386 RüdigerKunow
perspective like East and West in Kipling's (in)famous poem by that
title:"neverthetwainshallmeet."
Painandsufferinginthisviewcananddoindeedfindrepresentation
in language, namely as expressions of a sensation, but only just that, as
expressions, or what Wittgenstein calls "a mental phenomenon"
(Philosophical Investigations97) whose correspondence to an inner
bodily condition may be taken for granted culturally but can never be
proven, epistemologically or ontologically. The more general problem
forWittgensteinis thatstatementsaboutthepainofothersmustrelyon
somatic evidence, and that evidence is, in his view, ambivalent at best.
On such a basis, there can be no epistemologically significant and
cognitively secure sense in which the pain of another person can be
spoken of, except in the archives of culture—a reasoning with strong
"family resemblances" (another Wittgensteinian term) to that of post-
structuralistsanddeconstructivists.TheclosestthingWittgensteinhasto
offer is a form of analogical reasoning based on convention: "if I
supposethatsomeonehasapain,thenIamsimplysupposingthathehas
just the same as I have so often had (PhilosophicalInvestigations94).^83
Language encompasses the realm of what can be said or expressed by
andofhumanbeingsandtheirbodilyconditions.However,itssemantics
neveroffersanunambiguousrepresentationofthesomatic"thingitself,"
i.e.,theexperienceorsensationofpain.Even asWittgensteinis willing
to grant that the tension between conditions of embodiment and
linguistic expression can be somewhat attenuated by ancillary means
such a gestures or factual information about duration and intensity of
pain (or other conditions of the sentient body)—nonetheless, for him,
there remains an insurmountable gap between the private world of
sensateexperience(ofwhichpainishisfavoriteexample)andthepublic
world of communication. Hence, as Wittgenstein argues, "I can only
believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am"
(PhilosophicalInvestigations203).That,forhim,isall.
(^83) Cf. also Wittgenstein's repeated objections to a correspondence theory of
linguistic representation which are mostly phrased in terms of a grammar of
expression: "if we construct the grammar of the expression of sensation on the
model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as
irrelevant"(PhilosophicalInvestigations293).