Observe…that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s, he is a lawgiver.
Taking Stock
My new classes are making serious demands on my time, so the slow down I anticipated is coming to pass. I thought I would take a moment and look backwards and forwards, on where I have been and where I plan to go.
I still have a few more posts for the Reading “Reading Montaigne” series. After I finish with it, I intend to move on to a similar project, this time reading Emerson’s Representative Men essay on Montaigne. So Montaigne will continue to be at or near the center of my efforts. I also have more to say about Church-Man’s skepticism, about Availability, and about–of course–Wittgenstein. Look also for some posts on philosophical logic/theory of judgment. I am beginning to work again on Frege.
As always, thanks to those who have been following the blog and especially to those who have commented. I am sure the comments are doing me more good than my posts could be doing anyone else; I am clearly coming out ahead here.
Hopeful Philosophical Investigations
I struggle to express a particular way of taking up Philosophical Investigations–it seems like I have been doing this since I first began to read it seriously. What I want to express is something I rate as cognate with what others have expressed when talking about the “ethics” of PI, or of its “ethical over/undertones”, with responses to it as “a feat of writing” or as “the discovery of the problem of the other”. I have in the past expressed it (helping myself to Kierkegaard’s objective/subjective distinction) as a “subjective reading” of PI.
Here I go again. I am going to try yet again: I want to say something about hopeful philosophical investigations. Something brief.
Let me prefix Gabriel Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope:
I hope in you for us.
We can read the miniature dialogues that constitute PI in a variety of ways. It is natural enough, I suppose, to understand the voices as antagonistic (Cavell, if I remember correctly, uses that word in “Availability”). But although that is natural enough, is it best? Or is it, instead, a vestige of non-Wittgensteinian philosophical practice? –I will call it an analytic vestige. We know, don’t we? and what would it be to know it?, that Wittgenstein wanted no part of a conception of philosophy as contest, of any agonistic conception of philosophy. So, although I do not deny that we can perhaps find moments of agon in PI, such moments are not the stuff of PI. As I read PI, it is not a series of miniature contests, skirmishes, but instead a series of miniature ameliorations, betterments. Thinking of the voice of temptation and the voice of correction as in an ameliorative relationship, instead of an antagonistic one, frankly makes better sense of Cavell’s confessional understanding of PI than does thinking of the voices as in an antagonistic relationship–it also makes better sense of ‘temptation’ and ‘correction’ as terminological choices. In particular, ‘correction’ in an antagonistic relationship has a very different critical valence than it does in an ameliorative one. The hope of the dialogues is for mutual wholeness: neither the voice of temptation nor the voice of correction may treat the other voice as alien–anything one voice says may be said, and in a certain sense is said, by the other. And so the voices respond to each other, each finding itself in the other, working at becoming integral, to achieve agreement (in PI’s difficult sense of that term), to come to a meeting of voices, a time at which the passion of each voice is at one with its life (to borrow another bit of Cavell’s phrasing). The nisus of each voice I take to be expressed by Marcel’s summary of the nature of hope: each voice speaks from hope, and is constantly saying to the other, sotto voce: “I hope in you for us.”
I will come back to this.
Philosophy and Literature (Collingwood)
I am hip-deep in course prep. As I try to do each term, I took a few minutes today to review Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method. Collingwood’s next-to-last chapter is “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature” and he provides some very useful helps for students and teachers there (and passim of course).
The language of philosophy is therefore, as every careful reader of the great philosophers already knows, a literary language and not a technical. Wherever a philosopher uses a term requiring formal definition, as distinct from…expositional definition…, the intrusion of a non-literary element into his language corresponds with the intrusion of a non-philosophical element into his thought: a fragment of science, a piece of inchoate philosophizing, or a philosophical error; three things not, in such a case, easily to be distinguished.
The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to science, and to choose his words according to the rules of literature. His terminology must have that expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon context, which are the hallmarks of a literary use of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.
