Category Archives: Uncategorized

Borrowed From: Yelping with Cormack: Urban Outfitters

February 10, 2012 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Union Square – San Francisco, CA

Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Three stars.

And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their clothes preworn in some tropical factory and they shop and they hunt with dullbrown eyes through that cavalcade of false trinkets and those shrinkwrapped mockeries laying there in silent indictment and they reach out to touch those trite things and their faces are slack but in their gullets a scream lies stillborn for they are the kings and the queens reigning over the death of their people and the world is not theirs and never was and the suffering and the horrors are not their doing but the work of their bankrupt forbears and before them stretches an abyss beyond man’s imagining and within their lifetime the promise of a coming reckoning measured in blood and in pestilence and they shuffle through that store near paralytic and finally they take a metal thing with a feather on it and they buy that thing.

Living in Homonymy

January 15, 2012 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Forgive me, I have knees on the brain.  (What’re those lines in the chorus of the Cage the Elephant song, “Aberdeen“?  “Hold the phone/Hit repeat/You’ve got me foamin’ at the knees…”?)  I don’t know really what viability Aristotle’s organic theory has as science, if any, but going through knee replacement surgery (this is my second) makes the whole homonymy jig seem like it might not be up.  The doctor installs a “knee”.  Then the recipient, the therapists and pain team up to see if they can clear the metaphysical hurdle between “knee” and knee.  –Anyway, this is my new therapy mantra (repeated, in good sense, silently):  “Make it a knee, make it a knee, make it a knee”.

Six Million Dollar (or Less) Man

January 3, 2012 By in Uncategorized 6 Comments

I go under the knife tomorrow–knee replacement surgery.  Expect things to be relatively quiet here for a couple of days.  –They can rebuild me; they have the technology.

The Sphinx (A Lecture from April, 2002)

November 14, 2011 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , 1 Comment


At the gate of the school lies the sphinx who puts this question to every emerging scholar …: “How are you going to make your living?” And every [scholar] must answer or die: so the poor things believe.

We call this the system. It isn’t, really. The trouble lies in us who are so afraid of this particular sphinx. “My dear sphinx, my wants are very small, my needs still smaller. I wonder you trouble yourself about so trivial a matter. I am going to get a job in a bottle-factory, where I shall have to spend a certain number of hours a day. But that is the least of my concerns. My dear sphinx, you are a kitten at riddles. If you’d asked me, now, what am I going to do with my life, apart from the bottle-factory, you might have frightened me. As it is, really, every smoky tall chimney is an answer to you.”

Curious that when the toothless old sphinx croaks “How are you going to get your living?” our knees give way beneath us. … Do we really think we might not be able to earn our bread and butter? The odds against earning your living are one in five thousand. There are not so many odds against dying of typhoid or of being killed in a street-accident. Yet you don’t really care a snap about street-accidents or typhoid. Then why are you so afraid of dying of starvation? You’ll never die of starvation, anyhow. …

There is no cure for this craven terror of poverty save in human courage and insouciance. A sphinx has you by your cravenness. … Oedipus and all those before him might just as easily have answered the sphinx by saying … “My dear sphinx, go to school, go to school …. [H]ere you are, heaven knows how old, propounding silly riddles….” Exit the sphinx with its tail between its legs.

And so with the sphinx of our material existence. She’ll never go off with her tail between her legs till we simply jeer at her.

D. H. Lawrence.  –We have our sphinx at Auburn: she lives in and feeds on our University culture, and she speaks, all-too-often, with the voice of Bobby Lowder. [An Auburn trustee]  “How are you going to earn your living?” the Bobby-voice croaks – and our knees give way beneath us. The sphinx has us by our cravenness. We are cowards all. What we should say when she croaks is what Lawrence would have us say. “Earn my living, you crazy old bitch? Why, I’m going Jimmy-Shepherding. No, not sheep at all. Jimmishepherding ….”

One point of this answer is to ridicule the question and the questioner. Both are rather silly, really. Each of you is, with very few exceptions, going to earn a living. Each of you will probably do reasonably well. The penury that the sphinx terrifies you with is an extremely distant possibility.

