The Sublimity of Logic

March 16, 2012 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , , 13 Comments

PI 89:  A nodal point in PI–a point where numerous intimate connections can be traced.  I am not going to trace them now, not all of them.  But one is that the problem of the sublimity of logic is, at least partially, the result of our subliming of logic, of our relationship to the problem.  We are not wholly confused in subliming logic–logic is sublime.  But its sublimity must square with its not supplying us with new facts, with its investigation of the hardly memorable and easily forgettable.  –Can we so square the sublimity of logic without feeling that Wittgenstein has changed the subject?

These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime?

For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth–a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.–For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.—-It takes its rise, not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connexions: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.

Augustine says in the Confessions “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio”.–This could not be said about a question of natural science (“What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?” for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)

Status Update

March 15, 2012 By in meta-blog Leave a comment

Another long day banging my head against the computer, trying to write.  Hours later all I have to show for my efforts is a longish, so-so paragraph that may someday be the ancestor of a paragraph that will appear in a different paper.  Gah!  I need a better writing plan than this:  Write out of your own inner disorder.

A Thought on Cavellian Generic Objects and Our Relationship to Philosophical Problems

March 13, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, skepticism, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been talking about our relationship to philosophical problems, and I want to say more about that idea.  The idea is made more clear by Cavell’s notion of a generic object–and in its turn makes Cavell’s notion clearer.  (I will not now say more about the use to which the notion (and its companion notion, specific object) is put by Cavell.   To see that use, look at pages 52ff. of The Claim of Reason.)

Consider Cavell’s crucial comment:

I will not by such titles be meaning to suggest that there are two kinds of objects in the world [generic and specific], but rather to summarize the spirit in which an object is under discussion, the kind of problem that has arisen about it, the problem in which it presents itself as the focus of investigation.”

Here (briefly) is what I take to be crucial:  whether the object under discussion is to be ‘classified’ as generic is a matter not settled by the object itself (by its marks or features), but rather by the way in which we are related to the object–but that means by the way in which we are related to the problem of which the object is the focus.  To ‘classify’ the object as generic is really to classify the spirit of our discussion, our relationship to the problem.  In the Kierkegaardian terminology I habitually use here, to ‘classify’ an object as a generic object is to highlight the how of our relationship to it, not the what of the object.  (The distinction between generic and specific objects is not metaphysical but metaphilosophical.)

Cavell’s phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of The Claim of Reason, are extensions of Wittgenstein’s own (less protracted) phenomenologies of philosophizing, populating the pages of Philosophical Investigations.  And the phenomenologies are devoted to revealing our relationship to philosophical problems.

From Kierkegaard, a Lenten Thought

March 11, 2012 By in religion 2 Comments

And so there is to be found neither in heaven nor upon earth, nor in any relationship between man and man, an exaltation like this, when I turn away humbled and ashamed from my best deed as from a vileness and find repose in ‘grace’.  Let the pagan with his proud neck strike the heavens, or try to–from this humiliation comes the exaltation which blissfully reaches heaven.  Thou canst not worship God by good works, still less by crimes, and just as little by sinking into a soft slumber and doing nothing.  No, in order to worship a man must so comport himself:  he strives with might and main, spares himself neither day nor night, he tries to produce as many as possible of what upright men, humanly speaking, might call ‘good works’.  And then when he takes them and, deeply humbled before God, beholds them transformed to wretchedness and vileness, that is to worship God–that is exaltation.

Swelter Sings (from Titus Groan–by Mervyn Peake)

March 8, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“I shall sing to you, Steerpike, to you” whispered the cook, reeling and supporting himself with one hand against the stone pillar that was glistening with condensed heat, little trickles of moisture moving down its fluted sides.

“To you, the newcomer, the blue mummer, and the slug of summer–to you the hideous, and insidious, and appallingly cretinous goat in a house of stenches.”

The apprentices rocked with joy.

“To you, only to you, my core of curdled cat bile.  To you alone, so harken diligentiums.  Are you harkening? Are you listening for this is how it goes.  My song of a hundred years ago, my plaintively most melancholic song.”

Swelter seemed to forget he was about to sing, and after wiping the sweat from his hands on the head of a youth below him, peered for Steerpike again.

