Showing posts with label insight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label insight. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Plugin Death
The end of Flash on this device or that OS is not the end of the browser plugin.
Those who have an interest in this plugin-death buzz also want their browser to become the OS or their OS to have a, err, plugin, err API-based component rendering HTML5 - ah hell, just have the OS based on HTML5 (call it HTML5-on-the-chip kinda-like LISP-on-a-CHIP, right ? Use the 5th core. Exclusively. Right. First exit. To South Park.
The user without access to plugins is the dream consumer who cannot tell a computer screen from a TV or a real football game in progress from a simulation of the rained-out game. Or a Perl Parrot from a mature VM,
And also - those escort services at Vegas-style electronics shows - they, too, will be an imagined thing of the past. Left. Any exit. Also to South Park.
We do apologize: anywhere in the above where we mentioned HTML5 as we meant HTML. This will be repaired when Ruby 1.9.4.01 becomes Ruby 2.1
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Susanne Langer and insight
It is thought that the chapter on "insight" in The Practice of Philosphy influenced Bernard Lonergan.
There is a curiousity in the chapter: she seems to suggest that a map in a plane is a better approximation to the earth than a spherical orange.
Perhaps not so if the skin of a large orange were proportional to its radius as is the earth's crust to its radius. Not if the orange is at a distance from some giant balloon with sizes and distances proportional to those of sun and earth. Not if peeled to show lines of longitude. Not if peeled and that peel retrieved and used to suggest techtonic plates. Not if squashed slightly and set an angle of some 24 degrees upon a circle on a large table top with a flashlight at the center of that plane.
And what if the proportions were quite wrong? Could not an astronomer in Spain have held up an orange?
The sextant, the orange and the map. A man at sea.
There is a curiousity in the chapter: she seems to suggest that a map in a plane is a better approximation to the earth than a spherical orange.
Perhaps not so if the skin of a large orange were proportional to its radius as is the earth's crust to its radius. Not if the orange is at a distance from some giant balloon with sizes and distances proportional to those of sun and earth. Not if peeled to show lines of longitude. Not if peeled and that peel retrieved and used to suggest techtonic plates. Not if squashed slightly and set an angle of some 24 degrees upon a circle on a large table top with a flashlight at the center of that plane.
And what if the proportions were quite wrong? Could not an astronomer in Spain have held up an orange?
The sextant, the orange and the map. A man at sea.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Lonergan's ad hominem
Bernard Lonergan's "Insight - A Study of Human Understanding" appeared in 1958, too late to benefit from the first printing of "Mental Acts" by P.T. Geach in 1957. Geach and Austin are the two principal links of the British philosophical community to that of Munich, Gottingen and Freiburg associated with phenomenology. The link should have been through Russell, Goedel, Cantor and Hilbert - but it was not - perhaps due to Russell being paralyzed by his sessions listening to Wittgenstein. The irony is that Russell had Wittgenstein rather as Husserl had Heidegger: both of the latter were to be the triumph of the "everyday" over mathesis.
In Husserl's case, he may have himself to blame (although without consulting manuscripts it is not possible to say what comes from his shorthand and what from his assistants and later editors). Consider this, from the "Crisis" volume, Section 53:
"the essence of the incipient philosophy of this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that ... [its] beginning course [...] is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naïve self-evidence"
This is almost a sketch of Sartre at work after his ever so brief apprenticeship.
But then consider Lonergan's project - not on Intuition (Anschauung), but Insight (Einsicht). Husserl repeatedly resorted to ad hominem in dismissing scholastic disputations à la Thomas in spite of his debt to Brentano. Had Lonergan read these, one might understand his ready dismissal of Husserl regardless of Husserl's status with the mathematical community at Göttingen. Here is Lonergan's insight:
"In brief, phenomenology is a highly purified empiricism. and it did not take long for it to topple over into an existentialism that describes, not the abstract possibility of description, but men as they are."[p. 415]
There are fascinating threads in Lonergan and Husserl on the immanent and on judgment and on reason - but Lonergan's possible ignorance of the direction of Reinach and Ingarden make this difficult to pursue with much sympathy. In this regard, Geach could be the corrective. Both Geach and Husserl reject the destination reached by Hume and for very similar reasons. But to do justice to Lonergan is so very difficult due to how clear it is that his ultimate concern is to preclude a heresy concerning "immanent" ( a concern that can also be seen in some conservative political insights, for example, in Voegelin), the rational within man in his likeness to the one true God and sin in the fallen world.
There is a parallel in Husserl's rhetoric concerning science and infinite approximations - in the Krisis Husserl's provides a caricature of Galileo in spite of his express intent: Galileo is forced to serve his purposes contra Hume. The Krisis has no mention of Hermann Weyl, whose Zeit, Raum u. Materie had already gone through 5 editions between 1918 and 1922 (Husserl left Göttingen in 1916 to assume Rickert's chair in Freiburg.) Perhaps Husserl did not think he could assume familiarity with his mathematical background or the physics of the day - and it may have further impeded his pulling a definitive text together (see MacIntyre on Edith Stein's observations) - as it was, Erfahrung u. Urteil (Experience and Judgment) was pulled together by his students in the year after his death - but their work was cut short in 1939 and may even have been over-hasty.
A persistent worry is that Husserl's bogeyman of "empiricist psychology" is comparable to Charles Taylor's "behaviourist psychology" and in this regard Lonergan is of interest in his view of how one limited view can very naturally inspire its own equally limited inversion. The key difference is that Husserl was a "foundationalist" with regard to Logic, Mathematics and Exact Philosophy (with regard to which, see the volume reassessing the work of the young Rudolph Carnap.) Nothing in Husserl should undermine formal foundations for linguistics anymore than anything in Geach. Both could provide a corrective to a naive empiricism at various points. The deeper concern is revealed in Heidegger, where the price exacted is a disregard for linguistic niceties, for mere factual linguistic truths.
I have not looked through the latest re-edition of Geach Mental Acts (mine dates to 1971) to know if he removed his mentions of "the brutes" - or, in my reading, the "les abrutis". Something similar can be read in Lonergan, who goes so far as to refer to "the very stupid". Lonergan's target is "mere apprehension" and the tension with the pre-given of Husserl is quite immediate (no pun intended.) I imagine a follower of Geach issuing a revised version with a chapter on the seeming insight of pigs, corvids, dolphins, elephants, octopuses, apes and perhaps even a parrot. Pigs are the real challenge: it is hard to imagine anything more apt to offend in Rome than any consideration of whether something approximating "judgment" could evolve in a troupe of pigs in the wild. But note how pigs in the wild are treated with so much more respect by their hunting adversaries ...
Missing in Husserl is a profitable confrontation with that other Thomas, Thomas Reid. Had Reinach survived, we might have had just such a textual dialog or at least a dialectical tangle.
It often seems to me that Taylor takes some combination of Habermas-Gadamer to have provided a corrective to Heidegger - but Taylor's student readers find no repudiation of Heidegger - quite the opposite. Heidegger remains there only to be pardoned as memory fades. My corrective: that in November 1938 each Mesusah be restored to each preserved house in Marburg where Jews lived in 1927. Taylor avoids these issues of Heidegger's abandonment of Husserl's concern with reason and judgment - all that he takes from Jaspers - or acknowledges - is the phrase "axial age". Hans Jonas passes without mention, his sin being more difficult to pardon.