A corresponding duty rests with the reader of philosophical literature, who must remember that he is reading a language and not a symbolism. He must neither think that his author is offering a verbal definition when he is making some statement about the essence of a concept–a fertile source of sophistical criticisms–nor complain when nothing resembling such a definition is given; he must expect philosophical terms to express their own meaning in the way in which they are used, like words of ordinary speech. He must not expect one word always to mean one thing in the sense that its meaning undergoes no kind of change; he must expect philosophical terminology, like all language, to be always in the process of development, and he must recollect that this, so far from making it harder to understand, is what makes it able to express its own meaning instead of being incomprehensible apart from definitions, like a collection of rigid and therefore artificial technical terms.
I commend the essay and especially its penultimate chapter to all.
An Actual Reading Machine
Here’s a fun passage to pocket, especially if you ever are teaching or working on the reading sections of PI. The passage is from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Gosse talks of his being asked (forced?) as a child to read aloud to his parents from books he could not or did not understand.
…[I read books]…over which my eye and tongue leaned to slip without penetrating, so that I would read, and read aloud, and with great propriety of emphasis, page after page without having formed an idea or retained an expression. There was, for instance, a writer on prophecy called Jukes, of whose works each of my parents was inordinately fond, and I was eagerly set to read Jukes aloud to them. I did it glibly, like a machine, but the sight of Juke’s volumes became an abomination to me, and I never formed the outline of a notion of what they were about.
Robert Browning (from Bishop Blougram’s Apology)
The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,
Is–not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,–but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
A Prayer of John Donne’s
O Lord, I most humbly acknowledge and confesse, that I have understood sin, by understanding thy laws and judgments; but have done against thy known and revealed will. Thou has set up many candlesticks, and kindled many lamps in mee; but I have either blown them out, or carried them to guide me in by and forbidden ways. Thou hast given mee a desire of knowledg, and some meanes to it, and some possession of it; and I have arm’d my self with thy weapons against thee. Yet, O God, have mercy upon me. Let not sin and me be able to exceed thee, nor to defraud thee, nor to frustrate thy purposes: But let me, in despite of Me, be of so much use to thy glory, that by thy mercy to my sin, others sinners may see how much sin thou canst pardon…
The Socratic Fallacy
Platonism dogs me. I read the first pages of the Lysis early my freshman year of high school and decided that I would be a philosopher. When I started in college at Wooster a little later, my first class was a History of Ancient class, taught by Jim Haden, a most remarkable man. He was devoted to Plato, wholly devoted, and I became devoted in my own small way too. The next term I took a class taught by Jim and by Tom Faulkner (who taught Greek) on Socrates. That class left a mark. In between, Jim introduced me to Plotinus. I would eventually write my dissertation on Plotinus (with Deborah Modrak, a most remarkable woman). So, although most of my writing has been on other topics, Platonism has never stopped mattering to me, nattering at me.
This Fall, I begin my Intro to Phil class with Plato’s Theaetetus. That has become a central text for me and is wedded to Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. (My intro class ends with the Blue Book: the class’ subtitle is: The Flux.) Teaching those texts together makes Geach’s charge that Socrates’ “What is X?” question embodies a fallacy un-ignorable, since Geach’s charge is anchored in the Blue Book. What Geach says is that Socrates’ constraints on appropriate answers to the X-question are illegitimate, fallacious. Geach’s crucial point: we know heaps of things without being able to define the terms (i.e., answer the X-question thus constrained) in which we express our knowledge. Since we do, we need not engage in answering it. Without detailing any more of what Geach says (his discussion focuses on the Euthyphro; Geach’s paper is “Plato’s Euthyphro: An Analysis and Commentary”), I will simply assert that I have always found Geach’s charge convincing.
