Category Archives: Metaphilosophy

A Note on Talking Lions And Cavell

October 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 11 Comments

A quick thought.  Recall Cavell’s wonderful description of Wittgenstein’s famous line that “if a lion could talk we could not understand him”(II, pg. 223).  He describes the line as “penetrating past assessment ” to “become part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds”.  If it does less than that, he concludes, the line is “philosophically useless”.  Shouldn’t we describe one of Cavell’s most famous lines, a question, in the same way, mutatis mutandis?

Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?

Wittgenstein, Detective

September 29, 2011 By in juvenilia, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 4 Comments

(Digging around in my files, I found what must have been the first handout I ever constructed on Philosophical Investigations (it is dated 5/7/1992). A section of it follows.)

Understanding the Endless Book

Why is the Investigations so “bloody hard”?  Because the book is both a statement of its method and the result of its method.  To quote Cavell:  “The way this book is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot understand the manner (call it the method), before we understand its work…The Investigations is written in criticism of itself.”

Before even trying to makes sense of these cabalistic pronouncements, it might be a good idea to ask if Wittgenstein gave his reader any hint how to approach the book.  In the Preface he admits that “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.  But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”  Well and good.  What help does this give us?  Maybe a little, especially if we link it with another remark.

What I want to teach you isn’t opinions but a method.  In fact, the method is to treat as irrelevant every question of opinion…If I’m wrong then you are right, which is just as good.  As long as we look for the same thing…I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.

Let me delay comment on this remark long enough to point up its similarity (I think the similarity is instructive, thus the delay) to Kierkegaard’s comments in Section 12  of Purity of Heart.  The talk

…in order to achieve its proper emphasis…must unequivocally demand something of the listener.  It must demand not merely what has previously been requested, that the reader should share in the work with the speaker–now the talk must unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.

Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, requires more from his reader than merely close attention to the thought–he requires his reader to think the thought as well.  And part of the reader’s “thinking the thought” is the reader having thoughts of his own about it.

To understand, let’s think of the Investigations in a different way.  Wittgenstein had a well-known love for detective magazines.  Interestingly, the letters which follow a detective’s name are “P. I.”–“private investigator”.  Wittgenstein could well have affixed the same letters after his own name:  “P. I.”–“philosophical investigator”.  In fact, Wittgenstein did, in a way, affix them to his name by leaving behind an instruction manual with the appropriate title–Philosophical Investigations.  (Holmes, remember, delighted in calling himself the world’s only “consulting detective”; Wittgenstein may have been the world’s only “philosophical detective”.)  The Investigations is of course more than just an instruction manual, it is also a case book.  When we read it we are watching the detective.  But what we watch is not the completion of cases; nothing is stamped “solved”.  Instead we are given a glimpse into working cases.  We are made privy to conversations with informants, allowed to see mistaken hunches, provided portraits of suspicious characters.  We see reminders, clues not-yet-understood, records of previous crimes.  Interspersed (like voice-overs) are comments on the investigator’s business, how it works, what to do, what not to do, comments on methods that succeed and methods that fail, notes on the variety of temptations that confront the investigator and what happens when he yields to them.  We are taken into confidence, confessed to, told secrets.  In short, we are left with a mountain of pieces, but the puzzles–mysteries, crimes–remain unsolved.  To profit from the book, we must practice the investigator’s technique on the book itself.  We cannot merely read it, memorize it, parrot the book itself.  We must master it.  And mastery requires intense and continuous effort, not only learning the lessons but applying them–on the mean streets, as it were…

What is Your Aim in Philosophy?

September 23, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophy Leave a comment

I think I may say without exaggeration, that my whole philosophical career has been devoted to the production–I dislike using this physical term–of currents whereby life can be reborn in regions of the mind which have yielded to apathy and are exposed to decomposition.   Gabriel Marcel

To choose a starting point in philosophizing is to choose a way it ends.  And vice versa.  This doesn’t mean that I always know what way for it to end I have chosen; I may not know and may have to work it out.  But I will have chosen a way for it to end, and I cannnot reject that way for it to end and retain my starting point.  If I reject the way of ending I have chosen, then I must start over.  It is also possible that I can choose a way philosophizing ends without knowing what starting point I have thereby chosen.  I may have to start several times before I work out the right starting point for the way I have chosen for it to end.  There is no way-of-ending-neutral but otherwise compulsory starting point for philosophizing.