The attack on scientific psychology in Husserl is not based on "insight" - but the flanking attack on "modernity" and the "science of the Enlightenment" found in Taylor has its ground in Husserl's own attack on naturalism in science - not autobiographically, but in terms of its ready recognition by young readers. Husserl's own remarks on technology serve that project ( Galileo's great practical contribution was to ensure the greatest range for artillery in war - perhaps one of the most immoral practices of warfare and yet now accepted as truly the most natural - his telescope was a great boon to artillery - only the calculus became more significant - and in our day, computing comes to us directly from naval gunnery.)
But at what price such insight? It is not the "experience" of war to which we turn, but our "judgment" of what can be just in confrontations with utter violence and unbridled force. Consider our ready use of "the brutes" in our practice of warfare - even preventive, in the use of rats and monkeys to clear minefields - pigs are too heavy and the loss of dogs too traumatic for their handlers. And what of courage in the face of impending death on a battlefield bereft of fairness, respect or any consideration of a common humanity?
For Husserl prior to the loss of his son in war, the fundamental was undeniably mathematics. Years later the entire project of mathesis is brought into question and the fundamental concern becomes the origin of possible and realized true and adequate judgments. The usual ad hominem is that this transition occurs along a trail of failures where Husserl appears as something of a "last Mohican" as the frontier vanishes - vanishes not in the face of an endless reach of deforested lands, unmechanized farms and muddy towns, but in the face of impending total war.
To return to Husserl's project at a time when a concerted attack on science is underway - an attack proceeding a several fronts - an attack against which philosophers embracing substance dualism will provide no serious obstacle - an attack which while enshrining the soul is utterly inimical to insight, science, knowledge and fruitful debate regarding mind, respect and values. The attack proceeds by an appeal to recall the maligned merits of a battered tradition. It is best confronted with its own failure to engender science and to provide a defensible theory of experience and judgment in the light of that science. The tradition which cannot allow that pigs have souls cannot be - must not be - the one we embrace.
In Husserl's case, he may have himself to blame (although without consulting manuscripts it is not possible to say what comes from his shorthand and what from his assistants and later editors). Consider this, from the "Crisis" volume, Section 53:
"the essence of the incipient philosophy of this phenomenological-transcendental radicalism is that ... [its] beginning course [...] is necessarily one of experiencing and thinking in naïve self-evidence"
This is almost a sketch of Sartre at work after his ever so brief apprenticeship.
But then consider Lonergan's project - not on Intuition (Anschauung), but Insight (Einsicht). Husserl repeatedly resorted to ad hominem in dismissing scholastic disputations à la Thomas in spite of his debt to Brentano. Had Lonergan read these, one might understand his ready dismissal of Husserl regardless of Husserl's status with the mathematical community at Göttingen. Here is Lonergan's insight:
"In brief, phenomenology is a highly purified empiricism. and it did not take long for it to topple over into an existentialism that describes, not the abstract possibility of description, but men as they are."[p. 415]
There are fascinating threads in Lonergan and Husserl on the immanent and on judgment and on reason - but Lonergan's possible ignorance of the direction of Reinach and Ingarden make this difficult to pursue with much sympathy. In this regard, Geach could be the corrective. Both Geach and Husserl reject the destination reached by Hume and for very similar reasons. But to do justice to Lonergan is so very difficult due to how clear it is that his ultimate concern is to preclude a heresy concerning "immanent" ( a concern that can also be seen in some conservative political insights, for example, in Voegelin), the rational within man in his likeness to the one true God and sin in the fallen world.
There is a parallel in Husserl's rhetoric concerning science and infinite approximations - in the Krisis Husserl's provides a caricature of Galileo in spite of his express intent: Galileo is forced to serve his purposes contra Hume. The Krisis has no mention of Hermann Weyl, whose Zeit, Raum u. Materie had already gone through 5 editions between 1918 and 1922 (Husserl left Göttingen in 1916 to assume Rickert's chair in Freiburg.) Perhaps Husserl did not think he could assume familiarity with his mathematical background or the physics of the day - and it may have further impeded his pulling a definitive text together (see MacIntyre on Edith Stein's observations) - as it was, Erfahrung u. Urteil (Experience and Judgment) was pulled together by his students in the year after his death - but their work was cut short in 1939 and may even have been over-hasty.
A persistent worry is that Husserl's bogeyman of "empiricist psychology" is comparable to Charles Taylor's "behaviourist psychology" and in this regard Lonergan is of interest in his view of how one limited view can very naturally inspire its own equally limited inversion. The key difference is that Husserl was a "foundationalist" with regard to Logic, Mathematics and Exact Philosophy (with regard to which, see the volume reassessing the work of the young Rudolph Carnap.) Nothing in Husserl should undermine formal foundations for linguistics anymore than anything in Geach. Both could provide a corrective to a naive empiricism at various points. The deeper concern is revealed in Heidegger, where the price exacted is a disregard for linguistic niceties, for mere factual linguistic truths.
I have not looked through the latest re-edition of Geach Mental Acts (mine dates to 1971) to know if he removed his mentions of "the brutes" - or, in my reading, the "les abrutis". Something similar can be read in Lonergan, who goes so far as to refer to "the very stupid". Lonergan's target is "mere apprehension" and the tension with the pre-given of Husserl is quite immediate (no pun intended.) I imagine a follower of Geach issuing a revised version with a chapter on the seeming insight of pigs, corvids, dolphins, elephants, octopuses, apes and perhaps even a parrot. Pigs are the real challenge: it is hard to imagine anything more apt to offend in Rome than any consideration of whether something approximating "judgment" could evolve in a troupe of pigs in the wild. But note how pigs in the wild are treated with so much more respect by their hunting adversaries ...
Missing in Husserl is a profitable confrontation with that other Thomas, Thomas Reid. Had Reinach survived, we might have had just such a textual dialog or at least a dialectical tangle.
It often seems to me that Taylor takes some combination of Habermas-Gadamer to have provided a corrective to Heidegger - but Taylor's student readers find no repudiation of Heidegger - quite the opposite. Heidegger remains there only to be pardoned as memory fades. My corrective: that in November 1938 each Mesusah be restored to each preserved house in Marburg where Jews lived in 1927. Taylor avoids these issues of Heidegger's abandonment of Husserl's concern with reason and judgment - all that he takes from Jaspers - or acknowledges - is the phrase "axial age". Hans Jonas passes without mention, his sin being more difficult to pardon.
The attack on scientific psychology in Husserl is not based on "insight" - but the flanking attack on "modernity" and the "science of the Enlightenment" found in Taylor has its ground in Husserl's own attack on naturalism in science - not autobiographically, but in terms of its ready recognition by young readers. Husserl's own remarks on technology serve that project ( Galileo's great practical contribution was to ensure the greatest range for artillery in war - perhaps one of the most immoral practices of warfare and yet now accepted as truly the most natural - his telescope was a great boon to artillery - only the calculus became more significant - and in our day, computing comes to us directly from naval gunnery.)
But at what price such insight? It is not the "experience" of war to which we turn, but our "judgment" of what can be just in confrontations with utter violence and unbridled force. Consider our ready use of "the brutes" in our practice of warfare - even preventive, in the use of rats and monkeys to clear minefields - pigs are too heavy and the loss of dogs too traumatic for their handlers. And what of courage in the face of impending death on a battlefield bereft of fairness, respect or any consideration of a common humanity?
For Husserl prior to the loss of his son in war, the fundamental was undeniably mathematics. Years later the entire project of mathesis is brought into question and the fundamental concern becomes the origin of possible and realized true and adequate judgments. The usual ad hominem is that this transition occurs along a trail of failures where Husserl appears as something of a "last Mohican" as the frontier vanishes - vanishes not in the face of an endless reach of deforested lands, unmechanized farms and muddy towns, but in the face of impending total war.
