Philosophy KTL

Basic Action

2011-07-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

I happened to read an article on "action theory" this morning. (This has nothing to do with any ill-conceived plan of reading the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy cover to cover in preparation for comprehensive exams.) Apparently, there has been some debate about what constitutes the most basic action. Granted that many actions are done by doing something else which brings it about, there must be some action which is not done by doing anything else. Is a bodily action the most basic, or, since it seems to be possible to perform actions which fall short of bodily change (like trying to move a phantom limb), is there some action called "willing" that precedes and causes bodily action?

Since I'm the kind of guy who jumps right in on a conversation in progress, I'm eager to offer my solution to this problem. But so as not to appear as pompous and obnoxious as I actually am, I will put my first contribution in the form of a sort of puppet show. Let's imagine that two action theorists are sitting in a bar having a vexed back and forth over the question of whether Theorist A lifts his drink by trying to lift his drink, and Theorist B has for some time been trying to prove his point by endeavoring to attempt to lift his own drink without actually doing so, and has just hit on the idea that his very failure to prove his point proves his point. Suddenly, Hegel walks into the bar and, using his world-historical powers of perception, instantly locates the most interesting conversation in the room. (It's the one surrounded by a growing puddle of spilled beer.) Having just been awakened from nearly 180 years of peaceful slumber and thrown into a philosophical illustration, Hegel is groggy and in a somewhat diffident mood, so instead of driving the truth home like a corkscrew into the minds of the Action Theorists, he simply asks why they think it is that trying only ever shows up when it fails.

Action Theorist A thinks he sees the point of this question, and answers, "Well, stranger, that's because 'trying' is just what we call it when a sufficiently motivated action doesn't happen because it turns out to be impossible or at least prevented by the present circumstances."

Hegel has never heard anyone do analytic philosophy before, so he has to think about this for a minute. Absently, he grabs Action Theorist B's beer and gulps it down (what's left of it) while he works the matter over. "Entschuldigung!" he exclaims as he drains the glass and finally notices what he has been doing. "I'm so accustomed to thinking by drinking, I just drank your beer without realizing it."

"There, you see!" both Action Theorists shout at once.

Action Theorist A, shouting B down continues, "The eighteenth-century German dude--"

"Hegel," Hegel introduces himself.

"Hegel--pleased to meet you--Hegel performed a basic action without trying."

Action Theorist B rolls his eyes, "I think what Hegel is trying to say is that just not being conscious of the means by which you do something doesn't mean you aren't really doing it."

"Actually," Hegel interjects, "I was trying to apologize for drinking your beer. But now that you mention it, it is inevitable that the two of you would draw opposite conclusions from the case, because immanent in the abstract form of the action lies a contradiction (ah, yes, now we're talking). On the one hand, it is necessary that the abstract basis of an action (as lifting one's hand is the abstract basis of raising a glass) serve as the region of the action's actualization. On the other hand, it is precisely by cancelling this abstract basis as action that it can serve as such a context for the concrete action."

The Action Theorists stare, confounded. "Well," Hegel says, planting Action Theorist A's glass back on the table and buttoning up his coat, "It's been a pleasure."

Why are you doing that?

2011-01-16T12:43:00.000-08:00

A human being does each thing he does for a purpose. If this statement seems obvious and transparent, that may be because having a purpose is too easily confused with wanting something. Indeed, one commonly finds purpose explicated in terms of wanting. I am doing this because I want that. Such explanations appeal to a mechanistic view of action. The wanting bone connects to the doing bone I guess.

Too many commentators explain the first page of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with an illustration involving a chain of desires, like this one from Christopher Shields, who asks us to imagine that a philosophical friend has asked us why we are buying milk:

If we answer seriously and honestly that we want to buy milk for our morning porridge, and he presses on, wanting to know why we intend to eat porridge in the morning, then we may well answer that we find porridge healthy and delicious, especially with milk, which we may then excuse ourselves to buy. Insensible of our lack of interest, the philosopher may persist, wanting to know why we desire to eat delicious and healthy food. Again, we may respond, that it is because we enjoy delicious food, that eating brings us pleasure, and that we desire health for the obvious reason that health is good—and, lest it be asked, we all desire good things for ourselves. If we have not by now slipped away, we may hear the philosopher posing the same question, earnestly let us allow, ad nauseam, or at least until such time as we say, with exasperation, that we do all these things we do for the sake of happiness.

This sort of account seems cogent. I don't think I could give a more complete justification of milk-buying (except that I don't eat "porridge"). The problem is that it doesn't look anything like Aristotle's illustration of a hierarchy of purposes. The connection between bridle-making and horsemanship has nothing to do with what the bridle-maker wants. It can only be explained in terms of purpose. The purpose of bridle-making is to enable excellence in horsemanship—regardless of whether some individual bridle-maker wants to do so.

This idea of purpose only makes sense in terms of an order that goes beyond the individual. Bridle-making advances the good of a political community, regardless of how it affects the bridle-maker.

But for all that, it is still not clear how a human being can in making a bridle be doing something for a purpose. Sure enough, he is performing an action; sure enough, the action has a purpose, because the bridle is of use, but since this use belongs to the larger community, how can the purpose belong to the individual's action?

What people are saying about philosophy

2011-01-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

Attempted paraphrase of "Perception" section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

2011-01-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

(My reading relies heavily on Pinkard's Sociality of Reason. Yes, I will be happy if I can comprehend a single chapter of a secondary source on Hegel.)

So there are things and properties of things. The properties are what sense-certainty tries to get a hold of in complete independence from any higher order apprehension (that is, in abstraction from perception and everything which contextualizes perception itself). Now, they are perceived not as detached units but as properties of a thing perceived through them. But how does perception get a hold of this thing in which the properties inhere? That is, how can this thing be the object of perception? It is not itself a property, so it does not have the relatedness to a thing which mediates universal properties. Then it is a self-related individual, a one. As such it does not have the properties which would differentiate it from other ones. Thus it is a thing with properties and it is a thing without properties.

The attempt to reconcile this contradiction by way of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities fails because it implies that the thing is not the universal medium of the properties, but rather perception itself is responsible for their unity. The thing itself with its actual properties (primary qualities) on this account must lie beyond the reach of perception. This conclusion is not only epistemologically frustrating but incoherent: there remains nothing for perception to attribute that second set of properties to, even mistakenly. No thing in perception means no thing for perception to be in error about.

The properties which we perceive must be perceived as the properties of the one thing. And only by way of these properties can we perceive the thing as a determinate one differentiated from other ones. These propositions are the product of the experience of sense-certainty, which demonstrated the impossibility of unmediated knowledge of particulars. The perception of the thing as a one which as such has no properties essential to it falls back into the same impossibility, since it would have to know its object in exactly the same way, as a blank, undifferentiated singular thing.

2010-10-13T05:41:00.000-07:00

(hopefully more time for the Platonic geometer tomorrow)

What is the spiritual destiny of a state? This might be the proper way to ask in terms of a phenomenology of spirit how to understand the distinction between state and church. The individual gives himself over to more than one kind of common destiny, so that there are destinies which are not ultimate in the way of the destiny of the church. However, the destiny of an individual fits in with the destiny of the church, but the destiny of a state seems not to fit in so nicely. My American upbringing (read “the manifestation of objective spirit which forms in part (which 'part?') the material for my own self-offering destiny,” if you like) makes it horrible for me to think that a nation might simply have no destiny of its own, might be only a collective tool of individuals — unless such a lack were the determinate self-negation of national destiny itself. On the other hand, the state seems to become something monstrous as soon as it lays claim to destiny. Our own history has involved a gradual abdication from a sense of “manifest destiny” learned perhaps only through the wretched enactments of that perceived destiny. On the other hand, this abdication seems to be nothing peculiar to our history — more of a destiny of the whole Western world. Nevertheless, I find it is beyond me to deny that America is something. If anyone has any idea what, please let me know.

2010-10-05T11:16:00.000-07:00

“For to think does not mean to be an abstract 'I', but an 'I' which has at the same time the significance of intrinsic being, of having itself for object, or of relating itself to objective being in such a way that its significance is the being-for-self of the consciousness for which it is [an object]. For in thinking, the object does not present itself in picture-thoughts but in Notions, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself or intrinsic being, consciousness being immediately aware that this is not anything distinct from itself.”

I think the following is true—whether it's Hegel is another question:

Thinking an object means more than representing it for consciousness. For what can be represented to consciousness is not what can be thought. I can represent a circular thing to myself but I cannot represent a circle. The most I can do is represent something as representative of a circle. But even this "as" does not appear within representation. Only by hypothesizing the circular as the equal distance of points from a center on a plane do I form the concept of the circle. This hypothesis can be drawn through a figure, or better, through the tracing of a figure, and continually depends on the repetition of such a figure, in order to persist as the superseding of this figure. The circular is the determinate nothing constituted by the vanishing of a circular figure.
This concept of circularity is only a model: the discovery of the circular as the vanishing of a figure is not yet thinking, but it is like thinking. It is like thinking in that it supersedes what can be represented and is this superseding. Thinking, however, does not inhere in a mathematical approach to things, but in the disclosure of the thinghood of things through work. The proper object of consciousness shows up not in the light of the indiscriminate overturning of representation, but in the light of the good. At first this light shines in the proximate good which makes the object of work show up as something to be developed. Something that has to be worked into shape presents itself to the worker as resistance: it resists its own being—what it is supposed to be. Abstractly, the thing seems just to be what it is. In the light of the good which shines through work, it shows up as the concept of itself, which is to say that it shows up as really being what the working consciousness, referring to the good, has placed upon it to become. What from the outside seems to be a projection of the working consciousness on its object shows up in this light as the true being of the thing in itself.

2010-10-04T09:15:00.001-07:00

How can an account of the development of consciousness divide itself between two incompatible consciousnesses? The “subservient consciousness” of the bondsman does not have any of the benefit of the developments already conditioning the “independent consciousness” of the lord. It lacks a developed pursuit of recognition, yet it purports to be a result of this development. To be sure, “the action of the [bondsman] is the [lord]'s own action; for what the bondsman does is really the action of the lord.” But the action of the bondsman is what is to become thinking, and at this point doing someone else's action reaches a limit—no one can think for anyone else. On the other hand, it is not the bondsman who encounters this limit of his recognition nor, superseding it, the concomitant vanishing of the one-sidedness of the recognition. Thus, the dialectic seems to allow the lord to have done the thinking of the bondsman.
Perhaps the thinking by which self-consciousness passes from lord to bondsman to develop itself belongs neither to one nor the other. But then, to whom does it belong? The strange drift of the Hegelian wind seems once again to have blown thinking right out of the reach of any one who wanted to accomplish it.

Knottings

2010-10-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Stand by for more Hegel blogging. In the meantime some thoughts on that other threefold circler:

If, as Patrick Boyde has observed, Dante exploits the indeterminate phases of perception to create suspense, then the prelude to Geryon's arrival in Inferno amplifies this effect by disposing the monster's appearance out of the darkness as the expected, yet answer to a sign. When Virgil throws Dante's girdle down into the pit, the disappearance of the cord cuts a path into the darkness, through which Geryon can make his appearance. Dante, indeed, already perceives this possible arrival as a necessity:

"And surely, something strange must here reply,"
I said within myself, "to this strange sign--
the sign my master follows with his eye."

The sign is a cord, "knotted and coiled." It recently had the practical function of girdling Dante's attire, and once the allegorical function of enabling Dante "to catch the leopard with the painted hide." By divesting himself of it, Dante at once divests it of this its double significance--or rather, he testifies to the loss of its allegorical function. The history of the cord runs thus: once, it was an allegory--or a thing waiting to become one, like a coiled snake waiting to strike, its allegorical destiny bound within it; then, its significance waning, the allegorical occasion having escaped it, it became a mere thing, its knots and coils girdling only attire; now, Dante having "loosened it completely," the cord is loosened from its literal function as well. Yet, it remains "knotted and coiled." Around what, and binding what? Nothing, to be sure. But this nothing is a determinate nothing: the loosening of a thing from its literal and allegorical significance. Its meaning is now only this loosening, which it binds. "Strange sign," indeed.

Heapz2Thingz

2010-09-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

A thing is infinite. That is, if it is a thing in truth, and not a heap. A heap, too, can be a thing, of course, and perhaps it is in observing the thinghood of a heap that we can see the infinity of a thing most unquestionably, and venture an essay on the source of the infinity of a thing.

Let there be a heap of laundry accumulating on the floor of a young fellow's dorm room. At first, the fellow's roommate kicks off his socks after getting into bed and pushes them out onto the bare floor. The next morning, the fellow returns from class to find his roommate has finally awoken and dressed, which means his underwear have more or less joined the socks. The fellow figures his roommate will clean up later—too busy playing Halo at the moment; the fellow understands how it is. That night the fellow's roommate deposits his pants, undershirt, t-shirt and cap on top of the socks and underpants, perhaps with the idea of putting the same clothes on in the morning. But overnight the loose collection of articles of clothing has transformed into laundry, and the roommate confirms their expiration as components of a wardrobe by jumping out of the top bunk directly over them.

All is not right now in the room, our fellow discerns as he blearily awakens.

To be continued.

