu-
tion to his collectionWittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Arts(Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004) and ﬂexible enough quickly to accept and encourage
my idea for a paper; this resulted in ‘The Self, Thinking: Wittgenstein,
Augustine, and the Autobiographical Situation’ and has become the
ﬁrst two sections of Chapter 4. It was presented as the keynote ad-
dress at the annual Building Bridges Conference (this year the bridge
connected philosophy and literary studies) at the University of Illinois
at Carbondale, where I was graciously invited by Christopher Nelson;
another version was presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian
Society for Aesthetics in Quebec City at the invitation of Bela Szabados
and Alex Rueger. I must note that I am particularly indebted to Bela
for his long-standing encouragement of (not only) this project and for
his foundational article in the ﬁeld on Wittgenstein and autobiography,
as well as for his subsequent invitation to give another part of this
book at a later CSA meeting in an extended session on Wittgenstein,
this time in Halifax. The third section of Chapter 4, ‘Wittgenstein
Underground’, was published as part of the symposium ‘Dostoevsky
Recontextualized’, inPhilosophy and Literature, 28/2 (October 2004). I
remain indebted to Denis Dutton for his sustained encouragement of
these symposia (and more generally for our stimulating and highly en-
joyable ongoing co-editorship of that journal). This piece was presented
in early-draft form to the Philosophy Research Seminar at Bard; I was
on that occasion—as I so frequently am—grateful to and heartened
by my students for their unstopping blend of stimulation, intellectual

Acknowledgements xi
engagement, encouragement, and steadfast refusal to assume very nearly
anything as given.
When Michael Krausz told me he was editing a collection on the
problem of single versus multiple interpretations and that he wanted
an essay from me on the signiﬁcance of Wittgenstein’s philosophical
writings for this project, I saw at a glance that singular versus multiple
self-interpretation might be my subject, an idea he immediately fastened
upon with his characteristic acuity and encouraging warmth. The result,
providing here the basis of Chapter 5, was ‘Wittgenstein and the
Question of True Self-Interpretation’ in his collectionIs There a Single
Right Interpretation?(University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2002). Parts of this chapter were delivered, also at his invitation,
at a session of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium at
Bryn Mawr College—another most helpful and thoroughly enjoyable
occasion.
Another part of that originally drafted material concerned the per-
ception of persons as investigated with irreducible complexity by
Wittgenstein, especially where the question of the distinctive nature
of person-perception links to issues of biographical and autobiograph-
ical understanding. So in receiving an invitation from Richard Raatzsch
to write for a special issue ofWittgenstein-Studien(5 (2002)) entitled
Goethe and Wittgenstein: Seeing the World’s Unity in its Varietythat
he was co-editing with Bettina Kremberg and to present a paper at a
thoroughly delightful conference on the subject at the University of
Leipzig, I was given a chance to develop that material further. And then
Catherine Osborne invited me to present still another version at her
engrossing conference ‘Wittgenstein, Literature, and Other Minds’ at
the University of East Anglia. ‘The Mind Shown: Wittgenstein, Goethe,
and the Question of Person-Perception’ became the foundation for the
ﬁrst two sections of Chapter 6.
Toward the end of the preceding piece I could see that I would
need to extend the discussion of person-perception—particularly where
this turns recursively to self-perception—into aspect-perception and
‘seeing-as’. It was thus my continued good fortune when William Day
and Victor Krebs asked shortly thereafter if I might write for their
collectionSeeing Wittgenstein Anew(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008). I found this invitation especially attractive as it afforded
the possibility of reviving and integrating some work on§xi of part II of
Philosophical Investigationsthat I had done many years earlier while in
residence at St John’s College, Oxford; I thus ﬁnally have an opportunity

xii Acknowledgements
to thank them (if from across a considerable span of time), and par-
ticularly Dr P. M. S. Hacker, for having made that productive and
stimulating time possible. I also beneﬁted much from some character-
istically insightful and helpful advice from Colin Lyas some years back
on this topic. The long-delayed precipitate was published as ‘In a New
Light: Wittgenstein, Aspect Perception, and Retrospective Change in
Self-Understanding’. As it was nearing completion, Jerrold Levinson in-
vited me to give a paper to the University of Maryland’s visiting speaker
series. Presentation once again aided and abetted (as did Jerry), and the
end point of this chain of events is, at last, the ﬁnal section of Chapter 6.
I was also becoming increasingly aware that any study of this kind
would need to consider Wittgenstein’s too-little-discussed remarks on
memory and the signiﬁcance of these remarks for the clariﬁcation of
issues pertaining to ﬁrst-person narratives when David Rudrum invited
me to write for his collectionLiterature and Philosophy: A Guide to
Contemporary Debates(London: Palgrave, 2005). The project, as it
unfolded, became ‘Autobiographical Memory: Wittgenstein, Davidson,
and the ‘‘Descent into Ourselves’’ ’, and now constitutes the ﬁrst two
sections of Chapter 8. David also kindly invited me to take part in a
conference entitled ‘Wittgenstein and Literature’ that he organized at
the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where some of
the governing ideas for this book were aired.
Much of the content of the last section of Chapter 7 was part of
another symposium inPhilosophy and Literature(27/1 (April 2003)),
entitledWittgenstein and Literary Aesthetics. It appeared there as ‘On
Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical
Writing’, and versions of it were presented in San Francisco as part
of a session, ‘Wittgenstein and the Arts’, at an annual meeting of the
American Society for Aesthetics, and at the Seventh Annual Comparative
Literature Conference at the University of South Carolina, which was
devoted to the work of Stanley Cavell.
Sections of this study were also given at a number of other philo-
sophical conferences, and I want to thank, if too brieﬂy, the organizers
and the participants of these for their generosity in making it possible
to give various pieces of this book hearings in their formative stages.
David Goldblatt extended a generous invitation to speak in the visiting
philosopher series at Denison University, Ohio, where animated dis-
cussion with him and others proved most helpful. John MacKinnon
invited me to give part of this book at a spirited conference entitled ‘The
Complementarity of Human Perspectives’ at the Institute of Humane

Acknowledgements xiii
Studies at St Mary’s University in Halifax; on that occasion Richard
Keshen provided an insightful and stimulating commentary. Arthur
Lothstein extended a kind invitation to speak in the visiting philosopher
series at the C. W. Post Center of Long Island University, resulting
in a very helpful day and evening of discussion on parts of this book.
Another section was presented to the Eastern Division meetings of
the American Society for Aesthetics in Philadelphia; what I owe my
friends and colleagues in the ASA would at this point be impossible to
measure. I also presented some of these pages to national meetings of
the ASA, in Reno in a session on Wittgenstein and Beckett with Gary
Kemp, and still others in a session with Lydia Goehr in Bloomington.
Other sections of the work-in-progress were helpfully discussed in the
context of a plenary lecture delivered to the European College of Lib-
eral Arts in Berlin, in a lecture to Smolny College in the University
of St Petersburg, to the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Glasgow (where exacting questions from Antony Duff and Simon
Blackburn in particular helpfully led to revisions and expansions), in
a seminar at Columbia University (on the relations of an earlier book
to this then-forming project), at the visiting speaker series at McGill
University, to the School of Philosophy of the University of East Anglia,
to the visiting speaker series at the University of Sussex, to a similar series
at the University of Warwick, and as a keynote address at the annual
Mind and Society Conference at the Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge
(where pinpointing questions from Crispin Wright in particular also
helpfully prompted some revisions).
It is with distinct pleasure that I thank the Centre for Research in
the Arts, Social Sciences, and the Humanities at Cambridge University
for granting the visiting research fellowship that made possible an
extended return to the idyllic setting of this book’s inception some years
earlier and provided the uninterrupted time to bring it to completion;
here I particularly thank the Centre’s director at that time, Ludmilla
Jordanova, along with Ray Monk and (once again) Michael Krausz, for
having done so much to make this happen. I also thank the Centre’s
present director, Mary Jacobus, and my co-fellows for much valuable
stimulation during that time; I took much away from a number of
public presentations of parts of this project there.
As is true of persons, without these events this book would not
have had the developmental history it has, and thus would not be the
book it is. It has been improved in many ways by all these philoso-
phers, conference organizers, editors, fellow panelists, commentators,

xiv Acknowledgements
symposiasts, audience members, and late-night bon vivants (these, hap-
pily, are not exclusive categories), and I send my heartfelt thanks to
them all. Every book—or so I imagine—is, also like persons, in a
manner of speaking a palimpsest, and this one bears every kind of mark,
ranging from direct, strong, plainly evident inﬂuences to the slightest
under-layered traces of the encounters and experiences recounted above.
And despite the passage of many years the sense of indebtedness to
earlier teachers and advisers has not dimmed; it would thus, for me, be
gratifying if traces (or more) from those earlier years were discernible
in this book. Out of a longer list, I must mention, in connection
with this project and its philosophical aspirations, Henry Alexander,
Renford Bambrough, Frank Ebersole, and, going back to my earliest
formative inﬂuences, John Wisdom. In more recent years I have invari-
ably learned much from (if not invariably agreed with) the distinctive
philosophico-critical writings of (and from some helpful and encour-
aging conversations in various contexts with) Stanley Cavell, Arthur
Danto, Richard Eldridge, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Wollheim
(among others far too numerous to mention here, alas—although many
do appear in the text or footnotes). The one solitary part of this entire
undertaking is this: its remaining shortcomings, at all layers, are my
doing alone.
Lionel Trilling entitled a collection of hisAGatheringofFugitives,
which was his way of naming a book that brought together a number
of independent pieces each written for a particular separate occasion or
collection. Although this book does bring together the pieces as indicated
in the foregoing, it is not that kind of affair. It is, rather, something of a
reunion of accomplices, and I owe it to Peter Momtchiloff and Oxford
University Press, to the Press’s two extremely helpful anonymous readers
(one later emerging from the darkness as none other than John Gibson,
whom I particularly thank again for now having done even more for
this project), and to Kate Walker and Laurien Berkeley (to whom I
am especially indebted for discerning and sensitive copy-editing) that
this reunion has been a particularly enjoyable, philosophically helpful,
and productive one. Peter, John, and the still-anonymous reader will
see herein just how much I owe to their acumen, good advice, and
judgment.
Bard College is an institution to which I am greatly indebted, and it
continues to be a remarkable place for work in aesthetics (in fact increas-
ingly so). It is with a particularly deep gratitude that I want to thank
James H. Ottaway, Jr., and Leon Botstein for creating a new endowed

Acknowledgements xv
chair in philosophy and aesthetics; the academic world should have more
such positions and, indeed, more such visionary creators of them. For
years at Bard I have drawn philosophical inspiration and insight from
my close friends and colleagues William Grifﬁth and Daniel Berthold,
and now, fortunately, from Mary Clayton Coleman also. Carol Brener
has once again expertly prepared numerous manuscripts throughout the
process, and now Evelyn Krueger and Jeanette McDonald have joined
her as well; I remain very grateful to them. As I complete this project I
have now spent some very pleasurable and engaging months as a new
member of the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia;
it is an inspiring fact that I am already in a position to thank them
sincerely for their stimulation and encouragement.
Lastly, on an even more personal note: My daughter, Eva Hag-
berg, has been an unfailing source of joy of a kind—the brilliant,
sparky, effervescent, kind—that radiates throughout all of life. To Julia
Rosenbaum, an art historian—now Julia Rosenbaum Hagberg—in
this context (although itisa book on autobiographical or self-revelatory
language), I will only say that I now know what it means to say that
words fail. This book is for her.
G.L.H.
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and Norwich, England

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Contents
Introduction: Confronting the Cartesian Legacy 1
1. Autobiographical Consciousness 15
1. Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein’s Transition, and the Edge
of Solipsism 16
2. The ‘Inner Picture’ 25
3. Real Privacy (and Hidden Content) 33
2. The Self, Reﬂected 44
1. Observing Consciousness 45
2. The Picture of Metaphysical Seclusion 54
3. Cavell and the Stage of Speech 59
3. The Self, Speaking 76
1. A Behaviorist in Disguise? 77
2. First-Person Avowals 89
3. Real Introspection (and Kierkegaard’s Seducer) 97
4. The Self, Thinking 119
1. Imagining Thought 119
2. Augustine and the Autobiographical Situation 132
3. Wittgenstein Underground (and Dostoevsky’sNotes) 140
5. The Question of True Self-Interpretation 154
1. Meaning in Retrospect 158
2. The Pain and the Piano 163
3. Augustine in Retrospect 175

xviii Contents
6. The Uniqueness of Person-Perception 185
1. The Case of Goethe 187
2. The Mind Shown: Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Mimetic
Actors 196
3. Iris Murdoch, the ‘Unfrozen Past’, and Seeing in a New
Light 202
7. Rethinking Self-Interpretation 223
1. Autobiographical Memory 224
2. The ‘Descent into Ourselves’ 231
3. On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell,
and Autobiographical Writing 240
Index 259

Introduction: Confronting the Cartesian
Legacy
Thevoluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the
most profound reﬂections of our time on the nature of the human
subject and self-understanding—the human condition, philosophically
speaking. Yet the signiﬁcance of his writings for the subject (in both
senses) can far too easily remain veiled. One of my aspirations throughout
this study has been to help clarify that signiﬁcance, while at the same time
assessing and exploring the multiform implications of those writings for
our understanding particularly of autobiographical (and more generally,
self-descriptive) writing and thereby of the nature of the self and self-
knowledge. Any such attempt to unveil signiﬁcance of this self-reﬂexive
kind—that is, of a kind that should prove central to reconsidering
a nested set of beliefs concerning the self, self-knowledge, and self-
understanding that are foundational to moral psychology—requires
our going beyond Wittgenstein’s texts into actual autobiographical
practices. For this reason this study contains fairly detailed discussions
(which I would like to think of as one kind of philosophical criticism) of:
philosophers writing as autobiographers (including Augustine and Iris
Murdoch); a number of autobiographers whose writings, once seen in
this context, are clearly philosophically signiﬁcant; philosophers whose
philosophical writings are themselves intrinsically autobiographically
signiﬁcant (including Schopenhauer,Kierkegaard, Stanley Cavell, and
Donald Davidson); and literary ﬁgures whose writings cast distinctive
light on the self and its descriptions (including Goethe and Dostoevsky,
among others).
In a moment I will say a bit more about what is to follow throughout
these chapters, but if I were to enumerate the fundamental aspirations of
the undertaking, they would thus include these interlocking attempts:
1. to mine Wittgenstein’s later writings (and then to extend the discus-
sion well beyond those writings but along discernibly Wittgensteinian

2 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
lines) for an account of the self of a kind that stands in striking,
indeed revolutionary, contrast to the initially intuitively plausible
alternatives;
2. to assess the signiﬁcance of some of Wittgenstein’s later writings
on language and mind for our understanding and clariﬁcation of
particularly self-descriptive or autobiographical language;
3. to turn to autobiographical writing as a valuable and heretofore
little-explored resource for the philosophy of literature (taking these
writings, themselves the best examples we have of human selves
exploring themselves, in the light of issues in the philosophy of
language and mind);
4. to reconsider in a new light Wittgenstein’s multifaceted critiques
of Cartesianism (on Cartesianism, see below), seeing in (and again,
beyond) them a powerful way of clarifying the problems of autobio-
graphical consciousness;
5. to see the self, if not as an inner entity we can explore through
dualistically construed introspection, then as it is manifest in action
(of both the word and deed types), but in such a way that the
eviscerating reduction of behaviorism in both letter (the easier part)
and spirit (the harder part) is avoided and where ﬁrst–third-person
asymmetries are acknowledged (if in nontheoretical, irreducible
form);
6. most broadly, to take in turn the issues of self-consciousness, men-
tal privacy, ﬁrst-person expressive speech, reﬂexive or self-directed
thought, retrospective self-understanding, person-perception and the
corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous
phrase), self-deﬁning memory, to bring these into (I hope) mutually
illuminating contact with each other, and to develop a Wittgenstein-
inspired account (I am beingverybrief here: a better term than
‘account’ might be ‘conceptual clariﬁcation’) of each; and
7. to help show, over the book’s course, some small part of the
value of interweaving questions of subjectivity and selfhood with
both autobiographical and autobiographically signiﬁcant writings
on the one hand and a therapeutic, nonscientistic conception of
philosophical progress on the other.
I should say at the outset that, consistent with widespread philosoph-
ical practice, in this study I use the term ‘Cartesian’ to refer to a cluster
of intertwined metaphysically dualisticviews in the philosophy of mind

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 3
and language. Their precise articulations will follow chapter by chapter
but, brieﬂy and roughly stated, they include the views (a) that the self
is most fundamentally a contingently embodied point of consciousness
transparently knowable to itself via introspection, (b) that its contents are
knowable immediately by contrast to all outward mediated knowledge
(and that self-knowledge is thus non-evidential), (c) that ﬁrst-person
thought and experience is invariably private, thus presenting as a brute
ﬁrst fact of human existence an other-minds problem, and (d)that
language is the contingent andex post factoexternalization of prior,
private, pre-linguistic, and mentally internal content. It has in recent
years been argued that, as it has been memorably put, Descartes’s Big
Mistake occurred in the mid-twentieth-century. That is, anachronistic
readings have retroactively converted him into what we now call a
Cartesian, when in truth he was no more a Cartesian in that sense than,
say, Freud was a Freudian (in the terms of what that has come to mean
since his original writings) or even than Marx was a Marxist. So for the
purposes of this study, my use of ‘Cartesian’ will refer to that cluster
of metaphysically dualistic views, and not necessarily (although I do
think occasionally) to the views explicitly endorsed by that historical
ﬁgure.¹Of course, the grip, the culture-deep initial intuitive plausibility
of those dualistic views, in any case very much pre-dates Descartes
as much as they outlive him, so to show that these dualistic views,
or some of them, were nothisexplicitly endorsed positions, however
historically interesting, is not at all to show that the views and positions
contemporary philosophy debates under that heading have therefore
evaporated. In this respect Gordon Baker and Katherine Morris, in their
bookDescartes’ Dualism, take a particularly helpful line: to come to see
that these views are not ones advanced by Descartes can help to revivify
a sense of how strange, alien, or prismatically distorting of human
experience these philosophical pictures of selfhood in fact are, i.e. this is
itself one way to change radically, therapeutically, our point of view, our
way of seeing, these problems. For a helpful and historically informed
survey of the broadly Cartesian position, see Charles Taylor,Sources
of the Self.²On the anticipations of Cartesian views in the writings
of others, see Taylor’s opening remark on Descartes: ‘Descartes is in
¹See Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris,Descartes’ Dualism(London: Routledge,
1996), and Desmond M. Clarke,Descartes’s Theory of Mind(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
²(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. ‘Inwardness’.

