Emerson Finds Montaigne

October 6, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne, reading, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy.  It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes.  I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.  It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.  It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.”  Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.

“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.”  My life has been punctuated by books:  Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days.  Who knows what book will speak to him?  Or when?  But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?

Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine.  My hour has not yet come.”  But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time:  emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation:  and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now.  I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come.  The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud.  When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine.  I think too of littler things:  the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on.  The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.

Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays.  He did not just read them.  Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives.  The covers of our favorite books enclose us.  Our lives are bound by our reading.

Chump Change: a Thought on TLP 1

October 5, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , 3 Comments

(Handout.)

What should we say of TLP 1, what should we do with it?  We could note, I guess, that it plays an interesting role in a song by New Pornographers, Chump Change.  But that’s scarce help.

One odd feature of 1 is its Eliotic dual-aspect as Bang-Whimper (of course this at the beginning, not, as Eliot’s was, at the end).

Bang:  The world is everything that is the case!  Whoa!  Who woulda thunk it?  Everything, everydamnthing!  The world, man, the whole frickin’ world!  This must be the near end of a gargantuan Metaphysical Buffet!  Upcoming dishes:  God, The Soul, …Who Knows?  I can’t stand the suspense.  What next?

Whimper:  The world is everything that is the case…  Well, yeah.  What else would it be?  “Everything that is the case.”  Less exciting even than the Times’ “All the news that is fit to print”.  The world is–the world.  Whoopee…  Wake me at 1.1.

Why begin with a proposition that is somehow both thunderclap and cricket’s chirp, new news and old hat?

It is incredibly tempting to read TLP as follows:  The 1’s tell us What There Is.  The 2’s and 3’s tell us How Language Hooks onto What There Is.  The Bang aspect rules on this reading.  But is there another reading, one that perhaps allows the Whimper aspect to rule?  And if there is, what would we make of it, and of the 1’s, 2’s and 3’s?

Socrates, Kierkegaard and The Realistic Spirit? (David Swenson)

October 4, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Socrates Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Our time has experienced a reaction from the intellectually aristocratic unreality of the post-Kantian idealists, which has thrown us into the arms of the plebeian unreality of the naturalistic philosophers, whose sense of reality is satisfied by the massive, the extensive, the numerical, the quantitative; and thus we have merely exchanged one abstraction for another. But just as in ancient times the career of Socrates furnished perhaps the best commentary upon what a sense for reality means, so in modern times the life and thought of Kierkegaard offer an illuminating commentary upon the philosophy of the real, or upon realism in philosophy.

Reflecting on La Bête

October 4, 2011 By in poetry, writing Tags: , , , 2 Comments

My son just finished starring in La Bête here at AU.  He was terrific; the whole cast was great.  –The play revels in language and is a sustained meditation on language.  The two central characters, Valere and Elomire, represent two radically different ways of using and inhabiting language.  Elomire is a kind of Karl Kraus–without the humor:  he is deeply concerned for “moral discourse”, for language properly used.  Valere uses langauge–in a way that is beyond, or at least careless of, usage and abusage.  At the heart of the play is this contrast and the contrast between the two men.

It is easy, I think, to see the play as championing Elomire’s side, but that would be a mistake.  Part of the reason the mistake is easy is that Valere is a reductio (if I may put it this way) on himself.  He shows himself ridiculous in all that he says.  Elomire is no reductio on himself.  Even more, Elomire is championed by a young woman in the play, Dorine.  She is a teenager who has a disturbed relationship with language.  During the play, she refuses to speak except in monosyllabic words rhyming with “do”.  But at one crucial moment, when Elomire is pleading unsuccessfully for understanding from his acting troup, she is the only one who seems to understand.  She marks her understanding with a violation of her own rule.  When Elomire asks, in effect, “Does anyone understand?”, Dorine says, “I do.” (The constative/performative ambiguity in this line is worth reflection.)  –Her willingness to take his side, his relative lack of ridiculousness compared to Valere, these can together make it seem that Elomire is in the right.  But after wondering about that for a while, I realized that the young woman is the reductio of Elomire’s view.  To see how, consider her in relation to Cratylus, the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues.  The tradition has it that Cratylus was convinced by Heraclitus, but that Cratylus thought Heraclitus had not sufficiently radicalized his own doctrine.  So Cratylus emended “We cannot step into the same river twice” to “We cannot step into the same river once”.  Eventually, his embrace of Heraclitean principles led Cratylus away from words altogether; he spends his last years foregoing speech and simply wiggling a finger (fluxily).  While Elomire is no Heraclitean, he does so raise the stakes in speaking and writing that it can come to seem impossible properly to use language.  And I think Dorine is the victim of his view.  Her desire to speak in a properly moral discourse has robbed her of words.

