This is where I came in.
Well, not exactly. But it was in reading Boethius that I was first drawn to a life of reflection and inquiry. (You notice I'm careful not to say philosophy.)
The Consolation of Philosophy came into my adolescent misery like rain falling on a parched desert. Religion had only deepened my chronic sadness. Then came the voice of Dame Philosophy to Boethius in his cell on death row telling him that all, even death, was transient. She reminded him of his successes in which he took satisfaction, pointed out that these were as nothing, gone with the turning of the heavens.
As Boethius dried his tears, a flash of realization went through me. It was possible that someday things would be different, that wanting things to be right in my life was as pointless as complaining that they were wrong. I wanted to be one of those people, like Boethius, who could see this and be comforted by it even the midst of real suffering, should I ever actually experience any.
It hasn't worked out that way. I still lack perspective and patience. I blow up at people over trivial things. I don't make the effort to deepen my understanding or share my ideas with others. And most of my troubles are of my own making. Indeed, I've largely dodged the bullets that strike most people down. I've managed to stumble through life by shirking my responsibilities.
But there are people whose pain is so great as to set the universe on fire. The increase in their numbers threatens to sweep us all away in a torrent of tears. And this is just the public torment. Wars. Disease. Poverty. In many ways inner misery is are worse. Madness. Grief. Fear.
Recently a friend of mine, a former student, had a family tragedy that tripped her back into a despair she thought she had left behind. Paralysis. Suicidal thoughts. Hospitalization. Soul-numbing medications that threatened to destroy her capacity to work. I could only wait, get occasional reports from her father, also a friend. I could feel her pain through his. She was getting help, he told me, the very best. All I could feel was useless. What did I have to offer? My concern. My presence should the opportunity arise.
Actually my friend is fortunate. She will recover, is already making progress. She has a family that loves her and a career she loves. But what happened to her, the palpability of her suffering, brought home to me something that gets lost behind the multiplying images of the wounded and the starving and the enraged that flash across my TV screen..
What do I have to offer any of them? Certainly my efforts to resist war or alleviate hunger would be nice. But what else? Many, perhaps most, don't need my help. They get comfort from their faith and their community. What would it benefit anyone to be advised that this too shall pass? That they would fell better if they weren't so attached to that leg or that child or that village that they have lost?
Yet that seems to be the main way in which philosophy consoles. As Charlie Brown used to say in the Peanuts comic strip, "In five hundred years nobody'll know the difference."
We all gain some perspective with age. Perhaps this is because we've been down most paths often enough to know which lead somewhere and which don't. Whether this process is more extensive or thorough in those who habitually ask fundamental questions or engage in methodical self-examination is harder to determine.
My guess is that any benefits that do accrue from these speculative labors come largely from the expanded narrative that results from life of study and writing. But I suspect that almost any earnest endeavor from medicine to auto repair will do the same.
It is important how you think about things. A big part of recovery from depression, after the drugs kick in, is to reprogram how your mind works. Squelch those inner conversations about how you're never going to amount to anything because nobody gave a shit about you when you were little. Even if true that kind of talk plays havoc with your serotonin levels. This is because most thinking with the emotions, just as most serotonin is in the gut.
If the cure for suffering is to be freed of attachments, that is also the cure for joy. To be alive is to feel. It's the story we tell with our feelings that makes the difference.
boethius
fortune
suffering
serotonin
philosophy
Well, not exactly. But it was in reading Boethius that I was first drawn to a life of reflection and inquiry. (You notice I'm careful not to say philosophy.)
The Consolation of Philosophy came into my adolescent misery like rain falling on a parched desert. Religion had only deepened my chronic sadness. Then came the voice of Dame Philosophy to Boethius in his cell on death row telling him that all, even death, was transient. She reminded him of his successes in which he took satisfaction, pointed out that these were as nothing, gone with the turning of the heavens.
As Boethius dried his tears, a flash of realization went through me. It was possible that someday things would be different, that wanting things to be right in my life was as pointless as complaining that they were wrong. I wanted to be one of those people, like Boethius, who could see this and be comforted by it even the midst of real suffering, should I ever actually experience any.
