Philosophy

by

Existentialist Ethics

. . . not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives — like religions — a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which makes its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

by

Gloomy Passivity

A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

by

Derrida’s Platonic Phiction

After closing the pharmacy, Plato went to retire, to get out of the sun. He took a few steps in the darkness toward the back of his reserves, found himself leaning over the pharmakon, decided to analyze.

Within the thick, cloudy liquid, trembling deep inside the drug, the whole pharmacy stood reflected, repeating the abyss of the Platonic phantasm.

The analyst cocks his ears, tries to distinguish between two repetitions.

He would like to isolate the good from the bad, the true from the false.

He leans over further: they repeat each other.

Holding the pharmakon in one hand, the calamus in the other, Plato mutters as he transcribes the play of formulas. In the enclosed space of the pharmacy, the reverberations of the monologue are immeasurably amplified. The walled-in voice strikes against the rafters, the words come apart, bits and pieces of sentences are separated, disarticulated parts begin to circulate through the corridors, become fixed for a round or two, translate each other, become rejoined, bounce off each other, contradict each other, make trouble, tell on each other, come back like answers, organize their exchanges, protect each other, institute an internal commerce, take themselves for a dialogue. Full of meaning. A whole story. An entire history. All of philosophy.

“. . . . the sound of these arguments rings so loudly in my head that I cannot hear the other side.”

— Jacques Derrida, from “Plato’s Pharmacy,” from Dissemination [translated by Barbara Johnson]

by

Book Review :: Fiction and the Weave of Life :: John Gibson

John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780199299522.

Reviewed by Frank B. Farrell, Purchase College, State University of New York

Analytic philosophy of literature and deconstructionist thought make strange bedfellows, but they join in making matters difficult for the literary humanist. The analytic philosopher, using investigations regarding truth, reference, meaning, knowledge, justification, and the like will press toward a conclusion that literary fiction cannot be about the world and cannot give us knowledge of it. From quite different considerations, in emphasizing textuality and in supposedly undermining notions of representation and truth, the postmodern thinker concludes that literary fictions do not gain their significance through the ways they link up with a non-textual world beyond them. In contrast, the literary humanist wishes to argue that literature involves a cognitive engagement with the world, in ways that matter to our living out our lives as humans. John Gibson wants to give a strong defense of that claim, while at the same time granting considerable strength to the views of the humanist’s opponents.

Gibson is a philosopher of admirable clarity whose discussions contrast favorably with so much work in literary and cultural studies that seems to have little sense of what an argument is. At each point in his presentation, the reader knows just what move is being made in the debate. Gibson requires of his account that it satisfy two conditions at once. First, it should demonstrate that fiction has worldly import and illuminates reality, in a robust sense. Second, it should allow that the fictive stance we take toward literature is different in kind from the kind of stances we take toward linguistic sequences that purport to be assertions about how matters stand in the world. That is, the admirable effect produced by literature must be internal to what makes it function as the special kind of thing it is. One approach might be to challenge the analytic philosopher on what is meant by knowledge; perhaps there are models of what it is to grasp what the world is like that will apply better to fiction than the models now typically imported from philosophy. Gibson, while allowing that possibility, importantly decides to pursue a different strategy. He will grant the skeptic his claim that if fiction is somehow to be about the world, it will not be so in a manner that can be explained through the idea of knowledge. But then how can one prevent the text from becoming an isolationist realm, without tie lines to reality?

Continue reading →

by

Notes on a poem / Can you guess?

Notes on a poem are like anatomical lectures on a piece of roast beef.
–August Wilhelm Schlegel, Aethenium Fragment 40

.

Believing in tradition and always straining at new insanities; frenetically imitative and proudly independent; awkward in what is superficial and accomplished to the point of dexterity in what is profoundly or gloomily ponderous; congenitally vapid but striving to be transcendental in feeling and outlook; comfortably and seriously entrenched against wit and frivolity, and inflamed by a sacred abhorrence of these qualities. Can you guess to what great body of literature these traits correspond?
–August Wilhelm Schlegel, Aethenium Fragment 58

.

[from Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow]

by

Language is Language

Language itself is — language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical twice — language is language — how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we already are.

–Martin Heidegger, “Language”
[Translated by Albert Hofstadter]

by

Epigraphica

What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
–Vladimir Nabokov, “On Translating ‘Eugene Onegin'”
[D]

Another school of thought declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous details of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid . . .
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
[D]

In regard to Nature, it is agreed that philosophy ought to know her as she is, that if the philosophers’ stone (der Stein der Weisen) is hidden anywhere, it must at any rate be within nature herself, that she contains her own reason within her. . . . the ethical world (die sittliche Welt), on the other hand, the State. . .

Innocence, therefore, is merely nonaction, like the mere being of a stone (das Sein eines Steines), not even that of a child.
–Hegel
[D]

. . . Gullibility whipped up with blasphemy, this worldly black magic spreads, indeed, to literature, an object of study and criticism.