To return to Husserl's project at a time when a concerted attack on science is underway - an attack proceeding a several fronts - an attack against which philosophers embracing substance dualism will provide no serious obstacle - an attack which while enshrining the soul is utterly inimical to insight, science, knowledge and fruitful debate regarding mind, respect and values. The attack proceeds by an appeal to recall the maligned merits of a battered tradition. It is best confronted with its own failure to engender science and to provide a defensible theory of experience and judgment in the light of that science. The tradition which cannot allow that pigs have souls cannot be - must not be - the one we embrace.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
ad hominem and the author
Whether philosophical anthropology is a subject matter or not, imagine for a moment that it forms a series of three courses, each for one of the last three years of a four-year degree.
I will suppose that one of those course will treat of "existence" and will have to address itself to the writings of "existentialists". Suppose that my tone in my own lectures is mocking. How might I proceed?
I would almost certainly begin with the curious exchange between Bryan McGee and Iris Murdoch in which both seem to share the assessment that La Nausée by J-P Sartre is a great novel. Matters could only be worse if they had gone on the agree that "L'Etranger" by Camus is even finer.
Camus was not a philosopher, but the course must consider those writers within the western tradition who have insight into the human condition (in truth we publish the book's title and author on the course list to ensure enrollment - departmental budgets are no trivial matter.) Consider the book as a novel, not as a treatise or an assemblage of essays. A Frenchman murders an Arab. The French reader was aware that had Merseault been a somebody, a few thousand francs (or less?) to the victim's family and the whole matter could have been looked after - unless there were some political angle.
I encountered the book in two settings: first in a course on existentialism and then in a course in reading French. The latter was the more useful, as the message for the philosophy student was of no interest - only the obvious flaws of the novel. Change the setting such that a Russian kills an Estonian on a Baltic beach, or an Israeli kills a Palestinian on the West Bank or a Libyan diplomat murders a Turkish servant in Berlin - and the book (or in our day, a film based on the book) requires that we we know the life of that victim, how he came to be there that day, did he have brothers, was his father still living. what was his view of the French Empire (or Union or whatever face Paris was putting on their possessions.)
Were you to learn from an unpublished letter that some man born in Oran was obviously a racist, small-minded bigot, you might not purchase the letter (say you find it in a cardboard box in some shop.) If a scholar found the letter and authenticated it as Camus writing to fellow writer X, we have publishing paydirt.
In the case of Camus' novel, it helps to read it in French and to discuss it with someone with some feel for character and its place in the moral evaluation or assessment of a novel.
In the case of Sartre's effort, it is essential to read La Nausée in the original if you are to assess the book if only to be struck by the tasteless puns that litter the novel. It is also essential to ask why it ends with an incident of sexual depravity in a library. Why for all the attention to the root of a tree, there is nothing on the manner in which the root of the protagonist interacted with his partner in sex. The root is seen in the library.
The entire effect is remarkably juvenile. The only satisfaction for the reader is that Roquentin's time in a camp will be Sartre's (short) time in a camp. That Sartre was a complete and utter scoundrel is something the reader simply must know. Why?
Consider anonymity. Personally, I wish to see anonymity established in natural science technical journals. I wish to see the UN sponsor a research registry that is simply a science registry: you would not be published in a journal even as EC1905uv-CHEM but as A3456gt (Feynman, for one, was well aware of what happens when a physicist ventures into biology - even physicists mock mathematicians and vice-versa - the word "mere" and "just" and "only" are essential to their gossip, banter and inuendo.) Philosophers are worse: "She has only published one article - in philosophy of literature - and she has this thing about Simone Weil ..."
Tenure and promotion hang on publishing. So, in the case of science, the registry would emit a rating. Appeal it to an anonymous committee if you must (there would still be some abuses - students of X will still get more jobs, better jobs, than students of Y,etc - life is never fair nor expected to be so.)
Peer-reviewed may not suffice. In literature, writers have demonstrated that they can submit their own best-seller years later to their own publisher under another title and with a pseudonym and only to have the publisher's reader reject it.
It is inconceivable that String Theory would have gotten so far in our day without the name of Gell-Mann. Hidden variable theory got so far because some advocates were known by name as associates of Einstein.
Suppose you don't believe this. Enter a bookstore and see a book, "I Did It" by Fred Smith. Knowing that a legal loop-hole is allowing the royalties to go to a known murderer of another name, would you buy that book or woudl you instead by another thriller for the train trip to your conference? Do you want to risk being seen reading THAT book when you have not yet received tenure or your first promotion? (If you hope for tenure, pay attention even to the books -even the number of books, neither too many nor too few on your office shelves.)
There are books that, ceteris paribus, we might borrow from a library but we would not purchase new unless remaindered. If you are not that reader, I lost you a ways back, so I continue.
I recall reading some years ago that it was striking how little de Beauvoir had to say of interest of some of the remarkable people she met through her association with Sartre. If you are a female reader, I risk now having lost you. Let's switch to Iris Murdoch.
In her major work, Murdoch sees fit to link Husserl to his followers - but only to those who abandoned his project. Roman Ingarden is missing. Only Husserl in one phase is presented. But then she chooses, having first introduced a humourous comment about Zen, to tie Husserl to a Zen reading of his project (curiously, she may have been unaware of Heidegger's Japanese student.)
Husserl was a regular interlocutor with Cantor in Halle. Husserl was then a Goettingen. Later he took Rickert's position at Freiburg. Unlike Russell, he lost a son to war and he would lose all to Heidegger and the Nazis and die before seeing their defeat. All irrelevant. Start again. Husserl's concern was with mathematics and foundations. This is completely missing in the thoughtful chapter by Murdoch. The chapter - the book - is very much worth reading. Read carelessly, we see that Hegel begets Marx. But somehow Husserl fails to have the importance of Wittgenstein. Not that he is neglected by the author as is Ayer, Ryle and Russell (to see Ryle in psychoanalysis, read Roy Schafer, "A New Language for Psychoanalysis" and compare his early work on "internalization" - a strange affair of which Murdoch was perhaps unaware.)
Why is Husserl not worth the attention of Frege? How could a man with no morals, Heidegger, garner such continued attention?
Consider the failure of Heidegger to write one word of Edith Stein to his Hannah Stern.
Well, then don't. Consider this: we are finally getting back to Schopenhauer in the Anglo-American world of philosophy. In the German text, the idea of "family resemblance" is right there on the page, literally. Why had the attendees of Wittgenstein's afternoons not read their Schopenhauer? Terror of the master? One cutting word from LW about Schopenhauer would do it, one supposes.
Walter Bieml, years later in a Heidegger seminar on Heraclitus, on a day when the master had the grippe, is recorded as saying, roughly, "Perhaps today, in the absence of the Professor, I might venture to say that .."
A philosopher tells his reader, not his technical colleague, but his intelligent reader, that you cannot enter a public building from an open square without also "entering a cathedral". Follow me: the author is an unbelieving Jew whose grandparents had all converted but whose parents practiced no religion. Variant: the author is named Mackenzie. Variant: the author has converted from Methodist to Roman Catholic. Variant: the author no longer attends a mosque. Or: the author is an avowed atheist who never has a religion. Or: the author is an atheist who had been raised a High Church Anglican.
