Skepticism: Vain Thinking, 1

February 10, 2012 By in Montaigne, religion, skepticism Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

A fresh-ish start on a difficult topic.  Bear with me.

I take vanity to be the central concept of Montaigne’s writing:  it is the concept that joins his Christianity to his skepticism, in fact it is the concept that makes his skepticism Christian.  I suppose this claim might be a stumbling block for many, and for a variety of reasons.  The one I want to address now is this:  “You take the Essays (particularly the Third Book) as deeply colored by Ecclesiastes.  For you, the line, “Per omnia vanitas” is the running heading of the Essays.  But Ecclesiastes is, remember, a description of life “under the sun”–uncompromising, cold, objective, human–a description of a world without God.  So how can Montaigne’s Ecclesiastes-saturated essays be a form of Christian, again:  Christian, skepticism?”  But that is not how I understand Ecclesiastes.  Ecclesiastes I understand as itself revelation:  What is shows us is human life as revealed by God.  What it shows us is not something we can lift ourselves out of by coming to faith in God, as if faith in God undid the vanity of human life.  It doesn’t. God is Mystery; faith is Mystery; and the relationship of both to the vanity of human life is Mystery. That does not mean that we know nothing about God, faith or the relationship of human life to each or both, but it does mean that we cannot make simple, formulaic comments about it.  (It is not safe to say, for instance, that the view of human life in Ecclesiastes is one that simply requires the supplementation of grace in order for it to undo its vanity.  There’s something right about that, sure; but it is not a matter of simple supplementation.)  Human life is vanity.  God and faith in God do not change that straightforwardly, although God and faith in God allow for hope and patience in the vanity of human life.

Montaigne’s skepticism is his way of reckoning with the vanity of human life–a vanity still present in human life even when it is lived in Christian categories, a vanity in fact most fully disclosed in such living.  This does not mean that human life is devoid of value or of values, but it does mean that those values are, in an important but difficult sense, contradictory.  Happiness is vanity; but we should gather such happiness as we can.  Work is vain; but we need to work.  Neither happiness nor work is fully satisfying, but neither is without value.  Their value is enigmatic, contradictory.  As such, the role of each in human life is not open to easy survey–and to think either is so open is to fail to reckon with the view of human life God reveals, to fail to remember life’s existential deficiency. (Note that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, the Church-Man, has had this revealed to him not in ecstatic vision but in the midst of his own life’s striving:  “I marked…”, “I found…” “I learned…”.  It is important that the book is written first-personally. But what is marked, found and learned is not something that the Church-Man takes himself to have come to know independently of God’s revelation of it to him. What is true under the sun is not anyway available to be known under the sun.)

For Montaigne, as for the Church-Man, knowledge is vain.  We should seek it, cannot, in one sense, help but seek it:  “There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.”  But even when we have it, each of us must ask:  “What do I know?…I am an investigator without knowledge.”  –No matter what we do, we are all unprofitable servants.  –We know what we know, but knowing it does not eliminate our emptiness or neediness, as we expect it to do.  Nothing we can know can change what we are, make us new and different and better creatures.  More often than not, what we know turns out to be an encumbrance, a burden, a curse; knowing what we know makes us worse. (The Serpent’s lesson, taught in the Garden.)  At best, it tends to puff us up.  Puffiness is Montaigne’s aversion.

More soon.

Emily Dickinson (Poem)

February 9, 2012 By in poetry Leave a comment

546 (1651)

A Word made flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Now then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength–

A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He–
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology.

Immortal Openings, 3: Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, The Soliloquies of St. Augustine (Introduction)

February 7, 2012 By in writing Tags: Leave a comment

The anemic society of today needs not so much the specializing genius–the artist who lives because of his works–as the all-around man, the vital personality whose works live because of him; the man to whom nothing human is alien, whose experience circumscribes and transcends that of the common lot; the prodigious individual rather than the individual prodigy, the master rather than the marvel.  Such an one is St. Augustine, once Bishop of Hippo, peerless controversialist, incomparable church father; and once, the dreaming, doubting, half-heathen youth and man, eager of brain, restless of heart, lover of pleasure more than lover of God.

