Self-Reliance Video, with Emerson Plug
Hamann and the Tradition
Hamann and the Traditon (Northwestern University Press) is just out. My essay: “Metaschematizing Socrates: Hamann, Kierkegaard and Kant on the Value of the Enlightenment” is included. The editor, Lisa Marie Anderson, did a nice job with the volume. Lots of good stuff on Hamann—including especially an essay by my friend, John Betz, who is the Hamann guy (not that that’s all he is, by any means).
(I just noticed an annoying mistake in my paper, no doubt due to my faulty proofreading. The final footnote should compare Socrates to St. John the Baptist, not to Saint Paul, as it does. )
Socrates–Poem (Edward Young)
Night is fair Virtue’s immemorial friend.
The conscious moon through every distant age
Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall
On Contemplation’s eye her purging ray.
The famed Athenian, he who wooed from heaven
Philosophy the fair, to dwell with men,
And form their manners, not inflame their pride;
While o’er his head, as fearful to molest
His laboring mind, the stars in silence slide,
And seem all gazing on their future guest,
See him soliciting his ardent suit,
In private audience; all the livelong night
Rigid in thought, and motionless he stands,
Nor quits his theme or posture, till the sun
Disturbs his nobler intellectual beam,
And gives him to the tumult of the world.
Philosophical Questions 3
Philosophical puzzlement: unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers. If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached. But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way. –Rush Rhees
A most remarkable passage. There’s much that I’d like to say about it, but I want for now to limit myself to its bearing on the issue of philosophical questions and answers. Take Rhees to be pointing out just how hard it is to see how deep philosophical questions go, and so how hard it is to see how peculiar the answers to them must be.
Philosophical question threaten the very possibility of understanding altogether, but this means that the questions threaten their very possibility as questions, and threaten the very possibility of answers to them. The questions challenge the reality of discourse, of understanding: but how can a question, a mode of discourse, something that must be understood, challenge the reality of discourse or understanding? Success would seem failure; but failure cannot be success, can it? What sorts of questions are these?
More soon.
Opening My New Talk
Here’s a draft of the opening paragraph of my new talk on Merleau-Ponty’s lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy”. The paragraph is meant to be a compendium of the topics the talk addresses, as well as a hat tip to Stanley Cavell.
I find that I am always educating myself in front of others. There is, I suppose, an effrontery in this: I admit I feel ashamed somewhat in so doing. And I realize you may wonder what I take myself to be doing, since, “Surely,” you might mutter, “he ought to tell us something he knows or takes himself to know, something he has learnt, not something he is learning”. But I confess I understand philosophy to be a matter of educating oneself, of coming into knowledge, and not a matter of having knowledge that is then simply or complicatedly imparted. At least since Socrates, philosophy has countenanced a distinction between loving wisdom and being wise, and has chosen the first as the better part, or at least as its, as philosophy’s, part. A philosopher is someone who is crucially concerned with his own becoming—and in particular with his own becoming-a-knower. Thus is ignorance always internal to philosophy, and the recognition of his own inner disorder internal to any philosopher’s sense of himself as a philosopher. I write this out of my own inner disorder, my own ignorance of what to say about philosophy. —Can I speak for philosophy?
Update
Having now finished my travels, outlasted food poisoning and faced the Auburn weather version of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace (“It was an awful moment for the three young men. Nobody likes to be burned alive.” (from The Bible Story)), I am now back to work. Currently, I am writing a new talk on Merleau-Ponty and proofing an article for the book, Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith. I hope tomorrow to get back to work here on philosophical questions. I may also post some bits from the new MMP talk.
The Unexpected Pleasures of Blogging
Completely unexpectedly, in the midst of my late travels, I got to meet William Eaton, aka Montaigbakhtinian. Though surprised to meet him, I was not surprised by him: very smart, very articulate, very warm; a gentleman. It is always nice to put a face to a name, even better a person to a blog, it turns out. It is easy to forget that blogs, no matter how much of us they contain, are two-dimensional. (A grammatical remark?) I suppose the only sort of person a blog could tend to capture would be the type of George Kittredge, the coal mining tycoon who is Tracy Lord’s fiance in The Philadelphia Story. Of him, Tracy’s former husband, Dexter Haven, quips: “To barely know him is to know him well.”
Rhees on Philosophical Puzzlement (or, Philosophical Questions 2)
Philosophical puzzlement: unless this does–or may–threaten the possibility of understanding altogether, then it is not the sort of thing that has worried philosophers. If you overlook that, then you do not see what the understanding is that is sought in philosophy; or what it is that may be reached. But the understanding that is sought, and the understanding that may be reached–the understanding that has been achieved if philosophical difficulty has really been resolved–is not something one could formulate; as though one could now give an account of the structure of reality, and how how language corresponds to it; and to show the possibility or reality of discourse in that way.
This is from Rush Rhees’ Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse. I will have a say about it over the next few days.
The Christian’s Metaphysics?
Continuing my reading in Haecker:
Looking with a certain contempt upon Christianity, you observe that it has no philosophy, no metaphysics. But is that not an error? The Christian’s metaphysics is—that he eats God.
Grey? –Light Black from Pole to Pole
I have been horrified lately at the capacity of the human voice, quite apart from what it says, simply in itself, to express the spiritual extinction of a whole people; and not merely individually, but to betray, to express and proclaim it typically, representatively. The voice of the announcer.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 