Category Archives: education

Walden’s Epigraph 2: Ode to Dejection?

May 3, 2020 By in availability, education, Existentialism, Philosophy, Self-knowledge, Socrates, teaching, writing Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

In Boswell’s Life of Johnson (I think, I haven’t had time to check), an old acquaintance accosts Johnson to tell him that he (the acquaintance) had tried, like Johnson, to be a philosopher. “But,” the man went on to say, “cheerfulness kept breaking in.”

Stanley Cavell, writing of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, notes that Wittgenstein writes to create change in his readers, to deliver them to self-knowledge. And, Cavell adds, “self-knowledge is bitter.”

I want to address a few words about Thoreau’s worry about Walden being mistaken for an “ode to dejection”. I will not finish with the topic in this post.

Philosophy sounds in a minor key. At least, it does when it undertakes the living of a human life. Its lessons are of the need to change: to rethink, re-look, re-tell: Thoreau’s first chapter is Economy. If we were already leading the life philosophy would tell us to lead it would lack illocutionary space in which to speak. It sounds in the margins, narrow or wide, between what we are and what we should (and might) be.

Thoreau will tell his readers that he writes for “poor students”. He will tell them that most idle in “quiet desperation”. Even without exploring the linguistic densities of these two phrases, two of the densest in all of the book, it is easy enough to see why Thoreau worries that his reader will mistake Walden for an ode to dejection. The reader is a poor student, lives in quiet desperation. Not good news. Not big on uplift. If this is gospel, it is not the Prosperity Gospel.

To read Walden as an ode to dejection is to turn it into a metrical set piece. A bit of lofty sentimentalizing on a grand topic. Kierkegaard somewhere underlines that it served the Athenians to treat Socrates as a genius. Because, as a genius, he was eccentric, not really one of them, and, as such, his life had no claim on their lives: Socrates was a different form of life: his was not the form of Athenian life.

To treat Socrates as a genius was to (functionally) banish him from the city, excommunicate him. Teachers discover their own form of this banishment when they urgently recommend a book to students and the students take the recommendation only to reveal (more of) the eccentricity of the teacher. Thoreau writes Walden because he believes the life he led at Walden makes a claim on his reader’s life, on the discordant lives of the citizens of Concord (Everywhere, USA). That life exerts the pressure of an exemplar.

An effective means for escaping this claim, reducing its pressure, is to recategorize Thoreau’s communicative act (a kind of excommunication). “Ah! I see! An ode to dejection! Isn’t it fine? Highflown, lovely turns of phrase, — fighting ants, — splendid!” The reader aesthetisizes the book, as if its aim were to please by its magniloquent descriptions. Perhaps what it describes displeases, but the focus is not on the object of the description but on the description itself . And so Thoreau’s cannot discomfort his reader — everything has been rendered comfortable. “Write on, Thoreau, write on! Beautiful! Oh, look, a pun,” the reader mutters, reclining. “Write on!”

A strategy for refusing Thoreau’s Walden-life as an exemplar…

More soon

Half Rumination, Half Scrutiny (Mervyn Peake)

March 14, 2017 By in Day to day life, education, wonder 2 Comments

The long-sounding final paragraph of MP’s The Craft of the Lead Pencil:

What does it matter how long or slow you are in the traffic of lead and paper?  The advance from virtual blindness to that state of perception–half rumination, half scrutiny–is all that matters.  The end is hypothetical.  It is the journey that counts.

We could say this of writing too, and philosophy, and of thoughtful living generally. 

With an ‘L’ on his Forehead…

November 4, 2016 By in availability, Day to day life, education, Tractatus, virtue and vice Tags: 2 Comments

There are more values available for response in human life than anyone can possibly be responsible to.

I think of this as the Not World Enough and Time Problem:  we are all missing out on things that are objectively such as not to be missed.  That is the human predicament.

