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Emerson’s Incarnational Method

October 13, 2011 By in Emerson, Montaigne Tags: , , 3 Comments

Right at the beginning of his essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes:

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and on the other to morals.  The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these sides, to find the other.

I take this to be a method–Emerson’s method.  For us, raised as we have been to believe that there is a gulf fixed between sensation and morals, the method is hard to imagine.  To play the game one way, finding the morals in sensation, seems romantic.  To play the other way, finding the sensation in morals, seems crass.  And anyway, what exactly is Emerson saying?  Facts have sides?  They can be rotated, reoriented, so that the apparent side changes?

I am not really going to answer these questions.  Instead, I want the asking of them to provide the occasion for saying this:  Emerson writes scripture.  As he says in his essay on Goethe, “we too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.”  This is a close to a skeleton key to Emerson as I know.  The broad outlines of Emerson’s work become clear when we reflect on it.  Christian dogma treats Jesus, the God-Man, as the one who unites the heavens and the earthly world.  Emerson will dispense with the dogma but without dispensing with its structure:  the heavens do need to be united to the earthly world.  Jesus was taken to have done that in fact, ontologically, we might say.  But for Emerson Jesus is a man, merely a man.  Jesus, like Montaigne and Goethe, is a representative man, the greatest of representative men.  Still, a mere man.  For Emerson the Incarnation–the uniting of the heavens to the earthly world–is not something that has been done.  It is something that must needs be done.  Incarnation, for Emerson, is not so much a fact or a point of departure; it is more a conquest and a goal.  He writes toward it.  He writes his Bible.

Emerson urges his readers to unite the heavens and the earthly world in themselves; he asks his readers to become Incarnations.  Well, that is not quite right:  he reminds his readers that they are always already Incarnating, becoming more fully Incarnations than they are; his readers are to strive toward an ever more perfect unity of the heavens and the earthly world in themselves.  The heavens and the earthly world need to more fully interpenetrate one another.  The centerpiece of Emerson’s understanding of human greatness–this is it.  Over and over Emerson reminds and urges his readers:  Incarnate yourselves!

For Emerson, each human being is and is called to Incarnation.  Emerson begs us to hear and heed that call.  Because we are Incarnations we can hear it.  Because we can become more fully Incarnations we must heed it.

Emerson’s line about facts is an Incarnational method, a reminder that the good gamester of thought always understands each fact in relation to the heavens and the earthly world, and always works to reveal one when the other threatens to eclipse it.  To fail in the method is either to become a Docetist or an Ebionite about yourself, about everything, it is to leave your task of uniting the heavens and the earthly world undone.

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.

Chump Change: a Thought on TLP 1

October 5, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , 3 Comments

(Handout.)

What should we say of TLP 1, what should we do with it?  We could note, I guess, that it plays an interesting role in a song by New Pornographers, Chump Change.  But that’s scarce help.

One odd feature of 1 is its Eliotic dual-aspect as Bang-Whimper (of course this at the beginning, not, as Eliot’s was, at the end).

Bang:  The world is everything that is the case!  Whoa!  Who woulda thunk it?  Everything, everydamnthing!  The world, man, the whole frickin’ world!  This must be the near end of a gargantuan Metaphysical Buffet!  Upcoming dishes:  God, The Soul, …Who Knows?  I can’t stand the suspense.  What next?

Whimper:  The world is everything that is the case…  Well, yeah.  What else would it be?  “Everything that is the case.”  Less exciting even than the Times’ “All the news that is fit to print”.  The world is–the world.  Whoopee…  Wake me at 1.1.

Why begin with a proposition that is somehow both thunderclap and cricket’s chirp, new news and old hat?

It is incredibly tempting to read TLP as follows:  The 1’s tell us What There Is.  The 2’s and 3’s tell us How Language Hooks onto What There Is.  The Bang aspect rules on this reading.  But is there another reading, one that perhaps allows the Whimper aspect to rule?  And if there is, what would we make of it, and of the 1’s, 2’s and 3’s?