A certain deference, better, toward the extinct laboratory of the philosophers’ elixer, would consist of taking up again, without the furnace, the manipulations, poisons, cooled down into something other than precious stones, so as to continue simply through intelligence. Since there are only, in all, two pathways open to mental research, into which our need bifurcates — namely, esthetics on the one hand and political economy on the other — it is principally of the latter that alchemy was the glorious, hasty, and troubling precursor. Everything that once stood out, pure, for lack of meaning, prior to the current apparition of the crowd, should be restored to the social realm. The null stone, dreaming of gold, once called philosophal: but it foreshadows, in financial terms, the future credit, preceding capital or reducing it to the humility of small change! With what disorder are such things pursued around us, and how little understood! It is almost embarrassing to profer this truths, which imply neat, prodigious dream transfers, thus, cursively and at a loss.
–Mallarmé
[D]

“It isn’t playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one’s energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don’t you see?” he confessed with a queer face, “one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life,” he puzzled it out, “call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralyzing, or at any rate engrossing — all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one can see.”
–Henry James, The Ambassadors
[LN]

Style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us. . . . And it is perhaps as much by the quality of his language as by the species of . . . theory which he advances that one may judge of the level to which a writer has attained in the moral and intellectual part of his work. Quality of language, however is something that theorists think they can do without, and those who admire them are easily persuaded that it is no proof of intellectual merit.
–Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
[LN]

You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.
–Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man
[LN]

He shook his head sadly.
“i glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
“But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”
“Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.”
–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
[LN]

I said to him: “I am one who, when Love breathes
in me, takes note. And in whatever way
he dictates within, that way I signify.”
–Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXIV
[LN]

He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
–Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
[LN]

It is no chance matter we are discussing, but how one should live.
–Plato, Republic
[LN]

Here, as in all other cases, we must set down the appearances and, first working through the puzzles, in this way go on to show, if possible, the truth of all the deeply held beliefs about these experiences; and, if this is not possible, the truth of the greatest number and the most authoritative.
–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
[LN]

The exposition of the letter is nothing other than the development of the form.
–Dante, Letter to Can Grande
[LN]

Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
[LN]

. . . I spoke of the novel as an especially useful agent of the moral imagination, as the literary form which most directly reveals to us the complexity, the difficulty, and the interest of life in society, and best instructs us in our human variety and contradiction.
–Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
[LN]

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
–Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
[LN]

What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules.
What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II.xi
[LN]

Of these States the poet is the equable man . . .
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more
nor less . . .
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a
helpless thing . . .
He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and
women as dreams or dots.
–Walt Whitman, from By Blue Ontario’s Shore
[LN]

At the centre, the bed of crystalline Love was dedicated to her name most fittingly. The man who had cut the crystal for her couch and her observance had divined her nature unerringly: Love should be crystal — transparent and translucent. . . . Its roundness inside betokens Love’s Simplicity: Simplicity is most fitting for love, which must have no corners, that is, no cunning or Treachery.
–Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan
[LN]

No dogs, bicycles, or tricycles allowed in this garden at any time by order. The gardeners are required to conduct from the garden anyone infringing these rules.
–Sign in the garden of Cadogan Square, London, 1980
[LN]

We’ll let Teisias and Gorgias continue sleeping. For they noticed that plausible stories win more public honor than the truth. And so they make trivial things seem important and important things trivial through the power of their discourse, and they dress up new views in old language and old views in new language, and they have discovered how to speak about any subject both concisely and at interminable length.
–Plato, Phaedrus 267a6
[LN]

And if a cataleptic impression does not exist, neither will there be any assent to it, and thus there will not be any certainty either. And if there is no certainty, neither will there be a system of certainties, that is to say a science. From which it follows that there will be no science of life either.
–Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos vii, 182
[LN]

As we examine this view closely, it looks to us more like a prayer than like a truth.
–Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos xi, 401
[LN]

.

“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say–
What manner of man art thou?”

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
The heart within me burns.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
[NE]

And as he spoke, I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
–Philip Roth, The Counterlife
[NE]

Someone said, “Our right hand is in the book. But the left has the privilege of opening and closing. Thus both hands preside over the morrow of the book.”
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Dialogue
[NE]

You read. You tie yourself to what comes untied — to what unties you within your ties. You are a knot of correspondence . . . a knot of innocence, craftiness, of things likely and unlikely, of infinite faithfulness.
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
[NE]

A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forwards. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said.
–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
[NE]

Evasions of the existence of others may take the form of smothering a person, or a text, with seemingly scrupulous questions.
–Michael Fischer, “Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein”
[NE]

Kafka wanted to know at which moments and how often, with eight people sitting within the horizon of a conversation, you have to speak up in order not to pass for taciturn.
–Maurice Blanchot, “Interruptions”
[NE]

[A dream:] This is my sister here, with some identifiable friends and many other people. They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, the neighbor whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake because he is stronger than me. I also speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding. It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent; they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up, and goes away without a word. . . . My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and then I remember that it is not a haphazard dream, but that I dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details. I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone. Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?
–Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
[NE]

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.
–Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
[NE]

We die in a last word.
–Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
[NE]

.

