Category Archives: Socrates

Reading “RM” 8: Skepticism

August 7, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism, Socrates, virtue and vice Tags: , , 4 Comments

In Bk III, Montaigne’s skepticism is not something he has, an acquisition; it is something that he is, a state of being.  Call it, if you will, a nisus (in F. R. Leavis’ sense of that term), a profound, unwilled set of Montaigne’s whole being.  Unwilled:  for there is no striving in it, no stretching, in particular no self-assertion or desire to exalt himself; it is ripe with a joyful tranquility.  It is a nisus toward the total truth.  But there is no hurry, no hurry; hurry would slow him down.  He fondly and patiently contemplates himself and his life and life.  Each essay is a new elucidation of our human being.  He writes out of a prodigious lucidity, exhibiting himself to himself (and so exhibiting us to ourselves) across a living width of aspects.

He writes under the sign of Socrates.  Socrates’ labor (think of the Oracle and of his understanding of it) is to dismantle double ignorance:  the state of those who think they know but do not know.  Simple ignorance, simply not knowing, typically need not be considered vicious.  Its remedy is most often obvious and requires only time and application.  Double ignorance is vicious; in it, simple ignorance teams with pride.  Socrates attacks double ignorance and scorns the consequences of attacking it, drawing wisdom and courage from unknown deeps in himself.   His highest hope is to attain to a genuinely humble mind–where the humility is simultaneously and wholly epistemological and moral.  He hopes this for his interlocutor as well.  Thomas De Quincy writes,

Without hands a man might have feet and could still walk:  but, consider it, –without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know a thing at all!  To know a thing, what we can call knowlng, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it:  that is, be virtuously related to it.  If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he know?  His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.

Socrates’ elenchus targets unacknowledged ignorance; to accept aporia is to be humbled both epistemologically and morally.  Is accepting aporia enough to qualify as a skeptic?  Well, say what you will.  I deem there is no reason to refuse that title to someone who accepts aporia.  Notice that, like everything else, accepting aporia has its conditions.  Crucially, someone who accepts aporia recognizes that he has bottomed out, bottomed out in knowledge, bottomed out in pride, and is now ready to go on.   Aporia ends nothing, except perhaps an episode of conversation; in reality, it is a beginning.  Its valence is positive, not negative; the sun is rising, not setting.  Aporia marks the moment when we come to see that what we are contending with is a mystery, not a problem.   —If this be skepticism, what more can be said about it?  It is a skepticism that is turned against worldly wisdom, not a skepticism that is a form of worldly wisdom.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Euthyphro knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  By the standards of worldly wisdom, Callicles knows and is rightly proud of what he knows.  Socrates will not judge or be judged by those standards.

Montaigne’s Bk III essays are skeptical in this way, this Socratic way.  To read the essays is to become Montaigne’s interlocutor.  The essays are designed to create aporia in the reader, and to bring about its acceptance.  To almost quote John Berryman:

Wif an essay of Montaigne’s in either hand
We are stript down to move on

‘

Reading “RM” 7: Consciousness

August 2, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne, skepticism, Socrates, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Merleau-Ponty engages one of the most difficult ideas of the essay very near its beginning.  He writes of Montaigne:

Self-consciousness is his constant, the measure of all doctrines for him.  It could be said that he never got over a certain wonder at himself which constitutes the whole substance of his works and wisdom.  He never tired of experiencing the paradox of a conscious being.

Having written that, he turns directly to the task of differentiating Montaigne’s understanding of conscious being from Descartes’.  Montaigne’s understanding is as follows:

At each instant, in love, in political life, in perception’s silent life, we adhere to something, make it our own, and yet withdraw from it and hold it at a distance, without which we would know nothing about it.

Merleau-Ponty terms this adherence and withdrawal, consciousness’ acceptance and alienation, consciousness’ bondage and freedom, “…one sole ambiguous act…”  Descartes understands conscious being differently.  For him, consciousness is not one sole ambiguous act, but rather a pure act:  it does not adhere, accept or become bound.  It is all withdrawal, alienation and freedom.

Montaigne does not know that resting place, that self-possession, which Cartesian understanding is to be.  The world is not for him a system of objects the idea of which he has in his possession; the self is not for him the purity of an intellectual consciousness.

