Tag Archives: philosophy

Oakeshott on the Importance of Teaching Differences

February 10, 2016 By in Bradley, history of ordinary language philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , Leave a comment

Here is Michael Oakeshott in Experience and Its Modes, channeling Bradley:

To bother about a confusion de genres is the sign of decadent thought.  –But this is not the view of the matter I have come to take.  For…it became increasingly clear that unless these forms of experience were separated and kept separate, our experience would be unprotected against the most insidious and crippling of all forms of error–irrelevance.  And when we consider further the errors and confusion, the irrelevance and cross-purposes, which follow from a failure to determine the exact character and significance of (for example) scientific or historical experience, it becomes possible to suppose that those who offer us their opinions upon these topics may have something to say of which we should take notice.  To dismiss the whole affair as a matter of mere words is the first impulse only of those who are ignorant of the chaos into which experience degenerates when this kind of question is answered perfunctorily or is left altogether without an answer.  “Truth”, says Bacon, “comes more easily out of error than out of confusion”:  but the view I have to recommend is that confusion, ignoratio elenchi, is itself the most fatal of all errors, and that it occurs whenever argument or inference passes from one world of experience to another, from what is abstracted on one principle from what is abstracted upon another, from what is abstract to what is concrete, and from what is concrete to what is abstract…So far, then, as this part of my subject is concerned, it may be considered as an investigation of the character of irrelevance or ignoratio elenchi.

(Oakeshott names Bradley’s Appearance and Reality as one of the two books, along with Hegel’s Phenomenology, from which he has learnt the most.)

Bradley’s Critique

January 28, 2016 By in Bradley, history of ordinary language philosophy, Kant, writing Tags: , , 3 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kant:

That logic has already, from the earliest times, proceeded upon this sure path is evidenced by the fact that since Aristotle it has not required to retrace a single step, unless, indeed, we care to count as improvements the removal of certain needless subtleties or the clearer exposition of its recognized teaching, features which concern the elegance rather than the certainty of the science. It is remarkable also that to the present day this logic has not been able to advance a single step, and is thus to all appearance a closed and completed body of doctrine. If some of the moderns have thought to enlarge it by introducing psychological chapters on the different faculties of knowledge (imagination, wit, etc.), metaphysical chapters on the origin of knowledge or on the different kinds of certainty according to difference in the objects (idealism, skepticism, etc.), or anthropological chapters on prejudices, their causes and remedies, this could only arise from their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. We do not enlarge but disfigure sciences, if we allow them to trespass upon one another’s territory.  [emphasis mine]  The sphere of logic is quite precisely delimited; its sole concern is to give an exhaustive exposition and a strict proof of the formal rules of all thought, whether it be a priori or empirical, whatever be its origin or its object, and whatever hindrances, accidental or natural, it may encounter in our minds.

I have been reading and teaching F. H. Bradley.  I have also been reading about him–reading T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, Alan Donagan and others.  Bradley wrote wonderfully (and I have remarked on his prose previously on the blog).  But Bradley was a genuinely gifted thinker as well as stylist.  At the heart of his work is stationed the acknowledgment that Kant expresses above (“We do not enlarge but disfigure…”) and Bradley observes it dutifully throughout all his work.

Consider one important, wholly characteristic passage:

The supposed gulf between sheer errors and utter truths is, again, created by the same vice of abstractionism.  A truth so true that it has no other side, and an error so false that it contains no truth, I have condemned as idols.  They are to me no better than the truths which are never at all born in time, or again the truths whose life does not pass beyond that which is made and unmade by chance and change…

On the one hand it is the entire Reality alone which matters.  On the other hand, every single thing, so far as it matters, is so far real, real in its own place and degree, and according as more or less it contains and carries out the in-dwelling character of the concrete Whole.  But there is nothing anywhere in the world which, taken barely in its own right and unconditionally, has importance and is real.  And one main work of philosophy is to show that, where there is isolation and abstraction, there is everywhere, so far as this abstraction forgets itself, unreality and error.

