Category Archives: Metaphilosophy

Essence and Grammar (and Definition)

August 20, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

Reshef Agam-Segal has asked about the difference between Socrates’ desire for a definition and Wittgenstein’s for grammar.  The two desires meet or can seem to meet in the word ‘essence’.  Socrates wants to know, say, the essence of piety.  Wittgenstein wants to know the grammar of piety (“theology as grammar”); and, according to Wittgenstein, “essence is expressed by grammar”.  So each chases essence.

What Socrates chases is familiar enough (at least as standardly interpreted).  What Wittgenstein chases is not so familiar. To succeed in construing the grammar of piety would be to express the essence of piety.  The grammar of piety would be construed in an a series of grammatical remarks. But the series of grammatical remarks does not tell us the essence of piety.  Rather, the series of remarks expresses the essence of piety.  ‘Express’ in “essence is expressed by grammar” works intransitively.  That is, what grammar expresses is not something that we can tell, can say. If you like, what grammar expresses is inexpressible. (Moving, in that sentence, from the intransitive to transitive.)

We are here at one of those anti-type spots in PI–of which, of course, TLP contains the type.  We are in the ambit of showing/saying, as indeed in Wittgenstein we always already are.  But, as my typological talk is meant to suggest, what we have in PI is something foreshadowed in TLP; but what we have in PI is not what we have in TLP.  Getting the differences straight is more than I can do; I will though do what I can.  Perhaps the best place to start is with a glaring absence in PI:  the absence of the symbolism.  The symbolism glyphs the pages of TLP.  It wards those pages.  Without a real, active and sympathetic inwardness with the symbolism, TLP is a closed book.  (Anyone who has attempted to teach the book to undergraduates will know this.)  But the symbolism is almost nowhere to be seen in PI.  What does that mean?  And what does it mean for showing/saying in PI?  [Pause here to light pipe.]

One thing it means, I reckon, is that showing or expressing is now something done by means of ordinary sentences, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  The crucial issue in PI is the issue of our relationship to those sentences, to those phenomena.  A sentence is a grammatical remark not in and of itself–noumenally, as it were–but rather because of our orientation upon it.  The possibility of the orientation that makes a sentence a grammatical remark, and so one that expresses or contributes to the expression of essence, results from our being in the grip of a philosophical problem.  The problems provide the light, we might say, in which a sentence can shine forth as grammatical, as essence-expression. Without the problem, the sentence is, well, just a sentence.  Philosophy is a battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  But the language is only a weapon in that battle–a weapon of peace, ultimately, to be sure–if we orient on it in a way made possible by a philosophical problem.

This makes philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s way both easier and harder.  It is easier in that we need no special magical weapon, no Excalibur, no symbolism, to do what needs doing in philosophy.  It is harder because the weapons we have can always appear to be no weapons at all, to be valueless in the fight.  (“So?  That’s just more words.”)  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem makes the necessary orientation possible, but it does not make it automatic.  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem can also make the necessary orientation look only like so much rigmarole, like a willful way of losing track of what really matters in responding to the problem. Losing our way among words can lead us further afield, but it can also allow words to lead us home in a way that they ordinarily do not.  “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”  [Pipe dies; re-light.]

Having written all this, I am aware that I have still not answered Reshef’s question.  But I hope this opens the way to answering his question.  And I hope to get back to his question again soon.  (Thanks to D. for a recent useful conversation about these topics.)

Hopeful Philosophical Investigations

August 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 2 Comments

I struggle to express a particular way of taking up Philosophical Investigations–it seems like I have been doing this since I first began to read it seriously.  What I want to express is something I rate as cognate with what others have expressed when talking about the “ethics” of PI, or of its “ethical over/undertones”, with responses to it as “a feat of writing” or as “the discovery of the problem of the other”.  I have in the past expressed it (helping myself to Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction) as a “subjective reading” of PI.

Here I go again.  I am going to try yet again:  I want to say something about hopeful philosophical investigations.  Something brief.

Let me prefix Gabriel Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:

I hope in you for us.