Later in the essay, Merleau-Ponty again contrasts Montaigne and Descartes:

Descartes will briefly confirm the soul and body’s union, and prefer to think them separate; for then they are clear to understanding.  Montaigne’s realm, on the contrary, is the “mixture” of soul and body’; he is interested only in our factual condition, and his book endlessly describes this paradoxical fact that we are.

I take all of this differentiating to be internal to understanding Montaigne’s skepticism.  But before I say anything more about that, and I will by and by, I want to say a little about the differentiating itself.  What exactly is Merleau-Ponty describing, what sort of distinction is he drawing? The answer seems to me to be in the phrase “…one sole ambiguous act…”  For Montaigne, as Merleau-Ponty reads him, to be conscious of something, say of a horse seen through the library window, is to be open to the world, to the horse, even adherent to the horse; the horse is a gift that we accept.  There is no question that what we are conscious of is the horse.  And, being conscious of the horse, there is a sense in which consciousness becomes the horse, incarnates itself in horseflesh.  Yet, in the same act, consciousness withdraws into a kind of distance from the horse, alienates itself from the horse, is free of horseflesh, is utterly discarnate.  But this is not to be decried:  without the distance, the alienation, the freedom, we could not know the horse. “We are equally incapable of dwelling in ourselves and in things, and we are referred from them to ourselves and back again.”  Although Merleau-Ponty puts this in a way that sounds as though it is successive acts, I take him to be describing one sole ambiguous act, and act in which we are all at once all in and all out.   This is the paradox of conscious being.  We are everything and nothing.  We are Gods in nature; we are weeds by the wall.  We are not these by turns, but simultaneously, our conscious being is at each moment one sole ambiguous act.  Montaigne never got over a certain wonder at this, and no wonder.  Montaigne’s consciousness is in one sole ambiguous act a becoming and a knowing; and each requires the other while also being capable (abstractly) of cancelling the other:  to simply become would be to fail to know; to simply know would be to fail to become.  By becoming, we are in a world; by knowing, we find ourselves in that world.  But strangely, again paradoxically, our finding ourselves in the world requires that we not be where we are in the world.  “To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.”  Somewhere else, of course, contrasts with here, i.e with where I am.

For Descartes, consciousness dwells in itself; consciousness is a resting place.  It possesses itself–but that is all it possesses, since its ideas are crucially creatures of itself.  It is not tied to things, adherent to them.  It remains pure, wholly self-involved.  (This understanding of conscious being is in part responsible for Cartesianism being a gap-displaying method.)  The world of Cartesian consciousness is a system of objects kept by God in the right sort of relation to its ideas.  Cartesian consciousness is all light within; all darkness without.  The Cartesian walks by reason and not by sight.  He has the key to the world.  Montaigne (like Pascal, according to Merleau-Ponty) understands himself as interested in a world he does not have the key to.  For Montaigne, the world is a motley of things of things making an appeal to consciousness, and consciousness in response turns outside while it also faces inside.  The lightness and darkness of Montaigne’s consciousness is a crazy plaid, thrown over inside and outside alike.  Opacity is as much an inside thing as an outside thing.

As a result, achieving self-understanding cannot be circumspectly rotating the oculus mentis around its clean and well-lit place.  It is rather self-questioning, a dialogue with self in which the being who answers is at least partly opaque to the being who asks, and the being who questions must wait for an answer, “…a questioning without which reason’s purity would be illusory and in the end impure…”  Purifying reason requires self-questioning, not merely “visual” self-inspection.  It happens over time, not all at once, and it never results in any final purity, but must be done again and again, day after day, as Socrates did it in the Agora, and once, outside Athens’ walls, under a tree with Phaedrus.  “Phaedrus, my friend!  Where have you been?  And where are you going?”

Disposability, Availability

July 11, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, religion, Socrates, Wittgenstein 15 Comments

Marcel’s term for ‘disposability’ is ‘disponibilité’.  Here it is translated as ‘availability’:

[Availability] of course does not mean emptiness, as in the case of an available dwelling (local disponible), but it means much rather an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift.  Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might say favours, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal.  It has sometimes been said of late , “Personality is vocation”.  It is true if we restore its true value to the term vocation, which is in reality a call, or more precisely the response to a call.  We must not, however, be led astray here by any mythological conception.  It depends, in fact, on me whether the call is recognised as a call, and strange as it may seem, in this matter it is true to say that it comes both from me and from outside me at one and the same time; or rather, in it we become aware of that most intimate connection between what comes from me and what comes from outside, a connection which is nourishing or constructive and cannot be reliquished without the ego wasting and tending toward death.

