Because Psychology studies mental processes, it is very liable to behave as if Logic…were one of its subdivisions. But in fact Psychology, like every other science, must presuppose the autonomy of Logic; otherwise the writings of psychologists could be no more than their own autobiographies–not nearly so interesting or important as the autobiographies of statesmen, soldiers or artists. The interest which a psychologist claims for his theory is not that he happens to hold it, but that it is a true account of your experience and mine as well as of his own. But in this case he must have something to say in support of his theory over and above its psychological history. For every theory ever held has a psychological history.
Climacus on The Reason and The Paradox
I’ve been puzzling over Johannes Climacus’ handling of “the Reason” and “the Paradox”. Part of what is puzzling is what Climacus means by the Reason. Clearly, he is echoing Kant in various ways, particularly the famous opening lines of CPR:
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
One feature of those famous lines that must have attracted Climacus is that they concern human reason. What Climacus discusses in Philosophical Fragments as the Reason is human reason. For Climacus, human reason is created reason, not uncreated reason. That is, that human faculty is itself creaturely in the way that all human faculties, indeed humans themselves, are. Although the point can be muted by the way in which the Teacher is contrasted with Socrates, and the way in which the Teacherly Moment is contrasted with the Socratic moment, Climacus believes that, from the point of view of Christianity, the notion of human reason as divine, and the (related) notion of human immortality, are pagan. Immortality is not something given in human nature as such; it is a loving gift of God, made possible by Christ (the Teacher). Human reason is given in human nature as such, but is not divine, is not of itself immortal.
The Paradox, we must keep in mind, is the Teacher himself: he, the God-Man, is the content of his Teaching. And the Teacher provides the condition for the content of his Teaching: Faith. (The way is prepared for Faith and for the Paradox by our discovering our own error, that is, Sin; and, having discovered it, having taken leave of it, that is, Repented.) But among those things for which we must repent is the arrogance of the Reason, of its complacent assurance that it is all-in-all, that it is divine, immortal. We have to come to see it as limited; its powers can be transcended. –If the Reason views itself correctly, it will see that in fact it asks questions which outstrip its own competence–Climacus will say that the Reason wills its own downfall, that the Paradox is its passion. The Reason will be able to set itself aside, to humble itself before the Paradox. If that happens, then the Reason and the Paradox relate happily to one another in Faith. If the Reason does not view itself correctly, if its sees itself as unlimited, as all-in-all, then the Paradox will be an Offense to the Reason, and the Reason’s relationship to the Paradox will be unhappy. (For Climacus, the Paradox offers the Reason only one of these two relationships–Faith or Offense, tertium non datur. The Reason cannot be indifferent to the Paradox.)
I guess that most of us, and most of Climacus’ readers, have a tendency to fall into a picture of the Reason as divine, as immortal. The philosopher-in-us-all is decidedly pagan. And that makes the relationship between the Reason and the Paradox seem fated for unhappiness, as if it were a collision of the divine with the divine, the immortal with the immortal. Understood that way, it is hard to see why the Reason should set itself aside so as to make room for the Paradox in Faith. Indeed, it is hard to see why the Reason should tolerate faith at all. But if we think of the Reason as creaturely, we can more easily understand that it might need itself to repent, so to speak, that it might be such as not to be all-in-all, that it could set itself aside so as to take its place alongside the Paradox in Faith. Faith then could be seen as that which allows creaturely reason to cast off the burdensomeness of unignorable but unanswerable questions. Not because the Paradox is the answer to those questions, exactly, but because the Paradox reveals that the point of the questions is not to find answers, but rather to allow the Reason to discover what it is (and to keep discovering it): human reason, creaturely reason–call it the Reason, Ltd. In making room for the Paradox, it casts off the burdensomeness of its questions, and accepts a new burden, a new yoke–but this yoke is easy, and this burden is light.
Philosophical Doubt: A Snippet
(From a forthcoming paper co-authored with Keren Gorodeisky.)
