Category Archives: availability/disposability

A Philosophy of Considered Experience?

January 12, 2012 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Montaigne Tags: , 6 Comments

Can a philosophy be grounded on the considered experience of its author?  –So grounded, we could understand it as open to analysis and to disagreement, but not as straightforwardly vulnerable to argument based on general principle.  I ask because it strikes me that many of the philosophies I care most about can be understood as grounded in this way, as grounded in their author’s considered experience.  Montaigne’s, of course; but Cavell’s too, of course.  Many philosophers who turn in the direction of ’empiricism’, ‘experience’–can I think be best understood as appealing to his or her own considered experience.  They are not best understood as appealing to experience (full stop), are not worried about (or much worried about) theorizing the rational or a-rational bearing of experience (full stop) on belief or knowledge.  They are neither rationalists nor empiricists, although stretches of their philosophical terms, constructive or critical, sound empiricistic.

A give-away for the sort of philosophy with which I am concerned is a moment at which the philosopher talks of experience as something to which we can be loyal, something to which we can rally, something that can obligate us, something that can be educated.  Another give-away is talk about experience as accumulating, as having weight.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Marcel)

December 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Philosophy, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

My post on combative clarity (immediately below) was in part, and roundaboutly, a reaction to a point made in the closing sections of Marcel’s Introduction to The Mystery of Being.  He summarizes the point so:  Philosophical research is “research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken without loss of all reality to the result.”

I want to attend again to that Introduction.  It ends in a way particularly appropriate to the Nativity season.  Marcel mentions the notion of good will found in the Gospels, and goes on:

It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own day the notion of ‘the man of good will’ has lost much of its old richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic reverberations.  But there is not any notion that is more in need of reinstatement in our modern world.  Let the Gospel formula mean “Peace to men of good will” or “Peace through men of good will,” as one might be often tempted to think it did, in either case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be too much underlined.  Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts to the same thing, in conditions which permit peace to be assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which allows us to describe it as specifically a good will.  ‘Content’, however, is not quite the word I want here.  I think rather that the goodness is a matter of a certain way of asserting the will, and on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which, in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether war in men’s hearts or what we would call ‘real war’, must be regarded as intrinsically evil.  We can speak then of men of good will or peacemakers, indifferently.

A philosophy of peace, a weapon of peace–that is Marcel’s thinking.  Marcel writes philosophy so as to seek peace and ensue it.  –There are less noble motives.

Bringing Philosophy Peace?

September 17, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Self-knowledge, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, peace.  When we encounter this aim in PI, it is easy to believe that what he wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, is knowledge.  And of course there is something right about that, especially if we modulate the claim to one about self-knowledge.  (After all, Wittgenstein cares particularly about the philosophical questions that bring philosophy itself into question, questions that bring the philosopher-in-us-all himself into question.)  Crucially, however, self-ignorance involves alienation from ourselves more than it involves any failure of introspective acuity.  And so acquiring the peace of self-knowledge is less learning something about ourselves than it is acknowledging something about ourselves.  (Self-knowledge is typically bitter for good reason.)

So the peace Wittgenstein wants to bring is the peace of self-knowledge; we might even call it the peace of faith.  But faith in what?

Before answering, I want to help myself to an idea of Marcel’s.  Marcel talks about faith, about fundamentally pledging oneself, as reaching so deeply into the person pledged that it affects not only what the person has, but who the person is.  His term for this, the idea I want, is existential index.  When person’s belief has an existential index, ‘(e)’, the belief absorbs fully the powers of the person’s being.  For Marcel, beliefs(e) are incompatible with pretension:  A person who believes(e) is humbled by that in which he believes(e).

And now I want to say something that I know sounds paradoxical.  Wittgenstein wants to bring the philosopher-in-us-all to belief(e) in himself, so that he is no longer tormented by questions that bring himself into question.  But this will be a belief(e) in himself–a rallying to himself, to borrow another idea of Marcel’s–that involves no pretension.  In fact, it will be a form of humility, a form of true love of himself.  He will have faith in himself, but a faith that acknowledges his own nothingness.  This is a faith that allows the philosopher to be filled with the spirit of truth (although not, notice, with the truth); it is a faith that allows him to be light seeking for light.  Such humility does not protect the philosopher-in-us-all against error.  It does protect him against depending on himself.

When the philosopher-in-us-all is tormented by questions that bring himself into question, his has fallen prey to self-dependence.  He has lost his sense of his own thinking as a creative receptivity, a dependent initiative.  He believes he has to be responsible for himself, that he has to support every response to a question by responding to questions about that question.  To believe that is to fall into the predicament of being unable to make philosophical problems disappear.  Pretension on the part of the philosopher-in-us-all guarantees the appearance of the philosophical problems.  Pretension is a lack of faith, the surety of peacelessness.

(Probably a bad idea to try to write about such things when it is so late and I am so tired.)

