Kierkegaard, Browning and Dramatis Personae

August 5, 2013 By in Browning, Kierkegaard, Love, Self-knowledge, skepticism, virtue and vice, writing Tags: , , , 4 Comments

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I’ve been reading Browning for the last two or three years–but only here and there, a little at a time.  He’s like strong drink:  in the right amount, he sweetens and deepens experience; in the wrong amount–too much–he overwhelms experience, making it too easy to lose oneself in the various dramatis personae on offer.  But what has been on my mind lately is the systemic and instructive similarity between what Browning is doing in offering his dramatis personae and what Kierkegaard is doing in offering his psuedonyms.

Browning plots his course in various places, Book III of Sordello, in the Epilogue to Dramatis Personae, in intrducing The Ring and the Book and in Fifine at the Fair.  He aims to be a “Maker-see”, not just a poet who tells you what he sees but rather a poet who causes the reader to see:

See it for yourselves,
This man’s act, changeable because alive!

He takes it that we simply do not possess the requisite moral imagination–call it a negative capability–for really understanding the lives and the aliveness of others:

Action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought;
Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top,Out of the magic fire that lurks inside,
Shows one tint at a time to take the eye:
Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep,
Shifted a hair’s-breadth shoots you dark for bright,
Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so
Your sentence absolute for shine or shade.

Human beings are not always in their Sunday best or Saturday worst.  Browning wants us to catch a glimpse of the “bustle of a man’s work-time”, to see what the man or woman sees on a middling Monday, to see how hard it is to categorize when we attempt to realize the concrete spiritual drama of an individual’s life.

Once set such orbes, –white styled, black stigmatized, —
A-rolling, see them once on the other side
Your good men and your bad men every one
From Guido Franceschini to Guy Faux,
Oft would you rub your eyes and change your names.

…The inward work and worth
Of any mind, what other mind may judge
Save God who only knows the thing He made,
The veritable service He exacts?

Browning believes his work will be of value for so long as the soul of a person remains precious to us.  Now Kierkegaard works a slightly different angle, but it is importantly related in its technique.  He too wants to be a Maker-see.  He wants us to confront the concrete spiritual drama of the lives of others.  But the lives he dramatizes are lives we are meant to see as objects of comparison with our own–they are meant to lead us to  self-confrontation.  No doubt Browning’s dramatic monologues can and in fact often do the same, but that does not seem to be their primary purpose.  We might say that whereas Browning wants us to awaken to the mystery of others, to the littleness of our understanding of others; Kierkegaard wants us to awaken to the mystery of ourselves, to the littleness of our understanding of ourselves.  I suspect, though, that the two tasks are inextricably related, and that their being so is one reason why often Browning seems like Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard like Browning.

I plan to pursue this comparison across a few post in the next week or two.

Peak Experiences

August 5, 2013 By in music Tags: , , 3 Comments

From a current Salon interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:

I want to be introspective about whether I’m being a good person in my life and stuff, but I don’t wanna reflect too long or consider what the meaning is.  There was a horrible commercial not too long ago where a child whispered, “These are the days …” It was the absolute worst thing you could possibly ever say, just to sit there and stop in the middle of a peak experience and reflect on how it was a peak experience. Good way to shoot the peak experience in the head. But my realization is actually life has way more peak experiences than we think, like multiples per day. We’re constantly confronted with this reality that has a great deal in it, that is awesome.

Infested by Sphinxes–Collingwood

July 27, 2013 By in Philosophy, reading Tags: , , 5 Comments

From Collingwood’s consistently delightful The New Leviathan (2.54):

Man’s world is infested by Sphinxes, demonic beings of mixed and monstrous nature which ask him riddles and eat him if he cannot answer them, compelling him to play a game of wits where the stake is his life and his only weapon is his tongue.

Immortal Openings, 11: Robertson Davies, Leaven of Malice

July 21, 2013 By in Immortal Openings Tags: , , 3 Comments

I’m reading this book with pleasure.  I always read Davies with pleasure.  And while this is not the first sentence that occurs in the novel, it is the first in the novel proper.

When Fortune decides to afflict a good man and rob him of his peace, she often chooses a fine day to begin.

A Long Decline from a Glorious Past (Davies)

July 21, 2013 By in Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

Robertson Davies (from Leaven of Malice):

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

What Does Husserl Want?

