Category Archives: Philosophy

“Color is its own Reward”

March 3, 2012 By in Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

–or so sang Croweded House.  The department here at AU is hosting a conference, “Color and Philosophy”.  Today is the second and final day.

Wittgenstein writes that “colors spur us to philosophize”.  That seems right.  I reckon it is, in part, because colors are strangely phenomenologically mobile.  They seem to move from being ‘in’ us to ‘out there’ and back again.  They seem now existentially dependent upon me, and now existentially dependent upon the object they color; now wholly intimate with me, now wholly indifferent to me.  How can something be such that what it is–say, what it is essentially–is revealed completely even to a more or less casual glance (how can color be, to use Johnston’s term, “revelatory”) and still be something that I know only as a perceiver, as receptive?  Is color that, well, shallow?  And if it is, how can something so shallow, even infinitely shallow, find a place among the deep dark densities of the outer world?

Terms of Engagement–A Question

February 21, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 7 Comments

I am currently writing a new paper and have been developing in it a ‘variant’ of a point of Cavell’s–his point about the importance of identifying and thinking through a philosopher’s terms of criticism in reckoning the significance of the philosopher’s work.  I want to say that there is a genus of which terms of criticism are a species, namely terms of engagement.  These include the terms of address (of reader, of interlocutor) used by the philosopher, the expositives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and verdictives typically employed, etc.  Assuming this makes sense, I am curious:  what stands out to you about Wittgenstein’s terms of engagement in PI?

A Triptych of Quotation

February 6, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Three quotations that came to me, more or less together, this morning. The first is from Wittgenstein, the second from Marilynne Robinson, the third from Roger Teichmann:

…[D]on’t think, but look!

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the sense of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

Yes, I’m sure it was through her contact with Wittgenstein that Anscombe came to see the pitfalls of over-systematic thinking, and on the other hand the real potential in philosophical methods which aim to elucidate rather than to reduce. Like Wittgenstein, she had both intellectual honesty and philosophical stamina, and these are necessary when it comes to resisting the charms of system-building, since those charms have a lot to do with having an easier time of it. Getting an accurate overview of a complex and tangled set of problems is always more difficult than constructing a system and airbrushing out the inconsistencies and counterexamples.

St. Mark the Ascetic on Wickedness

January 23, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, religion, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein 4 Comments

Wickedness is an intricate net; and if someone is careless when partially entangled, he gets completely enmeshed.

This strikes me, to almost borrow a phrase from Cavell, as St. Mark’s religious interpretation of a perception he shares with Wittgenstein.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Marcel)

December 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Philosophy, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

My post on combative clarity (immediately below) was in part, and roundaboutly, a reaction to a point made in the closing sections of Marcel’s Introduction to The Mystery of Being.  He summarizes the point so:  Philosophical research is “research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken without loss of all reality to the result.”

I want to attend again to that Introduction.  It ends in a way particularly appropriate to the Nativity season.  Marcel mentions the notion of good will found in the Gospels, and goes on:

It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own day the notion of ‘the man of good will’ has lost much of its old richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic reverberations.  But there is not any notion that is more in need of reinstatement in our modern world.  Let the Gospel formula mean “Peace to men of good will” or “Peace through men of good will,” as one might be often tempted to think it did, in either case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be too much underlined.  Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts to the same thing, in conditions which permit peace to be assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which allows us to describe it as specifically a good will.  ‘Content’, however, is not quite the word I want here.  I think rather that the goodness is a matter of a certain way of asserting the will, and on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which, in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether war in men’s hearts or what we would call ‘real war’, must be regarded as intrinsically evil.  We can speak then of men of good will or peacemakers, indifferently.

A philosophy of peace, a weapon of peace–that is Marcel’s thinking.  Marcel writes philosophy so as to seek peace and ensue it.  –There are less noble motives.