I am strongly tempted to think that a lure to relativism, and to psychologizing the values of others, is our desire to deny the Problem:  we are never missing out; we just made different decisions, believed or desired different things, than so-and-so did.  We aren’t missing out and neither is he, neither is she.  But we know–and we do know–that in many cases we are missing out and that we will have to miss out.  It may not be our fault, but it is always our loss.

Gone

October 11, 2016 By in Day to day life, education, reading, wonder Tags: , Leave a comment

Reading Annie Dillard on a picnic table.  Tiny ants trudge around in myopic busyness.  One ambitious climber clambers up and onto the open pages of the book.  I fail to observe him and so crush him with my hand.  He dies slowly over minutes, seconds, aeons.  I watch him die:  it is the only gift I can give him.  His filament legs stop moving and he goes still.  Goes. Gone.  A universe of death packed into his inarticulate articulated body.  Goes.  Gone.  I look up at the patchy blue sky.  It seems to ripple above the water of the lake.  It envies the lake’s shores, the lake’s shapeliness.  A form of meaning.  The horizon is an obstruction, not a limit.  Gone.  I begin again to read, now careful where I put my hands.

Receptions End

August 8, 2016 By in Day to day life, education, Love, poetry Tags: , , Leave a comment

Receptions End

A daughter is a treasure
That keeps her father wakeful

Gather the Bud Lite bottles
Dump the undrunk champagne
Lavender table cloths shake and refold
Abandoned bouquets water and take home

The tent lights the night
Fans blow back the August heat

Revelry done, collect unopened gifts

Stray flowers decorate the ground
As if they would re-root
But life goes on
And life goes on
Sweet-sour sweet

Done is done

Drink what wine you may
With the rest honor the mysteries

Put the trash in the dumpster
On Debardeleben St.

Treasureless, go home to sleep

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Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

Letter to a Philosophical Inquirer

June 30, 2016 By in Day to day life, education, Philosophy, Plato, reading, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, wonder Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As I suppose most philosophers do, I get fairly common requests from folks who are fascinated by philosophy asking for reading lists and advice. I thought I would share my latest response to such a request.

Dear (Inquirer),

 

   Reading serious philosophers is demanding, but it is ultimately worth it.  But you have to read with a notebook and a pencil, working to write out what you take passages to mean, providing illustrations (literally, pictures), asking yourself questions, making notes of connections with other texts–whether that philosopher’s or other philosophers’.  You cannot read passively.  You have to push back against the text as hard as you can.  It will whip you soundly, but if you are game, and keep coming back, the volleys will last longer and you will begin to understand more and more.

   Suggestions:  Plato’s Socratic dialogues, particularly the Euthyphro, the Euthydemus, the Ion, the Charmides, the Apology.  Read Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.  Read St. Thomas (Aquinas Ethicus is free online and a great place to start.)  Read Descartes’ Meditations.  Read Rousseau’s Social Contract and Emile.  Read Kant’s Prolegomena.  Read Kierkegaard’s The Present Age.  Read F H Bradley’s Ethical Studies.  Read Russell’s Problems of Philosophy.  Read Wittgenstein’s Blue Book.   These are all wonderfully written, central works, that are written for an educated reader, but not necessarily someone with much formal training in philosophy.  If you can find someone to read with, that is a huge help.  Best if it is someone you can talk to face-to-face, but online is better than nothing.

Expect to be baffled.  Expect to be confused.  As I tell my students, philosophy requires a high confusion threshold.  To read philosophy, you have to be willing to be confused, know you are confused, but nonetheless to read on.  Much of what is necessary in philosophy is the right intellectual habituation, and you can only get that by frequent active reading and frequent conversation.

Best,

 

Kelly

 

Heidegger on an Education in Thinking

June 23, 2016 By in availability, Cavell, Day to day life, education, Metaphilosophy, poetry Tags: , , , , , 7 Comments

The following words of Heidegger’s have been on my mind for the past couple of weeks.

