Category Archives: Philosophy

Easter Day, Robert Browning (Poem)

August 12, 2013 By in Browning, Philosophy, poetry, religion Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Here are the opening lines of Browning’s awesome “Easter Day“.  Although my primary intent is eventually to say something about the relationship between Browning’s dramatis personae and Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, I thought it might be useful to preface that with a bit of Browning speaking, as it were, in propria persona, and speaking in a way that, to anyone who knows Kierkegaard, will sound remarkably familiar.  The poem is a dialectical tour de force, a deep and deepening investigation of all the ways in which faith is denatured, each a way of making it easy or easier to be a Christian.

Easter Day

HOW very hard it is to be
A Christian! Hard for you and me,
—Not the mere task of making real
That duty up to its ideal,
Effecting thus complete and whole,
A purpose or the human soul—
For that is always hard to do;
But hard, I mean, for me and you
To realise it, more or less,
With even the moderate success
Which commonly repays our strife
To carry out the aims of life.
“This aim is greater,” you may say,
“And so more arduous every way.”
—But the importance of the fruits
Still proves to man, in all pursuits,
Proportional encouragement.
“Then, what if it be God’s intent
“That labour to this one result
“Shall seem unduly difficult?”
—Ah, that’s a question in the dark—
And the sole thing that I remark
Upon the difficulty, this;
We do not see it where it is,
At the beginning of the race:
As we proceed, it shifts its place,
And where we looked for palms to fall,
We find the tug’s to come,—that’s all.

And Now for a Moment in Kant’s Imagination…?

August 9, 2013 By in Existentialism, Kant, Philosophy Tags: , , Leave a comment

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From Asher Moore’s “Existentialism and the Tradition”:

In Kant’s synthesis, transcendence was prior, existence derivative.  There is one place in his thought, however, at which it looks like he might reverse this order.  This is the concluding section of the Dialectic.  Leibniz’ pretensions to knowledge of self, other selves, and God have just been disposed of.  We have not yet been told, except in asides, that those realities are still there, busy changing into their second-act costumes.  Here on this watershed, and for just a moment, there is a sense that God, self and other selves are indeed present, but present as absent, as ideals and lures, as almost empty memories.

If one were determined to find nothing new in existentialism, to hold it derivative through and through, I think one would derive it, not really from Hume–who, except to the eyes of fondest affection, is too one-sided–but from this particular moment in Kant–this moment when, in Kant’s imagination, Hume stands alone on the battlefield, the unchallenged victor, but suddenly and poignantly moved by the grandeurs he has struck down.  For existentialists, transcendence, the ontological dimension, is present, but taken in its own inner sense, per se, it is present as an ideal, a standard of comparison–something regretted or hoped for, heard or plighted–a brave, comic pretension.

Browning’s Influence on Philosophers

August 8, 2013 By in Browning, Philosophy, poetry, writing Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

A bit of a side-step here.  I want to write about Browning and Kierkegaard, but I thought I would first mention something about Browning I find of interest.  Browning decisively influenced the thinking of a number of philosophers.  Let me mention two–Josiah Royce and William Temple.

Now of course Temple is not known as a philosopher; he is known as Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-44).  But Temple was trained as a philosopher and wrote philosophy (some I have previously mentioned on the blog).  Browning’s work was never far from Temple’s mind.  Proof of this is the stamp that Browning’s “A Death in the Desert” had on Temple’s understanding of the Gospel of John, itself the primary object of and impetus for Temple’s reflections throughout his life.

Browning was also, and perhaps more surprisingly, a constant stimulus to Royce.  Royce, so far as I know, mentions Browning far less often than does Temple, but he was perhaps as deeply indebted.  (Royce’s style, unlike Temple’s, makes little room for the direct use of poetry.  It is not that Royce’s style is wholly unliterary–it is not–but rather that it lacks the open texture of Temple’s.)  Certainly, prolonged contact with Royce’s works on Christianity reveals Browning there, supplying much of substance and almost all of the atmosphere.

I make this side-step really just so that I can underscore something about Browning’s poetry that engrosses me–it’s potential to be taken up into prose reflections, to supply something like theses or claims, remaining all the while, and unmistakably, poetry.

Critics sometimes seize this potential of Browning’s poetry and use it like a stick to beat him, presumably thinking that poetry that is so available to philosophy must have somehow or other (form not inseparable from content?) failed as poetry.  But I think that no one can deny that Browning is a poet unless that denial is theory-driven–specifically driven by a theory that has nourished itself on a one-sided diet of examples.

Infested by Sphinxes–Collingwood

July 27, 2013 By in Philosophy, reading Tags: , , 5 Comments

From Collingwood’s consistently delightful The New Leviathan (2.54):

Man’s world is infested by Sphinxes, demonic beings of mixed and monstrous nature which ask him riddles and eat him if he cannot answer them, compelling him to play a game of wits where the stake is his life and his only weapon is his tongue.

What Does Husserl Want?

July 19, 2013 By in Husserl, logic, Philosophy, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

I am preparing for a seminar on Plato, the Sophists, and psychologism this Fall.  Among the texts we will read is (sections of) Husserl’s Logical Investigations.  I have been working on the early sections on logic this morning.  Husserl complains of the incompleteness of all the sciences; none have that “inner clarity and rationality”:  as theories, they are not “crystal-clear”, the functions of all their concepts and propositions are not fully intelligible, not all of their propositions have been exactly analyzed.  –My question is this:  is this crystalline clarity Husserl demands itself crystal-clear, fully intelligible?  If not even mathematics (to take the crucial case) exhibits this crystalline clarity, then what grasp of what Husserl wants do we have?  Do we want a more mathematical mathematics?  Hard to see how that would help, since it would presumably only apply the lack of inner clarity and rationality to itself.  (And presumably not in a “fight fire with fire”-ish way.)

