Me and Machine (Photo)
Ladder, Salt
Leonard Linsky:
Wittgenstein’s ladder is Frege’s grain of salt.
(H/T to Chad Kidd)
Thinking About Believing
I consider my students and I consider myself–and I think: our problem is that we know heaps and heaps of things but we believe nothing, or almost nothing.
…
A friend of mine asked me the other day about Christian religious belief and being a good person, about whether you can be a good person and disbelieve. That sort of question I cannot answer formulaically, and would not, I hope, even if a formula came to mind. What I found myself saying was something like this:
We most of us have no real knowledge of what we believe or disbelieve, in the existentially indexed form of belief I take ultimately to be at issue in Christianity. What we believe or disbelieve is something that isn’t captured by putting a ‘T’ or an ‘F’ in the blank before, say, “There is a God”, on a True/False test. Perhaps living a good life–a genuinely good life, not a conventionally good one–is itself to believe. And perhaps living a bad life–a genuinely bad life, not a conventionally bad one–is to disbelieve.
What I said was something like that. At any rate, I reckon that someone who has a false understanding of Christ could disbelieve in that Christ without disbelieving in Christ. So too someone with a false understanding of Christ could believe in that Christ without believing in Christ. Kierkegaard somewhere attempts to elucidate Christian belief by talking about it as ultimately a matter of the imitation of Christ: imitation is the sincerest form of belief, we might say. Does imitation–in the sense at issue, whatever exactly that is–require that one know that one is imitating, who one is imitating?
“No one can come to the Father except through me”, “I am the door of the sheep”: couldn’t ‘going through’, ‘entering the door’, be a matter of what we are ontologically (salvation as theosis) and not, or not so much, a matter of what we are epistemologically, of what we believe in a non-existentially indexed sense? “Not everyone who saith unto me Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven…” Will non-existentially indexed denial prevent entrance?
What significance would all this have for the Church? Well, that is a huge topic. But Orthodoxy has taught me to believe that although we know where the Holy Spirit is (in the Church) we do not know where it isn’t. –What the Church does is to help us to live a good life, a genuinely good life, to live in imitation of Christ, deliberate imitation, and imitation of Christ truly understood.
Living a genuinely good life is far harder than we reckon it to be, I think, far harder; a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Both inside the Church and outside it, people underestimate how hard it is. Mea maxima culpa. And it is not just hard to live a genuinely good life, it is just as hard to figure out what one would be, what it would look like. Especially on your own, especially in situ. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leads to life, and few there be that find it.” Travelling the way is hard, yes; but finding it is just as hard.
I know there is much to complain about here–but I am just thinking aloud, quasserting, not asserting.
Transcendentalism? (Poem)
Transcendentalism?
(for Catlin Lowe, with a smile)
Browning starts his “Transcendentalism”
with the command: “Stop playing, poet!”
and here he (not Browning) stands, with his stark-naked thoughts,
embarrassingly enjambed, undraped in sights or sounds,
and Browning speaks to him.
Shouldn’t he just speak prose?
Stop making meaninglessly metered thoughts?
He would, if he could, yield to the breaking in
of the sudden rose—
live pliant fleshy
nose-fascinating blooming
red,
fragrant slow-motion boom!
But he cannot do it, let the sudden rose break in
over him, under, round him on every side.
He can only speak dry words.
He should stop playing poet.
Merleau-Ponty Underwrites Wittgenstein?
From The Visible and the Invisible:
We need only take language…in the living or nascent state, with all its references, those behind it, which connect it to the mute things it interpellates, and those it sends before itself and which make up the world of things said–with its movement, its subtleties, its reversals, its life, which expresses and multiplies tenfold the life of the bare things. Language is a life, is our life and the life of the bare things. Not that language takes possession of life and reserves it for itself: what would there be to say if there existed nothing but things said? it is the error of the semantic philosophies to close up language as if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave. But because he has experienced within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as the bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but–if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and foliation–the most valuable witness to Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it, that the vision itself, the thought itself, are, as has been said, “structured as language,” are articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing or something else…Philosophy itself is language, rests on language; but this does not disqualify it from speaking of language, nor from speaking of the pre-language and of the mute world which doubles them: on the contrary, philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being.
Cat Walk (Photo)
Grant and Hepburn, “Bringing Up Baby”
A Little More of the Country Gentlemen (Music)
My all-time favorite Country Gentlemen cut.
Lord, Don’t Leave Me Here
I grew up in a family whose family business was bluegrass. Predicatably, I suppose, as I became a teenager, I sprinted from the music as fast as I could, settling eventually as far from it as I could get–Devo and Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. While I can’t say that I have exactly found my way back to it, bands like Bad Livers and The Packway Handle Band have led me back toward it, and re-awakened my appreciation for some of what was the soundtrack of my boyhood (particularly the Country Gentlemen). Here’re a couple of weekend offerings, from the middle of Lent, and looking forward to Pascha.
Newman on the Human Condition
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s worlds, “having no hope and without God in the world”–all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.
What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact?
I used to spend pleasant hours with my teacher, Lewis White Beck, talking about our favorite writers. He introduced me to Cardinal Newman, and to the glories of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Who has ever written more perfectly controlled English prose? Here, a piece of prose to range alongside Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes. Consider the opening ten lines or so of that great poem.
Let Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crouded Life;
Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate,
O’erspread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,
Where Wav’ring Man, betray’d by vent’rous Pride,
To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide;
As treach’rous Phantoms in the Mist delude,
Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good.
Kant, Intuition and Direction of Fit
Nothing teaches better than teaching. I’ve been trying to ease (!) my Intro students into Kant’s Prolegomena. In the last class, we talked about directions of fit, world-to-mind and mind-to-world. It had never struck me (clearly) that Kant’s story about intuition makes it the case that pure intuition enjoys one direction of fit, world-to-mind, while empirical intuition enjoys another direction of fit, mind-to-world*. I suppose that is or ought to have been obvious to me, but it didn’t seem to be. I may have missed it (if we need an explanation other than my not being overly bright or my being careless) because I had gotten so focused on the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, and the differences in their respective directions of fit, and in thinking of the categories as spontaneous and intuition as receptive, that it hadn’t occurred to me that intuition could itself embody both directions of fit.
I guess we could say that intuition itself has a spontaneity (call it “anticipation”) and a receptivity. Its having a spontaneity is what makes pure mathematics possible (since pure mathematics constitutionally involves the spontaneity of intuition). –The Copernican revolution reaches all the way into intuition. Huh. It seems I had thought of it as reaching only into judgment, categorically. I mean, of course I knew that intuition was both pure and empirical, but I did not (fully) see that as already thematizing the synergy of spontaneity and receptivity. –Duh.
*I’ve edited the terminology here from the initial post. I had reversed the use of the standard terms. Apologies.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 