Attempted paraphrase of Phenomenology of Spirit, A.I. "Sense-Certainty"

2010-09-15T08:41:00.001-07:00

The deficiency of sense-certainty is not the lack of a warrant for following it through to a thing-in-itself, but its incapacity to fix certainty on any “this”—neither the “this” which it claims to sense nor the “this” which it is as absolute source of sensation. It cannot even refer to what it supposes itself to have as certain—since in the moment of grasping it, its “this” disappears—and the “this” which would be left over by negating the “here and now” is not immediate, which is to say it is an abstraction from anything which could be the certain object of sense. The negation of the abstract universal does not, however, simply sweep the last shred of certainty away into a Kritik-al trashcan, but turns universality back over to the world of the senses. “This” insofar as it can have a referent refers to a universal “here-now” which, infinite in itself, comprises many finite “here-nows.” The universal “this” encompasses the “thises” which have proven unreal. It is the thing in its thinghood—a mediated immediacy.

Retractions

2010-08-07T04:56:00.000-07:00

In reply to my questions about past love, minionofthepope writes:

But why is God dead at the end of your piece? The sentence makes me think I did not understand your post.

He is asking about the question, "How do you keep a promise to a dead god?" In putting this question, I seem to have fallen into (or fallen in love with) a way of talking that I don't understand and which in the past I myself have questioned. Now, I am like a fool who cannot even say what made him say what he said. It strikes me now as empty. Yet, I cannot persuade myself (is this just pride?) that I was a fool to say it.

Can we take this change as a case in point? Was there a god here making me say things I did not understand? Then where is that god now? If it is gone and dead, how can it have been a god? Certainly, it is not the God who "at every time and in every place,...draws close to man" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1). By withdrawing from me after exacting my promise it has withdrawn its right to be called a god. But a god does not change, so it never was a god. Never to have been a god: this is how a god dies.

Well, and if it is not that God beside whom we are to "have no other gods," why should I feel that I ought to remain faithful?

And so after many twists and turns, and feeling that I had escaped the danger, I find myself back in the same position as before, renouncing the unknown god.

2010-07-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand romanticized cigarette smoking--I forget in what context--as a profound act of human domination over nature: taming fire to our pleasure, to the point of holding it between our fingers. The same principle could be applied to a plethora of pleasurable indulgences. In a recent Wall Street Journal review of Stan Cox's book on the far-reaching environmental, social, geographical (etc.) effects of air-conditioning, Losing Our Cool, Eric Felten cites this "can-do" defense of technological comforts on behalf of American use of AC:

[Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini] notes that the refusal to suffer the sweaty indignity of equatorial heat is "the antithesis of passive resignation," and thus a perfect expression of the can-do American character. "In America, air-conditioning is not simply a way of cooling down a room," Mr. Severgnini writes. "It is an affirmation of supremacy."

I don't believe Felten and Severgnini have considered the full hierarchy of supremacy asserted in the decision to turn on the AC (to escape the "equatorial heat" which has magically swept up a thousand miles north of the equator). I exercise supremacy over nature, to be sure, when I adjust the thermostat, but my exercise of power is itself subordinated to the hierarchy of power within me. I have often turned on the A/C in my car or in the house with as little thought as a chain smoker gives to lighting his second cigarette. Precisely what compels me I am not prepared to say, but it suffices to observe that pressing buttons, flipping switches, and turning dials is not generally speaking a free act of self-assertion. Compare the will with which one turns on the AC, and the will with which one says, "Enough!" and flips the switch in the other direction.

2010-07-07T04:53:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that marriage is a private affair, right? Two people commit their lives (or maybe just "a chapter" of their lives if they're destined for a no-fault divorce) to each other, and this commitment makes each of them either happy or miserable, but it has nothing to do with politics.

The idea that a given marriage has public significance is considered ludicrous. If America had a failed marriage for every time someone sneered publicly at the notion that countenancing gay marriage would "somehow" undermine the fabric of marriage itself as a political institution, I reckon almost half our marriages would fail. (oh, wait...)

Well, haters, what if it turned out that the success or failure of every marriage had a significant influence on every other marriage within two degrees of separation? Rose McDermott:

'A person's tendency to divorce depends not just on his friend's divorce status, but also extends to his friend's friend.
'The full network shows that participants are 75 per cent more likely to be divorced if a person - obviously other than their spouse - that they are directly connected to is divorced.
'The size of the effect for people at two degrees of separation, for example the friend of a friend, is 33 per cent.

Like most social research findings, this should be obvious. Marriage is not just an arrangement between two people to meet the needs of each other's souls and bodies. It is a ministry to the world. Like any ministry, it turns poisonous as soon as it becomes self-centered.

Sound and Sound Judgment

2010-06-19T04:28:00.000-07:00

Ashok Karra finds a conflict between civic and private virtue in the Seven Against Thebes. The Theban king Eteocles, he says, displays his civic prudence and "effectiveness in the public realm" in assigning the champion face each of the seven attackers led by his brother Polyneices. He rebuffs the attack through sound generalship, and thus also rebukes the fear of the women who were overwhelmed by the sound of the enemy's approach. The question, Ashok says, is not whether Eteocles as agent of the city has some right and mandate to pit himself against his brother; the question is "to what degree Eteocles’ effectiveness in the public realm threatens the very existence of the private."

His point, I take it, is that the threat to the city's existence justifies the city in sending Eteocles to face Polyneices, even if it does not justify Eteocles in fighting and killing his brother. But is not the destruction of family at the highest level of the city itself a more mortal threat to the city?

Eteocles chastises the women for taking the enemy approach too much to heart:

Chorus: The snorting of horses! There, I hear it.
Eteocles: Do not listen; do not hear too much.

If the assignments of the champions to the seven gates of the city proves Eteocles' prudence, then his prudence consists in not hearing too much, in refusing to take in the terrible flood of merely sensory presentation of danger:

No equipment of a man will make me tremble
Devices on a shield deal no one wounds.
The plumes and bells bite not without the spear.

The correlations which Ashok astutely observes between the emblems of the Theban defenders and those of the attackers work out Eteocles' philosophical policy of pitting being against seeming (Amphiaraus, the only attacker who is "best not at seeming to be such / but being so," is interesting as the exception). Something has purged Eteocles of pity and fear. It has made him a dangerous man. Inasmuch as the sound of jangling war-gear and beating hooves has lost its hold over him, he has become insensible as well to the threat of mutual fratricide, a greater danger to the city than even extinction. If the women hear too much, Eteocles does not hear enough. "Do you hear me or not?" he asks the women. "Or are you deaf?" But he has shut his own ears to the voice of pity, speaking poetically in the bells and plumes of the enemy outside the gates.

The Popularization of Toleration [ii]

2010-06-16T03:52:00.000-07:00

As a matter of messaging, Addison does present himself as the agent of a transfer of a possession from one place to another. Commentators often quote the passage from Spectator No. 10 in which Addison writes,

“It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.”

What was once the exclusive possession of the educated upper class, Addison strives to make publicly available (with a particular eye to the rising middle-class frequenters of the establishments to which philosophy is to be delivered). The metaphor of transference indicates that the task is to bring an idea into the reach of minds which have not received it before.

This ambition of liberating philosophy from the inaccessible regions in which it lies hidden follows—or perhaps more accurately, initiates—the general democratizing tendency of the Lockean tradition. As Kenneth Maclean argues in John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, the project of intellectual equalization becomes conceivable (though not necessarily possible) on the basis of the rejection of innate ideas. According to Maclean, the “new stress on the education of the young apparent in the literature and life of the Eighteenth Century may well have been the result of Locke's philosophy which had cast aside innate ideas and made experience requisite for all knowledge.” The enthusiasm of a Richardson or a Chesterfield for Lockean education shows “the truth that this philosophy was a leveling force and fostered intellectual democracy. The process of equalization begins, it appears, with the denial of innate ideas.”

Yet, when it comes to delivery, the ideas of modern philosophy (which for Addison means above all Locke) come across not entirely in the same form. It would indeed be no exaggeration to say that in some cases they come across completely inverted. The case of wit and judgment is exemplary. Aside from the fact that the eighteenth century intellectual tradition of distinguishing wit and judgment regards Locke as its founder, the concept of wit itself crystallizes the essential difference in approach between philosophy and the popularization of philosophy.

Economy of Tradition

2010-06-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

From Daniel Kroeker, in the comments:

The economy may be fixed, but until there is something behind the decisions that fix it which touches every citizen with a new self-actualizing power and liberty, we will remain a people unworthy of our tradition...What it's really going to take is some generation or other having the humility and prescience to say, "We must give our children something we have lacked--an education which may save our democracy."

What it takes to be worthy of our tradition is to give our children something the tradition did not supply us with. A generation receives the tradition worthily only if it augments the tradition in passing it on. The virtue of the strong anti-traditional current in the American tradition is this requirement that its inheritors not rest with what they have received.

What has to be added to the American tradition? First of all, Daniel says, "humility and prescience." Then, by the light of these virtues, we must discover "an education which may save our democracy." I don't know whether it would be prescient to study the ancient Greeks: does our future lie in their past? But at least it would require some humility to learn from them while we cherish our own tradition, which has come so far since the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Plato's Republic may teach us the lesson we need to learn, provided we are not reading it to "meet the demands of [our own] souls" (see rimwell's cautionary remark). I'm learning that the issue in the Republic is what good we can do the next generation (an aspect of the text you don't see when you're reading it in college as part of "GeneratioNext" yourself). The question of the nature of justice arises directly from a consideration of whether diligent stewardship of money supplies this good. Cephalus believes he has done right by his sons by leaving them a little more than he inherited, but if money does not facilitate justice, as Cephalus says it does, one may wonder whether he has augmented the right inheritance. Yet, perhaps Cephalus can redeem his stewardship by passing on an argument: if Polemarchus inherits the question of justice, this may be due not to some kind of intellectual cowardice in his father, but rather (as rainscape has argued in a paper on this subject) a humble, prescient relinquishment of his spiritual possession.

2010-06-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

If love is real, it does not die. By clinging to this maxim, you might avoid the whole problem of past love; past love would never have been real love. But is this bearable: to believe that your life was ruled by something unreal? Is it even possible? If I found that the object of my love was not real or presented a false appearance, nevertheless the love was real. And surely if it was real and called for devotion, it still is and does even if there is no longer any object whereon it may be fixed.

Perhaps the exercise of this devotion consists in finding a true love, or rather a true beloved, meeting and not merely seeming to meet the ideals of the same love. This transfer might preserve the piety of love, but is it true to the beloved? Is it not callous and indifferent thus to fix old, once-or-twice-or-many-times-vexed hopes upon a new object innocent of those old disappointments? Does it not make of the beloved a sort of sacrificial victim to your ideals?

2010-05-26T04:34:00.000-07:00

What do you owe to past love? When love first strikes, it demands everything from you – and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future. But then through its series of unaccountable disappointments, love withdraws. Then what happens to the promise?

Perhaps in embarrassment you disavow it: you never promised, you never were the one who promised; you begin again.

At sufficient distance from or after too many repetitions of these negotiations, the resulting fragmentation of your life's story becomes a problem. But the only way to recover the whole is to take up the promise. And how can you keep a promise to a dead god?

pieces of flair

2010-05-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

I really don't know what to say when professors give a minimum word count, and then complain when you do not much exceed that word count. So I'll let Jennifer Aniston speak for me:

Well, it seems even she found it too much for words.

The Popularization of Tolerance [i]

2010-04-26T19:56:00.001-07:00

(more on musical form soon, if anyone is interested)

If we take it for granted that the unity of a morally divided political body is worth working for, and that the remedy for moral division is the development of broad-mindedness, how should we inculcate this virtue in the people? I believe that we have seen the failure of simply expounding this principle by direct promulgation (preaching to schoolchildren), narrative exempla with the moral readily extractable (the after-school special), and habitual disapproval of anything smelling even faintly of "fundamentalism" (passim). Ask around and I'm sure it won't take you long to find someone who will affirm for you the absolute necessity of transcending one's own perspective while they themselves can demonstrate no idea of anyone else's. The political party which in America currently fuels itself with the sentiment (you know what I'm talking about by now, if you've been following the current administration's practice of "bipartisanship") satisfies itself and its constituents with emphatic (no doubt sincere) pronouncements of it--while often evidencing no greater understanding of their rivals' principles than their rivals do of theirs. Getting a moral principle into people's heads gets them no closer to principled moral behavior. Broad-mindedness in particular becomes nothing more than an especially stupid narrow-mindedness when it makes its way into politics by way of an explicit concept.

But didn't Joseph Addison notch down the rancor of the political rhetoric of early eighteenth century England, and encourage a common ethic of tolerance, by teaching the people to read John Locke? It seems he did. But close examination of the methods by which Addison influenced the people, and of his explications and clarifications of Locke's thinking, reveals the incommensurability of his success with Lockean principles of education.

More to follow.

readings yesterday

2010-04-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

Maclean, Kenneth. John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century. "Book One: Neither Principles nor Ideas are Innate." [summary]

Harper's:
- Lapham's editorial;
- de Botton, Alain. "Arrivals." From a book (forgot the title)
- Farley, Paul. "Quality Street" (poem).
- Smith, Heather. "Squeal Estate."

The Economist (browsed).

The Musical Form of Thinking [ii]

2010-04-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

Far more than the "technique of finance and the technique of construction" lifted the formal and material limitations of architecture, the technique of digital representation lifts the material and formal constraints on music. One could compose music today by entering a series of hexadecimal characters. Or at least, so one might conclude from the fact that a digital recording of a musical performance is nothing else but a long, algorithmic concatenation of answers to positive yes-or-no questions (i.e., a series of 1's and 0's). If we can reproduce musical performances in this way, why not produce them digitally to begin with? (Here I'm not talking about "digital instruments" like the keyboard or the drumitar, with palpable spatio-temporal interfaces--just typing characters into a computer).