It may help to know that the the early Christians thought of themselves as Jews without temples. It may not. What about the insight: I remember entering a reknowned basilica after a day of cycling through summer farmlands and the near over-whelming frisson when gazing up in the dim and the chill of the nave. In that moment I might even have undergone a conversion. I do believe that it happens that the first large ceiling that I ever saw above me was indeed a church ceiling, but the first "Great Building" that I ever saw was seem from great distance across the prairie by the plume of black smoke rising from its unseen pinnacle, the great Bessborough, the Saskatoon railroad hotel (although now no railroad entered it below). Had I first seen the great Banff Springs Hotel (my father saw it in the Bow Valley before he ever laid eyes on the Bess', but he already knew the MacDonald from his boyhood in Edmonton. Unlike my first trip to the Bow Valley, he was there in knickers and later in a suit. He vacationed in vacation dress. His mother was English, his father a businessman - and an American at that.
The first building known by some of my mother's ancestors was a wigwam. A wigwam is not a teepee.
What insight of my own might be elided if I follow the vision of the writer, every great public building, a cathedral, incomprehensible without the cathedral, the bishops's seat, where declarations were made such as that which would take Edith Stein to Auschwitz in reprisal.
When a piece of writing is not presenting an argument, say one found on a sheet of paper in a shop - consider this novel line of argument, author unknown, could anything be less appropriate than ad hominem? It may depend on the premises I am asked to accept as true, the assumptions that appear to be required, but also the terms, the rhetoric, in which the matter is posed.
Take the case today of theists presenting the scientific case for the religious brain and the evolution of religion as the integument of culture and social structure and societal relations if not language itself.
Take the case of a writer child psychologist, appealing for consideration of mind, consciousness, self-awareness, character, courage in assessing the normal versus abnormal development of children. And then we learn that he was an abuser at his charity institution.
Someone tells you that Adolf H*tler loved animals. That he was neurologically afflicted. This may hold no interest for you at all.
But someone proposes that our study of language acquisition in the bonobo be conducted by an autistic animal trainer who does not touch fur and is almost mono-syllabic, has no pets, and no "liking" for animals. Now we may have an asset. Now we can mask the animal detecting that we too, as trainers, have feeling, like the little fellow, find him amusing, endearing, are glad to see him this morning.
Think what a discovery if we learned from a letter than Stanley Milgram wept each night over the plight of those in his experiments, that M*ng*l* whipped himself each night with a belt and prayed for forgiveness, that Harry Harlow had buried each little monkey in its own grave, visited them each year, pausing for a moment before each.
I confess, I am unaffected by the report that Derrida was in the habit of praying. I am too much aware of the man with whom he enjoyed conversing. I cannot imagine what could endear Derrida to me, make me reconsider the value of what is written in that slim PUF volume in its endearing cover, gold yellow, rough pages, carried about now for years from one city to another.
In a similar vein I am unable to take Habermas seriously having never been able to take seriously a single lecturer who embraced him.
I remember my vexation when a philosopher of note addressed an international conference on history and logic of science to say of hermeneutics that interpretation is a game that anyone can play.
First: not a game. Second, no, not anyone. Third, this is not "mere" interpretation. Even without a knock-down argument, a given reading of human life may be inadequate or unsatisfactory or otherwise incomplete on many grounds, if only a hunch.
But when the hunch we choose to follow is a hunch expressed in writing by an author we come to know as utterly disingenuous, a prevaricator, a liar, a traitor, a poseur or simply a person devoid of conscience we can politely say, "Sorry, she/he (or their book) simply doesn't interest me, failed to hold my interest..." If there is an interlocutor who responds with "But I think that what X is trying to say is that ..." now we reach the author's intention, imputing a good motive, an effort to be understood, we are asked to be just, fair. And with Samuel Beckett, I am always more than fair, and will ignore verse after verse until some one short verse catches hold of me. I would have to learn something truly hateful about Lawrence Durrell before I would cease to suggest his poetry - long after I have seased to recommend his first Quartet.
A man with a nasty reputation but given to good causes, reported to his readers his shock at learning that Frege was an anti-Semite. If I believe that a word from Frege was enough for Russell to have been deterred from visiting him to discuss propositional functions with him in Goettingen, at the university built as an alternative to building a prison, the home of Gauss, Hilbert - a doubt or suspicion is planted. Some writers must be above reproach just as a Pope must be above reproach, an Irish Catholic Bishop above reproach, a Rector of Heidelberg University above reproach. Any such reporach could be considered ad hominen, but in these special cases is excused.
And what of the Gifford Lectures? Or a Pulitzer Prize? Or the Nobel which may have been denied to Hoyle and Gamow? Must the Vietnamese wait a century to learn about the fate of Ho's wife?
Eliade wanted us to understand his actions in Romania as mere youthful indiscretions. Frankly I cannot read a writer today on the "sacred" in the "modern" age without hearing boots on paving stones.
I cannot read an attack on "technology" without seeing the marvelous inventions of Arthur Ganson.
Nothing in man's essence destined him to fly, but once airborne, who failed to denouce the "heros" who would drop bombs from aircraft? The courageous pilots!
An old friend, a neighbor, lies on his deathbed in a hospice - at Seymour Johnson he taught barnstormers to find a homing beacon before they were sent off to Europe. I reproached him for his habitual remarks about Jews. He lived a short walk from what had been the Jewish golf course. But he wrote no book, never stood for public office. He always apologized, I always forgave. His faults were not those of a Norm Coleman or a Michelle Bachmann, politicians here in our towns, our state, who could never have my vote. Leave politics, and I would accept them as neighbors, try to be just, try to forgive their faults, try to speak plainly but not too harshly. Even buy their autobiography - but only as a neighbor.
PS
In her remarks on "sees" in the same section, Murdoch appears unaware that the root for a "kind" in Russian is the same as the root for "to see" as in the Greek, video, VID, in Russian. It is a shame that Russian must not have been one of her languages and perhaps not even taught at her college in her day. Yet it is closer to English than is, say Hungarian to its cousin, Finnish. English, French and German - barely two languages from the diachronic standpoint, barely two from a synchronic standpoint if you instead consider English, French and Dutch. Imagine if the Danes had never been in England, not Jutes and Angles but only Frisians and Dutch before the Normans ... and you may grasp how silly that we count those as "foreign" languages. Contrary to this view, Ricoeur on "recognition" in English, French and German.
I will suppose that one of those course will treat of "existence" and will have to address itself to the writings of "existentialists". Suppose that my tone in my own lectures is mocking. How might I proceed?
I would almost certainly begin with the curious exchange between Bryan McGee and Iris Murdoch in which both seem to share the assessment that La Nausée by J-P Sartre is a great novel. Matters could only be worse if they had gone on the agree that "L'Etranger" by Camus is even finer.
Camus was not a philosopher, but the course must consider those writers within the western tradition who have insight into the human condition (in truth we publish the book's title and author on the course list to ensure enrollment - departmental budgets are no trivial matter.) Consider the book as a novel, not as a treatise or an assemblage of essays. A Frenchman murders an Arab. The French reader was aware that had Merseault been a somebody, a few thousand francs (or less?) to the victim's family and the whole matter could have been looked after - unless there were some political angle.
I encountered the book in two settings: first in a course on existentialism and then in a course in reading French. The latter was the more useful, as the message for the philosophy student was of no interest - only the obvious flaws of the novel. Change the setting such that a Russian kills an Estonian on a Baltic beach, or an Israeli kills a Palestinian on the West Bank or a Libyan diplomat murders a Turkish servant in Berlin - and the book (or in our day, a film based on the book) requires that we we know the life of that victim, how he came to be there that day, did he have brothers, was his father still living. what was his view of the French Empire (or Union or whatever face Paris was putting on their possessions.)
