Eulogy for my mother, Mij Thornton

"My brother and I wanted to say something about my mother Mij’s friendships. It seems the right focus here today with you all. She had a great capacity for making friends which, perhaps, she didn’t share with the male members of her family, sadly. She really enjoyed her friendships. But in thinking about what I would say about this, I realised how partial anything I might say would be. It is partial in two senses. Nothing a son says about his mother at her funeral would be anything other than biased. This is not the time for an objective view of a life. It is partial, however, for a second reason. I experienced, directly, only a very small proportion of Mij’s life and everything I did experience, I experienced from my particular perspective. I am going to embrace that perspectivalness and describe three, and a half, aspects of Mij’s life as I experienced them. At the end, I will try to draw some consolation by thinking, again, about perspective and the metaphysical implications, or rather their lack, of indexicals. I like to think that Mij would forgive me this.

The first scene clearly reflects my perspective on Mij’s life. If anyone had asked the five year old me, when I first began to realise that she was a particular mother rather than motherhood in general, what made my mother special, I wouldn’t, of course, have said anything about her capacity for friendship. I would have said: she makes soft toys, creatures. On any long car journey, just before ‘the boys’ – my brother and I – became fractious, she would turn round and present us with a pair of kangaroos, turtles, rabbits or whatever. She made toys partly to please us but also because she enjoyed the exercise of creativity. Just as later she painted, made jewellery and sketched, she made soft toys very well.

If I wanted to connect this aspect of her with the broad theme of friendship I could say that in the collection of creatures she provided the very young Tim, she anticipated the support she would later provide of my own friends and the interest she took in them.

But there is an ironic coda to this aspect of my mother: the ‘halfth’ aspect (as in three and half) I mentioned earlier and mention of which the presence today of a long standing family friend prompts [the doctor to be mentioned, but also a frog]. Although she was very skilled in the making of soft toys, the one creature she is likely to be remembered for might give the wrong impression. I badgered her to make me a frog and so she bought a pattern and did. But there was clearly something wrong with the pattern and, despite a series of cosmetic surgery operations which would have made Harley Street proud, he did not seem to be a success. And so my brother and I left him on a shelf and invested no great creativity in thinking up the name ‘Froggie’. Despite, or perhaps because of, this Froggie became a character, the Thornton Family mascot and was with me through my sixth form, university and stayed safely in Baildon when my partner and I went round the world for a year. He developed, in my brother’s and my hands, a strident and assertive character. If Mij were to remove him from an armchair to sit down herself he would pipe up – and you have to imagine my brother’s and my squeaky voices here – ‘You wouldn’t do that to your other guests. You wouldn’t do it to Dr David Anderson!’. I can only imagine how irritating that must have been. The fact that Froggie survived to frog adulthood with both legs intact says much for my mother’s patience.

When she went back to it, Mij was committed to her work. But I saw only a little of it from my perspective. One scene, however, stands out. In a university holiday, she took me for lunch at a curry house on Lumb Lane. Part way through we were interrupted by one of Mij’s clients one of whose children had, I think, been taken into care. The woman, another mother, was, understandably, distressed, angry and  emotional. I felt an instinctive desire to protect my own mother from her. But I wasn’t sure how to do this. Mij, however, got straight up to talk to her. I didn’t hear exactly what she said. It involved connecting her client’s concern for her own child with Mij’s concern for me and the need to have a chance to talk properly. Afterwards, her client was not only calm and satisfied with what they had agreed but she hugged Mij. It would be wrong to say that this was an expression of mutual friendship. But it was a genuine and mutual fellow feeling. Although I had seen the alchemy by which this had emerged from initial hostility, I didn’t, and still don’t know, how it came about.

The third scene is happier. For a number of years, Mij went with her work colleagues to the Fighting Cock for lunch and a half pint of Thatchers Falling Down cider, every Friday. A school-friend and I overlapped with them for a few months during our year off jobs. Let me describe the scene: a spit and sawdust pub with bare floorboards, wooden benches and Formica tables. The hot menu comprised only a chilli con carne. Because most people arrived in twos, the standard order was for two chillies. Every few minutes the chef would emerge from the kitchen and shout out "Two chillies", with no further identification of whose they were. Relative to the shortness of one’s lunch hour that day, one learnt to wait for an appropriate length of time and then arbitrarily claim the next chillies in the spirit of ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’. A hint of a socialist utopia in the heart of Bradford.

When we were there at the same time, Mij would come over and talk to me. And if the pub were busy, her group might join us. But she wasn’t there to see me and so normally, having come over to say hello, she would return to her group. And so I witnessed her obvious pleasure at this chance to spend time with her colleagues, her friends, with whom she shared a vocation and set of values. She clearly really enjoyed being there with them. And the half of Thatchers’ Falling Down. In fact, I think she reconciled herself eventually to her retirement only when it became difficult for public servants to be seen in a social environments at lunchtime.

We have had a number of condolence cards which have said how good a friend Mij was. I am sure that that was true. But I also think that she was a good friend to other people because they - you - were good friends to her. Her capacity for friendship went hand in hand with her pleasure in the company of friends.

