Category Archives: reading

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.

On the Study of Philosophers (Mother Maria)

November 17, 2011 By in Mother Maria, Philosophy, reading Tags: Leave a comment

While in Preles, I swallowed the whole of Descartes, so to speak–in one go, and now I am chewing him.  It is always the same, I simply have to give myself to a philosopher with my whole being, without any reserve, and slowly creep away from him again.  Not a bad way, but certainly somewhat exhausting.

A Few ?s on Climacus

October 27, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, reading Tags: , , 2 Comments

The relationship between Climacus’ Fragments and Postscript is unsurprisingly surprising and complex.  For example, Climacus treats Part One of Postscript as the proper (promised) sequel to Fragments, while he treats Part Two as “a renewed attempt on the same lines” but not as the proper sequel.  I suppose this must be one reason why the speculative side of the objective problem (in Part One) is treated in such a brief, comparatively off-hand manner–it had really been done already in Fragments.  The historical side is what was not done there.  Right?

The argument for the ignoratio elenchi of historical inquiry into Holy Scripture (to help or hurt belief in faith) puzzles  me.  The general form of the argument is perfectly clear:  Assume that historical inquiry has culminated in a set of the happiest results any theologian could wish.  Still, that assumption does not aid the believer in faith.  Assume that historical inquiry has culminated in a set of the unhappiest results any theologian could have dreaded.  Still, that assumption does not harm the believer in faith.  The believer is untouched by either assumption since only if he were an unbelieving believer (in other words, someone who has turned Christianity into something objective) would he be bolstered by or vulnerable to these assumptions about objective results.  Conclusion:  historical inquiry into Holy Scripture is beside the point for the believer in faith; it can neither aid nor harm the believer in faith.  But here’s a question about the detail of the argument.  How far into the content of Holy Scripture do the assumptions penetrate?  The happy results supposed to be of this sort: These books and no others belong to the canon; these books are authentic; these books are complete; the authors of these books are trustworthy; these books are logically consistent.  The unhappy results are the denials of the happy results.  So–is the following among the happy results?

Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

Or is the result supposed to be like this?

A  trustworthy author wrote, in an authentic, integral, and canonical book that Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

I take this last to be such that it is not supposed to allow the detachment of ‘Jesus turned water into wine’ from it.  (The prefix is not like ‘It is true that’.)  –Maybe another way of putting my worry is to ask just about the trustworthy happy-result:  If the authors are trustworthy, does that mean that they are accurately reporting events or does it mean that they are sincerely reporting them?  The first putative happy result looks like something that would be believed in faith; the second not.  I lean toward the second.  –One other reason this is so tricky is that the first putative happy result looks like it is open to an objective/subjective ambiguity; it can be believed in faith or objectively believed (or so it seems to me).  But if that is true, why can’t the first putative happy result be an actual happy result, assuming it is objectively believed (as it would be, given that it is to be an objective result)?  Gah.  Help.  (Thanks to my students, Greg and Megan, for pushing me on this worry.)

Unbelieving Believers: The Intended Audience of Concluding Unscientific Postscript

October 20, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, reading, religion, writing Tags: , , , , 6 Comments

Keeping his intended audience in mind is perhaps the most difficult thing to do when reading Johannes Climacus’ Postscript.  He writes, neither to those who deliberately reject Christianity nor to genuinely faithful Christians.  He is not writing to those who are caught in the throes of becoming a Christian.  Each of these audiences can of course find much in Postscript, but it is not written to them.  And, far too often, Postscript is criticized as if it had been written to these audiences.  (As a result, the book is criticized as if it were apologetics (God forbid!) or as if it were evangelistic).

Now I realize this may seem a strange claim, especially in the case of the last group, those in the throes of becoming a Christian.  “After all,” an objector might say, “Climacus’ controlling question is:  ‘How do I become a Christian?’  So isn’t he writing to that group?”