Bringing Philosophy Peace?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Form of a Philosophical Problem

September 15, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein comments that a philosophical problem has the form:  “I don’t know my way about.”  –So much in so little.

But I want now only to say this.  To feel the force of Wittgenstein’s comment, keep in mind that Wittgenstein is not lost in terra incognita; he is no stranger in a strange land.  He is lost at home.  He has to find himself, but to find himself where he is, where he has always been.  Everything around him is so alien and so familiar, so exotic and so everyday.  He is gone but he never left.

Sometimes the hallway to my living room becomes non-negotiable.  A philosophical problem has the form of homesickness in my easy chair.

Reading “RM” 11: “The Grace of Our First Certainties”

September 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism Tags: , 5 Comments

Now to address the final section of Merleau-Ponty’s “Reading Montaigne”.  The section winds together the earlier sections, attempting to describe the conditions and motives for Montaigne’s “return to the world”.  The initial paragraphs of the section set the tone:

It is not a question of reaching a reassuring conclusion at no matter what cost, nor of forgetting at the end what has been found on the way.  It is from doubt that certainty will come.  So we must measure the extent of it.  Let us repeat that all belief is passion and makes us beside ourselves, that we can believe only by ceasing to think, that wisdom is a resolution to be irresolute, that it condemns friendship, love, and public life.  And so here we are back to ourselves again.  And we find chaos still, with death, the emblem of all disorders, on the horizon.  Cut off from others, cut off from the world, incapable of finding within himself…and in an inner relationship to God the means of justifying the world’s comedy, Montaigne’s wise man, it would seem, no longer has any conversation except with that life he perceives welling madly within him for a little while longer, any resource except the most general derision, any motive except despising himself and all things.  In this disorder, why not give up?  Why not take the animals for a model–these neighing horses, these swans who sing as they die–why not join them in unconsciousness?  The best thing would be to go back to the puerile security, the ignorance of beasts.  Or to invent, against the feeling of death, some natural religion:  the extinction of a life is the way to a thousand other lives.

This movement is to be found in Montaigne.  But there is another one, too, which appears just as often…[T]he mind’s movement and irresolution are only half of the truth.  The other half is the marvel that our volubility has stopped, and at each moment stops again, in appearances which we may indeed show cannot withstand examination, but which at least had the air of truth, and gave us the idea of it.  Though, when it questions itself, never stops prolonging and contradicting itself, but there is a thought in act which is no little thing, and which we have to take into account.  The critique of human understanding destroys only if we cling to the idea of a complete or absolute understanding.  If on the contrary we rid ourselves of this idea, then thought in act, as the only possible thought, becomes the measure of all things and the equivalent of an absolute.  The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and that passion is ourselves.  At this moment, reasons for doubting become reasons for believing.  The only effect of our whole critique is to make our passions and our opinions more precious by making us see that they are our only recourse, and that we do not understand ourselves by dreaming of something different.  Then we find the fixed point we need (if we want to bring our versatility to a stop) not in the bitter religion of nature (that somber divinity who multiplies his works for nothing), but in the fact that there is opinion, the appearance of the good and true.  Then regaining nature, naiveté, and ignorance means regaining the grace of our first certainties in the doubt which rings them round and makes them visible.

Volubility, versatility, visibility; a truly astonishing passage.  Focus for now on the two Critiques, one of human understanding and one of human passion.  Merleau-Ponty reads Montaigne as a Critical philosopher, even as anticipating Kant’s first two Critiques, although Kant’s Critiques and Montaigne’s are deeply different.

