Tag Archives: philosophy

“Color is its own Reward”

March 3, 2012 By in Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

–or so sang Croweded House.  The department here at AU is hosting a conference, “Color and Philosophy”.  Today is the second and final day.

Wittgenstein writes that “colors spur us to philosophize”.  That seems right.  I reckon it is, in part, because colors are strangely phenomenologically mobile.  They seem to move from being ‘in’ us to ‘out there’ and back again.  They seem now existentially dependent upon me, and now existentially dependent upon the object they color; now wholly intimate with me, now wholly indifferent to me.  How can something be such that what it is–say, what it is essentially–is revealed completely even to a more or less casual glance (how can color be, to use Johnston’s term, “revelatory”) and still be something that I know only as a perceiver, as receptive?  Is color that, well, shallow?  And if it is, how can something so shallow, even infinitely shallow, find a place among the deep dark densities of the outer world?

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Marcel)

December 16, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Philosophy, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

My post on combative clarity (immediately below) was in part, and roundaboutly, a reaction to a point made in the closing sections of Marcel’s Introduction to The Mystery of Being.  He summarizes the point so:  Philosophical research is “research wherein the link with the result cannot be broken without loss of all reality to the result.”

I want to attend again to that Introduction.  It ends in a way particularly appropriate to the Nativity season.  Marcel mentions the notion of good will found in the Gospels, and goes on:

It would be folly to seek to disguise the fact that in our own day the notion of ‘the man of good will’ has lost much of its old richness of content, one might even say of its old harmonic reverberations.  But there is not any notion that is more in need of reinstatement in our modern world.  Let the Gospel formula mean “Peace to men of good will” or “Peace through men of good will,” as one might be often tempted to think it did, in either case it affirms the existence of a necessary connection between good will and peace, and that necessary connection cannot be too much underlined.  Perhaps it is only in peace or, what amounts to the same thing, in conditions which permit peace to be assured, that it is possible to find that content in the will which allows us to describe it as specifically a good will.  ‘Content’, however, is not quite the word I want here.  I think rather that the goodness is a matter of a certain way of asserting the will, and on the other hand everything leads us to believe that a will which, in asserting itself, contributes towards war, whether war in men’s hearts or what we would call ‘real war’, must be regarded as intrinsically evil.  We can speak then of men of good will or peacemakers, indifferently.

A philosophy of peace, a weapon of peace–that is Marcel’s thinking.  Marcel writes philosophy so as to seek peace and ensue it.  –There are less noble motives.

A Few ?s on Climacus

October 27, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, reading Tags: , , 2 Comments

The relationship between Climacus’ Fragments and Postscript is unsurprisingly surprising and complex.  For example, Climacus treats Part One of Postscript as the proper (promised) sequel to Fragments, while he treats Part Two as “a renewed attempt on the same lines” but not as the proper sequel.  I suppose this must be one reason why the speculative side of the objective problem (in Part One) is treated in such a brief, comparatively off-hand manner–it had really been done already in Fragments.  The historical side is what was not done there.  Right?

The argument for the ignoratio elenchi of historical inquiry into Holy Scripture (to help or hurt belief in faith) puzzles  me.  The general form of the argument is perfectly clear:  Assume that historical inquiry has culminated in a set of the happiest results any theologian could wish.  Still, that assumption does not aid the believer in faith.  Assume that historical inquiry has culminated in a set of the unhappiest results any theologian could have dreaded.  Still, that assumption does not harm the believer in faith.  The believer is untouched by either assumption since only if he were an unbelieving believer (in other words, someone who has turned Christianity into something objective) would he be bolstered by or vulnerable to these assumptions about objective results.  Conclusion:  historical inquiry into Holy Scripture is beside the point for the believer in faith; it can neither aid nor harm the believer in faith.  But here’s a question about the detail of the argument.  How far into the content of Holy Scripture do the assumptions penetrate?  The happy results supposed to be of this sort: These books and no others belong to the canon; these books are authentic; these books are complete; the authors of these books are trustworthy; these books are logically consistent.  The unhappy results are the denials of the happy results.  So–is the following among the happy results?

Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

Or is the result supposed to be like this?

A  trustworthy author wrote, in an authentic, integral, and canonical book that Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast.