Clarity, Combative Clarity

December 12, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Does philosophy have results?  –As I practice it (ahem!), I guess not.  Or at least it has no results that are not internal to philosophical investigation itself.  I am Wittgensteinian enough, or Kierkegaardian enough, or Marcelian enough to believe that what philosophy aims for is clarity.  But one is always becoming clear; one is never finally clear.

Clarity.  Clarity is internal to philosophical investigation:  it is not a separable result, isolable from the activity that realizes it and such that it confers value onto the activity because of a value it has independent of that activity.  If a result is separable, isolable and independent, then it has a career cut off in an important way from the process that realized it.  Indeed, in one sense its history only begins after the process that realizes it is finished.  The result can be seized and put to purposes quite different from anything that those involved in the process of realizing it intended or foresaw.

But clarity is valuable because of the process of philosophical investigation that realizes it.  And there is no clarity in isolation from the philosophical investigation that realizes it.  Philosophical investigation does not realize a clarity that someone could hope to enjoy who is no longer involved in philosophical investigation.  (“I got clear, you see; and now I am enjoying my clarity, although, thank God!, I am no longer involved in the travails of philosophical investigation.”)  –Kierkegaard’s Climacus talks about the true Christian, the subjective Christian, as “combatively certain” of Christianity, as certain in a way that requires that the certainty be daily won anew.  “Eternal certainty” (his contrast-term) is not something that the subjective Christian can enjoy on this side of the blue.  Similarly, the clarity realized by philosophical investigation is combative clarity, not eternal clarity.

It was once fashionable to charge that clarity is not enough. Someone (Austin, I believe) rejoined that we could decide whether clarity was enough once we’d gotten clear about something.  I worry that both the charge and the rejoinder treat clarity too much as if it were a separable result.

Sufficient unto the day is the clarity thereof, I reckon–the combative clarity thereof.

Rogers Albritton on Skepticism: “Words and their meanings are as ‘external’ as trees.”

December 11, 2011 By in Albritton, Philosophy, skepticism 1 Comment

We break in on Albritton mid-argument (from Philosophical Issues 21):

…What we know (as some unfortunate men and women might not, though they’ve heard of both baboons and human beings) is that we are human beings, not baboons, a fact (if “fact” is the word for it) from which it does not follow that we can’t be baboons or must be human beings. No such modal remarks are in order, as far as I can see, in our present situation. And it seems equally out of order that the earth may or can’t be supported by a huge tortoise or a transparent column with holes in it for the moon and so forth. Out of order in our actual situation, that is, which I can’t help. I didn’t invent it. Nobody did. One can invent others. What one can’t invent is a position outside all such epistemic confines, in which the question “Is it possible or not?” nevertheless has its usual purchase and from which it is evidently possible after all that the earth is supported by a huge tortoise and we are baboons. That position, in which, as one imagines it, no question would have an answer already, and we would be free to think absolutely anything possible (what else could we think?) would on the contrary be one in which the question, whether it is possible or impossible that p, could not have its usual sense, and indeed no question could have its usual sense, since its sense would be in question too, so to speak. In the position from which one would see that anything’s possible, if one could see anything, one couldn’t see anything, or think anything either. The idea of this position in which nothing is settled yet is illusory, as far as I can see, and so is the idea, which might seem more promising, of the position in which nothing a posteriori is settled yet, or nothing a posteriori except that it looks as if there were physical objects about (and the like), which might seem still more promising. Words and their meanings are as ‘external’ as trees. If I have to think that perhaps there are no such words, then I have to think that perhaps my very own as it were words have no meanings either, and therefore I am not, as I would have thought, thinking. And that isn’t thinking…

Understanding a Philosopher 2: Bollnow’s Question

December 9, 2011 By in Philosophy, reading, Self-knowledge, writing Tags: , 3 Comments

Otto Bollnow’s essay, “What does it mean to understand a writer better than he understood himself?”, begins like this:

In the interpretation of philosophical texts and literary works we often encounter the saying that it is important to understand the writer better than he understood himself. At first this saying appears presumptuous. If to understand another means to duplicate his experience, then only the one who had the experience can best know what he means by what he says; and perfect understanding would be the exact duplication and reproduction of what was immediately present in the one who had the experience. We can see how far we fall short of such perfection when we consider how weak the spoken word is as an image of actual life, and how much weaker still is the written word, which lacks the support of physical gesture or facial expression. Thus the claim to understand a writer better than he understood himself seems frivolous and presumptuous.