Now it is true that, in an important sense, Husserl attempts to explain what he wants across much of the rest of the book, often enough by the example of his phenomenological practice.  But it remains necessary to be aware that we do not really know what Husserl wants in the early sections:  clarity is something about which we have to become clear.  (Consider how distant Wittgenstein’s desiderated clarity is from Husserl’s.)

A Lack of a Sense of Reality?

July 16, 2013 By in Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas Leave a comment

Philosophers, you know, are disconnected, hot air balloons climbing to the height at which they pop in one distant burst; they are abstracted and lost in someone’s thoughts, sometimes their own; they are characterized by a peculiarly undistressed but by-their-fingertips hold on what is real.  –Consider this little turn from St. Thomas, offering a help for sorrow.  “Take a warm bath,” he says, “and get some sleep.”  Sheesh.  Only a philosopher…

Staying Put

June 17, 2013 By in education, Philosophy, Plato, religion, Self-knowledge, Socrates, teaching, writing Tags: , , 4 Comments

Here are a few lines from Fr. Stephen Freeman, addressing place and stability:

In monastic tradition, a monk makes four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Most people are familiar with the first three but not with the fourth. In classical monastic practice it meant that a monk stayed put: he did not move from monastery to monastery. It was not a new idea. Before this vow was formalized in various Rules, there was already the saying from the Desert: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

I have been lucky to have been able to stay put.  Perhaps, if I had been more talented or more ambitious or both, I would not have stayed put.  Perhaps I would have aimed more seriously at career upward mobility.  But I was not more talented and was not and am not more ambitious.  So, here I am.  So, here I stay.  Here I hope to stay–until I stay put permanently, resting, I hope, in peace.

When I got my job at Auburn, my teacher, Lewis White Beck, was very pleased.  He grew up not far from here.  His brother still lived (in those days) just north up 85, in Westpoint, Ga.  (I used to visit him to hear stories of Lewis’ childhood.)  Beck counseled me about Auburn:  “Don’t go and leave.  Stay and make it the kind of place where you want to be.”  The philosophy department at Auburn has become that, although I deserve little of the credit.  But I do think that staying has made me more of the person I have wanted to be.  I do not mean I am not deeply flawed; of course I am, of course.  Still, staying put has been a revelator and tutor:  I have learnt something about fidelity and commitment, about what it means to work with others to build something bigger and better than the builders.  I have learnt something about being unknown and unremarked, and about first being restively reconciled to it and later accepting it and still later coming to desire it.  “Live hidden” is good advice.  (Beck was once asked by the NYTimes (if I remember correctly) if they could do a feature on him, a sort of Elder Philosopher at Home bit.  He declined, telling them that he was determined to enjoy “the beneficent obscurity of senectitude”.   –Is that a line from Gibbon?)  I guess I still have a few years before I enter my senectitude, but it is not too early for obscurity to be beneficent.

As I grow older, my classes and my students fascinate me more than ever before.  Philosophical problems incarnate are now my meditation.  Philosophical problems disincarnate no longer exert much pull on me.  Perhaps what I have come to appreciate more fully is that there is a strict specificity about philosophical problems–they exist only in a specific person and they can be grappled with only in conjunction with that person and they can be solved–in whatever sense they are solved–only by that person.  Where I am not that person, I can help or hurt (from the lectern, from the page); but I can only help or hurt; but I can no more solve the problem for him or her than I can be prudent for him or her.  Philosophical problems arise from and are finally only responsive to the living experience of a specific person.  I believe I have learnt that from Socrates–himself a master of staying put.

As Robert Frost once recommended:  “Don’t get converted.  Stay.”

Merleau-Ponty Underwrites Wittgenstein?

April 16, 2013 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

From The Visible and the Invisible:

We need only take language…in the living or nascent state, with all its references, those behind it, which connect it to the mute things it interpellates, and those it sends before itself and which make up the world of things said–with its movement, its subtleties, its reversals, its life, which expresses and multiplies tenfold the life of the bare things.  Language is a life, is our life and the life of the bare things.  Not that language takes possession of life and reserves it for itself:  what would there be to say if there existed nothing but things said?  it is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as if it spoke only of itself:  language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave.  But because he has experienced within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as the bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but–if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and foliation–the most valuable witness to Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it, that the vision itself, the thought itself, are, as has been said, “structured as language,” are articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing or something else…Philosophy itself is language, rests on language; but this does not disqualify it from speaking of language, nor from speaking of the pre-language and of the mute world which doubles them:  on the contrary, philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being.

Guy Davenport on Wittgenstein

March 29, 2013 By in Philosophy, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , , 15 Comments

[Wittgenstein] was committed to absolute honesty.  Nothing–nothing at all–was to be allowed to escape analysis.  He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach.  The world was to him an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig iron.  Can we think about the lump?  What is thought?  What is the meaning of ‘can’, of ‘can we’, of ‘can we think’?  What is the meaning of ‘we’?  What does it mean to ask what is the meaning of ‘we’?  If we know the answer to these questions on Monday, are the answers valid on Tuesday?  If I answer them at all, do I think the answer, believe the answer, know the answer, or imagine the answer?

Completed Draft of New Talk

March 19, 2013 By in Kant, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Plato, Self-knowledge, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Since I posted bits of this already–its first part yesterday and its last part a while back–I thought I would go ahead and post the whole thing.  I find writing talks for audiences that will include both philosophers and non-philosophers especially hard.  I wish I were better at it.

Philosophical Investigations and Three Kinds of Illusion:  A Talk