In the later moments of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserts that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul.”¹  What ought we to make of such a brave assertion? There are many ways one may choose to interrogate these words. Is Wittgenstein declaring something ontological? Is he a physicalist in disguise? Does he hope to shelter philosophy from the “linguistic confusion” of a discourse on the soul, of the very essence of human life? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I want to suggest that Wittgenstein attempts to get to the forgotten heart of discourse on the soul. To suggest this, I want to have a discussion with two “friends”: intellectual friends of mine and, as I want to argue, friends of Wittgenstein. The first friend—the recently deceased American philosopher Stanley Cavell—is a familiar friend of Wittgenstein’s, insofar as his philosophical project could be seen as a prolonged engagement and wrestle with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The other friend—the British philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose—is a less familiar friend of Wittgenstein’s. Rose’s work was in part a critical engagement with the neo-Kantian inheritance (or distortion) of Hegel, and in part a series of reflections on the forgotten necessity of law for faith, and love amidst the “broken middle” — the necessary tragedy of navigating social life. Apart from their shared Judaism and sometimes unintelligible prose, what might Cavell and Rose have to say together?

Well first, let’s get back to Wittgenstein. The human body is the best picture of the human soul. In a simple sense, this means that we are embodied beings — that the essence of who we are is somehow, in some way, caught up with or implicated in the body. As Cavell is eager to point out, this means for Wittgenstein that the body is not an obstacle or a veil to the soul.²  The body does not hide the soul. Against the Gnostic or Cartesian soul’s withdrawal from the body, Wittgenstein insists that we see the expressive nature of the body — the necessity of the soul’s activity in and through the body. In Cavell’s words, “the human body is the best picture of the human soul — not, I feel like adding, primarily because it represents the soul but because it expresses it. The body is the field of expression of the soul. The body is of the soul; it is the soul’s; a human soul has a human body.”³ While the mind or soul of the Cartesian and Gnostic subject has retreated from the expressive face (in Sarah Beckwith’s terms), the Wittgensteinian soul remains in the territory of embodiment.⁴

While these Wittgensteinian insights are metaphysically significant, I want to focus more specifically on the social or anthropological weight of embodiment, as opposed to the nature of the soul as such. If the soul, the essence of human life, is expressed in the body, it necessarily follows that the essence of who we are is “out there,” out in the social world; vulnerable, accessible, to be seen, misinterpreted, understood, avoided, and acknowledged. With this reality comes a multitude of complicated and precarious factors. There is on the one hand, the question of my own expression, my own capacity to make myself present to the embodied world of risk. This is not a given. I can hide, the mind can retreat from the face, and I can falsely express or feign behaviour (think now of Wittgenstein’s continued investigation of pain and criteria). But I can also succeed, I can honestly express myself, I can be present and attentive, and I can be true to myself by resisting the temptation to escape the vulnerability of being seen.

Yet, even if this is the case, I am thrown (as Cavell says) upon the other and their capacity to see me, to acknowledge me and my expression. The converse is then also true: the other may express themselves to me, they may risk the vulnerability of standing on an empty stage, and I may fail to come to terms with who they are; I may blind myself by avoidance, or I may, in the skeptic’s case, project this ontological problem onto the other and write it off as an epistemic lack—a failure of my own mind to possess and know the other. For Cavell the general truth this reveals is that we are ontologically separate from the other, “but not necessarily separated by something”—a soul obscuring body.⁵ This then shifts the question of modern epistemic skepticism into a properly social “problem”—and thus not one to be solved in the arm-chair! Our separateness from the other is no longer an epistemological gap that needs to be bridged or mastered; it is an ontological reality that puts the burden of knowledge and existence on expression and its reception by another. Knowledge of the other, properly understood, is not the closing of this ontological gap by the power of our own minds faculties, but a recognition or acknowledgement of the other’s expression and agency to express. Knowledge is not a matter of independence, but of social dependence. Wittgenstein, as is to be expected, puts it bluntly: “Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.”⁶

If separateness is not a problem of knowledge (or put another way, if our relation to the soul of another is not an epistemological problem), it becomes the basis on which the social life—our relation to other persons—is built, constructed, and thus also fractured and broken. The question, then, is not one about knowledge, but about how I relate to another human soul and how another relates to my soul. If we are embodied, if the recognition of our soul is dependent on more than the power of our own will, we are dispossessed and thrown into the hands of another. Rose provocatively writes that “there is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability.”⁷ Whenever we express or authentically act we are necessarily at the mercy of another, and conversely, the other is at the mercy of us.⁸

This makes the work of expression a rather scary thing: What if you don’t understand me, what if you ignore me? What if I can’t bear to acknowledge you? The Gnostic or the Cartesian skeptic wishes to escape this predicament—to escape the burden of risk, failure, and dependence—by a withdrawal into the invisible mind, or by anchoring an epistemic foundation on a private and self-sufficient “I.” Whereas the skeptic sees the flight from dependency as the condition for knowledge, Cavell and Rose see the acknowledgement of dependency as the condition for knowledge. Finite life is a social project, a task necessarily bound up with what is shared rather than owned, what is embodied rather than hidden, what is risky rather than safe, and what is dependent rather than independent.

Throughout Rose’s corpus her concern for vulnerability and risk is primarily oriented towards the speculative endeavour of the social, political, and metaphysical task. That said, perhaps the most provocative and interesting investigation into risk is Rose’s less academic works—specifically, her memoir Love’s Work that was written during her struggle with the ovarian cancer that took her life at the age of 48. As she reckons with the harrowing actuality of her own finitude, Rose comes to terms with the necessity of risk and embodiment for love against the lure of “alternative healing” methods which seek to secure failure and tragedy in the safety of a disembodied and predestined individual soul. It is precisely this neo-Gnostic move to safe, pure, and self-sufficient ground that ignores the fact of our complicity in the other, in our necessary and broken social projects.⁹ And for Rose, the rejection of wounds, boundaries, conditions, and failures, is what thwarts the work of love. Conditioned and contingent is what we are as embodied beings, and thus “to grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, across the bounds. Acknowledgment of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”¹⁰

To return back to a Cavellian or Wittgensteinian theme, one cannot be acknowledged unless one can manifest their soul and express themselves, unless they play the game, unless they go to work, unless they get on that stage amidst the fright and act. To avoid this game and this work, or to craft strategic cheats and epistemic shortcuts is to abandon the task of love (sociality) itself. “If I am to stay alive,” Rose writes energetically, “I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love’s work.”¹¹ To remain in the sometimes frightening realm of embodied existence, to subject yourself to another through expression, is to resist the all too appealing temptation to slip into the detached avoidance of sociality, or the possessive annihilation of sociality. Love, knowledge, and most importantly, life, are faithfully pursued not without, but within, the conditional, contingent, and broken matter of creaturely existence.