Those who have been following the blog will recognize this as a both recapitulation and variation on earlier bits and pieces. It is from the essay I am working on.
Category Archives: Self-knowledge
The Objective Absorbed Back Into the Subjective
A…Socratic aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought is found in its instrumentalism, its consistently pragmatic character with reference to theory, expression, and practice. In this connection is it instructive to remember the difference between Socrates and Plato. The dialectic which in the hands of Socrates was an instrument to sweep away the cobwebs of illusion to make room for the human ideals, therefore a means of self-discipline and incidentally also a discipline of others, this dialectic was transformed by Plato, more or less clearly and consciously, into an end in itself, and the abstractions developed by this dialectic therefore naturally became the supreme realities. In short, Socrates was an existential thinker, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, while Plato was a speculative metaphysician. What Kierkegaard especially admires in Socrates is that he had no objective result, but only a way, that that it is only by following the Socratic way that one can reach the Socratic result…
In this Socratic sense, Kierkegaard’s own thought was instrumental and pragmatic also. His objective thinking is everywhere absorbed–absorbed back into the subjective, the personality… –Swenson, “A Danish Socrates”
I’m not entirely sure the actual Plato (as opposed to the textbook Plato) is quite as far from Socrates as Swenson puts him, but I think the contrast a good one–even if the actual men contrasted do not stand in such contrast to one another.
A Bit from a Dust-gathering Paper Draft: Decreating Philosophical Problems
As I have found myself thinking fairly regularly over the past few years, the best description of Philosophical Investigations is: it decreates philosophical problems. (I borrow the notion from Weil.) Wittgenstein teaches his readers what philosophical problems are and how readers should treat them. Wittgenstein’s revolution in philosophy–and he is a revolutionary fi gure, whose revolution we have still rightly to measure and deservingly to inherit–is not just an overthrow of the previous understanding of philosophical problems that is meant to result in, well, quiet, at least after the dust clears, a stillness, in which nothing philosophical stirs. This would be a revolution aimed at ending philosophy, punkt. Nothing on the hither side of what ended, only the overthrown stuff on the yonder side, now reduced to stone and rubble. But that is not the revolution. That is not decreation–decreation is a passage from the created into the uncreated, not from the created into nothingness. The revolution does aim at ending philosophy of a sort, philosophy fueled by a particular understanding of philosophical problems, but that is not to be the end of philosophy, punkt; it is only to be the end of that sort of philosophy, the yonder sort. On the hither side, the hither sort: philosophy pursued as the decreation of philosophical problems, philosophy as involving constant self-overcoming. The sort of philosophy that Wittgenstein does, and he does do philosophy, not just attack those who do it, goes on–and on. –Philosophically, things change. But they do not just end. No. Philosophy has not been dammed up or damned down. No. (“riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…”)
(As noted, I borrow the notion of `decreation’ from Simone Weil. I explore decreation in Philosophical Investigations briefly in my “Motives for Philosophizing”, Metaphilosophy Vol.40, No. 2, April 2009, pp. 260-272, as well as in my essay, “Philosophical Remarks” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, and in my essay, “Metaschematizing Socrates”, in the forthcoming Hamann and the Tradition. Only the fi rst of these employs Weil’s notion explicitly. The second two beat about in the bushes neighboring the notion. I am still working through the consequences of my use of it).
Moral Kangaroos
A key passage (and one of my favorites) from Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Cynthia is talking to Molly.
“Nonsense, Molly! You are good. At least, if you are not good, what am I? There’s a rule-of-three sum for you to do! But it’s no use talking; I am not good, and I never shall be now. Perhaps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I know.”
“But do you think it easier to be a heroine?”
“Yes, as far as one knows of heroines from history. I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation–but steady, every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo!”
Understanding a Philosopher 2: Bollnow’s Question
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.
Bringing Philosophy Peace?
Wittgenstein wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, peace. When we encounter this aim in PI, it is easy to believe that what he wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, is knowledge. And of course there is something right about that, especially if we modulate the claim to one about self-knowledge. (After all, Wittgenstein cares particularly about the philosophical questions that bring philosophy itself into question, questions that bring the philosopher-in-us-all himself into question.) Crucially, however, self-ignorance involves alienation from ourselves more than it involves any failure of introspective acuity. And so acquiring the peace of self-knowledge is less learning something about ourselves than it is acknowledging something about ourselves. (Self-knowledge is typically bitter for good reason.)
So the peace Wittgenstein wants to bring is the peace of self-knowledge; we might even call it the peace of faith. But faith in what?
Before answering, I want to help myself to an idea of Marcel’s. Marcel talks about faith, about fundamentally pledging oneself, as reaching so deeply into the person pledged that it affects not only what the person has, but who the person is. His term for this, the idea I want, is existential index. When person’s belief has an existential index, ‘(e)’, the belief absorbs fully the powers of the person’s being. For Marcel, beliefs(e) are incompatible with pretension: A person who believes(e) is humbled by that in which he believes(e).
And now I want to say something that I know sounds paradoxical. Wittgenstein wants to bring the philosopher-in-us-all to belief(e) in himself, so that he is no longer tormented by questions that bring himself into question. But this will be a belief(e) in himself–a rallying to himself, to borrow another idea of Marcel’s–that involves no pretension. In fact, it will be a form of humility, a form of true love of himself. He will have faith in himself, but a faith that acknowledges his own nothingness. This is a faith that allows the philosopher to be filled with the spirit of truth (although not, notice, with the truth); it is a faith that allows him to be light seeking for light. Such humility does not protect the philosopher-in-us-all against error. It does protect him against depending on himself.
When the philosopher-in-us-all is tormented by questions that bring himself into question, his has fallen prey to self-dependence. He has lost his sense of his own thinking as a creative receptivity, a dependent initiative. He believes he has to be responsible for himself, that he has to support every response to a question by responding to questions about that question. To believe that is to fall into the predicament of being unable to make philosophical problems disappear. Pretension on the part of the philosopher-in-us-all guarantees the appearance of the philosophical problems. Pretension is a lack of faith, the surety of peacelessness.
(Probably a bad idea to try to write about such things when it is so late and I am so tired.)
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 