Category Archives: Metaphilosophy

Keeping Your Distance: More on Merleau-Ponty (Philosophical Questions 6)

August 29, 2012 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

Just as we do not speak for the sake of speaking but speak to someone of something or of someone, and in this initiative of speaking an aiming at the world and at the others is involved upon which is suspended all that which we say; so also the lexical signification and even the pure significations which are deliberately reconstructed, such as those of geometry, aim at a universe of brute being and of coexistence, toward which we were already thrown when we spoke and thought, and which, for its part, by principle does not admit the procedure of objectifying or reflective approximation, since it is at a distance, by way of horizon, latent or dissimulated.  It is that universe that philosophy aims at, that is, as we say, the object of philosophy—but here never will the lacuna be filled in, the unknown transformed into the known; the “object” of philosophy will never come to fill in the philosophical question, since this obturation would take from it the depth and distance that are essential to it. The effective, present, ultimate and primary beings, the thing itself, are in principle apprehended in transparency through their perspectives, offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them, as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness their continued being—to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement, who is therefore not a nothingness the full being would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment.  It is necessary to comprehend perception as this interrogative thought which lets the perceived world be rather than posits it, before which the things form and undo themselves in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no. (The Visible and the Invisible)

In one of the essays in Signs, MMP says this about seeing:  “Seeing is that strange way of rendering ourselves present while keeping our distance…”  In his lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy”, he talks of philosophy as the Utopia of possession at a distance.  And he goes on from the long passage I have quoted above to talk of philosophy as a way of encountering what is far-off as far-off.  Has any philosopher ever made vision more definitive of philosophy than MMP?  When MMP thinks about philosophical questions and answers, he thinks in terms of seeing and of what is seen.  Distance is central:  “To possess ourselves we must begin by abandoning ourselves; to see the world we must first withdraw from it.”  But the distance must be a tethered distance:  it is a distance from something that is a way of rendering ourselves present to it, even while we remain distanced:   “A being which is in principle at a distance, in regard to which distance is a bond but with which there can be no question of coincidence.”  Given this, and given his conception of philosophy as interrogative, it is perhaps unsurprising that MMP comes to understand seeing itself as interrogative.  But if seeing is asking, how is the asking answered?  By having its astonishment confirmed.  And that means…what?  It means, I take it, that interrogative seeing reveals things as they thing and unthing, glidingly form and unform themselves, but in a way that is beneath, before, any yes or no, anything that would seem like a standard answer to a standard question.  (Interrogative seeing chips the sediment of traditon and habit and knowingness off things, the sediment that works like sand in the gears of things, keeping them frozen or relatively frozen, unable or nearly unable to glide.)  But since what I interrogatively see is of this sort, I can get it no nearer to me, and I cannot treat it as itself an answer to any traditional philosophical question.  I witness the instructive spontaneity of and in things, but that spontaneity neither confirms nor disconfirms standard philosophical questions, although it can, I take it, render those standard questions null or reveal them as sedimented and sedimenting.  Or, to put the matter differently, when we ask the standard questions, but not in the standard way, when the questions themselves become open-natured orientings upon Being, then the questions, while still not answered, create a free space; and, in that free space, there is

the disclosure of a Being that is not posited because it has no need to be, because it is silently behind all our affirmations, negations, and even behind all formulated questions, not that it is a matter of forgetting them in its silence, not that it is a matter of imprisoning it in our chatter, but because philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another…

Indeed, so understood, philosophy would seem impossible–it would be the rendering commensurate, first one way and then another, of two incommensurates; yes, it would seem impossible; except that the re-commensuration, the reconversion, happens on MMP’s pages, in a hard-won language that speaks silences and silences speech.

More anon.

Philosophical Questions 3

July 28, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, skepticism Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Philosophical puzzlement:  unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers.  If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached.  But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way.  –Rush Rhees

A most remarkable passage.  There’s much that I’d like to say about it, but I want for now to limit myself to its bearing on the issue of philosophical questions and answers.  Take Rhees to be pointing out just how hard it is to see how deep philosophical questions go, and so how hard it is to see how peculiar the answers to them must be.

