Dream Writing

July 28, 2011 By in Uncategorized, writing Leave a comment

I am on the Alabama coast, beached well.

I’ve been reading Norman Malcolm’s Dreaming and thinking about his work.  While I often disagree with him, how I wish I could write like Malcolm!  His studied, bristling honesty, his deep seriousness of purpose! He joints his paragraphs with woody sentences lacking internal punctuation. He will not ornament, he will not warp, he will not waste. His work strikes me as like Thoreau’s cabin

a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.

Like Thoreau’s cabin, everything is placed, everything exactly accounted for. Although constructed on a small scale, the soundness of the writing makes it

fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments.

In comparison, my writing is a snarl of cheap twine.  Oh well, for better or for worse, we work as we have been given to work.

Reading “Reading Montaigne” 3: Quotable Unquotability and Metonymic Quotation

July 27, 2011 By in Merleau-Ponty, Montaigne Leave a comment

(I just realized that I wrote this several days ago but forgot to post it.  Sorry it is out of order, but I left its number in its name, so that it can be placed.)

Final Preliminary:

I have mentioned Montaigne’s quotable unquotability.  I have mentioned that it makes writing on Montaigne difficult.  So what is to be done about it?  Am I setting up for a criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s quotation of Montaigne in “RM”?  No.  I am setting up for a practice of quotation that I want to continue and that I reckon Merleau-Ponty to use.  As I have mentioned, Merleau-Ponty quotes only from Bk III of the Essays; I am going to do the same.  Merleau-Ponty’s Montaigne is the Montaigne of Bk III.  I take Merleau-Ponty to be practicing what I will call “metonymic quotation”.  That is, he quotes Montaigne intending for the quotation to be a part that trails the whole, where the whole is first the essay from which the quotation is taken and second Bk III itself.  This means that Merleau-Ponty writes and quotes really only for those who are capable of appreciating the metonymic quotations, those who know the particular essay and who know Bk III.  I intend to do the same.  But I will, at least in places, reduce the metonymic strain and supply more of the relevant section of the essay quoted than Merleau-Ponty does.  When an author is quotably unquotable, metonymic quotation is the best strategy for avoiding what I will call “sententious quotation”, a practice of quotation that makes it look like single sentences carry the burden of a moral, a meaning, in particular a moral or meaning that is capable of isolated appreciation, that carries, as it were, its entire moral burden or burden of meaning between its initial capital and its period.  Metonymic translation sees what is quoted as, in a sense borrowed from Gottlob Frege, unsaturated, as needing completion–not exactly in the way of a Fregean concept, nor exactly in the way of a Fregean truth-functional operator (say, negation), but in a way related to them.  In other words, the quoted sentence is to be understood as abstracted, in specific way, from its context, not extracted from it.

Poem

July 27, 2011 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

I dreamt a jumble of things.  Then all tidied itself.

Muffled light of a sanctuary lamp
Eyes now open, large and dark,
Moments before closed, hidden
Vestigial tremors near the call into being
Out of an unbeing cleaved to closely

I dreamt a jumble of things
A worded page stretching from
Visual periphery to visual periphery
A sentence, choose one!, as horizon
Hemmed in by dreamy palaver
Meaning everything, meaning nothing
At once and earlier and later

Conscious now, the words linger
Or their senses do, without reference
The meanings present absences
De Re Nonsenses, de rerum natura
When will words again be word,
i.e., Word
Utterly words, so to speak,
When will everything that can be said be said
Clearly?  (I’d settle if someone whistled a
Snatch for me)

Everything’s smutched.  Jumbled.
Dreamt words tell me no more than I knew
As I slept.  In a dreamy sentence Bachelard
Prophesies:  The words of the world want to make
Sentences.  I believe it against my dream.
All tidies itself.  The words morning gather, crowd
Together between periods.   Together now, at least in twos
(Noun and verb), they make sense, couple

Loud sunlight overspeaks the sanctuary lamp
The horizon is now visible, neither intelligible nor unintelligible
I arise reassured of something—I know not what
I am rooted in
an old faith, the jumbled-made-tidy,
I walk by reading and not by sight