This:  Bradley’s peculiar anti-reductionism.  Bradley’s (Absolute) idealism largely resolves into this anti-reductionism.  It is easy to miss it, in part because Bradley’s talk of abstractionism makes you think up not down as reductionism usually does.  The anti-reductionism yeilds an ideal-ized version of Butler:  Everything is what it is and not another thing, and in the place that it is and not another place, and to the degree that it is and not to another.

Everything is justified as being real in its own sphere and degree, but not so as to entitle it to invade other spheres, and, whether positively or negatively, to usurp other powers…And it is the true Absolute alone that gives its due to every interest just because it refuses to everything more than its own due.  Justice in the name of the Whole to each aspect of the world according to its special place and proper rank–Reality everywhere through self-restriction and in denial…

For Bradley, philosophy enforces justice in the name of the Whole.  Isolation discounts the Whole for the sake of a part; abstraction discounts the part for the sake of the Whole. We may, if we need, knowingly isolate or knowingly abstract–knowingly discount Whole or part for the sake of the other.  But we must not allow ourselves to forget what we are doing, and so lose either the Whole or the part.  Bradley knew that to take thought is almost always to isolate or to abstract, and so he knew that taking thought renders the thinker liable to unreality or error.  The only way to resist the unreality or error is to remain constantly aware not only of the product of isolation or abstraction, but also of the process of isolation or abstraction that produced it, and so not lose sight of the product’s limited value and reality.  Philosophy itself matters, remains real, only through self-restriction and in denial.  Bradley would have appreciated J. L. Austin’s metaphilosophical reminder–neither a be-all nor and end-all be.

Bradley’s work is a remarkable conceptual successor of Kant’s; it is thoroughly Critical, and so thoroughly critical.  It builds nothing but character.

 

 

Affluence of Words: Coming of Age with Elvis Costello

October 29, 2015 By in costello Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Cover art

Oh, I just don’t know where to begin
(“Accidents Will Happen”)

Well, the door swings back and forward from the past into the present
(“Little Palaces”)

He’s the only singer fully to have mastered the come-hither snarl.

I was riding in my friend Tim’s compact car.  We were hurtling from Gallipolis to Cincinnati, Ohio.  We were going to see Elvis Costello.  Tim was a fan, but from a distance.  I’m not sure he ever entirely understood my devotion to Costello’s songs.

He listened to me indulgently through the din of This Year’s Model.  I was trying to explain.  “Other than the words of a few dead philosophers, his words mean more to me than anyone else’s.”

Why did they mean so much to me? Why do they?

I walked into a dorm room during my freshman year of college to find a new friend of mine, Jim, sitting on the far side of his bed with a guitar.  He had a cassette player sitting against the wall and was playing and singing along to a song I had never heard.  He seemed to be singing to the wall.  When he noticed me, I asked about the song.  He looked at me strangely when he told me that it was Elvis Costello.  He could see the name was news to me. I left his room that evening with a bootleg cassette of Imperial Bedroom.  I had no idea quite what to make of it at first.  The music was so different from what I knew.  But then the words began to hit me, like a spray of buckshot.

History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I’m just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
(“Beyond Belief”)

I knew nothing about fashionable hovels, having grown up in a double-wide trailer in rural Appalachia, but I knew something about old conceits and glib replies, and about the intestine turnings of authenticity and inauthenticity.  I could imagine myself an oily slick.  This often feckless, rueful self-monitoring–its dry heave of self-disgust–was mine.  I knew it from the inside.  But it was not just what Costello expressed.  It was also his expression of it.  A complex irony needled through the words. Formal properties of the words themselves (other than rhyme) were being attended to, responded to, marshaled to purpose. Some game I knew and did not know was afoot among the words

I went to college with three disparate musics in my head.  My father’s bluegrass, my church’s acapella hymns and my own small collection of Devo and Gary Numan albums.  The latter was my attempt to find a music of my own, one that distanced itself from the living  human all-too-human qualities of the other two–the murder and regret of bluegrass, the sin and salvation of the hymns.  I wanted to hole up in Gary Numan’s embalmed “Cars”, in a place where I could be stable for days.