Philosophical question threaten the very possibility of understanding altogether, but this means that the questions threaten their very possibility as questions, and threaten the very possibility of answers to them.  The questions challenge the reality of discourse, of understanding:  but how can a question, a mode of discourse, something that must be understood, challenge the reality of discourse or understanding?  Success would seem failure; but failure cannot be success, can it?  What sorts of questions are these?

More soon.

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?

Rhees on Philosophical Puzzlement (or, Philosophical Questions 2)

July 15, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Philosophical puzzlement:  unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers.  If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached.  But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way.

This is from Rush Rhees’ Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse.  I will have a say about it over the next few days.

Philosophical Questions 1

June 27, 2012 By in logic, Metaphilosophy Tags: , , , 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking lately about questions, philosophical questions.  It seems to me–although I admit to being unable to take this thought very far yet–that one useful way of gaining insight into a philosopher’s work is by working delicately to typify the relationship between the philosopher’s questions and her answers to them.  Perhaps, so stated, that seems obvious.  But what I mean is typifying the relationship as such (if that can be done), independent of the particular erototetic content or declarative content of the question and answer, respectively.  There are, I submit, a vast number of different typifying relationships to be discovered.  Part of the reason I began to think about this was re-reading a comment of mine on G. E. Moore:

Moore insists that we often ask a philosophical question without knowing quite what question our interrogatory words express.  But Moore does not ever seriously doubt that there is a philosophical question that the words express.  We can rightly say that Moore doubted the clarity of the questions that philosophers asked, and we can rightly say that he often doubted whether philosophers really believed the answers they gave to the questions; but we cannot rightly say that he doubted whether there were philosophical questions to be asked and answers to be given to them.  That Moore took this view of philosophical questions is shown by his deep unease with his own answers to them.  Moore, I think, believed his answers; but he also did not believe his answers.  (“I believe; help thou my unbelief.”)  His deep unease was the result of the mismatch between his understanding of the questions and the believability of his answers to them:  given his view of the questions, the very believability of his answers to them made the answers hard to believe.

Socrates’ questions and answers bear one sort of relationship to each other.   Augustine’s another.  Aquinas’ another.  Kant’s another–and so on.  Consider Heidegger, at least late:  he so absolutizes the question over the answer that it is no longer clear that there is, that there could be, even that there should be any answer to the question or even an attempt at an answer.  Such an attempt would violate the absoluteness of the question, allow us at least the hope of being able to end, at least for a moment, enduring the interrogative rack,  to stop bearing the question mark, to finish the forever-rising inflection–to scramble off the heath and into shelter, no longer exposed as mad Lear.  But Heidegger would have us stay.

(Ok, so I got a little carried away there.  Apologies.  But I plan to return–soberly–to this line of thought in coming days.)

The Sublimity of Logic

March 16, 2012 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , , 13 Comments

PI 89:  A nodal point in PI–a point where numerous intimate connections can be traced.  I am not going to trace them now, not all of them.  But one is that the problem of the sublimity of logic is, at least partially, the result of our subliming of logic, of our relationship to the problem.  We are not wholly confused in subliming logic–logic is sublime.  But its sublimity must square with its not supplying us with new facts, with its investigation of the hardly memorable and easily forgettable.  –Can we so square the sublimity of logic without feeling that Wittgenstein has changed the subject?

These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?

For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth–a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.–For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.—-It takes its rise, not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connexions: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.

Augustine says in the Confessions “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio”.–This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)

A Thought on Cavellian Generic Objects and Our Relationship to Philosophical Problems

March 13, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, skepticism, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been talking about our relationship to philosophical problems, and I want to say more about that idea.  The idea is made more clear by Cavell’s notion of a generic object–and in its turn makes Cavell’s notion clearer.  (I will not now say more about the use to which the notion (and its companion notion, specific object) is put by Cavell.   To see that use, look at pages 52ff. of The Claim of Reason.)

Consider Cavell’s crucial comment:

I will not by such titles be meaning to suggest that there are two kinds of objects in the world [generic and specific], but rather to summarize the spirit in which an object is under discussion, the kind of problem that has arisen about it, the problem in which it presents itself as the focus of investigation.”

