Ed Mooney on Living One’s Own Life

May 1, 2012 By in Philosophy, Self-knowledge, Socrates, teaching, virtue and vice Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I feel like I’m entering a wonderfully complex discussion, and fear I may be just muddying the waters, but let me just dive in. It’s surely correct that the self knowledge we seek is not informational, not a “knowledge that x”. We know Socrates knows himself because he’s steady in his living, and seems to ‘know what he’s doing’ in complex situations that could baffle an ordinary mortal. So knowing himself seems close to knowing how to be himself, or knowing what ‘living-as-Socrates’ must amount to. Now that knowledge is not observational (HE doesn’t conduct observations) and probably isn’t intentional: he doesn’t say to himself “I must try out living as Socrates today.” It may be retrospective: we can imagine him reflecting after a good bit of life is behind him on whether he’s happy with his comportment–has he been living a strange life, or his own life.  That’s a funny question to ask, perhaps, yet people can get alienated from themselves, and regret that they’re “living-as-my-father-wants” rather than “living my own life.”

Prospectively, I think self knowledge is a “knowing how” that requires intimate acknowledgment of one’s desires, feelings, commitments and their weights, and so forth, and that sort of knowing how — knowing how to dig through all that — always questioning, always weighing, always proceeding in fear and trembling that one might be kidding oneself — is hard to share or expose or make public and will sound like a confession full of fits and starts and ill-formed thoughts. But along with that ‘reflective” and “confessional” side seems to be a willingness to pledge or promise, to stay true to something often only dimly apprehended. So Socrates remained true to things (say the assurance that the oracle was trustworthy, or that Diotima had something worthy to say) even while it’s hard to say what undergirds that pledge to honor a truth intrinsic to who one must be. “Living-as-Socrates”, knowing how to do that, is something Socrates has to work out for himself — we can’t guide him.

And if we LEARN from Socrates, how does that happen? Perhaps, as Kelly suggests, if I learn from a poem it may show up in my writing my own poem. If I learn ‘knowing how live out the unfolding self I am” by holding Socratic living in mind, that can’t mean Socrates has authority to tell me how to live. If I learn from him, it will not be that I learn how to “live-as-Socrates” (except in the most general way: for example, ‘think about what words you use in probing yourself’). Learning from him will be much more learning how to “live-as-me” — “learning” what can I pledge myself to, to give my life that sort of solidity and continuity that in the longer run I can look back (and my friends can look back) and say: “for all his (propositional, informational, doctrinal) ignorance he knew himself, he led his own life. And “learning what I can pledge myself to” is perhaps mostly just pledging-in-the-relative-dark: not ‘finding out” but “doing.”

This is a comment on a previous post, a comment by Ed Mooney.  I have found it of so much interest that I wanted to station it in a more visible spot.  I plan to write something responsive in the next couple of days.  (The title here is mine, not Ed’s.)

Style Meld: A Questionnaire

April 30, 2012 By in Uncategorized 16 Comments

Here’s a question for you to answer:  What writer (and by that I mean anyone who writes, whether literature, philosophy, history … whatever) do you most wish you could successfully reduplicate as a writer?  So as to make things more interesting, I will rule out the Obvious Answers:  Plato, Shakespeare, etc.  Be sure to also specify why you’ve chosen that writer:  what makes that particular writer the one you chose?  And, just for more fun, supply a characteristic sentence or two from the writer that you take to show or do what you’ve specified.

Immortal Openings, 8: Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

April 27, 2012 By in Immortal Openings, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Philosophy, these sullen days, is somewhat a pensioner in the family of knowledge.  Like an aged grandfather living on a legacy outstripped by the times, philosophy depends on the kindness of relatives who may take some pride in the aura of grandness which surrounds the old man but who help to maintain him more out of loyalty than devotion.

Both Object and Means of Interpretation

April 26, 2012 By in Cavell, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 7 Comments

Cavell notes that in Part IV of The Claim of Reason PI had shifted for him from object of interpretation to means of interpretation.  I mention this because of my growing sense of how much of the blog has been devoted to trying to say something about the importance of PI, to reveal something of what and how it is central in my life, and I am chagrined by the error of each trial.  Nonetheless, I continue, even as I fail to satisfy myself in treating PI as an object of interpretation, —I continue unabashedly to use it as a means, even as my primary mean, of interpretation.  That impresses me now as mysterious.  Is it because I am convinced by the rightness of PI beyond my ability to articulate that rightness?  But how should I understand that inarticulate conviction?  Can it be trusted?  Or is it rather that my conviction of its rightness is itself justified for me by my repetitiously endured inability to articulate that rightness, as if being able to articulate it would demote PI from its position as standard for me, so that success would be a form of self-defeat?  Or is it rather because my conviction is that PI requires itself to withstand all of its own judgments, understands itself both as supplying and suffering its own terms of criticism, making itself simultaneously object and source of philosophical criticism?  Or is it rather because only what shows itself as a faithful means of interpretation is surely worth the difficulty of interpreting?

Writing Without Authority–Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein

April 24, 2012 By in availability/disposability, Kierkegaard, Philosophical Investigations, reading, Self-knowledge, writing Tags: , , , , , , 13 Comments

Kierkegaard understands himself to be, wants to be understood as, writing without authority.  I’ve lately been mulling over whether it means anything, and if means anything whether it means anything sufficiently interesting, to say that Wittgenstein understands himself to be, wants to be understood as, writing PI without authority.  The answer of course hinges on what it is to write without authority.  For Kierkegaard we might say that writing without authority is, first and foremost, to abjure the role of preacher.  But that is not all that it is for him:  he clearly means not only to reject one form of relationship to his reader, but a panoply of forms–any form that would make it the case that the reader’s attention finds it easier, more natural, to perch on Kierkegaard than on the reader himself, any form that deflects self-attention.  So Kierkegaard is always and forever side-stepping, ducking out, disappearing.  He wants his reader to read as if the reader is reading what the reader has written.  Reading as self-confrontation.