A Triptych of Quotation

February 6, 2012 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Leave a comment

Three quotations that came to me, more or less together, this morning. The first is from Wittgenstein, the second from Marilynne Robinson, the third from Roger Teichmann:

…[D]on’t think, but look!

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the sense of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

Yes, I’m sure it was through her contact with Wittgenstein that Anscombe came to see the pitfalls of over-systematic thinking, and on the other hand the real potential in philosophical methods which aim to elucidate rather than to reduce. Like Wittgenstein, she had both intellectual honesty and philosophical stamina, and these are necessary when it comes to resisting the charms of system-building, since those charms have a lot to do with having an easier time of it. Getting an accurate overview of a complex and tangled set of problems is always more difficult than constructing a system and airbrushing out the inconsistencies and counterexamples.

Immortal Openings, 2: Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era

January 30, 2012 By in writing 1 Comment

Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.

“Courage”–Charles Wagner

January 29, 2012 By in teaching, virtue and vice 5 Comments

Where is this good, of which I speak, to be found? We must seek for it. Those who seek for it and are capable of seeing it, will find it. I urge many young people to investigate this unknown region. They will discover many salutary herbs which will serve them as elixirs.

The truth is, that no one has any idea of the number of good people who live about us. The amount of suffering patiently borne, the injuries pardoned, the sacrifices made, the disinterested efforts, are impossible to count. It is a world full of unknown splendours, like the profound grottoes lighted by the marvellous lamp of Aladdin. These are the reserves of the future; these are the silent streams that run beneath the earth, and without which the sources of good would long since have become exhausted, and the world have returned to barbarism. Happy is he who can explore the sacred depths! At first, one feels profane, small, out of place. There are people of such a simple benevolence, of such natural disinterestedness, that one feels poor and unworthy beside them; but this is a grief which is salutary, a humiliation which exalts us. What can be better for a young man than to feel himself small and inferior in the presence of truth, of abnegation, and of pure goodness? If he is troubled, moved, bewildered, downcast; if he weeps; if his life, when compared with those which he sees about him, seems to him like a childish sketch by the side of a canvas of a great master, — so much the better for him. This humility is a proof in his favour, and places him at once in the path of progress. They say that young nightingales, whose voices are not yet formed, are very unhappy when they come into the presence of those older birds who fill the nights of summer with their music. When they hear them, they cease to sing, and remain silent for a long time. This is neither from a spirit of envy nor ill temper; but the ideal presented to them bewilders and disturbs them. They listen, they are intoxicated by the melody, and while thinking, perhaps, in their little bird brains, — “I can never hope to equal thee!” they become so inspired that they end by singing in their turn. Hail to the good listener!

Words: Frankenstein and His Monster

January 28, 2012 By in writing 3 Comments

Here’s an interesting passage from Lytton Strachey I ran across this morning. He is writing of words, language:

Those small articulated sounds, that seem so simple and so definite, turn out, the more one examines them, to be the receptacles of subtle mystery and the dispensers of unanticipated power. Each one of them, as we look, shoots up into

“A palm with winged imagination in it
And roots that stretch even beneath the grave.”

It is really a case of Frankenstein and his monster. These things that we have made are as alive as we are, and we have become their slaves. Words are like coins (a dozen metaphors show it), and in nothing more so than in this–that the verbal currency we have so ingeniously contrived has outrun our calculations, and become an enigma and a matter for endless controversy. We say something; but we can never be quite certain what we have said. In a single written sentence a hundred elusive meanings palpitate.

The Care and Feeding of William Faulkner (Poem)

January 27, 2012 By in poetry Leave a comment

The Care and Feeding of William Faulkner           

William Faulkner visits Iceland in the early 50’s.