I take this last to be such that it is not supposed to allow the detachment of ‘Jesus turned water into wine’ from it.  (The prefix is not like ‘It is true that’.)  –Maybe another way of putting my worry is to ask just about the trustworthy happy-result:  If the authors are trustworthy, does that mean that they are accurately reporting events or does it mean that they are sincerely reporting them?  The first putative happy result looks like something that would be believed in faith; the second not.  I lean toward the second.  –One other reason this is so tricky is that the first putative happy result looks like it is open to an objective/subjective ambiguity; it can be believed in faith or objectively believed (or so it seems to me).  But if that is true, why can’t the first putative happy result be an actual happy result, assuming it is objectively believed (as it would be, given that it is to be an objective result)?  Gah.  Help.  (Thanks to my students, Greg and Megan, for pushing me on this worry.)

Wittgenstein on Doing Philosophy: Stop or Go?

October 11, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 8 Comments

Yesterday, I had a useful conversation with my friend and former student, Andy Bass.  He described how strongly Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about philosophy struck him and how much they worried him.  Given what Wittgenstein says, why persist in philosophy?  Why not find something else to do?

It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s critical remarks generally should be thought of in this way:  (1) Much of what he says is about Philosophy-as-Other, i.e., philosophy not as he does it but as it is all-too-often done.  (2) Wittgenstein deliberately employs a deflationary rhetoric about the way he does philosophy.

(1) When Wittgenstein is talking about Philosophy-as-Other, he wants to highlight especially the false enchantments of traditional philosophy–highlighting such is important, as Auden notes, because it is a mark of a false enchantment that it “can all too easily last a lifetime”.  Austin provides a nice way of characterizing this false enchantment–the self-image of the philosopher as “a specialist in the sui generis”.

(2) Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric about he way he does philosophy is aimed primarily at himself, I believe, at his vanity and his tendency to high hat.  Wittgenstein’s way of being in philosophy, deeply personal, ascetic, purified, made it easy for him to treat his way of doing philosophy as something special, too special.  He needed to constantly warn himself against that.  But the rhetoric is aimed secondarily at others.  Wittgenstein did not want his way of doing philosophy to falsely enchant.  He knew that it could enchant, and he wanted it to enchant truly, where the mark of true enchantment, as Auden notes, is that it “fades in time.”  Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric is a warning to others against false enchantment, and a warning against the future fading of its true enchantment.  He knew that eventually the enchantment would go and that we would need then to “walk alone in faith”, as Auden puts it–walking alone in faith without either denying the promise of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, treating its promises as deceptions, or trying to recover its promise by distorting it into something else, something it is not (a form of naturalism, a closeted metaphysics).  No:  we must take up our fly-bottles and follow the path alone.

Emerson Finds Montaigne

October 6, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne, reading, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

…[S]ince the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne my be unduly great, I will, under the shield of the prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a world or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the essays remained to me from my father’ library, when a boy.  It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes.  I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.  It seemed to me as if I myself had written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.  It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.”  Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his château, still standing…and, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there.

“I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it.”  My life has been punctuated by books:  Plato, in high school; Plotinus and Schopenhauer and Santayana, in college; Kant and Austin, in graduate school; Wittgenstein and Frege, in my first years at Auburn; Marcel and Montaigne, in recent days.  Who knows what book will speak to him?  Or when?  But some books do speak so sincerely to our thought and experience that we cannot help but believe those books written by us–for how else could they have so undeniably been written for us?

Often when we read, the book says to us, “Your concern is not mine.  My hour has not yet come.”  But then, later, the book’s hour does come, and it reveals itself on time:  emerging from a pile of books knocked over in the corner of the study; called forth by some phrase in another book; mentioned repeatedly in conversation:  and then we read, we drink deep; the good wine was kept until now.  I simply cannot say with what delight and wonder I read Philosophical Investigations when I found I could read it, when its hour had come.  The thrill of the Preface to Foundations of Arithmetic had me running, more or less, up and down the department hallway, trying to get anyone whose office door was open to listen to me as I read passages from it aloud.  When I read Frege’s Three Principles, I had the feeling of great doors flung open suddenly–something I desperately wanted to understand was opened to me, even if it was not yet mine.  I think too of littler things:  the comic marvel of Austin’s footnotes; the incisive charm of Sellars’ occasional metaphilosophical pronouncements (“The landscape of philosophy is not only not a desert, it is not even a flatland”); and so on.  The many and varied pleasures of philosophical reading.