July 19, 2013 By in Husserl, logic, Philosophy, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

I am preparing for a seminar on Plato, the Sophists, and psychologism this Fall.  Among the texts we will read is (sections of) Husserl’s Logical Investigations.  I have been working on the early sections on logic this morning.  Husserl complains of the incompleteness of all the sciences; none have that “inner clarity and rationality”:  as theories, they are not “crystal-clear”, the functions of all their concepts and propositions are not fully intelligible, not all of their propositions have been exactly analyzed.  –My question is this:  is this crystalline clarity Husserl demands itself crystal-clear, fully intelligible?  If not even mathematics (to take the crucial case) exhibits this crystalline clarity, then what grasp of what Husserl wants do we have?  Do we want a more mathematical mathematics?  Hard to see how that would help, since it would presumably only apply the lack of inner clarity and rationality to itself.  (And presumably not in a “fight fire with fire”-ish way.)

Now it is true that, in an important sense, Husserl attempts to explain what he wants across much of the rest of the book, often enough by the example of his phenomenological practice.  But it remains necessary to be aware that we do not really know what Husserl wants in the early sections:  clarity is something about which we have to become clear.  (Consider how distant Wittgenstein’s desiderated clarity is from Husserl’s.)

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

July 18, 2013 By in tv Tags: , , 3 Comments

I’ve been re-watching The Adventures.  I had forgotten how silly and fun they are, how full of reference to classic westerns and to many other things.  If you like your whiskey with a broadly farcical chaser, step up to the bar and enjoy.  (Fans of Firefly should find the show especially interesting.)

lordbowler

Seeing a Cow in a Hat Shop (Ryle)

July 18, 2013 By in history of ordinary language philosophy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A cow wearing a hat

Ryle:

The epistemologist with the usual theoretical habits may bring himself to attend to the ways in which we use task-verbs, and may come to agree that our uses of achievement-verbs are correlated in certain important ways with our uses of task-verbs.  But he will still feel that a theory is being based upon what is exceptional rather than what is regular.  For ordinarily which I report having seen a cow or detected a smell of gas, I cannot, with the best will in the world, report the prior occurrence of a process of scrutiny.  Seeing a cow is not something accomplished as the terminal stage of a methodical process, however swift.  No task was accomplished, undertaken or envisaged.  I just saw a cow.  I did not so manage things or so organise my doings that at the last I saw a cow.  See a cow was, in an important way, the first thing that happened…

Now we must of course grant that the recognition on sight of the obvious cow is not the last move in a series of moves…But the non-occurrence of preliminaries does not entail the non-exercise of a technique.  We do not say that someone is skilful at something only when he frowns and hesitates over the doing of it; indeed, one of the signs that someone has achieved complete mastery of an art like signalling, pruning or long-division, is that he regularly performs perfectly the ordinary tasks in it without his wondering how to do it or preparing himself by any self-reminders, exhortation, exercises or other preliminaries.

Now we are all in the position of having achieved perfect mastery of the art of recognizing on sight the customary occupants of our customary environment–at least, when the light is good or fair, our health is normal, we are not dizzy or standing on our heads, looking through strange optical instruments and so on.  When all is plain sailing, no navigational problems are considered, nor do we try to make out what we are looking at when we get a fair view of a lonely cow in the sort of place where cows are among the things that we are not surprised to come across.  Of course we had once to learn how cows look at different distances, from different angles and in different lights, as well as where cows can be expected to be found, and it is just because that lesson has been learned and not forgotten that the cows is now obvious to us.  Its obviousness is the fact that the technique of recognizing it on sight has no longer to be exercised in a tentative way–and when we do have to exercise the technique in a tentative way, as when a cow confronts us in a thick fog, or in a hat shop, what we are looking at is for a moment or more not obviously a cow.  And, of course, the fact that it is ordinarily obvious that what we are looking at is a cow does not exclude the chance of its not being a cow at all.  It may be a goat, or a hole in the hedge looking like a cow.  Or there may be nothing that looks like a cow and I am just ‘seeing things’.  That such cases are exceptional is part of the meaning of such words as ‘see’. ‘perceive’, and so on, as well as of words like ‘obvious’.  If ‘I see a cow’ were not usually true, I could not fancy I saw a cow…

A Lack of a Sense of Reality?

July 16, 2013 By in Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas Leave a comment

Philosophers, you know, are disconnected, hot air balloons climbing to the height at which they pop in one distant burst; they are abstracted and lost in someone’s thoughts, sometimes their own; they are characterized by a peculiarly undistressed but by-their-fingertips hold on what is real.  –Consider this little turn from St. Thomas, offering a help for sorrow.  “Take a warm bath,” he says, “and get some sleep.”  Sheesh.  Only a philosopher…

Minding Your Business While Writing (Thoreau)

July 13, 2013 By in thoreau, writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

Thoreau:

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched.  He derives inspiration from his chagrins and satisfactions.  His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives impetus to what he says.  He minds his business.  He does not speculate while others drudge for him.