Life of a Monk
Category Archives: virtue and vice
Emerson on Montaigne 2: The Considerer
Emerson calls the skeptic, calls Montaigne, the Considerer. (See the quotation in EoM1.) What does this mean? It is tempting, I believe, to take it to mean something like judge. But I do not think that is the meaning, or at least it is not the primary meaning of the term. It is better to situate the term in contexts like this: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow…” Kierkegaard, commenting on this scriptural passage, writes: …[C]onsider them, that is, pay close attention to them: make them the object, not of a hasty glance in passing, but of your consideration…Alas, how many are there who truly consider them in accordance with the Gospel’s instructions.” I am not claiming that Emerson has Matthew 6 in mind when he chose the word ‘Considerer’, but I do think that he is using the word in that way, Kierkegaard’s way. My point is that the Considerer does not understand himself as standing over and above what he considers. No, he is enmeshed in what he considers, and his considering it is his way of learning how to cope in and with it all. To consider them to to attentively submit to them, to let them impress themselves upon you. But that only works to the extent that you are in sympathy and likeness to what you consider. –And this is another useful point of comparison with Kierkegaard, since one upshot of his edifying discourse on “What We Learn from the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air” is that the lilies and the birds can teach us nothing if we take ourselves to be nothing like them.
Of course, the drift of Emerson and Kierkegaard seems very different. Emerson is describing something linked with prudence; Kierkegaard is describing something contrasted with prudence. For Kierkegaard, the lesson of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air is that we are only independent in complete dependence on God. To learn the lesson of that complete dependence is not merely to believe that it is so but to live out that complete dependence. So do the lilies and the birds. What we learn from them must be reduplicated in our lives, or we have not really learned it. –But understood this way, the drift of Kierkegaard and of Emerson is not so very different, though sketching out the similarities would take more time than I have. For now, let me just note this: Each passage targets our vanity. Kierkegaard, following scripture, tells us to learn from, submit to, the birds of the air. Emerson, following his genius, tells us we are but poppinjays, little vulnerable conceited poppinjays. Let us be Considerers–but not in vain.
Augustine on the Danger
Confronting all those who travel in any way to the region of the happy life there is a huge mountain, which is set in front of the harbor [of wisdom]…What other mountain does reason maintain should be feared by those who are approaching and entering upon philosophy than the proud enthusiasm for empty glory? (The Happy Life)
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.)
Socratic Irony, Good and Bad
In his talk, “In Praise of Philosophy”, Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of Socrates’ irony by considering his behavior at the trial:
What can one do if he neither pleads his cause nor challenges to combat? One can speak in such a way as to make freedom show itself in and through the various respects and considerations, and to unlock hate by a smile–a lesson for our philosophy which has lost both its smile and its sense of tragedy. This is what is called irony. The irony of Socrates is a distant but true relation with others. It expresses the fundamental fact that each of us is only himself inescapably, and nevertheless recognizes himself in the other. It is an attempt to open up both of us for freedom. As is true of tragedy, both the adversaries are justified, and the true irony uses a double-meaning which is founded on these facts. There is therefore no self-conceit. As Hegel well says, it is naive. The story of Socrates is not to say less in order to win an advantage in showing great mental power, or in suggesting some esoteric knowledge. “Whenever I convince anyone of his ignorance,” the Apology says with melancholy, “my listeners imagine that I know everything that he does not know.” Socrates does not know any more than they know. He knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.
To this good irony Hegel opposes a romantic irony which is equivocal, tricky, and self-conceited. It relies on the power which we can use, if we wish, to give any kind of meaning to anything whatsoever. It levels things down: it plays with them and permits anything. The irony of Socrates is not this kind of madness. Or at least if there are traces of bad irony in it, it is Socrates himself who teaches us to correct Socrates…Sometimes it is clear that he yields to the giddiness of insolence and spitefulness, to self-magnification and the aristocratic spirit. He was left with no other resource than himself. As Hegel says again, he appeared “at the time of the decadence of the Athenian democracy; he drew away from the externally existent and retired into himself to seek the just and the good.” But in the last analysis it was precisely this he was self-prohibited from doing, since he thought that one cannot be just all alone and indeed, that in being just all alone he ceases to be just. If it is truly the City that he is defending, it is not merely the City in him but that actual City existing around him…It was therefore necessary to give the tribunal its chance of understanding. In so far as we live with others, no judgment we make on them is possible with leaves us out, and which places them at a distance.
For me, this is a Janus passage: it retrospects Reading “RM” 10 (as well as another recent post) and prospects Reading “RM” 11 (or it will, when I produce 11). –But for now I want to think about it just for Socrates’s sake. Montaigne I set aside. What interests me in the passage now is the contrast between good and bad irony. I agree that there is such a contrast and I agree in the main with Merleau-Ponty’s Hegelian understanding of it. Noting the contrast is important in reckoning with Socrates. (It is therefore important in teaching Socrates, as I now am. Students tend to react most strongly to the traces of bad irony in Socrates’ (good) irony and thus to treat his irony as (unalloyed) bad irony. Merleau-Ponty’s description helps me sympathize with the students when they react that way, without yielding to their reaction.) Socrates’ good irony hugs his ignorance, without crossing out that ignorance, rendering it merely apparent. As I have said in previous posts, Socrates targets double ignorance–thinking that you know when you do not know–and having that target makes irony all but unavoidable. Unlike simple ignorance–not knowing–double ignorance is not-knowing entombed in pride (self-conceit), coldly obstructed from the truth. Socrates’ good irony aims to disinter a person’s simple ignorance, and to bring a person to acknowledge that simple ignorance. Socrates’ good irony is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, a distant but true relation with others: distant–because if he comes too close he aggravates their pride, risks losing himself or approbates himself against their freedom; true–because genuinely hopeful and genuinely humble. Available, as I am now habitually putting it. Sometimes Socrates fails because he cannot maintain distance or maintain truth, and then he either misses irony altogether or he slips into some degree of bad irony. Good irony is Socrates’ way of making himself available to others without trespassing upon their freedom; it is also a way of targeting their pride, the pride that not only makes them unavailable to others, but makes them unhandy to themselves. Pride creates only the freedom to fall.