It sometimes seems to the skeptic (or to her opponent) that her philosophical doubt is a particularly high degree of ordinary doubt. But underlying that seeming is a mistaken understanding of the generality of the conclusion of philosophical doubt as opposed to the specificity of the conclusion of ordinary doubt. The former does not show that philosophical doubt is on the far end of a spectrum it shares with ordinary doubt. The sort of talk we often indulge in around skepticism, talk for example of ‘hyperbolic’ doubt, thus contains a strong suggestio falsi and needs to be handled carefully.
Note that attitudes toward philosophical doubt may be degreed. For example, a person might be very excited about philosophical doubt or might be thrown into deep despair by it. But neither of these reactions to the doubt is an intensification of it. Neither makes it a particularly high degree of ordinary doubt.
What Chalcedon Meant? (Florovsky)
“And was made man.” What is the ultimate connotation of this creedal statement? Or, in other words, who was Jesus, the Christ and the Lord? What does it mean, in the language of the Council of Chalcedon, that the same Jesus was “perfect man” and “perfect God,” yet a single and unique personality? “Modern man” is usually very critical of that definition of Chalcedon. It fails to convey any meaning to him. The “imagery” of the creed is for him nothing more than a piece of poetry, if anything at all. The whole approach, I think, is wrong. The “definition” of Chalcedon is not a metaphysical statement, and was never meant to be treated as such. Nor was the mystery of the Incarnation just a “metaphysical miracle.” The formula of Chalcedon was a statement of faith, and therefore cannot be understood when taken out of the total experience of the church. In fact, it is an “existential statement.” Chalcedon’s formula is, as it were, an intellectual contour of the mystery which is apprehended by faith. Our Redeemer is not a man, but God himself. Here lies the existential emphasis of the statement. Our Redeemer is one who “came down” and who, by “being made man,” identified himself with men in the fellowship of a truly human life and nature. Not only the initiative was divine, but the Captain of Salvation was a divine Person. The fullness of the human nature of Christ means simply the adequacy and truth of this redeeming identification. God enters human history and becomes a historical person.
This sounds paradoxical. Indeed there is a mystery: “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness; God was manifested in the flesh.” But this mystery was a revelation; the true character of God had been disclosed in the Incarnation. God was so much and so intimately concerned with the destiny of man (and precisely with the destiny of every one of “the little ones”) as to intervene in person in the chaos and misery of the lost life. The divine providence therefore is not merely an omnipotent ruling of the universe from an august distance by the divine majesty, but a kenosis, a “selfhumiliation” of the God of glory. There is a personal relationship between God and man.
Emerson’s Incarnational Method
Right at the beginning of his essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes:
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these sides, to find the other.
I take this to be a method–Emerson’s method. For us, raised as we have been to believe that there is a gulf fixed between sensation and morals, the method is hard to imagine. To play the game one way, finding the morals in sensation, seems romantic. To play the other way, finding the sensation in morals, seems crass. And anyway, what exactly is Emerson saying? Facts have sides? They can be rotated, reoriented, so that the apparent side changes?
I am not really going to answer these questions. Instead, I want the asking of them to provide the occasion for saying this: Emerson writes scripture. As he says in his essay on Goethe, “we too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.” This is a close to a skeleton key to Emerson as I know. The broad outlines of Emerson’s work become clear when we reflect on it. Christian dogma treats Jesus, the God-Man, as the one who unites the heavens and the earthly world. Emerson will dispense with the dogma but without dispensing with its structure: the heavens do need to be united to the earthly world. Jesus was taken to have done that in fact, ontologically, we might say. But for Emerson Jesus is a man, merely a man. Jesus, like Montaigne and Goethe, is a representative man, the greatest of representative men. Still, a mere man. For Emerson the Incarnation–the uniting of the heavens to the earthly world–is not something that has been done. It is something that must needs be done. Incarnation, for Emerson, is not so much a fact or a point of departure; it is more a conquest and a goal. He writes toward it. He writes his Bible.