We can read the miniature dialogues that constitute PI in a variety of ways.  It is natural enough, I suppose, to understand the voices as antagonistic (Cavell, if I remember correctly, uses that word in “Availability”).  But although that is natural enough, is it best?  Or is it, instead, a vestige of non-Wittgensteinian philosophical practice?  –I will call it an analytic vestige.  We know, don’t we? and what would it be to know it?, that Wittgenstein wanted no part of a conception of philosophy as contest, of any agonistic conception of philosophy.  So, although I do not deny that we can perhaps find moments of agon in PI, such moments are not the stuff of PI.  As I read PI, it is not a series of miniature contests, skirmishes, but instead a series of miniature ameliorations, betterments.  Thinking of the voice of temptation and the voice of correction as in an ameliorative relationship, instead of an antagonistic one, frankly makes better sense of Cavell’s confessional understanding of PI than does thinking of the voices as in an antagonistic relationship–it also makes better sense of ‘temptation’ and ‘correction’ as terminological choices.   In particular, ‘correction’ in an antagonistic relationship has a very different critical valence than it does in an ameliorative one.  The hope of the dialogues is for mutual wholeness:  neither the voice of temptation nor the voice of correction may treat the other voice as alien–anything one voice says may be said, and in a certain sense is said, by the other.  And so the voices respond to each other, each finding itself in the other, working at becoming integral, to achieve agreement (in PI’s difficult sense of that term), to come to a meeting of voices, a time at which the passion of each voice is at one with its life (to borrow another bit of Cavell’s phrasing).  The nisus of each voice I take to be expressed by Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:  each voice speaks from hope, and is constantly saying to the other, sotto voce:  “I hope in you for us.”

I will come back to this.

Philosophy and Literature (Collingwood)

August 15, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, writing Leave a comment

I am hip-deep in course prep.  As I try to do each term, I took a few minutes today to review Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method.  Collingwood’s next-to-last chapter is “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature” and he provides some very useful helps for students and teachers there (and passim of course).

The language of philosophy is therefore, as every careful reader of the great philosophers already knows, a literary language and not a technical.  Wherever a philosopher uses a term requiring formal definition, as distinct from…expositional definition…, the intrusion of a non-literary element into his language corresponds with the intrusion of a non-philosophical element into his thought:  a fragment of science, a piece of inchoate philosophizing, or a philosophical error; three things not, in such a case, easily to be distinguished.

The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to science, and to choose his words according to the rules of literature.  His terminology must have that expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon context, which are the hallmarks of a literary use of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.

A corresponding duty rests with the reader of philosophical literature, who must remember that he is reading a language and not a symbolism.  He must neither think that his author is offering a verbal definition when he is making some statement about the essence of a concept–a fertile source of sophistical criticisms–nor complain when nothing resembling such a definition is given; he must expect philosophical terms to express their own meaning in the way in which they are used, like words of ordinary speech.  He must not expect one word always to mean one thing in the sense that its meaning undergoes no kind of change; he must expect philosophical terminology, like all language, to be always in the process of development, and he must recollect that this, so far from making it harder to understand, is what makes it able to express its own meaning instead of being incomprehensible apart from definitions, like a collection of rigid and therefore artificial technical terms.

I commend the essay and especially its penultimate chapter to all.

More on (Plain) Reminders (PI 127)

August 10, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

A couple of excerpts on reminders from a paper of mine gathering dust in a drawer…

Consider the remark (127): “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” Calling his work assembling reminders accents the relationship between the his remarks and his interlocutor. If the interlocutor takes the remarks as reminders, then assessing the remarks involves the interlocutor’s assessment of herself. That is, taking the remarks as reminders requires the interlocutor to be present to herself as she thinks. She must be present to herself to assess herself. Is the remark a reminder? If so, why had she forgotten what she is now reminded of? Was her forgetfulness temporary? When, roughly, did she forget–when she started thinking about the philosophical problem the remark responds to, or before that? Why forget then?  Would she have remembered eventually on her own or not? If so, when and why?  If not, why not?   What, other than Wittgenstein’s remark, might have jogged her memory? For Wittgenstein, these questions on the part of the reader are exactly right: they force her back on herself, and keep her present to herself as she philosophizes. (I am not saying that they are all answerable, or easily answerable.)  For Wittgenstein, it is in part our failure to be present to ourselves as we philosophize that accounts for the apparent intractability of the problems.

Earlier, I let a list of questions tumble out, all turning on a remark of Wittgenstein’s being a reminder. All the questions forced the reader of the remark back on herself. None forced her back on the remark itself, so to speak. So someone might object: “Look, Wittgenstein may have been aiming at giving reminders, but he may sometimes have missed the mark, failed to provide a reminder.” And so he may. But the important point is that Wittgenstein failed to achieve his aim–giving a reminder. If a remark that is to be a reminder fails to be, then that is that; the remark falls beneath philosophical notice. For the remark had claim to notice only if was indeed a reminder. What I am trying to make clear is that by calling (some of) his remarks reminders, Wittgenstein has rendered a certain structure of critical terms properly applicable to the remarks. If one of Wittgenstein’s remarks is false, then it is not a reminder. (I can remind you of a falsehood in a way–by reminding you of something false that you believed. But this sort of reminder is not what Wittgenstein is interested in giving.) But if one of his remarks is true, that does not make it a reminder.  Reminders share a border with the false, but not with the true, except incidentally. (We cannot assemble reminders for God.) For a remark to be a reminder, it must not only be true, it must be true and true-in-a-certain-relationship (i.e., forgotten (or some relationship roughly cognate)) to the person reminded.  And even more, it must also be accepted by the person as a reminder.  If it is accepted as something else, Wittgenstein has not achieved his aim.  –Assembling reminders turns out to be an extraordinarily delicate occupation.

