Clarity, Combative Clarity

December 12, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Does philosophy have results?  –As I practice it (ahem!), I guess not.  Or at least it has no results that are not internal to philosophical investigation itself.  I am Wittgensteinian enough, or Kierkegaardian enough, or Marcelian enough to believe that what philosophy aims for is clarity.  But one is always becoming clear; one is never finally clear.

Clarity.  Clarity is internal to philosophical investigation:  it is not a separable result, isolable from the activity that realizes it and such that it confers value onto the activity because of a value it has independent of that activity.  If a result is separable, isolable and independent, then it has a career cut off in an important way from the process that realized it.  Indeed, in one sense its history only begins after the process that realizes it is finished.  The result can be seized and put to purposes quite different from anything that those involved in the process of realizing it intended or foresaw.

But clarity is valuable because of the process of philosophical investigation that realizes it.  And there is no clarity in isolation from the philosophical investigation that realizes it.  Philosophical investigation does not realize a clarity that someone could hope to enjoy who is no longer involved in philosophical investigation.  (“I got clear, you see; and now I am enjoying my clarity, although, thank God!, I am no longer involved in the travails of philosophical investigation.”)  –Kierkegaard’s Climacus talks about the true Christian, the subjective Christian, as “combatively certain” of Christianity, as certain in a way that requires that the certainty be daily won anew.  “Eternal certainty” (his contrast-term) is not something that the subjective Christian can enjoy on this side of the blue.  Similarly, the clarity realized by philosophical investigation is combative clarity, not eternal clarity.

It was once fashionable to charge that clarity is not enough. Someone (Austin, I believe) rejoined that we could decide whether clarity was enough once we’d gotten clear about something.  I worry that both the charge and the rejoinder treat clarity too much as if it were a separable result.

Sufficient unto the day is the clarity thereof, I reckon–the combative clarity thereof.

Rogers Albritton on Skepticism: “Words and their meanings are as ‘external’ as trees.”

December 11, 2011 By in Albritton, Philosophy, skepticism 1 Comment

We break in on Albritton mid-argument (from Philosophical Issues 21):

…What we know (as some unfortunate men and women might not, though they’ve heard of both baboons and human beings) is that we are human beings, not baboons, a fact (if “fact” is the word for it) from which it does not follow that we can’t be baboons or must be human beings. No such modal remarks are in order, as far as I can see, in our present situation. And it seems equally out of order that the earth may or can’t be supported by a huge tortoise or a transparent column with holes in it for the moon and so forth. Out of order in our actual situation, that is, which I can’t help. I didn’t invent it. Nobody did. One can invent others. What one can’t invent is a position outside all such epistemic confines, in which the question “Is it possible or not?” nevertheless has its usual purchase and from which it is evidently possible after all that the earth is supported by a huge tortoise and we are baboons. That position, in which, as one imagines it, no question would have an answer already, and we would be free to think absolutely anything possible (what else could we think?) would on the contrary be one in which the question, whether it is possible or impossible that p, could not have its usual sense, and indeed no question could have its usual sense, since its sense would be in question too, so to speak. In the position from which one would see that anything’s possible, if one could see anything, one couldn’t see anything, or think anything either. The idea of this position in which nothing is settled yet is illusory, as far as I can see, and so is the idea, which might seem more promising, of the position in which nothing a posteriori is settled yet, or nothing a posteriori except that it looks as if there were physical objects about (and the like), which might seem still more promising. Words and their meanings are as ‘external’ as trees. If I have to think that perhaps there are no such words, then I have to think that perhaps my very own as it were words have no meanings either, and therefore I am not, as I would have thought, thinking. And that isn’t thinking…

Understanding a Philosopher 2: Bollnow’s Question

December 9, 2011 By in Philosophy, reading, Self-knowledge, writing Tags: , 3 Comments

Otto Bollnow’s essay, “What does it mean to understand a writer better than he understood himself?”, begins like this:

In the interpretation of philosophical texts and literary works we often encounter the saying that it is important to understand the writer better than he understood himself. At first this saying appears presumptuous. If to understand another means to duplicate his experience, then only the one who had the experience can best know what he means by what he says; and perfect understanding would be the exact duplication and reproduction of what was immediately present in the one who had the experience. We can see how far we fall short of such perfection when we consider how weak the spoken word is as an image of actual life, and how much weaker still is the written word, which lacks the support of physical gesture or facial expression. Thus the claim to understand a writer better than he understood himself seems frivolous and presumptuous.

