Category Archives: Metaphilosophy

Wittgensteinian Clarity and Silence

July 26, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

In PI 133, Wittgenstein talks of “complete clarity”. It is a clarity in which the philosophical problems completely disappear.  Wittgenstein’s notion of clarity is connected with the notion of silence. Let me now say something brief about that. To do so, I distinguish between transitive and intransitive silence.

Think of transitive silence as a silence that involves the silencing of something or other, of something that has more to say but is cut off, shut up. (“Her unexpected laughter silenced his protestation of love.”) Transitive silence gags the problems. Intransitive silence is simple silence, a quiet in which nothing is forceably quieted, an untaut stillness.  Peace.  Genuine peace, not a detente with the problems, in which they hold their peace.

Wittgenstein does not aim at transitive silence; he aims at intransitive silence.  He aims at a silence in which the philosophical problems have been played out, utterly exhausted, at a silence unbroken by problems. The problems have had their say, said their piece; they do not even murmur.  Noiselessly, they dissipate.  They go to their rest.  To be completely clear in philosophy, to have made the problems disappear, is to have achieved intransitive silence.

How can intransitive silence be achieved?  PI is the answer to that.  But let me isolate one central theme:  We can only achieve it by deeply sympathizing with the philosophical problems.  We must, as it were, become the problems; we must hear the words of the problem as if each of the words comes urgently from the depths of our own consciousness. And whatever words we speak to the problem must themselves come from us just as urgently and from just the same depth. The problems take possession of us and then we must exorcise them. So we can only cause the problems to disappear on pain of risking that the problems will take lifelong possession of us, that they will resist exorcism, that our heads will spin permanently.

Marcel on Popular Philosophy

July 19, 2011 By in Marcel, Metaphilosophy 2 Comments

A nice portion of Marcel:

…[S]ome scraps of philosophical thought conveyed through newspapers, magazines and ordinary conversations find their way to one extent or another into all minds.  Most of the time these scraps could just as well be burned like household garbage, and it is perhaps one of the more important functions of true philosophical thought to carry out this kind of trash-burning.

Reading “Reading Montaigne” 1

July 19, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne Leave a comment

Before turning to “Reading Montaigne”, I want to notice passages from Merleau-Ponty’s talk, “In Praise of Philosophy”.  It seems clear that Montaigne is in his mind throughout the talk, and evidence of this occurs just at its end:  Montaigne is given the final (quoted) words of the essay.  But earlier there are passages that provide undeclared portraiture of Montaigne.

The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.  When he limits himself to accepting ambiguity, it is called equivocation.  But among the great it becomes a theme; it contributes to establishing certitudes rather than menacing them.  Therefore it is necessary to distinguish good and bad ambiguity.  Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge.  They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said.  What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement…

And:

The enigma of philosophy (and of expression) is that sometimes life is the same to oneself, to others, and to the true.  These are the moments which justify it.  The philosopher counts only on them.  He will never accept to will himself against men, nor to will men against himself, nor against the true, nor the true against them.  He wishes to be everywhere at once, at the risk of never being completely anywhere.  His opposition is not aggressive; he knows that this often announces capitulation.  But he understands the rights of others and of the outside too well to permit any infringement.  If, when he is engaged in external enterprises, the attempt is made to draw him beyond the point where his activity loses the meaning which inspired it, his rejection is all the more tranquil in that it is founded on the same motives as his acceptance.  Hence the rebellious gentleness, the pensive engagement, the intangible presence which disquiets those who are with him.  As Bergson said of Ravaisson in a tone so personal that one imagines him to be speaking of himself:  “He gave no hold…He was the kind of man who does not offer sufficient resistance for one to flatter himself that he has ever seen him give way.”

The first passage bears importantly on the discussion of Montaigne’s skepticism (and so of his knowledge and his ignorance) in “Reading Montaigne” (“RM”), so I will be thinking of it when I get to that particular, difficult juncture.  Also, and related, both passages could be said to be portraiture of Socrates as well as of Montaigne.  In fact, just a bit later in the essay, Merleau-Ponty writes “We must remember Socrates” as the copestone for the section. But Merleau-Ponty’s Socrates shadows Montaigne’s Socrates.  Remember that Socrates finally eclipses various other heroes of Montaigne (like Cato the Younger) by the time of the essays in Book III, so it will be hard to describe Montaigne as he appears in them without also to some extent describing Socrates as he appeared then to Montaigne.  (By the way, since I have conjoined Socrates and Montaigne here, I note that the second passage instructively relates to my ongoing discussion of disposibility and that I in part chose it for that reason.  Oh, and one other parenthetical item, since I have mentioned Socrates:  I recall that Pierre Hadot makes interesting use of this talk of Merleau-Ponty’s in some of his work on Socrates, for example in What is Ancient Philosophy?)  I will later notice another passage from the talk when I discuss the section on Montaigne’s religion in “RM”; what Merleau-Ponty says of Socrates’ religion elucidates what he says of Montaigne’s.

