Category Archives: writing

Merleau-Ponty Underwrites Wittgenstein?

April 16, 2013 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

From The Visible and the Invisible:

We need only take language…in the living or nascent state, with all its references, those behind it, which connect it to the mute things it interpellates, and those it sends before itself and which make up the world of things said–with its movement, its subtleties, its reversals, its life, which expresses and multiplies tenfold the life of the bare things.  Language is a life, is our life and the life of the bare things.  Not that language takes possession of life and reserves it for itself:  what would there be to say if there existed nothing but things said?  it is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as if it spoke only of itself:  language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave.  But because he has experienced within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as the bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but–if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and foliation–the most valuable witness to Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it, that the vision itself, the thought itself, are, as has been said, “structured as language,” are articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing or something else…Philosophy itself is language, rests on language; but this does not disqualify it from speaking of language, nor from speaking of the pre-language and of the mute world which doubles them:  on the contrary, philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being.

Newman on the Human Condition

April 7, 2013 By in reading, religion, Samuel Johnson, virtue and vice, writing Tags: , , , , 9 Comments

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s worlds, “having no hope and without God in the world”–all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.

What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact?

I used to spend pleasant hours with my teacher, Lewis White Beck, talking about our favorite writers.  He introduced me to Cardinal Newman, and to the glories of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.  Who has ever written more perfectly controlled English prose?  Here, a piece of prose to range alongside Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes.  Consider the opening ten lines or so of that great poem.

Let Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crouded Life;
Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate,
O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,
Where Wav’ring Man, betray’d by vent’rous Pride,
To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide;
As treach’rous Phantoms in the Mist delude,
Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good.

Guy Davenport on Wittgenstein

March 29, 2013 By in Philosophy, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , , 15 Comments

[Wittgenstein] was committed to absolute honesty.  Nothing–nothing at all–was to be allowed to escape analysis.  He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach.  The world was to him an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig iron.  Can we think about the lump?  What is thought?  What is the meaning of ‘can’, of ‘can we’, of ‘can we think’?  What is the meaning of ‘we’?  What does it mean to ask what is the meaning of ‘we’?  If we know the answer to these questions on Monday, are the answers valid on Tuesday?  If I answer them at all, do I think the answer, believe the answer, know the answer, or imagine the answer?

Some favorite essays and pieces

March 29, 2013 By in writing Leave a comment

Reblogged from the dancing professor:

Along with the usual assortments of assigned readings, I also collect various pieces that I share with my students in an 'optional but edifying' category. Most of these are advice pieces - how to write well and what-not - but others are about language more generally, or about education, majors, careers, and so on. Things that I generally think might be interesting and/or relevant to the lives of people who are being encouraged to hone their writing skills while they go about their educations and plan their careers.

Read more… 1,204 more words

A nice little essay on essay writing, replete with references. Enjoy!

In Spite of Death and the Devil: Husserl–Diary Entry, 9/25/1906

February 15, 2013 By in Husserl, Philosophy, prayer, writing Leave a comment

1514-Knight-Death-and-the-Devil-q75-727x943

Pure meditation, pure internal life, being absorbed by the problems and devoting myself to them, and to them only, that is the hope of my future.  If I do not succeed, then I shall have to live a life which is rather death.

…I have to pursue my way so surely, so firmly, so decidedly, and so in earnest as Dürer’s Knight in spite of Death and the Devil…And be God with me in spite of the fact that we are all sinners!

February 8, 2013 By in poetry, writing Tags: Leave a comment

Reblogged from Mists on the Rivers:

Tuesday, January 15, 1963

No wind stirs.

At Zero Fahrenheit the flakes of snow are not at all large.

Incredibly lightly and unwaveringly they fall.

A myriad of them  fills our meadow round the house.

One sees them best looking at the trees beyond.

Their falling accentuates the still-standing trees, the dark trunks.

And the still of the trees is the nearness of  falling snow.

Read more… 33 more words

Great bit of Bugbee from Ed Mooney's blog.

Notebook Fetish, Pen Fetish, …Fetish

January 8, 2013 By in writing 3 Comments

Like many folks who write, I am obsessed with notebooks and pens and just about anything else connected with them–pencils, sharpeners and erasers. I am embarrassed to admit that a quick check in my book bag (an entirely different obsession) reveals two smallish, Moleskine-like notebooks, a small sketch pad, a legal pad, a pocket-size notebook (all but the legal pad with graph paper), 2 Sailor fountain pens, 2 Parker fountain pens, 2 mechanical pencils, a Sharpie permanent fine-point marker, 4 pencils, 2 sharpeners, some erasers (I’d have to empty the bag to know how many, exactly), several Sailor ink refills and a pocket-size 2013 calendar. And, of course, on top of all that a copy of Husserl’s Shorter Logical Investigations, Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Plato’s Theaetetus, a Revised English New Testament. –Perhaps carrying all this is the professor’s way of trying to ensure he dies with his boots on.

Plotinus on the One (or, the Supreme) as translated by Stephen MacKenna

November 28, 2012 By in mysticism, religion, writing 5 Comments

Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away.  It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion:  we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become present.  We are always before it:  but we do not always look:  thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend; let it but face aright and it sings with beauty, present effectively.  We are ever before the Supreme–cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be–but we do not always attend:  when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of God.

Dick Moran Keeps it Real

November 26, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Kierkegaard, writing, skepticism, Kant, availability/disposability, Self-knowledge, reading, teaching, history of ordinary language philosophy, education Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine.  The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.

As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.

Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.

Literary Rigor–Re-blogged from Josh Blog (7 Nov ’12)

November 12, 2012 By in availability/disposability, education, Self-knowledge, writing Leave a comment

Scholars say that an author – usually of a philosophical text with literary dimensions – ‘invites’ us to do this or that, think of this or that, when they wish to treat the text as possessed of a sort of rigor, but also to avoid having to show how this rigor is essentially a matter of the literary dimensions of the text. This is like receiving an invitation, not accepting it, but passing it on to someone else.

‘We’ve been invited!’

‘Oh, how nice. Are you going?’

‘Well you’ve been invited! We all have!’

‘But what about you?’

I would like to say that this can’t be done halfway. To acknowledge the text’s rigor is to accept the invitation. The troublesome question should be, can it be accepted at all if one’s response is any less literary than the original? And more troublesome: how will one make one’s response just as literary, without loss of rigor?

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