Were you to learn from an unpublished letter that some man born in Oran was obviously a racist, small-minded bigot, you might not purchase the letter (say you find it in a cardboard box in some shop.) If a scholar found the letter and authenticated it as Camus writing to fellow writer X, we have publishing paydirt.
In the case of Camus' novel, it helps to read it in French and to discuss it with someone with some feel for character and its place in the moral evaluation or assessment of a novel.
In the case of Sartre's effort, it is essential to read La Nausée in the original if you are to assess the book if only to be struck by the tasteless puns that litter the novel. It is also essential to ask why it ends with an incident of sexual depravity in a library. Why for all the attention to the root of a tree, there is nothing on the manner in which the root of the protagonist interacted with his partner in sex. The root is seen in the library.
The entire effect is remarkably juvenile. The only satisfaction for the reader is that Roquentin's time in a camp will be Sartre's (short) time in a camp. That Sartre was a complete and utter scoundrel is something the reader simply must know. Why?
Consider anonymity. Personally, I wish to see anonymity established in natural science technical journals. I wish to see the UN sponsor a research registry that is simply a science registry: you would not be published in a journal even as EC1905uv-CHEM but as A3456gt (Feynman, for one, was well aware of what happens when a physicist ventures into biology - even physicists mock mathematicians and vice-versa - the word "mere" and "just" and "only" are essential to their gossip, banter and inuendo.) Philosophers are worse: "She has only published one article - in philosophy of literature - and she has this thing about Simone Weil ..."
Tenure and promotion hang on publishing. So, in the case of science, the registry would emit a rating. Appeal it to an anonymous committee if you must (there would still be some abuses - students of X will still get more jobs, better jobs, than students of Y,etc - life is never fair nor expected to be so.)
Peer-reviewed may not suffice. In literature, writers have demonstrated that they can submit their own best-seller years later to their own publisher under another title and with a pseudonym and only to have the publisher's reader reject it.
It is inconceivable that String Theory would have gotten so far in our day without the name of Gell-Mann. Hidden variable theory got so far because some advocates were known by name as associates of Einstein.
Suppose you don't believe this. Enter a bookstore and see a book, "I Did It" by Fred Smith. Knowing that a legal loop-hole is allowing the royalties to go to a known murderer of another name, would you buy that book or woudl you instead by another thriller for the train trip to your conference? Do you want to risk being seen reading THAT book when you have not yet received tenure or your first promotion? (If you hope for tenure, pay attention even to the books -even the number of books, neither too many nor too few on your office shelves.)
There are books that, ceteris paribus, we might borrow from a library but we would not purchase new unless remaindered. If you are not that reader, I lost you a ways back, so I continue.
I recall reading some years ago that it was striking how little de Beauvoir had to say of interest of some of the remarkable people she met through her association with Sartre. If you are a female reader, I risk now having lost you. Let's switch to Iris Murdoch.
In her major work, Murdoch sees fit to link Husserl to his followers - but only to those who abandoned his project. Roman Ingarden is missing. Only Husserl in one phase is presented. But then she chooses, having first introduced a humourous comment about Zen, to tie Husserl to a Zen reading of his project (curiously, she may have been unaware of Heidegger's Japanese student.)
Husserl was a regular interlocutor with Cantor in Halle. Husserl was then a Goettingen. Later he took Rickert's position at Freiburg. Unlike Russell, he lost a son to war and he would lose all to Heidegger and the Nazis and die before seeing their defeat. All irrelevant. Start again. Husserl's concern was with mathematics and foundations. This is completely missing in the thoughtful chapter by Murdoch. The chapter - the book - is very much worth reading. Read carelessly, we see that Hegel begets Marx. But somehow Husserl fails to have the importance of Wittgenstein. Not that he is neglected by the author as is Ayer, Ryle and Russell (to see Ryle in psychoanalysis, read Roy Schafer, "A New Language for Psychoanalysis" and compare his early work on "internalization" - a strange affair of which Murdoch was perhaps unaware.)
Why is Husserl not worth the attention of Frege? How could a man with no morals, Heidegger, garner such continued attention?
Consider the failure of Heidegger to write one word of Edith Stein to his Hannah Stern.
Well, then don't. Consider this: we are finally getting back to Schopenhauer in the Anglo-American world of philosophy. In the German text, the idea of "family resemblance" is right there on the page, literally. Why had the attendees of Wittgenstein's afternoons not read their Schopenhauer? Terror of the master? One cutting word from LW about Schopenhauer would do it, one supposes.
Walter Bieml, years later in a Heidegger seminar on Heraclitus, on a day when the master had the grippe, is recorded as saying, roughly, "Perhaps today, in the absence of the Professor, I might venture to say that .."
A philosopher tells his reader, not his technical colleague, but his intelligent reader, that you cannot enter a public building from an open square without also "entering a cathedral". Follow me: the author is an unbelieving Jew whose grandparents had all converted but whose parents practiced no religion. Variant: the author is named Mackenzie. Variant: the author has converted from Methodist to Roman Catholic. Variant: the author no longer attends a mosque. Or: the author is an avowed atheist who never has a religion. Or: the author is an atheist who had been raised a High Church Anglican.
It may help to know that the the early Christians thought of themselves as Jews without temples. It may not. What about the insight: I remember entering a reknowned basilica after a day of cycling through summer farmlands and the near over-whelming frisson when gazing up in the dim and the chill of the nave. In that moment I might even have undergone a conversion. I do believe that it happens that the first large ceiling that I ever saw above me was indeed a church ceiling, but the first "Great Building" that I ever saw was seem from great distance across the prairie by the plume of black smoke rising from its unseen pinnacle, the great Bessborough, the Saskatoon railroad hotel (although now no railroad entered it below). Had I first seen the great Banff Springs Hotel (my father saw it in the Bow Valley before he ever laid eyes on the Bess', but he already knew the MacDonald from his boyhood in Edmonton. Unlike my first trip to the Bow Valley, he was there in knickers and later in a suit. He vacationed in vacation dress. His mother was English, his father a businessman - and an American at that.
The first building known by some of my mother's ancestors was a wigwam. A wigwam is not a teepee.
What insight of my own might be elided if I follow the vision of the writer, every great public building, a cathedral, incomprehensible without the cathedral, the bishops's seat, where declarations were made such as that which would take Edith Stein to Auschwitz in reprisal.
When a piece of writing is not presenting an argument, say one found on a sheet of paper in a shop - consider this novel line of argument, author unknown, could anything be less appropriate than ad hominem? It may depend on the premises I am asked to accept as true, the assumptions that appear to be required, but also the terms, the rhetoric, in which the matter is posed.
Take the case today of theists presenting the scientific case for the religious brain and the evolution of religion as the integument of culture and social structure and societal relations if not language itself.
Take the case of a writer child psychologist, appealing for consideration of mind, consciousness, self-awareness, character, courage in assessing the normal versus abnormal development of children. And then we learn that he was an abuser at his charity institution.
Someone tells you that Adolf H*tler loved animals. That he was neurologically afflicted. This may hold no interest for you at all.
But someone proposes that our study of language acquisition in the bonobo be conducted by an autistic animal trainer who does not touch fur and is almost mono-syllabic, has no pets, and no "liking" for animals. Now we may have an asset. Now we can mask the animal detecting that we too, as trainers, have feeling, like the little fellow, find him amusing, endearing, are glad to see him this morning.
Think what a discovery if we learned from a letter than Stanley Milgram wept each night over the plight of those in his experiments, that M*ng*l* whipped himself each night with a belt and prayed for forgiveness, that Harry Harlow had buried each little monkey in its own grave, visited them each year, pausing for a moment before each.
