Wickedness is an intricate net; and if someone is careless when partially entangled, he gets completely enmeshed.
This strikes me, to almost borrow a phrase from Cavell, as St. Mark’s religious interpretation of a perception he shares with Wittgenstein.
Forgive me, I have knees on the brain. (What’re those lines in the chorus of the Cage the Elephant song, “Aberdeen“? “Hold the phone/Hit repeat/You’ve got me foamin’ at the knees…”?) I don’t know really what viability Aristotle’s organic theory has as science, if any, but going through knee replacement surgery (this is my second) makes the whole homonymy jig seem like it might not be up. The doctor installs a “knee”. Then the recipient, the therapists and pain team up to see if they can clear the metaphysical hurdle between “knee” and knee. –Anyway, this is my new therapy mantra (repeated, in good sense, silently): “Make it a knee, make it a knee, make it a knee”.
Can a philosophy be grounded on the considered experience of its author? –So grounded, we could understand it as open to analysis and to disagreement, but not as straightforwardly vulnerable to argument based on general principle. I ask because it strikes me that many of the philosophies I care most about can be understood as grounded in this way, as grounded in their author’s considered experience. Montaigne’s, of course; but Cavell’s too, of course. Many philosophers who turn in the direction of ’empiricism’, ‘experience’–can I think be best understood as appealing to his or her own considered experience. They are not best understood as appealing to experience (full stop), are not worried about (or much worried about) theorizing the rational or a-rational bearing of experience (full stop) on belief or knowledge. They are neither rationalists nor empiricists, although stretches of their philosophical terms, constructive or critical, sound empiricistic.
A give-away for the sort of philosophy with which I am concerned is a moment at which the philosopher talks of experience as something to which we can be loyal, something to which we can rally, something that can obligate us, something that can be educated. Another give-away is talk about experience as accumulating, as having weight.
I hope to get back to work on Monday. That should mean that the especially desultory posting of the last month will become less especially desultory. I plan to get back to work on Emerson and Montaigne, on Otto Bollnow and on a few other things I have left hanging. –I appreciate the well-wishes after my surgery. Thanks to everyone!
Under sedation, the mind does strange things. About the last thought I recall having as I went under on Wednesday was this: “Huh. My favorite characters in novels are all women, all much alike. Fanny Price (Mansfield Park) Anne Elliot (Persuasion), Little Dorrit (Little Dorrit), Molly Gibson (Wives and Daughters). My heroines. What does that reveal about me?” I don’t recall giving an answer. I don’t really have one now.
(A little poem from several years ago.)
Sometimes, Apple, my knees are too much with me,
cartilage sandy and stringy;I am unbowed, my knees unbending
but not from any noble unyeilding;If I were to kneel, I could not get up.
Apple, both you and I decay.
Well, I survived. Now to conquer the rehab mountain.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 