Category Archives: Merleau-Ponty

Opening My New Talk

July 25, 2012 By in Cavell, Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy Tags: , , , 6 Comments

Here’s a draft of the opening paragraph of my new talk on Merleau-Ponty’s lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy”.  The paragraph is meant to be a compendium of the topics the talk addresses, as well as a hat tip to Stanley Cavell.

I find that I am always educating myself in front of others. There is, I suppose, an effrontery in this: I admit I feel ashamed somewhat in so doing. And I realize you may wonder what I take myself to be doing, since, “Surely,” you might mutter, “he ought to tell us something he knows or takes himself to know, something he has learnt, not something he is learning”. But I confess I understand philosophy to be a matter of educating oneself, of coming into knowledge, and not a matter of having knowledge that is then simply or complicatedly imparted. At least since Socrates, philosophy has countenanced a distinction between loving wisdom and being wise, and has chosen the first as the better part, or at least as its, as philosophy’s, part. A philosopher is someone who is crucially concerned with his own becoming—and in particular with his own becoming-a-knower. Thus is ignorance always internal to philosophy, and the recognition of his own inner disorder internal to any philosopher’s sense of himself as a philosopher. I write this out of my own inner disorder, my own ignorance of what to say about philosophy. —Can I speak for philosophy?

Merleau-Ponty on Ideal Language

May 14, 2012 By in logic, Merleau-Ponty, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

Merleau-Ponty on Perception

November 1, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy 4 Comments

Nothing is more foreign to perception therefore than the idea of a universe which would produce in us representations which are distinct from it by means of a causal action. To speak Kantian language, the realism of naïve consciousness is an empirical realism—the assurance of an external experience in which there is no doubt about escaping ‘states of consciousness’ and acceding to solid objects—and not a transcendental realism which, as a philosophical thesis, would posit these objects as the ungraspable causes of ‘representations’ which alone are given.

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?

Reading “RM” 9: Skepticism and Christianity

August 11, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, religion, skepticism, Socrates Tags: , , , 1 Comment

One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Montaigne is this, the final paragraph in the section on Montaigne’s religion, his Christianity.

What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance.  Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism?  Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic.  All solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition.  As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remain answerless.  It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us.  When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond.  What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide ourselves by our own lights. ‘In ignorance and negligence I let myself be guided to the general way of the world.  I will know it well enough when I perceive it.’  Who would dare to reproach us for making use of this life and world which constitute our horizon?

I am in almost complete agreement with this.  (My disagreements should show through in what I am about to say.)  One of the accomplishments of the paragraph is that it reveals Montaigne’s skepticism finally to be (what I am calling) Church-Man’s skepticism.  Merleau-Ponty inscribes into the paragraph Montaigne’s lexicon of Church-Man’s skepticism:  ‘ignorance’, ‘strange’, ‘our lot’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘monstrous’, ‘question’, ‘answerless’, ‘folly’, ‘secret’.  Montaigne’s skepticism has an epistemic side, and so can avail itself of failures to know of a standard epistemic sort, and subsequently use those failures to humble our pretensions to certain (forms of) knowledge.  This is one form of ignorance and one use of it relevant to Church-Man’s skepticism.  But Church-Man’s skepticism centers on existential, not epistemological, ignorance:  on not-knowing classified best as ‘alienation’ or ‘restlessness’ or ‘dissatisfaction’.  This skepticism is not one that construes religion, Christianity, as providing solutions or as yielding a self-satisfied understanding.  It construes religion as acknowledging mysteries, acknowledging our monstrous condition.  Its questioning is justified, then; as questioning of a mystery, it remains answerless.  (Not all answerless questioning need dehort.)  This is Christianity’s vow of ignorance.  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  A familiar passage; but not often enough reflected upon.  It stresses asymmetry:  I now see God’s face through a glass, darkly.  God now sees my face, face-to-face free of any darkling glass.  (A strange one-way mirror that has only one side.)  Now I know in part, I know partly.  God now knows in total, He knows totally.  We long for symmetry.  Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. 

And of course we will have to guide ourselves by our own lights—but we need remember that not every light we count as ours is one we lit or one we power.  No one should dare reproach us for making use of this life and world.  What else do we have, here under the sun?  As the Church-Man says (in Ecclesiastes 3):

So I became aware that it is best for man to busy himself here to his own content; this and nothing else is his alloted portion; who can show him what the future will bring?