Perhaps we might make this clearer by pointing out that each of us from the very beginning, appears to himself and to others as a particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be, are not enough to provide a solution.  I use the term problem absolutely against my will, for it seems to be quite inadequate.  Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working, even supposing I manage to take him to pieces in the process, I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being?  We must even go further and say that such a knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive, it does no less than denude its object of the one thing he has which is of value and so it degrades him effectively.  That means–and there is nothing which is more important to keep in view–that the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God…

I supply this quotation as a commentary on and extension of my earlier post, Making Ourselves Disposable.  One striking thing about this, for anyone who is a fan of Cavell’s work, and especially of his essay, “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein”, is how much like Cavell it sounds, and how much light it sheds on at least one meaning of the title of his essay.  I am quite sure that one sense of ‘availability’ in the title is Marcel’s sense.  The second paragraph reads like a digest of Cavell’s thinking about Other Minds, setting up, as it does, Cavell’s crucial understanding of acknowledgement.

Making Ourselves Disposable

July 10, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Socrates, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

One use of a term I have lately been fascinated by is Gabriel Marcel’s use of ‘disposable’ (at least that is the word used in the translation I am reading; I have little, really no French).  For Marcel, the term represents a spiritual ideal, a goal to be worked toward as one matures in Christian life.  But it also represents for him a philosophical ideal, a goal of philosophizing—although I admit that he makes this less clear.  Marcel’s use of the term overlaps interestingly with the Authorized Version’s use of ‘humble’ and of ‘meek’. But Marcel does not use the term merely as synonymous with the AV’s use of either. It also overlaps to an extent with the AV’s use of  ‘charity’, both ‘love’ and ‘gift-giving’, and it is connected by important lines of filiation with its use of ‘hope’.

The ideal is to make yourself disposable to others, to be willing to give them not only the first word in philosophical investigation, but also the last word too.  It is to philosophize in a way free of possessions, where possessions are understood as, say, theses, some philosophy or other that guides, indeed requires, my pushing or pulling, forcing or resisting for the sake of some philosophical claim or other.  These possessions make me philosophically non-disposable.  Marcel writes,

I wonder if we could not define the whole spiritual life as the sum of activities by which we try to reduce in ourselves the part played by non-disposability.

And he treats non-disposability as “inseparable from a form of self-adherence”.  Treated as a philosophical goal, being disposable would be to understand philosophy as practiced readiness of response, as a willingness to hear what another has to say and to work through that from the inside, from the side of the person who says it.  Philosophical progress would be made by reducing in our responsiveness the non-disposability that to some degree or other inevitably infects it.  As I read him, Plato’s Socrates aims for a form of non-disposability; as I read him, Wittgenstein aims for a form of it too.  Wittgenstein’s desire for it shows (it seems to me) in the way that he begins Philosophical Investigations, giving the first words to Augustine and speaking himself only in response to Augustine; it shows in his interest in what he calls “the liberating word” and in his willingness to yield wholly to the other prerogative over whether any word is in fact liberating.  (The poet, John Ciardi, somewhere speaks of the aim of poetry as the speaking of “the enlarging word”, an idea that I take to be related to Wittgenstein’s of “the liberating word”. I reckon that the ideas of “the enlarging word” and of “the liberating word” are not merely showings of an aim at being non-disposable, but of an aim at making the other more fully disposable to himself and to others.  The image of being a fly trapped in a fly-bottle (a passage that my talk of Wittgenstein’s aim makes unavoidable) I take to be an image of finding oneself non-disposable, both to oneself and to others.)  Cavell has insisted on this feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, as has Cora Diamond, in her underscoring of Wittgenstein’s desire to philosophize in a way that does not lay down requirements.

Socrates’ desire for disposability shows in his repeated, often deeply frustrated hope that his interlocutor will state what the interlocutor actually believes, whether about piety or about courage or about knowledge; it shows in his understanding of himself as a philosophical midwife.  (Look again at the almost unbelievably wonderful passage in the Theaetetus 148e-151d; it deserves reading and re-reading, with, as Burnyeat memorably says, “feeling as well as thought”.)  It shows in his deference to the Logos.  It shows in his averment of his own ignorance.  Virtually all that Socrates does shows his aversion to philosophical self-adherence.

I will return to this again.