As Lawrence suggests (this is the other point of the Jimmishepherding answer), the question that should frighten you is the question of what you will do when you are not earning your living. “How will you live, not from 9 to 5, but during the rest of the day’s hours? What will you do with yourself on the weekends? Will your leisure be dignified? And what kind of person will you be, what kind of worker will you be, as you work from 9 to 5?” These questions should put you in a swither. And the Bobby-voice has nothing responsive to say to them, nothing. The sphinx is stony silent.

The sphinx wants to talk about earning a living, about earning your daily bread and butter. But the sphinx does not want to talk about whether you eat as a glutton, or about what you do after mealtime. The sphinx does not want to talk about kingdoms that are to come or not; the sphinx does not want to talk about forgiving trespasses or not forgiving trespasses. No. The sphinx wants to talk about earning a living – but not about living well. The sphinx wants to talk about the difference between the rich and the poor man – but not about the difference between the good and the bad man.

William James asked himself the question “Of what use is a college training?” After some meditation, the pithiest answer he could give was “It should help you to know a good man when you see him.” Pithy, true, that answer; and wise, too. James expands on his answer:

Studying in [the proper] way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms “better” and “worse” may signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow more accurate and less fanatical. … What the colleges … should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various guises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent, – this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal value. … The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineer’s line and the surgeon’s is appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs around us.

James said more here than I can comment on. (I recommend his essay to you for your study; it is titled “The Social Value of the College Bred.”) I will confine myself to comments on three things: First, notice that the sense for human superiority does not clash with recognizing diversity. Instead, it aids that recognition. For too long, our University culture has treated these two as if they clash. An important feature of James’ thinking here is that recognizing diversity falls out of, and is, so to speak, controlled by, the sense for human superiority. That is, diversity is recognized because the sense for human superiority reveals that superiority in a variety of times, peoples and cultures. Good human jobs occur in various settings: our sense for human superiority reveals to us that high human types can occur here and there, now and then. Diversity matters because human superiority matters.

Second, the teaching of a sense for human superiority can make a place for both the humanities and the sciences. Each can play a role in subtilizing the sense. James’ discussion of this point is one of the more complicated ones in his essay; I’ll abstract from the complications. Abstracted, James’ point is that both the humanities and the sciences can be taught in a way that educates the feeling for a good human job anywhere. James thinks that the short description of this way of teaching is teaching the biographical history of the subject. When the sciences, and even when the humanities, are not taught in this way, “literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.” Obviously, James is not condemning the teaching of grammar, of catalogues, of listed dates or of a sheet of formulas. What he is condemning is teaching that cannot or does not reach beyond these things, and in failing to reach beyond them, is teaching that leaves the student without a developed or developing sense of human superiority.

Third, the teaching of a sense for human superiority is the last things the sphinx wants to happen here or anywhere. Students taught such a sense would be able to smell the sphinx coming; they would know her for the cheapjack that she is, and be disgusted by her.

A student who has been taught the feeling for a good human job anywhere is a student who will know to reject the sphinx’s question for the silliness it is. Even more, that student will be able to answer wisely, at least in practice, the questions that students should find frightening: questions about how to live and about what sort of person or worker to be. An education that leaves these questions unanswerable, or that leaves a student to answer them only unwisely is, to borrow James’ phrase, “the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.”

You may, of course, still fear the sphinx. You may think what I’ve said is hopelessly otherworldly. You may. But if you do that’s just another side of your fear of the sphinx. She has browbeaten you into being lowbrow. Don’t let her do that. Fight her. Jeer at her. And listen once more to Lawrence:

To follow a high aim you must be fearless of the consequences. To promulgate a high aim and to be fearful of the consequences … is much worse than leaving high aims alone altogether. … Later, when we’ve plucked a bit of our courage up, we’ll embark on a new course of education. … Those of us that are going to starve, why, we’ll take our chance. Who has wits, and guts, doesn’t starve: neither does he care about starving. Courage, mes amis.