No.  Climacus’ interest in his controlling question is retrospective, not prospective.  He asks the question, and answers it, not as an exercise in evangelism, not as a tractarian, but for the sake of his intended audience, those who believe that they are believers, but who fail to believe.  His interest in his question is retrospective because, given the confusions of his intended audience, they will think of themselves as on the far end, as it were, of the question, not on its near end.  They need to realize that the way in which they believe they became believers is not a way of becoming believers.  I will call the intended audience the unbelieving believers.*

This intended audience is not wholly homogenous.  Some of the unbelieving believers account for their becoming Christians by believing it as a historical truth; some account for their becoming Christians by believing it as a speculative truth.  But both sub-groups have treated becoming a Christian as coming to be objectively convinced of the truth of Christianity.  To the extent that they have been worried about their subjective relationship to Christianity, their appropriation of it, they have taken it to be precipitated from objective conviction.  But appropriation does not precipitate from objective conviction.  Even worse, objective conviction makes appropriation even more difficult than it already is.  Objective conviction requires the inquirer to discipline out of her inquiry all questions of subjectivity, of how she is related to the object.  That very disciplining out tends to attenuate or destroy subjectivity.—This is one reason why the unbelieving believer who worries about appropriation expects appropriation to precipitate from objective conviction–the conditions of acquiring objective conviction are hostile to appropriation, so if it is to happen, it will look to those who pursue objective conviction but worry about appropriation like something that really can happen only once objective conviction occurs.

In showing what is really involved in becoming a Christian Climacus aims to shock his audience into recognizing that they are unbelieving believers.  Their account of how they became Christians, once they are clear about it and about the way one does actually become a Christian, reveals that they are not Christians.  They may be objectively convinced of something–it is unclear it really counts as Christianity–but they are not really believers, appropriators of Christianity.

That unbelieving believers are the intended audience is part of the story why Climacus is not much concerned about answering the objective question about the truth of Christianity.  (It is not the full story, but I am unsure I can tell the full story.)  His intended audience takes that question as settled.  They expect settling it to have settled the question of their faith too.  Climacus aims at unsettlement.  He will begin with an invitation:  “Tell me, and tell yourself, how you became a Christian…”

*NB  I use this phrase to suggest the simultaneous similarity and dissimilarity between Climacus’ intended audience and the father of the son possessed by a spirit (in Mark 9; cf. especially 9:24).

Beginning and Ending: TLP

October 6, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, reading, Tractatus, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

(Handout.)

“In my beginning is my end.” –T. S. Eliot

Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an early, deep influence on Wittgenstein, says of his own masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, that it is a book necessary to read twice. His reason: not only does the book’s ending presuppose its beginning, but its beginning presupposes its end. This structure of reciprocal presupposition makes two readings crucial, since the beginning’s dependence on the ending cannot be appreciated until the beginning has been read after the ending.

Something of the same is true of both TLP and PI. I will not just now go into structural detail about the two books–I will do that soon enough–but I will insist that the beginnings of each of the two books presupposes its ending. And radically so: it is not that the ending supplies a premise, say, that is necessary to explicate an early enthymeme, and so the question of the beginning’s truth is undecided until the end. Rather, it is that the ending supplies the point, the point, of the beginning, and so the question of the beginning’s meaning is undecided until the end.  This happens differently in TLP than it does in PI of course.

Consider TLP. On a first reading, the book begins by speaking light into the face of the deep: “The world is everything that is the case.” But it ends with a darkling hush:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Notice that the world figures in both beginning and ending, but more importantly (at least for now) the ending tells us something about the point of the beginning. On a second reading, the beginning that seemed a triumphal metaphysical revelation, a sounding of horns, is revalued as elucidation, hushed. “The world is everything that is the case”: a rung on a ladder, ladder-language, to be surmounted, not proclaimed.

We will of course talk much more about these last lines (6.54-7) of TLP. For now I just want to make clear how the book’s beginning presupposes its end. I harp on this by way of warning you. Do not assume that you know what Wittgenstein is up to as he opens either of the books. TLP opens as if it were metaphysics. PI opens as if it were philosophy of language. But Wittgenstein is no more doing metaphysics in TLP than he is doing the philosophy of language in PI.

