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Disposability, Availability
Marcel’s term for ‘disposability’ is ‘disponibilité’. Here it is translated as ‘availability’:
[Availability] of course does not mean emptiness, as in the case of an available dwelling (local disponible), but it means much rather an aptitude to give oneself to anything which offers, and to bind oneself by the gift. Again, it means to transform circumstances into opportunities, we might say favours, thus participating in the shaping of our own destiny and marking it with our seal. It has sometimes been said of late , “Personality is vocation”. It is true if we restore its true value to the term vocation, which is in reality a call, or more precisely the response to a call. We must not, however, be led astray here by any mythological conception. It depends, in fact, on me whether the call is recognised as a call, and strange as it may seem, in this matter it is true to say that it comes both from me and from outside me at one and the same time; or rather, in it we become aware of that most intimate connection between what comes from me and what comes from outside, a connection which is nourishing or constructive and cannot be reliquished without the ego wasting and tending toward death.
Perhaps we might make this clearer by pointing out that each of us from the very beginning, appears to himself and to others as a particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be, are not enough to provide a solution. I use the term problem absolutely against my will, for it seems to be quite inadequate. Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working, even supposing I manage to take him to pieces in the process, I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being? We must even go further and say that such a knowledge is in reality sacrilegious and destructive, it does no less than denude its object of the one thing he has which is of value and so it degrades him effectively. That means–and there is nothing which is more important to keep in view–that the knowledge of an individual being cannot be separated from the act of love or charity by which this being is accepted in all which makes of him a unique creature or, if you like, the image of God…
I supply this quotation as a commentary on and extension of my earlier post, Making Ourselves Disposable. One striking thing about this, for anyone who is a fan of Cavell’s work, and especially of his essay, “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein”, is how much like Cavell it sounds, and how much light it sheds on at least one meaning of the title of his essay. I am quite sure that one sense of ‘availability’ in the title is Marcel’s sense. The second paragraph reads like a digest of Cavell’s thinking about Other Minds, setting up, as it does, Cavell’s crucial understanding of acknowledgement.
Bittersweet
St. Francis de Sales:
Love is bittersweet, and while we live in this world it never has a sweetness perfectly sweet, because it is not perfect, not ever purely satisfied.
George Herbert (“Bitter-Sweet”):
Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.
Spiritual Disposability (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 9)
19For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more.
20And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;
21To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.
22To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
23And this I do for the gospel’s sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.
Making Ourselves Disposable
One use of a term I have lately been fascinated by is Gabriel Marcel’s use of ‘disposable’ (at least that is the word used in the translation I am reading; I have little, really no French). For Marcel, the term represents a spiritual ideal, a goal to be worked toward as one matures in Christian life. But it also represents for him a philosophical ideal, a goal of philosophizing—although I admit that he makes this less clear. Marcel’s use of the term overlaps interestingly with the Authorized Version’s use of ‘humble’ and of ‘meek’. But Marcel does not use the term merely as synonymous with the AV’s use of either. It also overlaps to an extent with the AV’s use of ‘charity’, both ‘love’ and ‘gift-giving’, and it is connected by important lines of filiation with its use of ‘hope’.
The ideal is to make yourself disposable to others, to be willing to give them not only the first word in philosophical investigation, but also the last word too. It is to philosophize in a way free of possessions, where possessions are understood as, say, theses, some philosophy or other that guides, indeed requires, my pushing or pulling, forcing or resisting for the sake of some philosophical claim or other. These possessions make me philosophically non-disposable. Marcel writes,
I wonder if we could not define the whole spiritual life as the sum of activities by which we try to reduce in ourselves the part played by non-disposability.
And he treats non-disposability as “inseparable from a form of self-adherence”. Treated as a philosophical goal, being disposable would be to understand philosophy as practiced readiness of response, as a willingness to hear what another has to say and to work through that from the inside, from the side of the person who says it. Philosophical progress would be made by reducing in our responsiveness the non-disposability that to some degree or other inevitably infects it. As I read him, Plato’s Socrates aims for a form of non-disposability; as I read him, Wittgenstein aims for a form of it too. Wittgenstein’s desire for it shows (it seems to me) in the way that he begins Philosophical Investigations, giving the first words to Augustine and speaking himself only in response to Augustine; it shows in his interest in what he calls “the liberating word” and in his willingness to yield wholly to the other prerogative over whether any word is in fact liberating. (The poet, John Ciardi, somewhere speaks of the aim of poetry as the speaking of “the enlarging word”, an idea that I take to be related to Wittgenstein’s of “the liberating word”. I reckon that the ideas of “the enlarging word” and of “the liberating word” are not merely showings of an aim at being non-disposable, but of an aim at making the other more fully disposable to himself and to others. The image of being a fly trapped in a fly-bottle (a passage that my talk of Wittgenstein’s aim makes unavoidable) I take to be an image of finding oneself non-disposable, both to oneself and to others.) Cavell has insisted on this feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing, as has Cora Diamond, in her underscoring of Wittgenstein’s desire to philosophize in a way that does not lay down requirements.