I listened to the cassette of Imperial Bedroom over and over, playing one side from beginning to end as I waited for sleep to fall each night.  “Beyond Belief” became the anthem of my freshman year.  It captured my dislocated fears and my feeling that my days were just a passing show, a phenomenalist’s play of welded-together sensations.

I’ve got a feeling
I’m going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing
Now I am beyond belief

The last line exactly captured my own ambiguity, my sense that I was both the subject and the object of a frigid incredulity.

The other songs on the album mapped the failures of domesticity.  The bluegrass of my youth had often enough done the same, but typically the persona presented in those songs sang self-righteously or regretfully, with a cumbersome Cumberland’s sincerity.  Bluegrass can do high and lonesome, but it cannot do irony or alienation.  During that freshman year I was often lonely enough, I guess; but mainly I was struggling with self-alienation.  I didn’t care for my company.  I could do without me.

Tim and I arrived in Cincinnati as the August sunlight stretched and turned golden.  Costello was touring behind Goodbye Cruel World.  My luck was good that night.  Nick Lowe opened for Costello, and Lowe had Paul Carrack with him.  I more or less got to see Nick Lowe and Squeeze (Lowe and Carrack performed “Tempted”) before Costello came on.  Lowe mentioned at one point in his show that it was Costello’s birthday, and he played “The Rose of England” in honor of the occasion.

Other than the words of Costello, the words of my freshman year were the words of dead philosophers, particularly Plato and Plotinus and Schopenhauer and a couple of British Idealists–Bosanquet and Bradley.  Bosanquet and Bradley’s Victorian prose entranced me more perhaps than  their idealism, but I styled myself in those days an expatriated latter-day British absolute idealist.  I read Plato and Plotinus in a divinatory spirit, and read all of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in one unblinking twenty-four hours.  Costello played on as I read on. I was 17–and the world was my will and my representation.

I walked the campus with my head down, lost, genuinely lost, in my thoughts.  The fallen leaves of a Wooster autumn scattered as I walked along.  I nearly ran into a woman.  She scolded me for walking with my head down.  I muttered a line from Proverbs in response:  “Ponder the path of thy feet.”  But the truth is that the words in my head were simply more real to me than my feet or the leaves or the autumn landscape.  Meaning plagued me more than being.  Being was taking care of itself.  Meaning I needed to tend.

Pretty words don’t mean much anymore
I don’t mean to be mean much anymore
All I see are snapshots, big shots, tender spots
mug shots, machine slots
Till you don’t know what’s what
You don’t know what you got
(“Pretty Words”)

Costello’s songs were often slightly deranged lists, efforts to anatomize experience or to bind together its loose ends.  Sometimes the lists were quite mad–sequential but otherwise disunited.  It all fit my moods, sense-making and sense-unmaking in turn, witness to the daily rise and fall of my life.

My love of words drew me to Costello and deepened because of him.  He has left his fingerprints on my verbal imagination.  He is capable, like Lewis Carroll or James Thurber, of making nonsense so delightful that the paucity or mere parody of sense do not matter.  He can write nonsense or semi-sense so moving that it slits you from your guggle to your zatch, from here to here.

You’re sending me tulips mistaken for lilies
You give me your lip after punching me silly
You turned my head till it rolled down the brain drain
II had any sense now I wouldn’t want it back again

New Amsterdam it’s become much too much
Till I have the possession of everything she touches
Till I step on the brake to get out of her clutches
Till I speak double dutch to a real double duchess

Down on the mainspring, listen to the tick tock
Clock all the faces that move in on your block
Twice shy and dog tired because you’ve been bitten
Everything you say now sounds like it was ghost-written
(“New Amsterdam”)

There’s a girl in this dress
There’s always a girl in distress
(“Shabby Doll”)

I fell in love and then got flushed by love during my freshman year.  Costello’s wary love songs–with their obligatory escape hatches or hidden tunnels–matched my skittish paranoia that love stories were cautionary tales.