Reading “RM” 6: Problems vs. Mysteries

July 27, 2011 By in Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Metaphilosophy, Montaigne, skepticism 7 Comments

For some of us, the impulse to philosophize is bound up with a realization of our broken world and our patchwork lives.  But among those of us for whom this is true, there is a further division:  for some of us, the breaks and the patchworks are problems, something to be solved; for others of us, they are mysteries, something that we live through.  Marcel famously distinguishes problems from mysteries; I am using his distinction—but I will not try here to provide a full account of the distinction, rather only an anticipatory sketch.  I need the sketch because it will aid me in my continuing reading of Merleau-Ponty’s “RM”.  I will say a bit about how momentarily.

Central to Marcel’s distinction is this:  a mystery is something whose true nature can only be grasped from the inside; no objective statements can be made about it from outside, for it is our situation, ours to live through.  We cannot get outside of it.  A problem has no inside/outside contrast, so to speak; it is something I confront, something I find complete before me.  I can therefore, as Marcel puts it, “lay siege to it”.  A problem is an object before me, inert; it is “voiceless”.  I can take an interest in it or not, but whether I do or not is a matter for my unconstrained decision.  A mystery is something that presents itself to me; it “speaks”; I respond or I refuse to respond.  A problem is always coordinate with a technique, a way of handling, treating, working on or solving it.  A mystery transcends technique.  Progress, as a notion, belongs to the problematic; is has no truck with the mysterious.  We make progress on a problem as we come to know things of which we previously were ignorant.  But the knowledge/ignorance contrast gets no real hold on a mystery; to the extent that it may seem to, each new acquist of relevant knowledge only to deepens the mystery.

One important result of this distinction is that it makes available a new term of philosophical criticism, namely the degrading of mysteries into problems.  We might think of this as a form of metaphilosophical reductionism.  Degrading is perennially tempting, because it allows us to normalize philosophy, to tame it.  Often, we degrade without realizing it:  we take something to have the form of a mystery while we deny it the power thereof.  Degrading permits us to be philosophers by acquisition, by having a philosophy (if you know the passage, think here of Marcel’s joking talk of “Marcelism” early in vol. 1 of The Mystery of Being), instead of requiring us to be philosophers only by maintaining ourselves in relation to mystery (since you will know it, if you have been following the blog, think here of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between teaching the absolute and teaching our absolute relation to it.)

I know that all this is far from clear, but I will continue to develop the distinction in later posts.  For now, bear in mind that what we think of Montaigne the skeptic will be quite different if we take Montaigne to be so-called because of his response to problems or because of his response to mysteries.

Dorothy Parker: The Veteran

July 27, 2011 By in poetry Leave a comment

When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
“Come out, your dogs, and fight!” said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid
I sit and say, “The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won–
The difference is small, my son.”

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called philosophy.

Wittgensteinian Clarity and Silence

July 26, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 5 Comments

In PI 133, Wittgenstein talks of “complete clarity”. It is a clarity in which the philosophical problems completely disappear.  Wittgenstein’s notion of clarity is connected with the notion of silence. Let me now say something brief about that. To do so, I distinguish between transitive and intransitive silence.

Think of transitive silence as a silence that involves the silencing of something or other, of something that has more to say but is cut off, shut up. (“Her unexpected laughter silenced his protestation of love.”) Transitive silence gags the problems. Intransitive silence is simple silence, a quiet in which nothing is forceably quieted, an untaut stillness.  Peace.  Genuine peace, not a detente with the problems, in which they hold their peace.

Wittgenstein does not aim at transitive silence; he aims at intransitive silence.  He aims at a silence in which the philosophical problems have been played out, utterly exhausted, at a silence unbroken by problems. The problems have had their say, said their piece; they do not even murmur.  Noiselessly, they dissipate.  They go to their rest.  To be completely clear in philosophy, to have made the problems disappear, is to have achieved intransitive silence.