“And why to you, my ray of addled sunshine? Why to you alone? Taking it for granted, my dear little Steerpike–taking it for more than for most granted, that you, a creature of less consequence than stoat’s blood, are so far removal’d from anything approaching nature–yet tell me, more rather, don’t tell me why your ears which must have originally been designed for flypapers, are for some reason better known to yourself, kept immoderately unfurled.  You move here and there on your little measly legs.  I have seen you at it.  You breathe all over my kitchen.  You look at things with you insolent animal eyes.  I’ve seen you doing it.  I have seen you look at me.  You’re looking at me now.  Steerpike, my impatient lovebird, what does it all mean, and why should I sing for you?”…

“It is a song, my Steerpike, to an imaginary monster, just like yourself if only you were a trifle bigger and more monstrous still.  It is a song to a hard-hearted monster so listen most fixedly, my pretty wart.  Closer!  Closer! Can’t you come a little closer to a dirgeous masterpiece?”…

“I am Swelter, the great Chef Abiatha Swelter, cook to his Lordship, boardship, and sorts of ships that sail on slippery seas.  Abiatha Swelter, man and boy and girls and ribbons, lots of kittens, forty year of cold and sunny, where’s the money, thick and hairy, I’m a fairy! I am a songster!  Listen well, listen well!”

“Are you listening?”…

The kitchen had become as silent as a hot tomb.  At last, through the silence, a weak gurgling sound began to percolate, but whether it was the first verse of the long-awaited poem none could tell, for the Chef, like a galleon, lurched into his anchorage.  The great ship’s canvas sagged and crumpled and then suddenly an enormousness foundered and sank.  There was a sound of something spreading as an area of seven flagstones became hidden from view beneath a cataleptic mass of wine-drenched blubber.

Swelter: Copyright, The Mervyn Peake Estate

A Bit from a Dust-gathering Paper Draft: Decreating Philosophical Problems

March 7, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Self-knowledge, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 11 Comments

As I have found myself thinking fairly regularly over the past few years, the best description of Philosophical Investigations is: it decreates philosophical problems. (I borrow the notion from Weil.)  Wittgenstein teaches his readers what philosophical problems are and how readers should treat them. Wittgenstein’s revolution in philosophy–and he is a revolutionary fi gure, whose revolution we have still rightly to measure and deservingly to inherit–is not just an overthrow of the previous understanding of philosophical problems that is meant to result in, well, quiet, at least after the dust clears, a stillness, in which nothing philosophical stirs. This would be a revolution aimed at ending philosophy, punkt. Nothing on the hither side of what ended, only the overthrown stuff on the yonder side, now reduced to stone and rubble. But that is not the revolution. That is not decreation–decreation is a passage from the created into the uncreated, not from the created into nothingness. The revolution does aim at ending philosophy of a sort, philosophy fueled by a particular understanding of philosophical problems, but that is not to be the end of philosophy, punkt; it is only to be the end of that sort of philosophy, the yonder sort. On the hither side, the hither sort: philosophy pursued as the decreation of philosophical problems, philosophy as involving constant self-overcoming. The sort of philosophy that Wittgenstein does, and he does do philosophy, not just attack those who do it, goes on–and on.  –Philosophically, things change. But they do not just end. No. Philosophy has not been dammed up or damned down. No. (“riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…”)

(As noted, I borrow the notion of `decreation’ from Simone Weil. I explore decreation in Philosophical Investigations briefly in my “Motives for Philosophizing”, Metaphilosophy Vol.40, No. 2, April 2009, pp. 260-272, as well as in my essay, “Philosophical Remarks” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, and in my essay, “Metaschematizing Socrates”, in the forthcoming Hamann and the Tradition. Only the fi rst of these employs Weil’s notion explicitly. The second two beat about in the bushes neighboring the notion. I am still working through the consequences of my use of it).

Immortal Openings, 5: Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors

March 5, 2012 By in writing Leave a comment

Blue is a mysterious color, the hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature.  It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue)…

“Color is its own Reward”

March 3, 2012 By in Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

–or so sang Croweded House.  The department here at AU is hosting a conference, “Color and Philosophy”.  Today is the second and final day.

Wittgenstein writes that “colors spur us to philosophize”.  That seems right.  I reckon it is, in part, because colors are strangely phenomenologically mobile.  They seem to move from being ‘in’ us to ‘out there’ and back again.  They seem now existentially dependent upon me, and now existentially dependent upon the object they color; now wholly intimate with me, now wholly indifferent to me.  How can something be such that what it is–say, what it is essentially–is revealed completely even to a more or less casual glance (how can color be, to use Johnston’s term, “revelatory”) and still be something that I know only as a perceiver, as receptive?  Is color that, well, shallow?  And if it is, how can something so shallow, even infinitely shallow, find a place among the deep dark densities of the outer world?

