Marcel on Disponibilité and Indisponibilité: Handy, Unhandy, Available, Unavailable

July 18, 2011 By in Marcel, Metaphilosophy Leave a comment

Continuing with the theme of disposability, here is a brief passage from The Mystery of Being, vol. 1.  Marcel comments on his own terms.

We come up against a notion here which seems to me of capital importance but for which it is difficult to find an idiomatic English equivalent—at least neither I, nor the English translator of my previous work, Being and Having, managed to do so. The French terms I use are disponibilité and indisponibilité.  Literally, in English, one would render these as availability and unavailability, but it might sound more natural if one spoke of handiness and unhandiness, the basic idea being that of having or not having, in a given contingency, one’s resources to hand or at hand. The self-centred person, in this sense, is unhandy; I mean that he remains incapable of responding to calls made upon him by life, and I am not thinking merely of the appeals for help that may be made to him by the unfortunate. I mean rather that, over a much wider field, he will be incapable of sympathizing with other people, or even of imagining their situation. He remains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private experience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is incapable of breaking through. He is unhandy from his own point of view and unavailable from the point of view of others.

Ezra Pound: Translations, “Lament of the Frontier Guard”

July 18, 2011 By in poetry Leave a comment

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

By Rihaku       

“I Will Teach You Differences!”

July 16, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

Resemblance does not make things as much alike as difference makes them unlike.  –Montaigne

Wittgenstein considered using “I will teach you differences” from King Lear as a motto for Philosophical Investigations. It is not entirely clear why Wittgenstein was drawn to it.  Commentators have sometimes understood the line as an Anti-Essentialist slogan.  Philosophers snub particulars; they crave generality and trust it.  Differences do not matter; differences bury the essential.  Wittgenstein will teach that differences matter.  Generality should be mistrusted.  Philosophers must grace particulars, attend to them, stop excavating the essential.

No doubt there is truth in this understanding of the line.  But it seems to me to that there is looseness in it:  a 7/16 wrench on a 3/8 nut.  Taking the motto as an Anti-Essentialist slogan makes the book too metaphysical, metaphysical in a rather too up-front way. Wittgenstein’s challenge to philosophy looks too fraternal.  Wittgenstein looks like a placard bearer for a minority position in metaphysics.

When Wittgenstein teaches differences he teaches the significance of logical differences, not metaphysical differences.  Part of assessing the significance of logical differences is recognizing that the difference between logical differences and metaphysical differences is itself a logical difference.  From the beginning of his work until the end, Wittgenstein cleaved to the idea that “logic must take care of itself”.  Teaching differences is teaching logical differences.  Learning to read PI is largely a matter seeing that and how Wittgenstein teaches the significance of logical differences–and that means seeing how Wittgenstein understood philosophical problems and proper responsiveness to them.

In an important moment of “Art and Sacrament”, David Jones remarks that understanding a painter correctly involves understanding how the painter can acknowledge his own making and yet insist on its identity with, say, some object or type of object he encounters.  Jones’ point is that, for a painter, what is painted is not so much a painting of a mountain as it is mountain–under the form of paint.  Similarly, when Wittgenstein takes up a philosophical problem–say, Essentialism, since I have mentioned it–he is not taking up the metaphysical problem of Essentialism; he is taking up Essentialism–under the form of logic.  For Wittgenstein that is not a change of topic.  He in effect insists on the identity of the traditional metaphysical problem and what he is taking up.  But he does radically reorient himself on Essentialism.  (The trick of course is reckoning with ‘under the form of logic’.)

The Proper Response to Epistemic Skepticism?

July 15, 2011 By in skepticism Leave a comment

What do we want from a proper response to epistemic skepticism?  To answer, I will press into service wonderful words from (more or less) Virginia Woolf .

That such a response would be above all things delightful; that it would add spring-heels to our boots; that it would fire the cold skepticism out of us and make the world glow in lucid transparency before our eyes…

The Ocean of Illusion–A Few Thoughts

July 15, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, skepticism, Wittgenstein 1 Comment

I was struck again a couple of days ago by the remarkable extended metaphor that Kant uses to open his “Phenomena and Noumena” chapter of CPR.  Here is a bit:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.

Kant advises that, before setting sail on the ocean of illusion, we should take on last look at our map of the land of truth, asking two questions:  (1) Can we be satisfied with what the map discloses, indeed, are we not in fact compelled to be satisfied with it, since there may be nowhere else to settle?; and, (2) By what title do we possess even the land of truth, are we in fact secure against all opposing claims?  Kant takes the “Analytic” to effectually have answered these questions, but he thinks that reviewing a summary answer to them is worthwhile.

The summary is not so much of interest to me now.  I am more interested in the extended metaphor itself.  It is an icon of CPR.  Up to this point in the text, Kant and his reader have been mapping the land of truth, exploring it, surveying it and measuring it.  But now it is time to go down to the ship, to set keel to breakers–to go forth on the ungodly sea.  Now it is time to face illusion.  And we have no choice.  –What mesmerizes me is Kant combining the ideas that we are compelled to be satisfied with our island, that we do possess a clear title to it, and that we are nonetheless gripped again and again by hopes (empty and delusive though they will prove to be) of farther shores out across the enshadowed ocean, tempted by (ultimately idle) adventures.  To be compelled to be satisfied does not guarantee satisfaction.  (The peculiar fate of human reason!)  Against what I take to be the ground on which CPR is figure, namely against the prioritizing of the practical over the theoretical, we can see CPR as thematizing the Church-Man’s skepticism.  Reason provides only conclusions in which nothing is concluded.  That is a topic I will return to in subsequent posts.