Emerson urges his readers to unite the heavens and the earthly world in themselves; he asks his readers to become Incarnations. Well, that is not quite right: he reminds his readers that they are always already Incarnating, becoming more fully Incarnations than they are; his readers are to strive toward an ever more perfect unity of the heavens and the earthly world in themselves. The heavens and the earthly world need to more fully interpenetrate one another. The centerpiece of Emerson’s understanding of human greatness–this is it. Over and over Emerson reminds and urges his readers: Incarnate yourselves!
For Emerson, each human being is and is called to Incarnation. Emerson begs us to hear and heed that call. Because we are Incarnations we can hear it. Because we can become more fully Incarnations we must heed it.
Emerson’s line about facts is an Incarnational method, a reminder that the good gamester of thought always understands each fact in relation to the heavens and the earthly world, and always works to reveal one when the other threatens to eclipse it. To fail in the method is either to become a Docetist or an Ebionite about yourself, about everything, it is to leave your task of uniting the heavens and the earthly world undone.
Nabokov on Gogol
A unique rolling stone, gathering–or thinking he would gather–a unique kind of moss, he spent many summers wandering from spa to spa. His complaint was difficult to cure because it was both vague and variable: attacks of melancholy when his mind would be benumbed with unspeakable feelings of forebodings and nothing except an abrupt change of surroundings could bring relief; or else a recurrent state of physical distress marked by shiverings when no abundance of clothing could warm his limbs and when the only thing that helped, if persistently repeated, was a brisk walk–the longer the better. The paradox was that while needing constant movement to prompt inspiration, this movement physically prevented him from writing.
Wittgenstein on Doing Philosophy: Stop or Go?
Yesterday, I had a useful conversation with my friend and former student, Andy Bass. He described how strongly Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about philosophy struck him and how much they worried him. Given what Wittgenstein says, why persist in philosophy? Why not find something else to do?
It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s critical remarks generally should be thought of in this way: (1) Much of what he says is about Philosophy-as-Other, i.e., philosophy not as he does it but as it is all-too-often done. (2) Wittgenstein deliberately employs a deflationary rhetoric about the way he does philosophy.
(1) When Wittgenstein is talking about Philosophy-as-Other, he wants to highlight especially the false enchantments of traditional philosophy–highlighting such is important, as Auden notes, because it is a mark of a false enchantment that it “can all too easily last a lifetime”. Austin provides a nice way of characterizing this false enchantment–the self-image of the philosopher as “a specialist in the sui generis”.
(2) Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric about he way he does philosophy is aimed primarily at himself, I believe, at his vanity and his tendency to high hat. Wittgenstein’s way of being in philosophy, deeply personal, ascetic, purified, made it easy for him to treat his way of doing philosophy as something special, too special. He needed to constantly warn himself against that. But the rhetoric is aimed secondarily at others. Wittgenstein did not want his way of doing philosophy to falsely enchant. He knew that it could enchant, and he wanted it to enchant truly, where the mark of true enchantment, as Auden notes, is that it “fades in time.” Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric is a warning to others against false enchantment, and a warning against the future fading of its true enchantment. He knew that eventually the enchantment would go and that we would need then to “walk alone in faith”, as Auden puts it–walking alone in faith without either denying the promise of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, treating its promises as deceptions, or trying to recover its promise by distorting it into something else, something it is not (a form of naturalism, a closeted metaphysics). No: we must take up our fly-bottles and follow the path alone.
Say Show Elucidate
(Another class handout. Last one for a while, I promise.)
Let’s think more about saying and showing—and about elucidating. To do so, I want to use an example of Edmund Dain’s but to situate it in a little more detail.
Imagine that you have been thinking about metaphysics. After a long, brow-knit silence, you intone: “There are objects.” I have been sitting next to you, drinking coffee and losing to myself at tic-tac-toe. I close my notebook full of x’s and o’s and look at you, puzzled. “Huh?”
Again you intone, with increased metaphysical drama: “There are objects.”
