I want again to thank publicly the administration, faculty and students at Southern Mississippi. I am indebted to you for inviting me to speak and for the engaging and educational (for me) discussion of Merleau-Ponty. I had a great time and learned a lot.
From a Handout: Socrates as Midwife (Philosophical Questions 7)
[This was a class focused on Plato’s Theaetetus, Wittgenstein’s Blue Book and Bouwsma’s John Locke Lectures (The Flux). The class was entitled, “The Flux”. I taught it in the Spring of 1996.]
Back, now, to midwifery.
I recommend that Socrates be seen as logically clarifying thoughts. His interlocutor says something–provides the datum clarificandum–and Socrates goes to work. He pulls the interlocutor’s saying this way and that. He compares it with first one sentence and then another. All the while he’s asking his interlocutor to decide: “Is this what you meant? Could you have meant this?” Sometimes the interlocutor keeps up for a while.
What is the midwifery comparison? Call it an exhibitive theory of philosophizing. It shows us things we already know, but in a way that makes us see them afresh.
Socrates pictures his interlocutors as pregnant. The have something inside them, although there is no way of knowing whether what’s inside them is going to be viable or still-born. Socrates brings on labor pains. He does this, I guess, by administering a potent medicine, by asking “What is x?” Upon hearing the question, the interlocutor goes into labor. The labor, like all labor, is painful. (Try giving birth to Truth!) Why is it painful? Answering a question like “What is knowledge?” is a strenuous and hurtful mental business.
Let me try this without the midwifery idom.
Socrates knows how to ask questions. The questions he knows how to ask are not of the “What’s his name?” or “What sort of architecture is that?” variety. Such questions are not one that we are full of answers to, or think we are. Sometimes we can answer them; sometimes we can’t. As long as we aren’t taking a test or on Jeopardy, not being able to answer doesn’t matter much. But when we can’t answer Socrates’ questions, it matters. No test, no Jeopardy. Socrates asks, “What is knowledge?” and we think we have to answer. Why? –We all know that we know what knowledge is. That’s why! We all talk about knowledge, use “know” or its cognates, all the time.
Theaetetus is a learner. Theodorus is a teacher. Surely, they know what knowledge is.
Socrates askes “What is knowledge?” and we have an answer in us. But the answer won’t come quickly. Augustine: “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” So we huff and we puff and we try things out: knowledge is perception. Knowledge is true judgment. None of these comes easily. We have the feeling that we force each out. The forcing hurts; it ought to be unnecessary. Socrates helps, if that is what he chooses to do, by asking still more questions. Each time we force out another answer, Socrates tests it. If it won’t do, he shows us it won’t. This is no fun, either. After all that work, after all those words, no one wants to see an apparent new answer, apparently fresh to the world and apparently full of promise, turn out to be nonsense–a phantom answer. Don’t rob us of our darling follies! But Socrates is a pro. He’s on a mission from God. He show us. Sometimes we go back to work forcing out another answer. Sometimes we take our phantoms and go home.
Socrates says he can tell those who are full of answers from those who aren’t. Those who aren’t he sends to Prodicus. (Prodicus has an office in our English department.) The others he helps. They profit from this help, even if they manage no viable births. How?
All this is strange. Midwifery is no glamorous role for the philosopher. He’s only around to help bring answers to light and to get rid of them, if they are monstrosities. (Philosophy: confusiasm over abstrocities.) The role is thoroughly negative. The philosopher is barren, has no answers of his own. He can’t adopt.
No pitter-patter of little answer-feet in the philosopher’s house.
Book Recommendations: Two Pairs
I don’t explicitly or directly recommend lots of books here, although I mention or quote from many and often make it clear that I think highly of them. But, as I rode my bike in this morning, I started thinking about two pairs of books that have meant a lot to me, personally and intellectually. I thought I would recommend them.
The first pair is:
The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (Walter Jackson Bate) and The Silence of St. Thomas (Josef Pieper). Neither of these books is quite or completely a biography, neither is quite or completely literary criticism (Bate) or philosophy (Pieper). Each is instead an examination of how the work of each man grew into what and who he was, and was grown into by what and who he was.
