Category Archives: writing

Unbelieving Believers: The Intended Audience of Concluding Unscientific Postscript

October 20, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, reading, religion, writing Tags: , , , , 6 Comments

Keeping his intended audience in mind is perhaps the most difficult thing to do when reading Johannes Climacus’ Postscript.  He writes, neither to those who deliberately reject Christianity nor to genuinely faithful Christians.  He is not writing to those who are caught in the throes of becoming a Christian.  Each of these audiences can of course find much in Postscript, but it is not written to them.  And, far too often, Postscript is criticized as if it had been written to these audiences.  (As a result, the book is criticized as if it were apologetics (God forbid!) or as if it were evangelistic).

Now I realize this may seem a strange claim, especially in the case of the last group, those in the throes of becoming a Christian.  “After all,” an objector might say, “Climacus’ controlling question is:  ‘How do I become a Christian?’  So isn’t he writing to that group?”

No.  Climacus’ interest in his controlling question is retrospective, not prospective.  He asks the question, and answers it, not as an exercise in evangelism, not as a tractarian, but for the sake of his intended audience, those who believe that they are believers, but who fail to believe.  His interest in his question is retrospective because, given the confusions of his intended audience, they will think of themselves as on the far end, as it were, of the question, not on its near end.  They need to realize that the way in which they believe they became believers is not a way of becoming believers.  I will call the intended audience the unbelieving believers.*

This intended audience is not wholly homogenous.  Some of the unbelieving believers account for their becoming Christians by believing it as a historical truth; some account for their becoming Christians by believing it as a speculative truth.  But both sub-groups have treated becoming a Christian as coming to be objectively convinced of the truth of Christianity.  To the extent that they have been worried about their subjective relationship to Christianity, their appropriation of it, they have taken it to be precipitated from objective conviction.  But appropriation does not precipitate from objective conviction.  Even worse, objective conviction makes appropriation even more difficult than it already is.  Objective conviction requires the inquirer to discipline out of her inquiry all questions of subjectivity, of how she is related to the object.  That very disciplining out tends to attenuate or destroy subjectivity.—This is one reason why the unbelieving believer who worries about appropriation expects appropriation to precipitate from objective conviction–the conditions of acquiring objective conviction are hostile to appropriation, so if it is to happen, it will look to those who pursue objective conviction but worry about appropriation like something that really can happen only once objective conviction occurs.

In showing what is really involved in becoming a Christian Climacus aims to shock his audience into recognizing that they are unbelieving believers.  Their account of how they became Christians, once they are clear about it and about the way one does actually become a Christian, reveals that they are not Christians.  They may be objectively convinced of something–it is unclear it really counts as Christianity–but they are not really believers, appropriators of Christianity.

That unbelieving believers are the intended audience is part of the story why Climacus is not much concerned about answering the objective question about the truth of Christianity.  (It is not the full story, but I am unsure I can tell the full story.)  His intended audience takes that question as settled.  They expect settling it to have settled the question of their faith too.  Climacus aims at unsettlement.  He will begin with an invitation:  “Tell me, and tell yourself, how you became a Christian…”

*NB  I use this phrase to suggest the simultaneous similarity and dissimilarity between Climacus’ intended audience and the father of the son possessed by a spirit (in Mark 9; cf. especially 9:24).

More On Emerson’s Incarnational Method

October 18, 2011 By in Emerson, religion, writing Tags: , , 2 Comments

I intend to get to Emerson on Montaigne, really to get to it, soon.  But I find myself wanting, needing I guess, to say more about what I turbidly called “Emerson’s Incarnational Method“.  I was drawn to that phrase because it seemed, and still seems to me to educe something deeply important in Emerson, something both inspiring and difficult.  I addressed the inspiring last time.  I want now to address the difficult.  I do so with hesitancy, for reasons that should be apparent momentarily.