But the question for me is this: is the fallacy (indeed, it is a fallacy) really Socrates‘? In the past, I have pushed students to notice that although it is true that Socrates asks the X-question and constraints it, his interlocutor’s invariably accept the X-question and those constraints. We could say, in fact, that the question thus constrained seems (once Socrates explains it) to be the exact form of the interlocutor’s philosophical ambition, just the trick the interlocutor believes he can turn. In this way, the X-question thus constrained makes contact simultaneously with the interlocutor’s supposed knowledge and all-too-real pride. The interlocutor’s conviction that he can answer the X-question thus constrained can be seen as the Interlocutor’s Fallacy. Maybe, just maybe, we do not have to understand Socrates as taking the X-question thus constrained to be fully legitimate. Maybe he is up to something else.
Now, I am not advancing this idea; I’m just tinkering. But two things make the tinkering perhaps more than a mere pastime. (1) In the Theaetetus, after asking the X-question, rejecting Theaetetus’ list answer, and explaining the constraints, Socrates asks, “Or am I talking nonsense? (146e; Levett trans.) That can be read as a fidget–and it is true that Theaetetus responds, “No, you are perfectly right”–but it could also be read as a hint to Theaetetus (who certainly seems less proud than the typical interlocutor) to be on his guard, to wonder about the X-question and its constraints. (Unfortunately, he does not take the hint.) (2) More interesting, Bernard Williams, in his introduction to the Theaetetus, takes up the Geach’s charge (without naming Geach) and concedes that “the general point is well taken”. He then construes the three famous attempts at a definition of ‘knowledge’ (as Levett denominates them) instead as three suggestions about the nature of knowledge, and he contends that Socrates rejects Theaetetus’ list as an answer to the Knowledge-question because it does not “give any insight into the nature of knowledge.” On the other hand, the first suggestion, that knowledge is perception, while “certainly not a definitional formula” does hold out hope of providing insight into the nature of knowledge.
I want to register discomfort here. While I can see why Williams thinks that the list provides no insight, he himself notes that paying attention to the list reveals that the first suggestion had better be that, the first suggestion, and not the first definition, since the different skills or expert knowledges listed by Theaetetus imply the hopelessness of knowledge is perception as a definition. (Geach notes this too.) So, is it quite true that the list does not provide any insight into the nature of knowledge? And if this is no provision of insight, then how is the first suggestion supposed to be a provision of insight? It is true that the first suggestion may seem to open up a possibility of testing that is not as clearly open with the list, and we might hope, even expect,that the testing will reveal something about the nature of knowledge. I wonder: perhaps it is only when we offer a theory (of knowledge) that we seem to make progress in having a theory (of knowledge)–offering a theory opens up a problem space for work and in which suggestions about the nature of the theoretical object hold out the prospect of insight (and may provide it even if they are rejected, perhaps even in the rejection of them). If something along those lines is right (I am certainly not sure it is), then the problem with the list is that it seems to open up no problem space and so seems not to hold out the prospect of insight.
Williams’ complaint–the list answer provides no insight–resembles the complaint against procedures of Moore’s that they refute without insight. Is the complaint there that Moore’s refutations are not contributions to the theoretical activity to which they respond, and so they offer no insights into the theoretical object (the nature of time, perception, etc.)? –Need philosophical investigation provide insight? What of Wittgensteinian reminders, Platonic Recollections, Kierkegaardian qualitative dialectics–and so on? I do not deny that we can call each of these insights, but don’t we have to vary the sense of the term when we do? Isn’t each of these differently situated in or around the supposed problem space that surrounds the theoretical object?
Anyway, Williams judges his suggestion suggestion a way around Geach’s charge of Socratic Fallaciousness. Is it? We can express knowledge without having any suggestion about, any theory of, the meaning of the terms in which we express our knowledge. So why do I need to make a suggestion? From whence any compulsion to open up a problem space? The claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about without a suggestion can be shrugged aside.
How may a Socratic conversation begin?
