Another in my series (?) of poems about phenomenologists.
Merleau-Ponty’s Ocular Body
Aristotle’s illustration
In the De Anima:
Imagine that the eye were a whole organism—
Then sight would be its soul.
A good enough illustration, I suppose,
In context.
But then you read Merleau-Ponty,
You watch him strain to see, see,
To see with his entire body, his integral being,
And you do not have to imagine anything:
Sight is his soul.
[Wittgenstein] was committed to absolute honesty. Nothing–nothing at all–was to be allowed to escape analysis. He had nothing up his sleeve; he had nothing to teach. The world was to him an absolute puzzle, a great lump of opaque pig iron. Can we think about the lump? What is thought? What is the meaning of ‘can’, of ‘can we’, of ‘can we think’? What is the meaning of ‘we’? What does it mean to ask what is the meaning of ‘we’? If we know the answer to these questions on Monday, are the answers valid on Tuesday? If I answer them at all, do I think the answer, believe the answer, know the answer, or imagine the answer?
A nice little essay on essay writing, replete with references. Enjoy!
Along with the usual assortments of assigned readings, I also collect various pieces that I share with my students in an ‘optional but edifying’ category. Most of these are advice pieces – how to write well and what-not – but others are about language more generally, or about education, majors, careers, and so on. Things that I generally think might be interesting and/or relevant to the lives of people who are being encouraged to hone their writing skills while they go about their educations and plan their careers.
Well, tonight I’m kind of uninspired, and a wee bit tired, and anyway, earlier, while I was sharing one of these with my classes, I really did think that some of you might not have seen some of them, and might enjoy a little perusing here and there. So I’m going to share some of my favorite pieces that are available online…
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I begin Kant’s Prolegomena in my Intro to Phil class today. Having students read the book is a stretch, but I rather like the way I excerpt it, and I think it provides a fitting capstone for the course (we also read Plato’s Theaetetus and Descartes Meditations) As you might guess, the Ariadne’s thread through this maze is the notion of knowledge. Today, we start Kant by talking about rationalism, empiricism and the antinomies, with emphasis on the antinomies.
I can’t read the Prolegomena without thinkng about a quip from my colleague, Roderick Long. “‘Prolegomena’ is Greek for ‘gateway drug'”.
I have been reading lots of Willard lately. Here’s a passage worth thinking about.
The moral dimensions of life pose similar demands on the substance of the self. They require the drawing together of massive dimensions of the self, if not of the self as a whole. The morally significant act is an act of the whole person. This is well illustrated by the moral act of forgiveness. It seems to me that forgiveness is best understood as a choice to resume relationships, in the light of good to be realized, after some violation of moral trust that has had significant harmful effects on those who are doing the forgiving. It is decided, by the one who forgives, that the good to be realized by resumption of the relationships—by no means saying the relationships are to be just the same as before the violation—is not to be sacrificed to the gratifications of resentment and retaliation.
Forgiveness is not a tiny, inward act which a discrete effort of will brings forth in response to specific types of occasions. Rather, it is part or product of an overall orientation of lives of a certain kind, which is “there” before any occasion or whether or not any occasion ever arises. The media spokespeople and various public officials expressed amazement at how forgiveness functioned in the Amish community after the recent schoolhouse slayings. But that was the “natural,” though not the inevitable or unalloyed, response of the people involved. The intentionality, structures of thought, historical understanding, feeling, and evaluation around which their consciousness and life were organized, support and issue in forgiveness in relevant situations. The people in that community thought about and approached forgiveness from within the framework of the intentional structures of their particular kind of life and world. Forgiveness requires a substantial self, incorporating subtly nuanced and dynamically organized long-term dispositions of thought, feeling and valuation into a character embracing all essential dimensions of the self. (If it hasn’t got to your body yet, it has a ways to go.) To cultivate forgiveness as a part of human life, if it means anything at all, is to cultivate an overall character of the sort that can do forgiveness, and, when in good shape, can do it at a walk. It is better when one does not have to do this in a particularly self-conscious manner, but any sensible way is better than none at all. “The quality of mercy is not strained,” wrote a profound soul. Likewise for forgiveness. A forgiving person will not understand what all the fuss is about. What else would one do? Like the “righteous gentiles” that put themselves in mortal danger to save their Jewish neighbors. Was there, given who they were, anything else to be done?
Since I have complained here (in a poem) and in the hallways (in prose, I guess) about Husserl’s writing, let me offer up the following wonderful passage, tacked onto the end of the “Noesis and Noema” chapter of Ideas.
In closing we would add the following remark. We have expounded phenomenology as a science in its beginnings. Only the future can teach us how many of the results of the analyses we have here attempted are destined to last. Much of what we have described must certainly, sub specie aeterni, be otherwise described. But we should and must strive in each step we take to describe faithfully what we really see from our own point of view and after the most earnest consideration. Our procedure is that of a scientific traveller in an unknown part of the world who carefully describes what he finds on the trackless ways he takes–ways that will not always be the shortest. He should be full of the sure consciousness of bringing to expression what in relation to time and circumstance is the thing that must be said, which, because it faithfully expresses what has been seen, preserves its value always–even when further research calls for new descriptions with manifold improvements. In a similar temper we wish in what further lies before us to be loyal expounders of phenomenological formations, and for the rest to preserve the habit of inner freedom even in regard to our own descriptions.
There. Hard to do much better than that, I think.
Tall Grass
1.
Small boy
Seven or eight
Hair so white blond
A blue jay will chase him from the barn
Strafing his head, hoping for hair
For a nest, presumably.
2.
Lessons
In the countryside:
A toy rifle with a scope,
A fresh gift.
Small toad
Caught, thoughtlessly dropped in the scope
And wedged, hopelessly, in the scope’s pinched middle.
Helplessly, trying to unwedge the toad
Without maiming it or killing it,
Unable to do so,
Small boy
Throws his gift, and the toad still alive, still wedged,
In the now sightless scope,
Into the tall grass down the hill from the fence.
3.
Later,
Small boy
Looks for his kitten,
Missing for several days;
And is led by his nose,
Trailing mounting fear,
To a dark spot beneath a workbench
In an outbuilding.
There
Small cat
Is found, rotting, its head
Somehow gotten into but unable to get out of
A mason jar, rolled from among canning supplies,
Underneath the bench.
Unable to bear
The thought of the cat’s death, not to mention its final moments,
Small boy
Throws partially jarred carcass
Into the tall grass down the hill from the fence.
4.
Big boy,
I wonder now about
That tall grass
Down the hill
From the fence,
That tall grass,
About whether it still hides
The guilt-edged horrors of my childhood:
Toy guns and toads, mason jars and kittens,
Knowledge of fate and death.
Visiting the Gardens with Eric Loomis and his wife, Keren. Good visit to South Alabama; really enjoyed the discussion of my talk and all the other discussions last night and today.
O Lord and Master of my life,
Grant not unto me a spirit of idleness,
of discouragement,
of lust for power,
and of vain speaking.
But bestow upon me, Thy servant,
the spirit of chastity,
of meekness,
of patience,
and of love.
Yea, O Lord and King,
grant that I may perceive
my own transgressions,
and judge not my brother,
for blessed art Thou
unto ages of ages.
Amen.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 