I confess, I am unaffected by the report that Derrida was in the habit of praying. I am too much aware of the man with whom he enjoyed conversing. I cannot imagine what could endear Derrida to me, make me reconsider the value of what is written in that slim PUF volume in its endearing cover, gold yellow, rough pages, carried about now for years from one city to another.
In a similar vein I am unable to take Habermas seriously having never been able to take seriously a single lecturer who embraced him.
I remember my vexation when a philosopher of note addressed an international conference on history and logic of science to say of hermeneutics that interpretation is a game that anyone can play.
First: not a game. Second, no, not anyone. Third, this is not "mere" interpretation. Even without a knock-down argument, a given reading of human life may be inadequate or unsatisfactory or otherwise incomplete on many grounds, if only a hunch.
But when the hunch we choose to follow is a hunch expressed in writing by an author we come to know as utterly disingenuous, a prevaricator, a liar, a traitor, a poseur or simply a person devoid of conscience we can politely say, "Sorry, she/he (or their book) simply doesn't interest me, failed to hold my interest..." If there is an interlocutor who responds with "But I think that what X is trying to say is that ..." now we reach the author's intention, imputing a good motive, an effort to be understood, we are asked to be just, fair. And with Samuel Beckett, I am always more than fair, and will ignore verse after verse until some one short verse catches hold of me. I would have to learn something truly hateful about Lawrence Durrell before I would cease to suggest his poetry - long after I have seased to recommend his first Quartet.
A man with a nasty reputation but given to good causes, reported to his readers his shock at learning that Frege was an anti-Semite. If I believe that a word from Frege was enough for Russell to have been deterred from visiting him to discuss propositional functions with him in Goettingen, at the university built as an alternative to building a prison, the home of Gauss, Hilbert - a doubt or suspicion is planted. Some writers must be above reproach just as a Pope must be above reproach, an Irish Catholic Bishop above reproach, a Rector of Heidelberg University above reproach. Any such reporach could be considered ad hominen, but in these special cases is excused.
And what of the Gifford Lectures? Or a Pulitzer Prize? Or the Nobel which may have been denied to Hoyle and Gamow? Must the Vietnamese wait a century to learn about the fate of Ho's wife?
Eliade wanted us to understand his actions in Romania as mere youthful indiscretions. Frankly I cannot read a writer today on the "sacred" in the "modern" age without hearing boots on paving stones.
I cannot read an attack on "technology" without seeing the marvelous inventions of Arthur Ganson.
Nothing in man's essence destined him to fly, but once airborne, who failed to denouce the "heros" who would drop bombs from aircraft? The courageous pilots!
An old friend, a neighbor, lies on his deathbed in a hospice - at Seymour Johnson he taught barnstormers to find a homing beacon before they were sent off to Europe. I reproached him for his habitual remarks about Jews. He lived a short walk from what had been the Jewish golf course. But he wrote no book, never stood for public office. He always apologized, I always forgave. His faults were not those of a Norm Coleman or a Michelle Bachmann, politicians here in our towns, our state, who could never have my vote. Leave politics, and I would accept them as neighbors, try to be just, try to forgive their faults, try to speak plainly but not too harshly. Even buy their autobiography - but only as a neighbor.
PS
In her remarks on "sees" in the same section, Murdoch appears unaware that the root for a "kind" in Russian is the same as the root for "to see" as in the Greek, video, VID, in Russian. It is a shame that Russian must not have been one of her languages and perhaps not even taught at her college in her day. Yet it is closer to English than is, say Hungarian to its cousin, Finnish. English, French and German - barely two languages from the diachronic standpoint, barely two from a synchronic standpoint if you instead consider English, French and Dutch. Imagine if the Danes had never been in England, not Jutes and Angles but only Frisians and Dutch before the Normans ... and you may grasp how silly that we count those as "foreign" languages. Contrary to this view, Ricoeur on "recognition" in English, French and German.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
"petites personnes", suspicion and distrust
The many readers of "Herzog" were not mere nobodies in the literary career of Saul Bellow.
Eliade, Ricoeur and Taylor. The latter, the Canadian philosopher, finds himself referenced in the Vienna lectures on recognition, but somehow a credit to Gabriel Marcel on the gift is missing.
Marcel converted, but I am not aware of a note by Ricoeur on his remaining a Protestant and his distance from the Catholic Church (so very different for the Anglicans or American Lutherans and Episcopalians.)
Les Fonds Ricoeur, in an official response to Robert Lévy, offer us des petites personnes and their preoccupations, I suppose.
In France, Ricoeur came to be recognized - the fulfillment of his career, his professional life. In America, he was at none other than U. Chicago.
I cannot help wondering if he may have seen the flawed Russian film, "The Return", prior to his lectures in Vienna on recognition.
Consider these nobodies. Some remain without any distinguishable religious beliefs but remain uncomfortable when it is announced that there will be a new assessment by eminent scientists of what behavior (not behaviour) distinguishes our own species from earlier primates and hominids.
Eliade was required reading in so many colleges, required by professors who were certain that there is always the need for faith.
Taylor is so crass as to toy with his readers: "Is that all there is?"
I wonder about capable scientists and judges whose careers meet with no acclaim: a few publications and few judgments over-turned on appeal and those appeals upheld.
In one collection of Taylor's essays in technical philosophy, a "grey essay" appears: an unpublished "paper". It is now common to create posthumous "Collected Works" in which each and every scrap finds its place in the master's legacy. But the fate of the "grey papers" of Ricoeur?
Ricoeur's own turn of phrase in the English translation seems most apt for Taylor: "the rhapsody of ideas". Eliade will eventually be placed with Arendt, a "writer" and not a "researcher" and a writer with an agenda.
Against the lot, I prefer Milosz responding, if you will, to Raja Rao, or Avishai Margalit's "argument" against what has no spiritual reality for him. Milosz has his contradictions, Margalit his modesty.
But then there is Jaspers and his letters to Arendt. Jaspers is in Luxembourg, already stripped of academic office, under a publishing ban, and he does not manage to get his wife, a Jew, to Switzerland. Yet he will take exception to post-war legislation and exile himself to Basel. With Husserl stripped, Jaspers stripped, Ricoeur heads off for a summer of '39 in Munich.
The little people, the mere readers, are to follow Ricoeur in his meanderings, in his distrust of science. We could ignore Sartre, who knowingly took the philosophy teaching post of a sacked Jew, from whom there is almost nothing to be learned. Almost nothing.
Then there are the elderly readers: new publishers spring up in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, publishing Festschrift and more, plump with a nostalgia for their old days in the DDR, all their plays produced, all their books in the schools, summer cottages, travel abroad. We may have lingering hopes of transcendence, they had literature, quoting Northrop Frye and Marx and Stalin and never a mention of the Stasi. No, "I regret having informed on your son, having over-heard him talking in his room to his friends when I was a guest in your home." For that we have "The Lives of Others".
Ricoeur's lectures close with a false opposition of Levinas-Husserl. There is a gap. The between. The attentive reader knows that it is bridged for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Catholic, Protestant.
The real attack on science and technology is, I believe, actually an attack on science and history. "Teknik" is a smokescreen, not unlike Leiss on "domination". After a lifetime devoted to "lived experience" and "co-constitution", all that I have left is a confidence in poesis and a willingness to continue to read. And a growing measure of disgust.
But there is also validation, when the reader recognizes in the learned author the same longing, the same nostalgia for the transcendent. At that point the author must be trusted.