4 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
many ways profoundly Augustinian’ (p. 143), where what is centrally
intended is ‘the emphasis on radical reﬂexivity’ and ‘the importance
of the cogito’. The self of the Cogito is, of course, a self necessary for
the coherence of the deception that Descartes’s universal doubt posits
(for deception to occur there has to be a deceived), and that self is
knowable unto itself independent of any other (external) claim. So,
while it may not capture all and only Descartes’s explicitly articulated
views, the term ‘Cartesian’ still—even with these welcome and salutary
concerns regarding anachronism—seems not utterly wide of the mark
either. In any case, it is in this study the cluster of views that go by a
well-entrenched name that is the focus, not historical attribution.)
In the preface to John Updike’s collection of critical writingsHug-
ging the Shore,³he explains his title by suggesting that literary reviews,
because they stay close to the texts they are criticizing and do not sail
out into the open sea of ﬁctional creation, ‘hug the shore’. Part of the
discussion here, in that sense, hugs the shore of Wittgenstein’s texts and
then of autobiographical or other philosophical or literary texts in turn,
trying in each case to disclose what is particularly helpful in them for the
achievement of a perspicuous and comprehensive view of ﬁrst-person or
self-revelatory speech, thought, and expression. But what we see along
each of these shorelines is not, as I hope becomes increasingly clear as
this study progresses, transparently evident upon simply looking at it.
On the contrary, what we are enabled to see along one of the two shores,
that is, either in Wittgenstein’s philosophy on the one side or in auto-
biographical or literary texts on the other, is powerfully shaped by what
we have just seen—or more accurately (for reasons that emerge as the
book advances) by what we havesaidabout what we have just seen—on
the other. Then, of course, other parts of the book sail into open waters.
In Chapter 1, I initiate a philosophical project central to the entire
book and that continues, with increasing speciﬁcity, throughout it:
unearthing a number of powerful but nevertheless often undetected
inﬂuences on our thinking of conceptual pictures, or simplifying the-
oretical templates, in particular the fundamental pictures of selfhood
that encourage correlated models of self-knowledge and especially of
autobiographical self-investigations. Freedom from such pictures pro-
motes conceptual clarity, which itself is a result of an acceptance of, or
an openness to, complexity and particularity. The chapter begins with
a reconsideration of the Schopenhauerian elements in Wittgenstein’s
³Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 5
early thinking about the self, followed by a close consideration of some
of the remarks showing his struggle against, and ultimate freedom from,
those early, theoretically neat, simplifying templates. Wittgenstein came
to see what he called ‘the inner picture’ as a source of a great deal of
philosophical difﬁculty and confusion, and in the second section of this
chapter I look at his own analysis of the cognitive forces, or pressures of
thought, that buttress the traditional Cartesian conception of selfhood.
In the third section of this ﬁrst chapter I turn to cases of autobiographical
writing, showing something of the gulf that separates our picture-driven
ways of theoretically construing autobiographical self-investigation from
actual autobiographical practices. And this permits a glimpse of the great
difference between real autobiographical privacy and the philosophical
misconstruals of ﬁrst-person privacy.
The second chapter begins with a reconsideration of the very idea
of observing consciousness and the distinctive picture of introspection
that this idea can easily enforce. ‘Introspecting’ is a word that carries
the concept, indeed the word, of ‘inspecting’ within it, and the act of
inspecting requires an object of inspection. With that conceptual linkage
we are all too quickly bound up with notions of the self as viewer of
inward objects, and consequentially with introspective language being
descriptive(carrying, as we shall see, distinctively philosophical implica-
tions) language. But a close look at Wittgenstein’s remarks pertaining
to this subject breaks this linguistically induced spell, and the second
section of this chapter turns to the picture of metaphysical isolation
engendered by this line of thinking, along with the correlated concep-
tion of autobiographical truth as veriﬁed correspondence between inner
object and outward description. The third section of this chapter turns
to some contributions Stanley Cavell has made to our understanding of
the pressures that would lead us, seemingly inexorably but only falsely
so, into this line of thinking. Here, telling asymmetries between the ﬁrst-
and third-person cases emerge, along with a deployment of a distinction
between the metaphysical voice and its ordinary counterpart of the
kind we will have encountered in Chapter 1 in connection with auto-
biographical privacy. And here thefundamental idea of self-narrative
comes to the fore, an idea that will be examined in ever-closer detail
throughout subsequent chapters.
A conceptual undertow can swiftly and powerfully drag us back
into a way of thinking of the self and its description deeply aligned
with Cartesian or dualistic metaphysics, and it can do this in ways
that are not entirely obvious on the surface. One less obvious way

6 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
of staying within the template of dualism has been to argue directly
against the inner half of the inner–outer picture. Behaviorism is, as
we see in the ﬁrst section of Chapter 3, such a position, and it has
on occasion proven difﬁcult to distinguish Wittgenstein’s position from
behavioristic reductionism. But in this section we see why he is not
what he called ‘a behaviorist in disguise’, why the ﬁrst-person case
cannot be assimilated to the third-, and why the language-games of
our mental vocabulary do not permitreduction to the language-games
of physical objects. We also see here why the perception of personally
expressive gestures is not, against what the inner–outer template and
the metaphysics of isolation would suggest,inferential(a subject to
which we will return in greater detail in Chapter 6). Behavior is
misconstrued as evidence in the vast majority of cases (where, that
is, we are not looking for evidence, or signs, because of a particular
context-speciﬁc suspicion), and seeing this, along with gaining a grasp
of the noninferential character of our perception of emotional states,
helps to free us from the tyranny of a dualistic self-concept. But then
how do we characterize—if we characterize themgenerallyat all—our
ﬁrst-person reports on what we call inner states? In the second section
of this chapter we excavate and then scrutinize the presumption implicit
in the preceding sentence, that is, that such language is itself rightly
described as a matter ofreporting. Wittgenstein shows that the matter
is, instructively, not so simple or direct; the philosophical grammar of
expression of states such as pain are not innocently construed on the
model of inner object and outward designation. Our language of this
kind, as it emerges under closer investigation, is not best characterized
as descriptions, but rather—again if we want a kind of shorthand
or generic category—as avowals. But then this makes us ask: If the
matter is not successfully characterized in terms of descriptions (where
this term imports metaphysical freight), how do we understand the
acts of introspection upon which autobiographical or self-revelatory
language would so evidently seem to depend (given that reductive
behaviorism will by then, I hope, have been moved beyond the bounds
of plausibility)? In the third section of this chapter we thus progress to a
study of introspection of a kind neither engendered by nor supportive of
dualism, or introspection that, in the manner of privacy as introduced in
Chapter 1, is real, i.e. drawn from—or better, shown in—our practices.
And it turns out that Kierkegaard’s ‘Diary of the Seducer’ is of great
value in this respect: duplicity is not dualistic, and an inner secret is not
metaphysically hidden.

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 7
Yet thinking—or our image of thinking—seems to require some
residual form of ‘mentalism’, some conception of the self as private in-
terior consciousness, where thinking of the self’s experience, intentions,
hopes, fears, regrets, aspirations, and so forth just is autobiographical
reﬂection. In Chapter 4 I consider both the inﬂuences on our thought
that lead us to picture the act of thinking in a decidedly dualistic way
and those remarks on thinking of Wittgenstein’s that can powerfully
reorient our thinking about thinking. This reﬂexive analysis, really a
layered diagnosis, looks into the way the mind tends to imagine its own
workings, and the word ‘thinking’ turns out to be better understood as
a particular tool in our language than as the name of a unitary mental
event. And then turning to cases here as well, in this chapter’s second
section we see in Augustine’s magisterial self-investigation a range of
practices that, taken together as the raw material for an overview of
self-directed thought, show autobiographical language to be far more
diverse—and more interesting—than the picture of self-revelatory
language as outward one-to-one linguistic correspondences of inward
thought would begin to suggest. Augustine’s practice shows that the
relation between what we call a thought and what the metaphysical voice
might generically classify as a proposition is anything but direct and im-
mediate. And here, in the third section, it is Dostoevsky’s underground
man who helps show a further expanded set of practices that we would
without question regard as self-directed thinking, but where this self-
investigation shows a self positioned in relation to his remembered past,
to his present self, and to his present utterances not with a transparent
immediacy but rather with a layered complexity. The issue of speaker’s
privacy—the distinctive relation to our own language that no one else
does or could have—resurfaces here, and we see again, for deepened
reasons, that we need to ‘de-psychologize’ our conception of ﬁrst-person
speech and writing in order to accommodate the interesting—and from
the Cartesian point of view, very ill-behaved—facts of the case. Indeed
our language, construed as merely contingentex post factoexpressions of
prior determinate mental events, or really as an afterthought, can only
further mystify the autobiographical processes that fall on a continuum
between self-revelation and self-constitution (a matter also to be taken
up in greater detail in subsequent chapters).
The contest between interpretive singularism (i.e. the view that there
is only one correct interpretation) and multiplism (i.e. the view that
there can be, in its weaker form, different, and in its stronger form, in-
compatible, interpretations) has concerned, primarily, the interpretation

8 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
of cultural objects and culturally emergent practices, e.g. works of art,
societal conventions and rituals, and so forth. In Chapter 5 I attempt to
extend the discussion of the contest into the area of self-interpretation.
Here I ﬁnd those (still too-little-discussed) passages of Wittgenstein
pertaining to retrospective meaning, i.e. the questions concerning what
we did and did not mean on a given occasion, particularly helpful in
excavating the metaphysical presuppositions embedded within stand-
ard ways of framing, or indeed picturing, the very problem of true
self-interpretation. In order to understand the (sometimes misleading)
motivations for favoring an interpretive singularism with regard to past
ﬁrst-person utterances, we need to examine the belief or intuition that
there is a determinate mental event that constitutes meaning something
and that this mental phenomenon of meaning itself requires the prior
existence of an inner locus of consciousness, an inner Cartesian self
that is the private sphere within which the act of meaning occurs. But
Wittgenstein’s investigation into this alleged phenomenon, which runs
parallel to his better-known investigation into the very nature of think-
ing itself (as examined in Chapter 4), shows that meaning something,
on close examination, is found not to be at all what we expect when
coming to the subject with certain philosophical expectations in mind.
Here it emerges that the subject does not reduce to a single, uniform
mental act, process, or state, and that various phenomena, not a single
phenomenon, are (perhaps surprisingly—given their power to unsettle
our picture-driven presumptions) relevant to the determination of
retrospective meaning. In particular, the metaphysically misled notions
of having meant something as (1) an easily remembered process or
state, (2) a process that follows a course and upon which we can report,
(3) a mental picture constituting the determinate thing that we mean,
(4) an act of stipulation, (5) a focused directing of inward attention
or the inner referent upon which we concentrate, (6) an act of inner
‘pointing’ modeled on outward ostension, and more generally (7) the
ineliminable essence required for the words ‘meaning something’ to
themselves mean, are all removed as candidates for the explanation of
retrospective meaning. Yet it is often incontrovertibly true that on a
given occasion we meant one thing and not another, and this blunt fact
persistently argues against the adoption of a generalized (and given the
foregoing considerations, de-psychologized) interpretive multiplism.
Thus, with Wittgenstein’s observation that guessing at how a word
(like ‘meant’) functions will not yield valuable philosophical results and
that the necessary task is to ‘look at its use and learn from that’, along

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 9
with a brief look at the distinctively active or ‘mind-making’ (as opposed
to passively ‘mind-reporting’) character of self-reﬂection that Richard
Moran and others have helpfully brought into focus, I turn back to the
actual case of Augustine catching himself in the acts of retrospective
self-interpretation. And I try, indeed, to learn from that. Among the
various lessons I draw from this example (in addition to the more
general one that one kind of project in literary interpretation can itself
constitute the work of philosophical investigation), I suggest that the
removal of prismatic metaphysical expectations itself constitutes indis-
pensable progress toward a perspicuous, post-Wittgensteinian, highly
context-sensitive and pragmatically situated understanding of retro-
spective meaning in particular, and more generally the nature of the
linguistic self that is the subject of interpretation in the ﬁrst place. And
at this point we will be much better positioned to fathom the competing
pulls, sometimes toward self-interpretive singularism, and at other times
toward self-interpretive multiplism.
We next turn to this question: Is there a distinctive nature of
the perception of persons, of human beings, that is unlike any other
mode, or perhaps category, of perception, and if so, what does this tell
us about our consciousness of self? Wittgenstein describes this most
distinctive kind of perception, memorably, as ‘an attitude towards a
soul’, and in elucidating this concept we see that it will not settle
either into the traditional categories of Cartesian or behaviorist models
of the self, or into any directly antithetical position advanced against
these polemically opposed but category-sharing pictures of selfhood.
Wittgenstein’s statement concerning the separateness of the language-
games of the mental and the physical, and the correlated claim that if
we try to characterize generally or theoretically the relationship between
them we shall go wrong, proves helpful here—but it also invites the
question asking exactly how then we are to understand this complicated
relation between language-games. Employing examples in Chapter 6
from both Wittgenstein and, more extensively, Goethe in his writing
on the perception of human qualities and mental states in artistic
representation, we begin to see something of the value of a ﬁdelity to
the nuances of lived experience and the value of an awareness of the
circumstantially situated and embodied-yet-irreducible character of the
expression of, and the perception of, emotional or affective states. Indeed,
Goethe’s concern with what has been called in this connection ‘the
whole mind’, i.e. the experientially highly variegated and conceptually
nonuniform aspects of mental life within what Wittgenstein called the

10 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
stream of life, proves strikingly similar (once one knows where and
how to look) to Wittgenstein’s investigations into mentally revelatory
actions. Goethe, like Wittgenstein, was wary of what he called ‘ossiﬁed
doctrines’ that, once lodged into our conceptual substructure, exert a
powerful but undetected inﬂuence on our subsequent thinking and,
owing to their seeming naturalness, resist direct investigative scrutiny.
An examination of Goethe’s writings on various works of sculpture,
painting, and drawing show that distinctive mode of person-perception
in contexts within which what Goethe called ‘the unity of mind and
body’ is evident, even if difﬁcult to describe succinctly (or without the
examples to do the work of showing what is difﬁcult to say compactly).
Goethe, like Wittgenstein, sees the expressive self notthroughorbehind
the body, but ratherinthe contextualized action of the person. Goethe’s
(and our) perception of Leonardo’s qualities of mind in his work,
and his similar thoroughly human perception of a thought-induced
tremble in a drawn ﬁgure of Rembrandt’s, shows that these perceptual
phenomena are indeed instructively resistant to any simpliﬁed formulaic
statement of the relation between the mental and the physical. Indeed
the relations between these language-games are not accurately, or with
a respectable ﬁdelity to the nuances of experience, describable with the
reductive concision traditional competing models or pictures of the self
would, again seemingly naturally, suggest. Goethe—if with his own
distinctive conceptual equipment—thinks deeply about the mind, and
throughout his writings he shows a good deal about the self, both directly
but also, like Wittgenstein, indirectly. In short, he offers material, of
considerable philosophical signiﬁcance, that shows how to comprehend,
without lapsing into polemic-generated theory, the phrase ‘an attitude
towards a soul’.
In a manner particularly ﬁtting for a philosophical novelist, Iris
Murdoch, writing in her diary, often gave voice to philosophical
questions concerning the nature of that very writing. In the third
section of Chapter 6 I turn to a number of those entries, particularly
those concerning what she called ‘the unfrozen past’. In them she
puzzles over the nature of our relations to our own pasts, and she
claims, strikingly, that so long as one lives, one’s relationship with
one’s past should keep shifting. Strengthening the moral dimension of
this claim, she adds ‘re-thinking one’s past is a constant responsibility’.
Here I suggest that one way of articulating this self-investigative process
can be found through a reconsideration of Wittgenstein’s remarks on
aspect-perception, or ‘seeing-as’, in this context. These remarks can