Shelley Freedman / CC BY 2.0

The temptation is to think that one only needs to accomplish a more complete synopsis of the possibilities of sound, and then freely achieve perfect forms of music without regard to any limitations. Well, why not? Is it so different from composing? Doesn't a composer put the tune he hears in his head down on paper according to a standard, completely interpretable notation?

Unlike a software engineer, a composer does not presuppose any algorithmic 'mode of projection' on the part of the executor of his notations. True: the musical notations do to some extent describe a series of sounds with a determinate pitch, volume, duration, and sequence. Yet such a series is not yet a tune. It is merely what the listener has to take no notice of in order to hear the tune. (As soon as you start focusing intently on the tones in a tune and trying to add up the positive features of sound, you stop hearing the tune.)

More Inelegant Discussion of Confinement

2010-04-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Today the difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

--Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (the quotation is from 1930)

How can the difference between good and poor change so that it is something different "today" than it once was? Isn't it always the criterion of a good architect that he designs good buildings?

pic by rightee / CC BY 2.0

Well, what makes a building good? That depends: what is it for? In the light of this question, the architect (to put it roughly) chooses materials suitable to the purpose and within the means of the client to procure, and designs a form within the limitations imposed by this material. However, these last two limitations (the availability of materials and the physical constraints on the structuring of materials), as Le Corbusier observed in 1923, erode over time: "The technical equipment of this epoch -- the technique of finance and the technique of construction -- is ready to carry out this task [of conceiving and planning towns throughout their entire extent.]" The new range of possibility open to the architect, Le Corbusier says, requires a new "breadth of vision" to match it. Only by drawing form and material together under this "breadth of vision" would architects catch up to engineers, whose ready grasp of and application to "problems" had given them the edge. But Le Corbusier raises no question as to whether the first limitation on architecture, namely, what it is for, can in principle open up under the advances of technique, or whether the broadening of vision would always exceed the bounds of purpose within which a 'good building' is even conceivable.

One cannot be certain what Wittgenstein meant by "temptations" of architecture, but certainly enough a temptation was manifesting itself to the practice of architects for the first time as he wrote: a temptation to indulge the architect's vision on a scale indifferent to limitation. Here it is not a question of limitations imposed on a work by technical deficiencies, but of the confines (or in a more architectural term, the enclosure) of the form of life within which the work could take its direction.

readings yesterday

2010-04-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought (browsed) [notes]
Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (browsed) [notes]
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, secs. 477-486. [notes]

The Musical Form of Thinking [i]

2010-04-20T07:11:00.001-07:00

It might be unobjectionable to say that thinking has musical form, up to a certain point. You can see that it involves a certain dissonance which is resolved, perhaps by a series of logical cadences or perhaps all at once, in the thought which you have been trying to reach.

"I am thinking my way towards something." Here you feel the thought as what would satisfy, though you can say nothing else about it yet.

But what about the thought itself? Aren't my thoughts punctiform, static, and complete in themselves, once I have arrived at them? At least, those thoughts which I am inclined to call "thoughts about facts." There do seem to be two kinds of thoughts: 1) those having to do with "what is the case," (facts) and 2) those having to do with the directedness/intentionality of the one thinking (shall we say, values). The latter would seem to have something musical about them, but the former, well, not so much: "prosaic" seems more the word.

pic by S. Diddy / CC BY 2.0

When do I have a thought about what is the case? I reach for an example, and notice the beer next to me and think the words, "This beer is empty." When does this thought occur to me? When I reach out to drink the beer, perhaps even raise it to my lips and find with a shock of disappointment that nothing is inside. Then of course, there is the case (as in the present) of looking for an example in philosophy--then I say, look, this bottle will do: it has a distinctive fact about it. Here for once it is "the fact that" and not the emptiness of the beer that occurs to me. But I wanted the emptiness of the bottle, that was supposed to be the example. So the thought becomes of no use, it turns out to be empty of its expected exemplarity. (An example, too, I can 'raise to my lips' in expectation, and likewise find it already drained.)

Try and pick up one of those "punctiform, static, and complete in itself" thoughts, and see if it serves your purpose.

How to not say what cannot be said or not said.

2010-04-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

It's common to divide Wittgenstein's philosophy into two phases: there is the Wittgenstein of the TLP and then there is the late Wittgenstein (and maybe also a middle one). There is some obvious justification for this division. When he published the TLP, Wittgenstein claimed to have dissolved all the problems of philosophy -- so that the very fact that he later returned to philosophy indicates that at least this assessment of his early career came under revision. Furthermore, it is a fact that Wittgenstein explicitly criticized aspects of the Tractatus. Besides, the reader of the Philosophical Investigations can hardly fail to gather that something radically different from the TLP is going on in this text.

Yet, it is not possible to account for the difference between the early and late Wittgenstein by saying that what earlier he maintained he later denied. Conversely, the important continuity will not be indicated by saying that he continued to assert certain propositions, e.g. that "The world is all that is the case." Part of the problem, I have been trying to say, is that it is not clear in what way Wittgenstein asserted anything at all even in the TLP, since the propositions therein are famously denied the status of propositions, and therefore the possibility of being asserted. But there is more than one way of not asserting non-propositions. The shift or shifts in Wittgenstein's thinking have most fundamentally to do not with what philosophy should say or not say, but how it should go about its task of keeping silence.

2010-04-15T09:27:00.001-07:00

Can you really make a promise to yourself? Give yourself a command? Expect yourself to do something? Or should you just say "I will..."?

I resolved yesterday to spend three hours writing every day and immediately I had the feeling that there was no one to whom I could appeal, or apologize when I fail.

If you can make a promise to yourself you can also give yourself excuses.

2010-04-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

Ashok Karra invites us to rethink the fear of death. Is constant expectation of the exhaustion of time even compatible with a good life, let alone the basis of one? The site of this rethinking is Emily Dickinson's "Each Second is the last:"

Each second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance -
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance's list
Before the Perishing!

About the opening line Ashok observes, "But something is dubious about the proposition in merely articulating it: it was recalled after a second had passed." In the time it takes to summon up a generalization that can tell us about the present moment, the moment passes. Perhaps instead of "merely articulating" the proposition as such the Man should have gone further--and this is not to say that he should have also applied the generalization to the new present moment (since this, too, makes the moment disappear), but rather that the difference between generalization and application should have been surmounted.

Doesn't one fear what can be present? But the fearful perhaps is already past when the proposition reaches it.

2010-04-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Renunciation and limitation seem to be related in the following way: one discovers or invents or receives limitations and thereupon renounces what lies on the far side in obedience to these limitations. This would be, for example, John Locke's sense of the renunciation called for in philosophy. Does this happen in every case? It seems to in these following at least:

If I renounce speaking about God perhaps it is because I have been taught or found out for myself that the concepts of my language are inadequate to God. If I renounce sweets it is perhaps because I recognize the limitations of my metabolism, or perhaps the limitations of my discipline.

But what of the renunciation of the picture of mental processes? Is this renunciation in obedience to a limitation?

"But surely you can't deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner process takes place." -- What gives the impression that we want to deny anything? When one says, "Still, an inner process does take place here" -- one wants to go on: "After all, you see it." And it is this inner process that one means by the word "remembering". -- The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our face against the picture of an 'inner process'. What we deny is that the picture of an inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word "remember". Indeed, we're saying that this picture, with its ramifications, stands in the way of our seeing the use of the word as it is.

(PI, Sec. 305)
Or in another place:

As I have often said, philosophy does not call on me for any sacrifice, because I am not denying myself the saying of anything but simply giving up a certain combination of words as senseless. In a different sense, however, philosophy does demand a renunciation, but a renunciation of feeling, not of understanding. Perhaps that is what makes it so hard for many people. It can be as hard to refrain from using an expression as it is to hold back tears, or hold in anger.

Is this renunciation in obedience to a limitation? If it were a denial of mental processes, it would be easy to understand it in this way. However, Wittgenstein is explicit that "[t]he great difficulty here is not to present the matter as if there were something one couldn't do. As if there really were an object, from which I extract a description, which I am not in a position to show anyone." Wittgenstein here denies denial as an explanation of his thinking. There is in this special denial a development of the position taken in the Tractatus. Here Wittgenstein's thinking becomes more musical. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought that he could draw a picture of the other side of a limitation and deny this picture, provided that this denial came under erasure--under the retractions applying the general renunciation of propositions: the ladder thrown away.

2010-04-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

I said last week that I am inclined at times to pursue possible directions of thinking "methodically one at a time as they occur to me." I wonder now how I can have thought that made any sense.

For the time during which I pursued things as they occur to me, one could say that I was following a certain method. But this only proves that the meaning of the word "method" submits so pliably to philosophical extension that it can be applied easily to its opposite. The concept in that case disappears.

This "method" is the same as that to which I contrasted it: pursuing all the directions for thinking "in a frantic mixture."

Apparently my invocation of method was just a cover for my consummately frantic disposition.

2010-04-09T21:27:00.001-07:00

Goodness gracious you people have posted a lot of comments lately. I promise I will get to them soon.

2010-04-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

The recent discussion here of context, limitation, totality, dialectic, confinement, and no doubt some other sixth thing provides me with many different directions to follow. And unlike a certain person I could name if he were not pseudonymous, my habit in such a situation is to pursue all the directions, methodically one at a time as they occur to me, or in a frantic mixture. The motto which now appears at the top of this blog was originally the motto for just this post, but it occurred to me that I would no doubt be repeating it constantly and it may as well cover the whole enterprise. Take it as you wish, however, for perhaps after all one unwavering rule to which I remain confined guides all the directions I take, without my knowing how.

As to confinement itself, I am struck by the manifold of forms this phenomenon takes in philosophy, and I am all afire to begin cobbling together a history of the task of setting limitations which philosophy has been giving to itself at least since the inception of modernity. What good this will do to anyone I do not know but there you have it: it can't be helped. At any rate nothing more will be done this evening.

Confined to all of it

2010-04-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

Pseudonoma has some very good questions in response to yesterday's contextualization of the Wittgensteinian mantra, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." You may recall that I referred this statement back to the opening statement of the work in which it appears: "The world is all that is the case." Here's part of Pseudonoma's response:

How can a whole be MERELY that which divides into parts? Are we not somehow obliged to account for this prior unity as such? And if, at bottom, propositions are (or even merely signify ---feel free to clarify which--) "what is the case, that is, parts of the world", then what are we to call that "language" which refers to the world and which would otherwise SEEM identical in form to the proposition? Or in other words, how are we to define a proposition if the assertion "The world is not something 'about which' propositions are formed" is not a proposition. And finally, what accounts for its SEMBLANCE as a proposition?

Pseudonoma's confinement of our discussion of Wittgenstein is pretty generous: the point to which he would limit us is the same point to which the Tractatus itself and (by the addition of a sign of negation) Wittgenstein's whole career were confined. In addressing Pseudonoma's questions, I will give myself free range over Wittgenstein's writings which do nothing but clarify and develop the statement that "The world is all that is the case."

I beg you to have patience with this statement, the clear truth of which lies in its eventual renunciation (and now I begin to wonder why Pseudonoma takes it to be 'obvious' that the dialectic of Plato is to be preferred here to that of Hegel). And I do wish this "eventual" to be taken seriously as belonging to the renunciation. The Tractatus tries to renounce the statement ahead of time and this is its most serious error.

a quotation contextualized

2010-04-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein's statement, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world" is in a certain sense a repetition of the starting point of the Tractatus: "The world is all that is the case." This starting point is enriched by the findings of section 5, in such a way that the world interpreted in section 1 as a free indirect discourse now shows itself to be identical with a world that I call "my" world. This enrichment comes about by way of what is original in the treatment of truth-functions.

It is a condition of complex truth-functions that the arguments which are to be comprised by the range of the function should be of the same type. They could not otherwise indifferently determine the sense of the function. If we are to reach the result that a truth-function says something, it must also be a condition that the arguments are either elementary propositions or can be analyzed into elementary propositions. It follows from these conditions that elementary propositions are of the same type as the complex propositions which are supposed to have been constructed out of them by the addition of 'logical constants.' Elementary propositions are already truth-functions of themselves. This claim is easy to overlook and hard to swallow, but it is the heart of Wittgenstein's logic.

If all propositions are of the same type, then there is in fact only one type: what is the case, that is, the parts of the world. It is necessary that the world which is the totality of these facts (not a whole greater than them but "divid[ing] into" them) would itself be constituted of the same type as that of the arguments of truth-functions. The world is not something 'about which' propositions are formed. If it were something beyond language then it would also be beyond language to say anything about the world.

It is characteristic of free indirect discourse not to present itself as such. Likewise the world does not come with quotation marks around it. Yet, we "picture facts to ourselves." In other words, we say the world to ourselves. The self thus simultaneously disappears from the world (realism) and becomes its limit (solipsism).

Understanding a sentence

2010-04-05T21:48:00.001-07:00

Take the case of trying to understanding a peculiar sentence in a philosophical text. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," says Wittgenstein at the beginning of section 5.6 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This sub-heading, with all its subsidiary remarks, is so full of resounding, paradoxical statements (one would almost have to quote the entire section to give a full catalog) that it is difficult to fathom how it could be the summation of a a very careful and technical analysis of truth-functions of elementary propositions. Life, subjectivity, reality, the will, the world: none of these themes are fields in which anyone would expect an entirely abstract logical discussion to produce anything. What do truth-tables have to do with these substantial issues?

To be continued.

