For the modern philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes, our immediate and basic experience of subjectivity occurs in an internal or reflective experience whereby I discover, by a sort of turning back of my own mental attention upon itself, that I am able to see, immediately, incontestably, that I exist at least as a stream of conscious states. Thought discovers that it always has this power to attend to itself; the mind has the ontological structure of existence-for-itself. For consciousness to exist is for it to be continually aware of itself, to be its own witness.
This reflexive experience is immediate and non-discursive; let us call it immanent reflection. There is an eclipse of the body functions and their interactions with the world; thought experiences itself directly, without the interposition of the body or the world, and even comes to wonder if it could then exist without the body and without the world. In turning back reflexively upon itself it seems to form a circuit with itself such that it not only becomes its own witness, but closes itself to outside observation. Its essential nature, which is to exist reflexively for-itself, is not mediated by anything extended or sensibly observable; the mind seems, then, not only to be its own witness, but to be its sole possible witness.
Category Archives: Philosophy
The Vocational Teacher
From josh’s blog:
A teacher who feels called to a vocation will feel all the more unhappy at inviting any student freely to leave what education is to be had rather than take it; like a priest who says, sorry, my child, if you can be saved, it’s not by me.
Indeed. Inviting someone to leave is not always the same as wanting them to go.
Secession
Philosophy has seceded from the Republic of Letters. Why is that?
Plato on The What and the How (but Especially the How)
…[I]t is barely possible for knowledge to be engendered of an object naturally good, in a man naturally good; but if his nature is defective, as is that of most men, for the acquisition of knowledge and the so-called virtues, and if the qualities he has have been corrupted, then not even Lynceus could make such a man see. In short, neither quickness of learning nor a good memory can make a man see when his nature is not akin to the object, for this knowledge never takes root in an alien nature; so that no man who is not naturally inclined and akin to justice and all other forms of excellence, even though he may be quick at learning and remembering this and that and other things, nor any man who though akin to justice, is slow at learning and forgetful, will ever attain the truth that is attainable about virtue. Nor about vice, either, for these must be learned together, just as the truth and error about any part of being must be learned together, through long and earnest labor…Only when all of these [instruments]–names, definitions, and visual and other perception–have been rubbed against one another and tested, pupil and teacher asking and answering questions in good will and without envy–only then, when reason and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, can the illuminate the nature of any object. (Seventh Letter, 334a-b)
A Quick Thought on Plato
I have been teaching lots of Plato lately: The Theaetetus in my Intro to Phil class; the Euthydemus and the Phaedrus (so far) in Ancient; and I’m doing a reading group on the Symposium (using Shelley’s translation–edited and introduced by the inimitable David O’Conner). It’s been a long time since I have been so Plato supersaturated. One thing that has struck me is the depth of Plato’s engagement with sophistry–and just how difficult he finds isolating the threat of sophistry to be: I don’t think I realized before just how formidable and how central a philosophical problem sophistry itself is for Plato. Part of what makes it so formidable and so central is the remarkable way in which, over and over, sophistry looks more like philosophy than philosophy itself does. (Put in other terms, it is the sophists who look like the rationalists, Socrates who looks like the irrationalist.)
Sophistry is internal to philosophy; philosophy cannot eliminate (the possibility of) sophistry without eliminating (the possibility of) itself. And so Socrates’s war with the sophists never ends, even if battles sometimes do.
I know this is a leap, but (what the hell) I will make it: one of my chief complaints about the self-understanding of many analytic philosophers I know is their easy confidence that philosophy as they do it can eliminate (the possibililty of) sophistry through a new acquist of ever more sternly regulated techniques–a technique for clarity, a technique for rigor, a technique for explicitness. But of course it is just this elevation of and reliance on technique that typifies sophistry. Now, by that I do not mean that these analytic philosophers I know are sophists. They aren’t—mostly. But they are far closer to sophistry than they know. What is meant to safeguard them from sophistry is what keeps them exposed to it.
Draft of MMP Talk
Here is a draft of a talk I am to give soon. I was asked to present something that might inspire majors and non-majors, and to do something more like what I would do in a class than what I would do giving a conference paper. This is the result so far. It is a formalization of the sort of thing I might do in an upper-level class. Since I think of it as a talk and not a paper, it is not bedecked with all the scholarly niceties–footnotes or full footnotes, etc. Most of the footnotes are really just drawers in which I have stashed useful quotations or (I hope) brief, helpful clarifications. Comments welcome.