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 11
prove particularly helpful here, because one often encounters three
fundamental positions put forward concerning our relations to our
pasts: (1) the view that we project onto past events new content, and
thus see in them what we, perhaps only unwittingly, put there; (2) the
view that the past is, contra Murdoch, ‘frozen’, and that it simply was
what it was, period (and thus autobiographical verisimilitude reverts
to simple correspondence between prior event and later description);
or (3) the view that we construct, in narrative, an ever-evolving view
of the past as we go along in the stream of life’s self-descriptions.
But Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing, seen, indeed, in a new
light within this context, show that we need not opt for straight
projectivism, perceptualism, or constructivism. Continuing the theme
from the previous two sections of this chapter, we come to see that our
relation to the past is neither systematically bounded nor unbounded
in any of these speciﬁc and uniform ways. Indeed, the process of
coming to see some part of our past—our past actions, words, thoughts,
reactions, hopes, fears, aspirations, or anything else in life that calls for
retrospective reconsideration—in a new light or new aspects (or seeing
newly emergent patterns of these) gives greater precision and clarity
to what Murdoch was alluding to as ‘re-thinking’. And, as we shall
see, closer attention to the vocabulary of sight, the language we use to
capture many ﬁne distinctions between categories and kinds of seeing,
can prove helpful in coming to understand more fully why we tend to
think of, or picture (employing ocular metaphors), the self’s relations
to its past as we do.
Wittgenstein also wrote a set of remarks—still, I believe, insufﬁciently
examined in the light of autobiographical issues—on memory, and
in the ﬁrst section of Chapter 7 I turn to an examination of a
picture of memory, and of remembering, derived from empiricism but
inﬂuential to the present day; this picture engenders the idea ofobjects
of consciousness, where the concept of remembering is elucidated as an
inward-directed act of perceptual scrutiny. But this image of memory
(and thus of the alleged unitary mental act of remembering) cannot
accommodate the relational embeddedness of memories, nor can it (as
we see in reference to a closely related discussion of Davidson’s) account
for the distinctions we make based on what we might call a memory’s
semantic link to the world, i.e. some are true and some are not. This
takes us in turn to Wittgenstein’s delicate unearthing of a false picture
of recognition: what it is to recognize (a close cognate of memory) turns
out to be a far more nuanced and interesting matter than anything

12 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
the empiricist picture of mental-object-scrutiny might suggest. In the
second section of this chapter I try to capture something of the change to
our way of seeing the acts of remembering—presumably central to the
work of the autobiographer and his or her self-descriptive writing—that
is made possible by a conceptual freedom from the empiricist picture
and its progeny. The phrase ‘looking into the past’ turns out not to refer
(as we far too easily take it to do) to an inward act of consulting inert and
hermetically sealed visual or auditory images stored in a retrieval system
by date and time, but rather to a rich set of experiences, of composite
kinds, that take on and cast off relational properties, or networks of
interconnections to other experiences both similar and different to them.
By the end of this study we will have seen a large number of fairly
detailed investigations into a multiplicity of ways in which the very
formulations of philosophical questions house misleading implications,
and the ways in which Wittgenstein’s work displays a heightened sensi-
tivity to this easily neglected fact. In the ﬁnal section of the last chapter, I
will consider, in the light of all the foregoing, the conceptual similarities
(and a few important dissimilarities) between Wittgenstein’s ways of
working through a problem—or giving his readers the raw material to
do so—and self-investigative therapeutic work. Here it emerges that
the very phrase ‘Wittgenstein’s method’ itself houses misleading impli-
cations (concerning the false hope thataunitary method might be ﬁrst
articulated in full and then applied), and that similarities to therapeutic
work can be helpful, but only within limits. Still, the earned freedom
from the impulsions to speak in a metaphysical voice in accordance with
the dictates of captivating pictures is, Wittgenstein suggests, the result of
allowing a misled way of thinking (i.e. one that rejects particularity and
complexity in the name of a theoretically simplifying schematic conci-
sion while still attempting descriptive ﬁdelity to psychological life, to
lived experience) to run its natural course. A distinctive kind of patience,
a philosophical sensibility receptive to ever-ﬁner contextualized nuance,
is necessary for the achievement of the kind of clarity, or perspicuity, of
which Wittgenstein writes. And this shows something of the distinctively
personalnature of this kind, or idiom, of philosophical work. The seeing
of newly emergent connections of the kind examined in Chapter 6, and
the layered and intricate analyses of linguistically induced conceptual
disquietudes, take time and care—as does the kind of autobiographical
work (whether it manifests itself in a formal autobiography, memoir,
diary, or not) considered throughout this study. Some have argued that
Wittgenstein’s ‘method’ is essentially (there is a gentle irony that appears

Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy 13
on both sides of the debate here) therapeutic, while others have argued
that it is essentially more conventionally argumentative in nature. Once
one has seen the ways in which this kind of conceptual work has, in a
number of important respects as outlined in the ﬁnal section, afﬁnities
with therapeutic work (and we see that in practice throughout this
book), and also that it extends into sectors of the philosophical land-
scape where argumentation is employed to considerable effect, it seems
somewhat less necessary to enter into this debate. Both of these aspects
are in evidence—along with the self-investigative, self-monitoring labor
undertaken throughout Wittgenstein’s later writings, a kind of work
that vigilantly monitors the pressures on our thinking and then turns
to diagnose, through therapeutic (or picture-freeing) analysis and argu-
mentation, the conceptual sources of these pressures. And the aim of
the philosophical undertaking that utilizes therapeutic, argumentative,
and self-monitoring modes of analysis (along with multi-voiced self-
directed dialogue) is, of course, conceptual clarity, perspicuity, and—in
a philosophical sense—self-understanding.
Conceptual perspicuity, as we see at the close of the ﬁnal section, is
the kind of thing one achieves in a case-by-case, piecemeal manner. The
fact that we cannot characterize generally a system called ‘Wittgenstein’s
method’ or generically deﬁne ‘perspicuousness’ itself (as we will see by
returning to Cavell and to Cavell’s Emerson at this point), along with the
fact that one cannot at the end of investigations of this kind elucidate
a succinctly expressed theory of autobiographical or self-descriptive
language that stands at the end of a single overarching argumentative
line, is not a limitation. It is, rather, a source of conceptual freedom, one
that allows an ever more clariﬁed way of seeing the contextually emergent
signiﬁcance of particularities. To put the matter in any more generalized
way would falsify one distinctive mode of conceptual engagement that
seems to some of us well worth keeping alive within the larger world of
the contemporary philosophical and literary-critical scene.
Lastly, I should perhaps state explicitly that the following chapters
comprise more of a set, or more of a mosaic, than they do a sequential
progression along a single argumentative line (although some chapters
and many sections of chapters are so related). Each chapter attempts
to cover (or dig into) one part of the larger terrain (or one part of
Wittgenstein’s ‘landscapes’, about which I’ll have more to say), so the
book is more perhaps of a philosophical analogue to an archeological
dig than to a sequence of mathematical reasoning. The task is to
unearth, as carefully as possible in each ensuing chapter, many very

14 Introduction: The Cartesian Legacy
particular and sometimes quite subtle linguistic forces that inﬂuence, to
a greater extent than we often realize, our thinking about the self and
self-description. Then standing back and taking them all together offers
a way of understanding autobiographical writing and self-descriptive
language very unlike the deeply entrenched and seemingly more intuitive
Cartesian model and its derivatives—a different way of seeing, of
describing, ourselves.
It will be clear that a number of classic Wittgensteiniantopoiare
investigated here (e.g. the relations of thought to language and the
Cartesian-versus-behaviorist dichotomy in modeling the self), but as
they are examined within the less familiar context of the question of
autobiographical language, I hope they themselves are seen in new ways.
And there are also a number of Wittgensteinian subjects that have been
little investigated (among them thepositiveconception of introspection;
the notion of hidden understanding in relation to self-knowledge;
the nature of retrospective meaning-determination; the remarks on
memory; and the too often concealed powers on our thinking exerted
by what Wittgenstein called philosophical pictures as seen in relation,
generally, to linguistic meaning and, particularly, to the self’s reﬂexively
descriptive, expressive, and constitutive language). In both categories of
topics, I hope that the context of the investigation allows new light to
be cast (and new aspects to dawn) on a philosophical problem surely as
old as the ﬁrst moment of reﬂective self-awareness.

1
Autobiographical Consciousness
Positionedon the edge—or the precipice—of solipsism, it was
Schopenhauer who famously asserted that the world is my repres-
entation. We know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy exerted a strong
inﬂuence on the early Wittgenstein, whose equally famous—and equally
metaphysical—claim in hisTractatusthat the world is all that is the case
resoundingly announced his early entanglement with grand metaphysics
(if in linguistic, rather than ontological, form).¹Schopenhauer’s claim
makes the world a mental, or individualistically interior, representation
that is, indeed, private to the mind of the individual whose represent-
ation it is, a representation that constitutes at once the contents and
the boundaries of private consciousness. It is thus, to borrow Thomas
Nagel’s phrase, not only a claim concerning the necessity of entering
that individual’s consciousness (where this possibility is denied by the
solipsist and debated by others) to knowwhat it is liketo be that
individual; it is, for Schopenhauer, a far stronger claim.²The world is
not a larger, realist place within which that individual consciousness is
contingently situated, but rather the veryideaof the world is unintelli-
gible withoutﬁrstpositing the existence of an individual consciousness
that constructs it as, indeed, itsownrepresentation.
¹Schopenhauer,The Word as Will and Representation,trans.E.F.J.Payne(New
York: Dover, 1966), vol. i,§§1 and 10; vol. ii, ch. 1; Wittgenstein,Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus,trans.D.F.PearsandB.F.McGuinness(London:Routledge&Kegan
Paul, 1961). See, in this connection, the entry ‘Consciousness’ in Hans-Johann Glock,
A Wittgenstein Dictionary(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), which I have found very helpful.
The Schopenhauerian inﬂuence does not wane quickly: Glock notes that as late as
Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1930–3 (as recorded by G. E. Moore), he said, ‘All that is real
is the experience of the present moment’ (p. 85).
²ThomasNagel,‘WhatIsItLikeToBeaBat?’,Philosophical Review, 83 (1974),
435–50.

16 Autobiographical Consciousness
1. SCHOPENHAUER, WITTGENSTEIN’S
TRANSITION, AND THE EDGE OF SOLIPSISM
This powerful claim was not far from the articulated view of the
young and early Wittgenstein in hisNotebooks, 1914–1916and the
Tractatus—with which he was, in his far deeper reﬂections in his rapidly
maturing remarks in theBlue Bookand then his fully mature remarks
ofPhilosophical Investigations, to wage a kind of reverse-Oedipal battle
with his former self (the ﬁrst skirmishes with that 25- to 27-year-old self
breaking out in his lectures of 1932). In theNotebooksentry of 11 June
1916 Wittgenstein, having already said that he knows that this world
exists—and one might reasonably load a good deal of metaphysical
freight into his word ‘this’, i.e. he means it in the proprietary sense
ofSchopenhauer’s‘my’—observesthatheisplacedinitjustasan
eye is placed in its visual ﬁeld. Rather like an analytical commentary
on Schopenhauer’s grand claim, this striking way of putting how it
is we are positioned in this world is a precise analogy to the visual
ﬁeld understood as the content and the boundary of our experience.
Giving the claim a chiseled precision, he adds the potent sentence
‘That life is the world’, i.e. the world, its substance and its extension,
is given within the mental, or interior, experiential analogue to the
visual ﬁeld of the eye, that is the private, individual consciousness.
Returning to the theme on 24 July 1916, he writes simply, ‘The World
and Life are one’ (which becameTractatus5.621), but then adds three
sentences: the ﬁrst, ‘Physiological life is of course not ‘‘Life’’ ’, deﬁes
any physicalistic reductionism and emphasizes by the exclusion of the
physiological the mental, the psychological interior. But then the second
sentence—as though anticipating his much later undercutting of the
entire behaviorism-versus-Cartesianism dichotomy—quickly rejects the
polar opposite: ‘And neither is psychological life.’ Having evaded these
twin reductive exclusions, he states the more encompassing, and more
Schopenhauerian, claim: ‘Life isthe world.’ And the Schopenhauerian
character of this pronouncement is further brought out in his entry
of 7 August: ‘The I is not an object,’ that is, to put it one way that
seems consistent with at least the spirit if not the letter of his remarks in
those years, the referent of the ﬁrst-person pronoun is not one among
many other particulars in the world that exist autonomously from their
names, in this case the ‘I’, but rather is itself the necessary condition of

Autobiographical Consciousness 17
that world. That referent, like the referent of Schopenhauer’s ‘my’ in
‘my world’, is, like the visual ﬁeld of the eye, notitselfencountered, not
itselfseen.³
Thus Wittgenstein adds four days later: ‘I objectively confront every
object. But not the I.’ And then closing, in a drop of grammar, whatever
small gap there might remain between the early Wittgensteinian and
the Schopenhauerian senses of these claims, on 12 August 1916 writes:
‘The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being
myworld.’
This conception of the self as an interior consciousness whose
boundary we do not perceive and whose nonencountered existence is
the precondition for the world—for that consciousness, a world that
isminewithout remainder—takes a central place in theTractatus.In
5.633 Wittgenstein encapsulates, and advances, the Schopenhauerian
points above: ‘Whereinthe world is a metaphysical subject to be found?’,
his italicized ‘in ’ now calling attention to the notion that the I, the self,
isnotan object like others in the world that we come across, identify,
describe, conﬁrm-as-existing, and so forth. He continues (anticipating
his debate with an interlocutor who consistently voices philosophical
positions showing the grip of philosophical pictures): ‘You will say that
this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual ﬁeld.’ Saying just
that, however, implicitly leaves open the possibility of encountering
the eye itself as an object in, or—differently—the limit of, that visual
ﬁeld, and so Wittgenstein adds: ‘But really you donotsee the eye.’ And
then, advancing the argument in favor of this conception, makes the
point that the role the eye plays in the visual experience is, as it were,
offstage: there is nothing observable ‘in the visual ﬁeld[that] allows you
to infer that it is seen by an eye’, the consciousness of selfhood, on
this model or picture, functioning analogously as (to cast the matter in
terms reminiscent of Kant) nonperceived precondition for experience.
And he had prepared the way for these observations with 5.632: ‘The
subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.’
That was in turn prepared for by his famous remark in 5.62 concerning
what he there identiﬁed as the element of truth in solipsism: ‘The world
ismyworld: this is manifest in the fact that the limits oflanguage’, to
which he then adds a densely compressed articulation of the picture
of exclusively inward, or private, language with which he will also do
³Wittgenstein,Notebooks, 1914–1916,ed.andtrans.G.E.M.Anscombe(Oxford:
Blackwell, 1961), entry for 4 Aug. 1916 (p. 80).

18 Autobiographical Consciousness
battle inPhilosophical Investigationsand change the course of modern
philosophy as a result—‘(of that language which alone I understand)
mean the limits ofmyworld.’ Thus the Schopenhauerian metaphysics
is transmuted from an ontological to a linguistic thesis, and it reaches
its culmination in 5.641: ‘The philosophical self is...the metaphysical
subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.’ And, as a limit,
the self is, indeed, theonlylimit: in 6.431 we ﬁnd: ‘So too at death
the world does not alter, but comes to an end,’ thus reafﬁrming the
Schopenhauerian–Wittgensteinian claim that any intelligible talk of an
existent world will be,ipso facto, of a mind-dependent one. And thus,
in 6.4311 we get: ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to
experience death,’ and a sentence later, linking this to the deep analogy
of the philosophical self and the eye and its visual world: ‘Our life has
no end in just the way in which our visual ﬁeld has no limits.’
All of this, to this point, casts light on the metaphysical picture
that rests beneath these self-deﬁning utterances; this conceptual model,
or picture, is expressed with the very greatest linguistic density in
5.63: ‘I am my world.’ The philosophical intuitions concerning the
nature of the self that are formed and fueled by the conceptual picture
Wittgenstein has adumbrated in his early writings in fact account for a
good deal of our attraction to autobiographical writing. To the extent
that we all-too-naturally think of the self and its place in its world
in a fashion consistent with Wittgenstein’s early position, we then
all-too-easily construe autobiographical writing as a specialkindof
writing: a kind that promises not only a glimpse of the world as seen
through other eyes (which would be interesting or magnetic enough),
but rather a glimpse—or indeed a sustained, long look—intoanother
world, a world that is, in the foregoing metaphysical and consciousness-
dependent sense, ‘my’world,i.e.theworldoftheautobiographer’s.
And as such, we thus think of autobiographical writing as a kind of
literary antidote to the true element of solipsism to which Wittgenstein
referred within the larger context of his Tractarian metaphysics, and
we—if only in a sense that could never attain true or complete entry
into the mind of the other but still holds out the promise of other-
mind understanding—expect a view not merely of what it is like
for another to live in our world, but rather the far more personally
and philosophically compelling viewinto another’s world. But every
component of this picture, this way of intuitively modeling the conscious
self in its autonomous world and then subsequently longing to cross the
skeptical divide into the mind-world of the other, Wittgenstein battled

Autobiographical Consciousness 19
against in his mature philosophy. Bewitching forms of language, lodging
conceptual confusion deep in the intuitive substrate, inculcate in us not
metaphysical truths of self-consciousness, but rather misleading pictures
that shape all of our subsequent thinking on the subject. And it would
be bewitching linguistic forms that Wittgenstein came to identify as the
enemy—the enemy of conceptual clarity—during, and increasingly
strongly thereafter, his 1932 lectures. The following of this struggle
against these earlier, and seemingly natural, ways of thinking—ways
of seeing consciousness and selfhood—should prove of immediate
relevance to an increasingly full and increasingly clear account of
the position of the self investigating itself, i.e. of autobiographical
consciousness.
Consider the striking difference in method, tone, and what one might
callway of seeingthe issue, in theBlue Book(dictated to his Cambridge
pupils in 1933–4):
The difﬁculty which we express by saying ‘I can’t know what he sees when he
(truthfully) says that he sees a blue patch’ arises from the idea that ‘knowing
what he sees’ means: ‘seeing that which he also sees’; not, however, in the sense
in which we do so when we both have the same object before our eyes: but in
the sense in which the object seen would be an object, say, in his head, or in
him. The idea is that the same object may be before his eyes and mine, but
that I can’t stick my head into his (or my mind into his, which comes to the
same) so that therealandimmediateobject of his vision becomes the real and
immediate object of my vision too. By ‘I don’t know what he sees’ we really
mean ‘I don’t know what he looks at,’ where ‘what he looks at’ is hidden and
he can’t show it to me; it isbefore his mind’s eye. Therefore, in order to get rid of
this puzzle, examine the grammatical difference between the statements ‘I don’t
know what he sees’ and ‘I don’t know what he looks at,’ as they are actually
used in our language.⁴
Wittgenstein, now in a different voice from that of his former Tractarian
self, is not stating a metaphysical limit of experience and showing
something of the solipsism that cannot within the limits of our world,
the limits of our language, be said (‘what the solipsistmeansis right’⁵).
He is, rather, asking if the very formulation of the problem (now
demoted to a ‘puzzle’) can makesense, and the tribunal that judges
that question will not be the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of selfhood,
⁴Wittgenstein,The Blue and Brown Books(Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 61.
⁵See Glock, ‘Solipsism’, inA Wittgenstein Dictionary, for a succinct discussion and a
helpful set of references throughout Wittgenstein’s published and unpublished writings
on this topic; the Schopenhauerian inﬂuences are helpfully brought out by Glock.

