Back in the saddle again…
Back from a few days vacation. Good to be home and back to the blog. Look for some new bits and pieces in the next few days.
The Objective Absorbed Back Into the Subjective
A…Socratic aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought is found in its instrumentalism, its consistently pragmatic character with reference to theory, expression, and practice. In this connection is it instructive to remember the difference between Socrates and Plato. The dialectic which in the hands of Socrates was an instrument to sweep away the cobwebs of illusion to make room for the human ideals, therefore a means of self-discipline and incidentally also a discipline of others, this dialectic was transformed by Plato, more or less clearly and consciously, into an end in itself, and the abstractions developed by this dialectic therefore naturally became the supreme realities. In short, Socrates was an existential thinker, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, while Plato was a speculative metaphysician. What Kierkegaard especially admires in Socrates is that he had no objective result, but only a way, that that it is only by following the Socratic way that one can reach the Socratic result…
In this Socratic sense, Kierkegaard’s own thought was instrumental and pragmatic also. His objective thinking is everywhere absorbed–absorbed back into the subjective, the personality… –Swenson, “A Danish Socrates”
I’m not entirely sure the actual Plato (as opposed to the textbook Plato) is quite as far from Socrates as Swenson puts him, but I think the contrast a good one–even if the actual men contrasted do not stand in such contrast to one another.
Hearing Voices in PI
[A thought connected to the paper I am working on today.]
Consider the interlocutory voices in PI. How am I, the reader, supposed to relate to them?
My surmise: I have to find my way to hearing all the voices as mine. I ought not simply choose one and denominate it my champion, or denominate it me. No, I must come to hear the voices as giving voice to different modulations of my existence; I find myself in each voice. To achieve this is to achieve a regrouping of my own mind. The best single term I know to use here is Gabriel Marcel’s: ingatheredness. I find my way to ingatheredness–and the ingatheredness is not achieved apart from the philosophical problems that confront the voices; rather the philosophical problems that confront the voices are themselves factors in the ingathering; they must play a role in my self-recollection because they play(ed) a role in my self-forgetfulness. (Finding myself in all the voices helps to make that clear.)
“But this means that the whole of PI is devoted to putting me back together? To finding in myself all these temptations, these corrections, these murks, these clarities?” –Yes. “So what do I take away from PI?” –Yourself. “I started with that.” –Did you?
To travel the length of PI, really to find yourself in all its voices, to achieve ingatheredness, is to have undergone ‘a change without change’. Marcel:
…[W]e must suppose that we are here in the presence of an act of inner creativity or transmutation, but also that this creative or transmuting act, though a paradox…also has the character of being a return–only a return in which what is given after the return is not identical with what was given before…The best analogy for this process of self-discovery which, though it is genuinely discovery, does also genuinely create something new, is the development of a musical composition; even if such a composition apparently ends with the very same phrases that it started with, they are not longer felt as being the same–they are, as it were, coloured by all the vicissitudes they have gone through and by which their final recapture, in their first form, has been accompanied.
[Footnote: N.B. the relationship between PI 1 and PI 693.]
I win and lose, win and lose ingatheredness: but this isn’t to toggle between the same two conditions again and again, but rather is the local shape of a globally ‘upward’, winning movement. And over and over, PI helps.
Leaving Mayberry–Poem
For Poetry Day:
Death paid a call
Last night
Dropped in unexpected
We weren’t receiving visitors
Andy Griffith was on tv so
At first we didn’t notice
Death’s tuneless quiet whistle
But when Barney said
“Nip it! Nip it! Nip it in the bud!”
Death stopped whistling
And all we could hear
Was silence and Death
Rocking in his chair
We knew someone was headed
To Mt. Pilot
Reminders and a Kind of Taste
I’ve been thinking again about Wittgensteinian reminders, and, while I was doing so, I ran across the following from Henry James.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
It strikes me that much of the power of Wittgenstein’s work in PI is only available to those who have the taste for emotions of recognition. In fact, I wonder if the juxtaposition of PI 127 and 128 is not itself a juxtaposition of the two tastes: in 127 Wittgenstein engages the taste for emotions of recognition and in 128 he denies the taste for emotions of surprise.
I suppose as I have put this it is oversimple–as James’ categorization itself is. But, there is something to it (isn’t there?), something important, I believe. Aren’t the two tastes also being juxtaposed in the final paragraph of PI 89?
This Is Quantum Est…
A Really Alive Person–A Comment from Gabriel Marcel
A really alive person is not merely someone who has a taste for life, but somebody who spreads that taste, showering it, as it were, around him; and a person who is really alive in this way has, quite apart from any tangible achievements of his, something essentially creative about him…
Immortal Openings, 6: K. L. Evans, Whale!
One question underlies all of Moby Dick: “So what’s eating you?” Many readers of the novel have put this question to its author, coming up with pat explanations of what is called Melville’s pessimism, or madness–even genius–as a response to his father’s breakdown or his poverty or his sexuality or his marriage, instead of asking the question of themselves, which is really what should be asked, and is asked, by Melville, and not rhetorically, What is eating us, what is eating you?
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William Eaton has a great new site. I encourage you to check it out, especially if you love the essay, love brevity, and especially love them together.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 