How can intransitive silence be achieved?  PI is the answer to that.  But let me isolate one central theme:  We can only achieve it by deeply sympathizing with the philosophical problems.  We must, as it were, become the problems; we must hear the words of the problem as if each of the words comes urgently from the depths of our own consciousness. And whatever words we speak to the problem must themselves come from us just as urgently and from just the same depth. The problems take possession of us and then we must exorcise them. So we can only cause the problems to disappear on pain of risking that the problems will take lifelong possession of us, that they will resist exorcism, that our heads will spin permanently.

After Ecclesiastes

July 25, 2011 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

A lovely poem sent to me recently by my friend and colleague, Dafi Agam-Segal.  The translation is hers.  It is a poem by Israeli poet Natan Yonatan.

The Last Chapter

When the yard becomes empty
And the packing house shuts down
And the last car is dismantled
And there remains something unkempt there shall remain
Only the sound of the pump
And the sun’s golden bowl shall die out
In the quicklime crematories on the mountains
And the gates shall be shut
Ironed and sealed.
On the road to the old well the pitcher’s pieces shall lie
There where the woman laid down to rest
And the pale silver cord of the moon shall go down
Unto the fountain’s darkness
And shall return again to its circuits the wind [spirit] and the dust
Of man shall return unto the ground out of which he was taken
And the daughters of music [of the poem] shall be brought low and the door shall close.
And those that shall remain after
Shall open a last chapter of Koheleth.

From: Poems on “Sefer Hayashar”, Or-Am, 1998, p. 68

Fashionable Thinking (William Temple)

July 25, 2011 By in William Temple 1 Comment

Men seem to differ very profoundly in the fashion of their thinking.  If two men are presented with a novel suggestion and both exclaim “I must think about that”, one will begin by putting together what he knows with reference to the subject, and his former opinions based upon that knowledge, his general theories concerning that department of inquiry, and so forth; piece by piece he will work out his conclusion with regard to the suggestion made to him.  The other will find that his mind goes blank; he will stare into the fire or walk about the room or otherwise keep conscious attention diverted from the problem.  Then abruptly he will find that he has a question to ask, or a counter-suggestion to make, after which the mental blank returns.  At last he is aware, once more abruptly, what is his judgment on the suggestion, and subsequently, though sometimes very rapidly, he also becomes aware of the reasons which support or necessitate it.

My own mind is of the latter sort.  All my decisive thinking goes on behind the scenes; I seldom know when it takes place—much of it certainly on walks or during sleep—and I never know the processes which it has followed.  Often when teaching I have found myself expressing rooted convictions which until that moment I had no notion that I held.  Yet they are genuinely rooted convictions—the response of my whole being, to certain theoretical or practical propositions.

This characteristic must needs affect the philosophical method of him who suffers (or gains) from it.  In discussions with others I frequently find myself eager to know to which of the two types described—are they the Aristotelian and Platonic, the Pauline and Johannine, respectively?—my interlocutor belongs.  So, following the Golden Rule, I expose myself to the contempt of whoso may think my own type contemptible.

Exposing myself to contempt, I confess I suffer (or gain) from the blank, Johannine type.

Johnson on Intellectual Pride (Sermon 8)

July 25, 2011 By in Samuel Johnson, virtue and vice Leave a comment

To these causes,or to some of these, it must surely be imputed, that learning is found so frequently to fail in the direction of life; and to operate so faintly and uncertainly in the regulation of [the learned’s] conduct, who are most celebrated for their application and proficiency.  They have been betrayed, by some false security, to withhold their attention from their own lives; they have grown knowing without growing virtuous; and have failed of the wisdom which is the gift of the Father of lights, because they have thought it unnecessary to seek it, with that anxiety and importunity, to which only it is granted; they have trusted to their own powers, and were “wise in their own conceits”.