20 Autobiographical Consciousness
but ordinary linguistic usage. Looking to see how such phrasesare
used in our language will break the hold of the picture, which it does
by calling into question the very sense of the various articulations
of that picture. Now Wittgenstein is placing that picture-driven and
conceptually bewitching language up against the standards of ourusage,
and he will go on to conclude that there indeed can be, and are, contexts
of human discourse within which we intelligibly speak of not knowing
what someone sees, but these will prove soberingly unlike the problem
of other-minds skepticism and mind-enclosed solipsism seen here: they
do not reduce to the problem of not being able to get access to the
inner content—the putativeimmediatecontent—of his experience.
And similarly, he observes in the subsequent discussion that, in regard
to the concept ‘person’, we are at liberty to choose from multifarious,
context-sensitive usages that, as he tellingly suggests, amount to choosing
‘between many different kinds of analogy’.⁶ Analogies for personhood,
for the self, for consciousness, exert great power on our thinking, and
to think of consciousness as a locked chamber, to think of the contents
of that chamber as perception that will thus seem ineluctably private, to
think of our experiencing of the world as hidden, but hidden inwardly,
all conspire in favor of the Schopenhauerian–early-Wittgensteinian
conception of the self and its world, and that way of picturing the
positioning of consciousness in turn fuels the kind of fascination
with autobiographical revelation mentioned above. The breaking of
that spell is accomplished in language, and thus Wittgenstein, in the
ﬁnal pages of theBlue Book, turns to the instructive particularities
of linguistic usage of the ﬁrst-person pronoun that loosen the grip
of those analogies, those pictures. He is showing, if not quite yet
explicitly saying, that understanding the variegated grammar of the ‘I’
is necessary if we are to understand the nature of the consciousness
that deﬁnes selfhood, in a way unlike that which his former self
envisioned.
Both calling a troublemaking group of phrases to the court of usage,
andpickingupathematicthreadfromhisearlierphilosophy—though
now addressing it in a transformative manner—he writes:
What tempted me to say ‘it is always I who see when anything is seen,’ I could
also have yielded to by saying: ‘whenever anything is seen, it isthiswhich is
⁶The Blue Book, 62. At this point Wittgenstein writes into his discussion an implicit
justiﬁcation of his own method. He observes that the word ‘personality’ has no one
legitimate heir any more than does the word ‘philosophy’.

Autobiographical Consciousness 21
seen,’ accompanying the word ‘this’ by a gesture embracing my visual ﬁeld
(but not meaning by ‘this’ the particular objects which I happen to see at the
moment). One might say, ‘I am pointing at the visual ﬁeld as such, not at
anything in it.’ And this only serves to bring out the senselessness of the former
expression. (p. 64)
Wittgenstein then articulates directly and forcefully the way in which
we are all-too-easily misled into thinking that the foregoing metaphysical
utterances possess meaning just as do nonmetaphysical expressions, ‘for
we wrongly compare our case with one in which the other person can’t
understand what we say because he lacks a certain information’ (p. 65),
and then adds, as if writing an abbreviated recipe for the sustained labors
ofPhilosophical Investigationsto follow, ‘(This remark can only become
clear if we understand the connection between grammar and sense and
nonsense.)’ The grammars of the self, of the ‘I’, of consciousness, do not
behave, on inspection, at all like the way we expected under the inﬂuence
of misleading analogies, bewitching language, and conceptual pictures,
and indeed we will be enabled to see those grammars as exhibited in
usage clearly, nonprismatically,onlyif we therapeutically free ourselves
of their domination. (That therapeutic project we will examine below,
in his remarks on consciousness inPhilosophical Investigations.) And he is
writing in self-defense, against an anticipated interlocutor who will insist
that, wholly independently of any tribunal of usage, he knows he means
something intelligible and profound by his Schopenhauerian utterances
on self and world. Against this expected reply—and very plausibly a
reply made by his own former, Tractarian self, in the early 1930s—he
writes: ‘The meaning of a phrase is not a mental accompaniment to
the expression. Therefore the phrase ‘‘I think I mean something by
it’’ or ‘‘I’m sure I mean something by it,’’ which we so often hear in
philosophical discussions to justify the use of an expression, is for us
no justiﬁcation at all. We ask: ‘‘What do you mean?,’’ i.e., ‘‘How do
you use this expression?’’ ’ (p. 65). And that test, using the measure of
intelligible usage, is one thatthe metaphysical utterances concerning
the ‘I’ cannot pass, which the ﬁnal part of theBlue Booksets out to
demonstrate on the level of grammatical detail. The work he undertakes
in those pages of theBlue Bookis far too intricate to recount fully here,
but a few passages may stand for the whole.
Exposing the inﬂuence of misleading analogies, Wittgenstein observes
that when we use the word ‘I’ as a subject in a sentence, we can far too
easily believe the illusion, created by the empirical fact that we do not
use it because we recognize a given person by his bodily characteristics,

22 Autobiographical Consciousness
that we really use the word to refer to a bodiless something, an inner,
metaphysically hidden ego that has its seat in our body, but is of
a different ontological kind from it (p. 59). Andthatconception of
selfhood is, of course, foundational to the Schopenhauerian metaphysic
and the correlative conception of autobiographical revelation; it is
fundamental to the entire conception of the reading of an autobiography
as a philosophical event, i.e. looking—to the extent that we can do
so using language—into the mind of another with the pre-later-
Wittgensteinian metaphysics. And of the sense of metaphysical privacy
endemic to that way of thinking, he writes: ‘When I say ‘‘Only this is
seen,’’ I forget that a sentence may come ever so natural to us without
having any use in our calculus of language’ (pp. 65–6).
But the conception of the self—and thus the subject of autobiog-
raphy—as an inner point of consciousness whose seat is, contingently,
the body, is a picture that dies hard. It is, as we now know, preserved,
even against our better judgment,⁷by the illusions of grammar. He
writes: ‘Now the idea that the real I lives in my body is connected
with the peculiar grammar of the word ‘‘I,’’ and the misunderstandings
this grammar is liable to give rise to’ (p. 66). At this stage of his
development Wittgenstein draws a contrast (one to be made with much
greater subtlety inPhilosophical Investigationsand his mature writings
on the philosophy of psychology) between categories of cases where ‘I’
is used as an object and those where it is used as a subject. If I refer
to my broken arm, the bump on my forehead, or the fact that I have
grown six inches (p. 66), I am using the ﬁrst-person pronoun in the
‘I-as-object’ sense; conversely, if I say that I think it will rain, or I see
an elephant, or I hear a distant ﬂute, or I have a toothache, I am using
the ﬁrst-person pronoun in the ‘I-as-subject’ sense. The distinguishing
mark of the former category of usage is that such usages involve the
recognition of a person, where, Wittgenstein pointedly adds, there is
(however remote) a possibility of error. For example, in an automobile
accident I may feel a pain in my arm, in disoriented confusion see my
neighbor’s broken arm, and mistakenly (probably very brieﬂy) think it
mine, or I could look into the rear-view mirror, see a bumped head, and
take it (momentarily) as mine. There is, importantly, no such possibility
of even the most ﬂeeting error in the ‘subjective’ cases of toothache,
hearing a ﬂute, seeing an elephant.
⁷I discuss the persistence of this picture of selfhood and its continual reviviﬁcation
by particular ways of speaking in Ch. 6, Sect. 3, below.

Autobiographical Consciousness 23
That the pseudosentences formed by the words ‘But are you sure it is
you who sees the elephant?’ and ‘But are you sure it is you who has the
toothache?’ are nonsensical linguistic curiosities is self-evident—and
that they convey a hint of metaphysical depth is telling. Such linguistic
curiosities transgress the boundaries of sense; they are, Wittgenstein
observes, not only bad moves, but ‘no move of the game at all’ (p. 67).⁸
It is, indeed, impossible to ‘moan with pain by mistake, having mistaken
someone else for me’ (p. 67). Thus, as he encapsulates the point here, to
make a statement about one’s pain using the ﬁrst-person pronoun is no
more a statementaboutthat person than is the moaning of that person.⁹
The conﬂation of these twin categories of cases—indeed very close to
what Ryle famously termed a ‘category mistake’¹⁰—yields strong and
deeply misleading support for the conception of metaphysical privacy
that is at the heart of the Schopenhauerian–early-Wittgensteinian
way of thinking that so quickly generates the correlated picture of
autobiographical consciousness. If we can be wrong about the arm or
the bump, perhaps we can be wrong about the pain, thus driving a wedge
between ourselves and our embodied experience. And this misplaced
self-directed skepticism makes that embodiment seem contingent and,
in a metaphysical sense, superﬂuous to who we truly are—which in
turn makes a Cartesian interior seem to be precisely what we want
autobiographical writing to report on,¹¹ i.e. the ‘walled garden’¹²to
⁸I offer a fuller discussion of the language-game (and its signiﬁcance for aesthetic
understanding) inMeaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary
Knowledge(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), ch. 1.
⁹I discuss some of these nuances of self-description in Wittgenstein’s philosophy,
particularly in connection with the behaviorist picture of the self and the reasons
Wittgenstein’s position cannot be reduced to, or encapsulated as, behaviorism in the ﬁrst
sections of Ch. 3 below.
¹⁰Gilbert Ryle,The Concept of Mind(London: Hutchinson, 1949); see esp. ‘The
Origin of the Category-Mistake’, 18–23.
¹¹In Ch. 5 below I try to identify a number of the conceptual pressures pushing us
into the very idea ofreportingon the contents of the Cartesian interior.
¹²For insightful (and instructively discordant) discussions of the picture of privacy
and its attendant problems of self-knowledge in recent Wittgenstein-inspired philosophy,
see Crispin Wright,Rails to Inﬁnity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical
Investigations’(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), sect. 3: ‘Privacy and
Self-Knowledge’, 215–374; and John McDowell,Mind, Value, and Reality(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), sect. 3: ‘Issues in Wittgenstein’, 221–321. See
esp. McDowell’s ‘Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein’, 297–321, where his
intricate diagnosis of the grip of a conceptual picture (what he here usefully calls ‘the
framework’) indeed shows how deeply such pictures are lodged in our language and
how persistent they continue to be not only in contemporary Anglophone philosophy of
language and mind but also in work that is allegedly Wittgensteinian in nature.

24 Autobiographical Consciousness
which we want, as readers, entry. Or, to take the grammatical conﬂation
the other way (and thus cause different metaphysical trouble), we might
all too easily think that because there exists no logical room for error in
the ‘subjective’ cases, there similarly exists none in the objective, and we
respond to any imagined counterexamples (of the automobile-accident
kind above) by saying that we never make errors about what weseemto
see or experience, thus driving a wedge between ourselves and the world
we inhabit and with which we interact.¹³And this in turn, through
an appeal to a variant of the sense-data picture of human experience,
makes our experience seem incorrigible within the Cartesian interior,
and thus when we turn to autobiography it will be—and here the two
kinds of conﬂations, the subjective category of I-usages assimilated to
the objective and vice versa, converge—the truthful presentation of that
interior content that we will want, and we will correspondingly think
of autobiographical truth as that interior content accurately represented
externally. And if we, or some parts of us, insist that regardless of the
disentangling of grammatical conﬂations that might preserve categorical
clarity with regard to usages of the ﬁrst-person pronoun, the word ‘I’
still must mean one determinate thing, Wittgenstein reminds us that
the ﬁrst-person pronoun is a tool, an instrument in our language, with a
variety of context-sensitive employments: ‘The word ‘‘I’’ does not mean
the same as ‘‘L.W.’’ even if I am L.W., nor does it mean the same as
the expression ‘‘the person who is now speaking’’ ’ (p. 67). The mistake
to make at precisely this juncture would be to thus believe that ‘L.W.’
and ‘I’ in this case meandifferentthings—that would be to cling to a
ﬁxed-referent conception of meaning-determination, where each word
functions as, or like, a name. So he adds: ‘But that doesn’t mean: that
‘‘L.W.’’ and ‘‘I’’ mean different things. All it means is that these words
are different instruments in our language’ (p. 67).
Such observations do not, of course,replaceone philosophical picture
with another: they, by contrast, loosen the grip of the picture and the
way of seeing the problem that is enforced by that picture. This deeper
philosophical process brings a kind of light, or a new way of seeing, not
accessible when, more superﬁcially and conventionally, the picture in
question is merely supplanted by another. And such transformations of
¹³See Donald Davidson’s remarks in ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, in Quassim
Cassam (ed.),Self-Knowledge(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); see esp. pp. 60–4
on the difﬁculties of overcoming a perniciouspicture of the mind enforcing the belief
that thoughts require (external-world-mediating) mental objects; we will return to these
matters in Ch. 7, Sects 1 and 2, below.

Autobiographical Consciousness 25
our ways of seeing problems, invariably within particularized contexts of
inquiry, just are the process and progress of the later philosophy in its full
maturation. Emphasizing that the meaning of a term or an expression
depends entirely on our use of it, Wittgenstein, in the closing passages of
theBlue Book, writes—against a way of seeing codiﬁed in his early writ-
ings—‘Let’s not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind
makes between a word and a thing, and that this connectioncontains
the whole usage of a word as the seed might be said to contain the tree’
(pp. 73–4). Transmuted to the understanding of autobiography, the
meaning determined by the occult connection would constitute some-
thing of a holy grail of other-understanding: not only knowledge of the
other’s Cartesian interior, but, in a grander metaphysical Schopenhauer-
ian manner, the world as represented in that other’s inner-meaning-
laden consciousness. But that conception, that picture, of the interior
self and its meaning-determining occult processes, if only a myth born
of misleading analogies and grammatical conﬂations, must be intricately
removed in order to grasp rightly the nature of the self and its contents
as revealed in our autobiographical practices. With that thought, we
turn—having seen both Wittgenstein’s starting point on these issues
and his middle-period reaction against his own former way of think-
ing—to the intricate removal of misconceptions of consciousness of his
late, mature work. Only this kind of removal will allow a clariﬁed view
of the richly human autobiographical endeavors in which we engage.
2. THE ‘INNER PICTURE’
InPhilosophical Investigations§416 Wittgenstein’s imagined interlocutor
suggests that, because we humans agree in saying that we see, hear,
feel, and so forth, we must thus be our own witnesses that we have
consciousness. Mindful of the snares of language, of misleading analogies,
and of the necessity of context for making intelligible, sense-bearing
moves within a language-game, Wittgenstein replies: ‘But how strange
this is! Whom do I really inform if I say ‘‘I have consciousness’’?’ And
then turning the focus from communicating the fact of our consciousness
to others to self-reporting, asks: ‘What is the purpose of saying this to
myself...?’ And he reminds us that therearecases, contexts, in which
we might tell someone who witnesses our fainting spell, ‘I am conscious
again’, but the implicit warning is that such cases are, on the level
of grammatical appearance, similar to the interlocutor’s philosophical

26 Autobiographical Consciousness
utterances, but in truth nothing like them at all. Pursuing this contrast
between grammatically disguised nonsense and the intelligible, he begins
§417 with the question ‘Do I observe myself, then, and perceive that
I am seeing or conscious?’ He dismantles the apparent but deeply
misleading sense of obviousness about this in layers. First, we ﬁnd the
concept ofobservationcalled into question. Wittgenstein does not fully
undertake such an investigation here (he did describe his book as ‘a
machine to think with’ and does characteristically leave a good deal
of work to the reader), but if we were to consider extensively cases in
which we readily and unproblematically speak ofobservingathingor
situation, we would see that the case of self-consciousness isnothinglike
that—indeed to the point where we would feel disoriented in trying to
apply the term ‘observation’ to the situation at all. And the close reading
of autobiographical self-investigation shows precisely this, as a number
of cases considered below will suggest.
But then Wittgenstein, at the next layer, asks: ‘Why not simply say
‘‘I perceive I am conscious’’?’ This would, however, constitute a kind of
thinly disguised conceptual recidivism, since the concept ofperception,
on a similar investigation, would seem equally remote, equally detached
from the real language-games of self-investigation. Thus, he asks, again
in a kind of analytical shorthand: ‘But what are the words ‘‘I perceive’’
for here?’ This phrase, as an instrument in our language, would show
notthe true underlying nature of the ordinary case of consciousness,
but rather, if applicable at all, only that our attention is disposed in a
particular way. One might say (Wittgenstein does not, but a thorough
investigation of the ground he is rapidly moving over would suggest
it) that the phrase ‘I perceive I am conscious’ is a kind of pleonasm
of self-reportage for the cleaner ‘I am conscious’. But these statements
do not capture the ordinary case of a person’s consciousness either, for
in what cases do wereport¹⁴on our states, and in what contexts do
wesay‘I am conscious’? In the fainting case in which thequestionof
consciousness has come to the fore, perhaps; in the stream of conscious
life, never. This is a sentence grammatically similar to ‘I am hungry’,
‘I am cold’, ‘I am delighted’, and, by slight extension, ‘We are not
amused’. And the sense of these remarks lends illegitimate support to
their grammatically similar self-report of consciousness, one that can
deliver only a false promise of intelligibility.
¹⁴I offer a discussion of Wittgenstein’s particularly relevant passages in Ch. 2, Sect. 1,
and Ch. 3, Sect. 2, below.