(A puzzle in Merleau-Ponty’s passage is its use of ‘distant’ and ‘distance’. Socrates’ irony is a “distant but true relation with others”, but Socrates will make no judgment on others that “places them at a distance”. I solve the puzzle this way: Socrates’ good irony does not place him at a judgmental distance from others. It is not a standing over and above them. In other words, Socrates can count himself among those he lives with, making no judgment on them that leaves him out, and which places them at a distance, even while his way of living among them is to maintain a distant but true relation to them. In fact, his ironic distance even aids his refusal to place others at a judgmental distance from himself: think of judgmental distance as a false relation to others.)
“Going the Bloody Hard Way” (Marcel)
It is indeed of the nature of value to take on a special function in relation to life and, as it were, to set its seal upon it. An incontestable experiment, which can scarcely be recorded in objective documents, here brings us the most definite proof: if I dedicate my life to serve some supreme cause where a supreme value is involved, by this fact my life receives from the value itself a consecration which delivers it from the vicissitudes of history. We must, however, be on our guard against illusions of all kinds which swarm around the word ‘value’. Pseudo-values are as full of vitality as pseudo-ideas. The dauber who works to please a clientele, even if he persuades himself that he is engaged in the service of art, is in no way “consecrated”; his tangible successes will not deceive us. Perhaps, in a general way, the artist can only receive the one consecration that counts on the condition that he submits to severe test. This does not necessarily take the form of the judgment of others, for it may happen for a long time that the artist is not understood by those around him–but it means at least that with lucid sincerity he compares what he is really doing with what he aspires to do–a mortifying comparison more often than not. This amounts to saying that value never becomes a reality in a life except by means of a perpetual struggle against easiness. This is quite as true in our moral lives as in scientific research or aesthetic creation. We always come back to the spirit of truth, and that eternal enemy which has to be fought against without remission: our self-complacency.
Marcel’s Table of Categories (Phillipians 4:8)
For the rest, my brothers, whatever things are true, whatever things have honor, whatever things are upright, whatever things are holy, whatever things are beautiful, whatever things are of value, if there is any virtue and if there is any praise, give thought to these things.
No Show, Again
I was re-reading today F. R. Leavis’ “Memories of Wittgenstein”, and came across the following story. Leavis and Wittgenstein hired a boat and, after Wittgenstein had paddled for a while, he stopped and got out, saying that he and Leavis should get out and walk. The walk takes them a fair distance and quite a bit of time. Eventually, Leavis reminds Wittgenstein that they hired the boat, have a long trek back (both by foot and by boat) and that the man from whom they hired the boat must still be waiting for them to return. They go back, arriving at the boathouse at about midnight.
The man came forward and held our canoe as we got out. Wittgenstein, who insisted imperiously on paying, didn’t, I deduced from the man’s protest, give him any tip. I, in my effort to get in first with the payment, had my hand on some money in my trousers pocket and pulling it out, I slipped a couple of coins to the man. As we went away, Wittgenstein asked: “How much did you give him?” I told him, and Wittgenstein said: “I hope that is not going to be a precedent.” Not, this time, suppressing the impatience I felt [Leavis had been impatient with Wittgenstein for a good part of the evening], I returned: “The man told you that he had been waiting for us for a couple of hours—for us alone, and there is every reason for believing that he spoke the truth.” “I, ” said Wittgenstein, “always associate the man with the boathouse.” “You may, ” I retorted, “but you know that he is separable and has a life apart from it.” Wittgenstein said nothing.
Wittgenstein on this occasion provides an example of the sort of thing that Marcel is trying to prevent in himself in the remark I quoted a few days ago: “I am not watching a show.” What Marcel wants to prevent in himself is, put one way, a failure of moral imagination, a failure of negative capability. Wittgenstein gives in to the impulse to see the world (to see the man at the boathouse) as (part of) a closed, rational system oriented on his own desires and habits and needs, as two-dimensional. The man at the boathouse becomes, slightly alarmingly, somewhat like the owner of the house in PI 398c:
Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it.–Someone asks “Whose house is that?”–The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot for example enter his house.
Wittgenstein’s boatman cannot leave the boathouse; he cannot return to his own home, to his life that is separate and apart from the boathouse. –We all give in to this impulse from time to time. That is why Marcel calls the no-show-ness of the world in which he finds himself “a fundamental spiritual fact”. Like all spiritual facts, ignorance of it counts not as being ill-informed, but as a refusal to know.
One reason this story struck me was because I was again re-pondering Marcel’s remark due to reflections Lowe provides on her blog.
Reading “RM” 8: Skepticism
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
‘
No Show
‘I am not watching a show’–I will repeat these words to myself every day. A fundamental spiritual fact.
Gabriel Marcel
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 