I judge “RM” to have the following structure:  Introduction, Montaigne’s skepticism, Montaigne’s religion, Montaigne’s skepticism, and a critical summation of Montaigne, weaving all the earlier discussions together.  My hope is to take up first Montaigne’s skepticism, second his religion, third his stoicism, and finally to take up the summation.

Reading “Reading Montaigne”

July 18, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne 1 Comment

For a long time now I have wanted to explore Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Montaigne.  I plan to begin to do that here in the next few days.  Merleau-Ponty confines himself (at least for the purposes of quoting Montaigne) to Book III of the Essays.  These essays Donald Frame adjudges “[Montaigne’s] mellowest, his most individual, his most thoroughly human.”  I will confine myself to Book III too, as far as Montaigne goes.  I may, however, make use of more than just Merleau-Ponty’s Montaigne essay; I may sift through some other work by Merleau-Ponty.

Marcel on Disponibilité and Indisponibilité: Handy, Unhandy, Available, Unavailable

July 18, 2011 By in Marcel, Metaphilosophy Leave a comment

Continuing with the theme of disposability, here is a brief passage from The Mystery of Being, vol. 1.  Marcel comments on his own terms.

We come up against a notion here which seems to me of capital importance but for which it is difficult to find an idiomatic English equivalent—at least neither I, nor the English translator of my previous work, Being and Having, managed to do so. The French terms I use are disponibilité and indisponibilité.  Literally, in English, one would render these as availability and unavailability, but it might sound more natural if one spoke of handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that of having or not having, in a given contingency, one’s resources to hand or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is unhandy; I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls made upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals for help that may be made to him by the unfortunate. I mean rather that, over a much wider field, he will be incapable of sympathizing with other people, or even of imagining their situation. He remains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private experience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is incapable of breaking through. He is unhandy from his own point of view and unavailable from the point of view of others.

Kantian Skepticism and John McDowell

July 13, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, skepticism Leave a comment

In an earlier post, I mentioned the distinction (treated most fully in Jim Conant’s paper) between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism.  I want to say a bit more about the latter, particularly in relation to John McDowell’s work.

When I first fell hard for McDowell’s work, back in my days at Rochester (I had somehow, I am now not sure how, managed to get hold of a bootlegged draft of Mind and World), I was both deeply enamored of and quite puzzled by McDowell’s response to skepticism.  I suppose now I would say that, at the time, I simply did not surely grasp the category of ‘Kantian Skepticism’ and so kept reading McDowell as if he were supposed to be responding, straightforwardly, to the Cartesian skeptic—and that made McDowell’s response to skepticism seem oddly non-responsive, full of mazeways that all dead-ended. But, as I said, I was also enamored of his response; it seemed somehow right despite my puzzlement at it. My gut seemed to get it; my head lagged behind.

What I finally came to say to myself was something like this:  “McDowell is simply unperturbed by skepticism, that is, about skepticism of ‘External World’ variety.  Maybe that is because, for McDowell, the action is somewhere else.  The illusions that worry him are not (call them) ‘illusions of sense’, but instead ‘illusions of thought’.  His skeptical worry seems somehow more entangled with spontaneity than with receptivity, although of course he withstands any attempt to treat those two as if they could be clinically separated.  It is as though McDowell has found a way to “gain the whole world” but only “by (potentially) losing his own soul”.  McDowell’s illusions of thought are not merely dialectical illusions, say, but are instead illusions that one is in fact even having a thought.  But if skepticism can penetrate that far (to the capital city, as it were), what does it matter if we manage to hang on sense-certainty (to distant villages)?  Aren’t we lost?  Even worse, what sense can be made of the ‘we’ who may be lost?”

I put forward these remembered musings not because they are of sustained interest, but because they do, it seems to me, contain a moment of interest for Kantian skepticism.  Just in case it seemed as though Cartesian skepticism were a game played for the highest possible stakes, along comes Kantian skepticism to show that it is possible to up the ante.  Anyone who—as I now think McDowell does—aims to use gains made responding to Kantian skepticism against Cartesian skepticism bets his bottom dollar.  But maybe that is the way it is with skepticism:  we can only win from it in proportion to what we are willing to risk against it.  There is no low-risk high-reward gamble with skepticism.

Disposability, Availability

July 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, Socrates, Wittgenstein 15 Comments

Marcel’s term for ‘disposability’ is ‘disponibilité’.  Here it is translated as ‘availability’:

[Availability] of course does not mean emptiness, as in the case of an available dwelling (local disponible), but it means much rather an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift.  Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might say favours, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal.  It has sometimes been said of late , “Personality is vocation”.  It is true if we restore its true value to the term vocation, which is in reality a call, or more precisely the response to a call.  We must not, however, be led astray here by any mythological conception.  It depends, in fact, on me whether the call is recognised as a call, and strange as it may seem, in this matter it is true to say that it comes both from me and from outside me at one and the same time; or rather, in it we become aware of that most intimate connection between what comes from me and what comes from outside, a connection which is nourishing or constructive and cannot be reliquished without the ego wasting and tending toward death.