Autobiographical Consciousness 27
But how then should we characterize the evident fact that most of us go
through life conscious most of the time (andthat—the particularities
and nuances of that experience that is for each of us distinctive to
us—is again how we think of the subject matter of autobiographical
writing)? In§418 Wittgenstein asks: ‘Is my having consciousness a
fact of experience?’ And he assembles some stray thoughts that seem
to endorse, indeed to necessitate, such a general claim: don’t we say
that persons have consciousness while trees and stones do not? And
(in§419) if we speak of a tribe with a chief, must not that chief have
consciousness? ‘Surely’, he continues the voicing of this grammatically
misled line of thinking, ‘we can’t have a chief without consciousness!’
There are contexts in which we speak of consciousness as an attribute
or as a state of a person, including ourselves, but there is a deep logical
difference (disguised by grammatical similarity) between saying that
green or hot are properties some things possess and others don’t and
that consciousness is a property some things have and others don’t, and
so it is a propertyof that kind. Some chairs are green, others are not, so we
can ask how many chairs in a room are green, how many not. It would
transgress conceptual–logical limits to inquire in turn, however, into
the nature of greenness itself: the disorienting generality of this question
(a question of a metaphysical kind logicallyverydifferent from either
a physicist’s question about the wave-behavior of green color, or the
neurophysiologist’s question concerning the ocular system that allows
us to differentiate green from blue) is a symptom of our having lost
our link to legitimate moves in the language-game. Similarly, various
kinds of things come into, and pass out of, existence in contexts of
all kinds; such particularized contexts are, again,veryremote from the
generalized question concerning, not when the self-reﬂective awareness
of a kind evinced in Petrarch’s sonnets or the hyperromanticized,
nervously overwrought self-image epitomized by Goethe’s Werther came
into existence, but rather—although grammatically similar but logically
different in the extreme—what the nature of existence, or indeed of
Being,itself¹⁵might be. If some chairs are green, and some exist, is then
existence not a property? If some entities are conscious, and others not,
is not consciousness a property? And here again, the word ‘as’, versus ‘is’,
condenses a cloud of philosophy into a drop of grammatical difference.
¹⁵For an exceptionally lucid, compact review of what one might call the etiology of
this kind of intellectual quandary, see P. M. S. Hacker,Wittgenstein: On Human Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 5–14.

28 Autobiographical Consciousness
Wittgenstein asks if we cannot imagine that the people around us
are automata, that they lack consciousness, and that, for example,
the liveliness of a group of children is the result only of automatism
(§420). He predicts that we will, in one reaction to this suggestion,
ﬁnd the words, the sentences, expressing this ‘automata view’ of persons
becoming quite meaningless when they are, as it were, held up against the
reality of the persons. Or as a second reaction to the suggestion, we might
momentarily provoke an uncanny feeling in ourselves. He then speaks of
this in terms of ‘seeing a living human being as an automaton...’, and
therein lies the grammatical cue (which relates directly to his important
remarks on aspect-perception and the phenomena of ‘seeing-as’ in part II,
§xi¹⁶) that calls for more elucidation than Wittgenstein gives it in this
passage of his ‘machine’. That we can try to see persons as automata
(and if slightly successful, experience the sense of the uncanny) suggests,
erroneously, that if we aren’t seeing them as automata, then we must,
in the ordinary case, be seeing them as something else—which in this
context would obviously be characterized as beings-with-consciousness.
This is a grammatically parallel construction that leads us astray precisely
because, in the ordinary case, we don’t see personsasanything; we
see that itisa person, or group of children, etc., before us. And
those we see, not on an additive model (which the misapplication
of the seeing-as construction would here strongly suggest) where the
perception of the person is analyzable into its constituent parts with the
separable property of consciousness being added to an isolated body or
a humanoid mechanism, but in terms of the irreducible, unanalyzable
‘attitude towards a soul’, anEinstellung zur Seele, of which Wittgenstein
writes.¹⁷That this distinctive attitude isbasicto human beings, i.e.
fundamental toanyunderstanding of who, what, and how we are, is
what gives the strength to the ordinary nature of our person-perception
sufﬁcient to make the ﬁrst reaction Wittgenstein articulates common,
where the words and sentences expressing the automata-view quickly
seem meaningless. This, to express it in a drop of grammatical difference,
is the triumph of ‘is’ over ‘as’. The picturing of the consciousness of
¹⁶I take this matter up directly in Ch. 7, Sect. 3, below.
¹⁷For a more detailed discussion of this irreducible attitude, see myMeaning and
Interpretation, ‘Against Reductionism’, 129–38. I think one can see a good deal of directly
relevant philosophical detail (on person-perception inrelation to the irreducible attitude)
in Mozart and Da Ponte’sDon Giovanni: I argue the case in ‘Leporello’s Question:
Don Giovannias a Tragedy of the Unexamined Life’,Philosophy and Literature, 29/1
(Apr. 2005), 180–99.

Autobiographical Consciousness 29
the person as ontologically distinct from, and only contingentlyrelated
to, what we will then callembodimentis fueled, in part, by the notion
that we see persons as entities-with-the-property-of-consciousness, and
it is not then long until we are, in keeping with this dualistic picture of
selfhood, asking how we can—or, solipsistically,ifwe can—gain access
to that inner realm, and we then look to autobiography in that light,
with those philosophical motivations and their correlated expectations.
In short, this is yet another juncture of thought at which a misconstrual
of the self, as a kind of grammatical optical illusion, makes us inquire
into the nature of consciousnessitself,i.e.inisolationfromthehuman
practices, engagements, and interactions that assure the intelligibility of
the concept of consciousness in the ﬁrst place, and this in turn causes
us to miscast deeply the nature of autobiography and, particularly,
autobiographical truth.
InPhilosophical Investigations§426 Wittgenstein contrasts the chiseled
precision and seeming clarity of the pictures, the conceptual models,
we employ in philosophical thinking about sense and meaning with
the actual diverse uses we make of the concepts under scrutiny, saying
that the latter invariably seem, by contrast with the former, ‘something
muddied’. He likens this to our conceptual tendencies in thinking
about set theory, where ‘the form of expression we use seems to have
been designed for a god’, i.e. the way we tend to speak of such issues
in the abstractsounds like what he now, in his mature philosophy,
understands to be the falsifying neatness—indeed, a false rigor—of
the way of thinking given articulation in theTractatus(where the
true rigor is now to acknowledge, comprehend, and painstakingly earn
an overview of the particularities of the concept in question). That
imagined godlike view in set theory, or in the philosophy of language in
determining sense and meaning, is perfectly parallel to the case of picture-
driven autobiographical thinking: that godlike perspective—precisely
the position we desire to occupy in understanding the mind of another
and which, on the model in question, we hope autobiography might
provide or approximate—is possessed, he writes, only by one ‘who
knows what we cannot know’. And then adding a phrase that renders
the connection we are now considering between a conception of sense
and meaning and a conception of autobiographical content explicit,
Wittgenstein writes: ‘he sees the whole of each of those inﬁnite series
and he sees into human consciousness’.
But Wittgenstein as quickly places his mature thought against that
reiteration of his old way of thinking, saying that those icy pictures

30 Autobiographical Consciousness
where everything would be ﬁxed ‘unambiguously’, high and remote
from any genuine use in human contexts, are like pontiﬁcal vestments
we might don but nevertheless can do nothing with, since we lack
what would give such vestments meaning and purpose. In the actual
use of expressions, he adds: ‘we make detours, we go by side-roads’.
Autobiographical writing is similarly a process of taking detours and
following up side roads; the autobiographer is, rightly if more messily,
understood not in the position of the god with regard to himself; nor do
we, as readers, ascend to that Olympian position.¹⁸But those pictures,
again, die hard; we might well say to ourselves in such contexts of
person-interpretation (or any biographical project, broadly construed)
that ‘while I was speaking to him I did not know what was going on
in his head’ (§427). But Wittgenstein adds, diffusing the misleading
power of the picture and thus showing the great importance a seemingly
small grammatical restructuring can assume, that, in saying this, ‘we
only mean what elsewhere we should mean by saying: we should like
to know what he is thinking’. And thinking is an activity that we
canmakeseem occult and ineluctably private in accordance with the
dualistic picture of the self that underlies the presently disputed way of
construing autobiography—but itneednot seem so.¹⁹
Thus§428 begins with the interlocutor’s sentence ‘This queer thing,
thought’, and that misled remark only heightens the sense of mystery of
ﬁrst-person content and the sense that such thought is the private maker
of the hidden Schopenhauerian world of the other. But the mature
Wittgenstein ofPhilosophical Investigationscounterposes: ‘—but it does
not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike
us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it
were retrospectively: ‘‘How was that possible?’’ ’ In accordance with
the picture, the genuine understanding of another person’s thinking,
another person’s thought, would be a metaphysical impossibility; in
accordance with a far less neat reality, such understandings, some-
times characterized as genuine in contexts where that word marks an
¹⁸The reality of those autobiographical processes is far closer, in fact, to what
pragmatism might suggest. Very brieﬂy, we would ﬁnd an individual or group of
individuals working within a problem-ﬁeld of self-or-other understanding—or working
within particularized contexts within which the criteria relevant to the determination
of the particular issue will emerge as relevant in highly context-sensitive ways that no
generalizedtheoryof autobiographical writing orperson-interpretation could possibly
accommodate.
¹⁹I attempt to show this much more fully in Ch. 4, Sects 2 and 3, below.

Autobiographical Consciousness 31
important contrast, will come in a thousand different forms (it is perhaps
literature that best provides the vast catalogue of cases of other- and self-
understanding of precisely the kind Wittgenstein repeatedly suggested
we assemble)—reminders of what weactually, contra the picture, say
and do—in order to change our way of seeing, to loosen the grip of
the falsely unifying picture. Returning to a theme from theBlue Book,
where he reconsidered the question of a word as a sign, the ‘life’ of that
sign, and the dichotomy this terminology insinuates, in§432 Wittgen-
stein, having said that every signby itselfseems dead (having said what
he did in theBlue Book,ofcourseheiswaryofthissign-versus-life
distinction, although he does not record this wariness here), he states
that the life comes from itsuse. No godlike speaker, as sole owner of
inward meanings, breathes life into them. And if that is true, then we,
as readers of autobiography, ought to be given our freedom from the
false prison²⁰of two deep misconstruals, in which we attempt to break
out of ourselves and gain entry into the meaning-determining, or lin-
guistically ‘life-breathing’, mind of another. The position—of us, and
of the autobiographer—iswhollydifferent. It is theusein our language
of self-descriptive, or self-investigative, terms that gives them their ‘life’;
free of a misleading picture of autobiographical consciousness, we can
begin to see the varied examples of autobiographical writing for what
they are: instructive reminders, against the deceptions of generalizing
theory, of what we do.
The sense that thecontentof lived experience, whatever else one
says (or whatever Wittgenstein has said), is, as a brute fact of life,
metaphysically private is one that seems to want to survive Wittgenstein’s
reﬂections to this point, and there is good reason to think that this sense,
however incompatible with all the ground Wittgenstein has covered and
however clearly picture-driven in all the ways heretofore considered, was
felt by Wittgenstein himself. For after ﬁnishing part I ofPhilosophical
Investigationsin 1945, he turned (in 1946) to problems exclusively in
the philosophy of psychology, to which he devoted the following three
years almost without interruption. And it is not long before the question
of the content of experience comes up. InRemarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology,²¹volume i,§109, Wittgenstein asks: ‘Where do we get the
²⁰I borrow this telling phrase from David Pears,The False Prison: A Study of the
Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
²¹2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), i, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright,
ii, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman.

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8th September. The night was bitterly cold. I could not sleep;
experienced much oppression of chest, and could not contrive to
keep my feet warm, all I could do—three pair of worsted socks on,
drawers and trowsers, double blanket, felt namba, and flannel jacket
and mackintosh over that, on the foot of the bed. In the night I got
flannel trowsers, and wrapped my feet in them, but produced no
warmth. The frost was very sharp, the stream turned to ice. The
sun, however, was bright and cheery, and under its genial influence
all were in good spirits. After breakfast we hunters started in
advance. We soon saw a herd of antelope. But they also saw us,
when we reached a low hill, behind which they slowly retired. I went
after them with Subhan, and opened them about three hundred
yards off. They soon increased that to four hundred, when some five
or six being grouped together, I took a shot at them with Whitworth,
and the bolt only just cleared their backs by an inch or so. Off they
scudded, and I fired the Enfield, both balls seemingly falling right
amidst them, but stopping none.
We crossed the plain where, on coming, we were so fortunate,
bucks jumping up under our very noses. Now we just caught a
glimpse of some in the distance, which were off at once. A piercing
blast, blowing off the snowy Karakorum, met us in the teeth, cutting
us through and through. I never felt anything like it. It seemed to
enter my eyes, and wither my brain. My nose and lips were in a
terrible state. Moving on, head down, I was aroused by Subhan's
signal, and saw in front, in a watercourse we were about to
descend, five antelope apparently asleep. I dismounted, and strove
to get at them; but, the ground offering no covert, no nullah, they
soon saw us, and away they sped into space. I now walked on, and
descended into the wide interminable shingle plain, stretching from
the base of the Karakorum. On turning an angle, I saw something
move. It was a miserable horse left here to linger out its last
moments in agonies. Two days, I suppose, it must have lingered,
deserted by the unfeeling owner, a Bokhara man, who had passed
us at Sugheit. He must have suffered heavy loss, as we have already
passed eight or nine of his dead horses. The throats of the others

had been mercifully cut. I put this poor animal to rest with a bullet in
his brain.
Hence, on to our former bleak and dreary camp ground, the wind if
possible more keen as we neared its primary source. I was glad to
dismount, and wrap my head in a blanket, turning my back to this
inhospitable blast. Soon up came Buddoo, the trusty, ever-cheerful,
quiet Buddoo, and not very long after, the invaluable, energetic
Abdoolah; and all the coolies came in by dusk. I have resolved, in
consequence of our very limited quantity of rations, to make a short
march to-morrow, though Sunday, to a place in the middle of the
Karakorum gorge, where I hope to find a little sprinkling of grass, as
we saw many antelope there, on coming through. This will give us
an easy march over the pass to a spot beyond the wretched charnel-
house, where we camped last time, and lost our first horse—offering
the important advantage of a bite or two of grass, and, I think, fuel.
I ordered a sheep to be killed, intending to regale my servants and
shikarries with flesh, the better to enable them to stand the cold—an
addition to their simple farinaceous diet most acceptable. Resorting
to every possible precaution to promote warmth, I put on three
flannel shirts, one amazingly thick, drawers, flannel trowsers, flannel
coat, nightcap tied on by a voluminous merino neckcloth also
encircling my throat, and on my feet, my principal place of suffering,
three pair of woollen socks, then over all a woollen gun-cover, in
which my feet are inserted, then the long ends folded round and
secured. Thus clad, with double blanket, felt ditto, mackintosh, and
warm choga enveloping me, I may surely hope for enough of caloric
for comfort and repose; though that terrible wind is howling its
menaces, and the frost set in hard. I wish I was safe in the Lobrah
valley. Well, well, a few days—say seven—and we shall (please God)
be at Chanloong; formerly, how despicable a place! now, how
ardently longed for!
9th September. Sunday. A very indifferent night; my feet numbed
and chill, in spite of all my manifold coverings; my lungs much
oppressed, and continually calling me to consciousness by a sense of

impending suffocation. On the sun's rays being distinctly recognised
by the growing transparency of my tent, I emerged from my many
wrappers. The outer atmosphere was intensely severe; ice
everywhere it was possible; and a wind that found its way to one's
marrow. My tent had been well secured at foot to exclude this
assailant, as also, by-the-bye, the poor goats, which, unhappy
sufferers, made several efforts to repeat their invasion of Friday
night, when two of them established themselves under my bed,
driven to this bold intrusion by the severe cold, and little Sara, as
though in appreciation of their sufferings, and compassionating
them, offered no opposition. Nor should I have taken measures to
exclude them, poor things! but that they kept me awake by their
constant restlessness and unusual noises.
I attempted to be, and to look, cheerful—on the Mark Tapley
principle. My attendants looked very black and pinched. No wonder;
there is some difference between this temperature and that of their
fervid plains. At breakfast Abdoolah told me, that the party generally
would prefer halting here to-day, as they needed rest. The coolies
wanted to mend their boots, and promised to go through to the halt
I had designed to-morrow. He observed, too, that the flour was all
but out, and as the Yarkand kafila would come up to-day, we could
indent upon them for their promised contribution. I had no objection
at all to remaining; on the contrary, it would enable me to maintain
my Sunday practice, proposed to be interrupted only on necessity.
I passed the day within, reading and writing; received report of the
death of a horse, knocked up yesterday, one with a dreadful sore
back, which I had remarked, and predicted its certain death. The
Bhooties in attendance on the horses cannot be induced to look
after them, or attempt to remedy the effects of the saddle-galls, by
mending or altering, or applications of any sort. The loss will be
theirs and their employers', as I have explained to them, with
repeated injunctions to look after the animals; but all in vain. The
Yarkandies came up in the afternoon. Abdoolah went to beg, and
only succeeded in obtaining twenty-six seers of atta. I was angry