I can tell that you regard what you are saying as urgent, so I try to understand: “Huh?”
You sigh, shaking your head at the hardness of mine, and you explain: “Descartes, you know doubt recall, quested heartily for something that was clear and distinct, indubitable. He hit upon ‘I think, therefore I am’. But I have hit upon something at least as good, likely better: ‘There are objects.’ That, my good man, is a true metaphysical principle. It survives even the furies of the evil genius. After all, if the evil genius fools me, then HE fools ME. There are objects, you see, him and me. I cannot be mistaken if I believe that there are objects. And notice how cleverly I have escaped Cartesian subjectivity. No need to talk of thinking at all. No need to find a path from in here to out there. I start out there. Me, the good genius, and him, the evil genius. Just objects, only objects; there are objects. There are objects.”
I say that I do not understand. “What do you mean, ‘objects’? I don’t get it. If you tell me that ‘There are objects that fell’ in answer to my question, ‘What made that noise?’ I would understand. I would know how to symbolize it even, after taking my logic class: ‘(Vx) (Fx)’. Or if you said, pointing to the fruit on the table here, ‘There are apples’, I would understand that, too: ‘(Vx) (Gx)’. But you don’t seem to be telling me anything about objects—like, they fell—or telling me that there are certain sorts of objects—like, apples—you are telling me what?”
You look disappointed. As usual, I have failed to match the seriousness of your thinking.
“I wish you had never taken that logic class. It has ruined you for thinking. You now just monger symbols. –Anyway, when I say ‘There are objects’, I mean that there are objects. And if I must resort to symbols to explain this to you, then I symbolize my indubitable thus: ‘(Vx) (Ox)’.”
“Huh. So you mean ‘There are objects’ to be like ‘There are apples’. But then what is the variable in your symbolization doing? In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says something about how ‘object’ talk, when used rightly, is expressed symbolically by variable names. So, if I want to say ‘There are two objects which…’ I say it by ‘(Vx, y)…’ I can thus predicate something of the ‘objects’. For example, when I symbolize ‘There are apples’ as ‘(Vx) (Gx)’ I can elucidate that by saying ‘There’s an x such that x is an apple’. So your symbolizing of your indubitable could be elucidated in a parallel way: ‘There is an x such that x is an object.’ But notice that your use of ‘object’ there is predicative, as my use of ‘apple’ is. Is that what you want, to predicate ‘( ) is an object’ of some x?’
You look puzzled. “Well, I am not quite sure. That seems like what I want and it does not seem like what I want. I am unsure that I want a predicative use of ‘object’. That seems to make the objects I am talking about too robust, too spatio-temporal, too ordinary. When I say that there are objects, although I am glad to be right because there are apples or because there are alligators, I take it that such objects as apples and alligators are not the best examples of my objects. I want objects that are less robust, less spatio-temporal, less ordinary. The more I think about it, I am not sure that I really mean to be using ‘object’ predicatively. I am using ‘object’, not to predicate, but rather to indicate that which is the subject of predications. I want to symbolize it in a way that resembles the symbolization of ‘There are objects that fell’, ‘(Vx) (Fx)’.”
“Oh. Huh. But what do you want to predicate of your ‘objects’? The sentence you mean to be analogous to your indubitable predicates ‘fell’ of the ‘object’. But your indubitable lacks any such predicate. I don’t understand what you want.”
“Well,” you say, now becoming exasperated, “this is what happens when you mix logic and metaphysics. Philosophy consists of two parts, metaphysics and logic—and the metaphysics is the basis of philosophy. How do I want to symbolize my indubitable? Like this: ‘(Vx) ([ ]x)’. There. That. Says. It.”
“It does?” I ask. “I don’t think that says it. I don’t think that says anything at all. I understand that you want it to say something, in fact, to somehow say your indubitable. But, as it stands, with the ‘[ ]’, it is a propositional variable, not a proposition. We need a predicate. I also understand that, as it stands, it seems indubitable, but that is because, since it fails to be a proposition, no one can take a propositional attitude toward it. Cheap indubitability, as it were.”