The second pair is:
Actor and Spectator (Lewis White Beck) and The Myth of Metaphor (Colin Murray Turbayne). I was lucky enough to have been taught by both men, although to a lesser extent and mostly informally (in conversation) by Turbayne. Both books are beautifully written and philosophically significant. And each is a study of the way in which a person can become so immersed in another’s thought that it is no longer clear who is doing the thinking and who is being thought about. With Beck, it is Kant; with Turbayne, it is Berkeley.
Enjoy!
Reading Kierkegaard
What makes reading Kierkegaard so difficult? Here’s one thing: his words are often pseudonyms of themselves.
Cartesian Witness Protection–Alphonso Lingis
For the modern philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes, our immediate and basic experience of subjectivity occurs in an internal or reflective experience whereby I discover, by a sort of turning back of my own mental attention upon itself, that I am able to see, immediately, incontestably, that I exist at least as a stream of conscious states. Thought discovers that it always has this power to attend to itself; the mind has the ontological structure of existence-for-itself. For consciousness to exist is for it to be continually aware of itself, to be its own witness.
This reflexive experience is immediate and non-discursive; let us call it immanent reflection. There is an eclipse of the body functions and their interactions with the world; thought experiences itself directly, without the interposition of the body or the world, and even comes to wonder if it could then exist without the body and without the world. In turning back reflexively upon itself it seems to form a circuit with itself such that it not only becomes its own witness, but closes itself to outside observation. Its essential nature, which is to exist reflexively for-itself, is not mediated by anything extended or sensibly observable; the mind seems, then, not only to be its own witness, but to be its sole possible witness.
The Vocational Teacher
From josh’s blog:
A teacher who feels called to a vocation will feel all the more unhappy at inviting any student freely to leave what education is to be had rather than take it; like a priest who says, sorry, my child, if you can be saved, it’s not by me.
Indeed. Inviting someone to leave is not always the same as wanting them to go.
Faith–Kirsopp Lake
After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence–a courageous trust in the great purpose of all things and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight, whatever the price may be. Who knows whether the ‘personality’ of which men talk so much and know so little may not prove to be the temporary limitation rather than the necessary expression of Life?
Teaching Philosophy, Honestly
As best I can recall, Wittgensten wrote a short letter to Norman Malcolm when Malcolm earned his Ph. D. It went something like this:
Congratulations to your PhD. And now may you cheat neither yourself nor your students. Because, unless I am very much mistaken, that is what will be expected of you.
There may have been a bit more. My memory fails me. But just this touches the problem. How can you teach without cheating yourself or your students? Exasperated a little by my students, I wrote to them today and said:
You have to decide: do you want an education–a real education, or do you just want a diploma? And if you just want a diploma, go and get it in someone else’s class, please: I don’t care a whit about your diploma. But I do care about your education.
The problem here is a kind of knot. Our students all too often want us to cheat them, or are willing to let us; and we all too often want them to want us to cheat them, or are willing to let them want us to cheat them, or be willing to let us cheat them. And so it goes.
Three Thoughts on Job
From an old notebook:
Job’s confused. God’s not helping. God’s making it worse. So too the comforters. (Carrion comforters!) They worsen Job’s confusion. It’s not bad enough that he’s wrestling confusedly with God; his comforters want to wrestle too: against Job, for God, as if they were members of a Divine tag-team.
Job speaks out his misery. What he says is of his pain just because it expresses it. He is venting his misery more than he is accusing God. But his comforters will not hear his misery; they hear only the accusing.
Job knows what his comforters know. He knows the glory and the power of God. But he knows more than his comforters know. He knows God’s power and glory in a way that does not deny that power and glory. Even more, he knows his innocence. Job knows that God knows it too. But now it looks like Job knows too much, more anyway than he can bear, for how could a God of such power and glory and knowledge as his tolerate Job’s misery?
Changes in Look
I grew tired of the old look of the site and have been tinkering with a new one. I believe that I have settled on this one. I hope folks haven’t been too disoriented by the changes.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 