with him for having either deceived me as to the quantity of flour in
hand, on my making particular enquiries on Monday, or for having
exceeded the proportion of issues he had then told me was
necessary daily, having led me to expect that we had ten days'
supply, when here on the sixth we were consuming the last day's
rations. He made some unintelligible explanations of having omitted
in his estimate some of the Bhooties who had hitherto subsisted on
their own provision; but all this should have been correctly
ascertained. I suspect that Abdoolah, in his anxiety to prevent my
prosecuting my intended inroad into the Yarkand territory, rather
exaggerated our resources, or under-reckoned our wants knowingly
—a very grave fault in our circumstances. But we have the
provisions, written and sent for, to hope and expect. Kamal is a
thoroughly trustworthy messenger, and will be probably fallen in with
at Bursey or Moorgaby.
The thermometer this morning at 7 A.M. was six degrees below
freezing in my tent.
10th September. While yet dark, poor shivering Buddoo came in to
take out bullock-trunk and chair for the coolies, now ready to start.
Oh! how cold the rush of external air! The tent again closed, I
enjoyed a sort of sense of comfort by comparison, and waited till the
first appearance of dawn; then speedily got ready, and, muffled up,
moved off. All the streams, though rapid, were frozen over thickly. I
tramped on as fast as the rough shingle and a pair of new
ammunition-boots, of great strength and corresponding hardness
and stiffness, allowed me. A gentle ascent of some eight miles, I
think, had to be surmounted ere we reached the actual pass of the
Karakorum, and this up a valley or river-way. Having gained partial
warmth after two hours' walk, and my boots chafing, I mounted,
and took Sara before me. But, though the sun was now illuming this
valley, the frost did not yield, and my moustache and beard were
firmly united in a mass of icicles from my congealing breath, so that
it was inconvenient (to use no stronger term) to open my mouth, as
it needed the parting or extraction of some hairs to effect. With

every contrivance to wrap them up, and with two pair of woollen
gloves—one, certainly, all rents—my hands became so painful I
could no longer keep poor little Sara under my cloak before me, so
set him down; and, soon after, we made a turn to the left, opening
the pass, from the snowy peaks of which came rushing an icy blast
that quite curdled my blood. My eyes ached, my brain seemed
congealed, and a pain in my back and side, and every now and then
a gasping for breath, completed my misery. I was soon obliged to
dismount, in spite of sore feet, to endeavour to restore the
circulation by walking as rapidly as possible. But the difficulty of
breathing was terrible. On I struggled, until a bend to the right into
a narrow ravine presented itself, whose lofty banks gave some
promise of shelter from this killing blast. For this I hastened; and,
finding a little nook in a bank, down I threw myself, lifting my face to
the sun, and so sought, and soon found, partial relief.
The shikarries came up, and we were all, I should think, half an hour
before attempting a remark. Then, having thawed a little, we could
find an objurgation or two against the country and climate. My
breakfast bundle unfolded displayed milk frozen in bottle to a lump—
tea, ditto. This was enveloped in a thick blanket, and carried on a
man's shoulder. It was soon liquidized in the sun. I remained an hour
or so basking: then, the worst over, away and up over the pass, and
down, down into the valley beyond, where the temperature under
the sun's increased power was tolerable. We passed the former
halting-place, Pulu, and, after resting an hour, continued our course
to Dupsang, where we chose our camp on an extensive plain, with a
scanty patch or two of grass. The effects came up late, coolies later;
but all got in. I determined to start the coolies very early, and leave,
myself and mounted party, at 8.30, after breakfast, to give the
horses more time to get a bite of grass.
11th September. On turning out I found a very severe frost, as I had
expected from my experience within. Abdoolah proposed to give me
an omelet for breakfast, but produced chops instead, explaining that

the eggs were frozen into stones, and he had hard work to separate
the meat.
We had to cross the elevated table-land, before described, now just
covered with a thin layer of snow. A bitter wind blew in our teeth,
putting all enjoyment of the scenery, or any pleasing train of
meditation, out of the question. All was silent endurance, grinning
discomfort. Yet I did give a glance, and sentiment or so of
admiration, to some magnificent forms of mountains in their pure
and brilliant garb of snow. But I was glad to be rid of their frozen
features, and descend into a narrow ravine, where, screened from
the wind, and cheered by the sun, my temperature and temper
regained their customary tone. Here we met a party conveying
goods of Bella Shah's—dyed leather—to Yarkand; and one of them
was the unfortunate owner of the horses with me, a merchant who
had been long in prison at Leh, and recently released. On gaining
freedom, he, of course, looked for his horses, and was very glad to
hear that they had been engaged for me. He now collected his
clothes, and turned back with my party, much questioning and
answering going on between him and the shikarries; he had read my
first note to the kardar at Panamik for supplies, and had pointed out
to that individual the necessity of implicit compliance; had met
Kamal on the hill over Chanloong, now six days back. This was
satisfactory. We need now have no apprehensions, but of a day's
scarcity—perhaps, a half ration. We continued on, far beyond our
original halt, and finally pulled up on the shingle, near a small thread
of a stream which was lost in the shingle. When we previously
ascended, this water-bed was intersected in every direction by rapid
streams: now water was difficult to find. The traps arrived late, and I
did not enter my tent till dark. There was a perceptible difference in
the atmosphere, though still frosty.
12th September. I intended to start the whole party early, in order to
bring the horses to the grass at Moorgaby, as soon as possible, but
found them all astray, having wandered away in search of grass
during the night. I could not wait in the cold, so started, my horse at

hand following as usual. I strode away best pace, and passed coolies
and Murad's party, and was deep in thought, when a rattling of earth
aroused my attention, and looking up, there were some thirty nâpu
close by me, on the hill-side on my right hand, not above fifty yards
off, all of a heap. They were leisurely moving upwards, a capital
shot. No shikarry, no gun near, that wretched Mooktoo having
lagged far behind. Abdool coming on, driving my horse before him, I
made frantic gestures to him to stop; but, head down, eyes on the
ground, not heeding, in stupid absorption, on he came, nor could I
gain his attention, till I picked up a stone and threw it at his head.
Then he ducked, and halted, and began to talk. Mooktoo, awake to
the circumstances, now came running up, rifle in case; fumbled at
that, then to cap—his fingers so numbed, I suppose, he bungled
sadly. The animals were now far up the mountain. I got the rifle, and
pulling trigger, no effects—the cap bad. At last I got off both barrels,
but the objects were too far off for this weapon—a polygroove.
We arrived at a point where the path, quitting the river-bed,
ascended the rugged mountain-side to a great height, and re-
descended. There being now no water, I thought we might go
straight on, but Abdool would not hear of the horse going. He said,
"man might go, but no horse could;" so Mooktoo and I, followed by
Lussoo, breakfast-bearer, entered the defile which delighted us at
first by its easy, accessible ingress. We soon, however, learned to
respect Abdool's opinion, at which and his experience we had been
scoffing. We found ourselves entangled in a confusion of rocks which
at last quite blocked up the passage. There was nothing for it, then,
but to retrace our steps, or climb the steep on either side. I set to
work at one point, Mooktoo at another. Making slow progress, and
slipping back often—for I had no staff to support me, and my boots
were ill fitted for climbing—I gained the ledge with much exertion,
and, after clambering along some hundred yards, found I must re-
descend into the bed of the torrent, all further progress being cut off
by a yawning precipice. Nerving myself for the attempt, I succeeded
in getting down, showers of loose stones accompanying me. I could
not pause for observation, but fixing my eyes on certain points

apparently firm I dashed at them, and off again before my weight
had detached them, leaving them to fall with awful resounding
crashes into the depths below. I got down all right, not a little
pleased and relieved thereat, and found the way now practicable.
Looking up, there were Mooktoo and Lussoo craning over the chasm.
I hailed them to try another place, and then went on, and heard
stones and rocks thundering down the steep. Reaching the point
where Abdool and horse should cross, they were not yet in sight, but
soon appeared, and in due time joined me. Half an hour had elapsed
since I left the other two in difficulties, and, becoming alarmed, I
despatched Abdool to look after them; who after ten minutes or so
reappeared, abusing them and Cashmiries in general as good for
nothing. They were close at hand, and came up, Subhan and
Phuttoo also. They had to extricate Lussoo who, terror-stricken, had
stuck half-way down the steep.
Here I breakfasted, and then went on to Moorgaby. No Kamal: but
an encampment—some of the people, and horses, and goods of the
Bokhara man. Horses lay dead around; and a man was engaged in
skinning and cutting up one for meat. My people did not make their
appearance till six or seven hours after me.
13th September. A cold frosty morning. I stepped out smartly for a
couple of hours, and then mounted, and found the Bokhara man
encamped, who to enquiries said that he had lost six horses, and the
others were so feeble that he must leave his goods behind, and take
them on to Lobrah to recover their condition. I found the torrent,
from wading and crossing which so many times, when coming, I had
suffered such agonies of cold, now a narrow gentle stream, much to
my satisfaction. On nearing Sassar a man with a loaded ass
appeared, who turned out to be one of the party come with my
supplies: the others were at Sassar. Kamal remained at Panamik,
footsore. We found the river at Sassar, so formidable when last
crossed, now easily forded in any place. Men, donkeys, and loads
there: others encamped with yâks designed for hire by merchants
whose horses might knock up.

Subhan rummaged out a sheepskin bag containing some dozen
letters and heaps of papers for me. I greedily seized and ran through
the former. Good news from home—all well, thank God! Excellent
accounts of the corps at Amritsir; no casualties from the date of my
leaving to the 20th July. The Baboo, writing the 20th ult., makes no
allusion to the receipt of my packet from Leh, or from Diskit. This is
perplexing and serious. If my letters, application for extension of
leave, &c., have miscarried, I shall be in a considerable fix. He says,
however, that he had previously despatched these letters by a coolie
who, after twelve days' absence, returned, saying that he was taken
ill on the road. Perhaps, in his letter first sent he mentioned the
receipt of those packets, and forgot to note the same in his second.
I hope so; but must suffer suspense and anxiety till my arrival at
Leh.
14th September. Up betimes for the arduous passage of the Sassar,
which I quite dreaded, so frightfully rough and fatiguing is it, without
a redeeming feature. The coolies had preceded us, so we had no
idea of meeting with shikar up the valley; but as I strode ahead,
Subhan signalled me, and I at once saw a large flock of nâpu
feeding in tranquillity on the steep hill-side on my right hand. They
might have been three hundred yards off. I took the Whitworth from
Phuttoo, and, followed by Subhan with the Enfield, moved gently up
the hill, straight for the animals, there being no other course. Luckily
the wind was down. I got to a big stone about a hundred and fifty
yards from the flock, scattered feeding a few yards apart, and was
obliged to wait some seconds for breath and composure. The
animals were quite unconscious of our neighbourhood. At last,
taking the opportunity of two coming together, one of which seemed
to me the largest there, and to have horns, I aimed. It was most
difficult to aim surely and with nicety, owing to the grey light of
morning, the grey colour of the animals, and that of the ground,
rendering the object very indistinct. Whispering this to Subhan, I let
drive, and down rolled one of the animals; when, to my infinite
astonishment, off dashed little Sara at speed, whose presence I was
not aware of. He had, however, followed silently my every

movement. He flew straight at the wounded animal, and seized it as
it struggled. I called him to come back: but in vain. So, taking the
double rifle, I looked for another shot, and fired at two passing
nâpu, I believe without effect, but the ball seeming to go through
one.
And now ensued an exciting and ludicrous scene. The wounded
nâpu, an animal as large as a fallow doe, partially recovered the
blow, and, shaking off the worrying Sara violently, came with
irregular bounds rapidly down the hill, pursued frantically by the
gallant little dog close at its haunches. I raised the rifle. Subhan
adjured me not to fire, lest I should injure the dog. But fearing that
the animal, apparently yet vigorous, might escape, I aimed well
forward, and over it rolled. Sara was at its head immediately, and
seized it by the ear, when a desperate struggle took place. The
animal bounded into the air; but the tenacious little rascal kept his
hold firm. Down they came, the dog undermost, never relaxing but
to get a better grip. And thus the contest continued, until I got hold
of the hind legs of the violently-struggling creature, and Subhan the
head. Then Sara, coming to my aid, fixed his teeth in the haunch,
and there held on, never yielding till life was extinct. His excitement
then subsided, and he lay down panting, and looking as if really
ashamed of his exploits.
Cheered by this incident, we pursued our way which was yet terribly
trying. However, the passage was in time accomplished, and after
reposing and refreshing for a couple of hours or so, during which
time Buddoo and tent passed us, and the other servants came up,
we went on and bivouacked on the hill above the Bhoot goatherds'
encampment, a spot producing a fair supply of grass. At Abdoolah's
suggestion I had engaged three of the yâks to relieve my tottering
horses and carry the baggage, the horses coming on unloaded, by
which plan I hope to save their lives.
We intend to go through to Chanloong to-morrow—a stiff journey,
with the tremendous mountain to get over, which, however, is not so
bad from this side. We are all elated at the near prospects of a

better land and a better climate than we have recently sojourned in.
I hear a deal of good-natured banter going on around, and feel very
'koosh' myself, and have been congratulating everybody upon our
having bid an eternal farewell to the Karakorum and Sassar horrors.
The Bokhara man sent for some corn. He lost three horses
yesterday. Two or three of mine look as though they would not
survive, poor wretches! in spite of being freed from their burdens.
15th September. Still bitterly cold, my camp being close to enormous
glaciers, in addition to the snow on the mountains. I led off at a
round pace down to the shepherds' huts, and saw donkeys there
loaded, which turned out to be an additional supply convoyed by the
faithful Kamal who had been detained by a sore foot. I renewed the
well-remembered horrors of this vale of stones and bones, to the
latter of which there were now many additions. The air breathed on
the mountain-side was quite pestiferous from the many rotting
carcases.
It was a terrible long drag up. Having reached the top, I ordered a
general dismount, or Phuttoo and Mooktoo would have assuredly
bestridden their poor jaded beasts all the way down. We stopped a
few minutes at a fine clear spring to refresh; and then on to the
willow groves of Chanloong. The descent occupied about an hour
and a half, best pace. How delightful and refreshing appeared the
struggling willows of this scrubby piece of cultivation! Selecting the
most umbrageous, I threw myself under it, and experienced such
delicious sensations as the privations I had recently undergone could
alone have procured me. Bees and insects in numbers were buzzing
and humming about, and the freshness of vivid vegetation was
strongly perceptible in the atmosphere. Excepting the valley of
Sugheit, the air of which was fine and agreeable, that I have been
breathing and exposed to may well be likened to a perpetual east
wind, the rawest and most intense experienced in March in England.
I revelled in the pleasant change, lying down in the shade, giving
the reins to memory and imagination, until gentle slumber stole over
me.

My attendants, baggage, and cattle, except one horse, came in. The
absent animal was obliged to be deserted on the mountain summit.
I ordered a man with corn to be sent up to make a last effort to save
him. How delighted all the poor fellows were to get down!
I eat my dinner again 'al fresco,' and sat out as long as the light
enabled me to read, occasionally casting a glance over the scenery,
always grand though savage, and in the evening-subdued light
endued with softer beauties: then turned in anticipating a good
night's rest.
16th September. I did enjoy an untroubled night of calm repose,
such as I have not experienced since I left Sugheit; no violent
palpitations and struggles for respiration, no biting wind penetrating
my every covering, and—oh! satisfaction indescribable—warm feet.
I rose early, the air cool and fresh, and just sauntered about among
the straggling bushes, feeling truly sensible, I trust, of the mercies
and blessings vouchsafed me. So far I had returned safe and sound.
I now look forward with pleasure to my return to my duties and
usual avocations. I passed a pleasant, cheerful day; and retired in
suitable mood again to enjoy a night of delicious, healthy sleep.

CHAPTER XV.
LEH AND LADÂK.
17th September. Everybody astir early. Even the coolies were
anxious for a start. Not their wont by any means: it has always been
a hard matter to rouse them up. But they, poor mortals! have their
affections, and are now looking forward to return to their homes and
families.
Having seen many hares and partridges when coming this stage, I
had my gun and shot ready, wishing to give little Sara some
diversion. Arriving at fields and cultivation after six or seven miles of
horrid barren country, I dismounted, and flushed a snipe in some
swampy ground, whilst a hare was visible running off in the
distance. I thought Master Snipey a certain bag after the hare, so
did not fire at him, though an easy shot. The hare made off through
a fence, and a teal rising I knocked it over. Now I tried for the 'long-
bill.' But whether the report of the gun had awakened dormant
hereditary suspicions—for he could never have been shot at—I know
not; but he proved himself the most 'cute and wide-awake creature
imaginable, and, after many dodges, finally took flight. So I tried
after the hare. No find. Then I took down a stream, and shot a long-
billed bird which, when sitting, I thought must be a woodcock: but it
was only some kind of plover, the head and bill exactly like the
woodcock's. I saw the 'long-bill.' There was but this one, and again I
sought his life. In vain: he was off long ere I got near him. Then I
tried a swamp; found nothing, and stopped to breakfast. All the
people and traps came up and passed. I felt resolved to have that
snipe. And, as he had gone off in the direction of the spot first found
in, I had no doubt of seeing him there, so went back. There he was,
quite conspicuous, feeding about, but still wide-awake, and ever
fluttering on out of shot; and at last, when my attentions became

too pressing, he took a long flight, but came back a long round, and
settled in some sedges. I was relentless, and resolved to compass
his death by treachery; so, taking advantage of a fence covering my
approach, I stole upon him. Reconnoitring carefully, I saw him
evidently on the 'qui vive,' and had to advance still some way to
make sure. I peeped again: he was not visible. Suspecting a 'ruse,' I
went on a little further, and looking over the hedge saw my fine
fellow, his head on one side, evidently listening. Without any
compunction, I blew out his brains then and there. Soon after, I shot
a hare, and then, turning towards the horses, a good long beat lying
between, I fired at four others ineffectually; a just punishment for
the persecution and murder of the solitary snipe.
I found my tent pitched at Panamik in the old spot; and in the
afternoon transacted a deal of business. The moonshi, Ahmet Shah's
relative, met me on the road. He and Abdoolah had come to some
understanding on prices and charges, and we got on very well. The
horse left on the hill died yesterday, making five in all out of the
seventeen taken from Panamik, which gives a fair idea of the nature
of the journey. The hire of each horse for the forty days, after due
deductions, is eight rupees, one anna. I was very glad to have the
matter settled, and attacked my stew with additional zest. Some
turnips and pumpkins obtained yesterday were a great treat after a
month's forced abstinence from all vegetables. No fruit to be got
here. I push on to-morrow beyond the corresponding stage when
coming, and, as the river is now low, shall probably avoid Diskit
altogether.
18th September. A more than usually tiresome march, the glare from
the surrounding bare sandy ground excessively trying to the eyes.
The moonshi overtook and accompanied me, and on arrival at
Lanjoong procured me some melons and apples which, though
indifferent of their kind, were most acceptable. Here I discharged
Tar-gness who appeared delighted with his rate of wages, doing
obeisance in a most servile manner. The kardar arrived from Diskit,
and I tipped him five rupees, much to his satisfaction.