Missing from the Ricoeur narrative is the avowal of a past falsified, an apology to Gusdorf. My only corrective is to re-read Beckett's "Murphy", Beckett having been a true hero of resistance. Not just another liar, poseur, windbag.
The message of Ricoeur is that phenomenology will be of no avail. I disagree. We require now a phenomenology of combat, to understand how we came it embrace grapeshot, boiling tar, fragmentation grenades, landmines that only maim, machine guns.
One of the pioneers of powered flight could not bear that we would fly to murder. Not kill in combat. Murder. The synchronization of machine gun with propeller was a major triumph. Now we are faced with theocracies who are in pursuit of nuclear arms, an Islamic nation with nuclear arms which is only one step from theocracy. A liar aims for the American Presidency and another liar occupies the highest effective office in the secular state of Turkey. Turkey, whose armies were stopped at Vienna.
If we cannot embrace science and history without religion, ethics without religion, law without religion, then we may not be armed well enough to survive the collective slouch to reassuring fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is not some marginal deviation. It is the core.
Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians would have us believe that we can have science and history and all the old certainty in the God who would watch a boy hang for a piece of bread, a girl buried alive. We can be reassured. We must restore the strength of our institutions, ensure the soundness of our library collections, our curricula.
So far blind trust in a Bible-believing President has brought us only a war in Iraq after a botched effort against the Taliban. Distrust and suspicion was not enough to prevent a pointless war against an Iraqi dictator, a modest dictatorship when compared to North Korea, Cuba or China. A war begun with remote-control missiles, cruise missiles. A war that claims precision, but cannot perform an inventory of ammunition dumps (what could the rag-heads use artillery shells for anyway?)
When we read our political commentators for insight, when we try to form an opinion, we do go forward with a certain trust. There is a rhetoric which ensures this trust. To read the apologies for the old DDR and its writers and critics is a lesson I will not too soon forget. And there is a rhetoric of the philosophers who write about "the really big questions" - especially those who seem to have no one answer, no system to offer us, such as Ricoeur, a Protestant, and Taylor, a Catholic.
With the doyen of American philosophers, Hilary Putnam, having made a complete tour of the positions available to him, the little people might be excused for believing that there is no progress in philosophy and that perhaps a theology which suits the President is not so disreputable after all. Anthony Flew finds his God. (it could be an effect of the aging brain and no President would confess a loss of faith.) And we, the mere readers, are still waiting for even a small group of philosophers to emerge who are able to address those of us who are reluctant to concede that all and anything that separates us from the hominids before us is our brain anatomy and chemistry, our social relations of dominance and exchange, and behavior (linguistic and emotive.)
To read a philosopher and know him to have failed to address his greatest public failings (were the camps for Officers not public arenas with publishing? ) - to read that Gusdorf elided the profanity and obscenity that punctuates military speech - and then you have heard the man. Ricoeur was sent to make amends at a school which had been exemplary during the war. Knowing what we now know about the extent of French collaboration - knowing something of how very differently the Poles comported themselves - perhaps the University of Chicago needs to reflect on the buffoons and worse whom it has ensconced on occasion: beginning with Tillich, Arendt, Eliade, Ricoeur and now Taylor.
I was taught that what was different about the Kennedy administration is that he brought in brains from Chicago. Now we have a taste of Chicago in the White House and a President, a lawyer, who may still consider a vague theology and disreputable sermons to be somehow more fundamental than science and history.
Einstein claimed that science cannot give you the taste of the soup. In many ways he was wrong, as our new views of beaches, clouds and human feeling amply demonstrate. Professors assure their students that philosophy is not about the meaning of life, but also guide their best students away from disciplines such as history and philosophy of history, literature and philosophy of literature risking that those fields can tolerate mediocre efforts with little harm.
Major universities use their endowments to help ensure that work that is deserving of publication is published and often that every notebook and every set of lecture notes appears in bound collected works. Most of us will only see the volumes that were aimed at the intelligent reader, the discerning reader (although the need to translate German and French texts for English markets might lead you to wonder how serious those readers are thought to be, unilingual, under-educated or merely language-challenged.)
Translations of lectures by a philosopher, published by a university press, suggest that this work merits reading. With few books of philosophy finding their way into American public libraries, my copy of The Course of Recognition from hclib.org might yet be replaced by Le Parcours from a participating inter-library loan institution. I wonder: were these lectures a strange avowal of his personal need and of his feeling of being threatened given what befell Eliade? Did he see himself in a portrayal by Bellow? Had his wife died without knowing why a Croix de Guerre with such connections had been consigned to resume teaching in a backwater? Had we known, would there have been an interdiction? Should there have been?
My own suspicion is that Ricoeur had read pre-war writing of Jaspers that were easily misread. Mikel Dufrenne is gone, Gusdorf is gone, and so we, mere readers, not scholars, may never have an answer. On the shelf behind, first to hand, the books of Paul Ricoeur. Books on almost everything ever dear to me. Husserl. Metaphor. Narrative. Freud. Books in which the author's best hunch, his hard-earned insight, his daring direction, are essential to the reader and his reading and what he shapes from this reading in his very own speech and thought and musings. In what he advises his children, his friends. Imperfect. Flawed. But not "essentially" flawed?
In these writers there can be no separation of the writer from his work. This is not science, this is not history, this is not mathematics. They do not offer an argument, a line of argument, from which you might divorce them, abstract them. They are in the lineage of Lessing, Nietzsche and Heidegger - they must themselves be read - and any unadvised reader will be hostage to the translator.
If we were to discover evidence that Jeshua, the Nazarene, a stone-cutter, had left behind a wife somewhere along the Ganges, the wife who taught him to speak and ensured more work for him, his father, his brothers, would that, could that, now be irrelevant? If the Vietnamese on the Chinese wife of Ho are any indication, it is not so. This would not be youthful indiscretion. Behold the man.
Eliade, Ricoeur and Taylor. The latter, the Canadian philosopher, finds himself referenced in the Vienna lectures on recognition, but somehow a credit to Gabriel Marcel on the gift is missing.
Marcel converted, but I am not aware of a note by Ricoeur on his remaining a Protestant and his distance from the Catholic Church (so very different for the Anglicans or American Lutherans and Episcopalians.)
Les Fonds Ricoeur, in an official response to Robert Lévy, offer us des petites personnes and their preoccupations, I suppose.
In France, Ricoeur came to be recognized - the fulfillment of his career, his professional life. In America, he was at none other than U. Chicago.
I cannot help wondering if he may have seen the flawed Russian film, "The Return", prior to his lectures in Vienna on recognition.
Consider these nobodies. Some remain without any distinguishable religious beliefs but remain uncomfortable when it is announced that there will be a new assessment by eminent scientists of what behavior (not behaviour) distinguishes our own species from earlier primates and hominids.
Eliade was required reading in so many colleges, required by professors who were certain that there is always the need for faith.
Taylor is so crass as to toy with his readers: "Is that all there is?"
I wonder about capable scientists and judges whose careers meet with no acclaim: a few publications and few judgments over-turned on appeal and those appeals upheld.
In one collection of Taylor's essays in technical philosophy, a "grey essay" appears: an unpublished "paper". It is now common to create posthumous "Collected Works" in which each and every scrap finds its place in the master's legacy. But the fate of the "grey papers" of Ricoeur?
Ricoeur's own turn of phrase in the English translation seems most apt for Taylor: "the rhapsody of ideas". Eliade will eventually be placed with Arendt, a "writer" and not a "researcher" and a writer with an agenda.