Present to the Past

March 1, 2012 By in Metaphilosophy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A couple of times in the last few months I have tried to get involved in Otto Bollnow’s fascinating paper, “On Understanding a Writer Better than He Understands Himself”.  But each time I have bogged down–for both internal and external reasons.  So I want to just state here in one post the basic point that I hoped to make in a more complete and complicated way across several posts.

The basic point:  The idea of understanding a philosopher better than he understands himself seems to me to typify the relationship between continental philosophers (and I guess I should say that I am thinking primarily of phenomenologists) and their forbears.  This idea does not typify the relationship between analytic philosophers and their forbears.  (Of course there are exceptions–vide McDowell among analytic philosophers.)  Analytic philosophers see themselves as ‘external’ to their forbears:  they agree with them or disagree with them, and they tend to understand their forbears’ work ‘discreetly’, as divided into chunks of argumentation with which they agree or not.  But continental philosophers see themselves as ‘internal’ to their forbears:  agreement and disagreement–well, neither is intimate enough to characterize the relationship.  Rather their aim seems to be to penetrate so deeply into the thinking of the forebears that they no longer know where they begin and their forebears end.  Criticism of the forebears thus becomes radically internal, almost always it is a “preaching to X from X” activity (vide Merleau-Ponty’s Husserl-contra-Husserl intro to The Phenomenology).  The forebears work is understood ‘continuously’, as a living whole that must be responded to somehow as such.  –That, such as it is, is the basic point.

Wittgenstein, Bouwsma and Our Relationship to Philosophical Problems

February 28, 2012 By in availability/disposability, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 9 Comments

O. K. Bouwsma once declaimed that “…Wittgenstein’s interest was not in any particular problem, but in the bothered individual, particularly the hot and bothered.” He was rhetorizing about PI.

I believe Bouwsma is on to something quite important here, even though he seems to me to miss a better way of putting his point. It is not that Wittgenstein is not interested in any particular philosophical problem in PI–he is, in fact, interested in many–but rather that he keeps steadily before himself the puzzled (“hot and bothered”) person (now his interlocutor, now his reader, now both, now both in different ways), the particular problem, and the relationship of the person to the problem. Wittgenstein’s specific focus, the spotlight of his attention, shifts across this structure in complicated, sometimes dizzying ways, but more often than not, he spotlights the relationship between the person and the problem. Wittgenstein over and over again tries to make that relationship the available to the person, often doing so (in part) by making his own relationship to the problem available to the person–i.e., by making himself exemplary (in one sense of the term). (H/T to j.) As I understand Wittgenstein, he believes that the person believes that the particular problem is just there, palpitating problematically in its isolation, and that his or her relationship to the problem has nothing whatever to do with its being problematic. But the person’s belief is confused. I do not have time now to go into detail, so let me try to explain briefly by means of two quotations, both from Remarks on Color:

In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem.
We must always be prepared to learn something new. (I, 15)

In philosophy we must always ask: “How must we look at this problem in order for it to become solvable?” (II, 11)

Each of these is a response to the relationship between the person and the problem. The first is a reminder that we are all-too-often guilty of a philosophical knowingness, of a carried-with-us conviction that we are certain at least of the roots of the problem, that we understand its logical aetiology. We are prepared to learn something new, but not at the root level: that would mean that we have misunderstood the problem completely, or fancied a problem where there is none. The second is a reminder that we tend to occupy one fixed position in front of a philosophical problem, as if there were a chair bolted to floor and as if we had to sit in that chair in order to see the problem for what it is. We will not unfix our position, bound from the chair, and take a look around, hunting specifically for an angle of vision on the problem that allows us to undo it, like an apparently complicated knot that simply falls out of the string when we pull on the right end. –We can comment on one thing that unites these remarks by using a term of Kenneth Burke’s, occupational psychosis. An occcupational psychosis is a kind of blindness created by the aquisition of certain skills, the shadow, as it were, of our occupational accomplishments. (By ‘psychosis’ Burke does not anything strictly psychiatric; instead, “it applies simply to a pronounced character [Burke’s emphasis] of the mind.”) We approach philosophical problems as philosophers, where that means that we approach the problems occupationally: we believe we know what the problems are and we believe we know how to see them–knowing these things is what makes us philosophers. We are not prepared to learn that we do not know what a philosophical problem is, that we are at the root confused. We are not prepared to abandon our familiar angle of vision on the problem. To abandon these would be to approach the problem non-occupationally, to approach the problem with empty hands. That is hard, really quite hard, to do. Our occupation is our preoccupation. How could philosophy become unskilled labor and still know itself as philosophy? (Forgive me for that.)

How often the conjuring trick that illudes us is one we play on ourselves, one that we play on ourselves when we pride ourselves on our skill at avoiding illusion.