And yet this maxim recurs unavoidably in the concrete work of textual interpretation. It is, perhaps, not taken quite seriously; it carries a faint undertone of self-irony — but it genuinely expresses a recurring situation in textual interpretation. We must ask: does this saying, which at first appears presumptuous, actually express a legitimate aim of textual interpretation?

Bollnow answers answers his question by (first) noting that normally the answer is that “there is something correct” about the maxim, but that the answer is given while the answerer shuffles his feet:  it “cannot be asserted with complete seriousness”.  But, even so, the answerer takes the maxim to point to a significant and important problem in interpretation.  Bollnow, however, does not rest with this recitation of the normal answer.  He goes on (second) to underscore that treating the maxim as somehow or other correct too often forestalls allowing the “uncanniness” of the maxim to show itself.  Better, Bollnow thinks, to allow the maxim to sink into us, to allow it to show itself as uncanny, to allow it to reveal something of importance about products of the human spirit.

More soon.

Mark Hopkins, Teacher

December 7, 2011 By in Philosophy, religion, teaching Tags: , Leave a comment

Of this philosophical wonder it should be observed, because it bears on our ground of belief, that its tendency is not, like that of ordinary wonder, to diminish through familiarity, but rather the reverse.  Awakened by the fact of being, necessarily involving the idea of being uncreated; also by the discovery of the immensity, and order, and movements, and adaptations of that around us which we call the cosmos, it increases as its object is dwelt upon till it becomes utter bewilderment. Whoever, therefore, recognizes all this, and accepts it as a reality, ought to have no difficulty on account of its strangeness merely, in accepting any form of the manifestation of being that may claim his acceptance.  That there should be a future life under a different form cannot be more strange than that there should be a present life under its present form.  That there should be a heaven hereafter cannot be more strange than that there should be a happy family here. That there should be a spiritual existence cannot be stranger than that there is a material existence.  That there should be a personal God, infinite and holy, cannot be more strange than that we should be personal beings, as we are, and that there should be this multiform universe in which we find ourselves. Indeed I think we may say, that live as long as we may during the eternal ages, go where we may into the depths of infinite space, we shall never find a scene of things more strange and wonderful than we are in now.

From Mark Hopkins’ The Scriptural Idea of Man.  Hopkins was a legendary teacher (he taught at Williams in the middle of the 19th century).  Bliss Perry, in his winsome book, And Gladly Teach, talks of Hopkins’ power as a teacher.

No one can furnish an adequate definition of greatness, but Mark Hopkins, like Gladstone and Bismark, gave the beholder the instant impression of being in the presence of a great man.  He had already become in his lifetime a legend, a symbol of teaching power:  ‘Mark Hopkins on one end of a log, and a student on the other.’  [This line originated in a comment of James Garfield’s (one of Hopkins’ students):  ‘A pine bench with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and me at the other is a good enough college for me.’–KDJ]

[His students] all agree that he was not, in the strict academic sense, a ‘scholar’; the source of his power was not in his knowledge of books.  But that is an old story in the history of the world:  ‘He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’  Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skill…

To some men in class, no doubt, he seemed a philosopher without a system, a moralist indifferent to definitions. He was in truth a builder of character who could lay a stone wall without ever looking at a blue-print.

All of us recognized his immense latent power.  ‘Half his strength he put not forth.’ Yet this apparently indolent wrestler with ideas–never dogmatic, never over-earnest, never seeming to desire converts to any creed or platform–was ceaselessly active in studying the members of each class and in directing, however subtly, the questions by which he sought to develop and test their individual capacity…