In my days of baffled enquiry, I have seen pious men ruined for all their piety, and evil-doers live long in all their wickedness.  Why then, do not set too much store by piety, not play the wise man to excess, if thou wouldst not be bewildered over thy lot. Yet plunge not deep in evil-doing; eschew folly; else thou shalt perish before thy time.  To piety thou must needs cling; yet live by that other caution too; fear God, and thou hast left no duty unfulfilled.

We cannot help but to orient ourselves, or to dream of orienting ourselves, on something above the sun, some other side of things to which we make constant wordless appeal.  And so fulfillment, surely our own, perhaps not our duty’s, is denied us.  What we find here under the sun is not valueless, but it’s value is not full.  We live amongst valuable vanities. We are fools in the farce who eschew folly.  We are wonders, mysteries, to ourselves.

Astonishing.

Reading “RM” 8: Skepticism

August 7, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , 4 Comments

In Bk III, Montaigne’s skepticism is not something he has, an acquisition; it is something that he is, a state of being.  Call it, if you will, a nisus (in F. R. Leavis’ sense of that term), a profound, unwilled set of Montaigne’s whole being.  Unwilled:  for there is no striving in it, no stretching, in particular no self-assertion or desire to exalt himself; it is ripe with a joyful tranquility.  It is a nisus toward the total truth.  But there is no hurry, no hurry; hurry would slow him down.  He fondly and patiently contemplates himself and his life and life.  Each essay is a new elucidation of our human being.  He writes out of a prodigious lucidity, exhibiting himself to himself (and so exhibiting us to ourselves) across a living width of aspects.

He writes under the sign of Socrates.  Socrates’ labor (think of the Oracle and of his understanding of it) is to dismantle double ignorance:  the state of those who think they know but do not know.  Simple ignorance, simply not knowing, typically need not be considered vicious.  Its remedy is most often obvious and requires only time and application.  Double ignorance is vicious; in it, simple ignorance teams with pride.  Socrates attacks double ignorance and scorns the consequences of attacking it, drawing wisdom and courage from unknown deeps in himself.   His highest hope is to attain to a genuinely humble mind–where the humility is simultaneously and wholly epistemological and moral.  He hopes this for his interlocutor as well.  Thomas De Quincy writes,

Without hands a man might have feet and could still walk:  but, consider it, –without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know a thing at all!  To know a thing, what we can call knowlng, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it:  that is, be virtuously related to it.  If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know?  His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.

Socrates’ elenchus targets unacknowledged ignorance; to accept aporia is to be humbled both epistemologically and morally.  Is accepting aporia enough to qualify as a skeptic?  Well, say what you will.  I deem there is no reason to refuse that title to someone who accepts aporia.  Notice that, like everything else, accepting aporia has its conditions.  Crucially, someone who accepts aporia recognizes that he has bottomed out, bottomed out in knowledge, bottomed out in pride, and is now ready to go on.   Aporia ends nothing, except perhaps an episode of conversation; in reality, it is a beginning.  Its valence is positive, not negative; the sun is rising, not setting.  Aporia marks the moment when we come to see that what we are contending with is a mystery, not a problem.   —If this be skepticism, what more can be said about it?  It is a skepticism that is turned against worldly wisdom, not a skepticism that is a form of worldly wisdom.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Euthyphro knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Callicles knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  Socrates will not judge or be judged by those standards.

Montaigne’s Bk III essays are skeptical in this way, this Socratic way.  To read the essays is to become Montaigne’s interlocutor.  The essays are designed to create aporia in the reader, and to bring about its acceptance.  To almost quote John Berryman:

Wif an essay of Montaigne’s in either hand
We are stript down to move on

‘

Reading “RM” 7: Consciousness

August 2, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, skepticism, Socrates, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Merleau-Ponty engages one of the most difficult ideas of the essay very near its beginning.  He writes of Montaigne:

Self-consciousness is his constant, the measure of all doctrines for him.  It could be said that he never got over a certain wonder at himself which constitutes the whole substance of his works and wisdom.  He never tired of experiencing the paradox of a conscious being.

Having written that, he turns directly to the task of differentiating Montaigne’s understanding of conscious being from Descartes’.  Montaigne’s understanding is as follows:

At each instant, in love, in political life, in perception’s silent life, we adhere to something, make it our own, and yet withdraw from it and hold it at a distance, without which we would know nothing about it.