19th September. A long and most wearisome march, repeating all
the disagreeables of yesterday in a magnified degree, the road lying
through an interminable tract of shingle and deep sand by the river
side. I shot a hare at the village where we stopped to breakfast, and
disturbed a young brood of chakore there. The hen bird exposing
herself to certain destruction to draw off attention from her
nestlings, I forbore to injure her, respecting her maternal solicitude
and magnanimous self-devotion. We finally brought up at a small
village on the right bank, having passed by Diskit and Kalsar, and
thus gaining a position almost opposite the ravine leading down
from Karbong. The sheep arrived from Diskit looking well, all but the
solitary survivor of the Wurdwan lot which, whether from pining in
strange company in an uncongenial climate, or other cause
unknown, is in very poor case.
20th September. After two or three miles of very deep sand, we
crossed the river where divided into several channels. Its waters are
diminished in depth and force, otherwise it is not fordable when
comprised in its main channel. We had now a rough path up a
rugged ravine, with some very steep pitches to ascend, and did not
reach Karbong until eleven, and had to wait for breakfast till twelve.
The owner of the horses of my expedition, who is accompanying me
to Leh, there to receive his money, came up and reported that five
of the coolies had bolted at our camp, and every male had
disappeared from the village, so that Abdoolah had adopted the only
course left, and gone back to another village with the sepoy to
impress other coolies. This mishap compelled me to give up all
thoughts of going further to-day, which will necessitate a double
march to-morrow, including that horrid mountain.
21st September. A very severe frost, and the cold intense on this
elevated plateau, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. I rose at
the first glimpse of dawn, and tramped fast and long before
acquiring any glow. After a heavy drag up hill for four hours I halted
to breakfast about a mile and a half from the foot of the ascent;
which I then accomplished, not without sundry slips and tumbles,

the ice beneath the snow being hard and slippery. The descent was
steep and rugged, down a horrid stony path running through corn
fields now under the reapers' hands, to the immediate precincts of
Leh, passing under the rock and its crowning palace; and thence
turning across the fields we entered the enclosure where was our
camp, and were warmly welcomed by Suleiman and domestics. The
former was much relieved at our appearance, having suffered, he
said, much suspense from want of authentic information regarding
us, and flying rumours of misfortune.
Major Tryon had taken his unfortunate servant with him in a doolie.
He had lost some of his fingers which had dropped off, but was
thought to be getting better.
No letters or papers for me, nor any news of those transmitted
hence having reached the Baboo. I am thus in a fix, not knowing
whether I have leave or no, nor even if my application for leave was
ever received. I must hasten on to Cashmere, expecting to meet the
Baboo's explanations 'en route.'
The thanadar was very civil in messages, sending apples and a
sheep, bed and bedding too. Abdoolah arrived and reported things
on the way, yet far behind. Buddoo and bedding arrived, so I was
well provided for. I sat chatting by the fire some time, and then
turned into my large tent, quite a mansion, and read for an hour or
so. One small snooze—and then I was roused and kept awake for
hours by an inharmonious combination of sounds—people wandering
about, coolies arriving holloaing at each other, servants and
followers all jabbering away together, horses neighing, a jackass
braying, yâks grunting, and Sara and Fan rushing out of the tent and
adding their shrill yelps to the general outcry. I summoned patience,
and dwelling on my safety and comfort forbore to interrupt my
retainers in the outpouring of their mutual gossip on reunion; but lay
and endured it all, hoping for a lull in the storm, which at length
arriving, I submitted joyfully to the sweet bonds of sleep.

22nd September. A delightful fresh morning. I just sauntered about
around my tent, and ordered two sheep, rice, flour, and tea for the
entertainment of my establishment, to commemorate the safe return
of the expedition. Suleiman reports that he had distributed all the
Scriptures and tracts, but a few which he had kept in reserve in case
we should visit Kopalu. He had met with some attentive listeners,
one a Sikh from Lucknow, now resident in this country, who said his
mind was full and troubled after reading the Gospel, and wished he
could consult with a 'padre.' He is going to Kopalu, and Suleiman
was going to entrust him with some books for the Rajah of that
place, a very intelligent man, and one with whom Suleiman, in his
former travels in this country with Colonel Martin, had held
communication and discourse, of whom too he was hopeful. But we
learn that the Rajah is now in Sirinuggur attending the durbar, so we
hope to meet him in person.
There is also an old man, a bunga, native of Feruckabad, who has
been here some years, and has married a native woman, by whom
he has three young children: he is earnest in his enquiries, and
professes a conviction of the truth of Christianity. He proposes to go
under my escort to the mission at Amritsir. But to remove and deport
a family of the Maharajah's subjects without full sanction would be
going much too far. And, then, how would my friends, the
missionaries, approve of my burdening them so heavily? After
pondering over the subject, I resolved, if the customs and laws of
the land permitted, to run all risks and encounter the trouble and
expense, for the sake of the children—nice, lively, dirty, naked, little
wretches, always merry and chattering. So I sent Abdoolah and the
moonshi to enquire of the thanadar about the matter, who replies
that, when a foreigner marries a native of the country, he ought not
to quit without due authority from the Maharajah. So I thought the
utmost prudence necessary in such a case. I was sorry to reject the
poor man's petition, and, pitying his disappointment, said I would
endeavour to get a purwanah from the Maharajah for his exit,
should I have an interview with his highness.

Poor old Basti Ram is ailing, and obliged to be bled, so I have
announced my intention to pay him a visit.
23rd September. Sunday. A quiet morning. About breakfast time
Bella Shah, the moonshi, Murad, and other folk and attendants came
to see me. Murad, who looked remarkably down and conscious,
excused himself from going on with me, stating that his horses were
lame, and, when this was contradicted, he then declared that he
owed Bella Shah money, which if I paid he would go. Bella Shah had
then taken leave. I declined it, and told him he was at liberty to
choose his own route, time, &c., and so dismissed him.
24th September. I paid all wages and claims before breakfast, and
afterwards off to the town to Bella Shah's, and inspected some rugs,
and damask silks, and other goods. The silks were described as from
Russia, but had a stamp with the arms of England, lion and unicorn,
on them. If they are from England, a far less circuitous route might
be found for such merchandise. Questioning Bella Shah as to
Murad's being indebted to him, he said it was true; he had borrowed
money at Yarkand from his nephew to be repaid here, but that this
should be no obstacle to his accompanying me. I had thought much
last night over Murad's conduct, and the best course to take in
regard to it, and had come to the conclusion that it was my duty to
take possession of the head of the deceased gentleman, leaving the
other things with Murad.
I now went to Basti Ram's, and was ushered into the old
gentleman's presence with due ceremony. He is feeble, but his eye is
bright and his voice strong. A large group of slovenly attendants and
my own suite were admitted to the presence. We had much chat
about my journey, and then brought Murad upon the 'tapis.' Basti
Ram became excited and energetic, declaring that he would force
him along with me, and send an escort with him: had he not come
under my protection, he would have been imprisoned immediately
on his arrival, so strong were the suspicions entertained against him:
there were merchants of the first respectability now in Leh aware of
all the circumstances of M. Schlagentweit's murder, who distinctly

taxed Murad with connivance and complicity in the treachery that
betrayed him to Walli Khan. The old man was quite roused as he
dwelt on this topic. I now made up my mind, and explained my
wishes to Basti Ram that he should summons all the credible
persons from Yarkand, who were cognisant of any of the facts of this
wicked business, examine them, and duly and officially record their
depositions in Persian, attaching his sign manual thereto; and that
the same parties should also give evidence before me. To this he
readily assented, issuing the necessary orders on the spot. He told
me that there was a merchant, a man of importance, in the town,
who was actually present when M. Schlagentweit was killed. This
arranged, I took leave.
There was food for reflection in the information just received, and
my resolve thereupon at once taken I sent the jemadar, who
followed me from Basti Ram, to bring me the head from Murad, and
then returned to camp. After a while the jemadar arrived with
Murad, the head, book, and instrument. The head, taken from the
box and unwrapped, exhibited a skull complete with facial bones.
Earth and dust adhered to it as when it was exhumed. The upper
front teeth were remarkably prominent, the two centre ones large.
The jemadar, who had been well acquainted with the deceased, had
no doubt of the identity. There was a deep cut in the bone just
above the nape of the neck. The few roots of hair on the skull were
black. I ordered these relics to be placed in my tent, and Murad was
made aware that he must accompany me. He only demurred at the
difficulties of feeding himself and horses on the road. But this was at
once overruled, as Basti Ram had engaged to settle all such matters,
or I would have done so. The witnesses are to be paraded before
me this evening, when something definite, one way or the other,
may be elicited. I have taken measures to have them interrogated
separately, and much ado I had to get this understood. Natives will
follow their own train of ideas, and pervert one's words in conformity
thereto.

Murad and the witnesses having come, after fruitless efforts to
conduct an examination in any useful form—it being impossible to
obtain definite answers, and equally out of the question keeping a
witness to the point, and preventing interruptions from my
attendants, all wanting to have a say—I gave up the attempt in
despair, and sent the whole party off to the thanadar to be examined
on their oaths.
Abdoolah returned from the inquisition with Murad and a paper
containing the summary of evidence taken on oath before the
thanadar, who sent me word that there was nothing whatever
stated, which could in any way incriminate Murad; his suspicions
against him were now entirely removed, and he believed his
narrative to be substantially true. This result gives me the greatest
satisfaction. I congratulated Murad upon it, and pointed out how
necessary it was for his own sake that the rumours to his prejudice
should have been sifted and refuted. He now holds up his head
again, and is quite ready to accompany me, but requires an advance
of cash; so I gave him the sum he asked, twenty rupees.
25th September. Bella Shah and his nephew and other people came
to see me, and we had a long and interesting conversation on the
circumstances connected with M. Schlagentweit's journey and death.
Bella Shah's relative says, that the Chinese authorities of Yarkand
are not inimical to the British, and would have treated M.
Schlagentweit hospitably and with honour. The borders of the
country of Andejan are three days' march from the city of Yarkand.
This territory contains eleven large cities, is a month's journey in
width, and joins its frontiers to the provinces of Russia, which
country has recently erected and established a military cantonment
on its frontier, after some opposition and fighting. Peace now
prevails, and a large amount of trade is carried on. Even British
goods find their way by this route through Bokhara, where only any
duty is levied, and that light, computed at two and a half per cent. I
questioned Bella Shah as to why he, an eminent merchant, did not
introduce British manufacturers by the Ladâk route. He replied, that

the exactions were too heavy, and the difficulties of the route caused
heavy expenses. He did send calicoes and piece goods, but
sometimes found the market overstocked by consignments from
Russia. It was so at present: such goods were selling in Yarkand for
half their original value. It seems unfortunate that the Indian
government did not support Moorcroft in his schemes for opening up
these vast regions to British commercial enterprise. Russia has now
established her influence here, and makes a good thing of it.
I have been purchasing some warm articles of felt clothing for my fat
friend the lumbadar of Eish Mackahm; then took a warm farewell of
Bella Shah. Yesterday evening, when Murad returned from the
thanadar, that functionary sent with him a man denounced by Murad
as having in his possession property to the value of 1008 rupees of
M. Schlagentweit's. The man admitted to having been entrusted with
goods to that amount by M. Schlagentweit who had sent him on
arrival at Khylian to a neighbouring village to dispose of them. He
followed M. Schlagentweit on to Yarkand, thinking to find him there,
and was himself made prisoner. The goods, he said, were safe in the
hands of other parties in Yarkand. Mahomed Dahomey had sent a
sepahu to him from the Andejan country to give up this property, but
he had refused to comply without due authority. The thanadar sent
me word that, if the man did not give up the goods at my bidding,
he would send him to Lahore to be dealt with. I sent directions to
the thanadar to act himself in the matter, and take such steps as he
deemed best to procure the property, and transmit it to British
authority. He sent to me this morning to write him an order so to
act. I have, therefore, given him an official authority, as a British
officer, in the absence of other legitimate authority, to search for,
and possess himself of, all or any effects or papers of the deceased,
and duly apprise the Punjab government when he may succeed. This
seemed to me the rational course to take.
26th September. Every one astir ere dawn amid a scene of bustle
and confusion. The shikarries and even all my servants, Abdoolah
told me, had resolved to indulge themselves with tattoos. Not the

remotest objection on my part, as I would only pay for Abdoolah's
and the moonshi's. I tipped jemadar, gopal, and the old bunga who
was anxious that I should not forget his name, in order to bring his
case before the Maharajah. Abdool, the whilom guide, appeared and
undertook to lead the way out of the labyrinth of paths, and then
took his leave with proper salaams. I believe the poor creature is
really grateful for the treatment he has received from me, a rare
feeling among Asiatics.
We arrived without any adventure at Mimah, and camped in an
enclosure. The evening was delightfully fresh, even rather chill,
rendering a clear crackling fire pleasant to sit and think or chat over.
My nights now, unbroken by that terrible oppression of lungs
experienced further north, pass in tranquil and refreshing repose. If
I do awake, it is but to enjoy the realisation of my condition of
health and security under God's blessing and providence.
27th September. We altered our course from that in coming, Subhan
recommending the road by Sassapool instead of Hemschi, the
abatement of the waters of the Indus now having rendered the
lower road practicable. No ways loath, mindful of the stony hilly
demerits of the other, it was so ruled. The road as far as Sassapool
was very fair. Subhan recommended a move on to Noorla, as it was
yet early, about 9.30 A.M., and that place not distant. In this,
however, he was much mistaken. The path led along the banks of
the Indus, up and down precipitous rocks, rough, difficult, and most
wearisome, the distance such that we did not reach Noorla till 4 P.M.
There was little hope of the baggage coming up till night, and the
Cashmere coolies could hardly be expected at all. I determined to
make the best of the lots of walnuts to be had for the pelting, and
some apples.
At dusk Ali Bucks came up with the disagreeable news of all the
Bhoot coolies, who were taken in relay at Sassapool, having bolted;
that a few things only were coming on, and that Abdoolah and the
sepoy were endeavouring to press other people. I soon had some
chupatties made, which with some cold meat formed an excellent

dinner: I got some Yarkand tea also which was quite flavourless, but
being hot did well enough. Buddoo and the large tent now came up,
but no bed or bedding. However, I contrived very well with part of
the outer fly of the tent and one or two nambas spread on the
ground; and Abdoolah, the sturdy, invincible Abdoolah, having
arrived and reported things all on the way, though far distant,
describing the difficulties and struggles attending the flight of the
former coolies and the forcible enlistment of the new lot, I rolled
myself up, little Fan nestled close on one side, and Sara stretched
out under the covering on the other, and passed a fair night, though
often disturbed by the irregular arrival of the grumbling coolies. The
gopal of this place was reported to be drunk from 'bang,' when we
arrived, and was not only useless, but saucy and obstructive. I sent
him a threatening message, when the fumes were leaving his
faculties somewhat clearer, which had the desired effect of providing
for our wants.
28th September. Finding that everything had arrived during the
night, I determined to reach Lama Yurru to-day. I enjoyed a pleasant
walk at a good pace to Kalsee, to which place Kamal had been
despatched an hour ere dawn to direct a relay of coolies. It was here
that I purchased the crop of corn for my camp. On enquiring of the
gopal, he pointed to the produce remaining stuck up in the walnut
tree. I amused myself by the consternation with which he received
my demand for the restitution of a rupee in consideration of this
harvest. My followers, however, helped themselves liberally to
walnuts on the strength of it. The jemadar of the bridge fort, who
had been uncommonly civil and obliging when coming, advanced
from his fortalice to salute me, and, on my entering the doorway,
presented a tray of apples, congratulating me on my safe return. A
Co. rupee 'backsheesh' called forth abundant thanks, and I passed
the wooden bridge over the Indus, and was soon in that tremendous
gorge leading up to Lama Yurru, the scenery truly magnificent in its
savage grandeur, the road full of precipitous ups and downs, and
running as a mere ledge over fearful depths and chasms. My old
nag, on which I was mounted, was a little nervous at these slight

shelves so projecting, some of which were formed on pieces of
timber let into the smooth side of the perpendicular cliff, and,
besides having an ominous leaning downwards, were very shaky and
full of holes. The old Yarkandi snorted with alarm, craned in front,
and dashed forward when urged, trying to jump the suspicious
spots. But for this pusillanimous conduct he sought to make amends
by dashing at the stairlike path up hill, and springing up at full
gallop. I much enjoyed the excitement of this hap-hazard ride. The
weather was delightful, and the surrounding scenery full of romantic
charms.
We reached the halting-place, and things arrived in due time. I made
enquiries after the yâk I had wounded. The villagers interrogated
pretended ignorance, which naturally persuaded us that the animal
had recovered, and on the gopal arriving he at once told us that it
was so. My ponies' shoes requiring replacing, nailing, &c., I had sent
off for a smith who resided some six miles off. Night approached,
but no man of iron. Lamenting this as a serious mishap, the gopal
volunteered to do the job, and set to work, and in such a manner as
to keep me on tenter hooks, lest he should lame my nags; his
hammer, a little round-headed tool, falling with unsteady aim, driving
the nail this way and that. One only having been driven home, and
another with difficulty extracted, he relinquished the attempt until
morning, daylight now quite failing. Should I ever undertake a
similar journey in such barbarous regions, I will go provided with
farrier's tools, shoes, and nails, and do my own shoeing.
It was very cold here, snow falling on the mountains; and a bitter
cutting wind blowing with sharp frost reminds me of the Karakorum.
But I can find means here to repel the cold, which there no
precaution could effect.
29th September. Leaving the gopal at work at the horses, I marched
off, wishing to outstrip the coolies already started, as there was
some chance of seeing shâpu as on the former occasion. But many
people were passing to and fro, so that any animals were scared
from the neighbourhood of the path. It was a stiff pull up the