A common complaint about Emerson is that he lacks a sense of tragedy.  There is something to that.  Recall the awful scene of Emerson having Waldo exhumed, so that he can see that Waldo is dead, that Waldo’s dust is returning to dust.  Emerson wants to think and write Incarnationally; he wants to live that way.  But he cannot manage it resolutely.  (Can anyone?)  When writing to read in public, he tends always to see the relationship of fact to morals, to see the heavens in the earthly world.  And this makes him, and his urging his readers toward self-reliance and self-obedience, too Docetist.  He has a hard time with the hard facts, with the facts in relation to sensation. He writes from a luminous sense of omniscence, of omnipotence:  everything is transfigured, aglow with uncreated light.  But in his writing for himself, in his living, he finds that he is a dwarf, omni-nescient, powerless.  He is too Ebionite.  His son is taken from him in the sixth year of his joy, but Emerson cannot accept that.  Death, in particular the death of Waldo, seems like the triumph of sensation over morals, a putting-out of the uncreated light, darkness.  As he puts it in a journal entry (the one I am weaving into this post), he knows himself defeated constantly, but believes he is “born to victory”.

It strikes me that Emerson lacks a true sense of the sacramental.  (I believe this shows itself in Emerson’s (mis)understanding of religious ritual.)  For Emerson, creation itself is and should be sacramental, and the Incarnation he is and strives better to be is itself an instance of the sacramental, and is oriented toward the fullness of the sacramental.  The Incarnation finishes the sacramental activity of creation. Emerson needs to see the material as itself what realizes the spiritual, the tangible as what itself what realizes the moral.  But he all-too-often sees the material as opposed to the spiritual, the tangible as opposed to the moral.  So seeing, he all-too-often confronts facts divided, divided into the side that is related to sensation and the side that is related to morals.  So seeing, he becomes overwhelmed with the material, with sensation, and cannot find his way out of the darkness.  He would have Waldo immortal; he cannot imagine Waldo resurrected:  he is left with Waldo dead.  –How can someone born to victory be so defeated?

Nabokov on Gogol

October 12, 2011 By in writing Tags: Leave a comment

A unique rolling stone, gathering–or thinking he would gather–a unique kind of moss, he spent many summers wandering from spa to spa.  His complaint was difficult to cure because it was both vague and variable:  attacks of melancholy when his mind would be benumbed with unspeakable feelings of forebodings and nothing except an abrupt change of surroundings could bring relief; or else a recurrent state of physical distress marked by shiverings when no abundance of clothing could warm his limbs and when the only thing that helped, if persistently repeated, was a brisk walk–the longer the better.  The paradox was that while needing constant movement to prompt inspiration, this movement physically prevented him from writing.

Emerson Finds Montaigne

October 6, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne, reading, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy.  It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes.  I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.  It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.  It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.”  Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.

“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.”  My life has been punctuated by books:  Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days.  Who knows what book will speak to him?  Or when?  But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?

Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine.  My hour has not yet come.”  But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time:  emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation:  and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now.  I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come.  The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud.  When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine.  I think too of littler things:  the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on.  The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.

Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays.  He did not just read them.  Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives.  The covers of our favorite books enclose us.  Our lives are bound by our reading.

Chump Change: a Thought on TLP 1

October 5, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , 3 Comments

(Handout.)

What should we say of TLP 1, what should we do with it?  We could note, I guess, that it plays an interesting role in a song by New Pornographers, Chump Change.  But that’s scarce help.

One odd feature of 1 is its Eliotic dual-aspect as Bang-Whimper (of course this at the beginning, not, as Eliot’s was, at the end).

Bang:  The world is everything that is the case!  Whoa!  Who woulda thunk it?  Everything, everydamnthing!  The world, man, the whole frickin’ world!  This must be the near end of a gargantuan Metaphysical Buffet!  Upcoming dishes:  God, The Soul, …Who Knows?  I can’t stand the suspense.  What next?

Whimper:  The world is everything that is the case…  Well, yeah.  What else would it be?  “Everything that is the case.”  Less exciting even than the Times’ “All the news that is fit to print”.  The world is–the world.  Whoopee…  Wake me at 1.1.

Why begin with a proposition that is somehow both thunderclap and cricket’s chirp, new news and old hat?

It is incredibly tempting to read TLP as follows:  The 1’s tell us What There Is.  The 2’s and 3’s tell us How Language Hooks onto What There Is.  The Bang aspect rules on this reading.  But is there another reading, one that perhaps allows the Whimper aspect to rule?  And if there is, what would we make of it, and of the 1’s, 2’s and 3’s?