I will miss her more than I can say now. On such a day, in the grip of sadness, it is hard not to feel somehow trapped in the ‘now’. Today’s sadness seems so much more real than merely past happiness. But I take some comfort from the following thought about the nature of my perspective today. We use indexical words like ‘here’ to pick out the place where the word is spoken. We use ‘I’ to indicate the speaker or the thinker. ‘Here’ stands in contrast to other places over there. ‘I’ stands in contrast to other people such as him, her or them. Similarly to say or think ‘now’ picks out this moment in contrast the future and the past. But the use of the indexical words ‘I’ or ‘here’ does not undermine the reality of other people or other places. They are just as real. So, our use of ‘now’ does not make the past any the less real.

I wish Mij were alive here with us today. But she lived to be 81. She had a good job: both fulfilling and morally good. She had a loving family and enjoyed warm and close friendships. That life, her life, makes up a part of the world. So, although today is a sad day, it is also a chance to celebrate and be thankful for a good life, a life well lived."

Philosophers' Rally 2014 short video

There is short pop video of a few moments from this year's Rally here. Sorry it seems to have gone. I'll re-link if it returns.

Consultation on Proposals for New Mental Capacity Legislation for Northern Ireland

I learn from Colin Harper that the NI Mental Capacity Bill is now out for consultation. You’ll find the documents here.

Grief and attention

Mij Thornton

My mother died on Sunday night. She had been rushed into hospital two months earlier with a subsequent, and for me shocking, diagnosis of leukaemia and given, initially, a day or so to live. Under treatment she rallied, although medical opinion remained pessimistic. Ten days ago we were told that her prognosis had again fallen to a week or two and we watched her decline over the final days. She was 81 and had had what I think one might call a good life with a (morally) good job and loving family. Her death, in the end, in the circumstances, was timely, a release. But such rationalistic and objective thoughts don't immunise me against the pain and sickness of grief. It is like arriving in a horrible parallel world in which the same national events - eg., the EU elections - are taking place but now lack all significance.

Among the many things that have surprised me here is the connection between grief and attention. During the last few weeks, when trying to explain why meetings I was arranging might have later to be cancelled, I found that the act of attending to the point in logical space occupied by the thought I wanted to express (and first, to think it) would bring the weight of emotion which went with the thought crashing down and robbing me of speech. There were things I simply couldn't utter. I could navigate all round them, refer indirectly to some thought, but to essay it, to articulate it for expression, was impossible. The grief reaction, the mood, the affect, was secondary to attending to a possibility but then came with a kind of hideous inevitability.

Now, in the initial aftermath, there's a related but passive version. The productive way that one thought rationalises and leads to another has become an enemy of a peaceful mind. A thought utterly innocent of grave significance might connect by stages to another and dreadful idea - the loss of this, the never seeing or sharing that - which will plunge me, sickeningly, perhaps also embarrassingly, back into grief. I find myself trying to second-guess, without full-on thought (since that would make second-guessing pointless), the destination of a train of ideas.

I am also told (by a colleague who arrived in this territory earlier) of another possibility which may, I suppose, come when I have recovered a little. The temptation to poke a thought with a stick, to see whether the resonances are lessening or still as potent.

If I simply looked elsewhere, could I make all this feel less bad? Or does one simply have to go through a kind of sentence, attending to what will almost immediately bring pain through a kind of necessary compulsion?

(Later I posted my inadequate eulogy here.)

PanVascular Medicine

Here are the details of a book in which I have a chapter on the nature of tacit and explicit knowledge. Not where I would have expected to publish but very happy to.

P. Lanzer (Ed.) PanVascular Medicine 

• Sound interdisciplinary platform for vascular care, with emphasis on the need for a team approach 
• Comprehensive coverage of basic science, diagnostics, and therapy 
• Discussion of current international guidelines relevant to a wide range of specialists 

Vascular management and care has become a truly multidisciplinary enterprise. As a result of scientific progress, the number of specialists involved in the treatment of patients with vascular diseases is steadily increasing. While in the past, treatments were delivered by individual specialists, in the twenty-first century a team approach is without doubt the most effective strategy. Depending on the clinical manifestations, cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, vascular specialists, angiologists, radiologists, vascular surgeons, neurologists, neurointerventionalists, lipidologists, blood coagulation specialists, and diabetologists, to name but a few, may be involved.

In order to promote professional excellence in this dynamic and rapidly evolving field, a shared knowledge base and interdisciplinary standards need to be established. PanVascular Medicine, 2nd edition has been designed to offer such an interdisciplinary platform, providing vascular specialists with state-of-the-art descriptive and procedural knowledge. Basic science, diagnostics, and therapy are all comprehensively covered. In a series of succinct, clearly written chapters, renowned specialists introduce and comment on the current international guidelines and present up-to-date reviews of all aspects of vascular care.