Faulkner’s coming

Here, to Iceland

We’re to show him a good time

But, not too good

In Japan, he misbehaved badly

Drunk, on hard stuff

We should serve him beer

Just, not too much

Keep a constant careful eye on him

Slightly, on his glass

“Doesn’t anyone here drink hard liquor?”

 

William, William

Meet our guests:

Don’t you want to meet the famous authors of Iceland?

Here’s one, they think he’ll win the Nobel Prize, like you.

Bring it back to their ice and snow and buried boiling waters

Like you did to your sun and heat and gentle warm springs.

(Silence)

Too bad you won’t say much—at least you don’t talk about yourself.

 

The State Department sent you to Iceland

To convince them that we, that is, we Americans,

Are worth knowing, worth having around.

Your job is to show them our culture; and you can do that by just

Being there, by sharing your high and nobel presence.

 

You see, we write, too; and read.

True, we have to keep watch on our culture.

It drinks, you know, bourbon on the rocks in a tall glass.

And gets wobbly, and we have to send cablegrams

Addressed to the one Southerner in all of Iceland,

Explaining the care and feeding of our culture.

Since sometimes it cannot stand on its own.

Wittgenstein and the Ordinary, the Everyday

January 24, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

Kierkegaard’s Judge William distinguishes two histories, external (outer) and internal (inner).  The two histories have different structures.  In the first, the person whose life is historized is understood as a stuggler who does not have what he wants or desires to have, but who eventually acquires it.  In the second, the person whose life is historized is understood as a stuggler who has what he wants or desires, but who cannot take possession of it, because of a series of obstacles.  The first is a “Someday…” history.  The second an “Already but not yet…” history.   The nature of external history allows for shortening, for omission.  Not every moment of the time that passes from lack to acquisition matters; shortening is allowed, even to be encouraged.  But the nature of internal history makes each moment matter; shortening would lose the history itself, lose what it is, in a sense, a history of.

In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein characterizes what he calls “the aspects of things that are most important for us”, “the real foundations of our inquiry”–what I want to call the ordinary or everyday–as “hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”.  How can simplicity and familiarity camouflage anything?  How can simplicity and familiarity hide anything, much less what is most important, the real foundations of inquiry, even–what is “most striking and powerful”?

The answer involves Judge William’s distinction.  According to the Judge, anything that has an internal history is, in an important sense, unrepresentable.  But this also renders anything that has an internal history easy to miss–there are no fanfare moments, no peak instants, in the internal history that would allow what it is a history of suddenly to become conspicuous, to step into view.  No, anything with an internal history is, as such, inconspicuous at each moment.

I take it that the ordinary or the everyday has an internal history.  It is not representable.  Wittgenstein understands the ordinary, the everyday, to be the real foundations of our inquiry, and so rests his philosophizing on something that cannot be singled out, moved into prominence, made striking.  –Or at least it cannot in any straightforward way.  As Wittgenstein puts it, “The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.  Unless that fact has at some time struck him.”   We might gloss this as saying that the ordinary, the everyday, comes into view only once we have realized that they do not come into view.  Which means that they do not come into view at all as do those things with external histories.

Here’s a kind of Kierkegaardian parallel.  Take humility.  The genuinely humble person, as C. S. Lewis once pointed out, doesn’t talk of himself or of humility, but is instead wholly interested in others .  As far as humility goes, the genuinely humble person will not strike us as humble.  But that fact about a person can strike us, and, in so doing, reveal the person as genuinely humble.  What it will reveal is not some one moment, however, in which the person’s humility manifests itself, but rather it will reveal to us the shape of the person’s whole life, of all of his moments.  His life is his taking possession of humility, overcoming the obstacles of empty self-obsession that prevent possession.

The work of Philosophical Investigations is taking possession of the ordinary, the everyday, overcoming the obstacles of philosophy that prevent possession.

(H/T to Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell)