Some days, between trying to get it right, trying too hard to make it come out right, and not being able to wait for it to strike me in the right way, interpretation wearies me, even sickens me, and I feel as if all real interpretation is just seeing and saying, and what I occupy myself with daily is instead nothing but saying I see, seeing if I can say, reading without seeing, seeing more than I can say, saying what should just be seen, reading instead of saying, saying instead of being. —Little knots of thinking and willing and wishing.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Philosophical Investigations and Three Kinds of Illusion
I am linking an essay of mine that has been hanging out in my Huh? File. That is, the file in which I put things I have written whose merits and demerits are unclear to me, or so nearly even that I cannot decide whether to invest any more effort in them. I wrote this for viva voce delivery. I don’t know that it deserves further work, deserves my trying to make it a full-on scholarly essay. If any of you have the time and the curiosity to read this, let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!
Lurching Restart
I’m back. Sorta. Anyway, I do expect to begin posting here again over the next few weeks. I’ve missed working on the blog and interacting with those of you who follow it. But I want to restart by shouldering Heidegger’s reminder:
There is a significant darkness in every philosophical endeavor, and even the most radical of these endeavors remains finite.
The God of the Philosophers (Herbert McCabe)
It is true that philosophers, generally speaking, are the most dogmatic of men, but they cannot claim any divine authority for their dogmatism. The kind of philosophical reflection that is called “natural theology” exists because God made the world and men. I think that this reflection can lead to the conclusion that there is a “beyond” that transcends all that we can know. Broadly speaking, we look at the world and it has a created look about it, which is as far as we can go. There used to be an idea (invented, I think, by Pascal) that the God of the philosophers was a different kind of being than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Now of course the God of the philosophers that Pascal had in mind may very well be different from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the God of my philosophy (and here I am at one with St. Thomas) is not well known enough to be different from Yahweh of the Old Testament. Philosophy tells us almost nothing about God, certainly not enough to set up a rival religion. –The New Creation
The Surpassing Strangeness of (Believing in) Sense-Data
A confession (although my regular readers will likely be unsurprised): For me, many of the most perplexing philosophical problems relate to philosophers themselves. Here’s one thing I mean by that. I find the arguments for sense-data unmoving–they are few in number and they radiate only a meager glory. But I find the fact that philosophers have come to believe (in some at least professional sense of that term) that there are sense-data deeply fascinating. How can that be? It staggers credulity. Surely no one, not Russell, not Moore, especially not Moore, really believes that there are sense-data?
When you look closely at supposed arguments for sense-data, you actually find little argumentation. Conjuration is what you find instead. Sense-data are made to appear (usually hands are waved, even while they are perhaps waived) via an open sesame–‘illusion’, ‘dream’, ‘error’, ‘double-vision”, ‘after-image’.
In his “Moore’s Theory of Sense-Data”, O. K. Bouwsma masterfully reveals how hard it is to succeed–or, how easy it is to fail–to get the conjuration right. Moore takes himself to have supplied instructions that will allow the reader to “pick out” a sense-datum. (Look at your hand and do as follows….) Bouwsma tries repeatedly to follow Moore’s instructions, but never manages to pick out a sense-datum–he keeps slipping, seeing his hand and failing to see the sense-datum. Bouwsma ends the essay by noting that he has not refuted Moore: and that is surely right. But we should also remember that a set of instructions is neither valid nor sound. It is either helpful or not. Bouwmsa has shown that Moore’s instructions are not helpful. They didn’t help Moore. Moore took himself to have picked out a sense-datum (he seems to have had one handy) and then asked himself how he had gone about it, assuming, we might say, that since he had succeeded (however he did, if he did), anyone following his instructions would succeed. Moore as reverse-engineer. How much help are Moore’s instructions for someone who does not (yet) believe in sense-data and is waiting for one to appear, waiting to succeed in picking one out, before believing in them? (I’m from Missouri; show me!)
Thursday Philosophy Thought for the Day
I do not want the world. I just want the box it came in.
Immanuel Kant
Lewis Carroll’s Purification
Lewis Carroll’s private journal, 7 January 1856:
Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
The Fly Bottle, Paul Horwich and Arthur Collins
“What is your aim in philosophy?–To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI 309)
My icon of Philosophical Investigations is an antique, green glass fly bottle that hangs on my back porch. Morning and evening most days, as I sit outside with my dogs, I eventually find myself staring at it and thinking yet again about philosophical problems, self-entrapment and freedom. The last few days, my thinking as been preoccupied by Paul Horwich’s preoccupation with the fly bottle in his Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. I am now at work on a new paper on Wittgenstein (for a collection on metaphilosophy) and in that paper I spend some time on Horwich’s book. Having more or less sorted what I want to say about it, I began at last to look to see what others had said, and found a nice NDPR review of the book by a philosopher I much respect, Arthur Collins. In the review is the following sober and sobering passage,
Like any other fan I enjoy this fly-in-a-bottle image. It is valid if it is itself not over-generalized. It says what happens to some philosophical problems according to some passages. It is not presented by Wittgenstein as the overall story for philosophy. Wittgenstein does not think that philosophy is an activity that always has the same formulaic structure, or that philosophy might close up shop one day. We should bear in mind that, the fly-bottle boast notwithstanding, Wittgenstein returns again and again to the same philosophical problems providing ever-new comparisons, examples, and insights. For instance, he had a life-long desire to deliver us from the idea of inner mental processes or entities that we can describe and report and that are somehow constitutive of our perceptual experience, sensation, remembering, believing, meaning, understanding, intending, and so on; constitutive, that is, of our conscious mental life. His work is full of brilliant passages that offer help in this project, but no completion of it is suggested. He did his brilliant and profound best. No one has matched his success. He did not think he had done anything like enough, and he was right.
