Category Archives: education

Immortal Openings, 12: John Fowles, Daniel Martin

August 10, 2013 By in education Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

The first sentence of one of my favorite novels, maybe even my favorite (certainly it, along with John Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts, is a contender for Favorite Contemorary Novel):

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

If you don’t know the remarkable prose poem, “The Harvest”, that is the first chapter of the book, do make its acquaintance soon.

Fowles was influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, who writes in the Forward (“Seeing”) to The Phenomenon of Man:

. . . the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being, by the penetration and synthetic power of their gaze? To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence.To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence.

I would add something about Iris Murdoch and vision, but I suspect my readers can supply the requisite something themselves.  (I will add that I find the ‘fit’ between the  de Chardin passage and various passages in Merleau-Ponty worth pondering–and it further suggests thinking more about Fowles’ novel in light of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision.)

PI’s Opening Remark

June 26, 2013 By in education, history of ordinary language philosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 8 Comments

The final paragraph of a paper I am now finishing:

Wittgenstein puts away the common notions that a book, particularly a book of philosophy, should open either by presenting its undeniable first premise or by defining its terms or by telling you what is coming. He does nothing of the sort. He begins instead with a quotation from St. Augustine. That quotation serves as a blessing from St. Augustine, who Wittgenstein venerated; as an example of authority or the lack of it in philosophy, or at least of its nature and its acknowledgment or denial; as a reminder of the way in which philosophy can shape even what seem relatively unremarkable remarks, as if philosophy were always stealing a march on us, out ahead of and so determining what we have it in us to think or to say; as a critical target, carrying with it a germ, a contagion, a communicable if not wholly communicated picture of communication; as a lexicon-in-use, a first glimpse of a use (or attempt at a use) of the words whose use (and non-use) will preoccupy the pages of PI; as invoking connections between philosophy and childhood and education, of the ways in which philosophy is now accessible, now inaccessible to childhood, and of the ways in which childhood is now accessible, now inaccessible to philosophy (what makes more merry or kills more joy than childhood, than philosophy?), and of the ways in which philosophy requires us to learn how to learn and how not to learn and how to unlearn what there is to learn or what we have learnt. But of course not all of that can be clear on a first reading of the first remark. Which means, I take it, that the remark has not been read until it has been double-read, until it can be read in relation to the rest of the book and the rest of the book in relation to it. As I said, PI begins but has no beginning, ends but has no ending. When we open it at the first page and we confront its first remark, we are confronting the whole of PI, not just one remark. We may make PI’s acquaintance one remark at a time, but we do not come to understand it that way. In for a dime, in for a dollar–the book makes no small change.

Staying Put

June 17, 2013 By in education, Philosophy, Plato, religion, Self-knowledge, Socrates, teaching, writing Tags: , , 4 Comments

Here are a few lines from Fr. Stephen Freeman, addressing place and stability:

In monastic tradition, a monk makes four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Most people are familiar with the first three but not with the fourth. In classical monastic practice it meant that a monk stayed put: he did not move from monastery to monastery. It was not a new idea. Before this vow was formalized in various Rules, there was already the saying from the Desert: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

I have been lucky to have been able to stay put.  Perhaps, if I had been more talented or more ambitious or both, I would not have stayed put.  Perhaps I would have aimed more seriously at career upward mobility.  But I was not more talented and was not and am not more ambitious.  So, here I am.  So, here I stay.  Here I hope to stay–until I stay put permanently, resting, I hope, in peace.

When I got my job at Auburn, my teacher, Lewis White Beck, was very pleased.  He grew up not far from here.  His brother still lived (in those days) just north up 85, in Westpoint, Ga.  (I used to visit him to hear stories of Lewis’ childhood.)  Beck counseled me about Auburn:  “Don’t go and leave.  Stay and make it the kind of place where you want to be.”  The philosophy department at Auburn has become that, although I deserve little of the credit.  But I do think that staying has made me more of the person I have wanted to be.  I do not mean I am not deeply flawed; of course I am, of course.  Still, staying put has been a revelator and tutor:  I have learnt something about fidelity and commitment, about what it means to work with others to build something bigger and better than the builders.  I have learnt something about being unknown and unremarked, and about first being restively reconciled to it and later accepting it and still later coming to desire it.  “Live hidden” is good advice.  (Beck was once asked by the NYTimes (if I remember correctly) if they could do a feature on him, a sort of Elder Philosopher at Home bit.  He declined, telling them that he was determined to enjoy “the beneficent obscurity of senectitude”.   –Is that a line from Gibbon?)  I guess I still have a few years before I enter my senectitude, but it is not too early for obscurity to be beneficent.

As I grow older, my classes and my students fascinate me more than ever before.  Philosophical problems incarnate are now my meditation.  Philosophical problems disincarnate no longer exert much pull on me.  Perhaps what I have come to appreciate more fully is that there is a strict specificity about philosophical problems–they exist only in a specific person and they can be grappled with only in conjunction with that person and they can be solved–in whatever sense they are solved–only by that person.  Where I am not that person, I can help or hurt (from the lectern, from the page); but I can only help or hurt; but I can no more solve the problem for him or her than I can be prudent for him or her.  Philosophical problems arise from and are finally only responsive to the living experience of a specific person.  I believe I have learnt that from Socrates–himself a master of staying put.

As Robert Frost once recommended:  “Don’t get converted.  Stay.”

Carlyle, from Heroes and Hero-Worship

April 23, 2013 By in education, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, religion Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Dick Moran Keeps it Real

November 26, 2012 By in education, history of ordinary language philosophy, Kant, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, reading, Self-knowledge, skepticism, teaching, writing 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.

Rilke to a Young Poet–For My Students

November 15, 2012 By in education, reading, teaching 4 Comments

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.

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?

Link

A Manifesto–from Henry Bugbee’s Inward Morning

November 2, 2012 By in education, teaching Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Since [my] earliest days of philosophic study, I have remained concerned with the works of philosophers, not in themselves, but as helps to the understanding of experience. I study the works of philosophers out of an interest which subordinates theory to understanding. . . . It will be ever important to me to give attention to technical philosophy but I will never be able to take technical philosophy as the ultimate phase of a reflective life.

Henry G. Bugbee

Education–George MacDonald

September 27, 2012 By in education, teaching Tags: , , 5 Comments

There are in whose notion education would seem to consist in the production of a certain repose through the development  of this and that faculty, and the depression, if not eradication, of this and that other faculty.  But if mere repose were the end in view, an unsparing depression of all the faculties would be the surest means of approaching it, provided always the animal instincts  could be depressed likewise, or, better still, kept in a state of constant repletion. Happily, however, for the human race, it possesses in the passion of hunger even, a more immediate saviour than in the wisest selection and treatment of its faculties.  For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awakening from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.

We have here, I think, something like the contrast between the way students see (have been taught to see) their education and what they should see.  What they want is unsparing depression of their faculties and constant repletion of their animal instincts, a kind of upside-down ascesis.  What they should want is noble unrest, hunger, wakefulness–a fever that urges them from their beds rather than keeping them abed.