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; the summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned over the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
–Wallace Stevens
[CWK]

God made man because he loves stories.
–Elie Wiesel
[CWK]

How shall we know all the friends whom we meet on
strange roadways.
–Ezra Pound, “Cathay”
[CWK]

Poetry is capable of saving us.
–I. A. Richards
[CWK]

To the aesthetic temperament nothing seems ugly. There are degrees of beauty — that is all.
–Max Beerbohm
[CWK]

It is a deadly error to expect poetry to provide the supersubstantial nourishment of men.
–Jacques Maritain
[CWK]

A book [of prose fiction] at the time [it is written] is a good or bad action.
–Jean-Paul Sartre
[CWK]

One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. . . . The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is seperable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.
–George Orwell
[CWK]

“What takes place” in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; “what happens” is in language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.
–Roland Barthes
[CWK]

Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. . . . The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
–T. S. Eliot
[CWK]

A work of art is . . . a bridge, however tenuous, between one mind and another.
–Andrew Harrison
[CWK]

[Art] is civilization’s single most significant device for learning what must be affirmed and what must be denied.
–John Gardner
[CWK]

Reading is the easiest thing in the world, it is freedom without work, a pure Yes blossoming in the immediate.
–Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus
[PR]

. . . . . . . . . .

Initials of titles from which the above epigraphs are taken:

CWK . . . . . . . . . . Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988)

D . . . . . . . . . . Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (translated by Barbara Johnson) (1981)

LN . . . . . . . . . . Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990)

NE . . . . . . . . . . Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (1995)

PR . . . . . . . . . . Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading (1998)

by

Dude, Where’s My Philosophy?

What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.

~ Crowfoot, Blackfoot Warrior and Orator Continue reading →

by

Was ist das–die Philosophie?

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under “things in the broadest possible sense” I includes such radically different items as not only “cabbages and kings”, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be . . . to “know one’s way around” with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, “how do I walk?” but in the reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

~ Wilfred Sellars Continue reading →

by

On Certainty :: Ludwig Wittgenstein

On Certainty (Über Gewissheit)

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright
Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe
Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1969, 1972

Preface

What we publish here belongs to the last year and a half of Wittgenstein’s life. In the middle of 1949 he visited the United States at the invitation of Norman Malcolm, staying at Malcolm’s house in Ithaca. Malcolm acted as a goad to his interest in Moore’s ‘defence of common sense’, that is to say his claim to know a number of propositions for sure, such as “Here is one hand, and here is another”, and “The earth existed for a long time before my birth”, and “I have never been far from the earth’s surface”. The first of these comes in Moore’s ‘Proof of the External World’. The two others are in his ‘Defence of Common Sense’; Wittgenstein had long been interested in these and had said to Moore that this was his best article. Moore had agreed. This book contains the whole of what Wittgenstein wrote on this topic from that time until his death. It is all first-draft material, which he did not live to excerpt and polish.

The material falls into four parts; we have shown the divisions at #65, #192, #299. What we believe to be the first part was written on twenty loose sheets of lined foolscap, undated. These Wittgenstein left in his room in G. E. M. Anscombe’s house in Oxford, where he lived (apart from a visit to Norway in the autumn) from April 1950 to February 1951. I (G. E. M. A.) am under the impression that he had written them in Vienna, where he stayed from the previous Christmas until March; but I cannot now recall the basis of this impression. The rest is in small notebooks, containing dates; towards the end, indeed, the date of writing is always given. The last entry is two days before his death on April 29th 1951. We have left the dates exactly as they appear in the manuscripts. The numbering of the single sections, however, is by the Editors.

It seemed appropriate to publish this work by itself. It is not a selection; Wittgenstein marked it off in his notebooks as a separate topic, which he apparently took up at four separate periods during this eighteen months. It constitutes a single sustained treatment of the topic.

G. E. M. Anscombe G. H. von Wright

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1. If you know that here is one hand,[1] we’ll grant you all the rest.

When one says that such and such a proposition can’t be proved, of course that does not mean that it can’t be derived from other ones. But they may be no more certain than it is itself. (On this a curious remark by H. Newman.) Continue reading →

by

The Thinker As Poet :: Martin Heidegger

The Thinker As Poet

(Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens)

Martin Heidegger (1947)

* * * * *

Way and weighing

Stile and saying

On a single walk are found.

Go bear without halt

Question and default

On your single pathway bound.

* * *

When the early morning light quietly grows above the mountains….

Continue reading →