We all still need an education in thinking, and before that first a knowledge of what being educated and uneducated in thinking means.  In this respect, Aristotle gives us a hint in Book IV of his Metaphysics (1006a ff.).  It reads…”For it is uneducated not to have an eye for when it is necessary to look for a proof, and when this is not necessary.”

This sentence demands careful reflection.  For it is not yet decided in what way that which needs no proof in order to become accessible to thinking is to be experienced.  Is it dialectical mediation or originary intuition or neither of the two? Only the peculiar quality of that which demands of us above all else to be admitted can decide about that.  But how is this to make the decision possible for us before we have admitted it? In what circle are we moving here, inevitably?

Aristotle’s passage–and its non-kissing cousin in EN–have become more and more deeply embedded in my thinking and teaching.  My Seven Deadly Sins course this summer (now just ended) in many ways pivots on the EN passage.  I take that passage to insist on differences in kind among objectivities, differences in kind among, say, geometry and history and philosophy and rhetoric.  I have grown increasingly resistant to attempts to solder philosophy to science or to mathematics–or to whatever.  (Not that I was ever very receptive to such attempts.)  Philosophy is its own thing and not another thing.  Perhaps Heidegger gets a little too invested here and there in soldering philosophy (or thinking) to poetry (that is a topic for another time), but generally he is acrobatically adept at sundering philosophy from other things.  (Heidegger inherits the form of his Idealist predecessors’ metaphilosophy even if he rejects its specific content. –Compare him here to Bradley or to Oakeshott.)

Anyway, I do not like thematizing philosophy as argument, as argumentative.  Why should philosophy be beholden to proof?  I do not mean that philosophy should jettison proof or that proof does not matter.  But why should it be essential?  I am happy to say that argument has its place, an honored place, in philosophy.  But there is no reason to believe that gaining admittance to philosophy requires an inference ticket (apologies to Ryle).   –That does not mean that we just throw open the doors–free admission!  –No, but some things may get in without an inference ticket.  –Ok.  But what, and why, and when, and how?  –We need a sense of what is relevant in philosophy, to philosophy, and a sense that relevance itself is not a matter (always) for proof.  (In what circle are we moving here, inevitably?)  We need to understand what it looks like to be educated and uneducated in philosophy, so that we can embark on our philosophical education.

We glimpse here why the vocabulary of late Heidegger runs through the all the inflections of ‘receptive spontaneity’, why hearkening and following a path become leitmotifs of the work.  The claim of relevance is not always to be established by argument; sometimes the claim of relevance is simply the peculiar quality of certain things, a claim that demands acknowledgment from us.  We hearken to such things.  We follow in their paths.  Their relevance is their solemn power, calling us to free response. We make ourselves available to thought.

 

 

Season 3 Q3: Change?

May 18, 2016 By in chuck, education, Love, Self-knowledge, skepticism, television, tv Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

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Spoilers!

This is the last in the series of short essays I have been writing.  It is also likely to be the last Chuck-related essay I write for a while.  Other tasks demand my attention.  I thank those who have read and commented on these essays.

 

 

We cannot step into the same river twice.  –Heraclitus
We cannot step into the same river once.  –Cratylus

Change is hard for us.  It is hard to endure. It is hard to understand.  Each hardness hardens the other.  While we are changing, especially early in the change, we have a hard time knowing exactly what is happening to us.  We have a hard time putting up with it.  We have a hard time conceptualizing it.  While we are changing we are somehow in a passage and a transportation between two worlds which seem to have no real unity–a murky one behind, a brightening one ahead. But we cannot see clearly into either or see clearly during our passage. As we change, we are doing our undoing; we put off the old person so as to put on the new, but the new is not a ready-made.