Emerson lived with Montaigne’s essays.  He did not just read them.  Our lives are read within our favorite books; the books are not read within our lives.  The covers of our favorite books enclose us.  Our lives are bound by our reading.

Socrates, Kierkegaard and The Realistic Spirit? (David Swenson)

October 4, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Socrates Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Our time has experienced a reaction from the intellectually aristocratic unreality of the post-Kantian idealists, which has thrown us into the arms of the plebeian unreality of the naturalistic philosophers, whose sense of reality is satisfied by the massive, the extensive, the numerical, the quantitative; and thus we have merely exchanged one abstraction for another. But just as in ancient times the career of Socrates furnished perhaps the best commentary upon what a sense for reality means, so in modern times the life and thought of Kierkegaard offer an illuminating commentary upon the philosophy of the real, or upon realism in philosophy.

Bringing Philosophy Peace?

September 17, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Self-knowledge, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, peace.  When we encounter this aim in PI, it is easy to believe that what he wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, is knowledge.  And of course there is something right about that, especially if we modulate the claim to one about self-knowledge.  (After all, Wittgenstein cares particularly about the philosophical questions that bring philosophy itself into question, questions that bring the philosopher-in-us-all himself into question.)  Crucially, however, self-ignorance involves alienation from ourselves more than it involves any failure of introspective acuity.  And so acquiring the peace of self-knowledge is less learning something about ourselves than it is acknowledging something about ourselves.  (Self-knowledge is typically bitter for good reason.)

So the peace Wittgenstein wants to bring is the peace of self-knowledge; we might even call it the peace of faith.  But faith in what?

Before answering, I want to help myself to an idea of Marcel’s.  Marcel talks about faith, about fundamentally pledging oneself, as reaching so deeply into the person pledged that it affects not only what the person has, but who the person is.  His term for this, the idea I want, is existential index.  When person’s belief has an existential index, ‘(e)’, the belief absorbs fully the powers of the person’s being.  For Marcel, beliefs(e) are incompatible with pretension:  A person who believes(e) is humbled by that in which he believes(e).

And now I want to say something that I know sounds paradoxical.  Wittgenstein wants to bring the philosopher-in-us-all to belief(e) in himself, so that he is no longer tormented by questions that bring himself into question.  But this will be a belief(e) in himself–a rallying to himself, to borrow another idea of Marcel’s–that involves no pretension.  In fact, it will be a form of humility, a form of true love of himself.  He will have faith in himself, but a faith that acknowledges his own nothingness.  This is a faith that allows the philosopher to be filled with the spirit of truth (although not, notice, with the truth); it is a faith that allows him to be light seeking for light.  Such humility does not protect the philosopher-in-us-all against error.  It does protect him against depending on himself.

When the philosopher-in-us-all is tormented by questions that bring himself into question, his has fallen prey to self-dependence.  He has lost his sense of his own thinking as a creative receptivity, a dependent initiative.  He believes he has to be responsible for himself, that he has to support every response to a question by responding to questions about that question.  To believe that is to fall into the predicament of being unable to make philosophical problems disappear.  Pretension on the part of the philosopher-in-us-all guarantees the appearance of the philosophical problems.  Pretension is a lack of faith, the surety of peacelessness.

(Probably a bad idea to try to write about such things when it is so late and I am so tired.)

The Form of a Philosophical Problem

September 15, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein comments that a philosophical problem has the form:  “I don’t know my way about.”  –So much in so little.

But I want now only to say this.  To feel the force of Wittgenstein’s comment, keep in mind that Wittgenstein is not lost in terra incognita; he is no stranger in a strange land.  He is lost at home.  He has to find himself, but to find himself where he is, where he has always been.  Everything around him is so alien and so familiar, so exotic and so everyday.  He is gone but he never left.

Sometimes the hallway to my living room becomes non-negotiable.  A philosophical problem has the form of homesickness in my easy chair.

A Smiling Philosophy (Santayana)

August 27, 2011 By in meta-blog, Metaphilosophy Tags: , , Leave a comment

Here is one more system of philosophy.  If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system…differs widely in spirit and pretensions from what usually goes by that name.  In the first place, my system is not mine, nor new.  I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.  There are convictions in the depth of his soul, beneath all his overt parrot beliefs, on which I would build our friendship.  I have a great respect for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere.  I think that common sense, in a rough and dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole.  I am animated by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind:  they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded.  What novelty my version of things may possess is meant simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form.  I do not pretend to place myself at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its periphery.  I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more extensive and complex.  I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life;  I should not be honest otherwise.  I accept the same miraculous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.