Valere inhabits a language without rules.  All that matters is what he can press it into doing for him.   He rules language. (And he is largely the sort of clueless despot you would expect.)  Elomire inhabits a language with more rules than Calvin’s Geneva.  Doing anything in it requires a sensitivity and skill that seem to exceed human capacities.  It strikes me that the beast of the title is not so much Valere, although he is referred to in that way by Elomire; no, the beast is language itself, wild and tame, uncontrollable and compelling, infinitely jesting and deadly serious.

Improvidence (Samuel Menashe)

October 3, 2011 By in poetry Leave a comment

Owe, do not own
What you can borrow
Live on each loan
Forget tomorrow
Why not be in debt
To one who can give
You whatever you need
It is good to abet
Another’s good deed

How to Read TLP?

October 3, 2011 By in logic, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, poetry, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , Leave a comment

(Class Handout.)

(1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic.
 
(2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides.

(3) Wittgenstein (from Culture and Value) around 1930, but apropos of TLP (and, mutatis mutandis, of PI):

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all views of one object seen from different angles.

(4) Wittgenstein considered titling TLP something else–Der Satz, The Proposition.  The book isolates the look, the physiognomy, the sound, the structure of the proposition–a literary and a logical task.  It prioritizes the proposition stylistically and philosophically.

(5) Ronald Gregor Smith wrote of Martin Buber’s I and Thou:

To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at the first reading we may say that I and Thou is indeed a poem.  Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part…will then be illumined by the brightness of another part.  For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.

Just so, exactly just so, of TLP too.  I have been stressing the necessity of allowing the total effect of TLP to work on your mind.

A Note on Talking Lions And Cavell

October 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 11 Comments

A quick thought.  Recall Cavell’s wonderful description of Wittgenstein’s famous line that “if a lion could talk we could not understand him”(II, pg. 223).  He describes the line as “penetrating past assessment ” to “become part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds”.  If it does less than that, he concludes, the line is “philosophically useless”.  Shouldn’t we describe one of Cavell’s most famous lines, a question, in the same way, mutatis mutandis?

Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?

Why Might Not the Unintelligible Happen? (Royce,Tractatus)

September 30, 2011 By in Kant, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

(A class handout.)

In an earlier handout I urged that we cannot distribute Frege’s Three Realms across the Pix Theory.  In particular, I urged that we cannot treat the picture as in the Third Realm while the pictured is in the Outer Realm.  As I said, since the pictured is itself logically formed, it is hard to see how it could be a denizen of the Outer Realm, a thing.  (Rather, it is a fact.)

Picture and pictured are both in logical space.  One reason this may seem hard to accept is that it may seem that the pictured is just the world, and that the world could just as easily (maybe more easily) be bat shit crazy as be logically formed.

Think about this passage from Josiah Royce, in which he is posing the problem to which Immanuel Kant’s transcendental deduction is the response:

Why might not the genuine world simply ignore our categories?  If it did so, and experience failed to conform to our ways of conceiving things, which could we do to enforce our conceptual constructions?  Present experience, in any case, is not mere conceptual construction.  Why might not the unintelligible happen?  Why might not experience break away from the forms of my intellect?  Why might not chaos come at any moment?  That such chaos does not now occur, what is that but itself a merely empirical fact, neither a priori nor necessary?

This is forcefully put, a credit to Royce.  But what is the response to this problem in TLP?  To answer, one passage you should consider is 3.03-3.031.  I will leave that passage to you.  I want to think about something else, but something related.

Royce summarizes Kant’s response to this objection in a fascinating way:  “What experience itself is…you cannot learn through experience.  That you must learn by reflection.  –The concept of experience, strange to say, is itself not an empirical concept.”  This strikes me as something we can “restate” in Tractarian terms.  But to do so, we need to develop some of those terms.

At 4.126 (as we discussed yesterday), Wittgenstein distinguishes proper concepts from formal concepts.  A proper concept can be presented by a function.  So, to use an  example, Silver is a horse, we can say that the proper concept, (  ) is a horse, appears in it.  A proper concept is such that an object saturates it–in our example, Silver.  To say that an object saturates the function is a way of saying that the object, Silver, falls under the proper concept, (  ) is a horse:  symbolically, Hs.  A formal concept, on the other hand, is such that nothing falls under it in the way something falls under a proper concept. When something falls under a formal concept, it is the value of a variable:  a variable is a sign for a formal concept.  The H in Hs falls under the formal concept of function, since it is the value of a function variable; and the s falls under the formal concept of name, since it is the value of a name variable.  A formal concept we might think of as a method of representation; a proper concept as a predicate (cp. PI 104).

