Seeing the Soul

Extract

1. ‘“But aren't you saying that all that happens is that he moans, and that there is nothing behind it?” I am saying that there is nothing behind the moaning’ (‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data”’, The Philosophical Review, July 1968, 302). This passage seems to me to epitomize a conception of the mind and its relation to the body found in the later work of Wittgenstein. It will be convenient to write as if this is his view of the mind. He suggests elsewhere that he is not advancing philosophical theses in his later work; so maybe this view is not a philosophical thesis in some relevant sense; or maybe Wittgenstein is not wholly consistent; or maybe he puts it forward only dialectically, and in other philosophical contexts would have espoused other views of the mind as much as he espouses this one. In any case, what does this one amount to? ‘There is nothing behind the moaning.’ What does this mean?