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

‘

Pure Philosophical Theses, Plain Reminders

August 4, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Uncategorized, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something–because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Thompson Clarke has been much on my mind, particularly his distinction between the plain and the pure (the philosophical).  According to Clarke, a sentence like “I am awake, not dreaming” has a plain use that can be exhibited thus:  Imagine a scientist experimenting with soporifics.  He has been using himself as subject.  As he tests the various soporifics, he makes notes to himself in his journal.  At one point, after awakening and shaking off his druggy lethargy, he begins a journal entry by writing, “I am awake, not dreaming.”  For Clarke, in the situation as so described, “I am awake, not dreaming” is something that the experimenter knows; in the situation, the written sentence is “implained”, and the experimenter’s knowledge is plain knowledge.  Clarke believes that the sentence, so situated, is an example of what Moore is defending when he defends common sense. (I am muting certain details in saying that.) But the obvious problem here is that the implained sentence, regarded as expressing knowledge, seems to express knowledge that is impure, too dependent on its situation to be such that, in expressing knowledge, it expresses something genuinely philosophically substantial, independent, something that could satisfy the deep intellectual need displayed in the problem of the external world.  But the sentence that could express that is a twin of the plain sentence, i.e., “I am awake, not dreaming”.  On this pure understanding of the sentence, it means whatever its constituent words make it mean, wholly independent of any non-semantic practices.  The experimenter in soporifics does not know the sentence on that understanding; he knows plainly–not purely.  The experimenter’s plain knowledge, compared to the promise of pure knowledge, looks restricted, or, as Clarke’s puts it in memorable phrase, there is a “relative ‘non-objectivity'” about the experimenter’s knowledge.  If he knew that he was awake, not dreaming, and knew it purely, then his knowledge would be absolutely objective.

I present all of this not because I want to trace the mazeways of Clarke’s paper.  I present it because I hope it offers an orientation on PI 127-9.  Here’s a sketch.

Start in the middle, with 128.  Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that the theses advanced in philosophy cannot be debated because everyone agrees to them.  Rather, he is saying that we cannot really advance theses in philosophy.  When we try, we fail, because what we “advance” never turns out to have the (grammatical) features internal to a thesis–it would not be debate-apt, it would not be controversial.  But that creates at least two questions:  (1) Why might we take ourselves or be taken to be advancing theses?  (2) What might we actually be doing? It is important to bear in mind as I answer that I judge Wittgenstein here to be thinking about someone who is concerned to philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, not just in any old way.

(1) I reckon that the words we call on as we philosophize  can be understood either plainly or purely.  And it is a standing temptation to understand those words purely, not plainly.  So understood, of course, our calling on those words would be our advancing theses, we would be saying something debatable, controversial.  Some will say “Yea”, others “Nay”.  But when we philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, our contribution to our engagement with our interlocutor will take the form of plain words.  So understood, the words will not say anything debatable, controversial.  They will simply not be theses.  Again, so understood, everyone will agree with them.  –Still, there is the danger, since the pure saying of the words is, at the level of the words themselves, indistinguishable from the plain saying (they are twins), it will always be possible both for us and our interlocutor (undeliberately) to “gestalt shift” into the pure.  If we do so, however, we leave Wittgenstein’s way of philosophizing.  This sort of reading of 128 seems to me to help with 127–as indeed I believe it was intended to do.  A reminder is plain.  Nothing pure can function as a reminder, as Wittgenstein is thinking of it.  If what I assembled, taking myself to be assembling reminders, were pure, I would instead have assembled theses, advance them.  But reminders are matters of recall, not of advance.  If what I offer you as a reminder is debatable, I have failed in the task assigned in 127.  Wittgenstein once said that nothing he wrote in PI was hard to understand—what was hard to understand was why he wrote it.  Right.  There is going to be a difficulty of staying in the plain, both for ourselves and our interlocutors.  What we are doing will, from one familiar angle, only seem worth doing in the name of ‘philosophy’ if we migrate to the pure.  It is hard to see why anyone would assemble reminders of the sort Wittgenstein has in mind, hard to see how so doing could have any relevance to philosophy.  (As if I tried to settle the debate about the external world by producing my grocery list.)  That bring us to (2).

