Category Archives: writing
Wilfrid Sellars on Writing
Although I enjoyed teaching and could contemplate this aspect of an academic career with enthusiasm, writing was quite another story. Like most American students I had almost no experience in writing term papers until the last two years of college. Examinations I took in my stride; the constraints assimilated writing them to the debater’s task of thinking on one’s feet. With papers, there was always (until the last minute!) the opportunity for second and third thoughts about every step, and, as so often happens, the will-o’-the-wisp of the best made every choice look bad. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that no matter how clumsy, gappy, and incoherent a first draft is, it contains the essence of what one has to say; and the comfort of finding raw material on paper to be licked into shape makes writing the next draft an entirely different experience. I have known philosophers whose first draft is the final product, and an excellent one at that. But I contemplate them with the same awe as I do Mozart, who could hear completed symphonies in his head.
The Art Must Enter the Body
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too. A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint. Anne Dillard, The Writing Life
Why You Are Wrong
Seeing, Reading, Saying, Being: A Note from Josh Blog
Some days, between trying to get it right, trying too hard to make it come out right, and not being able to wait for it to strike me in the right way, interpretation wearies me, even sickens me, and I feel as if all real interpretation is just seeing and saying, and what I occupy myself with daily is instead nothing but saying I see, seeing if I can say, reading without seeing, seeing more than I can say, saying what should just be seen, reading instead of saying, saying instead of being. —Little knots of thinking and willing and wishing.
Cicero on Inconsistency with Yesterday
You appeal to my writings, and testify to what I may at some time have said or written. You may deal in this way with others, who in their discussions follow prescribed rules. We live for the passing day ; we say whatever strikes our minds as probable ; and so we alone are free.
Opening Speech: Socrates, A Tragedy in Five Acts (Francis Foster Barham)
SOCRATES.
ACT I. Scene I.— Athens.
Socrates solus, basking in the sunshine.
Philosophers have many a pleasure — known–
Felt — by themselves — which to the vulgar world
They rarely express : and when they do, how seldom
Do the hearts of men respond ! — Ay, at this moment
There is a rapture in this sunshine — spreading
Its hot o’erwhelming lustre over Athens,
Which they conceive not ; —
Unto me it is Symbolic of the incommunicable flame
Of Deity ! It seems to embrace me, like
The beatific vision of Olympus,
Transforming what it shines on, to its likeness ;
It enters into my very soul, and makes
A summer of my conscience! — I rejoice
To anticipate the eternity when I
Likewise shall be as a sunbeam.
Johnson, recall, complained of Milton’s great poem that no one ever wished it longer. I doubt Johnson believed such a wish was rejected as early as the first few of Milton’s lines. Here, however…
Socrates, the sunbeam!
Lewis Carroll’s Purification
Lewis Carroll’s private journal, 7 January 1856:
Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Dog Pause
Sorry to have left things hanging with Browning and Kierkegaard. I rescued a dog last week and have been busy working with him, getting him used to my routine and to the house rules and to proper etiquette on a leash, etc. I expect to get back to work here soon. Besides the B & K, I plan to say a bit about Rush Rhees and the idea of conversation, and about Husserl on psychologism (both topics currently under discussion in my Plato seminar).
My new dog is Bane.
Browning’s Influence on Philosophers
A bit of a side-step here. I want to write about Browning and Kierkegaard, but I thought I would first mention something about Browning I find of interest. Browning decisively influenced the thinking of a number of philosophers. Let me mention two–Josiah Royce and William Temple.
Now of course Temple is not known as a philosopher; he is known as Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-44). But Temple was trained as a philosopher and wrote philosophy (some I have previously mentioned on the blog). Browning’s work was never far from Temple’s mind. Proof of this is the stamp that Browning’s “A Death in the Desert” had on Temple’s understanding of the Gospel of John, itself the primary object of and impetus for Temple’s reflections throughout his life.
Browning was also, and perhaps more surprisingly, a constant stimulus to Royce. Royce, so far as I know, mentions Browning far less often than does Temple, but he was perhaps as deeply indebted. (Royce’s style, unlike Temple’s, makes little room for the direct use of poetry. It is not that Royce’s style is wholly unliterary–it is not–but rather that it lacks the open texture of Temple’s.) Certainly, prolonged contact with Royce’s works on Christianity reveals Browning there, supplying much of substance and almost all of the atmosphere.
I make this side-step really just so that I can underscore something about Browning’s poetry that engrosses me–it’s potential to be taken up into prose reflections, to supply something like theses or claims, remaining all the while, and unmistakably, poetry.
Critics sometimes seize this potential of Browning’s poetry and use it like a stick to beat him, presumably thinking that poetry that is so available to philosophy must have somehow or other (form not inseparable from content?) failed as poetry. But I think that no one can deny that Browning is a poet unless that denial is theory-driven–specifically driven by a theory that has nourished itself on a one-sided diet of examples.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 