I won’t walk with my head bowed
Beyond caution where lovers walk
Your love walks where three’s a crowd
Beyond caution where lovers walk

Lovers walk, lovers scramble
Beyond caution where lovers walk
Lovers step, shuffle and gamble
Beyond caution where lovers walk
(“Lovers Walk”)

My father played bluegrass.  Back in the 50’s, he cut classes for most of a term at Marshall University and practiced the mandolin.  He had heard that Eck Gibson and the Mountaineer Ramblers, a local group of some acclaim, planned to head to the studio but without a mandolin player. My father, never ordinarily one for rash acts, showed up at the studio the day that the group was scheduled to begin recording.  Dad talked his way into an audition and got the gig.

My father did not talk much.  At home, when it was too dark to work, he picked up his guitar or his mandolin and played.  I can hardly remember him in doors without an instrument in his hands.  As a small boy, I spent many weekends at the homes of other bluegrass players, usually the lone child in the house, nursing a warming Pepsi and listening.  I listened a lot.  I still have a head full of bluegrass songs, songs of loneliness and homesickness and failed farms and love gone wrong, songs of dying  little girls and dreadful snakes.  I don’t know how much of it I understood at first but I began to understand it, and to understand something of the darker corners of the adult world.

I can no longer remember the list of songs Costello played that August night.  Many of the songs on Goodbye but others too; I was especially eager for songs off Get Happy! and Trust.  I had spent long hours listening to both and wondering about the cover photo on the latter.  That above-his-sunglasses glance away came to seem essential to the music to me.  I coveted the indirection of the music.  I wanted to be told things in ways somehow consistent with my finding them out for myself. Costello’s lyrics obliged.

The sun set before the show reached its finale.  Costello came out and played a few songs by himself.  The band rejoined him, played another few songs and then they finished.  The stage lights went down and we drove home in the dark.

The hymns that stuck with me most were hymns whose lyrics were by Isaac Watts. I especially loved his “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”.  I had no way of knowing it as a child, when the song first took up lodging in my memory, but the song is a full-on spiritual exercise.  So too are many of Costello’s songs.  (Perhaps this is a vestige of his Catholic upbringing?)  They require that we adopt, in a way resembling Costello’s own adoption of it, the persona of the song.  We are then shown the persona, often shown its tragedy, and shown it as caused by various of the character flaws of the persona.

Consider this a negative spiritual exercise; it works through a bad, not a good example.  (“No man is good for nothing; he can always serve as a bad example.”   –Someone should explore the similarities between Costello and Nestroy.)  The songs alert you to your own flaws or beginnings of flaws to the extent that you find the persona a good fit.  Costello’s goal, I take it, is to implicate us in the world of such a persona, and to ask us if that is where, who we want to be.

The irony–sometimes transmuting into satire–in Costello’s songs is his way of flinging himself against the world without posturing.  It is a function of his desire for the world to be good and his conviction that it is bad, and that he, too, would be good but is often bad.  His unwillingness to acquiesce to that badness, even if it takes the relatively innocuous form of conformity or of spiritless drudging, drives the music.  But his awareness of himself and of his own flaws and conformity and drudging forbid self-righteousness.

I wouldn’t see Costello live  again for another 15 years or so.  The next time I saw him with my wife in Atlanta, Georgia.  I had grown up (some).  He had grown older.  But the words were still there, his and mine. When talking to my grad school teacher, Lewis White Beck, I once attributed (rightly) a distinction to the philosopher, C. I. Lewis.  I called it “Lewis’ distinction”.  Beck chided me.  “Kelly, we are friends, but you should not refer to me by my first name in a paper.”  I explained that I hadn’t; I had referred to C. I. Lewis and not Lewis White Beck.  Beck looked down, embarrassed.  Then, brightening, he looked up and said:  “I have been using that distinction for so long I thought it was mine.”  By the time I saw Costello for a second time, I had been using his words for so long I thought they were mine.