Keeping Your Distance: More on Merleau-Ponty (Philosophical Questions 6)
Just as we do not speak for the sake of speaking but speak to someone of something or of someone, and in this initiative of speaking an aiming at the world and at the others is involved upon which is suspended all that which we say; so also the lexical signification and even the pure significations which are deliberately reconstructed, such as those of geometry, aim at a universe of brute being and of coexistence, toward which we were already thrown when we spoke and thought, and which, for its part, by principle does not admit the procedure of objectifying or reflective approximation, since it is at a distance, by way of horizon, latent or dissimulated. It is that universe that philosophy aims at, that is, as we say, the object of philosophy—but here never will the lacuna be filled in, the unknown transformed into the known; the “object” of philosophy will never come to fill in the philosophical question, since this obturation would take from it the depth and distance that are essential to it. The effective, present, ultimate and primary beings, the thing itself, are in principle apprehended in transparency through their perspectives, offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them, as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness their continued being—to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement, who is therefore not a nothingness the full being would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment. It is necessary to comprehend perception as this interrogative thought which lets the perceived world be rather than posits it, before which the things form and undo themselves in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no. (The Visible and the Invisible)
In one of the essays in Signs, MMP says this about seeing: “Seeing is that strange way of rendering ourselves present while keeping our distance…” In his lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy”, he talks of philosophy as the Utopia of possession at a distance. And he goes on from the long passage I have quoted above to talk of philosophy as a way of encountering what is far-off as far-off. Has any philosopher ever made vision more definitive of philosophy than MMP? When MMP thinks about philosophical questions and answers, he thinks in terms of seeing and of what is seen. Distance is central: “To possess ourselves we must begin by abandoning ourselves; to see the world we must first withdraw from it.” But the distance must be a tethered distance: it is a distance from something that is a way of rendering ourselves present to it, even while we remain distanced: “A being which is in principle at a distance, in regard to which distance is a bond but with which there can be no question of coincidence.” Given this, and given his conception of philosophy as interrogative, it is perhaps unsurprising that MMP comes to understand seeing itself as interrogative. But if seeing is asking, how is the asking answered? By having its astonishment confirmed. And that means…what? It means, I take it, that interrogative seeing reveals things as they thing and unthing, glidingly form and unform themselves, but in a way that is beneath, before, any yes or no, anything that would seem like a standard answer to a standard question. (Interrogative seeing chips the sediment of traditon and habit and knowingness off things, the sediment that works like sand in the gears of things, keeping them frozen or relatively frozen, unable or nearly unable to glide.) But since what I interrogatively see is of this sort, I can get it no nearer to me, and I cannot treat it as itself an answer to any traditional philosophical question. I witness the instructive spontaneity of and in things, but that spontaneity neither confirms nor disconfirms standard philosophical questions, although it can, I take it, render those standard questions null or reveal them as sedimented and sedimenting. Or, to put the matter differently, when we ask the standard questions, but not in the standard way, when the questions themselves become open-natured orientings upon Being, then the questions, while still not answered, create a free space; and, in that free space, there is
the disclosure of a Being that is not posited because it has no need to be, because it is silently behind all our affirmations, negations, and even behind all formulated questions, not that it is a matter of forgetting them in its silence, not that it is a matter of imprisoning it in our chatter, but because philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another…
Indeed, so understood, philosophy would seem impossible–it would be the rendering commensurate, first one way and then another, of two incommensurates; yes, it would seem impossible; except that the re-commensuration, the reconversion, happens on MMP’s pages, in a hard-won language that speaks silences and silences speech.
More anon.