“Ok. I suppose I concede that. I must want something else: maybe ‘(Vx)’, just that. But that looks weird.”
“Yeah. Frege would’ve regarded that as a monstrosity. But I see, in a way, what is happening to you. But there isn’t really anything you are saying when you say ‘There are objects’. You are drawn both to what Wittgenstein calls the ‘pseudo-concept’ use of ‘object’—the one replaced by the variable—and to some other use of ‘object’, a use on which it means something like ‘anything that can be carried’. But the problem is that neither of those is really what you want. The first won’t let you say anything, and so won’t let you say enough; the second lets you say something, but it says too much. An isolated quantifier is a monstrosity; it says nothing. A propositional variable says nothing; but it at least provides a kind of stencil for saying something. But the predicative use of ‘object’ seems wrong too. I wonder if part of the reason why your indubitable seems indubitable to you is that is not only seems to say something, it seems to say more than one something and, oddly enough, more than one nothing, all at once. Depth, indeed.”
You meet this with a profound frown. “Huh!”
Comment: I do not take the argumentative movements in this little conversation to be obligatory. The point is not to establish anything seriously about ‘There are objects’ but rather to provide an incarnated example of elucidation.
Much that is said in the conversation is what I call “ladder-language” (borrowing a term from Sellars). It is language that is meant to help to show (transitively) what shows (intransitively) or does not show (intransitively) in some sentence or sentence-like structure. Thus the language is didactically useful, but is not meant to stand—constatively—on its own. The language is unformalizable but nonetheless tied to formalization, tied to (intransitive) showing or its failure. (Remember, in nonsense, nothing (intransitively) shows.) When someone comes to see clearly the symbols in a genuine sentence or when someone comes to see that there is nothing that he means by some sentence-like structure, then what was said to get him to see that has no further role to play. All that matters is the person’s clear recognition of the sense or the nonsense.
Descartes’ Broom of the System: An Apple? No, Doubt.
(A little ditty for my Intro students–to push them into the Meditations’ deep sea.)
Descartes has gone wrong. He knows it. Between the true and the false there is a double yellow line, and he’s been swerving from lane to lane. He’s been suckered. His senses are untrustworthy, his dreams betrayals and his God, well, maybe his God has been a cheat. His mind, his home, his castle, has been invaded. The walls are full of rats and the roof leaks and the foundation shakes. He needs a fresh start, a spring-cleaning, a clean sweep. He needs repair.
But to repair he needs to test. What does he have worth keeping? How can he decide? He decides to doubt. Not a pale, will-I-make-it-on-time? had-those-leftovers-gone-bad? daily double doubt. No, he wants to doubt a real doubter’s doubt, steroidal doubt, fertility be damned. He will drive out the rats, patch the leaks, and secure the foundations. He’ll rid himself of falsity. He will throw open his windows, prop open the door, let some air in. Breathe deep.
How now to doubt, really doubt? One needs a plan. –He doesn’t want to doubt willy-nilly, randomly. He wants to doubt systematically. The doubt should be endeavored with a bankerish caution. A little doubt first, and then more, and then yet more, until all that can be doubted has been doubted. Then: what is left is for keeps: doubters keepers, believers weepers.
Descartes starts. He starts with eyes and hands, suchlike. –They’ve fooled him. Hands have been faster than eyes. –He can’t believe his eyes. His hands go numb. He has heard without hearing. Things smell funny. He has failed taste tests. So much senseless sensing.
Still, some of that sensing seems sensible. Can he really be wrong about his hand before his eyes? Can that be doubted? Maybe not by doubt like the doubt he’s been doubting. But turn that doubt up. He had dreamt his hand before his eyes when he was asleep, when he saw nothing. He could be dreaming even now. So much for his senses.