And so is Collins.
Browning and Kierkegaard on Oblique or Indirect Communication
Browning from near the end of The Ring and the Book:
…learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
How look a brother in the face and say,
“Thy right is wrong, eyes has thou yet art blind;
Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length:
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”
Say this as silvery as tongue can troll–
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him
Are not so bad to bear–but here’s the plague
That all this trouble comes of telling truth.
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,
Nor recognizable by whom it left;
While falsehood would have done the work of truth.
But Art, –where in man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, –Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall, —
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever e’en Beethoven dived,–
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.
And now some of Kierkegaard, from The Point of View:
No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed. If it is an illusion that all are Christians–and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all. That is, one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion. Instead of wishing to have the advantage of being oneself that rare thing, a Christian, one must let the prospective captive enjoy the advantage of being the Christian, and for one’s own part have resignation enough to be the one who is far behind him–otherwise one will certainly not get the man out of his illusion.
Supposing then that a religious writer has become profoundly attentive to this illusion, Christendom, and has resolved to attack it which all the might at his disposal (with God’s aid, be it noted)–what then is he to do. First and foremost, no impatience. If he because impatient, he will rush headlong against it and accomplish nothing. A direct attack only strengthens the person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing which requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God–that he has lived under an illusion.
The religious writer must, therefore, first get into touch with men. That is, he must begin with aesthetic achievement. This is earnest-money. The more brilliant the achievement, the better for him…Therefore, he must have everything in readiness, though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his readers with him, so that with the momentum gained by devotion to the aesthetic they rush headlong into contact with the religious.
Comments to come.
More on Abiding in Hope
Abiding in hope…
Ed Mooney, over at Mists on the Rivers, has been mulling over the Heidegger passage I posted yesterday, as have I. The passage fascinates me in part because so many paths intersect in it: one from Socrates and his avowal of ignorance, one from Eckhart and his working-out of contemplation, one from St. Thomas and his condemnation of curiositas as a form of cognitive intemperance, one from Neitzsche and his linking the will to knowledge to the will to power, one from Husserl and his plying of the reduction, one from Marcel and his ideal of secondary reflection, and one from Wittgenstein and his contrast of explanation and description.
I cannot rise to the level of Ed Mooney–but let me say a bit more about the line from Marcel. Marcel distinguishes primary from secondary reflection by distinguishing between what we might call their ‘objects’, problems and mysteries. There is a lot to say about that distinction, and I have toyed with it on the blog a time or two (here for example). But a key idea is the idea of investigations that are, as it were, self-willed, where the investigator stands above, over and against, what he investigates, and one where the investigator is ‘object-willed’, moved to consideration of what she stands enmeshed in, alongside, and which calls out to her for consideration. We might say that in the first case, the investigation proceeds in light produced by the investigator, in the second, in light produced by the ‘object’ investigated. (Marcel works a far-reaching change on the popular understanding of mystery, which he regards, not as a darkness that overwhelms, but as a light that is blinding, –at first, but that becomes eventually the light in which we see light: think of Christ on Mount Tabor.) Heidegger seems to understand some things as worthy of thought, as calling out to us to think them, and to think in relationship to them. Curiosity all-too-often is something that we project upon the world–we think about what we regard as worthy of thought, instead of what calls us out of ourselves and into thought.
There seems to me little doubt that Walden (to hook up with Ed’s reflections) is not only a book about but a book that exemplifies secondary reflection. And I think that secondary reflection is at play too, albeit in different ways, in Socrates’ unknowledge, Echart’s contemplation, St. Thomas’ studiositas (the contrast to curiositas), Husserl’s reduction and Wittgenstein’s descriptions. It seems likely true even in Nietzsche’s transvalued knowledge. For all of these, the relationship between the investigator and the investigated transforms the investigation, and that must always already be on the mind of the investigator. The world does not bumble around us, a flattened pother of objects indifferent to their investigation and that we investigate willy-nilly as we choose, but instead structures and variegates itself around us, featuring objects that call us to thought and objects that do not. And what they reveal to us is not a matter of what we take from them but of what they give us, sometimes only after we have earned it by abiding in hope before them, listening even to their silence, waiting for them to speak. What we ‘know’ of them in such moments is not something that we can commodify, something that we can learn by banking on our own conceptions of reasoning about them, our own ability to wring answers to our questions from them.
Didn’t Aristotle push us this way, too, long ago, when he noted that the problem of method is entirely (note that word) determined by the object?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 