Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away. It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become present. We are always before it: but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend; let it but face aright and it sings with beauty, present effectively. We are ever before the Supreme–cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be–but we do not always attend: when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of God.
Category Archives: writing
Dick Moran Keeps it Real
There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine. The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.
As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.
Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.
Literary Rigor–Re-blogged from Josh Blog (7 Nov ’12)
Scholars say that an author – usually of a philosophical text with literary dimensions – ‘invites’ us to do this or that, think of this or that, when they wish to treat the text as possessed of a sort of rigor, but also to avoid having to show how this rigor is essentially a matter of the literary dimensions of the text. This is like receiving an invitation, not accepting it, but passing it on to someone else.
‘We’ve been invited!’
‘Oh, how nice. Are you going?’
‘Well you’ve been invited! We all have!’
‘But what about you?’
I would like to say that this can’t be done halfway. To acknowledge the text’s rigor is to accept the invitation. The troublesome question should be, can it be accepted at all if one’s response is any less literary than the original? And more troublesome: how will one make one’s response just as literary, without loss of rigor?
Representations–in Time and of Time
By all means, take the time and read this subtle and wonderful essay by Rachel Cohen.
Always Worth a Read: Lucian’s The Sale of Creeds
Emerson and Montaigne 2
I find it natural to parcel out my reflections on Emerson by addressing first Emersonian sentences, then paragraphs, then essays. (This is more or less Firkins’ approach.) Emerson uniquely composes each. Although I have had a go once at Emerson’s sentences, I want to try to say something about them again.
I reckon that Firkin’s is right to claim that the obscurity of Emerson’s sentences has more to do with strangeness than dimness. But I judge the strangeness more strangeness of form than of content, although content is strange too. Emerson does something strange with sentences, he puts them together in his own peculiar way. Part of what Emerson is doing is striving for aphoristic integrity, a cut-from-diamond hardness and perfection, for sentences that can withstand judgment simultaneously literary and philosophical, and severe. He plays for high sentential stakes: No sentence may be mere filler, or only a very few, at most. Virtually every sentence has to be such as to retain perfect integrity even if isolated from its particular paragraph and particular essay. Wittgenstein in TLP accounts for sentences so as to render the sense of any one independent of the truth of any other. Emerson tries to write sentences such that the understanding of one is, in some sense, independent of the understanding of any other. Sentential self-sufficiency.
But, even so, Emerson writes these sentences into paragraphs and these paragraphs into essays. How? How can these aphoristic atoms become molecular? How can sentential self-sufficiency be retained in a paragraph in which sentences stand in mutual relation, perhaps even in some sort of mutual dependence?
I will let the questions hang for now. –Back to sentences.
Emerson is also handles his lexicon strangely. He so words sentences that often the words in them mean more, and mean it differently, than the words do in the sentences of others. But assigning that differently meant different meaning cannot be done unless the word is left where it is. It does what it does there, in that sentences, flanked by just those other words. (The phenomenon is most familiar in poetry. Emerson manages it in prose–and not in prose-poetry, in prose.) These words play something analogous to the role that technical terms play in other writers, although they are not technical terms in Emerson. (There are no technical terms in Emerson.) Instead, they are carefully managed flections (inflections or deflections or reflections) of the meaning of the word, fully contextually bound, but carrying forward much of what is most completely his own in Emerson’s writing. (Consider: ‘aversion’.) Sentences featuring his truly characteristic lexicon cannot be paraphrased.
Emerson and Montaigne 1
I will begin with a quotation–as I so often do. But–“we are all quotation”–so, why hide it?
This is from Firkins’ strange and compelling book on Emerson. He is addressing the issue of clarity in Emerson.
Dr. Garnett writes of the individual sentence in Emerson: “His thought is transparent and almost chillingly clear.” For most men, the clarity is hardly of the sort that regulates the temperature. It is true, nevertheless, that for Emerson, as for Browning and Meredith, around the fact of obscurity and illusion of greater obscurity has grown up. The trouble with Emerson is more often strangeness than dimness; the indistinctness of the moral Monadnock or Agiochook which he points out to us is due rather to the distance of the peak than to the haze of the atmosphere.
I will let this quotation stand alone for a moment. I will have something to say about it, and about other moments in Firkins, in the next post.
Emerson on Montaigne, a New Start
Last year, around this time, I was writing here about Emerson’s essay on Montaigne. I got distracted from that and moved on to other things. But I am going to get back to it now. Look for more posts in the coming days. In the meantime, you might want to look at the initial post I wrote last year.
William Temple on Plato’s Vision of the Ideas
To us the Ideal Theory is myth, as it was to Plato in the later period. Prof. Burnet wrote recently of the myths–“They have their roots in something older than philosophy, and possessing a vitality which is denied to philosophical systems.” And just before he had pointed out that Aristotle, who begins with accepted facts and ends in myth, has always been a pillar of orthodoxy, while “most heresies come from Plato” because he insists on scientific treatment of ultimate questions. This is no doubt true; but this distinction is rooted in another. Here, as in all departments of human activity, the ultimate fact is temperament. Aristotle was bound to produce a philosophy which would be a basis for orthodoxy, for, colossal as was his intellect–perhaps the greatest in history, –he was by temperament a churchwarden; and Plato was bound to be the philosophic father of many heretics because he was by temperament a Titan. There is an inspiration in the spectacle of the old philosopher tearing in shreds his proudly built philosophy and beginning it all afresh. But among his actual works what I have called “the old Ideal Theory,” which he himself rightly discarded, is worth more to mankind than the method of division elaborated in the Sophist and the Politicus…[This] may be of great scientific value, but [it imparts] no impulse. The Ideal Theory, as held by Plato in his middle period, may be myth; but it is the outcome and expression of something more valuable than any specific doctrine, however true–of intellectual courage that refuses to allow any sphere to be set beyond the reach of knowledge, of mystic vision in which all that is mean and sordid disappears, and the temperamental fire without which no great achievement is possible in action or art. —Mind 1908 (Vol 17 No 68)
“You ask kindly after my work…”–Stephen Mackenna
You ask kindly after my work: ’tis my heartscald, would God it would be my death. ‘Tis too hard and high for me: gin I but grind at it two hours, I get a headache like a slow furnace and reel like one that has quaffed off the winecup–I doubt I will ever finish it, tho’ most unhappily I’m so situated, on many grave counts, that I have to keep pegging on, trying until my brain frys and I long to be quietly dead. Otherwise my life is happy here: I seem to have given you a false impression; no grandeurs: but space and peace and delightful meditative walking, all around my mudcot (save where the villagers pile their dreadful heaps of dead salmon tins and broken glass and leaky kettles and Daily Mails–by choice just at my shrubbery gates.)
This from a letter likely of January 1927, to Mrs. A. F. Dodds. Mackenna was working to translate Plotinus. If you don’t know his translation, take a look. It is a translation that is both all wrong as translation and all right (not just alright) as Plotinus.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 