2010-04-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

When I want to know something, I want to see it as it is. I think that if I could put aside everything else that distracts and clouds my vision (everything competing for my attention), I would see the thing alone and find contentment of understanding in a pure comprehension of it. But when I think of times when I have had the feeling, after long contemplation and puzzlement, --"Now I see it"--, it has always been because I finally understood a context.

To be illustrated in the next post.

2010-03-31T17:26:00.001-07:00

I've about reached the end of what I can say about what it means to say that Aristotle does not think there is an art of the good life. Hopefully, yesterday's post made it clear that the important question is whether virtue can in any way be an art (techne), as opposed to some other spiritual activity. We won't get anywhere answering this question completely without a close reading of Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics and probably Book V, too.

For now, I just want to wrap this series up by pointing out that the very question about what spiritual activity constitutes virtue is dependent on Plato's philosophical findings as published in the Republic. Plato could still take it as a reputable opinion (endoxa) that virtue is an art. But he brings this opinion to the point of crisis through his account of justice. Book II , which obliquely introduces justice in the form of a division of labor, shows that art as an activity of the soul is subject to competition, not between artists but within each artist's soul; two arts in the same soul ruin each other. The discovery of this competition makes it impossible to think of virtue as an art.

Although, as we've seen, Aristotle starts his treatise on a dialectical ground of opinions, these probable starting points notably omit the formerly reputable opinion that virtue is an art. In this omission, which makes the inquiry of Book VI possible, Aristotle follows the thinking of Plato.

That is all I mean by "There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks." Admittedly, I wanted to mean more by it when I wrote it a few days ago, but perhaps I should say that I wanted to mean less, since I was thinking of an identity in the conclusions, and now I am thinking of an identity in the beginning, and of course the beginning is more than half the whole (as both Plato and Aristotle say).

Whether there is an art of the good

2010-03-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't make it through yesterday's post, here's where we're at regarding the different anti-systematic factors of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics:

The guiding question of the work has no ready-made place in a system of valid undertakings, justifiable in advance on the basis of their outcomes.

To determine the object of the spiritual activity of posing this question as something political has at least to begin with no scientific basis.

Aristotle leaves in question what the spiritual activity itself is, which when it directs itself to politics seems to supply the governing hold on the highest good.

"But if this is so," he says of the possibility of improving our aim by knowledge of the highest good, "one ought to try to get a grasp, at least in outline, of what it is and to what kind of knowledge or capacity it belongs" (tr. Joe Sachs, emphasis mine). Is politics a knowledge or a capacity? As Sachs point out in a note to his translation, "Aristotle does not specify the noun implicit in the substantive adjective "the political" (he politike), so "politics" here, from its context, means either the knowledge, the art, or some other capacity that is devoted to the things of the city."

Whether this indeterminacy is a deficiency of the starting point, to be scientifically honed down to a single definite spiritual activity, or reflects an indeterminacy in the subject matter, remains to be seen.

Kinds of imprecision

2010-03-29T10:53:00.001-07:00

It is not enough to point out that Aristotle's thinking is not always systematic. For this observation to amount to anything would require an enumeration and clarification of the differences from systematicity in his writings, as well as a demonstration of the extent to which these characteristics of his writings are not merely the mode of presentation of a set of doctrines which is in itself systematic. (One way of reading the Nicomachean Ethics, once it has become obvious that the text cannot be a coherent set of asserted propositions, is to try to identify which of those propositions represent Aristotle's actual doctrine or "considered opinion," and which were only a imprecise scaffolding or dialectical counterpoint. This seems to me still to attribute too much systematicity to Aristotle.)

As Pseudonoma already pointed out, the first hold Aristotle gets on the good of human life in the Nicomachean Ethics is dialectical: there is no scientific grounding for the position that politics is a master art, or that it would belong to such an art to supply governing knowledge of the highest good, or that the ground of a city is higher than that of the individual. Furthermore, as I pointed out in answer, the entire passage bases its validity on the hypothesis that there is a highest human good at all, and it is only in the context of this hypothesis that it even makes sense to say what that highest good would be (whether scientifically or dialectically). This hypothesis is not a presupposition, but a consciously hazarded entrance into a question which it might do no good to pursue. The study of ethics cannot at its inception justify itself as something ethical--which puts the following limitation on the possible findings of ethics: if in the end ethics does some good, and if this is because it directs us to the highest good, then it follows that the good of human life must be accessible without the introduction of the certainty born of deliberation (which means, a fortiori, without ethics); or if ethics does no good, well, that has almost the same result.

But before I can explain my sense of the first book of the Ethics, there is still one more important imprecision to be enumerated...tomorrow.

warning

2010-03-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

Prepare for a new wave of KTL proliferation. I think I've figured out a way to be able to write every day. If you notice, however, in the near future that my posts are less precipitous than usual, that is because I am handwriting everything and copying it in later. I'm not doing this on purpose to improve my writing (though I do hope it will), it's just that I can't use my computer in front of my son without his clambering all over me shouting "BAT BAT BAT BAT BAT BAT BAT BAT..."

2010-03-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

You might think of Aristotle as a very systematic philosopher. His treatises are for the most part each devoted to one of a range of themes which are still regarded as though they were departments of philosophy: ethics, philosophy of nature, logic, metaphysics, to name the big ones. So you might expect that he would present in each of these treatises a set of doctrines, along with some arguments for them. You might think that it would be pretty easy to separate the doctrines from the arguments and walk away with the "Aristotelian system" in your back pocket. Or you might not, dear reader, I don't know you that well. But I have always tended to expect this systematic structure in Aristotle, and I am even now surprised whenever I find in Aristotle's writings show more sketches toward a way of thinking than finished representations.

Well, that was supposed to be a preface to some remarks about the first pages of the Nicomachean Ethics, but that's all I can do today. I owe you.

Introduction to the identity of Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the good

2010-03-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

One man, one art.

This rule is laid down in the Republic of Plato as indispensable to the true city. If we contextualize this principle, which in the course of the Republic comes to light as the definition of justice (viz., "One man, one art"), we see that Plato defines justice as the principle which ensures maximal flourishing (in the sense of completion of a work) of the whole in which it inheres. This definition is justified by the agreement that justice is the human good, combined with the understanding that humans are creatures whose good consists in the completion of some work.

Justice, if the earlier treatment of it in the Republic as one art alongside others retains its currency, turns out to be the art of success in arts. But this definition renders it impossible to apply. One would have to have two arts, the art of justice and the art whose success it is to ensure. But the former art would consist in having only one art, which would make it impossible to have a second art to which it could apply.

There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks.

readings last week

2010-03-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, ch. 11, "Generality."
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prologue; Q. 1 [notes]; Q. 2, a. 1.
Des Chenes, Physiologia, ch. 2 (-2.3), "Motus, Potentia, Actus."
Saki, "Wratislav"
Wittgenstein, TLP, 5-5.641
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 3-20. [notes]

essay on the essential mood of language

2010-03-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein's famous notion of a "family resemblance" is introduced obliquely in the opening discussion of language-games in the Philosophical Investigations. There, the question, "But how many kinds of sentence are there?" implies the eventual unstated answer, "Just look and see how they are related."

In order to bring this answer out implicitly, Wittgenstein 'tries' to reduce all utterance to the indicative mood by making explicit the framework of report which is supposed to insensibly accompany all utterances (i.e. "I want you to...," "I would like to know...," etc.). He rightly observes that this reduction does not help to "bring the different language-games together." The resemblance among them and their innate common referability to the indicative must be presupposed for them to serve as arguments of that frame made explicit.

The significance Wittgenstein sees in the possibility of reduction to the indicative (what solipsism means to say but can't) is doubtful. The analysis here of the common referability of different kinds of sentence completely ignores the findings of the previous sections. The test-cases of highly primitive languages make it more plausible that the common mood of utterance would be on a spectrum from invitatory to imperative. The teaching of solipsism itself could be expressed, "Invite this thought into your head: I am everything."

The above example shows that the correlative of invitation/command is not necessarily acceptance/obedience, at least insofar as the latter is taken to express a completely passive position. Acceptance/obedience must itself be reducible to invitation/command, not reciprocally doubling back on the speaker but experimentally or expectantly or hopefully transmitting the same mood or spectrum of moods forward into reality--urging it to respond to my will, soliciting its meaning, demanding its adherence to a physical model, expecting it to resonate with joyful surprise (as when I laugh at a joke)--and so on. The essence of language shows up clearly in the transmissions of its original mood in a way that renders not hopeless the project of scientifically comprehending the common aspect under which all appear (provided that science, too, can be reduced to the original mood).

Furthermore, the transitivity of acceptance/obedience can be transmitted back into the invitation/command, which itself must have listened to something more original.

Two clarifications: first, a 'spectrum' of mood does not repeat the problematic of an indeterminate diversity of functions. It is one mood with two poles--the orientation to one or the other of which is the whole field of ethics. Second: on this understanding, the equivalence of solipsism and realism (as treated in the TLP) has no place. The essence of language corresponds to a sol-"us"-ism, where the "us" is indeterminately defined but must include whatever is most original. The listener is as much the limit of the world as is the speaker. In the face of this contradiction of multiple limits, language ranges from a sociopathic campaign to regularize the conflict of limits according to my own, to a late, lyrical lament arising out of the pain of contradiction between world and self.

2010-03-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

Socrates and Adeimantus:

"And what about this? Who would do a finer job, one man practicing many arts, or one man one art?"
"One man, one art," he said.
"And, further, it's also plain, I suppose, that if a man lets the crucial moment (kairos) in any work pass, it is completely ruined."
"Yes, it is plain."

It is this neglect of the crucial moment, due to the interruption of a work, which I would like to put forward as a Platonic cousin of the 'Aristotelian' cousin of the deviance from a terminus ad quem. (Aristotelian is in scare quotes here not because I am aware of any divergence from Aristotle's doctrine on this point in the late Aristotelians, but simply because I am not yet aware of Aristotle's doctrine on this point, if he has one. I suspect it is not too different from Plato's in any case.)

I don't have a great quote for terminus ad quem but "J" proposes a squirrel eating an acorn, preventing its arrival at becoming an oak. The squirrel is of course only fulfilling its own being--nothing "devilish" about that.

2010-03-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

I wonder whether the principle--which is supposed to be distinctively Aristotelian--that deviance from nature is the result of an interruption of the interval from a terminus a quo to a terminus ad quem could have a common provenance with the Platonic-Socratic sense of the interruption of one work by another, which robs each of its crucial moment. Is a terminus ad quem a kairos?

I'll have to write something later contextualizing this question for those of you who are not picking up my psychic broadcast.

Weekend Readings

2010-03-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy Part IV, Chs. 2+3
Joseph Addison, (on wit and judgment) [commentary coming soon to KTL]
Benjamin Rosenblatt, "Zelig"
Dennis Des Chenes, Physiologia, Part I, Ch. 1

Historicism as the Substantiation of a Material Conditional

2010-03-14T08:13:00.000-07:00

Here is Robert M. Wallace's concise description (in his introduction to The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) of the theory of "reoccupation of positions" as an explanation of modernity's pretensions, in opposition to the then-prevalent theory of secularization:

When modern thinkers abandoned the Christian 'answers,' they still felt an obligation to answer the questions that went with them--to show that modern thought was equal to any challenge, as it were. It was this compulsion to "reoccupy" the "position" of the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology--rather than leave it empty, as a rationality that was aware of its own limits might have done--that led to the grandiose constructions of the 'philosophy of history.' And naturally these constructions drew more attention to themselves than did the modest idea of possible progress that was overextended (and discredited) in their service.

Although the context in which reoccupation theory emerges is the explanation of a certain overextending attitude of arrogance typical of early, un-self-critical modernity, Blumenberg finds other explanatory uses for it. One might say of it what Blumenberg himself says, incredulously, of the secularization thesis: "If one took the frequency of its application as evidence, there could be no doubt about the historical applicability of the category of secularization. Its productivity seems to be unlimited" (13). In the chapter entitled "The Epochs of the Concept of an Epoch," Blumenberg uses it to dispel the logic by which epochs seem to be necessarily nominal, not real.

The nominal concept of epoch which held sway in the prior "epoch of the concept of an epoch," as exemplified by Bishop Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle, had as its function the clarification of times. Bossuet, Blumenberg writes,

had still related the concept of an epoch to the privileged standpoint of the contemplator of history for whom the comparison of ages was to be possible. It is not history but this contemplator of history who halts at a resting place so as to survey what happens before and after and thus to avoid anachronisms, the errors that consist in confusing one age with another. (460)

According to Bossuet, these historical vantage points are like the "principal countries" which one marks on a general map of the world as reference points for the others; their function is "to help the memory in the knowledge" of its object. The student of history is supplied with a framework whereby he can frame a material conditional to determine when any given event might have occurred. In principle then, no necessity attaches to the use of any particular collection of epochs.

Blumenberg rather confusingly subverts Bossuet's model of historical error by showing what happens if one takes the material conditional in a more substantial sense of dependence:

The quality of the 'epoch' presents itself, to begin with, as the summation of those features that protect the historian from leveling off the course of history into the monotony of what is always the same, and thus from the error of thinking that anything can happen at any time. Independently of the clerical universal historian's actual intentions, this would perhaps in fact be the most comprehensive definition of the possibilities of error in historical cognition. (460-1; emphasis added)

The sense "that anything can happen at any time" would mean for Bossuet only that a student of history has so blank a sense of the content of history that they are reduced to brute memorization when trying to fix the time of an event's occurrence. Blumenberg brings out the ambiguity of the material formulation arising out of the study of history that "[not] anything can happen at any time": it can be turned to the use of historicism, which would take it to mean that a substantial rather than merely logical dependence prevents any given event from occurring in any but its proper epoch.