Season 3 is the season of change in Chuck, the moulting season.  I do not deny that changes have been underway since the pilot.  I do not deny that changes continue in Seasons 4 and 5.  As Chuck says in vs. the Coup d’Etat, “change is inevitable”.  Still, S3 is the season of the most fundamental changes, the season in which Chuck and Sarah finally break free of the asset/handler relationship that has imprisoned them and find their way to a new relationship, a relationship in which each of them is renewed, changed.  I have addressed some of the central changes in the first couple of essays (here and here).  In this final one, I want to address some of the larger issues of S3 and of the series.

Abstractly stated, the problematic dynamic between Chuck and Sarah involves three things.

(1) Sarah is changing and wants to change, and she needs Chuck to help her.
(2) Chuck needs to change but Sarah fears him doing so.
(3) Chuck does not fully believe in the depth of the change in Sarah.

(1) Sarah is changing and wants to change.  She has changed enough to recognize that Chuck represents both the tutor of her change and, in some way, its destination.  She needs Chuck to teach her how to change and to be there as what she is changing for.  But this means that she does not want Chuck to change.  If he does, he imperils her education in change and the goal of her change.  One of the most unsettling features of S3 is Sarah’s despair over the changes in Chuck.  She despairs for him, first and foremost, but she also despairs for herself.

Sarah is in the midst of change, in the middle of her transportation between two worlds, when her tutor seems to abandon her and deprive her of the result of the change she most desires–him.  Sarah’s despair causes her to flail about wildly, even if it is hard to notice it given the amount of attention Chuck’s even wilder flailing draws.  Sarah ends up with Shaw as a slumping stand-in for Chuck; Shaw becomes her substitute teacher.  But he is about as effective as substitute teachers normally are, that is, not very.  While under Chuck’s tutelage, Sarah was oriented on her future–even her forays into her past are for the sake of her future.  Under Shaw’s tutelage, Sarah orients on her past; she starts trying to identify not the person she is to become but the person she was (Sam).  While Sarah wounds Chuck when she shares her name with Shaw, Chuck and Sarah will both eventually realize that it is not her name, not her real name.  It was Sarah’s name but is no longer.  Shaw educes nostalgia of a sort in Sarah (he is trapped in a different sort of nostalgia himself) but he cannot manage Sarah’s passage into her future, her transportation to a new world.

(2) Chuck needs to change.  Sarah fears his changing and takes it to be unnecessary, but it is necessary.  Sarah loses faith for a while in Chuck (and in herself as a consequence).  She is focused only on the way others–Beckman, Shaw, Casey–picture the result of Chuck’s changing.  She really cannot imagine anything else clearly herself.  Chuck is no help here, because he only knows he is changing; he cannot see clearly what he is changing into, and, adding to the confusion, he sometimes believes he needs to change into what Beckman et al. want him to become.  Chuck is a hero and has behaved heroically frequently enough for his heroism to be a settled feature of his character–Sarah recognizes that it is.  Because she recognizes this about Chuck, she sees his changing as unnecessary:  he is a hero; he does not need to become one.  But Chuck does not see himself as Sarah sees him.  He does not recognize what she recognizes.[1]

Recall the exchange in vs. the Final Exam.  Chuck, nauseated and unbalanced by the sudden assignment to kill the mole, asks Sarah what he will be if he is not a spy.  She answers that he will still be Chuck, and that is good enough.  Sarah means what she says–he will still be Chuck, the hero, and his not being a spy is inconsequential.  (That last claim fudges:  given how things stand between them, personally and professionally, if Chuck is not a spy he will probably not be with Sarah–and that is consequential, and Sarah knows it. But of course, to her credit, she is not really thinking about them at this moment, only about him.)  But Chuck hears her as sentencing him to the Buy More, as sentencing him to being (to use a later line) alone in Burbank.[2]

Although being alone in Burbank is preferable to being a killer, Chuck now knows what he wants to do with his life and who he wants to do it with–to be a spy with Sarah. He wants that so desperately that he is willing to entertain killing the mole, although he cannot will to kill him.  (This is why we see his trigger finger begin to squeeze and then release the trigger:  he cannot do it.  He cannot kill simply to realize his dreams.  But that he can so much as squeeze the trigger measures his desperation.)