Perhaps we might make this clearer by pointing out that each of us from the very beginning, appears to himself and to others as a particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be, are not enough to provide a solution.  I use the term problem absolutely against my will, for it seems to be quite inadequate.  Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working, even supposing I manage to take him to pieces in the process, I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being?  We must even go further and say that such a knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive, it does no less than denude its object of the one thing he has which is of value and so it degrades him effectively.  That means–and there is nothing which is more important to keep in view–that the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God…

I supply this quotation as a commentary on and extension of my earlier post, Making Ourselves Disposable.  One striking thing about this, for anyone who is a fan of Cavell’s work, and especially of his essay, “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein”, is how much like Cavell it sounds, and how much light it sheds on at least one meaning of the title of his essay.  I am quite sure that one sense of ‘availability’ in the title is Marcel’s sense.  The second paragraph reads like a digest of Cavell’s thinking about Other Minds, setting up, as it does, Cavell’s crucial understanding of acknowledgement.

Making Ourselves Disposable

July 10, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Socrates, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

One use of a term I have lately been fascinated by is Gabriel Marcel’s use of ‘disposable’ (at least that is the word used in the translation I am reading; I have little, really no French).  For Marcel, the term represents a spiritual ideal, a goal to be worked toward as one matures in Christian life.  But it also represents for him a philosophical ideal, a goal of philosophizing—although I admit that he makes this less clear.  Marcel’s use of the term overlaps interestingly with the Authorized Version’s use of ‘humble’ and of ‘meek’. But Marcel does not use the term merely as synonymous with the AV’s use of either. It also overlaps to an extent with the AV’s use of  ‘charity’, both ‘love’ and ‘gift-giving’, and it is connected by important lines of filiation with its use of ‘hope’.

The ideal is to make yourself disposable to others, to be willing to give them not only the first word in philosophical investigation, but also the last word too.  It is to philosophize in a way free of possessions, where possessions are understood as, say, theses, some philosophy or other that guides, indeed requires, my pushing or pulling, forcing or resisting for the sake of some philosophical claim or other.  These possessions make me philosophically non-disposable.  Marcel writes,

I wonder if we could not define the whole spiritual life as the sum of activities by which we try to reduce in ourselves the part played by non-disposability.

And he treats non-disposability as “inseparable from a form of self-adherence”.  Treated as a philosophical goal, being disposable would be to understand philosophy as practiced readiness of response, as a willingness to hear what another has to say and to work through that from the inside, from the side of the person who says it.  Philosophical progress would be made by reducing in our responsiveness the non-disposability that to some degree or other inevitably infects it.  As I read him, Plato’s Socrates aims for a form of non-disposability; as I read him, Wittgenstein aims for a form of it too.  Wittgenstein’s desire for it shows (it seems to me) in the way that he begins Philosophical Investigations, giving the first words to Augustine and speaking himself only in response to Augustine; it shows in his interest in what he calls “the liberating word” and in his willingness to yield wholly to the other prerogative over whether any word is in fact liberating.  (The poet, John Ciardi, somewhere speaks of the aim of poetry as the speaking of “the enlarging word”, an idea that I take to be related to Wittgenstein’s of “the liberating word”. I reckon that the ideas of “the enlarging word” and of “the liberating word” are not merely showings of an aim at being non-disposable, but of an aim at making the other more fully disposable to himself and to others.  The image of being a fly trapped in a fly-bottle (a passage that my talk of Wittgenstein’s aim makes unavoidable) I take to be an image of finding oneself non-disposable, both to oneself and to others.)  Cavell has insisted on this feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, as has Cora Diamond, in her underscoring of Wittgenstein’s desire to philosophize in a way that does not lay down requirements.

Socrates’ desire for disposability shows in his repeated, often deeply frustrated hope that his interlocutor will state what the interlocutor actually believes, whether about piety or about courage or about knowledge; it shows in his understanding of himself as a philosophical midwife.  (Look again at the almost unbelievably wonderful passage in the Theaetetus 148e-151d; it deserves reading and re-reading, with, as Burnyeat memorably says, “feeling as well as thought”.)  It shows in his deference to the Logos.  It shows in his averment of his own ignorance.  Virtually all that Socrates does shows his aversion to philosophical self-adherence.

I will return to this again.

Motto?

June 30, 2011 By in Albritton, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Rogers Albritton

Philosophy, as he [Wittgenstein] means to be practicing it “simply puts everything before us, [it] neither explains nor deduces anything” and it “may not advance any kind of theory” (Philosophical Investigations I 126, 109). Its aim is, rather, “complete clarity,” which “simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (ibid., 133). I’d like nothing better. Moreover, I believe it: the problems (at any rate, those I care most about) should indeed, as he says, completely disappear. That’s how they look to me. I love metaphysical and epistemological theories, but I don’t believe in them, not even in the ones I like. And I don’t believe in the apparently straightforward problems to which they are addressed. However, not one of these problems has actually done me the kindness of vanishing, though some have receded. (I don’t have sense-data nearly as often as I used to.) And if there is anything I dislike more in philosophy than rotten theories, it’s pretenses of seeing through the “pseudoproblems” that evoked them when in fact one doesn’t know what’s wrong and just has a little rotten metatheory as to that.