The possibility of this subversion of the formulation fits out the mnemonic function of epochs to put pressure on a new historiography which otherwise would have nothing to do with the chronological historiography of a Bossuet. Why should historicism bind itself to strict chronological articulation? In the shift from nominal articulation for the convenience of the student to real articulation of history prior to any studied apprehension, does not the justification for a requirement of chronological exactitude disappear? But insofar as something makes the real principled division of history present itself as an image of the division of history in the mind, or rather as an immanentization of what originally was in the mind, it may be expected to serve the same function as it did in mind--preventing "confusion of times."

2010-03-12T21:03:00.000-08:00

I made the mistake of trying to edit today's post before publishing it. Tomorrow, I promise.

2010-03-11T19:04:00.000-08:00

Perhaps because Wittgenstein himself in various places renounced the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his interpreters seem to feel a need to locate the proof which could definitively dissuade a Tractarian believer. I am suspicious of all such proofs by whomever they may be proffered. Anscombe, for instance, claims that the Tractarian claim that the truths of logic are tautological falls to Church's proof "that multiple quantification theory has no decision procedure; that is, that there cannot be a method by which one could settle, concerning any well-formed formula of that theory, whether it was a theorem or not." But a proof could easily be given in turn that the propositions of the Tractatus itself have no "decision procedure," since they all present themselves under the force of the final retraction which denies them the status of propositions. In order for a proof to demonstrate the falsehood of any claim in the Tractatus, it would first have to regard the claim as something which might be either true or false, and in this way it would fail to receive their meaning and wind up having no relevance to the Tractatus whatsoever.

Here is a typical statement (from Culture and Value) of Wittgenstein renouncing the Tractatus:

I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now.
Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

What Wittgenstein renounces in the Tractatus is its own manner of renunciation--it "throws away the ladder" only after having used it to get somewhere. "It is a great temptation," says another remark in Culture and Value, "to try to make the spirit explicit." If the temptation tries to mitigate itself by intending subsequently to put this explicitation under erasure, that only makes the temptation all the more insidious, because it betrays the spirit while pretending to piety. It is Wittgenstein's succumbing to this temptation in the Tractatus which calls for its renunciation.

Introduction to Wittgenstein's Secular Demonology

2010-03-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

Is this the sense of belief in the Devil: that not everything that comes to us as an inspiration comes from what is good?

I wonder what moved Wittgenstein to venture this formulation. It seems calculated to make viable an integration of pious caution with the bold impiety of the age. The atheist who believes in demons would be like the good architect according to Wittgenstein's earlier remark:

Today the difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

But what is the point of treating the moderation of a secular progressiveness as "belief in the Devil," even when the Devil has nothing to do with it? Is this a secularization theory, claiming that even hard-nosed materialists may secretly still believe in the devil? Or a theory of consequential equivalence, claiming only that we might as well say they believe? Or is there yet another possibility, that "Devil" never meant anything other than the indeterminate source of inspirations which do not come from what is good, and that the secular caution of the type of the good architect only makes this indeterminacy obvious?

reading notes update

2010-03-10T19:34:00.001-08:00

Finally finished notes for Ch.7 of Blumenberg.

Some questions on the City of God

2010-03-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

It is peculiar that, on the one hand, St. Augustine's demonology justifies itself on the basis of a syllogism in which Christians draw the conclusion, while in other cases, he takes it to be more characteristic of the Christian habit of theological virtue either to resist the conclusion of a syllogism or to defer the scientific pursuit of a middle term. What determines the Christian position with regard to a particular syllogism? Why does the contradiction of divine foreknowledge and human freedom not force something to give by the rules of hypothetical deduction? Why by contrast is the arbitrariness of a beginning of the world in infinite time decisively contradictory to the divine will? Or how can the essence of the divine justice of history, which indubitably exists as the middle term of a syllogism, be withheld for the final judgment?

Evidently, the role of logic in The City of God is not as determinate as might appear from any particular passage.

Divine Dilemma

2010-03-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

We too easily flatten (and think ourselves justified in overlooking) the thinking of the early philosophical lights of the Christian age by reading into them a naive and unreflective Platonism. The polemic of apologetics may veer at times in the direction a heavy-handed condemnation of all the likenesses of truth pretending to the position of the original, but we must ask whether it is after all through some studied intellectual ascent that the original becomes discernible as such.

The always insightful and inspiring Bioluminescences blog offers a reflection (not unflavored by the customary proportion of rosemary) on the situation of idolatry and demonism in the derivation of evil presented in St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation. The familiar Platonic structure of imitation subverting original suggests that we should expect that these two forms of imitative divinity would automatically take pride of place in this derivation. Instead, we find the Doctor of Deathlessness (you can use that one, everybody) thoughtfully developing the imitative impieties in the context of a narrative of descent:

The last paragraph of Chapter 11 traces out a particularly striking picture of that path down through rings of Hell on Earth – a set of dominoes crashing down, one after the other, inevitably. But that idolatry and blatant sinfulness we come to expect are found in the middle of that path. They are neither the first causes nor the final effects, but rather the inglorious unfolding of a tragedy whose root is ingratitude and whose fruit is ignorance.

If ingratitude is the ground from which every impious turn begins, is gratitude a guarantee against impiety? Or are there limiting cases in which the most earnest gratitude would still devolve through demonism into a disappearance of piety? How should we read W. B. Yeats's poem, "Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors?"

What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.

What is there to be thankful for in this instruction? I wonder with a shudder at the identity of these instructors. There is the cold, unpitying savor of tragic joy in this precipitous dependence of all things upon... what remains--when all things are said to hang--for them to hang upon? Nothing. Can we be grateful for nothing?

I believe that the possibility of a redemption of Yeats's poetics hangs upon the answer to this question.

Blumenberg's theory of tradition

2010-03-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

The question of the legitimacy of the secularization thesis (no not that secularization thesis, the other one)hinges in part on the interpretation of spiritual ownership, a concept which has been much discussed in the short life of this blog. What Blumenberg calls the "background metaphor" of the idea that progress (and a raft of related modern tropes) are not legimitate productions of modernity but taken and twisted from Christian theology is the notion of ideas as spiritual property. How one takes "property" here will determine in what respects it makes sense to speak of modernity acquiring the property of its historical predecessor.

The "anachronism" of the secularization thesis , according to Blumenberg, lies in the difference between the criteria of legitimate ownership respectively maintained by the Christian and modern epochs. From the perspective of Christian theology, "legitimate ownership arises through acquisition from the hand that has disposition over the object." The modern epoch, on the other hand, "produced the axiom that the legitimate ownership of ideas can be derived only from their authentic production." These concepts of ownership as applied to spiritual ownership determine the possibilities of tradition.

2010-03-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

I've decided not to clutter up the front page and RSS feed of this blog with haphazard reading notes, but I will still upload these to the "Reading Notes" page linked above. I'll do no more here than mention that the page has been updated.

Eventually, I'll want to replace this page with an embedded google wave or set of waves, open to your collaboration. For now, if you are interested in this sort of thing, just comment if you think I've got something wrong or am missing the point.

Yesterday's reading: Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, chs. 5+6

Blumenberg's theory of tradition

2010-03-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

My first impression of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is that it is an inconclusive, tangled mess of fairly interesting historical analysis. I'd leave it at that, but something makes me think (and this might just be the nagging awareness that there is an assigned essay to be written on the text) it would be worth working through it a little more carefully for the argument as it relates to tradition.

I don't have a grand unifying thesis on Blumenberg yet. For now I am just collecting extracts and trying to comment on them.

Within the overall framework of a response to the widely accepted secularization theory of the modern world definitively authored by Lowitz, Blumenberg argues that the underlying metaphor of an illegitimate transfer of property fails to register in the actual difference between the Christian age and the modern. The criteria which according to this metaphor which justifies the claim of secularization theory are "the identifiability of the expropriated property, the legitimacy of its initial ownership, and the unilateral nature of its removal" (23-4). The investigation of each of these criteria displays the temporality of tradition in the logic of its interruptions.

Under the heading of the "unilateralness of the removal" we find an account of the self-secularization of eschatology by the logic of its own annunciation, as the source of "worldliness:"

Franz Overbeck wrote that to the Church, the end of this world seemed near only so long as it had not yet conquered a piece of it. But this conquest came too late to repress 'immediate expectation,' to compensate for the great disappointment. It must have been the other way around: The energy of the eschatological 'state of emergency,' set free, pressed toward self-institutionalization in the world. But this does not falsify Overbeck's statement of symmetry: "As long as the Church possesses this piece, it will continue to be interested in the continued existence of the world; if the last piece is ever really endangered, then she will join her voice in the old cry again." (45)

The "property" in question here is eschatology, and according to the secularization theory the notion of progress appropriates this eschatology unilaterally.

2010-02-28T22:42:00.001-08:00

Do you think it's strange that for the last two hours I have been preparing for a qualifying examination in philosophy by reading about sperm?

2010-02-26T22:44:00.000-08:00

Following up on Pseudonoma's "definition" of space, Sebastian has declared the conversation on space both over and not over. I do not know whether my contribution will fit in the space afforded by the interval between these two possibilities, nor whether I will even be able to produce this contribution, but let me just get my foot in the door with an aphorism, and may it come to me how I may amplify it tomorrow:

Space is the grant by which logic, not to say first becomes logical, but rather makes this "first" which belongs inalienably to its logicality into a gift.

2010-02-25T02:37:00.000-08:00

Who's been up all night writing about Wittgenstein?

I've written a paper much too long to be suitable for a blog entry, but I will be happy to make it available upon request. Excerpt follows:

6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

One is tempted at a number of points in reading the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to exclaim, perhaps while throwing the book against the wall, “But that's obviously wrong, Ludwig!” Proposition 6.5 seems to afford such an occasion: surely riddles bedevil us all our lives. Leaving aside for now the question of the meaning of being, what about the not uncommon question, “What do I do?” Whether I ask this question as I stumble blearily out of bed on a Saturday morning, or as I confront an overwhelming pile of unprocessed work, or even at the nadir of despair-—in any case, I ask it precisely because no action immediately presents itself, and I am forced to reconsider my disposition to action in a radically different way than when I coast mechanically from task to task. The question has a reflective turn mirrored in its reflexive structure: what do I do? I might as well ask, what does my doing do? Obviously no answer on the order of “Pour a bowl of Wheaties” or “Write an abstract for a conference submission” will serve here, because it would have to be selected from a range of options already “on the table,” which is just what is lacking when I ask this question. Rather, I have come to interrogate the sustaining source of my doings—-yet, this questioning necessarily occurs only in the absence of that source, at the moment of its sudden abandonment: otherwise it would already be providing me with an action and give me no cause to ask, “What do I do?” Now an answer to this question “in words” would not supply what the question is asking for--its satisfaction would take place only in a grant from the sustaining source of my doings. In other words, the answer to this question can only be a conversion: the source and I must reconcile. Does it follow that the question was never put into words in the first place? With careful attention to Wittgenstein's sense of what it means to be “put into words,” we may see in what way it can be said that a riddle such as the one described above is not ever a question put into words.

history

2010-02-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

Blumenberg:

The "active forgetfulness" of which Nietzsche speaks, the forgetfulness of the child, for which he makes Zarathustra long, seems not to be easy to introduce into history. The divine art of forgetting, which is invoked in the fragments of the "Dionysus Dithyrambs," is not the art of human history, whose irreversibility implies memory. In history the price we pay for our great critical freedom in regard to the answers is the nonnegotiability of the questions.

Nietzsche's indelible memory of the theological questions the answers to which have "lapsed" is a function of his commitment to history. And the commitment to history is precisely the context of that lapse.

I hope to have something to say soon about the urgency of a philosophy of history.

Re: Ereignis @ Seynsgeschichte

2010-02-23T00:36:00.000-08:00

Pseudonoma seems very enthusiastic about something to do with thinking and time.

Re: Patzig, Günther. 1969. Aristotle's Theory of the Syllogism. Tr. Jonathan Barnes. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Ch. I, "What is an Aristotelian Syllogism?"

2010-02-22T23:29:00.000-08:00

Includes a nice wind-up of part of the discussion of the absence of particular propositions. The reasons adduced for this omission by Ross (following along with the model of scientific practice) and Lukasiewicz (desire to get everything ready to work as both subject and predicate) don't cut it. Instead, the three classes of being given in I.27 are real types (particular, universal, categorical), and only the middle type fits the generalized program for discovering deductions presented in the following chapter, and serves the purpose of making this program possible.

Only half-way through chapter one, but at least I gather that an Aristotelian syllogism is a conditional proposition, rather than a valid generalized argument form. Can't say I see what's riding on that distinction yet.

Re: Blumenberg, H, 1983, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, R. Wallace (tr.), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press., Pt. I, Ch. 3, "Progress Exposed as Fate"

2010-02-22T23:14:00.000-08:00

I'm interested in the hermeneutic framings and reframings. In Ch. 2 Blumenberg took up Gadamer's claim of a "dimension of hidden meaning" displayed through the concept of secularization (which would require one observing it to undergo a turn in order to be undeceived of the undeveloped surface). Now he puts a new spin on the turn, declaring that the thesis "that the modern age is unthinkable without Christianity...gains a definable meaning only through a critique of the foreground appearance--or better: the apparent background presence--of secularization" (30). The hidden dimension turns out to be just as susceptible to partiality.