Some Underdeveloped Thoughts on Montaigne’s Style

September 27, 2011 By in Montaigne, skepticism, writing Tags: , , , 5 Comments

What should be said about the way Montaigne writes?  He writes essays–as he says, if his mind could gain a firm footing, he would not make essays, he would make decisions, but his mind is always in apprenticeship and on trial.  On apprenticeship and on trial:  what Montaigne says of his mind I apply to his words.  His words are on apprenticeship and on trial.  His words are apprenticed to his subject, they are on trial by their use.  The question is:  will this word do?  Do what it needs to do, stand the test it must stand, carry the burden it must carry.  Above all, his words must portray passing, not being.  They must be capable of illumining the moment of obligation in experience, where ‘moment’ means both a brief period of time and an important point in a course of development.  But they must be able to do so in a way that does not make of the moment of obligation anything that steps free of the experience, that steps free of time.  Even the moment of obligation in experience passes.  So his words must be chosen in such a way that they do not arrest time or run from it.

One of the deepest peculiarities of Montaigne’s essays is that they too pass in time, in his time and in the reader’s time.  Consider the way in which most essays are organized spatially and not temporally, even where on occasion their logico-rhetorical form is temporal.  Most essays are written in such a way that the entire essay is to be understood as ultimately present to the reader’s mind all at once, in a timeless present, as it were.  The introduction to the essay is not earlier than the body, or the body earlier than the conclusion; no, the introduction is above the body, which in turn is above the conclusion.  Although it may take the reader time to work from top to bottom, all the parts of the essay are compresent, and understanding it means coming to hold all its parts together in compresence, in what Augustine might have called the present of the present, available to one contemporary summary observation.  But Montaigne’s essays pass.  The introduction become the past of the body which becomes the past of the conclusion.  Each part jettisons the earlier part, takes its place in the present.  The essay is thus not available to observation, but instead to memory, where it is still not present all at once, but rather passes in review.

Now I should say that I am not venturing into the metaphysics of composition or of reading here.  Instead I am picturing two different processes and two different understandings of composition and reading.  The crucial idea is that the parts of Montaigne’s essays replace each other, they do not exist together with the other parts.  That does not mean that the earlier parts do not bear on the later, but rather that they bear on the later parts in a different way.  Montaigne changes as he writes the essay.  Sometimes he intends to change; sometimes he just does.  And the moment of obligation in his experience changes too.  So what he writes now may not agree or harmonize with what he wrote earlier.  But since what he is presently writing supplants what he wrote earlier, he sees no reason to treat the disagreement as vitiating the essay.  The essay may contradict or be in tension with itself but it does not contradict and is not in tension with the truth.  The conclusion of his essay concludes the essay but it is not a conclusion in the logical sense.  The essay starts and ends but its beginning is not a function of its ending in any argumentative sense, although the beginning and the ending are thematically united, united by subject.

The essay I have been leaning on as I have written this is Montaigne’s “Of Repentance”.  I have been leaning particularly on its opening paragraphs.  That essay’s title provides a way of focusing what I have been struggling to say.  Montaigne’s words are always in apprenticeship and trial.  Because of this, Montaigne writes so as not to have to repent for his essays:  He does not teach, he tells. He tells us what he sees as he sees it.  What Montaigne tells now may contradict what he told earlier, or at any rate may not chime perfectly with it, but what he tells now never contradicts him–he remains always in creative fidelity to himself.  He also remains in creative fidelity to the relevant moment of obligation in experience.  But he does not worry about remaining in creative fidelity with what he has already told; that is, in an important sense, gone.  He did his best with it as he does with what he is telling, but he is no longer responsible to it.

Spending time trying to unify a Montaigne essay wastes time.  If an essay is out of agreement with itself, then it is.  There is no deeper unity.  But that does not mean that each essay is out of agreement with itself.  It may be that the later parts of the essay are such that, although they do not follow from the earlier, they follow the earlier, in the sense that they progressively enrich and deepen the creative fidelity of Montaigne’s treatment of himself and of his subject.

Now the lines of my painting do not go astray, though they change and vary.  The world is but a perennial movement.  All things in it are in constant motion–the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt–both with the common motion and with their own.  Stability itself is nothing more than a languid motion.