It hasn't worked out that way. I still lack perspective and patience. I blow up at people over trivial things. I don't make the effort to deepen my understanding or share my ideas with others. And most of my troubles are of my own making. Indeed, I've largely dodged the bullets that strike most people down. I've managed to stumble through life by shirking my responsibilities.
But there are people whose pain is so great as to set the universe on fire. The increase in their numbers threatens to sweep us all away in a torrent of tears. And this is just the public torment. Wars. Disease. Poverty. In many ways inner misery is are worse. Madness. Grief. Fear.
Recently a friend of mine, a former student, had a family tragedy that tripped her back into a despair she thought she had left behind. Paralysis. Suicidal thoughts. Hospitalization. Soul-numbing medications that threatened to destroy her capacity to work. I could only wait, get occasional reports from her father, also a friend. I could feel her pain through his. She was getting help, he told me, the very best. All I could feel was useless. What did I have to offer? My concern. My presence should the opportunity arise.
Actually my friend is fortunate. She will recover, is already making progress. She has a family that loves her and a career she loves. But what happened to her, the palpability of her suffering, brought home to me something that gets lost behind the multiplying images of the wounded and the starving and the enraged that flash across my TV screen..
What do I have to offer any of them? Certainly my efforts to resist war or alleviate hunger would be nice. But what else? Many, perhaps most, don't need my help. They get comfort from their faith and their community. What would it benefit anyone to be advised that this too shall pass? That they would fell better if they weren't so attached to that leg or that child or that village that they have lost?
Yet that seems to be the main way in which philosophy consoles. As Charlie Brown used to say in the Peanuts comic strip, "In five hundred years nobody'll know the difference."
We all gain some perspective with age. Perhaps this is because we've been down most paths often enough to know which lead somewhere and which don't. Whether this process is more extensive or thorough in those who habitually ask fundamental questions or engage in methodical self-examination is harder to determine.
My guess is that any benefits that do accrue from these speculative labors come largely from the expanded narrative that results from life of study and writing. But I suspect that almost any earnest endeavor from medicine to auto repair will do the same.
It is important how you think about things. A big part of recovery from depression, after the drugs kick in, is to reprogram how your mind works. Squelch those inner conversations about how you're never going to amount to anything because nobody gave a shit about you when you were little. Even if true that kind of talk plays havoc with your serotonin levels. This is because most thinking with the emotions, just as most serotonin is in the gut.
If the cure for suffering is to be freed of attachments, that is also the cure for joy. To be alive is to feel. It's the story we tell with our feelings that makes the difference.
boethius
fortune
suffering
serotonin
philosophy
I've been bloghopping a little lately, looking at sites that focus on philosophy (sic).
The term philosophy, by the way, is one I dislike and try to avoid. But it is necessary to use it as a tag, both in order to find blogs that may be of interest and so that this time capsule may someday be opened.
It is commentary enough that Technorati has no stand-alone tag for philosophy, but links the topic with religion. Similarly the metaphysics bag has come to be largely filled with spiritual goodies, while ontology now refers to the automation of knowledge. None of this is undesirable. And the postmodernists may well feel happily prescient.
Anyway, what I found was both daunting and illuminating. Daunting because there's some tough cookies out there in Blogland. Power lifters who have read the great thinkers and keep up with the latest stuff (watch me try later to use this against them). Illuminating because it sheds a little light into that cave of shadows in which my mind is trapped.
Ever since the days of the uber-sophist Socrates we've been skirmishing along the boundary between Opinion and Truth. Science, instead of restoring peace, simply added to the arsenal of data with which we cudgel each other. Being dissatisfied with mere facts is the hobgobblin of philosophic minds.
All of which is preface. What struck me most in my casual walkabout was the degree to which the various practioners of meta-theory/hyper-knowledge spend most of their time arguing with arguments. This is probably not their fault. For this is the way of the academy, the treadmill to degree and tenure. (Beware here of that trick in which latecomers discredit the conversation because they can't break in on it.)
No harm in this really. It improves blood flow to the brain, exerts a civilizing influence, enriches the culture. Much like music. But as Comrade Marx said, "It bakes no bread." (Whoops! Where did that come from?)
Another, but less remembered, denizen of the nineteenth century, Paulsen, put it about that "the true philosopher (sic) goes after the thing itself." For a long time I took it that he meant (as he probably did) the thing-in-itself. But I favor now the idea that he could as easily mean that the true object of speculative inquiry (the term I prefer) is the limits of actual existence. No discovery here. Sounds like science (which it is) and existentialism (which it isn't).