Kierkegaardian Subjectivity and Austinian Performatives 1

October 31, 2011 By in Uncategorized 2 Comments

There is parallel between Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction and Austin’s constative/performative distinction.  The parallel turns out to be far-reaching and instructive.  One result is that it loosens the grip of the epistemological interpretation of Kierkegaard’s distinction.  That interpretation is clearly erroneous, but it persists nonetheless.  (Part of the problem is Kierkegaard himself:  he tends to talk about the objective in terms that seem epistemological and so seem to force an epistemological interpretation of the subjective; also, he tends to talk about the subjective in a way that exults in a certain paradoxical ring, a ring that is most audible when what he says is taken epistemologically.  But that does not make it the right way to take what he says.)  The parallel with Austin’s distinction makes the epistemological interpretation look obviously wrong, since Austin’s distinction is obviously not epistemological.

Of course it may still seem wrong to press the parallel too much, since although neither distinction is epistemological, Kierkegaard’s is, well, existential and Austin’s is, well, linguistic.  –It may help in response to this to remember that Austin describes his work as linguistic phenomenology and that Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic could also be so described.  I won’t outline the case for that description now, but for those who know Cavell’s paper on existentialism and analytic philosophy, I can say that the case would overlap importantly with Cavell’s case for paralleling Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation with Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic.  And of course Cavell’s later discussions of passionate utterance are also helpful with the parallel.

More on this soon.

Pure Philosophical Theses, Plain Reminders

August 4, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Uncategorized, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something–because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.–And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Thompson Clarke has been much on my mind, particularly his distinction between the plain and the pure (the philosophical).  According to Clarke, a sentence like “I am awake, not dreaming” has a plain use that can be exhibited thus:  Imagine a scientist experimenting with soporifics.  He has been using himself as subject.  As he tests the various soporifics, he makes notes to himself in his journal.  At one point, after awakening and shaking off his druggy lethargy, he begins a journal entry by writing, “I am awake, not dreaming.”  For Clarke, in the situation as so described, “I am awake, not dreaming” is something that the experimenter knows; in the situation, the written sentence is “implained”, and the experimenter’s knowledge is plain knowledge.  Clarke believes that the sentence, so situated, is an example of what Moore is defending when he defends common sense. (I am muting certain details in saying that.) But the obvious problem here is that the implained sentence, regarded as expressing knowledge, seems to express knowledge that is impure, too dependent on its situation to be such that, in expressing knowledge, it expresses something genuinely philosophically substantial, independent, something that could satisfy the deep intellectual need displayed in the problem of the external world.  But the sentence that could express that is a twin of the plain sentence, i.e., “I am awake, not dreaming”.  On this pure understanding of the sentence, it means whatever its constituent words make it mean, wholly independent of any non-semantic practices.  The experimenter in soporifics does not know the sentence on that understanding; he knows plainly–not purely.  The experimenter’s plain knowledge, compared to the promise of pure knowledge, looks restricted, or, as Clarke’s puts it in memorable phrase, there is a “relative ‘non-objectivity'” about the experimenter’s knowledge.  If he knew that he was awake, not dreaming, and knew it purely, then his knowledge would be absolutely objective.

I present all of this not because I want to trace the mazeways of Clarke’s paper.  I present it because I hope it offers an orientation on PI 127-9.  Here’s a sketch.

Start in the middle, with 128.  Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that the theses advanced in philosophy cannot be debated because everyone agrees to them.  Rather, he is saying that we cannot really advance theses in philosophy.  When we try, we fail, because what we “advance” never turns out to have the (grammatical) features internal to a thesis–it would not be debate-apt, it would not be controversial.  But that creates at least two questions:  (1) Why might we take ourselves or be taken to be advancing theses?  (2) What might we actually be doing? It is important to bear in mind as I answer that I judge Wittgenstein here to be thinking about someone who is concerned to philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, not just in any old way.