Chuck needs Sarah to help him become what he wants to be, to help him to understand what it is he wants to be.  But they are in an impossible situation.  He needs her to make real his change; she fears his change and resists it–wants nothing to do with it. She feels guilty, regrets, that he even wants to change. He cannot explain and she cannot help.

(3) Sarah is changing at a depth that mostly eludes Chuck or is hidden from him.  Chuck wants Sarah to change.  He fears that the change he sees is either merely apparent or temporary or superficial.  It does not help that Sarah is not always aware of how deeply she is changing.  For example, at the end of S2, Sarah believes she can leave Burbank, leave Chuck, and go with Bryce to Washington.  She is conflicted; yet, she believes she can do it.  She cannot.  During Ellie’s wedding ceremony, Sarah realizes that her belief is false.  She can no longer choose to be a spy if choosing it means she will have to abandon Chuck. But Chuck does not know how deep this change reaches in Sarah.  –He lingers in unclarity about this, to lessening degrees, until S4. The ghost of this lingering helps make the end of S5 so unsettling–it is as if, at some level, Sarah did not change after all. –And Sarah’s anger and pain and hurt serve to mask the depth of the change in her.  Chuck cannot see that she does not want to choose the spy life if that choice costs her him.  She does not want him to choose it since she thinks that choice must cost him her.

****

I could say more about these changes.  I say some more about them in my book.  But, even though I could say more, I will finish here.  Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Chuck is the fundamental but believable and emotionally satisfying changes in its main characters.  Few shows have managed such changes.  Relatively few have really tried.

Change is hard.  Portraying it is hard.  As characters change, they go out of focus for themselves and, as a result, for the audience. But we can, with patience and with a disciplined imagination, bring into focus why they go out of focus.

S3 is messy.  It admits this near the end of vs. the Three Words.  To straighten up some of the mess, we have to remember that we can conceptualize change (to the extent that we can) only by contextualizing it between a past (world) and a future (world).  We have to see the changes as changes, as in passage or in transportation.  No still snapshot alone will make sense or help us to make sense. Now, I cannot straighten up all the mess of S3; I have not tried.  But if we keep in mind that fundamental changes are underway, we can explain some of the mess, excuse some of the mess, and, perhaps, ignore the rest.  We can face the changes.

[1] Besides, being a hero–unless you hail from Krypton or chance bites from radioactive spiders–is not exactly a career choice.

[2] Among the many challenges of S3 is recognizing just how different Sarah’s vision of Chuck is from his of himself, and recognizing the centrality of Chuck’s vision to what happens between them.  Sarah sees him as a hero, and as a man who can educate her in what it means authentically to be human.  He sees himself as a underacheiver, losing and losing on his way to being a loser.  –Is Sarah’s vision more just?  Yes. –Is it as efficacious as Chuck’s vision?  No.

As Chuck will tell Sarah in vs. the American Hero, he has hated himself for all his existential maundering–his (personal and professional) indecisiveness, caused by his inability to get over his failures:  his failure at Stanford, his failure with Jill, his failure to escape the Buy More, his failure to get out of his sister’s apartment.  (N.B., if this isn’t the only time Chuck uses the word ‘hate’, it is one of a very few.  ‘Hate’ is not one of Chuck’s words; but there it is, falling off his lips, characterizing his relationship with himself.  (One’s self is the one self one cannot fail to have a relationship with.  The only question is what that relationship is to be. Even failing to have a relationship with oneself turns out to be having a particular relationship to oneself. I am deeded to me.))  Chuck’s self-hatred nourishes the roots of S3’s darkness (as do Sarah’s hurt and regret). Acknowledging it and overcoming it is Chuck’s task.  So, despite the fact that Sarah’s vision of Chuck is more just, his vision of himself has more explanatory power, particularly in the arctic night of the first 13 episodes of S3.  

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