Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (31 page)

In our form of life, we're certain that the human race didn't arrive from another planet a hundred years ago. If we believed that, then we could not believe in the existence of our grandparents. Wittgenstein furthers his understanding of certainty by stating, “I believe my name is Ludwig Wittgenstein,” and adds that while such a belief is not infallible, at the same time “I could not be mistaken about it.” Indeed, in
On Certainty
, Wittgenstein is at great pains to distinguish between propositions that are subject to doubt—ones we can easily envision being overturned by evidence—and those that cannot be subject to doubt—those that are so certain that if they were to be cast into doubt, everything would be up for grabs. He writes:

           
All testing . . . of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system . . . belongs to the essence of what we call an
argument. The system is not so much the point of departure as the element in which all arguments have their life. (section 105)

Such a system is frequently not subject to doubt if we are to get on with the testing.

Here it is vital that we distinguish between logical and empirical propositions. “I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition
is
one” (section 308). There is a vast distinction between “I think my arm is broken” and “I think I spent last night on the Moon.” While an appropriate response to the person who thinks his arm is broken might be, “No, it is just sprained,” the appropriate response to the person who says he spent last night on the moon would not be, “No, you were on Neptune.” “My arm is broken” is an empirical proposition and hence verifiable or refutable by inspection. But the element in which the argument “my arm is broken” has its “life” is something like, “My arm exists.” Wittgenstein thought that if we looked at the contraries of these two kinds of sentence, we would see that there is something importantly different about them. We can entertain uncertainty about “my arm is broken.” If it turns out to be false—a sprain not a break—we can live with it. We were simply mistaken. We cannot entertain any uncertainty about “my arm exists.” To say “my arm does not exist” while holding up one's arm is not to say something false, but to say something nonsensical. We'd have to question whether whoever said it really meant it, understood what they were saying, or was sane. For if it such a statement could be true, it would throw both our language and our logic, our entire basis for making empirical judgments, into disarray.

Wittgenstein wrote, “My life consists of being content to accept many things.” He thought there was a difference between “riverbed” or “hinge” propositions, about which we are certain, and what we shall call non-hinge propositions (or non-riverbed propositions) about which we may entertain doubts. The hinges make sure that the door can be open or shut, and of it's being open
or
shut we have no doubt. But we may doubt whether the door is open or whether it is shut until we see for ourselves. The riverbed of certainty allows us to be uncertain whether or not our friend slept in his room last night, but it does
not
allow us to be uncertain about whether or not he slept
on the moon, or on the Planet of the Apes in 3974, the year when Taylor and his crew crashed there.

Without such guiding systems—or hinges or riverbeds—we could not have certainty
or
uncertainty. We could, suggests Wittgenstein, doubt everything and hence be unable to doubt anything: “A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt” (section 450). And while no organized living, including that in Ape City, can succeed without certainty, neither can it succeed without doubt. Thus it is crucial, he adds, that we know what kind of proposition we're considering: whether it is a systemic, hinge proposition, such as “External reality is made up of material elements,” or empirical ones such as “It is cloudy today.” And “this is my hand” (or on the Planet of the Apes, “this is my paw”) is not an empirical claim but a logical one. It is like a hinge, not like an assertion that the door is open.

Life is for Wittgenstein a series of language games—in which what we can say is of a piece with what we can do and what we can think—and some doubts are prohibitive: “If he calls
that
in doubt—whatever doubt means here—he will never learn the game.” What was of philosophical interest—he would call it “logical” interest—is not what we can know but what we cannot seriously doubt, regardless of its ultimate fallibility or infallibility. Furthermore, what seems to be maximally certain and beyond doubt can change. I am certain that Taylor is certain he is on some distant planet other than Earth until he encounters Lady Liberty half-buried on the beach. At that point he becomes unhinged.

Taylor is rather like Wittgenstein's philosopher friend and colleague, G.E. Moore. Both of them are captured, one in a legendary film, the other in Wittgenstein's philosophical speculation. Let's take Taylor and Moore in turn.

Given his appearance and the wound in his throat that keeps him from speaking, Taylor is immediately judged upon his capture to be sub-simian, or human. He eventually recovers his voice and—as a benefit of having traveled 2006 years in just eighteen months at the speed of light—is unusual among sub-simians because he is still able to speak: “Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty ape.” It is a shocking thing for
him to have said, for a foundational, hinge, riverbed principle of this planet's society is that humans or humanoids are themselves grunting, stinky, filthy, inferior creatures.

Wittgenstein mused in
On Certainty
about “What if something really unheard of happened?” such as the cattle standing on their heads and laughing and men turning into trees and trees into men. Well, something unheard of on the Planet of the Apes has happened. A foundational principle has been breached. A form of life has been fractured. A hinge proposition has been loosened, and now the whole Planet of the Apes may become
un
hinged. A riverbed has been breached; a flood may ensue at any time.

Wittgenstein: “But what could make me doubt whether this person here is N.N., whom I have known for years? Here a doubt would seem to drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos.” We can dismiss a man who says he slept last night on Pluto. Simian society on the Planet of the Apes cannot dismiss a stinking human who acts as though
he
is a simian—and can back it up with language and authority. He creates doubt that “would seem to drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos.”

As for Moore, whose “capture” we will momentarily investigate, he was famously the inspiration for the work Wittgenstein did in
On Certainty
, for it was based on a paper given by his Cambridge colleague Moore, who wrote, “Here is a hand” (holding up his hand) and “Here is another” (holding up his other hand) and saying that there are simply no reasonable grounds on which to cast any philosophical doubts upon such assertions. Wittgenstein admired the forthrightness of Moore's common-sense assertion and agreed with it. But, following the brilliant trail we have already traced, he thought Moore erred because he did not identify what sort of proposition “Here is a hand” really is. It is not an empirical proposition, like “Your arm is broken” or “I spent last night in Beloit, Wisconsin.” Rather, it is a logical proposition, the sort of hinge assumption on which so much in daily life depends and about which we cannot entertain any serious doubt if we are to live our form of life.