mountain to the pir, but I did not dislike the work, the lungs here
playing freely; then, down again by a long slope into a valley where
the trusty Kamal had provided a fire and fresh milk. Having
breakfasted, I mounted and had gone but a few paces, when a duck
rose from the stream and resettled. The gun was at hand, and the
bird soon potted. On nearing Karbo, our halting place, as I was
descending to the stream watering the valley, the shikarries signalled
me and I was at once aware of a number of teal in the ford just
under us. I got the gun, and creeping to a position to enfilade them
delivered right and left as they rose, stopping six of their number. As
they appeared to settle some way down stream, I followed along the
bank, and again came upon them. Three fell to one barrel, the other
did not go off. But I had committed slaughter enough.
Waterfowl are not numerous in this country, there being no 'jheels'
or feeding grounds for them apparently. But in Chan-than and
Roopschoo, where these qualifications are plentiful, they abound. In
Cashmere, at this season, they swarm in the lakes and rivers; snipe
also are numerous, and that splendid bird, the woodcock, not rare in
the jungles; so that, what with pheasants and partridges, the shot-
sportsman may find ample amusement. Should I obtain my
extension, I must try a day or two by way of experiment to see what
there really is to be got.
30th September. Sunday. An exceedingly sharp frost. I took a stroll,
morning and evening; the weather all that could be desired, and
scenery magnificent, though monotonous in colour. The remains of
an extensive fort crown the lofty height immediately over the village.
One is led to wonder under what condition of circumstances this
small valley could have been of sufficient importance to be worth
such a considerable defensive work. Many like ruins are met with in
these valleys, mostly perched on inaccessible rocks. The shikarries—
not reliable historians—tell me that the population generally
inhabited these strongholds, prior to the conquest of Lower Thibet
by Golab Sing, being subject to frequent inroads and depredations
by roving bands of freebooters. So, in fact, I suppose that the

cultivators of every one of these strips of valleys retired from their
daily labours to the security of these forts, their only residence.
I enjoyed my day's halt and repose, and took the opportunity of
pointing out to the shikarries and others assembled round the fire
the wisdom and beneficence of the Sabbath ordinance, well
exemplified in the enjoyment displayed by the coolies and horses in
this respite from their toils. I tried to describe a Sunday in England,
with the general stillness and tranquility prevailing, save the bells
ringing out from the many churches, and the troops of worshippers
to be seen wending their way in obedience to that cheerful mandate.
My audience seemed to approve much of such a rule and practice,
but did not, I imagine, think it applicable to themselves.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE BARA SING.
1st October. A fine, sharp, frosty morning. I got off at half-past five,
my usual time of starting now, as the sun's fierceness is much
abated at this season. The path followed the stream which was
broken into many rivulets. A brace of teal were espied, which I
potted at one shot. We had then a long hill to get up, and
descending the other side came to a village where Kamal had
prepared a fire and fresh milk. He goes on ahead for the purpose
now every morning. We reached Shazgool at mid-day. Looking about
over the valley, I saw some birds, and when viewing them through
the glass found them to be chakore. I took the gun, and went after
them, but they were on the alert and off ere we got well up to them.
However, I knocked two over, right and left; but on Subhan running
to pick them up, one found strength enough to fly away, and the
other gave us a chase. At the report of the gun down came the dogs
from camp, and commenced hunting: they would both do well with
practice and teaching.
2nd October. To Kargyl: a long stage this, but midway very pleasant,
traversing a cultivated vale, and passing under a long grove of trees
whose shade was agreeable, although the air was fresh. Through
Pashgyam, and then over the bare uplands where the sun was
oppressive and the glare great, till we descended into the smiling
valley of Kargyl, with its many willows, fine brawling river, and
unsightly whitewashed fort. I noticed here, as several times
previously 'en route,' some curious cooking vessels from Iskardo.
They are chiselled out of solid stone, of various sizes, from half a
gallon to two or three, are no thicker than the ordinary earthenware
pots, and, I am told, stand the fire better. Although there must be
much labour and skill required in their manufacture, though left

quite rough, the price is but six annas or so, according to size. The
colour of the stone is grey. Another description of vessel of smaller
size is carved from stone at Iskardo, of a greenish-yellow colour, and
soft in substance. These are more for ornament than use, I believe.
The former are highly esteemed for ordinary purposes, and supply
the place both of metal and earthenware utensils in these parts.
3rd October. To Tazgan: a long and very rough march, the path
hanging on the mountain side over the torrent descending a narrow
valley which leads to the pass of Soonamurgh. Some patches of
cultivation with two or three huts here and there on either side—
evident signs of increased fertility of soil—are now discernible.
Straggling bushes, some stunted fir trees, and many deformed, limb-
twisted junipers, dot the sides of the mountains, which are broken
into stupendous ranges of magnificent forms, and shew bright tints
in the watercourses seaming their declivities, where rank grasses
and thick-growing shrubs find suitable soil and moisture. Other
coarse herbage also gives a pleasant hue of green, though now
yellowing, to the general surface—all being a prelude to the coming
beauties of Cashmere.
The halting place is by a sort of warehouse for the deposit of the
Maharajah's merchandise in transit, who I find is the principal
merchant of his realms, speculating largely in all produce, and
exercising a monopoly of tea and pasham, chiefly imported from
Las; yet, not to be called a speculation, because he must always
make immense profits, as he pays no dues, fixes his own prices, and
forces sales on his unwilling but submissive subjects. Thus he always
ensures a winning game.
4th October. On turning out, I found that many coolies had deserted.
They were engaged to complete this day's march to Dras. I thought
there was something amiss last night, as the fellows kept up a
jabbering uproar long after I had turned in. Leaving the energetic
Abdoolah and the sepoy to extract other 'slavies' from the few
houses straggling in the neighbourhood—which must shelter a
population of forty or fifty, I imagine, exclusive of women and bairns

—I stepped out quickly to the tune of the crackling ice and crisp
ground under me. The scenery was similar to that of yesterday,
except that more open levels were met with, and the path much
improved. The valley widened, admitting a considerable extent of
grassy undulations and flats as we neared Dras—a large maidan,
boasting a fort of the usual form, in good repair and of
unexceptionable whitewash. A large enclosure serves for camping. A
jemadar and some twelve sepoys are here. Enquiring about my last
letter forwarded, I learned to my vexation that it had only left Dras
three days; so I arranged to send in Kamal by tattoo dâk to
Sirinuggur, where he will probably arrive a day sooner than the so-
called post, and rejoin me the other side Soonamurgh. The traps
arrived in good time, coolies having been provided.
5th October. The people all astir unusually early, long before dawn. I
turned out by moonlight—a severe frost, and so fine and fresh—and
tramped away merrily over the frosty, ringing ground, and crossed
many an ice-bound stream; and after some eight miles or so, during
which I had left all my followers far behind, I reached a hamlet
called Pendras, and sending for the head man (mukadam) requested
fresh milk and firewood, shewing a 'jo' as the compensation, which I
always find assists my vocal appeals admirably, and invariably
succeeds in obtaining the trifles I require. After a bit, Mooktoo and
others came up; and then, on again. Ere long a signal from Subhan,
close behind me, brought to notice three fowl below us in the river, a
duck and two teal. I stole down upon them, and dropped the duck
as it neared the opposite bank, and the two teal with the other
barrel. Further on I spied half a dozen teal across the river. We rode
down to cross at a shallow, when a couple of ducks rose, and,
having gone down stream, returned and were passing high over
head, when aiming well forward I fired and down whirled the leader,
falling into some bushes. On reaching him I found Sara already in
full possession. I thought the teal seen were still undisturbed. Syces,
Subhan, and moonshi came up and reported them still visible from
above; so, cautiously stealing to the place, I found three remaining,
and waiting till their dabbling brought them together knocked them

all over. Sara, at the discharge, rushed into the stream, and dragged
a struggling victim to shore. 'Sha-bash! Sara.'
We had a stiff pull up a hill abutting into the valley, at the base of
which two streams, issuing severally from deep narrow gorges,
united; and following up the course of that on our right hand, high
up above it, we wound along many a bend and turn. The mountains
on our left were now well clothed with birch woods stretching
downwards. Rich heavy growth of vegetation is now general from
rocky summit to base, and the watercourses are distinguishable by
the bright emerald tint of their grasses, diminishing in brilliancy
outwardly, the colouring gradually assuming a yellowish hue as it
recedes from the water. The foliage, generally, has now assumed a
yellow hue from the effects of the severe frosts; and some of the
more sensitive shrubs already glow in the deepest tints of orange,
portions here and there showing like broad red stripes down the
mountain; so vivid is the colour, and the whole effect of outline and
detail is enchanting. Feasting my eyes on these lovely scenes, I
suddenly became aware of an unusual object on one of those
emerald slopes. A moment for the eye to dwell, and I was
convinced, and shouted, "Balloo, balloo." There was the first bear.
He was far away—high up on the other side the river.
Now descending a bit, we came to three stone huts at the foot of an
enormous glacier, whence issued a torrent from eastward. Our
further route lay up the prolongation of the valley we were
ascending, southward. But our day's march was terminated. The
bear was on the opposite mountain-side, straight across; and lying
down I watched its movements, not thinking it worth while to
undergo the fatigue of an attempt on him, from the open character
of the ground, and the extreme probability of his soon returning
satiated to his lair. Still he grubbed, and now and again ascending a
rise to reconnoitre returned to his repast. I dozed: woke up, and
there he was still. And so the parties remained till the arrival of
Mooktoo who bore the spyglass. Through this I now inspected the
distant beast, and found it a very large one. Very soon he moved

off; and, after patiently following his eccentric movements, I marked
him down, behind a jutting rock high up on the mountain.
Summoning Phuttoo and Mooktoo, I made my own bunderbus for
the assault; rode Mooktoo across the river, and was obliged to
ascend the mountain by a gulley to windward of the bear's retreat,
but hoped, by getting above, to weather on him. It was hard work
getting up—the grass very slippery, and I had only common shoes
on. We reached right over the spot I thought Bruin occupied; closely
examined the rock I thought he harboured by; but of him we saw
nothing. Nor could we get a glimpse of him elsewhere; so,
supposing he had withdrawn unobserved, we prepared for our
difficult descent, in which we were engaged, Phuttoo assisting my
sliding feet, when he uttered an exclamation, and, following his eye,
I saw the dust flying, as the bear, till now in a fast snooze, scuttled
off. Phuttoo handed me the Whitworth, and, luckily, the brute turned
round on a rise far above us to have a look at the disturbers of his
repose. That moment of curiosity was fatal; as, taking advantage of
the glimpse of him, I sent a bolt into his neck, and staggered him.
Growling savagely, he made his way some little distance, and
climbed on to a prominent piece of rock—a fine mark, about a
hundred and fifty yards off. Phuttoo, quickly loading, handed me the
rifle, and the discharge of its contents brought Bruin from his lofty
perch. Mooktoo, who was far above us, made for the spot, and
dragging the carcase from a cleft in which it had lodged, it came
spinning and rolling, over and over, on to a snowdrift in a ravine. I
hastened to inspect it—a fine large female, in full fur, and fat as
butter. I resolved to pack off all the traps, and wait till the skin and
fat were brought in, in the morning.
6th October. All the baggage off, and Mooktoo with two coolies gone
for the spoils, I sat by the fire two hours at least ere the skinning
party returned; then off immediately, and crossed several snowdrifts
—the valley narrow with a gradual, almost imperceptible ascent. We
had arrived at an extensive mass of snow over which ran the path,
when Subhan, as I was crossing it, pointed out some wild fowl on a
frozen pool below. They were far off, and rose wild. As they

squattered over the ice, I fired both barrels and dropped one bird, a
duck; then crossed the snow, and scrutinising the stream saw wild
fowl in a bend under some overhanging snow; crawled up and
dropped five of them—a duck, a widgeon, and three teal.
We continued our route, crossing over to the other side on an
enormous mass of snow filling the ravine—no longer a valley—and
bridging the torrent. A sharp climb up, then a gradual ascent, and
we were on the top of the pass, though not on the top of the
mountain. A view of transcendent magnificence and beauty opened
upon us. Every conceivable form and colour of loveliness in
landscape seemed here united. The mountains, opening out into
valleys and dells clad in the richest verdure, with foliage of infinite
variety—only, perhaps, rather too general a tint of yellow—stretched
in ranges on either hand far away back, giving beautiful distances
with their infinite shades of blue. Close at hand, their savage rugged
crests, riven and split into all imaginable forms of pinnacle and peak,
here and there a snow-covered mass more level separating them,
frowned overhead. Lovely peeps downward to the torrent glistening
below were offered through the vistas of the foliage. Indeed, all was
seen from out a frame, and from under a canopy, of bright foliage.
While from below was wafted up a delicious fresh fragrance of rich
and abundant vegetation, giving an idea of teeming fertility, but all
of nature's wildest. I felt that had I done nothing more in this long
excursion than just bring myself to this spot to feast upon these
charms of nature, I had been amply repaid.
I had dismounted, and now descended, the way running down in
short sharp zigzags, the declivity on this side being of great length
and extremely steep. Pausing, now and again, on some prominence
to gaze out upon the glorious picture around, thus I went down my
way rejoicing into a fine grassy vale: then mounted and rode some
ten miles along it, with an occasional stretch of intervening pine
woods to cross—the mountains on either side glorious; those on the
left more thickly timbered. Luxuriating in such scenery—so widely
different from that recently quitted—I reached our halting place, a

sweet spot, a level turf close by a river, over which is thrown a rude
but picturesque bridge. A straggling hamlet being hard by, a few
acres of cultivation, irregular and unfenced, are spread around, the
grain now in sheaves. The valley has opened out into an expanse of
downs; but lofty mountains, mostly covered to their summits with
vegetation or timber, overlook and shut it in. One remarkable
mountain, richly clad below, but his hoary summit bare rock broken
into countless pinnacles, stands as a gaunt sentinel over the hamlet.
I was charmed with so delightful a spot for a bivouac, and
determined to halt to-morrow (Sunday), though I should have to
send for provisions, that is, flour. Subhan went off on his tat to visit
a shepherd on a neighbouring mountain, and obtain reliable
information of shikar. He returned after my dinner, the moonshi
Suleiman with him, who had taken a fancy to accompany him on
foot. The shepherd declared he had heard the bellowing of a stag for
the last four or five nights, and had seen several hinds with one
enormous stag in their midst a few days since; and that there was a
pool with a well-trodden track to it, where these animals passed
constantly. Coming back Suleiman, having started before Subhan,
encountered a bear midway. It was now dusk, and, being unarmed,
he had fled amain. Subhan, just seeing him from an eminence going
at top speed, and disappearing in the distance, could not imagine
what possessed him. Poor Suleiman had evidently exerted himself.
He was streaming with perspiration—his long locks in great disorder.
He is too short and stout for continued speed without disagreeable
consequences. I had a little fun with him, which he enjoyed too. The
shepherd had promised to come to camp early in the morning, and
bring further intelligence of the voices of the night.
7th October. Sunday. The morning very cold, a sharp frost as usual.
The sun was well up, and the depths of the valley even smiling
under his genial beams ere I set out for a stroll towards the place
indicated as the shepherd's encampment. All around me replete with
picturesque charms—a perfect landscape—and the atmosphere clear
and deliciously invigorating, my mind could not divest itself of the

thoughts and speculations conjured up by the previous day's reports
of the game hereabouts, which the aspect of the surrounding scene
was well calculated to encourage. It seemed the very 'beau ideal' of
a sporting locality. I strolled on to the top of a hill overlooking a deep
valley covered with rich vegetation, and the woods standing thick
around it. This must be the haunt of the deer, I thought. An old
deserted wooden hut stood on the left hand, but I saw no trace of
the shepherd's camp.
Retracing my steps I paused to admire one or two charming sites for
a sketch, bringing in my camp, the village, river, and bridge, with a
long perspective up the valley descended yesterday, and on the left
the huge hoary-headed mountain, conspicuous above its fellows,
and remarkable in its serrated ridge. What a picture it would have
made! But I have quite given up sketching, feeling how entirely
incapable I am of portraying such sublime magnificence—how
inadequate would be my most successful efforts to represent such
scenes!
The shepherd had arrived. Indeed, I had met him, but took him for
the mukadam. He had not noticed the bellowing of the stag during
the night, but thought there was no doubt of his being still
somewhere thereabout. I arranged to move up to his place in the
evening after dinner, simply taking my bedding and food for the day
following, and to give chase to the stag on Monday.
In the middle of the day Subhan came, and said it would be well for
himself and Phuttoo to start at once for the ground, and make a
reconnaissance: to this I consented. After dinner I set out myself,
and met the shepherd on the way, who whispered something in a
peculiar manner to Mooktoo. On my enquiring what it was, he told
me the bara sing was dead, shot by Subhan. I was exceedingly
annoyed: the act was so altogether contrary to usage and orders. I
was guided to the place, not more than two miles from my camp,
and there lay the stag, a noble specimen with fine branching horns
of great beauty, Subhan looking guilty and agitated, Phuttoo also
putting on a demure look of doubtful expectation. Reprimanding my

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Describing Ourselves Wittgenstein And Autobiographical Consciousness Garry Hagberg

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