There’s a hand on a wire that leads to my mouth
I can hear you knocking but I’m not coming out
Don’t want to be a puppet or a ventriloquist
‘Cause there’s no ventilation on a critical list
Fingers creeping up my spine are not mine to resist
Strict time

Toughen up, toughen up
Keep your lip buttoned up
Strict time
(“Strict Time”)

Puzzled and perplexed by a failed love and by my failure at philosophy, I dropped out of school at the end of my freshman year.  I packed my philosophy books in boxes and took them home, putting them in an empty corner of Dad’s tool shed.  Months would pass before I reopened those boxes, tearing away scabs.  But Get Happy! was in my tape deck all the while.

But he’s not the man you’d think that he can be
I don’t know why you can’t see
That he is only the imposter
That he is only the imposter

When I said that I was lying
I might have been lying
Never let me hear you say
You’re not trying, no, no
(“The Imposter”)

John Wisdom, Other Minds I (Part 1): Reasons and Causes–Philosophical Criticism

May 27, 2015 By in criticism, john wisdom Tags: , , 1 Comment

Near the beginning of “Other Minds I”, Wisdom makes a distinction between two sources of doubt about other people’s states of mind.  I will not now take up that distinction; I will come back to it soon.  Wisdom notes that his attention was drawn to the need to make the distinction by Wittgenstein.  And Wisdom takes this mention of Wittgenstein’s name as an opportunity to say something about his debt to Wittgenstein:

How much in this paper is due to Wittgenstein will be appreciated only by people who have listened to him.  My debt to him is enormous and is no means to be measured by the few places where I happen to mention that such and such a point come from him or put a W. against an example of his.  At the same time I do not think my way of doing things would quite meet with his approval–it’s not sufficiently hard working–a bit cheap and flash.

I make no apology for mentioning this sort of point.  For this is the sort of criticism of philosophical work which I find appropriate.  Those who deplore so ‘personal’ an attitude and say, “Who cares whether so and so likes what is said, wheat we want to know is whether it is true”, emphasise the objectivity of philosophy to the point of turning it into a science.  I remember with what relish I once heard McTaggert say in a discussion, “What we want to know is not why he said it but what reason he had for saying it”, But I didn’t then realise how near to reasons are some causes which aren’t reasons and how beside the point are many reasons.

I want to spend some time thinking about Wisdom’s sort of philosophical criticism.  I will begin doing so tomorrow or Friday.

Lewis Carroll’s Purification

October 18, 2013 By in Philosophy, religion, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Lewis Carroll’s private journal, 7 January 1856:

Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

“Thoreau: Child of the Mist”–Ed Mooney Speaks at Auburn

September 30, 2013 By in thoreau Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Anyone who would like to hear the talk, follow the link.  Both the talk and the discussion session are recorded.

Browning and Kierkegaard on Oblique or Indirect Communication

August 24, 2013 By in Browning, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, poetry, religion Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Browning from near the end of The Ring and the Book:

…learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
How look a brother in the face and say,
“Thy right is wrong, eyes has thou yet art blind;
Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length:
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”
Say this as silvery as tongue can troll–
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him
Are not so bad to bear–but here’s the plague
That all this trouble comes of telling truth.
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,
Nor recognizable by whom it left;
While falsehood would have done the work of truth.
But Art, –where in man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind, –Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall, —
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever e’en Beethoven dived,–
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

And now some of Kierkegaard, from The Point of View:

No, an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed.  If it is an illusion that all are Christians–and if there is anything to be done about it, it must be done indirectly, not by one who vociferously proclaims himself an extraordinary Christian, but by one who, better instructed, is ready to declare that he is not a Christian at all.  That is, one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion.  Instead of wishing to have the advantage of being oneself that rare thing, a Christian, one must let the prospective captive enjoy the advantage of being the Christian, and for one’s own part have resignation enough to be the one who is far behind him–otherwise one will certainly not get the man out of his illusion.

Supposing then that a religious writer has become profoundly attentive to this illusion, Christendom, and has resolved to attack it which all the might at his disposal (with God’s aid, be it noted)–what then is he to do.  First and foremost, no impatience.  If he because impatient, he will rush headlong against it and accomplish nothing.  A direct attack only strengthens the person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him.  There is nothing which requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it.  If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost.  And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately.  This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws (for love is always shy), so as not to witness the admission which he makes to himself alone before God–that he has lived under an illusion.