Reflecting on La Bête

October 4, 2011 By in poetry, writing Tags: , , , 2 Comments

My son just finished starring in La Bête here at AU.  He was terrific; the whole cast was great.  –The play revels in language and is a sustained meditation on language.  The two central characters, Valere and Elomire, represent two radically different ways of using and inhabiting language.  Elomire is a kind of Karl Kraus–without the humor:  he is deeply concerned for “moral discourse”, for language properly used.  Valere uses langauge–in a way that is beyond, or at least careless of, usage and abusage.  At the heart of the play is this contrast and the contrast between the two men.

It is easy, I think, to see the play as championing Elomire’s side, but that would be a mistake.  Part of the reason the mistake is easy is that Valere is a reductio (if I may put it this way) on himself.  He shows himself ridiculous in all that he says.  Elomire is no reductio on himself.  Even more, Elomire is championed by a young woman in the play, Dorine.  She is a teenager who has a disturbed relationship with language.  During the play, she refuses to speak except in monosyllabic words rhyming with “do”.  But at one crucial moment, when Elomire is pleading unsuccessfully for understanding from his acting troup, she is the only one who seems to understand.  She marks her understanding with a violation of her own rule.  When Elomire asks, in effect, “Does anyone understand?”, Dorine says, “I do.” (The constative/performative ambiguity in this line is worth reflection.)  –Her willingness to take his side, his relative lack of ridiculousness compared to Valere, these can together make it seem that Elomire is in the right.  But after wondering about that for a while, I realized that the young woman is the reductio of Elomire’s view.  To see how, consider her in relation to Cratylus, the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues.  The tradition has it that Cratylus was convinced by Heraclitus, but that Cratylus thought Heraclitus had not sufficiently radicalized his own doctrine.  So Cratylus emended “We cannot step into the same river twice” to “We cannot step into the same river once”.  Eventually, his embrace of Heraclitean principles led Cratylus away from words altogether; he spends his last years foregoing speech and simply wiggling a finger (fluxily).  While Elomire is no Heraclitean, he does so raise the stakes in speaking and writing that it can come to seem impossible properly to use language.  And I think Dorine is the victim of his view.  Her desire to speak in a properly moral discourse has robbed her of words.

Valere inhabits a language without rules.  All that matters is what he can press it into doing for him.   He rules language. (And he is largely the sort of clueless despot you would expect.)  Elomire inhabits a language with more rules than Calvin’s Geneva.  Doing anything in it requires a sensitivity and skill that seem to exceed human capacities.  It strikes me that the beast of the title is not so much Valere, although he is referred to in that way by Elomire; no, the beast is language itself, wild and tame, uncontrollable and compelling, infinitely jesting and deadly serious.

How to Read TLP?

October 3, 2011 By in logic, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, poetry, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , Leave a comment

(Class Handout.)

(1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic.
 
(2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides.

(3) Wittgenstein (from Culture and Value) around 1930, but apropos of TLP (and, mutatis mutandis, of PI):

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all views of one object seen from different angles.

(4) Wittgenstein considered titling TLP something else–Der Satz, The Proposition.  The book isolates the look, the physiognomy, the sound, the structure of the proposition–a literary and a logical task.  It prioritizes the proposition stylistically and philosophically.

(5) Ronald Gregor Smith wrote of Martin Buber’s I and Thou:

To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at the first reading we may say that I and Thou is indeed a poem.  Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part…will then be illumined by the brightness of another part.  For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.

Just so, exactly just so, of TLP too.  I have been stressing the necessity of allowing the total effect of TLP to work on your mind.

On the Subjugation of Pit Bulls

September 28, 2011 By in Philosophy, writing Leave a comment

Another in my on-going line-up of unfinished essays.  This one is a bit different, though, focusing, as it does, on the plight of the Pit Bull.  It was written, as I note, in tribute to Vicki Hearne and much under the influence of her work.  I should note also that the essay is written for (what Robertson Davies calls) the clerisy, not for philosophers per se.  It really is unfinished.  Whole sections are missing or are present in telegraphese.  Comments welcome.

