11 posts tagged “philosophy”
I kind of want to Cafepress myself a JE COEUR PAUL RICOEUR T-shirt. I had been wondering where was the account of nineteenth-century historiography and the novel; why no one could engage with Hayden White's tropological theory of history without sliding into his dumb relativism; where was the reasonable account of those qualities that make narrative an indispensable counterweight to science which still took seriously the ways in which our lives are not very much like The Brothers Kamarazov. Every vein here is loaded with ore, and as with Truth and Method, which I read over the holidays, this was only a first pass through something I'll be returning to for a long time. (I did kind of skim the twenty pages about The Magic Mountain. Hans, the magic mountain sucks! Go home!)
Honoring Cora Diamond is an action I approve of, so I was happy to grab this off the new releases shelf at the library. The book probably should have been called Wittgenstein or the Moral Life - most of the essays tackle one or the other - but if you're into this kind of thing I especially recommend Juliet Floyd's subtle analysis of what's at stake in the Tractatus controversies. Hilary Putnam also interjects some considered doubts about the remarks on mathematics and David Finkelstein has a commonsense emendation of the questionable Davidson/Rorty line on animals having no thoughts. (Do not read James Conant's long and annoying parody of Johannes Climacus, which confirms his status as Diamond for Dummies.)
And then I was privileged to encounter the latter part of a long interpretive chain - John McDowell remarking on Stanley Cavell reading Diamond reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello - all of them being fine enough thinkers and writers that meaning accretes rather than attenuates in the process. It's nice when the good people cluster together. The rest was anticlimax.
It started out strong, working in the same conceptual ballpark as After Virtue; so what happened? After his initial argument, Taylor seemed to decide that he wanted to rewrite Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, or maybe a philosophical version of Auerbach's Mimesis; at any rate, the scope goes very wide, the examples start to bury the argument, and especially once Taylor gets into matters where I have some knowledge of my own, it starts to seem pretty cursory - all the footnotes to his Romanticism section refer to The Mirror and the Lamp by Abrams; same thing with modernism and The Romantic Image by Kermode. In sum? There is good stuff, but you have to dig; and our encyclopedic ambitions should be handled very very cautiously.
What, must Man then retire from Society and go to live with the Bears? Well no, but consider the Savage who sells his cotton bed to the Explorer and returns weeping later that day to buy it back, for he gave no thought in the morning to his needs for the evening. Like me, who just poured his bottled water into a glass at the cafe, thus depriving myself of water for the walk home. God damn it, Rousseau.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
The melancholy of Berkeley.
But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone's rights in the name of someone else's utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.
But pessimism, he says, is one more luxury we will have to forgo to get through these times. At the end it turns out that we are living the dark ages over again, that the barbarians are already in charge and the only hope for a coherent moral life lies in something like the Benedictine monastic model. Which is provocative but perhaps not arguable (if our moral equipment is that decayed, moral argument will have to involve some measure of bad faith). Epic morality might be nice and straightforward, but I would have made a shitty Homeric warrior, especially because the Greeks didn't have contact lenses. On the other hand, I think I would have made an excellent monk.
Whew! It's an admirable book, painstaking in its appreciation and critique of Freud and ascetic in its rejection of glib generalities; these same qualities also made it intermittently hard going for someone like me who am not much of a Freudian. I got the most out of the introduction and conclusion, which put Freud first next to Marx and Nietzsche, then with and against Hegel, and end up sketching a project for a combined phenomenology and hermeneutics. Meanwhile, the middle 400 pages are all about taking Freud on his own terms. And those terms - you know, I really respond to him with a unique combination of fascination in broad strokes and monumental indifference in matters of detail. I can only take the feces-penis-money-mother complex so far.
Obviously this prefigures a lot of later stuff, but what I really like is the setting of consciousness in a very wide field. In very broad terms the linking of self-consciousness and being-with-others seems right to me, and certainly a much better avenue than all the arguments that take a narrow tack on phenomenal experience (zombies! redness!) and thereby seem stipulated as insoluble. A quale of bathood isn't any kind of convertible currency.Das ganze Leben wäre möglich, ohne dass es sich gleichsam im Spiegel sähe: wie ja thatsächlich auch jetzt noch bei uns der bei weitem überwiegende Theil dieses Lebens sich ohne diese Spiegelung abspielt -, und zwar auch unsres denkenden, fühlenden, wollenden Lebens, so beleidigend dies einem älteren Philosophen klingen mag. Wozu überhaupt Bewusstsein, wenn es in der Hauptsache überflüssig ist? - ... so darf ich zu der Vermuthung weitergehn, dass Bewusstsein überhaupt sich nur unter dem Druck des Mittheilungs-Bedürfnisses entwickelt hat, - dass es von vornherein nur zwischen Mensch und Mensch (zwischen Befehlenden und Gehorchenden in Sonderheit) nöthig war, nützlich war, und auch nur im Verhältniss zum Grade dieser Nützlichkeit sich entwickelt hat.
The whole of life would be possible without it, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive it may sound to older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?... I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility.
Nietsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral). Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967 (1887).
I guess the thing to say about the first piece is that the title is hard to translate. The reigning English versions "Use and Abuse of History" and "Advantages and Disadvantages of History" both get one term right while sacrificing the other for euphony: "advantage" would be Vorteil, "abuse" would be Mißbrauch or Mißhandlung. It isn't really a pros-and-cons argument about historical study and life, since we always use history in the service of life, and it's only the perverse nature of scientific study (which is really what Historie is; the succession of historical events itself is Geschichte) that allows us to forget this. The point is less to revamp historical study than to integrate it into a fuller life overall.
The thing to say about the second piece is that when I got to the section on punishment, I realized I could get rid of all my Foucault.
That is Hegel's account of how we comprehend a three-word subject-predicate sentence. I'd like to see his account of how we comprehend his account. It must be like the difference between googol and googolplex.The first subject enters into the determinations and is their soul; thus the second subject, which knows, still finds in the predicate that with which it had wished to be done so it could return into itself; and instead of being in a position to function as the active element in the movement of the predicate - arguing back and forth whether this or that predicate would be suitable - the second subject is still preoccupied with the self of the content and has to stay with that instead of being by itself.
No, there's something to it, but I didn't get it after one go-round. Anyway that's enough Hegel for now - I just wanted a sampler so I would stop feeling quite so ignorant when he came up in all my other reading. Also today's genteel paperbacks are purty and all, but man do I wish Anchor was still around.
"It's a book about my two least favorite things!"
No, Hegel knows it's impossible that I should approve of my society, and Taylor makes a pretty good case that he at least thought through some of the problems. It is short and lucid and only occasionally seems dated by its references to those kids who want to "drop out" into nature, so as to avoid the "system," you know, and by its periodic emphasis on the Soviet Union. Because, you know, people are really unhappy in the Soviet Union.