Here (briefly) is what I take to be crucial:  whether the object under discussion is to be ‘classified’ as generic is a matter not settled by the object itself (by its marks or features), but rather by the way in which we are related to the object–but that means by the way in which we are related to the problem of which the object is the focus.  To ‘classify’ the object as generic is really to classify the spirit of our discussion, our relationship to the problem.  In the Kierkegaardian terminology I habitually use here, to ‘classify’ an object as a generic object is to highlight the how of our relationship to it, not the what of the object.  (The distinction between generic and specific objects is not metaphysical but metaphilosophical.)

Cavell’s phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of The Claim of Reason, are extensions of Wittgenstein’s own (less protracted) phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of Philosophical Investigations.  And the phenomenologies are devoted to revealing our relationship to philosophical problems.

Present to the Past

March 1, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A couple of times in the last few months I have tried to get involved in Otto Bollnow’s fascinating paper, “On Understanding a Writer Better than He Understands Himself”.  But each time I have bogged down–for both internal and external reasons.  So I want to just state here in one post the basic point that I hoped to make in a more complete and complicated way across several posts.

The basic point:  The idea of understanding a philosopher better than he understands himself seems to me to typify the relationship between continental philosophers (and I guess I should say that I am thinking primarily of phenomenologists) and their forbears.  This idea does not typify the relationship between analytic philosophers and their forbears.  (Of course there are exceptions–vide McDowell among analytic philosophers.)  Analytic philosophers see themselves as ‘external’ to their forbears:  they agree with them or disagree with them, and they tend to understand their forbears’ work ‘discreetly’, as divided into chunks of argumentation with which they agree or not.  But continental philosophers see themselves as ‘internal’ to their forbears:  agreement and disagreement–well, neither is intimate enough to characterize the relationship.  Rather their aim seems to be to penetrate so deeply into the thinking of the forebears that they no longer know where they begin and their forebears end.  Criticism of the forebears thus becomes radically internal, almost always it is a “preaching to X from X” activity (vide Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl-contra-Husserl intro to The Phenomenology).  The forebears work is understood ‘continuously’, as a living whole that must be responded to somehow as such.  –That, such as it is, is the basic point.

Clarity, Combative Clarity

December 12, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Does philosophy have results?  –As I practice it (ahem!), I guess not.  Or at least it has no results that are not internal to philosophical investigation itself.  I am Wittgensteinian enough, or Kierkegaardian enough, or Marcelian enough to believe that what philosophy aims for is clarity.  But one is always becoming clear; one is never finally clear.

Clarity.  Clarity is internal to philosophical investigation:  it is not a separable result, isolable from the activity that realizes it and such that it confers value onto the activity because of a value it has independent of that activity.  If a result is separable, isolable and independent, then it has a career cut off in an important way from the process that realized it.  Indeed, in one sense its history only begins after the process that realizes it is finished.  The result can be seized and put to purposes quite different from anything that those involved in the process of realizing it intended or foresaw.

But clarity is valuable because of the process of philosophical investigation that realizes it.  And there is no clarity in isolation from the philosophical investigation that realizes it.  Philosophical investigation does not realize a clarity that someone could hope to enjoy who is no longer involved in philosophical investigation.  (“I got clear, you see; and now I am enjoying my clarity, although, thank God!, I am no longer involved in the travails of philosophical investigation.”)  –Kierkegaard’s Climacus talks about the true Christian, the subjective Christian, as “combatively certain” of Christianity, as certain in a way that requires that the certainty be daily won anew.  “Eternal certainty” (his contrast-term) is not something that the subjective Christian can enjoy on this side of the blue.  Similarly, the clarity realized by philosophical investigation is combative clarity, not eternal clarity.

It was once fashionable to charge that clarity is not enough. Someone (Austin, I believe) rejoined that we could decide whether clarity was enough once we’d gotten clear about something.  I worry that both the charge and the rejoinder treat clarity too much as if it were a separable result.

Sufficient unto the day is the clarity thereof, I reckon–the combative clarity thereof.

Philosophical Investigations 309: My Redacted Version

November 19, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 1 Comment

What is your aim in teaching philosophy?  –To increase devotion to philosophical questions, to increase promptitude, fervor, inwardness and agility in responding to them.

‘Responding’–so you want to help the students find answers?  –No, I want them to learn how to interrogate philosophical questions.  The questions must answer for themselves–or not.