It is very wrong to portray [philosophy] as inaccessible to children, with a surly, frowning, and terrifying face. Who has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing more gay, more lusty, more sprightly, and I might almost say more frolicsome. She preaches nothing but merry-making and a good time. A sad and dejected look shows that she does not dwell there.
Category Archives: writing
Frege and Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Audience
Please excuse this letter as springing from my unsatisfied need for communication. I find myself in a vicious circle: before people pay attention to my Begriffsschrift, they want to see what it can do, and I in turn cannot show this without presupposing familiarity with it. So it seems I can hardly count on any readers for the book I mentioned… (Letter to Marty)
This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it–or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. (Preface to TLP)
Conversation (Wyndham Lewis)
Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious feeling that ignorant men have for the written or printed word.
A Thought or Two on Augustine’s Book of the Interior
Augustine’s Confessions opens and is an opening upon the vastness of God, a vastness that somehow is contained in even while it contains our inwardness. Augustine’s opening paragraphs vault toward God and are the vault of the book’s lexicon: Thou (Lord, God), I, pray, praise, power, wisdom, man, creation, desire, nature, death, sin, witness, pride, satisfaction, restlessness, rest, know, understand, believe, preach, seek, find, call, faith, gift. The book opens in search and closes in rest. It moves, like Plotinus’ Enneads, simultaneously inward and upward. Plato’s dialogues end in aporia, wholly stymied by Socrates; Augustine’s confessions begin in aporia, absolutely humbled before God. Augustine is born early in the book. But his later new birth, at its center, represents the book’s true autoboiographical beginning.
The inwardness of the book fascinates me. Has anyone so opened himself to himself? Who has more searchingly charted the interior? Who before him knew that prayer was the proper vessel for such exploring? Confessions is The Art of Travel Inward.
I directed myself to myself and to myself I said, “You, who are you?” And I responded, “A human being.”
What am I, then, my God? What nature am I? My life is many and various and violently without measure.
Augustine will know who and what he is. He will know himself as person and as nature. What he will know he can ask provisionally of himself but must ask ultimately of God (since being a person is in some sense a function of being a human being, and the provenance of our being a human being is God).
Montaigne writes, “I do not portray being. I portray passing.” What he portrays is a passing being. Augustine wants to portray that too; but only against the backdrop of a unpassing being, with whom there is no shadow of turning.
“Quotation and Originality” (Emerson)
Observe…that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s, he is a lawgiver.
Philosophy and Literature (Collingwood)
I am hip-deep in course prep. As I try to do each term, I took a few minutes today to review Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method. Collingwood’s next-to-last chapter is “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature” and he provides some very useful helps for students and teachers there (and passim of course).
The language of philosophy is therefore, as every careful reader of the great philosophers already knows, a literary language and not a technical. Wherever a philosopher uses a term requiring formal definition, as distinct from…expositional definition…, the intrusion of a non-literary element into his language corresponds with the intrusion of a non-philosophical element into his thought: a fragment of science, a piece of inchoate philosophizing, or a philosophical error; three things not, in such a case, easily to be distinguished.
The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to science, and to choose his words according to the rules of literature. His terminology must have that expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon context, which are the hallmarks of a literary use of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.
A corresponding duty rests with the reader of philosophical literature, who must remember that he is reading a language and not a symbolism. He must neither think that his author is offering a verbal definition when he is making some statement about the essence of a concept–a fertile source of sophistical criticisms–nor complain when nothing resembling such a definition is given; he must expect philosophical terms to express their own meaning in the way in which they are used, like words of ordinary speech. He must not expect one word always to mean one thing in the sense that its meaning undergoes no kind of change; he must expect philosophical terminology, like all language, to be always in the process of development, and he must recollect that this, so far from making it harder to understand, is what makes it able to express its own meaning instead of being incomprehensible apart from definitions, like a collection of rigid and therefore artificial technical terms.
I commend the essay and especially its penultimate chapter to all.
The Living Past (Andrew Lytle)
If we dismiss the past as dead and not as a country of the living which our eyes are unable to see, as we cannot see a foreign country but know it is there, then we are likely to become servile. Living as we will be in a lesser sense of ourselves, lacking that fuller knowledge which only the living past can give, it will be easy to submit to pressure and receive what is already ours as a boon from authority.