Socratic Irony, Good and Bad

August 25, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , Leave a comment

In his talk, “In Praise of Philosophy”, Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of Socrates’ irony by considering his behavior at the trial:

What can one do if he neither pleads his cause nor challenges to combat?  One can speak in such a way as to make freedom show itself in and through the various respects and considerations, and to unlock hate by a smile–a lesson for our philosophy which has lost both its smile and its sense of tragedy.  This is what is called irony.  The irony of Socrates is a distant but true relation with others.  It expresses the fundamental fact that each of us is only himself inescapably, and nevertheless recognizes himself in the other.  It is an attempt to open up both of us for freedom.  As is true of tragedy, both the adversaries are justified, and the true irony uses a double-meaning which is founded on these facts.  There is therefore no self-conceit.  As Hegel well says, it is naive.  The story of Socrates is not to say less in order to win an advantage in showing great mental power, or in suggesting some esoteric knowledge.  “Whenever I convince anyone of his ignorance,” the Apology says with melancholy, “my listeners imagine that I know everything that he does not know.”  Socrates does not know any more than they know.  He knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.

To this good irony Hegel opposes a romantic irony which is equivocal, tricky, and self-conceited.  It relies on the power which we can use, if we wish, to give any kind of meaning to anything whatsoever.  It levels things down:  it plays with them and permits anything.  The irony of Socrates is not this kind of madness.  Or at least if there are traces of bad irony in it, it is Socrates himself who teaches us to correct Socrates…Sometimes it is clear that he yields to the giddiness of insolence and spitefulness, to self-magnification and the aristocratic spirit.  He was left with no other resource than himself.  As Hegel says again, he appeared “at the time of the decadence of the Athenian democracy; he drew away from the externally existent and retired into himself to seek the just and the good.”  But in the last analysis it was precisely this he was self-prohibited from doing, since he thought that one cannot be just all alone and indeed, that in being just all alone he ceases to be just.  If it is truly the City that he is defending, it is not merely the City in him but that actual City existing around him…It was therefore necessary to give the tribunal its chance of understanding.  In so far as we live with others, no judgment we make on them is possible with leaves us out, and which places them at a distance.

For me, this is a Janus passage: it retrospects Reading “RM” 10 (as well as another recent post) and prospects Reading “RM” 11 (or it will, when I produce 11).  –But for now I want to think about it just for Socrates’s sake.  Montaigne I set aside.  What interests me in the passage now is the contrast between good and bad irony.  I agree that there is such a contrast and I agree in the main with Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelian understanding of it.  Noting the contrast is important in reckoning with Socrates.  (It is therefore important in teaching Socrates, as I now am.  Students tend to react most strongly to the traces of bad irony in Socrates’ (good) irony and thus to treat his irony as (unalloyed) bad irony.  Merleau-Ponty’s description helps me sympathize with the students when they react that way, without yielding to their reaction.)  Socrates’ good irony hugs his ignorance, without crossing out that ignorance, rendering it merely apparent.  As I have said in previous posts, Socrates targets double ignorance–thinking that you know when you do not know–and having that target makes irony all but unavoidable.  Unlike simple ignorance–not knowing–double ignorance is not-knowing entombed in pride (self-conceit), coldly obstructed from the truth.  Socrates’ good irony aims to disinter a person’s simple ignorance, and to bring a person to acknowledge that simple ignorance.  Socrates’ good irony is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, a distant but true relation with others:  distant–because if he comes too close he aggravates their pride, risks losing himself or approbates himself against their freedom; true–because genuinely hopeful and genuinely humble.  Available, as I am now habitually putting it.  Sometimes Socrates fails because he cannot maintain distance or maintain truth, and then he either misses irony altogether or he slips into some degree of bad irony.  Good irony is Socrates’ way of making himself available to others without trespassing upon their freedom; it is also a way of targeting their pride, the pride that not only makes them unavailable to others, but makes them unhandy to themselves.  Pride creates only the freedom to fall.

(A puzzle in Merleau-Ponty’s passage is its use of ‘distant’ and ‘distance’.  Socrates’ irony is a “distant but true relation with others”, but Socrates will make no judgment on others that “places them at a distance”.  I solve the puzzle this way:  Socrates’ good irony does not place him at a judgmental distance from others.  It is not a standing over and above them.  In other words, Socrates can count himself among those he lives with, making no judgment on them that leaves him out, and which places them at a distance, even while his way of living among them is to maintain a distant but true relation to them.  In fact, his ironic distance even aids his refusal to place others at a judgmental distance from himself:  think of judgmental distance as a false relation to others.)

Reading “RM” 10: A Few Words on Montaigne, Socrates and Stoicism

August 23, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, Socrates 4 Comments

After addressing Montaigne and Christianity, Merleau-Ponty turns to Montaigne and the Stoics.  It will help us think about that relationship if we remind ourselves of a passage of Montaigne’s from Of Experience.