I can still remember the profound jolt this passage was to me during my sophomore year of college.  I had somehow embarked on a course of Santayana reading, and even found a professor to aid me (Troy Organ, blessed man!).  I promptly memorized the passage, and although I have forgotten much of it over the years, its brilliant pastiche of Luther’s “Here I stand.  I can do no other”—“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life;  I should not be honest otherwise”–I have never forgotten.  (Indeed, one of the singular moments of my recent life is connected with it.  I was standing outside the Harvard Faculty Club, talking with Sean Kelly, and I quoted the line.  It struck my ear strangely, I guess because I realized I was likely standing where Santayana himself had sometimes stood.)  I still don’t know what I make of the contents of the book this passage prefaces–Scepticism and Animal Faith–but I have tried to think in creative fidelity to the passage.  Anyway, the passage bore itself in on me as a compendium of some recent themes on the blog.

Essence and Grammar (and Definition)

August 20, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

Reshef Agam-Segal has asked about the difference between Socrates’ desire for a definition and Wittgenstein’s for grammar.  The two desires meet or can seem to meet in the word ‘essence’.  Socrates wants to know, say, the essence of piety.  Wittgenstein wants to know the grammar of piety (“theology as grammar”); and, according to Wittgenstein, “essence is expressed by grammar”.  So each chases essence.

What Socrates chases is familiar enough (at least as standardly interpreted).  What Wittgenstein chases is not so familiar. To succeed in construing the grammar of piety would be to express the essence of piety.  The grammar of piety would be construed in an a series of grammatical remarks. But the series of grammatical remarks does not tell us the essence of piety.  Rather, the series of remarks expresses the essence of piety.  ‘Express’ in “essence is expressed by grammar” works intransitively.  That is, what grammar expresses is not something that we can tell, can say. If you like, what grammar expresses is inexpressible. (Moving, in that sentence, from the intransitive to transitive.)

We are here at one of those anti-type spots in PI–of which, of course, TLP contains the type.  We are in the ambit of showing/saying, as indeed in Wittgenstein we always already are.  But, as my typological talk is meant to suggest, what we have in PI is something foreshadowed in TLP; but what we have in PI is not what we have in TLP.  Getting the differences straight is more than I can do; I will though do what I can.  Perhaps the best place to start is with a glaring absence in PI:  the absence of the symbolism.  The symbolism glyphs the pages of TLP.  It wards those pages.  Without a real, active and sympathetic inwardness with the symbolism, TLP is a closed book.  (Anyone who has attempted to teach the book to undergraduates will know this.)  But the symbolism is almost nowhere to be seen in PI.  What does that mean?  And what does it mean for showing/saying in PI?  [Pause here to light pipe.]

One thing it means, I reckon, is that showing or expressing is now something done by means of ordinary sentences, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  The crucial issue in PI is the issue of our relationship to those sentences, to those phenomena.  A sentence is a grammatical remark not in and of itself–noumenally, as it were–but rather because of our orientation upon it.  The possibility of the orientation that makes a sentence a grammatical remark, and so one that expresses or contributes to the expression of essence, results from our being in the grip of a philosophical problem.  The problems provide the light, we might say, in which a sentence can shine forth as grammatical, as essence-expression. Without the problem, the sentence is, well, just a sentence.  Philosophy is a battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  But the language is only a weapon in that battle–a weapon of peace, ultimately, to be sure–if we orient on it in a way made possible by a philosophical problem.

This makes philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s way both easier and harder.  It is easier in that we need no special magical weapon, no Excalibur, no symbolism, to do what needs doing in philosophy.  It is harder because the weapons we have can always appear to be no weapons at all, to be valueless in the fight.  (“So?  That’s just more words.”)  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem makes the necessary orientation possible, but it does not make it automatic.  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem can also make the necessary orientation look only like so much rigmarole, like a willful way of losing track of what really matters in responding to the problem. Losing our way among words can lead us further afield, but it can also allow words to lead us home in a way that they ordinarily do not.  “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”  [Pipe dies; re-light.]

Having written all this, I am aware that I have still not answered Reshef’s question.  But I hope this opens the way to answering his question.  And I hope to get back to his question again soon.  (Thanks to D. for a recent useful conversation about these topics.)