Merleau-Ponty terms this adherence and withdrawal, consciousness’ acceptance and alienation, consciousness’ bondage and freedom, “…one sole ambiguous act…”  Descartes understands conscious being differently.  For him, consciousness is not one sole ambiguous act, but rather a pure act:  it does not adhere, accept or become bound.  It is all withdrawal, alienation and freedom.

Montaigne does not know that resting place, that self-possession, which Cartesian understanding is to be.  The world is not for him a system of objects the idea of which he has in his possession; the self is not for him the purity of an intellectual consciousness.

Later in the essay, Merleau-Ponty again contrasts Montaigne and Descartes:

Descartes will briefly confirm the soul and body’s union, and prefer to think them separate; for then they are clear to understanding.  Montaigne’s realm, on the contrary, is the “mixture” of soul and body’; he is interested only in our factual condition, and his book endlessly describes this paradoxical fact that we are.

I take all of this differentiating to be internal to understanding Montaigne’s skepticism.  But before I say anything more about that, and I will by and by, I want to say a little about the differentiating itself.  What exactly is Merleau-Ponty describing, what sort of distinction is he drawing? The answer seems to me to be in the phrase “…one sole ambiguous act…”  For Montaigne, as Merleau-Ponty reads him, to be conscious of something, say of a horse seen through the library window, is to be open to the world, to the horse, even adherent to the horse; the horse is a gift that we accept.  There is no question that what we are conscious of is the horse.  And, being conscious of the horse, there is a sense in which consciousness becomes the horse, incarnates itself in horseflesh.  Yet, in the same act, consciousness withdraws into a kind of distance from the horse, alienates itself from the horse, is free of horseflesh, is utterly discarnate.  But this is not to be decried:  without the distance, the alienation, the freedom, we could not know the horse. “We are equally incapable of dwelling in ourselves and in things, and we are referred from them to ourselves and back again.”  Although Merleau-Ponty puts this in a way that sounds as though it is successive acts, I take him to be describing one sole ambiguous act, and act in which we are all at once all in and all out.   This is the paradox of conscious being.  We are everything and nothing.  We are Gods in nature; we are weeds by the wall.  We are not these by turns, but simultaneously, our conscious being is at each moment one sole ambiguous act.  Montaigne never got over a certain wonder at this, and no wonder.  Montaigne’s consciousness is in one sole ambiguous act a becoming and a knowing; and each requires the other while also being capable (abstractly) of cancelling the other:  to simply become would be to fail to know; to simply know would be to fail to become.  By becoming, we are in a world; by knowing, we find ourselves in that world.  But strangely, again paradoxically, our finding ourselves in the world requires that we not be where we are in the world.  “To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.”  Somewhere else, of course, contrasts with here, i.e with where I am.

For Descartes, consciousness dwells in itself; consciousness is a resting place.  It possesses itself–but that is all it possesses, since its ideas are crucially creatures of itself.  It is not tied to things, adherent to them.  It remains pure, wholly self-involved.  (This understanding of conscious being is in part responsible for Cartesianism being a gap-displaying method.)  The world of Cartesian consciousness is a system of objects kept by God in the right sort of relation to its ideas.  Cartesian consciousness is all light within; all darkness without.  The Cartesian walks by reason and not by sight.  He has the key to the world.  Montaigne (like Pascal, according to Merleau-Ponty) understands himself as interested in a world he does not have the key to.  For Montaigne, the world is a motley of things of things making an appeal to consciousness, and consciousness in response turns outside while it also faces inside.  The lightness and darkness of Montaigne’s consciousness is a crazy plaid, thrown over inside and outside alike.  Opacity is as much an inside thing as an outside thing.

As a result, achieving self-understanding cannot be circumspectly rotating the oculus mentis around its clean and well-lit place.  It is rather self-questioning, a dialogue with self in which the being who answers is at least partly opaque to the being who asks, and the being who questions must wait for an answer, “…a questioning without which reason’s purity would be illusory and in the end impure…”  Purifying reason requires self-questioning, not merely “visual” self-inspection.  It happens over time, not all at once, and it never results in any final purity, but must be done again and again, day after day, as Socrates did it in the Agora, and once, outside Athens’ walls, under a tree with Phaedrus.  “Phaedrus, my friend!  Where have you been?  And where are you going?”