Socrates’ desire for disposability shows in his repeated, often deeply frustrated hope that his interlocutor will state what the interlocutor actually believes, whether about piety or about courage or about knowledge; it shows in his understanding of himself as a philosophical midwife. (Look again at the almost unbelievably wonderful passage in the Theaetetus 148e-151d; it deserves reading and re-reading, with, as Burnyeat memorably says, “feeling as well as thought”.) It shows in his deference to the Logos. It shows in his averment of his own ignorance. Virtually all that Socrates does shows his aversion to philosophical self-adherence.
I will return to this again.
The Church-Man’s Skepticism 2
I have added bits of poetry in the last couple of posts, one from Johnson, the other from Herbert, as further explorations of what I am calling “Church-Man’s skepticism”. I suspect some may find my choice to call this “skepticism” as peculiar; perhaps “pessimism” or “cynicism” will seem to them to be more appropriate. I have puzzled over those terms; I have felt, indeed I feel, their pull. But I do not think they fit as well as “skepticism”.
I should admit that I use the term idiosyncratically. I have learnt so to use it from Stanley Cavell and Thompson Clarke. Cavell, developing a line of thought in Clarke’s work, insists that there is a truth in skepticism. Now, the skepticism that Cavell and Clarke first are thinking of is more or less Cartesian external world skepticism, a skepticism that pictures the would-be knower as related to the would-be known in something of the way that the Rich Man was related to Lazarus: between them there is a great gulf fixed. The would-be knower has thoughts and those thoughts bear on the world, but the question is whether they bear on it in a way that makes them true. As much as the would-be knower would like to feel the cool water-drop of knowledge on his parched epistemological tongue, he cannot. His cognitive thirst cannot be satisfied. Lazarus is barred from him. But looming behind Cartesian external world skepticism is a larger and darker form of skepticism, Kantian skepticism. That skepticism questions whether the would-be knower is rightly so-called; it questions whether the “would-be knower” so much as has thoughts that bear on the world; it doubts that the “would-be knower” can so much as produce items that could be truth-valuable.
I will say more about these two forms of skepticism in a later post; I will also say more to connect my use of the term to Cavell’s and Clarke’s in a later post; so treat what I have said so far as partial but I hope helpful background. But I want now to consider what Cavell in one place (in The Claim of Reason) says is the truth in skepticism, namely that our relationship to the world is not primarily one of knowing. Gloss: we do not secure a world to know or a world to talk about primarily by acts of cognition, specifically by acts of knowing. Of course that is not meant to leave us ignorant of the world. Rather, it changes the way in which we find ourselves as in the world. We find ourselves in the world in our non-bodily circumstances, oriented away from our bodies, indeed from ourselves, and so away from our bodies as the sufferers or ourselves as the bearers of knowledge. Finding ourselves in the world in this way makes problems of knowledge recede; they do not press us. To reverse and amend Schopenhauer’s classic set of claims (near the beginning of vol. 1 of The World as Will and Representation): there is a sun; there is an earth; I do not know an eye that sees a sun or a hand that feels an earth. But saying this does not solve, resolve or dissolve skepticism. It simply shunts it aside, shuns it, crowds or reduces the space in which it lives and moves and has its being. Put another way, this truth in skepticism will not satisfy the skeptic; it will not seem to him or her to capture the truth of skepticism. (As, indeed, it does not, if there is such a thing.)
But thinking about skepticism in this way allows us to remove ourselves from the primarily theoretical predicament of Cartesian and even Kantian skepticism and allows us to return our attention to our practical predicament, and to forms of skepticism that may arise within it.
Church-Man’s skepticism is primarily practical. It focuses not so much on knowledge as it does on various other ways in which we are implicated in the world, particularly on the world as a scene of values, and of those values’ spheres of influence. Church-Man’s skepticism is not skeptical about our knowledge of those values, but of the valuability of the values themselves, of whether or not they are wholly satisfactory. It questions not the reality of the values, or their (differential) availability, but rather their fullness (for lack of a better term). This is neither cynicism, which would question, even deny, the reality of the values; nor is it pessimism, which would question, even deny, their availability. It is a skepticism, practical or (as I said in an earlier post) existential. It does not deny that life, here under the sun, is livable or that life must deny the wise person any satisfaction. But it does understand that life as enigmatic; its meaning, sought here under the sun evades us–again, not as a theoretical insight, but rather as a practical reality. Our problem is not ignorance: it is restlessness.