(1) I reckon that the words we call on as we philosophize  can be understood either plainly or purely.  And it is a standing temptation to understand those words purely, not plainly.  So understood, of course, our calling on those words would be our advancing theses, we would be saying something debatable, controversial.  Some will say “Yea”, others “Nay”.  But when we philosophize in Wittgenstein’s way, our contribution to our engagement with our interlocutor will take the form of plain words.  So understood, the words will not say anything debatable, controversial.  They will simply not be theses.  Again, so understood, everyone will agree with them.  –Still, there is the danger, since the pure saying of the words is, at the level of the words themselves, indistinguishable from the plain saying (they are twins), it will always be possible both for us and our interlocutor (undeliberately) to “gestalt shift” into the pure.  If we do so, however, we leave Wittgenstein’s way of philosophizing.  This sort of reading of 128 seems to me to help with 127–as indeed I believe it was intended to do.  A reminder is plain.  Nothing pure can function as a reminder, as Wittgenstein is thinking of it.  If what I assembled, taking myself to be assembling reminders, were pure, I would instead have assembled theses, advance them.  But reminders are matters of recall, not of advance.  If what I offer you as a reminder is debatable, I have failed in the task assigned in 127.  Wittgenstein once said that nothing he wrote in PI was hard to understand—what was hard to understand was why he wrote it.  Right.  There is going to be a difficulty of staying in the plain, both for ourselves and our interlocutors.  What we are doing will, from one familiar angle, only seem worth doing in the name of ‘philosophy’ if we migrate to the pure.  It is hard to see why anyone would assemble reminders of the sort Wittgenstein has in mind, hard to see how so doing could have any relevance to philosophy.  (As if I tried to settle the debate about the external world by producing my grocery list.)  That bring us to (2).

(2) So what are we doing.  Well, we are implaining ourselves and (we hope) our interlocutor.  We are assembling reminders for the purpose of implaining our interlocutor.  We remind so as to reveal to the interlocutor the distance between where he believes himself to be and where he actually is.  In the face of the twin sentences, with their divergent understandings, the interlocutor can see that he or sh has a forked understanding, divided between the pure and the plain.  To bring his or her understanding back into agreement with itself, the interlocutor needs to integrate either plainly or philosophically.  But to do so philosophically, he or she must be able to stabilize the pure understanding, to make clear what the words he or she calls on them say given their clinical isolation from the entire range of non-semantic practices.  Maybe that can be done; maybe not:  at any rate, each attempt must be met in its particular straits of exigency; there are, I suspect, too many too various strategies for attempting to make clear what the words called on mean purely for there to be any ahead-of-the-moment response to them all.  To integrate plainly is to renounce the pure and to want from the words called on nothing that their relation to the assembled reminders cannot allow them to have, nothing that cannot be intelligibly projected from the assembled reminders.  But that is not all:  fully to integrate plainly is to come to rest, to peace, even if only momentarily, in the plain.  It is to come to struck by the very plainness of the plain, by our own plainness.  It is to see how the very homeliness and familiarity of the plain allow it to be the foundations of our inquiries, despite our inability normally to see it functioning so.  It is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful.  But that is still not all:  fully to integrate philosophically is to see the plain as what is most striking and powerful, all the while still seeing it as plain, all the while refusing to transfigure the plain into the pure. Doing this would not be a matter of quickly and gestaltly shifting back and forth but would instead be the actualizing of a specific (cultivated) capacity to be awed by the humble, to find the sublime in the everyday.  If we could do this, the plain could satisfy our deep intellectual need.  But we would have made it so by rotating the axis of our examination.

I recall Chesterton’s words from Orthodoxy:

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

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?”

A Little Dialogue on Carnapian Names

July 30, 2011 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

That man’s name is “Smith”.
–Oh, so that’s the name of his name.  But what’s his name?
I told you.  His name is “Smith”.
–Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but could you please answer my question.
I did.  I said: “That man’s name is “Smith”.”
–Oh, so you are now naming something else?  What are you doing?  What is that the name of, if it is a name?  I want to know the man’s name.
But, look, I told you.  When I said ‘ “Smith” ‘ I told you his name.
–That’s not his name.  It is not even the name of his name.  It is the name of his name’s name.  We are making no progress.  Are those tortoise shell glasses?
Damn.  Hey, Smith, come here and help me.
–Oh, <sigh> thanks.  Now I know his name.
Gawd.  Saying and showing.  FML.

(inspired by Anscombe and Lewis Carroll)