If you can't believe that your hand is your hand, you can't fetch a book. You can't drive a car. You can't be sure that it is you who is typing a letter. Here we arrive at the paradox inherent in the professor's classroom request, “Those of you who do
not believe that your hand is your hand, raise your hands!” Or: “Those of you who do not believe you are simians, raise your paws.” Believing that your hand is your hand is rooted in the assumption that you're not hallucinating. It's based on the assumption that the hand has external reality apart from your mere perception of it: that it does not vanish when you are not looking at it, or that it disappears for a while but your friends haven't quite had the heart to tell you about it.

There may be contexts in which the statement might make more sense, such as in an anatomy class in which the professor holds up a detached hand and says, “Here is a hand,” or if a person has a brain lesion and says, “I am making progress. I now know that this hand is a hand and that it is my hand.” But “this is my hand” is not in the same category as “this is my broken arm.” Rather, it is such a bedrock proposition that it compares favorably with “In 2012 it will take us 2,006 years to get to the year 4018,” even if, by year 4018, it may be possible to say, along with Commander Taylor and hinge-like certainty, “I can travel 2,006 years in three months.”

But suppose the forthrightly common-sense philosopher, Professor Moore, were captured not by an advanced simian society but by “a wild tribe” convinced that he had come from somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. Wittgenstein asks, how would Moore convince them otherwise? Unlike Commander Taylor, he cannot
show
them anything by speaking the unspeakable. Unlike the simians on the Planet of the Apes, this wild tribe has no knowledge of physics. And it may have some fantastical ideas about “the human ability to fly.”

Could Moore insist that he has never been to such a place as they say he has come from? But even if he did, what compelling grounds would he communicate to them that would be convincing? He could say he “knows” that there is no such place from which he is said to have come. But Moore is not up against an empirical disagreement with this wild tribe. He is contesting a logical disagreement. And they are playing an entirely different language game from his.

As Wittgenstein says, the language-game is “not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life.” The language game of the “wild tribe” is not based on something it “knows,” any more than a child “knows” that milk exists. “Does a cat know that a mouse exists?” Ways of life via language are not
based on “knowledge” or “experience” but on “acting.” And the wild tribe's form of life, its daily and routine actions, is based on those things which it can never seriously doubt, or even consider doubting, if such a form of life is to function. Thus Professor Moore
must
have come from somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. We ourselves, along with Moore, might think of the wild tribe—as well as simians everywhere, on whatever planet—as “primitive beings,” but here Wittgenstein gives us a timely warning: “I want to regard man here (i.e., in language games) as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination—as a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some form of ratiocination.”

Thus Moore, himself a primitive, is up against an equally primitive—but wildly different in its assumptive form of life—wild tribe. There's nothing he can say other than, perhaps, “Well, where I come from we do things differently.” Wittgenstein would say that Moore should not say to the tribe, “I know I don't come from there,” but rather “It ‘stands fast' with me that I do not.” It is not a matter of knowledge but of what simply cannot be borne—something that we just cannot have, any more than a “primitive” squirrel can entertain the notion that nuts are not for collecting.

Commander Taylor is, in a way, luckier. In addition to his ability to demonstrate the validity of alternatively logical foundations—what might be demonstrated to
us
the day a gorilla rides a horse and orders us about in perfect Shakespearean English—he also has two simian scientists, Zira and Cornelius who are ready to allow empirical investigation to trump logical social foundations, and thus permit an empirical process to transform a hinge proposition into a door one, and to metamorphose what was once the river bed into the stream (as happens, presumably, in geological phenomena as well). The planet's philosopher king, Dr. Zaius, has been promulgating some parallel to Plato's “Myth of the Metals” in
The Republic
, by which the members of an ideal society are convinced to do, via second nature, what they are told.

Though he knows there is evidence in a cave that the simians evolved from the despised humans, Dr. Zaius feels it is better to keep the simians in the dark. He gives them instead an
origin myth justifying their permanent superiority, for if humans can devolve into apes, then apes can always devolve into humans—a dangerous idea. Wittgenstein observed, “The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of the rules of a game. And the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.” Wittgenstein's insight is also a key to why Dr. Zaius' origin myth is so flimsy. If it must be based on an
explicit
rule—Do not enter the Forbidden Zone or its cave—then it has not yet been woven implicitly or powerfully enough into the warp of the planet's society. Rulers who have to insist on rules are not potent. Dr. Zaius is reduced to having to destroy the evidence. His desperate powerlessness is also a lucky break for Commander Taylor's getting his humanness validated.

Thus Taylor (maybe until he sees the sunken Statue of Liberty and discovers to his horror that the Planet of the Apes is Earth itself) is a far more powerful foundation breaker than poor Professor Moore. Dr. Zaius is a far less powerful foundation upholder than is the chief of Moore's “wild tribe.” “Take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty ape” is far more effective, in saying what no human was presumed to be able to utter, than poor Professor Moore's “That I do not come from a place between Earth and the Moon holds fast with me.” Taylor can suggest an empirical line of investigation that can shake social foundations. Moore can only confess that
his
logical foundation
—his
form of life—is not the same as that of his captors. He would be like a cat explaining to us that in its form of life, eating mice is a steadfast practice, never to be greeted with any form of skepticism. But if a cat could speak we could probably not understand him, just as Moore's captors cannot understand him.