On Refrain

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 it before, 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.

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.

pieces of flair

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.

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 historical-logical demonology of St. Augustine

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.

What's the use continued

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.

It's getting mighty chunky up in here

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.