Beginning Marie McGinn’s book Elucidating the Tractatus, in hope

As a break from answering emails and other administrative tasks, I’d like very briefly to flag a kind of textual anticipation. I’ve started to read Marie McGinn’s book Elucidating the Tractatus [McGinn 2007]. Reading it on my iPad I ignored an early comment by the author that she’d written a long book. It’s more than 300 pages, however, a fact obscured when one doesn’t support its weight (when, for example, reading in the bath). So it will take some time for me to put together enough snatched moments to get through it.

But I’m optimistic – the mood I’d like to record here in advance – because of the possibility of there being an account of the early Wittgenstein which reconciles two things. First, the attraction of taking the later Wittgenstein’s simple mindedness about nonsense to be operating in the TLP and hence ruling out the idea of sly pointing towards metaphysical insights into or even explanations of the hook up between language and the world. But second, the sheer eccentricity of its author offering such a detailed account of language and world if virtually all of it, bar some framing sentences, is merely a kind of reductio. Is there nothing to be said for thinking, for example, that what we might mean by a ‘world’ is a totality of facts, of things (where it is impolite to ask which things) which are the case? And what of the account of logic developed?

McGinn promises to steer a middle course which accepts the first point but which offers a view of the TLP as offering some sort of insight into language and logic and the articulation of a world which goes hand in hand with that. A quick skim of the first half suggests two concrete ideas from the first ten pages help with this.

First, there is the idea held dear by the resolute reading that ‘the early and the later philosophy are united in their rejection of the very possibility of taking what John McDowell calls ‘a sideways on’ perspective on language’ [ibid: 5-6]. With this idea in play, the baldy metaphysical tone of the first few sentences of TLP is thought of not as grounding a view of language as from outside it, nor as the result of a kind of inference to the best explanation of what the world in itself must really be like if language is possible, but rather a pithy expression of the most general way the world is articulated as seen, obviously, from within language. (I want to add: which is to say, from within the limits of sense, which is no qualification at all.)

Second there’s an idea to defuse the traditional view that simple names stand in relates to enduring metaphysical atoms which is stated like this at the start:

The concept of a simple object that is correlated with a name emerges, I want to argue, in the context of this conception of the meaning of a word as something that we grasp and which explains our ability to understand the sense of propositions in which the word occurs, without having their sense explained to us. As both Ishiguro and McGuinness remark, the idea of the object that is the meaning of a name that emerges in this context does not correspond in any way to our ordinary notion of particular, concrete objects that constitute parts of empirical reality. [ibid: 7]

and then rather later thus:

Objects are not necessary existents that endure through all change, but the meanings of primitive signs in a system for representing the world in propositions. [ibid: 144]

Thus, Wittgenstein wants us to recognize that our investigation into how a proposition expresses its sense is directed, not towards what symbols mean (the object they signify), but towards how they symbolize: how they are used with a sense. The conception of meaning that dominates Wittgenstein’s argument for simples now slips into the background and his logical investigation focuses exclusively on the use of expressions in propositions with sense. [ibid: 163]

The second move is the sort of thing that might make the first possible. But whether it is enough to head off what had seemed an account of how representation is possible, an account itself self-undermined with desperate acts of pointing, and replace it with mere description, I’m not sure. Nor whether what results is a kind of philosophical insight.

I have always liked the sketch of a sense of method in resolute readings – not that one discovers that particular possibilities are ruled out, since in the preference for talk of limits of sense over limitations, nothing is exogenously ruled out – but that each reader is invited to reflect on whether she or he has put in the work to invest meaning in particular combinations of symbols. I worry that this seems a solipsistic activity. I also worry that we can no longer say what it was that was achieved: not for example showing that a private language was impossible since that now becomes showing that *** *** is impossible. But at least there seems to be a premiss discharging philosophical method.

McGinn,M. (2007) Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Logic and Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Advancing Dysphagia Practice conference at UCLan

I was lucky enough to be invited to help out at a day-long conference on dysphagia, today, at UCLan by chairing two question periods.

Clearly there is a substantial body of bio-medical knowledge which underpins dysphagia care and had today’s conference focussed on that I would have been at sea. But instead it looked at other aspects including the symbolic nature of eating (nourishment rather than mere nutrition), values-based decision making, capacity and best interests, different patient reactions to severe illness, the balance of risk and wellbeing, rational reasons for rejecting gastrostomy and experience-based co-design of services.

Conferences are not neutral selections of clinicians. They tend to be self selecting depending on the nature of the content to be presented. But I was struck by the audience’s acceptance of the importance of values based practice, the central role of capacity decisions, the value of an acceptance of risk rather than the clinically safer idea of liquidising all food (to over simplify grossly) and all sorts of other non-narrowly-medical-scientific judgements. Why would that be?

In mental health care, one reason for an interest in such aspects is as a reaction to the ever present possibility of the uber-paternalism reflected in coercive treatment under the Mental Health Act. But that doesn’t apply to dysphagia care. But it was suggested to me over lunch that the reason might be this: no other area of medicine presents to non-medical-doctors the frequent interplay of both a lack of capacity in its patients with the need for invasive medical procedures. So speech and language therapists are forced to think of the broader aims of healthcare and the key issue of a balance of quality of life versus its mere preservation. If so, we should expect them to be at the forefront of the philosophy of healthcare. I must keep an eye open.