To retourn: When I said α I did not mean by ‘I’: Wittgenstein. For W. is charakterized by his body, or by his memories or by his charakter etc. but I wasnt concerned with any such thing. I did not mean to state that mostly when I see there are near to the geom. eye parts of a body which people call W's. This may be so but it is just as easily imaginable that the body round the geom eye disappears for good or changes it's shape ˇ& properties constantly etc. I did not want to state α as a prop. of experience. – Immagine that the upper half of my head vanished without my noticing it but the geom. eye would still lie in the same position with respect to my mouth, say, als before. I should then talk about what I see just as usual. One might say: this is exactly the case as
having pains in
feeling
your amputed
foot
leg
. All right, but let us ask the analogouus question in this case: with what right does the
man say that he has pains in the foot which belongs no more to him than to his neighbour? Well with right does he i.e. that particular mouth shout? , or make a gesture of pain? But isn't that just the connection which pain has to him. (We are not talking of the hypothetical connection through nerves & brains). We can imagine a man to have pain in a sixth finger although he never had one. In which case s◇hould we say this? Imagine him touching the
imaginary
sixth
finger with his other hand. What is the criterium for the place in which the pain is. In what sense does he know where the pain is before he touches the painful spot. You ask the man with the amputated foot “where do you feel pain?” & he points to a point in space. It his his pointing that fixes the place of pain. Compare this to seeing a spot & pointing to it. – Now back to the question “with what right does he say ‘I see’ if his eyes have been removed & the geom. eye isn't on any part of his body?” Let us ask: With what right does his body shrink from an approaching danger or his mouth shout; even if he has never learnt any language? Let us talk about ‘the mouth,’ that
sees’ meaning the mouth of the man who sees. Now which mouth do we call the mouth which sees if the geom eye is not in a human eye? Do I chose the mouth with which I say “I see …”? Or doesn't the mouth which says it determine the meaning of the word ‘I’? What meaning would the word ‘I’ have if it came from a microphone? But you say: “It would perhaps have no meaning to anybody else but the person who sees would know that he saw”. But what would he know? (Note the queer idea of meaning when you say it has a meaning to him. The idea of a private meaning is obviously that of a picture he sees & no one else does. Now what would this picture of himself be like? Would it not be that of his body in the ordinary sense?) Knowing is something like saying & the sense of what you say depends on the use that's made of your the words you say. Now if he says to himself ‘I’ that's no use if he cannt distinguish the person which says it from other people. The man who says ‘α’ falls tumbels from one language into another as the man who says ‘I am here’. Here too people might
think
say
that this prop has no sense
for anyone else but that it has for the man who thinks it.