And yet this maxim recurs unavoidably in the concrete work of textual interpretation. It is, perhaps, not taken quite seriously; it carries a faint undertone of self-irony — but it genuinely expresses a recurring situation in textual interpretation. We must ask: does this saying, which at first appears presumptuous, actually express a legitimate aim of textual interpretation?

Bollnow answers answers his question by (first) noting that normally the answer is that “there is something correct” about the maxim, but that the answer is given while the answerer shuffles his feet:  it “cannot be asserted with complete seriousness”.  But, even so, the answerer takes the maxim to point to a significant and important problem in interpretation.  Bollnow, however, does not rest with this recitation of the normal answer.  He goes on (second) to underscore that treating the maxim as somehow or other correct too often forestalls allowing the “uncanniness” of the maxim to show itself.  Better, Bollnow thinks, to allow the maxim to sink into us, to allow it to show itself as uncanny, to allow it to reveal something of importance about products of the human spirit.

More soon.

Mark Hopkins, Teacher

December 7, 2011 By in Philosophy, religion, teaching Tags: , Leave a comment

Of this philosophical wonder it should be observed, because it bears on our ground of belief, that its tendency is not, like that of ordinary wonder, to diminish through familiarity, but rather the reverse.  Awakened by the fact of being, necessarily involving the idea of being uncreated; also by the discovery of the immensity, and order, and movements, and adaptations of that around us which we call the cosmos, it increases as its object is dwelt upon till it becomes utter bewilderment. Whoever, therefore, recognizes all this, and accepts it as a reality, ought to have no difficulty on account of its strangeness merely, in accepting any form of the manifestation of being that may claim his acceptance.  That there should be a future life under a different form cannot be more strange than that there should be a present life under its present form.  That there should be a heaven hereafter cannot be more strange than that there should be a happy family here. That there should be a spiritual existence cannot be stranger than that there is a material existence.  That there should be a personal God, infinite and holy, cannot be more strange than that we should be personal beings, as we are, and that there should be this multiform universe in which we find ourselves. Indeed I think we may say, that live as long as we may during the eternal ages, go where we may into the depths of infinite space, we shall never find a scene of things more strange and wonderful than we are in now.

From Mark Hopkins’ The Scriptural Idea of Man.  Hopkins was a legendary teacher (he taught at Williams in the middle of the 19th century).  Bliss Perry, in his winsome book, And Gladly Teach, talks of Hopkins’ power as a teacher.

No one can furnish an adequate definition of greatness, but Mark Hopkins, like Gladstone and Bismark, gave the beholder the instant impression of being in the presence of a great man.  He had already become in his lifetime a legend, a symbol of teaching power:  ‘Mark Hopkins on one end of a log, and a student on the other.’  [This line originated in a comment of James Garfield’s (one of Hopkins’ students):  ‘A pine bench with Mark Hopkins at one end of it and me at the other is a good enough college for me.’–KDJ]

[His students] all agree that he was not, in the strict academic sense, a ‘scholar’; the source of his power was not in his knowledge of books.  But that is an old story in the history of the world:  ‘He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’  Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skill…

To some men in class, no doubt, he seemed a philosopher without a system, a moralist indifferent to definitions. He was in truth a builder of character who could lay a stone wall without ever looking at a blue-print.

All of us recognized his immense latent power.  ‘Half his strength he put not forth.’ Yet this apparently indolent wrestler with ideas–never dogmatic, never over-earnest, never seeming to desire converts to any creed or platform–was ceaselessly active in studying the members of each class and in directing, however subtly, the questions by which he sought to develop and test their individual capacity…

Uphill–Poem

December 5, 2011 By in poetry Tags: 6 Comments

Laboring uphill
unlike Dante
my steps do not lighten
as I go

Pine pollen paints
shoes a dusty green
olive drab slightly yellowed

Alive between Inferno
and Paradise
Purgatory
we may sin no more
but we pay for the sins
behind and below us