(2) So what are we doing.  Well, we are implaining ourselves and (we hope) our interlocutor.  We are assembling reminders for the purpose of implaining our interlocutor.  We remind so as to reveal to the interlocutor the distance between where he believes himself to be and where he actually is.  In the face of the twin sentences, with their divergent understandings, the interlocutor can see that he or sh has a forked understanding, divided between the pure and the plain.  To bring his or her understanding back into agreement with itself, the interlocutor needs to integrate either plainly or philosophically.  But to do so philosophically, he or she must be able to stabilize the pure understanding, to make clear what the words he or she calls on them say given their clinical isolation from the entire range of non-semantic practices.  Maybe that can be done; maybe not:  at any rate, each attempt must be met in its particular straits of exigency; there are, I suspect, too many too various strategies for attempting to make clear what the words called on mean purely for there to be any ahead-of-the-moment response to them all.  To integrate plainly is to renounce the pure and to want from the words called on nothing that their relation to the assembled reminders cannot allow them to have, nothing that cannot be intelligibly projected from the assembled reminders.  But that is not all:  fully to integrate plainly is to come to rest, to peace, even if only momentarily, in the plain.  It is to come to struck by the very plainness of the plain, by our own plainness.  It is to see how the very homeliness and familiarity of the plain allow it to be the foundations of our inquiries, despite our inability normally to see it functioning so.  It is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful.  But that is still not all:  fully to integrate philosophically is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful, all the while still seeing it as plain, all the while refusing to transfigure the plain into the pure. Doing this would not be a matter of quickly and gestaltly shifting back and forth but would instead be the actualizing of a specific (cultivated) capacity to be awed by the humble, to find the sublime in the everyday.  If we could do this, the plain could satisfy our deep intellectual need.  But we would have made it so by rotating the axis of our examination.

I recall Chesterton’s words from Orthodoxy:

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

“Objects of Comparison”: St. John the Evangelist’s Method

August 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, William Temple, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

One marked characteristic of the mind of the Evangelist, or of the Beloved Disciple, is worth mention.  He often records argument in debate, but he does not argue from premises to conclusions as a method of apprehending truth.  Rather he puts together the various constituent parts of truth and contemplates them in their relations to one another.  Thus he seems to say “look at A; now look at B; now at C; now at B C; now at A C; now at D and E; now at A B E;  now at C E”, and so on in any variety of combination that facilitates new insight.  It is the method of artistic, as distinct from scientific, apprehension, and is appropriate to truth which is in no way dependent on, or derived from, other truth, but makes its own appeal to reason, heart and conscience.

William Temple, Readings In St. John’s Gospel, xxi-xxii

Some Preparatory Remarks for a Class

August 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy 7 Comments

There are no shallows in philosophy, no knee-deep, shoreline waters.  It is abysmal from horizon to horizon.

Nothing we read will be textbook-like.  That is, nothing we read will begin easy, with starters, and proceed gradually through middling difficult intermediates, and on to truly difficult finalities.  So you will not likely get better as you read straight ahead.  You get better backtracking, as you re-read:  the intermediates come into view on a second or third reading; the finalities only after long frequentation, sometimes life-long re-readings.  (You must learn to cultivate the pleasures while overcoming the challenges of re-reading!)  Re-reading is the analog, in reading philosophy, of working through a textbook.

To make progress in philosophy, you need a high confusion threshold.  You have to be capable of being, willing to be, thoroughly confused without falling into despair.  And you have to be willing to enter into confusion again and again, even while not seeing any exit from it.  The exit, if there is one, is always “across a step or two of dubious twilight” (to borrow a phrase from Robert Browning).  No one who refuses to enter, or who will make no settlement in that twilight, that confusion, will ever be a philosopher.

The Structure of Philosophical Investigations (and the Tractatus)

July 28, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

Here are a couple of paragraphs from a current draft of a paper of mine.  It touches on a point I have been concerned to make in more than one place of late, a point about the structural similarity of TLP and PI.

In TLP and PI, the concentration of metaphilosophical remarks occurs in the dialectical middle (a middle not necessarily the same as its paginal middle): the 4s in the TLP and in 89-133 in PI. Rhetorically, each of the books is a large epanados, a chiasmus. That is, each of the books is organized spatially around a center or middle. Each book has the structure, roughly, of a large ‘x’, with the metaphilosophical remarks stationed at the crux of the ‘x’. (A handy example of a small epanados is Unamuno’s false but memorable sentence, “Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”) The similar chiastic structures of the two books has not been stressed as it should be.

Placing the remarks as Wittgenstein does is a broad hint about how not to understand them. It is a broad hint not to think, among other things, that the remarks can be understood in isolation from the other non-metaphilosophical remarks that stand to the left of them and to the right of them. I like to think of PI as unified by both a centripetal and a centrifugal energy, the first the movement of the left-hand and right-hand remarks inward toward the center, and the second the movement of the center outward toward both the left-hand and right-hand remarks.

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.