When can “restate” Royce’s summary of Kant’s response in these terms.  Experience is a formal concept, not a proper concept.  In its way, Experience as a formal concept is like Picture as a formal concept.  To see something as a picture is to see it as the value of a variable, not to see it as such that it saturates a proper concept, (  ) is a picture.  Similarly, to see something as an experience is to see it as the value of a variable, and not to see it as such that it saturates a proper concept, (  ) is an experience. (If experience was a proper concept, then it would presumably be an empirical concept, one that I would have to learn from experience itself.)  Seen as the value of a variable, an experience has the sort of bi-polarity that propositions do.  Experiences face reality-ward.  (Kant would say they are objectively valid.)  But this means that experiences cannot be understood as the problem posed above would have it.  Experiences, as bi-polar, do not themselves have predicates or enter into relations.  The problem though requires that we conceive of experience as experience all right, but as somehow completely alien to a world that is bat shit crazy (and, odd as it sounds, this would require us to think of experience as taking predicates or entering into relations).  But in such a situation, my experience would not even rise to the level of falsity:  in such a situation, I get nothing right and get nothing wrong.  There is just me, over here, with my orderly but beggarly experience, and the world, over there, in its alien and chiropteric chaos.  Experience no longer is understood as facing reality-ward.  It is really not facing any way at all. It has no face, and so no orientation.

(HT/James Conant:  “The Problem of Error”)

Wittgenstein, Detective

September 29, 2011 By in juvenilia, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 4 Comments

(Digging around in my files, I found what must have been the first handout I ever constructed on Philosophical Investigations (it is dated 5/7/1992). A section of it follows.)

Understanding the Endless Book

Why is the Investigations so “bloody hard”?  Because the book is both a statement of its method and the result of its method.  To quote Cavell:  “The way this book is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot understand the manner (call it the method), before we understand its work…The Investigations is written in criticism of itself.”

Before even trying to makes sense of these cabalistic pronouncements, it might be a good idea to ask if Wittgenstein gave his reader any hint how to approach the book.  In the Preface he admits that “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.  But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”  Well and good.  What help does this give us?  Maybe a little, especially if we link it with another remark.

What I want to teach you isn’t opinions but a method.  In fact, the method is to treat as irrelevant every question of opinion…If I’m wrong then you are right, which is just as good.  As long as we look for the same thing…I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.

Let me delay comment on this remark long enough to point up its similarity (I think the similarity is instructive, thus the delay) to Kierkegaard’s comments in Section 12  of Purity of Heart.  The talk

…in order to achieve its proper emphasis…must unequivocally demand something of the listener.  It must demand not merely what has previously been requested, that the reader should share in the work with the speaker–now the talk must unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.

Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, requires more from his reader than merely close attention to the thought–he requires his reader to think the thought as well.  And part of the reader’s “thinking the thought” is the reader having thoughts of his own about it.

To understand, let’s think of the Investigations in a different way.  Wittgenstein had a well-known love for detective magazines.  Interestingly, the letters which follow a detective’s name are “P. I.”–“private investigator”.  Wittgenstein could well have affixed the same letters after his own name:  “P. I.”–“philosophical investigator”.  In fact, Wittgenstein did, in a way, affix them to his name by leaving behind an instruction manual with the appropriate title–Philosophical Investigations.  (Holmes, remember, delighted in calling himself the world’s only “consulting detective”; Wittgenstein may have been the world’s only “philosophical detective”.)  The Investigations is of course more than just an instruction manual, it is also a case book.  When we read it we are watching the detective.  But what we watch is not the completion of cases; nothing is stamped “solved”.  Instead we are given a glimpse into working cases.  We are made privy to conversations with informants, allowed to see mistaken hunches, provided portraits of suspicious characters.  We see reminders, clues not-yet-understood, records of previous crimes.  Interspersed (like voice-overs) are comments on the investigator’s business, how it works, what to do, what not to do, comments on methods that succeed and methods that fail, notes on the variety of temptations that confront the investigator and what happens when he yields to them.  We are taken into confidence, confessed to, told secrets.  In short, we are left with a mountain of pieces, but the puzzles–mysteries, crimes–remain unsolved.  To profit from the book, we must practice the investigator’s technique on the book itself.  We cannot merely read it, memorize it, parrot the book itself.  We must master it.  And mastery requires intense and continuous effort, not only learning the lessons but applying them–on the mean streets, as it were…