A frighteningly rebellious attitude seems to run through the argument. The modern age's legitimacy may be predicated on its impulse to kick free of its genesis, to enjoy its own resources in a project of self-development (self-assertion?).

Re: Anscombe, G.E.M., 1959, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, London: Hutchinson., ch. 7 "Wittgenstein, Frege and Ramsey"

2010-02-22T22:54:00.000-08:00

A tentative new feature on philosophy ktl: quick notes, trying to describe what I think about whatever I read today.

The thesis, more or less, is that the appearance of universals in language is due to the fact that actual relations have to be represented with a meager supply of spatial relations of words. That something is on top of another thing could be represented easily with pictures, but the pictorial relation is referred to rather than shown in words. Result, there appears to be a universal concept "being on top of." Objects relate to each other, not to the relations which relate them. Because it is by their power of so relating that they are objects at all, the concepts are a function of the being of the objects.

I'm not convinced that Wittgenstein "dissolved" the problem of universals in the Tractatus. Anscombe probably doesn't either, but it's hard to tell. At any rate, she doesn't make anything of the fact that importing universals into objects as "properties" doesn't eliminate them. I think the virtue of this procedure, if its pretense to erasure can be erased, is that it returns the universals to their starting point.

Not sure what I mean by that except that I get an exciting sense of recollection when I think of universals as an illusory residue and transpose them into the unprotected, unguided sheer manifold of being of things.

Now that I think of it

2010-02-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

To answer my own challenge in the comments of my recent commentary on the historical syllogism of St. Augustine, I am reminded that The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure by then Joseph Ratzinger gives a model of a pious dilation of the final era (I won't say epoch, so as not to suggest I have any sense of "epochality") of history. Perhaps it is time for me to dust off the old Hexaemeron.

2010-02-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

I have yet to find a way to answer the challenge posed last month by City in Speech, to say what space is. I have several anxieties which obstruct my attempting any answer to that question. However, in the next day or two I will have something to say at least in the way of destroying those anxieties.

Introduction to the historical-logical demonology of St. Augustine

2010-02-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

At the conclusion of his argument in Book II of The City of God that the "gods who demand plays" are manifestly wicked on the evidence of the disrepute in which everyone holds the players (a discussion whose full relevance to a certain cyberpath lately traversed I have yet to realize), St. Augustine gives the following remarkable summary:

And the whole of this discussion may be summed up in the following syllogism. The Greeks give us the major premiss: If such gods are to be worshipped, then certainly such men may be honoured. The Romans add the minor: But such men must by no means be honored. The Christians draw the conclusion: Therefore such gods must by no means be worshipped.

I call this summary "remarkable" for two reasons. First, the nature of the syllogism here shows itself to be such that the act of drawing a conclusion exceeds and does not automatically follow the manifestation of premises. The Christians do not achieve their conclusion on account of being supplied with any further matter of fact than those which were already available to the Romans. A historical comma transpires between the premises and the conclusion. Perhaps this comma shares its source with the obtuseness of St. Augstine's imagined interlocutors, against whom at the beginning of Book II he complains:

If the feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that even ater the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging the force of what they do see. There therefore frequently arises a necessity of speaking more fully on those points which are already clear, that we may, as it were, present them not to the eye, but even to the touch, so that they may be felt even by those who close their eyes against them.

Second, St. Augustine here indicates in passing his general theology of history in a way that amplifies its centrality to philosophy. That Christians are conclusion-drawers has everything to do with the fact that for St. Augustine the Christian age is the final immanent development of history. This fact in turn is not merely a way of interpreting the chronology of events but permeates the temporality of all intellectual learning. The significance of the comma noted above between the minor premise and the conclusion is that only Christ brings anything to a conclusion.

Mutual exclusivity of reading and graduate study?

2010-02-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

I think I may only be able to read one philosophical text in my life. I still don't know which one it should be.

Obviously I distinguish between a) reading and b) passing my eyes over all the words, perhaps in conjunction with an authoritative statement from someone who has succeeded in reading (a teacher, a commentator). I have had occasion to "read" many works in the latter sense. The more I read in this way (i.e. the longer I remain a grad student and thereby submit to the necessity of having read many books in a certain time without regard to the pace of development of my own understanding), the more discouraged and cynical I become.

Every semester I renew my resolve to pay no attention to the requirements of my classes, and every semester this resolve dissipates in the face of an imposed sense of responsibility.

This makes me wonder whether I should be in school. My pace of understanding certainly isn't matched to what the syllabi demand. I haven't entirely given up on finding room in the graduate program for actual learning (I do have some marvelous evenings in the library these days, and ktl is going a long way), but I do sometimes wonder whether there wouldn't be just as much room for it outside the magical "academic community."

On the other hand, perhaps the tedious acquisition of basic facility with and superficial recognition of the themes of a large set of standard texts really is a necessary part of learning philosophy, and I should just stop complaining and get back to work.

introduction to the assertiveness of non-assertoric propositions

2010-02-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

I would like to reach a decision on the question of whether any proposition can remain without a truth-value on account of its not being asserted. First of all, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is any such thing as a proposition which is not asserted. Perhaps the special content of a propositional question? The question demands and waits for answer: is this so, or not? It incorporates a proposition into the structure of a demand. It asks for a decision, and this decision has built into it the same special content as does the demand. Should I assert this, or not? I should, if I find it true. Then how does this finding happen? Do I examine the proposition as a neutral object and then measure my beliefs for agreement or disagreement? If so, in what does this measuring consist, and how is it commensurable with the proposition? i should be looking for a belief that looks like the proposition or like its negation. This means that I must already know what the proposition says, and what my beliefs say, so that I can see whether my beliefs and the proposition say the same thing. But an unasserted proposition:--what does it say? Nothing, but that its assertion would say something. It is this latter something which is to be measured against my beliefs. Therefore, to undertake this measuring, I must first posit the assertion of the proposition, since the unasserted proposition says something incommensurable with the beliefs which need to be checked in order to decide whether I should make it.

Then it is impossible to reach a decision about an unasserted proposition, as to whether it should be asserted, and we do not find any proposition prior to the assertion of it. The appearance that the assertion of a proposition may be suspended in a question arises from the fact that we sometimes find ourselves trying to reach a decision on some point or other (as even now I am trying to do). We think that, because we have externalized the assertion in a realm of possibility, there has been no actual assertion. But wherever (in whatever "realm of being") we put it, we still actually put it there, as an assertion, and so we put it there along with the truth-value which is supposed to be deferred.

Natality and Fate of Tradition

2010-02-09T21:58:00.000-08:00

The manifestation of the temporality of tradition, and therefore of the temporality of being in a community, depends on achieving the sense of a founding in terms of a developed consciousness. This means that the provenance of tradition cannot be given in propositional form, whether this proposition should be an unquestioned authoritative mandate or a hypothesis for future verification. However, there is in this fact a substantial piece of information about the sense of a founding—namely, that it is such as to reveal itself not abstractly but only through historical time, not construed as the mere passing of the seconds, minutes, etc. which regulate the motions of physical bodies, but as the medium of a dialectical development of historical perspective. Insofar as tradition involves a responsibility to a founding (as opposed to the thoughtless aping of a fetishized set of protocols, which can be the foundation of no community), it must relate thoughtfully to this founding: it has to know the founding. This knowledge of the founding in its true temporal meaning turns out, as we have seen, to require a development of temporality itself. Formally speaking, this requirement is the temporality of tradition.

Trying to say the impossible one more time

2010-02-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

Allow me once again to repeat myself. I seem to have put things so badly in yesterday's post that a more thoughtful statement corresponding in nearly every point to my own intention could be brought against my statement as its negation.

It is exactly because the external view of tradition is my inheritance from the western tradition that I am loth to give it up, and why I cannot accept the necessity of abandoning the internal/external dichotomy as long as this necessity is interpreted as a mandate to roll back consciousness to a point before tradition came to be seen in an externally historical perspective. That is what I meant to say in point 2 of yesterday's post.

I also said yesterday that I am looking for a way to preserve the achievement of the western tradition in affording me the external view, while not being limited by the fact that this view, taken in itself, obscures any possibility of standing within tradition. I think my intention here was admirably paraphrased by pseudonoma as the pursuit of an "escape from the external view without deviating from its most proper intention and aim."

An impasse shows the way forward, because it shows what thinking still has to do. This is why an impasse is not a "dead end."

2010-02-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

To sum up the last week's series of posts in pursuit of the nature of tradition, I have arrived at the following impasse:

1. The dichotomy between the internal and external views of the temporal character of tradition has to be abandoned, because as a religious being searching for piety, I cannot be satisfied with an interpretation which situates me as an outside observer of tradition.

2. The dichotomy cannot be abandoned, because it seems to involve forfeiting the position from which the most can be seen, rolling back consciousness to a point before it discovered the externally historical presentation of tradition; in other words, it seems to involve a willful denial of what the tradition of the philosophy of history has come to know and has passed on to me as my inheritance from it.

I am not sure that I should regard these demands as being equal in force, but I do so regard them. In an attempt to reconcile them, therefore, I am looking for a way to hold on to the synoptic view afforded by the external interpretation while removing the one-sidedness of an "external" position. For this reason it will not content me to retreat to the internal position any more than to abandon myself to the external. For, as I have been saying all along, the very notion of an internal point of view, as one side of a fundamental division, is a function of the external view which lays this division down in the first place--so that the intention to retreat (known as "traditionalism") fails from the outset by capitulating to the very thing it is trying to flee.

2010-02-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

Can it be to the advantage of thinking to have given up a distinction? The external view of tradition described in the below postings seems to be conscious of more than the internal. Surely we should not have to dim our awareness in order to reach the truth. Besides, as pseudonoma pointed out in response to yesterday's posting, the external view is itself taken up, passed on, affirmed, and questioned from within the internal view, as a ramification of it.

No solutions today, just more problems.

The Natality of Tradition, c't'd

2010-02-04T21:27:00.000-08:00

In yesterday's posting, I was trying to explain why after saying that tradition is regarded internally "as the way it has always been (let "it" be what it may)," I felt it necessary to add "or at least the way it has been since before one's initiation into the field in which the tradition in question holds sway." The reason I gave was twofold: first of all, any description of tradition, from whatever point of view, has to take account of the fact that tradition may and perhaps must relate to a founding; secondly, in the light of a distinction between internal and external ways of encountering tradition, a distinction based on and itself reinforcing the external view, the interpretation of founding which most readily presented itself was an external one: that a founding is an action which invents and introduces a new way of doing things which subsequently catches on.

I have not yet given any reason for denying that this interpretation is the correct one. However, it is certainly incorrect to give it as part of the internal point of view. Now, the question naturally arises as to whether it is even possible from the point of view we have been taking so far, to give a correct statement of the manner in which the internal view would take account of the fact of a founding. I propose that this is not possible, and that the external view of tradition is not even capable of stating in any matter of fact way how founding is traditionally interpreted, let alone what founding is in truth.

KTL Overdose

2010-02-03T23:37:00.000-08:00

More on Wittgenstein, continuing the line started last month. Read it if you're interested.

The account of propositions as a kind of expression repeats and deepens the lacuna in the picture theory (its omission of display and perception of logical pictures). The proposition is an expression of a thought, which is in turn a "logical picture" by which we "picture to ourselves" the facts which make up the world. First of all there is the fact, or, as far as thought with logical form is concerned, it might be better to say the elementary binary node of possibility. This node is what we picture to ourselves and determine positively or negatively. The binary node of possibility which is one point in the world appears to us in our picturing it to ourselves in logical space. The world is not a logical picture but finds expression in one, and this is what it means for a logical picture to be "of" facts.

Now the words "node," "point," "appears," "picturing," and "space" above all seem to be metaphors transferring the material of the senses into the structure of thinking. On the basis of this metaphoricity, it would be necessary to qualify also the statement that the world finds "expression" in thought (Such an analysis would be in accord with the traditional interpretation of intellectual perception as a metaphor). However, to posit a metaphysical rift between sense and thinking will make it impossible to explain how it is that the expression of a thought "can be perceived by the senses" in a proposition.

The thought may be a picture but does the thought then think itself? (Does a picture perceive itself and display itself?) We cannot neglect this question by chalking it up to the penumbras of the metaphoricity of "logical pictures," as though we were looking for a correlative in thinking to the production and reception of pictures only because we had been deceived by the metaphor into expecting everything to be the same "over there" in thinking as it is "over here" in sensing. Rather, it is the very gap in correspondence between sense and thinking which requires us to ask about the thinking of a thought. We can be satisfied, at first, with the substantial existence of sensible pictures. A thought, however, is not already "out there" but comes about simultaneously with the thinking of it. The phrase "picture...to ourselves" nicely reproduces the ambiguity of "machen uns Bilder," which in good usage means that we get an idea of something, but taken word for word also attributes the production of ideas to us as simultaneous with our receiving them. Wittgenstein's usage here points to a critical difference in the nature of a thought and the nature of a picture; the latter is produced and subsequently received, and stands in the meantime waiting in the world, ready to be seen.

The picture-theory of the Tractatus persistently treats the logical picture as though it were something substantial--that is, perduring in a meantime between production and perception, and says nothing about what it means to see a logical picture, or to display it. These, however, are the real moments of thinking, of which "the thought" is a fleeting shadow. What thinking is, then, remains fundamentally unclear in the Tractatus, and this leads to a deeper unclarity in what seems clearest: the senses. Here it must be admitted that we have no clear way of discerning whether the static interpretation of thought is responsible for the static interpretation of the proposition, or the other way around. At any rate, that an expression of a thought can be perceived by the senses proves that the senses no more receive a ready object than does thinking. Thinking must already somehow have a hand in saying and hearing for perception of a proposition to come about.