(Kant’s extended metaphor also provides an icon of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  But in PI, Wittgenstein and his reader are almost always sitting amidships, wind jamming the tiller, sailing into and then out of fog banks, up to and then away from swiftly melting icebergs.  He and his reader spend scant time on the land of truth.  They spend their days on deepest water, longing for shore leave, for a dry and homely ingle.  But real needs keep them at sea.  Being at sea and occasionally coming back home:  the rhythm of their lives.)

Exegesis: Ramon Guthrie

July 15, 2011 By in poetry Leave a comment
No, lady, the foregoing poem is neither
a riddle nor a rebus.  Nothing to be guessed.
When it says, “It has no name,” it means just that.
No, not “grace,” “vision,” “caritas,”
or some exuberant, all-embracing, new,
exhilarating virtue that God and I
have just concocted.
Look, read the thing again, taking it literally.
You are handicapped by thinking of me as having
some eldritch pact with words.  Whereas—
groping drop-out from night school,
lifelong at odds with them for their chicanery and despotism—
I consort with words only from sheer loneliness,
as a lifer in solitary might welcome
the companionship of a spider or a cockroach.
          Listen…
No, that is asking too much…

Apology

July 14, 2011 By in meta-blog 4 Comments

I apologize for all the fidgeting with the look of the blog.  I have been trying to get something that is both clean (Reporter:  “What is it you like about the desert?”  T. E. Lawrence:  “The desert is clean.”) and allows me to have the various add-ons I like.  I believe I have now settled on the current look.  Sorry if the changes have given anyone a case of mal de mer.

Kantian Skepticism and John McDowell

July 13, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, skepticism Leave a comment

In an earlier post, I mentioned the distinction (treated most fully in Jim Conant’s paper) between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism.  I want to say a bit more about the latter, particularly in relation to John McDowell’s work.

When I first fell hard for McDowell’s work, back in my days at Rochester (I had somehow, I am now not sure how, managed to get hold of a bootlegged draft of Mind and World), I was both deeply enamored of and quite puzzled by McDowell’s response to skepticism.  I suppose now I would say that, at the time, I simply did not surely grasp the category of ‘Kantian Skepticism’ and so kept reading McDowell as if he were supposed to be responding, straightforwardly, to the Cartesian skeptic—and that made McDowell’s response to skepticism seem oddly non-responsive, full of mazeways that all dead-ended. But, as I said, I was also enamored of his response; it seemed somehow right despite my puzzlement at it. My gut seemed to get it; my head lagged behind.

What I finally came to say to myself was something like this:  “McDowell is simply unperturbed by skepticism, that is, about skepticism of ‘External World’ variety.  Maybe that is because, for McDowell, the action is somewhere else.  The illusions that worry him are not (call them) ‘illusions of sense’, but instead ‘illusions of thought’.  His skeptical worry seems somehow more entangled with spontaneity than with receptivity, although of course he withstands any attempt to treat those two as if they could be clinically separated.  It is as though McDowell has found a way to “gain the whole world” but only “by (potentially) losing his own soul”.  McDowell’s illusions of thought are not merely dialectical illusions, say, but are instead illusions that one is in fact even having a thought.  But if skepticism can penetrate that far (to the capital city, as it were), what does it matter if we manage to hang on sense-certainty (to distant villages)?  Aren’t we lost?  Even worse, what sense can be made of the ‘we’ who may be lost?”

I put forward these remembered musings not because they are of sustained interest, but because they do, it seems to me, contain a moment of interest for Kantian skepticism.  Just in case it seemed as though Cartesian skepticism were a game played for the highest possible stakes, along comes Kantian skepticism to show that it is possible to up the ante.  Anyone who—as I now think McDowell does—aims to use gains made responding to Kantian skepticism against Cartesian skepticism bets his bottom dollar.  But maybe that is the way it is with skepticism:  we can only win from it in proportion to what we are willing to risk against it.  There is no low-risk high-reward gamble with skepticism.

Logos, Tropos and Hamlet’s Ambivalence

July 12, 2011 By in religion, skepticism Leave a comment

I’ve got Hamlet on the brain, I guess.  I was thinking today about the wildly divergent claims Hamlet makes about human beings in the play.  At one point, very famously, Hamlet begins, “What a piece of work is man!”.  But at another point, less famously, he notes, “Man delights not me.” Is this just Hamlet’s antic disposition at work (or at play)? Or is there something else to say about it?

St. Maximus the Confessor in various works follows the Orthodox tradition of seeing something other than a mere parallelism in the Scriptural line,

Then God said Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…

For Maximus, the image is one thing, the likeness another.  Human beings are made in the image of God—and, for Maximus, this is our essence, our Logos.  But whether we are in the likeness of God is not a matter of how we are made; it is rather a matter of what we make of ourselves (and of course we can make nothing of ourselves outside of (non-hypostatically) participating in God’s life, i.e., we can make nothing of ourselves without our Logos)—and what we make of ourselves is our Tropos.  Our Logos is what we are; our Tropos is the way we are, how we are.

It strikes me that we can use Maximus to gloss Hamlet.  In the vaunting passage, when Hamlet acknowledges what a piece of work we are, he sees our Logos.  In the deploring passage, when he expresses his disrelish of us, he sees our all-too-human Tropos.  For Hamlet, we are made in the image of God, yes; but we all-too-rarely manage even to come close to God’s likeness.