William Temple on Descartes’ Faux Pas
Personally I find it not at all impossible to entertain the fancy that all our experience, that of self included, is part of the dream of a Demiurge, that all of it
shall dissolve/And like this insubstantial pageant faded,/Leave not a rack behind./We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep
—not our sleep, but that of the Demiurge. I cannot refute that hypothesis, and I find it possible to contemplate it without intellectual turmoil. I am equally unable, no doubt, to refute the notion that my primary assurance is of myself, and that my awareness of the world about me is secondary and derivative. But I cannot contemplate that hypothesis without intellectual perturbation of the profoundest kind—a perturbation with is the deposit of all the acrobatic feats by which philosophers from Descartes to Kant have worked out the implications of that hypothesis and tried to avoid becoming entangled by it in manifest nonsense.
Reading “RM” 9: Skepticism and Christianity
One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Montaigne is this, the final paragraph in the section on Montaigne’s religion, his Christianity.
What he retains of Christianity is the vow of ignorance. Why assume hypocrisy in the places where he puts religion above criticism? Religion is valuable in that it saves a place for what is strange and knows our lot is enigmatic. All solutions it gives to the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition. As a questioning, it is justified on the condition that it remain answerless. It is one of the modes of our folly, and our folly is essential to us. When we put not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence, we can neither obliterate the dream of an other side of things nor repress the wordless invocation of this beyond. What is certain is that if there is some universal Reason we are not in on its secrets, and are in any case required to guide ourselves by our own lights. ‘In ignorance and negligence I let myself be guided to the general way of the world. I will know it well enough when I perceive it.’ Who would dare to reproach us for making use of this life and world which constitute our horizon?
I am in almost complete agreement with this. (My disagreements should show through in what I am about to say.) One of the accomplishments of the paragraph is that it reveals Montaigne’s skepticism finally to be (what I am calling) Church-Man’s skepticism. Merleau-Ponty inscribes into the paragraph Montaigne’s lexicon of Church-Man’s skepticism: ‘ignorance’, ‘strange’, ‘our lot’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘monstrous’, ‘question’, ‘answerless’, ‘folly’, ‘secret’. Montaigne’s skepticism has an epistemic side, and so can avail itself of failures to know of a standard epistemic sort, and subsequently use those failures to humble our pretensions to certain (forms of) knowledge. This is one form of ignorance and one use of it relevant to Church-Man’s skepticism. But Church-Man’s skepticism centers on existential, not epistemological, ignorance: on not-knowing classified best as ‘alienation’ or ‘restlessness’ or ‘dissatisfaction’. This skepticism is not one that construes religion, Christianity, as providing solutions or as yielding a self-satisfied understanding. It construes religion as acknowledging mysteries, acknowledging our monstrous condition. Its questioning is justified, then; as questioning of a mystery, it remains answerless. (Not all answerless questioning need dehort.) This is Christianity’s vow of ignorance. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. A familiar passage; but not often enough reflected upon. It stresses asymmetry: I now see God’s face through a glass, darkly. God now sees my face, face-to-face free of any darkling glass. (A strange one-way mirror that has only one side.) Now I know in part, I know partly. God now knows in total, He knows totally. We long for symmetry. Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
And of course we will have to guide ourselves by our own lights—but we need remember that not every light we count as ours is one we lit or one we power. No one should dare reproach us for making use of this life and world. What else do we have, here under the sun? As the Church-Man says (in Ecclesiastes 3):
So I became aware that it is best for man to busy himself here to his own content; this and nothing else is his alloted portion; who can show him what the future will bring?
In my days of baffled enquiry, I have seen pious men ruined for all their piety, and evil-doers live long in all their wickedness. Why then, do not set too much store by piety, not play the wise man to excess, if thou wouldst not be bewildered over thy lot. Yet plunge not deep in evil-doing; eschew folly; else thou shalt perish before thy time. To piety thou must needs cling; yet live by that other caution too; fear God, and thou hast left no duty unfulfilled.
We cannot help but to orient ourselves, or to dream of orienting ourselves, on something above the sun, some other side of things to which we make constant wordless appeal. And so fulfillment, surely our own, perhaps not our duty’s, is denied us. What we find here under the sun is not valueless, but it’s value is not full. We live amongst valuable vanities. We are fools in the farce who eschew folly. We are wonders, mysteries, to ourselves.
Astonishing.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 