Don't get it? Don't buy it? Actually, I'd rather be in trouble at this point. For one thing, I'm in over my head. For another, I'm doing exactly the thing I like least--striving for a definition from which all else flows. I need to do what I think needs to be done and let the work create its own category and method.
What is it that forces us into perpetual oscillation between truth and opinion? Is it our fault for wanting absolutes in a relative universe? Can we not be content with the grain of sand that contains the universe? We ought to be since the physicists are continually filling in the details of the universe that contains the universe. Can there be anything beyond this worth knowing?
The short answer is probably the one on most people's minds: How are we going to survive as a species? (Granting, of course, that for some people this actually means: How can I prevent my life style from slipping to the level of the majority of people on the planet.)
Part of the answer is factual. But a lot of it lies in that branch of morality known as policy. This leads us back to the blurry realm of opinion, and (curiously) to the vain quest for foundational discourse, especially the sort based on an ever deeper reading of the texts.
Full disclosure requires that I identify myself as a recovering neo-scholastic. I so wanted there to be real substances underlying the myriad of forms. My discovery of these, I thought, would stop the noisy debate and require everyone to listen to me. Consequently I favored the hard-core logicians and epistemologists, the theorists of language, and above all miners for a Heart of Being.
I give them their due. But honestly I can't keep up. I'm more interested now in work that is less technical but more rooted in deep thought and broad culture.
The few that make the cut are ones like Buber and Santayana, perhaps Unamuno, Whitehead and Dewey. Not because I agree with them, but because I want to be them. They have wrestled with and mastered the conundrum posers, but only to leave them behind. They speak with the authority that comes from thoroughly processed experience. What saves them from ending on the scrap heap of Opinion is not their answers but their questions.
It is from such a vantage that one might best address our actual situation. That seems the proper goal for speculation in this world at this time. It is not longer legitimate to inquire whether we exist, but only how we can.
buber
santayana
unamuno
whitehead
dewey
scholasticism
epistemology
ontology
metaphysics
marx
paulsen
philosophy
The term philosophy, by the way, is one I dislike and try to avoid. But it is necessary to use it as a tag, both in order to find blogs that may be of interest and so that this time capsule may someday be opened.
It is commentary enough that Technorati has no stand-alone tag for philosophy, but links the topic with religion. Similarly the metaphysics bag has come to be largely filled with spiritual goodies, while ontology now refers to the automation of knowledge. None of this is undesirable. And the postmodernists may well feel happily prescient.
Anyway, what I found was both daunting and illuminating. Daunting because there's some tough cookies out there in Blogland. Power lifters who have read the great thinkers and keep up with the latest stuff (watch me try later to use this against them). Illuminating because it sheds a little light into that cave of shadows in which my mind is trapped.
Ever since the days of the uber-sophist Socrates we've been skirmishing along the boundary between Opinion and Truth. Science, instead of restoring peace, simply added to the arsenal of data with which we cudgel each other. Being dissatisfied with mere facts is the hobgobblin of philosophic minds.
All of which is preface. What struck me most in my casual walkabout was the degree to which the various practioners of meta-theory/hyper-knowledge spend most of their time arguing with arguments. This is probably not their fault. For this is the way of the academy, the treadmill to degree and tenure. (Beware here of that trick in which latecomers discredit the conversation because they can't break in on it.)
No harm in this really. It improves blood flow to the brain, exerts a civilizing influence, enriches the culture. Much like music. But as Comrade Marx said, "It bakes no bread." (Whoops! Where did that come from?)
Another, but less remembered, denizen of the nineteenth century, Paulsen, put it about that "the true philosopher (sic) goes after the thing itself." For a long time I took it that he meant (as he probably did) the thing-in-itself. But I favor now the idea that he could as easily mean that the true object of speculative inquiry (the term I prefer) is the limits of actual existence. No discovery here. Sounds like science (which it is) and existentialism (which it isn't).
Don't get it? Don't buy it? Actually, I'd rather be in trouble at this point. For one thing, I'm in over my head. For another, I'm doing exactly the thing I like least--striving for a definition from which all else flows. I need to do what I think needs to be done and let the work create its own category and method.