The religious writer must, therefore, first get into touch with men.  That is, he must begin with aesthetic achievement.  This is earnest-money.  The more brilliant the achievement, the better for him…Therefore, he must have everything in readiness, though without impatience, with a view to bringing forward the religious promptly, as soon as he perceives that he has his readers with him, so that with the momentum gained by devotion to the aesthetic they rush headlong into contact with the religious.

Comments to come.

Browning’s Influence on Philosophers

August 8, 2013 By in Browning, Philosophy, poetry, writing Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

A bit of a side-step here.  I want to write about Browning and Kierkegaard, but I thought I would first mention something about Browning I find of interest.  Browning decisively influenced the thinking of a number of philosophers.  Let me mention two–Josiah Royce and William Temple.

Now of course Temple is not known as a philosopher; he is known as Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-44).  But Temple was trained as a philosopher and wrote philosophy (some I have previously mentioned on the blog).  Browning’s work was never far from Temple’s mind.  Proof of this is the stamp that Browning’s “A Death in the Desert” had on Temple’s understanding of the Gospel of John, itself the primary object of and impetus for Temple’s reflections throughout his life.

Browning was also, and perhaps more surprisingly, a constant stimulus to Royce.  Royce, so far as I know, mentions Browning far less often than does Temple, but he was perhaps as deeply indebted.  (Royce’s style, unlike Temple’s, makes little room for the direct use of poetry.  It is not that Royce’s style is wholly unliterary–it is not–but rather that it lacks the open texture of Temple’s.)  Certainly, prolonged contact with Royce’s works on Christianity reveals Browning there, supplying much of substance and almost all of the atmosphere.

I make this side-step really just so that I can underscore something about Browning’s poetry that engrosses me–it’s potential to be taken up into prose reflections, to supply something like theses or claims, remaining all the while, and unmistakably, poetry.

Critics sometimes seize this potential of Browning’s poetry and use it like a stick to beat him, presumably thinking that poetry that is so available to philosophy must have somehow or other (form not inseparable from content?) failed as poetry.  But I think that no one can deny that Browning is a poet unless that denial is theory-driven–specifically driven by a theory that has nourished itself on a one-sided diet of examples.

PI’s Opening Remark

June 26, 2013 By in education, history of ordinary language philosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 8 Comments

The final paragraph of a paper I am now finishing:

Wittgenstein puts away the common notions that a book, particularly a book of philosophy, should open either by presenting its undeniable first premise or by defining its terms or by telling you what is coming. He does nothing of the sort. He begins instead with a quotation from St. Augustine. That quotation serves as a blessing from St. Augustine, who Wittgenstein venerated; as an example of authority or the lack of it in philosophy, or at least of its nature and its acknowledgment or denial; as a reminder of the way in which philosophy can shape even what seem relatively unremarkable remarks, as if philosophy were always stealing a march on us, out ahead of and so determining what we have it in us to think or to say; as a critical target, carrying with it a germ, a contagion, a communicable if not wholly communicated picture of communication; as a lexicon-in-use, a first glimpse of a use (or attempt at a use) of the words whose use (and non-use) will preoccupy the pages of PI; as invoking connections between philosophy and childhood and education, of the ways in which philosophy is now accessible, now inaccessible to childhood, and of the ways in which childhood is now accessible, now inaccessible to philosophy (what makes more merry or kills more joy than childhood, than philosophy?), and of the ways in which philosophy requires us to learn how to learn and how not to learn and how to unlearn what there is to learn or what we have learnt. But of course not all of that can be clear on a first reading of the first remark. Which means, I take it, that the remark has not been read until it has been double-read, until it can be read in relation to the rest of the book and the rest of the book in relation to it. As I said, PI begins but has no beginning, ends but has no ending. When we open it at the first page and we confront its first remark, we are confronting the whole of PI, not just one remark. We may make PI’s acquaintance one remark at a time, but we do not come to understand it that way. In for a dime, in for a dollar–the book makes no small change.