The Natality of Tradition

2010-02-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

I gave an incorrect description yesterday of the "internal" view of tradition. It should be obvious that an acknowledgment that things might once have been different and that one's initiation into the field could have been differently governed is already a transposition to the external view. However, this failed to be obvious to me, and I think the elusiveness of this fact had to do with two things: 1) It is not foreign to tradition (and may even be essential to it) to involve a relation to a founding, which means that the internal view can in some way involve a sense of a time before the tradition, and 2) the external view of tradition has such an overwhelming credibility, once it comes over the horizon, that the description of an internal view of tradition (which here means only a description of the negated other of the external view) cannot help being determined by the external.

The second of these things is a correlative of the problematic described at the end of yesterday's post: if the dichotomy between internal and external cannot be described from an internal point of view, without losing that point of view, neither can a correct description of the internal view be given from the external point of view.

As for the other point, I will have more to say tomorrow about the sense of a founding.

The Nature of Tradition

2010-02-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

Tradition presents itself in one of two ways, depending on whether it is viewed externally or internally: 1) as the way it has always been (let "it" be what it may), or at least the way it has been since before one's initiation into the field in which the tradition in question holds sway, and 2) as a pattern introduced into a temporal process, belonging to some subjectivity (let this be an individual or a community) which would otherwise have the possibility of being introduced into the same field in a variety of different ways. In general, it is impossible for any tradition to be regarded in both of these ways at once (since to accept the possibility of having been introduced into a field in some other way is to cease to be traditional with respect to that field), and this is the point of describing one as internal and the other as external.

But note that this description is not neutral. Rather, it requires an external perspective to imagine the possibility of both. If we would like to understand the nature of tradition while remaining traditional we will have to abandon this dichotomy.

introduction to metaphorical originality

2010-02-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

Another Gadamer passage provoking mixed feelings:

The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players. We can already see this from the use of the word, especially from its many metaphorical uses.

Here as always the metaphorical usage has methodological priority. If a word is applied to a sphere to which it did not originally belong, the actual "original" meaning emerges quite clearly. Language has performed in advance the abstraction that is, as such, the task of conceptual analysis. Now thinking need only make use of this advance achievement.

Something like this methodological priority seems to me to be what I have been thinking towards in my analysis of having, except that I do not limit it to a merely methodological priority. I particularly draw your attention to that last-linked posting, in which I insisted that having an ability more originally belongs to having than does having in the hand. True: Gadamer does say that the 'actual "original" meaning emerges' only in the light of the later transference of the term, and this might mean that the original usage was secretly guided by something more original. But this saying should only lead us to ask what it means for a word to have an "actual" meaning, when actually no one means that, yet.

2010-01-29T21:21:00.000-08:00

Once again, time is short, so let me give you a topic: outlines vs. diagrams.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

2010-01-28T21:21:00.000-08:00

Circumstances prevent me from making a full post today, but perhaps tomorrow I will tell you all about the prying personal questions I asked William Desmond this evening.

the horror

2010-01-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

Gadamer, on the purification of misery and horror (AKA pity and fear):

It seems clear to me that Aristotle is thinking of the tragic pensiveness that comes over the spectator at a tragedy. But pensiveness is a kind of relief and resolution, in which pain and pleasure are peculiarly mixed. How can Aristotle call this condition a purification? What is the impure element in feeling, and how is it removed in the tragic emotion? It seems to me that the answer is as follows: being overcome by misery and horror involves a painful division. There is a disjunction from what is happening, a refusal to accept that rebels against the agonizing events. But the effect of the tragic catastrophe is precisely to dissolve the disjunction from what is. It effects the total liberation of the constrained heart. We are freed not only from the spell in which the misery and horror of the tragic fate had bound us, but at the same time we are free from everything that divides us from what is.

Should we not recoil in horror at the miserable fate of losing a sense of misery and horror? If someone fails to rebel against and refuse to accept the "agonizing events" of the 9/11 attacks, or the holocaust of unborn children in America and throughout the world, is this not something inhuman? Why then should we attend and foster the birth of such a terrible beauty as accomplishes this purgation of feeling?

2010-01-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

[In religious rituals and in the proclamation of the Word in preaching], "being present" means genuine participation in the redemptive event itself. No one can doubt that aesthetic differentiation--attending to how "beautiful" the ceremony was or how "well preached" the sermon--is out of place, given the kind of claim that is made on us. Now, I maintain that the same thing is basically true when we experience art. Here too the mediation must be thought of as total. Neither the being that the creating artist is for himself--call it his biography--nor that of whoever is performing the work, nor that of the spectator watching the play, has any legitimacy of its own in the face of the being of the artwork itself.

As a lover of poetry and in particular of poetic drama, I am in complete accord with this saying of Gadamer in Truth and Method. But as a religious being searching for piety, I cannot understand how the anxiety does not arise for Gadamer which his religion-art parallel induces in me. How are we to decide whether the claim a work of art makes on us is one which it is pious to obey? If it is impious to ask such a question, how are we to become initiated into the correlative piety? Or if it is a matter of returning to an original piety from the impiety of questioning the claim a work of art made on us, how are we ever to extricate ourselves from idolatrous claims? What if the play which presents itself in a work of art and in doing so making a claim on the whole of life (as Gadamer also says) is a wicked god, like the gods Augustine discerned behind the "scenic plays" of ancient Rome?

What Wittgenstein's Picture Theory is For

2010-01-25T19:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry to change the subject abruptly but this is a blog, after all.

My thinking is going to be somewhat constrained by the courses I'm taking for the next few months, and today is Wittgenstein day.

The picture theory of language as expounded in the Tractatus seems to me something like a vigorous assertion of the reach of the correspondence theory of truth--it charges again and again in the direction of thinking and though it is at each advance prevented the force of its attack does pull it up into an orbit of significance. Lots to explain in that sentence. First, why do I say that Wittgenstein's approaches to thinking are prevented? Witggenstein says, "What a picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it--correctly or incorrectly--in the way it does, is its pictorial form." It must be admitted that in this formulation he has taken a step in the direction of thought, in that he has identified something that appears before the mind but as such is no longer the original state of affairs. However, all this step accomplishes (and it is in the positive spirit of the Tractatus to accomplish very little), is to extend the plane of the thinkable to include mental pictorial structures--even making these the principal objects of thinking. It does not in the least explain the act of thinking, nor the structure of language, as it is supposed to do.

What does it mean to "picture facts to ourselves?" how is this different than simply to picture facts? Is it a matter of first composing a logical construction with a certain pictorial form, and subsequently putting it on display within the mind? The ludicrousness of this interpretation shows that there must be in a single moment both the construction and the display, and not even in the sense of two simultaneous but distinct acts. To "picture to ourselves" is not perspicuously analyzable into construction and display. It has to be understood all together or not at all. "The thought," as something presented to thinking for its appreciation, is a fiction. It is part of a narrative which gives discursive thinking something to hold on to, in a matter too immediate to be thought in its immediacy.

The distinction between thinking and the thought must be collapsed if we are to make progress beyond the facts of what thinking has for its object, and beyond the manner in which it presents itself to thinking. The notion of "the thought" brings with it precisely the same structure and penetrates not at all into thinking. But to give up this distinction means to give up the explication of thinking in terms of pictorial form.

Wittgenstein claims to achieve very little in the Tractatus. This is correct, in that the greater work remains of renouncing what he has achieved. I do not know whether this renunciation belongs to the "late Wittgenstein," but I am certain that it is the proper and logical consequence of the picture theory.

Have some more having

2010-01-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

Here's what I hope to convince you of first: physical property is not the primary object of having.

I think the natural tendency in analyzing having would be to reduce it to an ever more physical grasp. When I say that I have a car, for instance, surely this is by extension from the fact that I can count on putting into my hands that part of the car which makes it useful as a car, namely, the key, which I have in my pocket. And by this I mean that at any time I could reach into my pocket and have it in my hand. Any closer to me and the key would be inside me, and my having it would fall prey to the fact that you can't have your key and eat it, too. A skilled and dexterous thief could perhaps extract the key from my hand, and if having it only meant being able to put it into one's grasp, he would have it more than I, even as I hold it in my hand.

Yet, perhaps the tendency to reduce having in this way to the physical grasp isn't so natural as it seemed. For what sort of nature would this course be innate? Not to the animal. Having in the hand is something no animal does except in the act of transforming this having into some use. Having a big stone means being able to take a crack at a palm nut. The stone is never simply grasped but already put to use as soon as the monkey's finger touches it. What the monkey has is not a stone but an ability to use the stone.

The above reduction of having to holding in the hand is in fact secretly guided by this fact, in conjunction with the prejudice that having means first of all having to oneself. Next, I hope to show the error of this prejudice.

What's the use continued

2010-01-21T19:34:00.000-08:00

My previous post may have struck you as uncharacteristically "analytic." Just keep in mind that analytic philosophy is bastardized Hegelianism and I am the intellectual bastard child of bastards crossed with bastards, trying to become somebody (maybe get my name in the phone book), and I hope you'll forgive me. And I'm not going to backspace any of what I just wrote because I'm trying to become a blogger and being a blogger means not backspacing. At least, not very much.

Why is my instinct to analyze? Why do I want to know what I mean when I say "I have a laptop?" What significance could such an analysis have for the purpose of saying what the meaning of tradition is? Well, I don't know yet. That's why this is a blog and not a book. There's no design here, just what I think when I sit down for half an hour to write in the evening, more or less moderated to bear on a line of thought. But I do believe that I will find answers to those questions which could be put about my way of proceeding and that I will find myself justified in some sense (even if it is in the sense of being brought into line from error) in proceeding as I did. If I didn't believe this I wouldn't dare expose my thinking.

So, in case you were wondering, what's the use of following this blog, if I don't even know what I'm talking about, the answer is that this blog is bound to a destiny in thought to which its author is striving to adhere. Do you believe that it is good to listen to something like that? If you do, keep reading. If you don't, the internet is a big place and I'm sure you will find on it somewhere a philosophy blog by someone who does know what they're talking about.

But the question, let's not forget, is what does it mean to have? And I wanted to approach this question by describing what I think I mean when I say that I have something. Which I'll get back to tomorrow, perhaps, now that I've unburdened my intellectual conscience.

use enjoys myself

2010-01-20T19:16:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to have something? I'm suddenly getting that overwhelming feeling that comes from having loudly announced to a room that I have something significant to say. But neither of the "haves" in the previous sentence will do for the present purpose, although they too will have to be explained. I also say that I have a laptop. I think I mean that I count on being able to use it. Why should I make such a point of distinguishing using it from enjoying it? To answer that I'll have to say what "use" means.

That's all I've got today. You were expecting, what, a dissertation?

Preview of a thought I am still hoarding

2010-01-19T19:45:00.001-08:00

In speaking of tradition in terms of the meaning of the word "tradition," that is, in terms of turning something over (to someone), it is tempting to say that this is a metaphor with a limited application to the sorts of things to which we would like to apply it. Intellectual, liturgical, and cultural traditions seem to be exempt from the inescapable fact which makes the turning over of physical property difficult and involves it in contentions so fervid that complex legal structures of contract law and enforcement are required to keep them from tearing human society apart: that the one who turns over property no longer has it. Yves Congar in The Meaning of Tradition, writes:

Usually, when it is a question of handing over a material object, the donor loses possession of it and can no longer enjoy it. But this is no longer true when it is a question of spiritual riches--when a teacher transmits a doctrine he commits it into the keeping of another, to be enjoyed by him, without losing any of it himself.

Spiritual riches, we like to think, are free from competition. But is it always or even preeminently true of traditions that the possession of what is turned over is beyond contention? I believe that Congar maintains this position only by mistaking the meaning of competition for goods, and therefore of what it means to possess them or turn them over. Is it in order to enjoy some good that I strive to possess it when someone else has it and cling to it when I have it?

Tune in tomorrow (by which I do mean Wednesday, January 20, 2010, and not in any other iteration of the eternal return but in continuity with this very day!), when I shall try to say something of what I myself think about the meaning of possession, competition, and turning over (and therefore of the "meaning of tradition").

How Chunky is Space?

2010-01-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

Speaking of chunks, how about Sebastian's argument "that space, in its actuality, must be finitely subdivided?"

Now, it would seem that it would take an infinite amount of time to move through an infinite amount of space, unless one has the capacity to move at an infinite velocity. Since human beings do not seem to possess the means to means to travel at an infinite velocity, it follows that no one would be able to cross even a finite distance, since to do so they would have to move through the infinite subdivisions of the finite amount of space. In fact, nothing unable to move at an infinite velocity would be able to move at all, since it would have to cross infinite space to reach a point even infinitesimally farther away from where it started.

At first I resisted, but now I am reconciled to the logic of this reasoning. However, I am making this concession with no idea in mind but to show that the same argument also proves that space is infinitely subdivided. The argument says that it would take an infinite amount of time to move through an infinite amount of space at a finite velocity. But how far apart should we say the discrete units of space are, which according to the argument are supposed to divide space? At no distance from each other, or at some distance? If at no distance, then all space is in the same place, and no motion is possible. If at some distance, then there is either a measure for the distance between them, which is a further division of space, or the distance between them is infinite, and motion from one to the other would require infinite time and/or infinite velocity, neither of which is available to humans or to anything with whose motion we are familiar.