Wittgenstein is doing something original in each book, something that is neither metaphysics nor the philosophy of language. And what he is doing in TLP is not the same as what he is doing in PI, despite the fact that what he is doing in each is like what he is doing in the other, and despite the fact that in neither is he doing metaphysics or philosophy of language.

In practical terms, this does not mean that you should be agnostic about what Wittgenstein is saying as he opens the books. You have to try to understand what he is saying as he is saying it; you cannot read the books otherwise. But you should regard any understanding you have as potentially sacrificial, as an “understanding” that may be taken from you later. The path up Mt. Moriah is long. Who knows what, among our possessions as we begin, may be demanded from us by the end of the climb?

Emerson Finds Montaigne

October 6, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne, reading, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy.  It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes.  I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.  It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.  It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.”  Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.

“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.”  My life has been punctuated by books:  Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days.  Who knows what book will speak to him?  Or when?  But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?

Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine.  My hour has not yet come.”  But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time:  emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation:  and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now.  I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come.  The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud.  When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine.  I think too of littler things:  the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on.  The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.

Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays.  He did not just read them.  Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives.  The covers of our favorite books enclose us.  Our lives are bound by our reading.

Reading (the Psalms): Mother Maria

July 24, 2011 By in reading, religion Leave a comment

From the Preface to The Psalms:  An Exploratory Translation:

I had studied the Psalms, form, rhythm, content, historical background, as they were sung from age to age, in liturgical harmony, of joy and of grief, by Old Israel; and the distant, unhalting psalmody in the Orthodox Church had often carried me to the shores of eternity, where my prayer could come to rest; and for many years I had myself recited the Psalms in the monastic Offices.  But, one day, I was roused as if out of a slumber, and with sudden, violent clarity I knew that I did not know the Psalms; that, what I knew, was but a surface, or what I myself projected into the Psalms; it was not the life of the Psalms.  And I was ashamed.

Could it not be that each Psalm had a face, a personal face, a particular, unique life, which had remained hidden from me within the eternity flow of liturgical prayer?  I must seek it; but how could I find it?

Could I go back, and yet further back, word by word, listening, delicately, with held breath?  Would then the Psalm let me enter, and allow me, from the inside, to experience it, as if for the first time?

A striking, striking passage.  It captures a feeling I believe we have all had when reading books that matter to us.  We become ashamed of ourselves as readers, know that we have not read with the needed discipline, know that we know only a surface, not the hidden life of what we read.  We need a new pitch of attention to find that life:

Could I go back, and yet further back, word by word, listening, delicately, with held breath?

Enforced Quiet

July 23, 2011 By in reading, religion, writing 2 Comments

I spent the last couple of days at the Monastery of the Holy Ascension.  Lots of trees, lots of quiet. Time to meditate, to read.  The monastery is in Resaca, Ga., north of Atlanta, south of Chattanooga.  (The abbot joked, when I asked him what ‘Resaca’ meant, that he was pretty sure it meant backwater in some language or another.)  I spent a the remains of last night, as it grew dark, reading Austen’s letters.  Somehow her brisk chatter with her sister, about buying muslin (what is that, exactly?) and about days spent over tea and in visiting, seemed fitting, even as cassocked monks moved quietly between the bookstore and the kitchen (prosphora was baking, filling the humid air with yeasty scent). Perhaps the reason Austen seemed fitting was because she has a way of writing, on display alike in her letters and her novels, that never uses a him or a her that is not destinate with a thou.  She (Austen) and him and her are always on their way to us.  Because of this, Austen writes even of strangers with a humorous largeness of spirit, a willingness to be pleased (to mention a notion of Samuel Johnson’s that clearly mattered to Austen:  it plays a crucial role in Persuasion), to be familiar.  Austen can see, see steadily and wholly, see what is, without succumbing to any need to stand over against who she sees.  Such seeing is a benediction, a blessing–a way of responding out of an abyss of respect:  for Austen there is always a real person behind the shifting facades, a real person to be seen even in the play of lights of social circumstance, beyond the affectation and hypocrisy, a real person to be seen, and, seen, blessed.