But Descartes realizes that not everything in his mind was deposited there by his senses. He believes, well, like math and stuff. Does dreaming doubt doubt that? Maybe not. To turn doubt all the way up Descartes looks heavenward. Maybe there exists a creature like God, but rotten, rotten to the core, wormy. A creature like the Garden-creature, but more seductive. An apple-giver of the worst sort, coiled around the Tree of Knowledge, choking it, all the while smiling its villain’s smile. Maybe that creature, that evil demon, has been fooling Descartes. Not just about hands and eyes, but even about math and stuff. Maybe everything has to go. Maybe nothing is left. Walls, roof, foundation—all to go, and not just rats, leaks and shakes. Nothing left, no, just bits of stone and rubble. –Descartes’ mind gone to ruin. Demonized.
Wait, though; wait just a demon-damned minute! Descartes’ mind gone to ruin. Right. Right. There is something left. Descartes. Someone’s standing in the stone and rubble. Our doubter! (Bless his doubting heart!) The demon can do his worst, has done his worst, but he has to do it to someone. Someone’s got to be his patsy, his fool. And Descartes is the man for the job. Fool him once, shame on you, fool him twice, shame on you, –all you are doing is establishing his foolish existence. Because he can be fooled, he exists. Because he can get everything wrong, he exists. What the demon can’t fool him about is his fitness to be fooled. To be the jester in the demon’s court Descartes must be. He submits, as all do, to the dialectic of Hamlet: to be or not to be. And while that is the question, Descartes knows the answer. To be. He is. He thinks, maybe foolishly, but he thinks, so he is.
There, in the midst of doubt, stands Descartes. He’s waiting for the midst to clear.
Beginning and Ending: TLP
(Handout.)
“In my beginning is my end.” –T. S. Eliot
Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an early, deep influence on Wittgenstein, says of his own masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, that it is a book necessary to read twice. His reason: not only does the book’s ending presuppose its beginning, but its beginning presupposes its end. This structure of reciprocal presupposition makes two readings crucial, since the beginning’s dependence on the ending cannot be appreciated until the beginning has been read after the ending.
Something of the same is true of both TLP and PI. I will not just now go into structural detail about the two books–I will do that soon enough–but I will insist that the beginnings of each of the two books presupposes its ending. And radically so: it is not that the ending supplies a premise, say, that is necessary to explicate an early enthymeme, and so the question of the beginning’s truth is undecided until the end. Rather, it is that the ending supplies the point, the point, of the beginning, and so the question of the beginning’s meaning is undecided until the end. This happens differently in TLP than it does in PI of course.
Consider TLP. On a first reading, the book begins by speaking light into the face of the deep: “The world is everything that is the case.” But it ends with a darkling hush:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Notice that the world figures in both beginning and ending, but more importantly (at least for now) the ending tells us something about the point of the beginning. On a second reading, the beginning that seemed a triumphal metaphysical revelation, a sounding of horns, is revalued as elucidation, hushed. “The world is everything that is the case”: a rung on a ladder, ladder-language, to be surmounted, not proclaimed.
We will of course talk much more about these last lines (6.54-7) of TLP. For now I just want to make clear how the book’s beginning presupposes its end. I harp on this by way of warning you. Do not assume that you know what Wittgenstein is up to as he opens either of the books. TLP opens as if it were metaphysics. PI opens as if it were philosophy of language. But Wittgenstein is no more doing metaphysics in TLP than he is doing the philosophy of language in PI.
Wittgenstein is doing something original in each book, something that is neither metaphysics nor the philosophy of language. And what he is doing in TLP is not the same as what he is doing in PI, despite the fact that what he is doing in each is like what he is doing in the other, and despite the fact that in neither is he doing metaphysics or philosophy of language.
In practical terms, this does not mean that you should be agnostic about what Wittgenstein is saying as he opens the books. You have to try to understand what he is saying as he is saying it; you cannot read the books otherwise. But you should regard any understanding you have as potentially sacrificial, as an “understanding” that may be taken from you later. The path up Mt. Moriah is long. Who knows what, among our possessions as we begin, may be demanded from us by the end of the climb?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 