The only possible conclusion of this argument, from which two contradictory conclusions follow, is that motion is not what the argument takes it to be, namely, a traversal of a certain kind of topological extension, which unlike other such extensions is perfectly blank and indifferent. I have the feeling this is what Sebastian has been trying to get at anyway, but only he can say.

It's getting mighty chunky up in here

2010-01-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

Philosophy KTL's archnemesis Richard Chappell has a nice refutation up of the peculiar evasion of responsibility afforded by consequentialism of a certain modal outlook (different from Chappell's own consequentialism). Ever the sucker for a charming turn of phrase, I can't get over Chappell's handling of the term "chunky" ("chunkiness of market sensitivity," "chunky impacts"):

It might typically take 100 boycotters to ensure that one less crate of 100 steaks is bought. But one of those hundred individual choices must have made the difference between the store choosing to buy X crates or X-1. We just don't know which one -- where the tipping point lies -- whether we just need to decrease demand by 1 more steak, or 36, or 99, before the store will respond. So, in the absence of any further information, any individual consumer should see their personal steak boycott as having a 1/100 chance of reducing the store's purchasing by 100 steaks. (And so on up the supply chain.) That's an expected impact of (ta-da) one steak. The "chunkiness" of the market's sensitivity thus makes no difference. Your lessened chance of making an individual impact is exactly counterbalanced by the higher steaks payoff if you happen to succeed in influencing an entire 'chunk' of demand.

But verbal ingenuity aside, it does lead me to wonder at the kind of world which would lead one to think that almost all of one's day-to-day choices are, you know, inconsequential. Isn't it so like the sleek casings with which we like to have our electronics masked, to protect us from the complexity of their real mechanisms? You can scratch an iPod with a nail for hours without messing up its operation.

There's a reflection cooking somewhere in there on the connection between macroeconomics and the essence of technology. I just wanted to give you a whiff of it.

2010-01-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

Morgan Meis at The Smart Set reports that Heidegger's "coffin is sealed" by the publication of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.

I'm still waiting to see if Heidegger knows the one inch punch.

Results of a Conversation

2010-01-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

[Update (1/27/10): I'm prefixing the actual result up at the top for those of you who do not want to read the tedious transcript: The question of whether and in what way a man can be the same as God is the same question as whether poetic inspiration can be the same as divine inspiration, provided that the hypothesis was correct that poetic inspiration is being inspired by one's own spirit.]

A couple friends came over today to talk. Rolf was wondering how poetic inspiration stands in relation to divine inspiration. I'm often wondering this myself, so I was glad to talk about it. At some point Rainscape hypothesized that in poetic inspiration one is inpsired by one's own spirit. Then, by way of a digression on the manner of communication involved in divine inspiration (dictation, planting an idea in the intellect, or what), we got to talking about how much the inspired author should be said to contribute, and after some time concluded that it would depend on the extent to which it would be true to say that he was like a god or the same as God--taking it for granted that there must be some upper limit to such a saying, but not knowing just where to put it.

Here's how we left it, tying it all together. The question of whether and in what way a man can be the same as God is the same question as whether poetic inspiration can be the same as divine inspiration, provided that the hypothesis was correct that poetic inspiration is being inspired by one's own spirit.

Boast for thinkers

2010-01-13T21:32:00.000-08:00

Seems every Johnny Headswell and Jane Q. Thinkypants from here to some other place far far away from here has an idea to sell, which is to say a way to sell themselves. Not me, though. I've got nothing but the shirt on my back (and my other clothes and possessions), a few sundry intangibles, and a head full of questions.

reading the Posterior Analytics

2010-01-12T08:59:00.000-08:00

"All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge." (first sentence of the Posterior Analytics)

I still haven't figured out how this can possibly be correct. Wouldn't you have to learn the particulars in order to learn universals through induction? The particulars are not all clear from the moment of your birth, and neither deduction nor induction could account for your coming to know the particulars (deduction could if you already knew the universals, but since we're talking about particulars from which an induction to a universal is possible, the universal will have to wait. Therefore, you must learn the particulars in some other way than induction or deduction. But what way is there of learning on the basis of prior knowledge besides induction and deduction? And what prior knowledge, for that matter, could be involved in learning a particular?

I realize this is an obvious and probably superficial objection, and that fifty eminent scholars have explained it somewhere but do you see me sitting on top of an already read stack of fifty eminent scholars' writings on the Posterior Analytics? I have a hard enough time getting through one article in a week.

new rule for KTL in 2010

2010-01-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

I started this blog as part of an effort to produce more by lowering my standards. But as you can see it quickly succumbed to my usual perfectionist paralysis. I'm not giving up yet, though. I just need to keep reminding myself, as pseudonoma (to whose comment I have still given no answer) has reminded me, that it's just an effing blog.

So from now on: less deliberating and dilating, more posting. I'm going to try to post something every day, at least on weekdays, and to reply to comments within 24 hours. I reserve the right to proceed in my usual way on the gracklog, but here please expect to hear from me more often.

On Refrain

2009-12-24T16:41:00.000-08:00

I am in general in favor of repeating myself, and it seems to me that as a blogger I have a special license to do so. So although I have said itelsewhere and in the same context of song-writing, this will not prevent me from remarking again here that echo says the impossible. But let me also go a little further and say that the marvelous phenomenon of refrain depends on that same impossible saying. Take the lyrics of this Mountain Goats song:

And I sang "Oh, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do without you?"

Needless to say, this refrain is already calculated to make a repetition-lover like me smile. But is it also needless to say that this is not yet a refrain? It is "only" repetition. Only the empty rhetorical words of a broken man for whom nothing is possible, wandering in speech through his own indifferent thoughts just as he "wandered through the house like a little boy lost at the mall." And please don't let the force of that image go to waste! For a little boy with his mother the mall may be a place of wonder (even there, perhaps, the gods are present!), with something new to astonish him at every turn--but with his mother's disappearance, there disappear also all the various and surprising invitations of the place and all that is left is the space between him and his mother, which threatens to be infinite--nothing appears to this child but that his mother is not there, nor there, nor there again, as with each step she--all he could hope to find--does not appear.

"What do I do?" An expression of the impossibility of doing anything. If a man reaches out to speak, or rather to sing, in the midst of the impossibility of doing anything at all, this expression threatens to become all he has and to repeat itself infinitely in all his song. Song itself, the wondrously various and surprising highway of the soul, becomes an exercise in futility.

But if this man sings these words so often that they lose their meaning, he might recognize that they had all along the peculiarity of not meaning what they mean: "What do I do?" A question. How am I to proceed? But the words meant precisely that this question could not be asked, because no answer could be expected, and there is no such thing as a question which expects no answer. A question, to be a question, has to "[get] ready for the future to arrive." If it does not have this readiness it asks for nothing and is only bitter rhetoric. And in our song this readiness which the singer has is why his repetition of the refrain is emphatically not only a repetition, but a discovery. Suddenly the very words of hopelessness have joined the world in coming alive.

And let me say also this: in order for all of this to be true, the refrain must have already had this life in the first place in order to come alive. If in its first entrance the same saying which concludes the song on an expectant note does not bear itself toward the future with expectancy, it must for that very reason be said that it does bear itself in this way toward its transformation in the end. Waiting: holding back. If the song is a composition, something to be performed more or less according to prescription, then the sense of expectancy is withheld deliberately and knowingly from the first entrance of the refrain, in expectation of the second. The first waits for the second. And only because it does so, because it refrains and holds something back can the second come as a surprise.

Philosophical Hunting

2009-12-14T21:26:00.000-08:00

Book II, Chapter 13 of the Posterior Analytics begins, “Now we have already said how what a thing is is set out in the terms, and in what way there is or is not demonstration or definition of it; let us now say how one should hunt out what is predicated in what a thing is.” That the hunt for what belongs to a thing in what it is does not differ from a hunt for the demonstrative middle is not immediately obvious, but follows from the fact that what belongs in what a thing is does not differ from what is necessary. The discussion which follows makes clear that the hunt here has the purpose of discovering what something is, that is, of finding out of the demonstrative middle what it is. The things which are predicated in what it is are hunted out, sorted, and sifted with a view to the substance of the object. Aristotle says this explicitly: “such things must be taken up to the first point at which just so many are taken that each will belong further but all of them together will not belong further; for necessarily this will be the substance of the object.”

The question about how things predicated in what it is are to be hunted out is not a question of by what means these things may be identified. Rather it is a question of the context proper to such a pursuit: “How?” here has the sense of “In what way? Along what path?” None of these attributes inhering necessarily in a thing is of scientific interest on its own account, as the stopping point of an inquiry. Rather, they have the character of an “if it is.” Knowledge of them imparts knowledge that there is a demonstrative middle. The satisfaction of the inquiry in pursuit of the that is not a stopping point, but opens on a further inquiry, in pursuit of what it is. Aristotle is not here articulating a methodology for turning up attributes which belong necessarily to something. Indeed, his position here would caution against the very notion of such a methodology in abstraction from inquiry proper, which directs itself to a middle term to learn what it is. Such a pedantic, disinterested manner of “hunting out” would differ from the “hunting out” here recommended as a sportsman's weekend out putting bullets in things differs from the patient, urgent incursions into the wild of a man who hunts for his sustenance. That is to say, it differs in failing, however many trophies it may accrue, to be the hunt—the genuine, high human activity of science which runs through and unifies our intellectual capacities, and gives them their meaning.

The Humane Critique, c't'd

2009-12-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

Because the principle of purposiveness must be open-ended in its range of applicability, the possibility always remains open to judgment of construing all of nature in mechanistic terms, and indeed given the option, the intentional direction of our cognitive powers is such that they will always lead us to prefer such an interpretation, since we will prefer what brings all of nature within our ambit. If we follow this inclination, which is so deeply rooted in our nature that it grows together with and indeed gives life to our scientific activity, then we give free rein to our cognitive powers and simply let their own self-born orientation direct us in our relation to things. However reckless this might seem, if all the same this is the direction which comes to us through the unimpeded activity our most characteristic powers, would this not be most human?

But this ramification of the principle of purposiveness has a companion growing almost invisibly alongside it: namely, the critical power which retrospectively reflects on and clarifies the origin of science. And this power begins with a presupposition contrary to that which judgment wishes to arrogate to itself: that the cognitive powers are limited, and that these limitations present themselves to view purposively for the ordering of cognitive ambition, rather than for meeting its intention. This presupposition will be found in no one of the powers into which Kant divides cognition, as though he were doing so exhaustively—and this is perhaps the strangest feature of Kant's thought, that he omits to provide or even look for conditions of possibility for that mode of attention which facilitates his entire project. Whether this silence is a failure of self-consciousness or rather a supreme tact of the true charioteer seems to be the question, although perhaps it is no question at all—since it is at least suggestive of the highest human condition if not true to say that failure of self-consciousness is the essence of tact, just as Douglas Adams has imagined the secret of flight as consisting in being able to throw oneself at the ground, and miss.

Part 2: The Geo-Logical Foundations of Techno-Logic According to Wall-E

2009-12-04T15:05:00.001-08:00

So what is an axiom?

Axiom, as no doubt you are aware, is the name of the great space station on which mankind draws out its centuries-long vacation from the planet as the movie Wall-E opens. It seems to have been named in the confidence that it could supply the complete conditions for human life without any need of its being supported, and this confidence would seem seem to be confirmed by the fact that so many generations later, humans still live on the ship, with not even a memory of any other place to live. However, we learn that the Axiom has according to its own intelligence reached such an estimation of its self-sufficiency that it rebels against that part of its directive which it interprets as a threat to its autonomy--namely, the directive to seek a return to ground. Being themselves aliens to ground, men have no resource to question this claim.

Not to make too much or too little of the heroic exploits by which mankind is brought back down to Earth, it will be enough for my present purposes to remind you that the same Axiom which adrift in space sustained nothing which could be called human life and therefore failed in its own directive, when grounded on the Earth does serve human life as a starting point--that is, a point of departure. And this departure (from itself) is the true being of the Axiom.

Tune in next time for the full interpretation of this allegory.

The Logical Foundations of Logic According to Wall-E

2009-12-03T17:55:00.000-08:00

There is a prejudice abroad that an axiom is a certain sort of proposition or statement, which serves as one of a set of starting points to build the any science (construed as a set of interrelated propositions regarding a genus) through inferences from these axioms. For those who distinguish between axioms and principles--which we must if we are to countenance the notion of an empirical science (and let that be an axiom if you like)--this thesis may be refined to say that axioms serve as the most general starting points and function alongside the empirically disclosed and clarified principles of any given empirical science to govern the manner in which inference may and must proceed from those starting points.

Presumably Aristotle is somehow responsible for this state of affairs, since perhaps there are only a handful of prejudices of logic which cannot somehow be traced back to his work. I have not yet found anything of the sort asserted in the Analytics, but perhaps that will only tell you how little attention I have been able to give that text. What I do find is the fact that an axiom is never brought into a straightforward argument: e.g., "That it is not possible to affirm and deny at the same time is assumed by no demonstration--unless the conclusion too is to be proved in this form" (An Post 77a10). In other words, only if one wants to prove precisely that a certain true proposition is not to be denied, or that a certain false proposition is not to be asserted, do we appeal to the axiom known as the principle of non-contradiction. Yet, even in this case, if the principle of non-contradiction is truly an axiom in the sense of being indispensable for grasping anything whatsoever, the same principle which is made explicit as a premise must also undergird the connection of this premise through the other to the conclusion. And it cannot do this as a premise.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Wall-E? I guess all you robot-loving fools out there will just have to wait till next time to find out,