Perception breaking in upon sense

Dog before the World, by Franz Marc

In ‘Snake’ D H Lawrence wrote:
‘The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But I must confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough.
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
For he seemed to me again like a king, …

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.’

Many philosophers are ranged against Lawrence‘s perception of the snake. Wittgenstein repeatedly insisted that what lies outside our language is inaccessible. He wrote: ‘If I were to talk to myself out loud in a language not understood by those present my thoughts would be hidden from them.’ And:
‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’

In ‘What is it like to be a Bat’ Nagel insists that the subjectivity of others is beyond anything we can experience or imagine.

Rorty, who is well known for his rejection of the claim that language holds a mirror up to nature, believes that ‘The fundamental flaw in previous attempts to discuss knowing has been the confusion of facts with objects’. He quotes with approval Wittgenstein’s claim that the world we know is a totality of facts, not of things. Facts refer ‘to the language we speak now’ as they rely upon society’s necessarily ethnocentric linguistic usage.

Lawrence clearly believed in ‘the language we speak now’, but he insisted that, apart from facts, we also know things; such as that particular snake – that mute snake. Alongside human sense there is the perception of mute spectacles.

The subjectivity that maintains facts looks down on mute things with condescension because they are unable to respond in its discursive economy. But this interpretation of muteness; e.g. ‘It’s a dog’s life’, overlooks the possibility that mute things may be distressed when they find that we do not respond to the relations between things they know. Everything in the natural world belongs to the circulation of mute spectacles. Just as in the discursive economy words disclose an association between facts, each spectacle discloses some resemblance within the circulation of spectacles. Every spectacle is a subjective event set apart from the whole, but it respects and requires the circulation to which it belongs. There is a beatific grace, and liberty, to this natural circulation that is often missing in the discursive economy.

Lawrence believed that the Etruscan world was alive:

The whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world.

Mute life is not simply a depravation of the social signs that make interpretation possible. It is not an abject life, but a life devoid of shame, a prelapsarian circulation of subjects who are always spectacles. If human beings wish to belong to the natural world then their perception of others must not be eclipsed by the subjectivity and prejudice of sense and their figurative speech must constitute the mute voice of a spectacle.