Another fine bit from Hort’s The Way, The Truth, The Life. It captures something I wish I could bear more presently in mind when I teach.
For every questioner who is not the merest sophist, if indeed we dare make that exception, is concentrically manifold, self within self; and the question which alone he is able to present in words is but a rude symbol of the question in his mind, as this again is but a rude symbol of the whole search within.
Point out what’s not hidden.
Sticky, drizzly and grey here in the heart of Dixie. I am struggling to get my courses off the ground. I so hate the first few days of class, those days where I am aware of myself, the students seem aware of themselves and we together struggle to turn our awareness to the material at hand. I like it when the material takes over and we all can forget ourselves in it, in a focused, teamworky way. As usual, I am finding the first days of Phenomenology particularly difficult. (If anyone out there has created some particularly graceful, hardly-disturbs-the-water dive into Phenomenology, I’d be most eager to know about it.) The trouble, as I see it, is that there are several different dimensions of difficulty and you need to make progress on them all, sorta simultaneously. There’s the Reduction, of course, but there is also the threat/problem of psychologism, and it is hard to see how to understand either of those aright without understanding the other–and, of course, there is the ubiquitous, term-long fight to distinguish Phenomenology from Phenomenalism, and that too is bound up with explanation of the Reduction and the threat/problem of psychologism.
At the moment, we are reading Frege–his review of Husserl’s book on arithmetic and his seminal “The Thought”. I use the distinctions among the Three Realms as a way of making progress on these topics (the Reduction, etc.), although the Realms have to be used dialectically, dropped after they’ve done their job, since they do not really quite work. The basic strategy is to distinguish the Realms and their denizens–physical objects, ideas and thoughts–and then to distinguish the intentional object of a particular case of perception from the intentio of that perception, pointing out that the intentional object is a denizen of the Outer Realm (a tree, say) and then asking whether the intentio seems more like a denizen of the Inner Realm (an idea) or like a denizen of the Third Realm (a thought). Now, the intentio strictly speaking seems misfit as a denizen of either, but considering it as a denizen of the Inner Realm helps the students to understand psychologism, and why it is a threat/problem for phenomenology, and considering it as a denizen of the Third Realm helps to make sense of the claim that what the Reduction discloses is something essential and, in some way, objective–or at least not subjective as ideas are subjective. The heart of the strategy is to get the students to begin really to struggle with the worry about whether what the Reduction discloses is something that is existentially mind-dependent (ideas) or not existentially mind-dependent (physical objects or thoughts), or whether there is some other way of trying to understand what is disclosed.
There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine. The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.
As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.
Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.
Since [my] earliest days of philosophic study, I have remained concerned with the works of philosophers, not in themselves, but as helps to the understanding of experience. I study the works of philosophers out of an interest which subordinates theory to understanding. . . . It will be ever important to me to give attention to technical philosophy but I will never be able to take technical philosophy as the ultimate phase of a reflective life.
There are in whose notion education would seem to consist in the production of a certain repose through the development of this and that faculty, and the depression, if not eradication, of this and that other faculty. But if mere repose were the end in view, an unsparing depression of all the faculties would be the surest means of approaching it, provided always the animal instincts could be depressed likewise, or, better still, kept in a state of constant repletion. Happily, however, for the human race, it possesses in the passion of hunger even, a more immediate saviour than in the wisest selection and treatment of its faculties. For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awakening from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.
We have here, I think, something like the contrast between the way students see (have been taught to see) their education and what they should see. What they want is unsparing depression of their faculties and constant repletion of their animal instincts, a kind of upside-down ascesis. What they should want is noble unrest, hunger, wakefulness–a fever that urges them from their beds rather than keeping them abed.
[This was a class focused on Plato’s Theaetetus, Wittgenstein’s Blue Book and Bouwsma’s John Locke Lectures (The Flux). The class was entitled, “The Flux”. I taught it in the Spring of 1996.]
Back, now, to midwifery.
I recommend that Socrates be seen as logically clarifying thoughts. His interlocutor says something–provides the datum clarificandum–and Socrates goes to work. He pulls the interlocutor’s saying this way and that. He compares it with first one sentence and then another. All the while he’s asking his interlocutor to decide: “Is this what you meant? Could you have meant this?” Sometimes the interlocutor keeps up for a while.
What is the midwifery comparison? Call it an exhibitive theory of philosophizing. It shows us things we already know, but in a way that makes us see them afresh.
Socrates pictures his interlocutors as pregnant. The have something inside them, although there is no way of knowing whether what’s inside them is going to be viable or still-born. Socrates brings on labor pains. He does this, I guess, by administering a potent medicine, by asking “What is x?” Upon hearing the question, the interlocutor goes into labor. The labor, like all labor, is painful. (Try giving birth to Truth!) Why is it painful? Answering a question like “What is knowledge?” is a strenuous and hurtful mental business.
Let me try this without the midwifery idom.
Socrates knows how to ask questions. The questions he knows how to ask are not of the “What’s his name?” or “What sort of architecture is that?” variety. Such questions are not one that we are full of answers to, or think we are. Sometimes we can answer them; sometimes we can’t. As long as we aren’t taking a test or on Jeopardy, not being able to answer doesn’t matter much. But when we can’t answer Socrates’ questions, it matters. No test, no Jeopardy. Socrates asks, “What is knowledge?” and we think we have to answer. Why? –We all know that we know what knowledge is. That’s why! We all talk about knowledge, use “know” or its cognates, all the time.
Theaetetus is a learner. Theodorus is a teacher. Surely, they know what knowledge is.
Socrates askes “What is knowledge?” and we have an answer in us. But the answer won’t come quickly. Augustine: “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” So we huff and we puff and we try things out: knowledge is perception. Knowledge is true judgment. None of these comes easily. We have the feeling that we force each out. The forcing hurts; it ought to be unnecessary. Socrates helps, if that is what he chooses to do, by asking still more questions. Each time we force out another answer, Socrates tests it. If it won’t do, he shows us it won’t. This is no fun, either. After all that work, after all those words, no one wants to see an apparent new answer, apparently fresh to the world and apparently full of promise, turn out to be nonsense–a phantom answer. Don’t rob us of our darling follies! But Socrates is a pro. He’s on a mission from God. He show us. Sometimes we go back to work forcing out another answer. Sometimes we take our phantoms and go home.
Socrates says he can tell those who are full of answers from those who aren’t. Those who aren’t he sends to Prodicus. (Prodicus has an office in our English department.) The others he helps. They profit from this help, even if they manage no viable births. How?
All this is strange. Midwifery is no glamorous role for the philosopher. He’s only around to help bring answers to light and to get rid of them, if they are monstrosities. (Philosophy: confusiasm over abstrocities.) The role is thoroughly negative. The philosopher is barren, has no answers of his own. He can’t adopt.
No pitter-patter of little answer-feet in the philosopher’s house.
From josh’s blog:
A teacher who feels called to a vocation will feel all the more unhappy at inviting any student freely to leave what education is to be had rather than take it; like a priest who says, sorry, my child, if you can be saved, it’s not by me.
Indeed. Inviting someone to leave is not always the same as wanting them to go.
After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence–a courageous trust in the great purpose of all things and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight, whatever the price may be. Who knows whether the ‘personality’ of which men talk so much and know so little may not prove to be the temporary limitation rather than the necessary expression of Life?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 