Against the lot, I prefer Milosz responding, if you will, to Raja Rao, or Avishai Margalit's "argument" against what has no spiritual reality for him. Milosz has his contradictions, Margalit his modesty.
But then there is Jaspers and his letters to Arendt. Jaspers is in Luxembourg, already stripped of academic office, under a publishing ban, and he does not manage to get his wife, a Jew, to Switzerland. Yet he will take exception to post-war legislation and exile himself to Basel. With Husserl stripped, Jaspers stripped, Ricoeur heads off for a summer of '39 in Munich.
The little people, the mere readers, are to follow Ricoeur in his meanderings, in his distrust of science. We could ignore Sartre, who knowingly took the philosophy teaching post of a sacked Jew, from whom there is almost nothing to be learned. Almost nothing.
Then there are the elderly readers: new publishers spring up in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, publishing Festschrift and more, plump with a nostalgia for their old days in the DDR, all their plays produced, all their books in the schools, summer cottages, travel abroad. We may have lingering hopes of transcendence, they had literature, quoting Northrop Frye and Marx and Stalin and never a mention of the Stasi. No, "I regret having informed on your son, having over-heard him talking in his room to his friends when I was a guest in your home." For that we have "The Lives of Others".
Ricoeur's lectures close with a false opposition of Levinas-Husserl. There is a gap. The between. The attentive reader knows that it is bridged for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Catholic, Protestant.
The real attack on science and technology is, I believe, actually an attack on science and history. "Teknik" is a smokescreen, not unlike Leiss on "domination". After a lifetime devoted to "lived experience" and "co-constitution", all that I have left is a confidence in poesis and a willingness to continue to read. And a growing measure of disgust.
But there is also validation, when the reader recognizes in the learned author the same longing, the same nostalgia for the transcendent. At that point the author must be trusted.
Missing from the Ricoeur narrative is the avowal of a past falsified, an apology to Gusdorf. My only corrective is to re-read Beckett's "Murphy", Beckett having been a true hero of resistance. Not just another liar, poseur, windbag.
The message of Ricoeur is that phenomenology will be of no avail. I disagree. We require now a phenomenology of combat, to understand how we came it embrace grapeshot, boiling tar, fragmentation grenades, landmines that only maim, machine guns.
One of the pioneers of powered flight could not bear that we would fly to murder. Not kill in combat. Murder. The synchronization of machine gun with propeller was a major triumph. Now we are faced with theocracies who are in pursuit of nuclear arms, an Islamic nation with nuclear arms which is only one step from theocracy. A liar aims for the American Presidency and another liar occupies the highest effective office in the secular state of Turkey. Turkey, whose armies were stopped at Vienna.
If we cannot embrace science and history without religion, ethics without religion, law without religion, then we may not be armed well enough to survive the collective slouch to reassuring fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is not some marginal deviation. It is the core.
Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians would have us believe that we can have science and history and all the old certainty in the God who would watch a boy hang for a piece of bread, a girl buried alive. We can be reassured. We must restore the strength of our institutions, ensure the soundness of our library collections, our curricula.
So far blind trust in a Bible-believing President has brought us only a war in Iraq after a botched effort against the Taliban. Distrust and suspicion was not enough to prevent a pointless war against an Iraqi dictator, a modest dictatorship when compared to North Korea, Cuba or China. A war begun with remote-control missiles, cruise missiles. A war that claims precision, but cannot perform an inventory of ammunition dumps (what could the rag-heads use artillery shells for anyway?)
When we read our political commentators for insight, when we try to form an opinion, we do go forward with a certain trust. There is a rhetoric which ensures this trust. To read the apologies for the old DDR and its writers and critics is a lesson I will not too soon forget. And there is a rhetoric of the philosophers who write about "the really big questions" - especially those who seem to have no one answer, no system to offer us, such as Ricoeur, a Protestant, and Taylor, a Catholic.
With the doyen of American philosophers, Hilary Putnam, having made a complete tour of the positions available to him, the little people might be excused for believing that there is no progress in philosophy and that perhaps a theology which suits the President is not so disreputable after all. Anthony Flew finds his God. (it could be an effect of the aging brain and no President would confess a loss of faith.) And we, the mere readers, are still waiting for even a small group of philosophers to emerge who are able to address those of us who are reluctant to concede that all and anything that separates us from the hominids before us is our brain anatomy and chemistry, our social relations of dominance and exchange, and behavior (linguistic and emotive.)
To read a philosopher and know him to have failed to address his greatest public failings (were the camps for Officers not public arenas with publishing? ) - to read that Gusdorf elided the profanity and obscenity that punctuates military speech - and then you have heard the man. Ricoeur was sent to make amends at a school which had been exemplary during the war. Knowing what we now know about the extent of French collaboration - knowing something of how very differently the Poles comported themselves - perhaps the University of Chicago needs to reflect on the buffoons and worse whom it has ensconced on occasion: beginning with Tillich, Arendt, Eliade, Ricoeur and now Taylor.
I was taught that what was different about the Kennedy administration is that he brought in brains from Chicago. Now we have a taste of Chicago in the White House and a President, a lawyer, who may still consider a vague theology and disreputable sermons to be somehow more fundamental than science and history.
Einstein claimed that science cannot give you the taste of the soup. In many ways he was wrong, as our new views of beaches, clouds and human feeling amply demonstrate. Professors assure their students that philosophy is not about the meaning of life, but also guide their best students away from disciplines such as history and philosophy of history, literature and philosophy of literature risking that those fields can tolerate mediocre efforts with little harm.
Major universities use their endowments to help ensure that work that is deserving of publication is published and often that every notebook and every set of lecture notes appears in bound collected works. Most of us will only see the volumes that were aimed at the intelligent reader, the discerning reader (although the need to translate German and French texts for English markets might lead you to wonder how serious those readers are thought to be, unilingual, under-educated or merely language-challenged.)
Translations of lectures by a philosopher, published by a university press, suggest that this work merits reading. With few books of philosophy finding their way into American public libraries, my copy of The Course of Recognition from hclib.org might yet be replaced by Le Parcours from a participating inter-library loan institution. I wonder: were these lectures a strange avowal of his personal need and of his feeling of being threatened given what befell Eliade? Did he see himself in a portrayal by Bellow? Had his wife died without knowing why a Croix de Guerre with such connections had been consigned to resume teaching in a backwater? Had we known, would there have been an interdiction? Should there have been?
My own suspicion is that Ricoeur had read pre-war writing of Jaspers that were easily misread. Mikel Dufrenne is gone, Gusdorf is gone, and so we, mere readers, not scholars, may never have an answer. On the shelf behind, first to hand, the books of Paul Ricoeur. Books on almost everything ever dear to me. Husserl. Metaphor. Narrative. Freud. Books in which the author's best hunch, his hard-earned insight, his daring direction, are essential to the reader and his reading and what he shapes from this reading in his very own speech and thought and musings. In what he advises his children, his friends. Imperfect. Flawed. But not "essentially" flawed?
In these writers there can be no separation of the writer from his work. This is not science, this is not history, this is not mathematics. They do not offer an argument, a line of argument, from which you might divorce them, abstract them. They are in the lineage of Lessing, Nietzsche and Heidegger - they must themselves be read - and any unadvised reader will be hostage to the translator.
If we were to discover evidence that Jeshua, the Nazarene, a stone-cutter, had left behind a wife somewhere along the Ganges, the wife who taught him to speak and ensured more work for him, his father, his brothers, would that, could that, now be irrelevant? If the Vietnamese on the Chinese wife of Ho are any indication, it is not so. This would not be youthful indiscretion. Behold the man.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