But how is that to work?  Is the experience of such reading supposed to be like the experience of finding something you’ve written previously but forgotten, so that now its content seems news, as does the fact that you are its author?  That seems too distanced a relationship to what is written.  Is the experience supposed to be like the experience of re-writing something that you have written, editing, poking, patting and scraping?  That seems a not-distanced-enough relationship to what is written.  (Partly because there is, in an important sense, nothing written yet.  You are still writing.  Everything remains in the flux of composition.)  So what is the experience supposed to be like?

Wittgenstein writes:

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

And Kierkegaard prefaces For Self-Examination with this:

My dear reader!  Read, if possible, aloud!  If you do this, allow me to thank you.  If you not only do it yourself, if you induce others to do it also, allow me to thank them severally, and you again and again!  By reading aloud you will most powerfully receive the impression that you have only yourself to consider, not me, who am without authority, or others, the consideration of whom would be a distraction.

I reckon that what Kierkegaard wants from his reader is for the reader to experience the reading as private conversation with himself, as saying things to himself tete-a-tete.  Doing so fastens the reader’s attention on himself, makes any examination the reading requires self-examination.  We read Kierkegaard aright when we read in forgetfulness of him–and only read in remembrance of ourselves.  I believe that this is something Wittgenstein aspires to as well.  That is, I take his remark about conversations with himself as not purely descriptive but as also prescriptive, say as a registration of a realized writerly intention, realized in PI.

In this way, Wittgenstein aims to write without authority.  And I think Wittgenstein signposts this aim:  PI’s self-effacing (as I read it) epigraph leaves it to the reader what sort of advance, if any, and if any, how much, PI represents.  His desire not to spare others the trouble of thinking and his hope that he would stimulate thinking seem not to target thinking about him (Wittgenstein) but rather thinking by the reader and for the reader and about the reader–specifically, about the reader in relationship to philosophical problems.  (As Kierkegaard targets thinking by, for and about the reader–specifically, about the reader in relationship to existential problems.)

Here is what I find myself moved to say:  PI exists as being-for-another.  Wittgenstein writes it as a gift to his readers.  It is a work of testimony, of confession, and Wittgenstein wrote it for those who are troubled as he is troubled.  It is a gage of his friendship, even his love, for them, for his readers.  But for it fully to exist as such, the reader must fully acknowledge it, fully acknowledge it as such.  To fully acknowledge it is to answer its call to self-awakeness.  Wittgenstein wrote a book to be acknowledged, not, if I may put it this way, a book to be known.  (I judge this one of the deep similarities between Wittgenstein and Emerson and Thoreau.  What they write puts the reader in the space of acknowledgement, and their reader answers the call of the writing, or not.  Sometimes gifts are refused.  And sometimes what looks like acceptance is still a form of refusal.)

Wittgenstein toyed seriously with the idea of prefacing his work with Bach’s epigraph to the Little Organ Book:

To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.

He hesitated because he thought that in the darkness of our time such a remark would be misunderstood.  And so it probably would.  But why is that?  What has gone wrong in a time when giving and receiving have soured, a time in which we have become so stuffy even while so indigent, a time so graceless as ours?  Job endured the Lord taking back what He had given.  We will never have to endure that.  But only because we have made ourselves unreceptive, and so have never been given anything.  Job got everything back, double; we go on and on with nothing.

Strange Evidence: On Writing

April 24, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

Reflecting on writing and on the difficulties of writing, both my own and others’, I was reminded of this final passage in Fairfax and Moat’s fascinating and idiosyncratic, The Way to Write:

So it is important to be published?  You answer.  After all, you are the only one who can tell you.

But, if it’s any help, here are two things that publication will never do.  First, it will never prove that you are any good as a writer.  Second, it will not even prove that you are a writer.

If you look to publication for such proof, then watch out:  you’re a very inflammable moth, the one in the legend who is consumed by the flame of his own illusion.

In the first place, no writer ever knows whether he is any damn good.  In the second place, there is for the writer only one proof of identity that is meaningful and incontrovertible:  the strange evidence that he continues to write.

This is followed by the most succinct Suggestions for Practice that may ever have been given:

Practice…

From the Vespers for the Sunday of Thomas: “O The Delicacy of the Beautiful Unbelief of Thomas”

April 23, 2012 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

O good Christ, when thou enteredst unto thy Disciples, the doors being shut, Thomas, who was called Didymus, was not with them. Wherefore, he doubted what was told him. Albeit, thou didst not deem him unworthy for his lack of faith, rather assuring him of faith, by showing him thy pure side, and the wounds in thy hands and feet. Therefore, having sought and beheld, he confessed that thou art an unabstract God, and an unsimple Man, crying, My Lord and my God, glory to thee.

The Disciples, being doubtful, the Savior, after eight days, came to where they were gathered and granted them peace. Then he cried unto Thomas, Come, O Apostle, and probe the two palms which were pierced by the nails. O the delicacy of the beautiful unbelief of Thomas, as coming with the heart of an unbeliever to knowledge, he called out with fear, My Lord and my God, glory to thee.