Category Archives: Philosophical Investigations

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.