Reading “Reading Montaigne” 3: Quotable Unquotability and Metonymic Quotation

July 27, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne Leave a comment

(I just realized that I wrote this several days ago but forgot to post it.  Sorry it is out of order, but I left its number in its name, so that it can be placed.)

Final Preliminary:

I have mentioned Montaigne’s quotable unquotability.  I have mentioned that it makes writing on Montaigne difficult.  So what is to be done about it?  Am I setting up for a criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s quotation of Montaigne in “RM”?  No.  I am setting up for a practice of quotation that I want to continue and that I reckon Merleau-Ponty to use.  As I have mentioned, Merleau-Ponty quotes only from Bk III of the Essays; I am going to do the same.  Merleau-Ponty’s Montaigne is the Montaigne of Bk III.  I take Merleau-Ponty to be practicing what I will call “metonymic quotation”.  That is, he quotes Montaigne intending for the quotation to be a part that trails the whole, where the whole is first the essay from which the quotation is taken and second Bk III itself.  This means that Merleau-Ponty writes and quotes really only for those who are capable of appreciating the metonymic quotations, those who know the particular essay and who know Bk III.  I intend to do the same.  But I will, at least in places, reduce the metonymic strain and supply more of the relevant section of the essay quoted than Merleau-Ponty does.  When an author is quotably unquotable, metonymic quotation is the best strategy for avoiding what I will call “sententious quotation”, a practice of quotation that makes it look like single sentences carry the burden of a moral, a meaning, in particular a moral or meaning that is capable of isolated appreciation, that carries, as it were, its entire moral burden or burden of meaning between its initial capital and its period.  Metonymic translation sees what is quoted as, in a sense borrowed from Gottlob Frege, unsaturated, as needing completion–not exactly in the way of a Fregean concept, nor exactly in the way of a Fregean truth-functional operator (say, negation), but in a way related to them.  In other words, the quoted sentence is to be understood as abstracted, in specific way, from its context, not extracted from it.

Reading “RM” 6: Problems vs. Mysteries

July 27, 2011 By in Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism 7 Comments

For some of us, the impulse to philosophize is bound up with a realization of our broken world and our patchwork lives.  But among those of us for whom this is true, there is a further division:  for some of us, the breaks and the patchworks are problems, something to be solved; for others of us, they are mysteries, something that we live through.  Marcel famously distinguishes problems from mysteries; I am using his distinction—but I will not try here to provide a full account of the distinction, rather only an anticipatory sketch.  I need the sketch because it will aid me in my continuing reading of Merleau-Ponty’s “RM”.  I will say a bit about how momentarily.

Central to Marcel’s distinction is this:  a mystery is something whose true nature can only be grasped from the inside; no objective statements can be made about it from outside, for it is our situation, ours to live through.  We cannot get outside of it.  A problem has no inside/outside contrast, so to speak; it is something I confront, something I find complete before me.  I can therefore, as Marcel puts it, “lay siege to it”.  A problem is an object before me, inert; it is “voiceless”.  I can take an interest in it or not, but whether I do or not is a matter for my unconstrained decision.  A mystery is something that presents itself to me; it “speaks”; I respond or I refuse to respond.  A problem is always coordinate with a technique, a way of handling, treating, working on or solving it.  A mystery transcends technique.  Progress, as a notion, belongs to the problematic; is has no truck with the mysterious.  We make progress on a problem as we come to know things of which we previously were ignorant.  But the knowledge/ignorance contrast gets no real hold on a mystery; to the extent that it may seem to, each new acquist of relevant knowledge only to deepens the mystery.

One important result of this distinction is that it makes available a new term of philosophical criticism, namely the degrading of mysteries into problems.  We might think of this as a form of metaphilosophical reductionism.  Degrading is perennially tempting, because it allows us to normalize philosophy, to tame it.  Often, we degrade without realizing it:  we take something to have the form of a mystery while we deny it the power thereof.  Degrading permits us to be philosophers by acquisition, by having a philosophy (if you know the passage, think here of Marcel’s joking talk of “Marcelism” early in vol. 1 of The Mystery of Being), instead of requiring us to be philosophers only by maintaining ourselves in relation to mystery (since you will know it, if you have been following the blog, think here of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between teaching the absolute and teaching our absolute relation to it.)

I know that all this is far from clear, but I will continue to develop the distinction in later posts.  For now, bear in mind that what we think of Montaigne the skeptic will be quite different if we take Montaigne to be so-called because of his response to problems or because of his response to mysteries.