But the idea of reading Montaigne as a Critical philosopher, for me a philosopher of limits, is deeply right.  Kant cartographizes transcendentally, finding reflection’s limits as reflection plays out.  Montaigne cartographizes existentially, finding his own limits as he plays himself out.  And what he finds is that unacted reflection plays itself out in a sickly, kill-joy chortle, chilling life itself in the pallor of thought; and that unreflected action plays itself out in pointless passions, vaunting vanities as lasting values.  Thought in act, as Merleau-Ponty says, becomes the equivalent of an absolute.  Thought in act:  the meeting point of the two Critiques, a place from which we can see what is genuinely precious and can see how we distort it, devalue it, by dreaming dreams of complete possession of ourselves in understanding or of completely dispossessing ourselves of our passions.  

The point is not, of course, that thought in act is always true–‘always true’:  both not false and not faithless.  We are all too often false and faithless.  But when we manage thought in act, we make ourselves available to the world and to others while remaining handy to ourselves.  Such availability and such handiness are not to be understood as complete self-possession or as complete apatheia.  In fact, such availability and handiness are irreconcilable with complete self-possession or complete apatheia, since thought in act is humble and vulnerable, not sequestered, aware of our opacity to ourselves and of the permanence of our passions.  We have to acknowledge that we are ringed round with doubt, like an island in an ocean, but acknowledging that allows us to start westward to Eden, to leave our nodding dreaminess.  It allows us to once again be graced by our first certainties:  graced—acknowledging that here where we are and there where we are going there are no Pelagian certainties.  Our original sin is our conviction that we can achieve the absolute.  All we can hope for is to live in an absolute relationship to it.  And, surprisingly perhaps, that requires that we live in a relative relationship to ourselves, without derision never taking ourselves fully seriously, never forgetting that we are investigators without knowledge, magistrates without jurisdiction, and, all in all, the fools of the farce.

Topsy-Turvy Frege

September 4, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Davidson’s Truth and Predication–at least parts of it–have been in front of me this weekend.  Good stuff, although I am out of sympathy with many of the details of the stories he tells, both about the history of the problem of predication and about the solution of the problem.

But I guess my fundamental disagreement with Davidson centers on the reality of the problematic he investigates.  For Davidson, the unity of the proposition must be explained; explaining it requires solving the problem of predication.  Seeing things this way, when Davidson turns to Frege he understands objects and concepts as constituents of propositions, constituents fashioned, as it were, so as to constitute a propositional unity.  Predictably, Davidson is most fascinated with concepts, since they are–even more than objects–fearfully and wonderfully made:  they are incomplete.   Objects of course are complete–as are propositions (although in a different sense (Frege got confused about this, unfortunately)).  The beginning of wisdom in reading Frege is recognizing the varieties of incompleteness and completeness he thematizes in his thinking–but that is a topic for another post.  What I want to consider here is the way that Davidson turns Frege upside-down.  I believe Frege understands objects and concepts as abstractions from propositions, not constituents of propositions.  Objects and concepts are, shifting descriptions, made from propositions, not made for them.  The proposition, the propositional unity, is prior to objects and concepts.  There is no explaining the unity; and there is no problem of predication to solve.  Davidson’s problematic is unreal.

Of course there is a problematic looming here, but it is more metaphilosophical than metaphysical.  Namely, how do we philosophize without this problem?  What would it be to philosophize constrained by the unity of propositions, recognizing that ultimately our only grip on anything as an object of thought is as what we are thinking instead of as what we are thinking about?  Or, to put this in a more Fregean way, what would it be to philosophize constrained by The Context Principle–and its two companion Principles from Foundations?  Frege’s Principles, as I believe (and have argued elsewhere), are the methodological counterpart to the unity of the proposition.  Taken seriously–kept is Frege’s word–the Principles reorient philosophy itself.  Wittgenstein’s work, both in TLP and in PI, strives to keep Frege’s Principles.  Arguably, Davidson senses this.  Although he shies away from Wittgenstein (saying a bit about why in a long footnote) he does at one point talk of a “deep truth” in a “Wittgensteinian thought”–but he seems unable to see how really to entertain the thought.  That is unsurprising, since the thought impugns the problematic that provides the very structure of Davidson’s thinking.

Easy Pieces? (Zettel 447)

August 31, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , Leave a comment

(Another past class handout.)