Reading “RM” 5: More on Skepticism

July 25, 2011 By in Montaigne, skepticism 2 Comments

Merleau-Ponty starts “RM” with a pertinent reminder:

Skepticism has two sides.  It means that nothing is true, but also that nothing is false.  It rejects all opinions and all behavior as absurd, but it thereby deprives us of the means of rejecting any one as false.  Destroying dogmatic, partial, or abstract truth, it insinuates the idea of a total truth with all the necessary facets and mediations.  If it multiplies contrasts and contradictions, it is because truth demands it.

The reminder here is that there is a form of skepticism, Montaigne’s, that serves the demand of truth.  As such, Montaigne’s skepticism is two-sided:  it has its expected negative side (“nothing is true”) but also its unexpected positive side (“nothing is false”).  The point of the two sides is not skeptical self-stifling, but rather an all-the-more gladsome servitude to truth.  Dogmatism, partiality, abstraction all ill-serve the truth, providing only one facet among many or excluding required mediations.  Think of this as skepticism with a finally positive valence, a skepticism that approaches truth by various refusals of truths.

As I mentioned before, in his “In Praise of Philosophy”, Merleau-Ponty insists that great philosophers thematize ambiguity, but that their so doing “contributes to establishing certitudes rather than menacing them”, and so he distinguishes between good and bad ambiguity–the one, I take it, establishing, the other menacing, certitude.  What Merleau-Ponty says about Montaigne’s skepticism concretizes the claim about thematizing ambiguity.  In destroying dogmatic, partial or abstract truth, Montaigne thematizes good ambiguity, an ambiguity calling for nuance, mediation; an ambiguity indicating the shape of the total truth.

Montaigne contradicts himself, when he does, out of the extremity of his servitude to the truth.

The first and most fundamental of contradictions is that by which the refusal of each truth uncovers a new kind of truth.

This sentence is the nervus probandi of the Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to “RM”.  Notice that Merleau-Ponty here describes (materially) metalinguistic negation.  (Laurence Horn, who has done the most to clarify this form of negation, understands it as a metalinguistic device for registering objection to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever (including even the way it was pronounced).  In the thanks-footnote to his classic article from 1985, Horn provides a gracious and humorous example of the phenomenon:  after mentioning the folks he is indebted to, he notes, “Their contributions were not important–they were invaluable.”)  I understand Merleau-Ponty to see Montaigne’s negations as informed by a recognition that a particular utterance is dogmatic, or is partial or is abstract.  That utterance is then negated on the grounds that it is either dogmatic, or…   This is the way in which Montaigne’s refusals of truths “uncover a new kind of truth”, where “new kind” does not mean that we have, as it were, shifted from a truth-predicate at say, the zero level, to one at the first level (and so on) but rather that we are moving from a partial truth to a less partial truth–and the partial truth is not negated in the sense that it is false, but rather in that it is partial.  This shifting can be seen not only at the level of particular lines of Montaigne’s essays, but even in the essay’s basic structure, in the way paragraph follows paragraph, shifting from the partiality of the previous paragraph to a subsequent paragraph that renders what is being said less partial.  The earlier paragraph is not to be refused totally, but rather refused in the interests of the total truth.  A formalist example:  If I say “It is not exactly incorrect to say that p”, I do not mean that It is correct to say that p but I also do not mean It is correct to say not-p.  Rather, saying “p” stands in need of further saying, of a further less partial saying, perhaps; or, of one less dogmatic or less abstract.  A new kind of truth is a less dogmatic or a less partial or a less abstract truth.  (Some of you will recognize metalinguistic negation from its very common use in J. L. Austin’s work, where it informs not only the content of his presentation of, e.g., performatives, but where it informs the very style of Austin’s prose.  Jean-Philippe Narboux has recently written a wonderful paper on this and related matters, “There’s Many a Slip between Cup and Lip:  Dimension and Negation in Austin”.)  Often, then, what take the form of contradictions in Montaigne are best understood as pairings of p and not*-p, its metalinguistic negation.  This has an important shaping effect on Montaigne’s skepticism and his prose, and helps to reveal that it is, as Merleau-Ponty says, two-sided, insisting on facets and mediation, multiplying contrasts and contradiction, welcoming ambiguity as a helpmeet—because truth demands it.