Some Underdeveloped Thoughts on Montaigne’s Style

September 27, 2011 By in Montaigne, skepticism, writing Tags: , , , 5 Comments

What should be said about the way Montaigne writes?  He writes essays–as he says, if his mind could gain a firm footing, he would not make essays, he would make decisions, but his mind is always in apprenticeship and on trial.  On apprenticeship and on trial:  what Montaigne says of his mind I apply to his words.  His words are on apprenticeship and on trial.  His words are apprenticed to his subject, they are on trial by their use.  The question is:  will this word do?  Do what it needs to do, stand the test it must stand, carry the burden it must carry.  Above all, his words must portray passing, not being.  They must be capable of illumining the moment of obligation in experience, where ‘moment’ means both a brief period of time and an important point in a course of development.  But they must be able to do so in a way that does not make of the moment of obligation anything that steps free of the experience, that steps free of time.  Even the moment of obligation in experience passes.  So his words must be chosen in such a way that they do not arrest time or run from it.

One of the deepest peculiarities of Montaigne’s essays is that they too pass in time, in his time and in the reader’s time.  Consider the way in which most essays are organized spatially and not temporally, even where on occasion their logico-rhetorical form is temporal.  Most essays are written in such a way that the entire essay is to be understood as ultimately present to the reader’s mind all at once, in a timeless present, as it were.  The introduction to the essay is not earlier than the body, or the body earlier than the conclusion; no, the introduction is above the body, which in turn is above the conclusion.  Although it may take the reader time to work from top to bottom, all the parts of the essay are compresent, and understanding it means coming to hold all its parts together in compresence, in what Augustine might have called the present of the present, available to one contemporary summary observation.  But Montaigne’s essays pass.  The introduction become the past of the body which becomes the past of the conclusion.  Each part jettisons the earlier part, takes its place in the present.  The essay is thus not available to observation, but instead to memory, where it is still not present all at once, but rather passes in review.

Now I should say that I am not venturing into the metaphysics of composition or of reading here.  Instead I am picturing two different processes and two different understandings of composition and reading.  The crucial idea is that the parts of Montaigne’s essays replace each other, they do not exist together with the other parts.  That does not mean that the earlier parts do not bear on the later, but rather that they bear on the later parts in a different way.  Montaigne changes as he writes the essay.  Sometimes he intends to change; sometimes he just does.  And the moment of obligation in his experience changes too.  So what he writes now may not agree or harmonize with what he wrote earlier.  But since what he is presently writing supplants what he wrote earlier, he sees no reason to treat the disagreement as vitiating the essay.  The essay may contradict or be in tension with itself but it does not contradict and is not in tension with the truth.  The conclusion of his essay concludes the essay but it is not a conclusion in the logical sense.  The essay starts and ends but its beginning is not a function of its ending in any argumentative sense, although the beginning and the ending are thematically united, united by subject.

The essay I have been leaning on as I have written this is Montaigne’s “Of Repentance”.  I have been leaning particularly on its opening paragraphs.  That essay’s title provides a way of focusing what I have been struggling to say.  Montaigne’s words are always in apprenticeship and trial.  Because of this, Montaigne writes so as not to have to repent for his essays:  He does not teach, he tells. He tells us what he sees as he sees it.  What Montaigne tells now may contradict what he told earlier, or at any rate may not chime perfectly with it, but what he tells now never contradicts him–he remains always in creative fidelity to himself.  He also remains in creative fidelity to the relevant moment of obligation in experience.  But he does not worry about remaining in creative fidelity with what he has already told; that is, in an important sense, gone.  He did his best with it as he does with what he is telling, but he is no longer responsible to it.

Spending time trying to unify a Montaigne essay wastes time.  If an essay is out of agreement with itself, then it is.  There is no deeper unity.  But that does not mean that each essay is out of agreement with itself.  It may be that the later parts of the essay are such that, although they do not follow from the earlier, they follow the earlier, in the sense that they progressively enrich and deepen the creative fidelity of Montaigne’s treatment of himself and of his subject.

Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change and vary.  The world is but a perennial movement.  All things in it are in constant motion–the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt–both with the common motion and with their own.  Stability itself is nothing more than a languid motion.