The Pulley: George Herbert
WHEN God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.So strength first made a way ;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure :
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottome lay.For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
So both should losers be.Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.
The Vanity of Human Wishes (first verse): Samuel Johnson
Let Observation with extensive View,
Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,
And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life;
Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate,
O’er spread with Snares the clouded Maze of Fate,
Where wav’ring Man, betray’d by vent’rous Pride,
To tread the dreary Paths without a Guide;
As treach’rous Phantoms in the Mist delude,
Shuns fancied Ills, or chases airy Good.
How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice,
Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice,
How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppres’d,
When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s Request.
Fate wings with ev’ry Wish th’ afflictive Dart,
Each Gift of Nature, and each Grace of Art,
With fatal Heat impetuous Courage glows,
With fatal Sweetness Elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the Speaker’s pow’rful Breath,
And restless Fire precipitates on Death.
The Church-Man’s Skepticism
Here is Mgr. Knox’s translation of the opening of Ecclesiastes:
A shadow’s shadow, he tells us, a shadow’s shadow; a world of shadows! How is man the better for all this toiling of his, here under the sun? Age succeeds age, and the world goes on unaltered. Sun may rise and sun may set, but ever it goes back and is reborn. Round to the south it moves, round to the north it turns; the wind, too, though it makes the round of the world, goes back to the beginning of its round at last. All the rivers flow into the sea, yet never the sea grows full; back to their springs they find their way, and must be flowing still. Weariness, all weariness; who shall tell the tale? Eye looks on unsatisfied; ear listens, ill content. Ever that shall be that ever has been, that which has happened once shall happen again; there can be nothing new, here under the sun. Never man calls a thing new, but it is something already known to the ages that went before us; only we have no record of older days. So, believe me, the fame of to-morrow’s doings will be forgotten by the men of a later time.
And here is Montaigne closing “Of Vanity”:
This opinion and common usage to observe others more than ourselves, has very much relieved us that way; ’tis a very displeasing object: we can there see nothing but misery and vanity: nature, that we may not be dejected with the sight of our own deformities, has wisely thrust the action of seeing outward. We go forward with the current: but to turn back toward ourselves is a painful motion; so is the sea moved and troubled when the waves rush against one another. Observe, says every one, the motions of the heavens, of public affairs; observe the quarrel of such a person, take notice of such a one’s pulse, of such another’s last will and testament; in sum, be always looking high or low, on one side, before, or behind you. It was a paradoxical command anciently given us by the god of Delphos: “Look into yourself; discover yourself; keep close to yourself; call back your mind and will, that elsewhere consume themselves into yourself; you run out, you spill yourself; carry a more steady hand: men betray you, men spill you, men steal you from yourself. Dost thou not see that this world we live in keeps all its sight confined within, and its eyes open to contemplate itself? ‘Tis always vanity for thee, both within and without; but ’tis less vanity when less extended. Excepting thee, oh man”, said that god, “everything studies itself first, and has bounds to its labors and desires, according to its need. There is nothing so empty and necessitous as thou, who embracest the universe; thou are the explorator without knowledge; the magistrate without jurisdiction: and, after all, the fool of the farce.”
And here is Samuel Johnson’s Imlac, speaking of the pyramids in Rasselas:
But for the pyramids no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labour of the work…It seems [that this pyramid] has been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must always be appeased by some enjoyment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.
I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasure, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the pyramids , and confess they folly!
What emerges across these quotations is a form of skepticism that I want to call Church-Man’s Skepticism, after the writer of Ecclesiastes. It is a form primarily of practical skepticism, not theoretical–call it an existential skepticism. But it is not existentialism, unless it be Christian existentialism. I plan to write more about this over the next few weeks. Let me finish with one more quotation, this time of Mgr. Knox himself, from a remark about Ecclesiastes:
The argument of the book does not progress in strict logical fashion, but the general sense is clear: no human value is entirely satisfying; life itself therefore is an enigma. But it still remains livable, and the doctrine of the author is that a wise man will be satisfied with living it, while remembering its deficiencies.
Writing it Down: Andrew Lytle
It is part of the discipline of a writer that he read well, and reading well requires writing it down.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 