Yes; Good Night, Good Night
James Gould Cozzens is not much in fashion these days, is little read. But whatever one may think of the man, the man could write. Here are the closing paragraphs of his final novel, Morning Noon and Night, a remarkable novel of old age, loss and mystery.
When in certain moods I look back I seem to myself wandering directionless down these many years in a kind of game or exercise of blindman’s buff–now sightlessly bumping into things, now suprised by sportive unreturnable blows. When in certain moods I look around me, I seem to see current experience as resembling progress of a tourist who revisits relics of the past. I pick with subdued curiosity an aimless way through memory’s remains. I investigate fragmentary scattered ruins, eons old, of a lost city of antiquity whose traces extend over a campagna otherwise empty under a clear level vacancy of sunset light.
Like that childishly remembered pound of band music cemetery-bound, the picture can be guessed to take shape from a forgotten actual incident of long ago, a childhood occasion in the course of foreign travel with my parents when on an unidentified day at an unidentified place the little boy finds himself wandering out beneath evening skies to gaze at scattered classical ruins which are the local sights–temple columns in twos or threes still loftily upright, damaged capitals held high, while marble drums of others fallen apart lie around them sunk in earth, half concealed by bush and grass. He looks down curving wide ranges of shattered stone steps while he is informed that here had once been a theater. At a distance he can see the tall line of a dozen or more aqueduct arches, commencing suddenly, and suddenly ending; coming now from nowhere, now going nowhere. Thin final sunlight of a sort sometimes seen in Canaletto paintings gilds gently enigmatic ancient stone, sere swards of coarse modern grass, and occasional broken hunched old trees. A calling or twittering of skylarks or other birds has ceased; the immense twilight silence settles, and the child must soon be taken away to bed. Yes; good night, good night. Good night, any surviving dear old Carian guests. Good night, ladies. Good night, all.
Dream Writing
I am on the Alabama coast, beached well.
I’ve been reading Norman Malcolm’s Dreaming and thinking about his work. While I often disagree with him, how I wish I could write like Malcolm! His studied, bristling honesty, his deep seriousness of purpose! He joints his paragraphs with woody sentences lacking internal punctuation. He will not ornament, he will not warp, he will not waste. His work strikes me as like Thoreau’s cabin
a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.
Like Thoreau’s cabin, everything is placed, everything exactly accounted for. Although constructed on a small scale, the soundness of the writing makes it
fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments.
In comparison, my writing is a snarl of cheap twine. Oh well, for better or for worse, we work as we have been given to work.
Enforced Quiet
I spent the last couple of days at the Monastery of the Holy Ascension. Lots of trees, lots of quiet. Time to meditate, to read. The monastery is in Resaca, Ga., north of Atlanta, south of Chattanooga. (The abbot joked, when I asked him what ‘Resaca’ meant, that he was pretty sure it meant backwater in some language or another.) I spent a the remains of last night, as it grew dark, reading Austen’s letters. Somehow her brisk chatter with her sister, about buying muslin (what is that, exactly?) and about days spent over tea and in visiting, seemed fitting, even as cassocked monks moved quietly between the bookstore and the kitchen (prosphora was baking, filling the humid air with yeasty scent). Perhaps the reason Austen seemed fitting was because she has a way of writing, on display alike in her letters and her novels, that never uses a him or a her that is not destinate with a thou. She (Austen) and him and her are always on their way to us. Because of this, Austen writes even of strangers with a humorous largeness of spirit, a willingness to be pleased (to mention a notion of Samuel Johnson’s that clearly mattered to Austen: it plays a crucial role in Persuasion), to be familiar. Austen can see, see steadily and wholly, see what is, without succumbing to any need to stand over against who she sees. Such seeing is a benediction, a blessing–a way of responding out of an abyss of respect: for Austen there is always a real person behind the shifting facades, a real person to be seen even in the play of lights of social circumstance, beyond the affectation and hypocrisy, a real person to be seen, and, seen, blessed.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 