In Zettel Wittgenstein writes:

Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips. This inversion in our conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may well bedone, if one means a cross-strip. –But in that case we never get to the end of our work! –Of course not, for it has no end. (447)

This is a paragraph worth frequenting. It is a fine example of the elasticity of Wittgenstein’s philosophical imagination, and of course it’s more than just that. Wittgenstein here disjoins two ways of looking at philosophy, what I will call the longitudinal view and the latitudinal view. On the longitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein believes common, philosophy is divided into (a finite number of) longitudinal strips–each strip a philosophical problem–and each strip itself infinitely long. On the latitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein recommends, philosophy is divided into (an infinite set of) latitudinal strips, each strip only finitely long. Now, on each view, the work of philosophy never ends, but its unendingness is presented under very different aspects. Latitudinally, we can solve individual philosophical problems: they are finite. But we never finish with philosophy, since there are an infinite number of problems.  Longitudinally, we cannot solve individual problems: they are infinite. And we of course then never finish with philosophy either, but only because we never finish with any of its problems. –This last predicament disquiets us. We never finish with any problem and so we never finish with philosophy. We never get nowhere. (You pass no mile markers on The Road to Nowhere, since you are never any closer to nor any further away from your destination.)  On the latitudinal view, there are an infinite number of philosophical problems. That might strike you as showing that what is meant by ‘problem’ on the view cannot be quite the same as what is meant by ‘problem’ on the longitudinal view. In fact, the idea that there are an infinite number of philosophical problems may itself worry you. Yes, such an idea makes philosophical piecework possible, but only a the expense of making mysterious the idea of a philosophical problem. Are there infinitely many? Could there be?

Stepping beyond what is actually said in 447, I consider Wittgenstein to count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways. E.g., there is Kelly’s skeptical problem, Brian’s, Betrand’s, and so on. The Skeptical Problem is the determinable for all of these determinates, roughly as red is the determinable for cardinal, scarlet, candy-apple, and so on. To engage with skepticism is to engage with Kelly or Brian or Bertrand or whomever, qua skeptic. –At any rate, if we count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways, it becomes easier to see how there might be infinitely many, particularly if we also are willing to count problems in person-(at-a-time)-sensitive ways, as I suspect we ultimately must be. I can solve, say, Brian’s (lunchtime on Tuesday the 11th) skeptical problem. That is to have achieved something in philosophy. There are an infinite number of such tasks to perform; the philosopher will never go out of business. But his or her business is a cheek by jowl struggle with the dynamics of the actual thinking of an actual person, and not distanced, person-insensitive reflection on the geometry of thought.

A Smiling Philosophy (Santayana)

August 27, 2011 By in meta-blog, Metaphilosophy Tags: , , Leave a comment

Here is one more system of philosophy.  If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system…differs widely in spirit and pretensions from what usually goes by that name.  In the first place, my system is not mine, nor new.  I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.  There are convictions in the depth of his soul, beneath all his overt parrot beliefs, on which I would build our friendship.  I have a great respect for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere.  I think that common sense, in a rough and dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole.  I am animated by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind:  they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded.  What novelty my version of things may possess is meant simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form.  I do not pretend to place myself at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its periphery.  I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more extensive and complex.  I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life;  I should not be honest otherwise.  I accept the same miraculous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.

I can still remember the profound jolt this passage was to me during my sophomore year of college.  I had somehow embarked on a course of Santayana reading, and even found a professor to aid me (Troy Organ, blessed man!).  I promptly memorized the passage, and although I have forgotten much of it over the years, its brilliant pastiche of Luther’s “Here I stand.  I can do no other”—“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life;  I should not be honest otherwise”–I have never forgotten.  (Indeed, one of the singular moments of my recent life is connected with it.  I was standing outside the Harvard Faculty Club, talking with Sean Kelly, and I quoted the line.  It struck my ear strangely, I guess because I realized I was likely standing where Santayana himself had sometimes stood.)  I still don’t know what I make of the contents of the book this passage prefaces–Scepticism and Animal Faith–but I have tried to think in creative fidelity to the passage.  Anyway, the passage bore itself in on me as a compendium of some recent themes on the blog.