What is it that forces us into perpetual oscillation between truth and opinion? Is it our fault for wanting absolutes in a relative universe? Can we not be content with the grain of sand that contains the universe? We ought to be since the physicists are continually filling in the details of the universe that contains the universe. Can there be anything beyond this worth knowing?
The short answer is probably the one on most people's minds: How are we going to survive as a species? (Granting, of course, that for some people this actually means: How can I prevent my life style from slipping to the level of the majority of people on the planet.)
Part of the answer is factual. But a lot of it lies in that branch of morality known as policy. This leads us back to the blurry realm of opinion, and (curiously) to the vain quest for foundational discourse, especially the sort based on an ever deeper reading of the texts.
Full disclosure requires that I identify myself as a recovering neo-scholastic. I so wanted there to be real substances underlying the myriad of forms. My discovery of these, I thought, would stop the noisy debate and require everyone to listen to me. Consequently I favored the hard-core logicians and epistemologists, the theorists of language, and above all miners for a Heart of Being.
I give them their due. But honestly I can't keep up. I'm more interested now in work that is less technical but more rooted in deep thought and broad culture.
The few that make the cut are ones like Buber and Santayana, perhaps Unamuno, Whitehead and Dewey. Not because I agree with them, but because I want to be them. They have wrestled with and mastered the conundrum posers, but only to leave them behind. They speak with the authority that comes from thoroughly processed experience. What saves them from ending on the scrap heap of Opinion is not their answers but their questions.
It is from such a vantage that one might best address our actual situation. That seems the proper goal for speculation in this world at this time. It is not longer legitimate to inquire whether we exist, but only how we can.
buber
santayana
unamuno
whitehead
dewey
scholasticism
epistemology
ontology
metaphysics
marx
paulsen
philosophy
I called my friend Judy recently. We haven’t seen each other in easily twenty years. But every few months we get on the phone to compare notes about the state of the world. She was upset straight away. She’d been reading an article about one of Cheney’s advisors. The bile rose in her throat.
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
I’ve tried to make the point (see previous posts) that being obsessed with attaining that secular/rational equivalent of enlightenment or transcendence called universal knowledge has been something of a curse.
At least for me. It may be that someone with a generous spirit and a disciplined mind could do it, but I discovered early that while Aristotle claimed that “philosophy begins in wonder,” the reality is that it begins in wonderfulness. It’s not enough to pass the courses and get the licence. There are some things that can’t be taught. Humanity, for example.
Still, there’s something to be said for street smarts.
It goes like this: I have a friend, a former student. He drops me an email, suggests we meet for coffee. We’ve done this before. I suspect we’ll talk about his grief at the murder of one of his daughters and his fears for the sanity of another daughter.
He’s a middle-aged guy with a string of failed marriages. The last divorce is still fresh. He isn’t ready to think about another relationship, fears there won’t be one.
The one bright spot--his new career as a nurse--remains more stress than satisfaction. It is only with regard to nursing, since I helped him prepare for it, that I am qualified to speak. I do not let this stop me from posing as an expert on everything. from madness to love.
He’s already drinking iced tea and trying to log on the wireless hub when I get to the coffee house. Our stated purpose is to swap information about the medical databases we have on our PDAs. But in no time we’re talking about his living but very depressed daughter (also one of my former students).
He’s worried her medications are impairing her ability learn in her new job as a nurse. “She’s afraid of failing,” he says. “It’s making her more depressed.” I agree. It worries me too. She’s a wonderful person. I’m very fond of her.
What do I have to offer him? Nothing, but perhaps the chance to talk freely. I sense that he’s down on himself. He has high standards, blames himself for the misfortunes of his daughters. I meet this by playing the fool, a bigger fool than he. I tell the truth about my marriages and affairs, the damage I did to my children.
This is a kind of treachery. He’s a smart guy has a lot of insight after years of therapy. I really have nothing to tell him that he doesn’t know. But he respects me as teacher. He hasn’t been a nurse long enough to know he’s already better at it than I am. My aim is to subvert that, to laugh in the face of my crimes. I have no point, no advice. It is not therapy, though it may be friendship.
He thinks so, suggests we go fishing.
Oddly, though, it is my failed quest that makes this possible. