Category Archives: Philosophy

Hamann and the Tradition

July 31, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, religion Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

Hamann and the Traditon (Northwestern University Press) is just out.  My essay:  “Metaschematizing Socrates:  Hamann, Kierkegaard and Kant on the Value of the Enlightenment” is included.  The editor, Lisa Marie Anderson, did a nice job with the volume.  Lots of good stuff on Hamann—including especially an essay by my friend, John Betz, who is the Hamann guy (not that that’s all he is, by any means).

(I just noticed an annoying mistake in my paper, no doubt due to my faulty proofreading.  The final footnote should compare Socrates to St. John the Baptist, not to Saint Paul, as it does. )

Philosophical Questions 3

July 28, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, skepticism Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Philosophical puzzlement:  unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers.  If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached.  But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way.  –Rush Rhees

A most remarkable passage.  There’s much that I’d like to say about it, but I want for now to limit myself to its bearing on the issue of philosophical questions and answers.  Take Rhees to be pointing out just how hard it is to see how deep philosophical questions go, and so how hard it is to see how peculiar the answers to them must be.

Philosophical question threaten the very possibility of understanding altogether, but this means that the questions threaten their very possibility as questions, and threaten the very possibility of answers to them.  The questions challenge the reality of discourse, of understanding:  but how can a question, a mode of discourse, something that must be understood, challenge the reality of discourse or understanding?  Success would seem failure; but failure cannot be success, can it?  What sorts of questions are these?

More soon.

Rhees on Philosophical Puzzlement (or, Philosophical Questions 2)

July 15, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Philosophical puzzlement:  unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers.  If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached.  But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way.

This is from Rush Rhees’ Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse.  I will have a say about it over the next few days.

Nauseated

June 21, 2012 By in Philosophy Tags: , , , , 9 Comments

It is Sarte’s birthday.  I find myself conflicted.

Coming of age philosophically in a department supersaturated by the methods and work of Chisholm and Gettier was difficult for me.  My sympathies were wider than that, and, even worse,  I had serious reservations about the Propose-a-Definition-Cast-about-for-a-Counterexample style of philosophizing I was being taught.  In those days, the president of Rochester was a philosopher, Dennis O’Brien.  O’Brien had written a dissertation on Wittgenstein (under Richard McKeon, believe it or not), taught at Princeton (where he wrote a book, Hegel on Reason in History), and served as president of Bucknell before coming to Rochester.  (Those familiar with the secondary literature on Wittgenstein may know O’Brien’s fine paper, “The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Thought”, one of the earliest papers challenging the Two Wittgensteins orthodoxy, and containing the exactly appropriate continuation of the famous Wittgensteinian advice, “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use”–“And don’t ask for the use, either!”)  At Rochester, O’Brien discomfitted the faculty by teaching courses on Sartre.  The TA assignment for those courses was disrelished by graduate students:  after all, the courses were on Sartre, Sartre!—and they required a lot of preparation because O’Brien’s presidential duties could any week call him away leaving the grad student with a 3-hour lecture to give on some portion of Being and Nothingness.  Predictably, given the view in the department that I would read anything (not exactly a compliment), I got tabbed for the assignment. It was a lot of work, but I learnt a lot about Sartre and a lot about teaching from O’Brien.  I am in his debt.

But, Sartre.  Well, I never know what to say about him.  There’s so much I admire and so much I don’t.  Undoubtedly, the man could write–and there are many moments of profound phenomenological insight in his work.  Still, there is something wrong with it.  Marcel, I believe, has helpful things to say about that.  In an aside in “Testimony and Existentialism”, Marcel quotes Sartre’s B & N discussion of gifts and giving, which opens with “Gift is a primitive form of destruction…Generosity is, above all, a destructive function”.  Marcel responds:

I doubt if there exists a passage in Sartre’s work which is more revealing of his inability to grasp the genuine reality of what is meant by we or of what governs this reality, that is precisely the capacity to open ourselves to others.

I admit that seems right to me.  I have sometimes teased students in my classes by commenting that many forms of existentialism can be produced via a formula:  Choose one of the seven deadly sins.  Imagine someone held fast in the grip of the vice.  Now, treat that person as the norm of human existence, and the phenomenology of the vice as the phenomenology of existence per se.  Of course, I am teasing when I say this, but like most professorial humor it has a point, it is meant to shed some light.  In Henry Fairlie’s book, The Seven Deadly Sins Today, each chapter on a deadly sin is prefaced by a drawing by Vint Lawrence.  Here’s the drawing of envy.

Isn’t this a drawing of the Sartrean human?  Sideways keyhole spying, fingernail gnawing, distendly squatting, beingful of nothingness?

Of course, I could be wrong.

Language and Bewitchment: PI 109

June 1, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , , 7 Comments

A footnote from an old essay of mine:

Think of the instructive amphiboly in the (translation of the) concluding line of PI 109:  “Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”  How is this to be understood?  Is it (1) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence-by-means-of-language” or (2) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language”?

And then in the text proper:

The very thing which is to free us from confusion is the very thing which confused us to begin with.  The poison is also the antidote.

Abbot Theodore and Thoreau

June 1, 2012 By in Philosophy, religion, Self-knowledge, teaching, thoreau Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

Another brother asked the same elder, Abbot Theodore, and began to question him and to inquire about things he had never yet put into practice himself.  The elder said to him:  As yet you have not found a ship, and you have not put your baggage aboard, and you have not started to cross the sea:  can you talk as if you had already arrived in that city to which you planned to go?  When you have put into practice the things you are talking about, then speak from knowledge of the thing itself!

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Thoreau as Philosopher

May 24, 2012 By in Philosophy Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

Below is the Prefatory Statement I wrote for an issue of Reason Papers devoted to Thoreau that I edited back in the 90’s.  Ed Mooney’s recent blog entries on Thoreau have me thinking about Thoreau again.

Thoreau as philosopher: Why does this theme still seem a bit strange, a bit forced – like
an attempt to fob off something phoney on us? Well, one problem is that most of us
met Thoreau too early. We met him in adolescence, and we thought of him then as a quirky nature prose-poet; or, as a rustic rebel whose name connected up vaguely with peaceful political protest. Did we think of Thoreau as a philosopher? – No; we poeticized him; we rusticated him. How, then, to reclaim him?

At a time when philosophy is increasingly professionalized, Thoreau is worth reading
because he reminds us of the distinction – and of the relationship – between philosophy
professed and philosophy lived. Like the Greeks, Thoreau heard philosophy’s call, heard
philosophy call for a life, heard philosophy call for professing – in Thoreau’s case, for
writing. What Thoreau understood was that the authority of philosophical writing must
always be won anew, word by word, inkling by inkling. The authority of philosophical
writing is won anew not by displays of virtuosity, whether literary or argumentative, but
by displays of vitality, by finding words that incorporate, and are incorporated by, a
well-lived life. Philosophically authoritative words are words that stand face-to-face with
a well-lived life; such words and such a life reciprocally implicate one another. Thoreau
demonstrates his understanding of this by writing in the first-person and by providing
what he demands from others – “a simple and sincere account of his own life.” Clearly,
this understanding of philosophical authority is dangerous – by that I mean, has its dangers: empty self-obsession, stultifying idiosyncracy, blank unintelligibility. But perhaps worse than these dangers is the danger that such an understanding of philosophical writing renders philosophy written in its service unavailable to contemporary professional philosophy. Put crudely, the danger is that philosophy written in the service of such an understanding and contemporary professional philosophy will end up out of even spitting distance of one another. To contemporary professional philosophy, Thoreau’s writing is writing ad hominem, or worse, writing ad personam: philosophical writing conceived in a matrix of fallacies, not to be borne. If philosophy as Thoreau writes it and contemporary professional philosophy continue to recoil from each other, philosophy will lose much of what has made it admirable – its stubborn efforts to make ends meet, to keep body and soul together. Philosophy will then exist only as a zombie, or as a ghost, of its former self, demanding either voodoo or exorcism.

Thoreau’s philosophical writing alternately provokes and pacifies. It knots together
paradox and platitude. Thoreau does not write books to be held at arm’s length; he writes
books to be either pitched angrily or clutched greedily; or, maybe, both. Thoreau gives
and requires a live response, the response of a life. Call this Thoreau’s Concordian
Revolution: Copernicus taught us that our sun with all its furies is at the center of the
galaxy; Kant taught us that our mind with all its categories is at the center of space and
time; Thoreau teaches us that our life with all its forms is at the center of things. Kant set
reason after reason, because reason is fated to ask itself questions that it cannot answer.
Thoreau set life after life, because life is fated to ask itself questions it cannot answer.
Reason and life are alike antinomian: both require transcendental responses. Thoreau
requires that we read him against our lives, and through our lives.

Before clearing the way for the essays that follow, I acknowledge the overwhelming
debt this collection owes to the pioneering work of Stanley Cavell. I also record my
sadness, and the sadness of others, at the death of David L. Norton. Had David lived, he
would have contributed an essay to this collection. If time is, as Thoreau said, “a stream
we go a-fishing in,” David was the Compleat Angler.

K.D.J.
Auburn, Alabama

Immortal Openings, 9: Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch

May 23, 2012 By in Philosophy, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Perhaps this book on surrender-and-catch begins thus (or even:  thus begins).

After this walk.  After this–so it might seem–initiatory walk.  For it is to walk, between the stones and walls between which the walking goes, to communicate with the gates and the houses, the ochre paint, or the outrageous red, on the walls around the olive gardens, to greet the forbidding fort, whose walls preclude the view of our cupola, our campanile, our civic tower.  And the cypresses:  black brush slips in the towering sky–for the weather is not good.  The olive trees shimmer, shivering in their own mean color of graygreen against the dark-gray lumpiness of a sky.  And yet:  nothing can happen because one returns home, out of the wind that makes itself known as possibly not joking, and there it is still and warming, and soon expectant.  Expectant?  These words.  I can wait a while.

(For Ed Mooney–in belated (alas!) celebration of his being Ten Days In)