Philosophical Questions 5: The Approach to What is Far-Off as Far-Off
Since I am on a Merleau-Ponty spree…
Just as we do not speak for the sake of speaking but speak to someone of something or of someone, and in this initiative of speaking an aiming at the world and at the others is involved upon which is suspended all that which we say; so also the lexical signification and even the pure significations which are deliberately reconstructed, such as those of geometry, aim at a universe of brute being and of coexistence, toward which we were already thrown when we spoke and thought, and which, for its part, by principle does not admit the procedure of objectifying or reflective approximation, since it is at a distance, by way of horizon, latent or dissimulated. It is that universe that philosophy aims at, that is, as we say, the object of philosophy—but here never will the lacuna be filled in, the unknown transformed into the known; the “object” of philosophy will never come to fill in the philosophical question, since this obturation would take from it the depth and distance that are essential to it. The effective, present, ultimate and primary beings, the thing itself, are in principle apprehended in transparency through their perspectives, offer themselves therefore only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them, as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness their continued being—to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement, who is therefore not a nothingness the full being would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment. It is necessary to comprehend perception as this interrogative thought which lets the perceived world be rather than posits it, before which the things form and undo themselves in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no.
Our discussion…announces to us another paradox of philosophy, which distinguishes it from every problem of cognition and forbids us to speak in philosophy of a solution: as an approach to what is far-off as far-off, it is also a question put to what does not speak. It asks of our experience of the world what the world is before it is a thing one speaks of and which is taken for granted, before it has been reduced to a set of manageable, disposable significations; it directs this question to our mute life, it addresses itself to that compound of the world and of ourselves that precedes reflection, because the examination of the significations themselves would give us the world reduced to our idealizations and our syntax. But in addition, what it finds in thus returning to the sources, it says. It is itself a human construction, and the effort, in the best of cases, will take its place among the artefacts and products of culture, as an instance of them. If this paradox is not an impossibility, and if philosophy can speak, it is because language is not only the depository of fixed and acquired significations, because its cumulative power itself results from a power of anticipation or prepossession, because one speaks not only of what one knows, so as to set out a display of it—but also because one does not know, in order to know it—and because language in forming itself expresses, at least laterally, an ontogenesis of which it is a part. But from this it follows that the words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin. Hence it is a question whether philosophy as reconquest of brute or wild being can be accompanied by the resources of elegant language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say. (The Visible and the Invisible, 101-2)
For the purposes of my fitful reflections on Philosophical Questions, I really needed only the first paragraph above. But the second paragraph is so deliciously rich I could not resist adding it—and, I note, the second is also part of Merleau-Ponty’s response to the apparent plight of philosophy he describes in a passage I quoted earlier this week (The “Work” of the Philosopher). Quoting that passage, as I did, without continuation, creates a somewhat misleading impression: but it is true that Merleau-Ponty takes the ability of philosophy to speak as a problem (perhaps the problem), and his reason for so doing is well described in that earlier quotation. The other fascinating feature of the second paragraph is its intended self-application to Merleau-Ponty’s language, its way of shedding light on the prolonged enigma of Merleau-Ponty’s prose. I will comment on this passage soon, as well as returning to finish up with comments on an earlier passage from Rush Rhees.
One other quick thought: Merleau-Ponty’s contrast between two uses of language in the second paragraph, one “elegant” the other “charged with philosophy”, relates quite closely to F. R. Leavis contrast between the Augustan and the “exploratory-creative” use of language. It is too bad Leavis so underestimated the interest of philosophers in the problems that most mattered to him. Understandable, but too bad.
Merleau-Ponty on the “Work” of the Philosopher
The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he harkens to within himself. His entire “work” is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences… (From The Visible and the Invisible)
Philosophical Questions 4: Understanding Rhees
One of the striking things about Rhees’ passage is this: there is not only something deeply peculiar about the question that seeks understanding in philosophy, but there is also something deeply peculiar about the understanding which is sought. It is not something that can be formulated, stated. I will say more about that this week, but for now I just want to relate the idea to the work of Rhees himself.
Reading Rhees is itself a peculiar experience. In one sense, everything is simple, and its simplicity is further simplified by its repetitive, chant-like structure. Sentences are short. Rarely is any technical or recondite vocabulary employed. And yet, and yet Rhees work is extremely difficult. It is as though what he wants you to understand cannot be found in any of his sentences, no matter how often repeated. It is as though what he wants you to understand is somehow floating among the sentences, brought to presence by them, but embodied in no one of them nor in their conjunction. —So maybe Rhees has found a way of writing that is true to his conception of the understanding that is sought in philosophy?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 