It is from my experience that I affirm human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the most certain fact in the school of the world.  Those who will not conclude their own ignorance from so vain an example as mine, or as theirs, let them recognize it through Socrates, the master of masters.  For the philosopher Antisthenes would say to his pupils:  “Let us go, you and I, to hear Socrates; there I shall be a pupil with you.”  And maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, that virtue was enough to make a life fully happy and free from need of anything whatever, he would add:  “Excepting the strength of Socrates.”

Socrates trumps Antisthenes, even for Antisthenes; Socrates is master of masters.  So he was for Montaigne too.  This passage is one in which Montaigne signals his passage from the Stoics to Socrates.

Hamann dubbed Socrates the prophet of the Unknown God (thinking, of course, about St. Paul on Mars Hill).  Merleau-Ponty notes of Montaigne that he invokes an Unknown God.  But Montaigne also invokes, as Merleau-Ponty sees it, an Impossible Reason.  Merleau-Ponty is driven to this phrase (and by the way, the capitalization is mine, not MMP’s) by Montaigne’s repeated strain of withdrawal, of preserving some piece of ourselves, some place in ourselves, from which we can see all that we do, all that we commit, all that we have committed to, as external–as something happening almost to someone else, as the vicissitudes of a role we play, but not of ourselves.  This withdrawal, this holding back, this is what tempts Montaigne in stoicism.  He can see that mixing in marriage, in love, in social life, in politics is to live according to others.  Montaigne would rather live according to himself.

But, Merleau-Ponty argues, Montaigne cannot really hope to do what he would rather do.  “He had described consciousness, even in its solitude, as already mixed according to its very principle with the absurd and foolish.  How could he have prescribed consciousness dwell in itself, since he thinks it is wholly outside itself?  Stoicism can only be a way-point.”

Montaigne knows that the world pulls us in, and does so not so much against our will as because of the nature of our consciousness.  We will be mixed up with the world–that’s that.  We cannot hole up in consciousness and let the world go by without touching it and without being touched.  Socrates is the master of masters–in the world but not of it.  Married with children, a soldier, an occasional (forced) politician, a man of conversation:  he was decidedly mixed up with the world.  But he somehow managed to avoid being mixed up by the world.  In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, Porphyry marvels at Plotinus’ ability “to be present at once to himself and his friends”.  Socrates had this ability; Montaigne could see it (as could Antisthenes:  it is Socrates’ “strength”).  Montaigne wants to find a way to live as Socrates did.  He wants to understand how to live according to himself while he lives according to others.  That could seem impossible–but Socrates realized the impossibility.  So what are the “conditions and motives for this return to the world”, for this overcoming of Stoicism, this mixing with the world?  That is the question Merleau-Ponty asks as he ends the section on Stoicism and prepares to begin the long final section of the essay–the answer to the question.  Put the question this way:  how can a person become disposable to the world, available to it, without becoming unhandy to himself?

Hopeful Philosophical Investigations

August 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 2 Comments

I struggle to express a particular way of taking up Philosophical Investigations–it seems like I have been doing this since I first began to read it seriously.  What I want to express is something I rate as cognate with what others have expressed when talking about the “ethics” of PI, or of its “ethical over/undertones”, with responses to it as “a feat of writing” or as “the discovery of the problem of the other”.  I have in the past expressed it (helping myself to Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction) as a “subjective reading” of PI.

Here I go again.  I am going to try yet again:  I want to say something about hopeful philosophical investigations.  Something brief.

Let me prefix Gabriel Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:

I hope in you for us.

We can read the miniature dialogues that constitute PI in a variety of ways.  It is natural enough, I suppose, to understand the voices as antagonistic (Cavell, if I remember correctly, uses that word in “Availability”).  But although that is natural enough, is it best?  Or is it, instead, a vestige of non-Wittgensteinian philosophical practice?  –I will call it an analytic vestige.  We know, don’t we? and what would it be to know it?, that Wittgenstein wanted no part of a conception of philosophy as contest, of any agonistic conception of philosophy.  So, although I do not deny that we can perhaps find moments of agon in PI, such moments are not the stuff of PI.  As I read PI, it is not a series of miniature contests, skirmishes, but instead a series of miniature ameliorations, betterments.  Thinking of the voice of temptation and the voice of correction as in an ameliorative relationship, instead of an antagonistic one, frankly makes better sense of Cavell’s confessional understanding of PI than does thinking of the voices as in an antagonistic relationship–it also makes better sense of ‘temptation’ and ‘correction’ as terminological choices.   In particular, ‘correction’ in an antagonistic relationship has a very different critical valence than it does in an ameliorative one.  The hope of the dialogues is for mutual wholeness:  neither the voice of temptation nor the voice of correction may treat the other voice as alien–anything one voice says may be said, and in a certain sense is said, by the other.  And so the voices respond to each other, each finding itself in the other, working at becoming integral, to achieve agreement (in PI’s difficult sense of that term), to come to a meeting of voices, a time at which the passion of each voice is at one with its life (to borrow another bit of Cavell’s phrasing).  The nisus of each voice I take to be expressed by Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:  each voice speaks from hope, and is constantly saying to the other, sotto voce:  “I hope in you for us.”

I will come back to this.