Seven cursive P’s
cut into my forehead
peccati
one for each day of
my weak week

We stay in a cabin
on the hill
looking down
on water

Prayers from those
breathing, casting shadows
sporting their Adam or Eve
could shorten my time
uphill

I take a path
trees marked in Passover red
I run my hand along the bark
where fire has chased these trees
and scorched their ankles

Atop the hill
I have been told
is a Lodge
closed for repairs
statework taking its
sweet overtime

I wonder how they can leave it closed
with so many waiting to enter and stay

Life is serious
in such strange ways
immanent and transcendent
betwixt and bewitched and between
inexperience facing
the demands of the day

Uphill laboring
by laborious footfalls

I am callow
unable to focus
in full upon life’s liturgy
its serious play
unwilling to accept it as a gift
so misunderstanding it as a task

Love loves
hopes to love understandingly
but loves misunderstandingly
often
making unhappy both
lover and beloved

I do not have my life
in precise and stringent categories
living in sloppy thinking
wringing the acorn from the lily
chasing the rabbit on an ox
out of season even in season

Can our life be our poesy
can we live metered lives
can we find ourselves Canting
day to day
turning to the left to find
Virgil there, whenever

It is our vacation
the family’s
holiday
but I would dignify my leisure
by taking time to sorrow in knowing
no one has crowned or mitered me Lord of myself
I am impure and too flabby to mount to the stars

I labor uphill
my forehead a child’s penmanship lesson

Today Redux

December 4, 2011 By in Philosophy, virtue and vice 1 Comment

“No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I am happy now, because I am in love with you.”  This is the line that releases Phil Conners (Bill Murray) from his apparently endless string of Groundhog Days.  Why does it have this power, how does it liberate him?  Because he finally finds a way to be present to the present, to deserve it.  And isn’t his desert a matter of his finally risking himself, finally becoming more than a visitor in Punxsutawny, in his own life, tethering himself and his happiness to the town and to Rita?  When he says to Rita, at the end of the movie, “Let’s live here!”  he expresses a decision he has, without realizing it, already made.  By choosing to stay, he earns the freedom to leave.

Phil’s problem is not that he is trapped in today, but that he has constantly withheld himself from today, never had a today.  He lives Groundhog Day over and over and over; but not today.  His first today precedes his first tomorrow in a very, very long time.  Phil abandoned today long before he got to Punxsutawny.  The only way to have a tomorrow is to have a today.

How (Long Ago or) Soon is Now?

December 2, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, religion Leave a comment

What is it to live, to think, in the present?  How do I manage to be present to the present?  How do I avoid experiencing now either as déjà vu or as the future past?  Part of the answer is risk, I think.  I have to stake myself wholly in the moment, not holding back a bit either backwards or forwards, so that what I was or what I will be somehow prevents my present exposure to the present.  Johannes Climacus says–in effect–“No risk, no faith.”  Why not, here, “No risk, no now”?  Today is the day of salvation–or of damnation.  Holding back now may save me from damnation, but it also dams me from salvation.  Eventually, a life bereft of todays damns itself.

Preaching to X from X: Relating to Philosophy’s History

December 2, 2011 By in Philosophy 1 Comment

I was thinking this morning about a phrase in James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnositicism.  Ward describes himself at one point as preaching to Kant from Kant.  I find the phrase worth thinking about because it concisely captures a way of relating to philosophy’s history I care deeply about.  That way is–put in a very general slogan–the way of understanding a philosopher better than the philosopher understands himself.  As I mentioned in a post some time ago, Otto Bollnow has an interesting essay on this way of relating to philosophy’s history, and I want to comment on that essay.  Part of the reason I want to do so is that I take it that this way of relating to philosophy’s history typifies the self-understanding of continental philosophers more than that of analytic philosophers; so commenting on the essay is a way of measuring something of the difference between the two traditions.

‘Typifies’–of course there are exceptions.  And ‘self-understanding’–because of course not everyone who understands his relation to the philosophy’s history this way realizes that self-understanding.  Nor of course does everyone who in fact relates to philosophy’s history in this way understand himself as so doing.

I had intended to get back to this topic for a while, but it took a visit from Jean-Philippe Narboux (and a little conversation with him) to get me back to it.  (My thanks to him.)  –I plan to work at it slowly during the holidays.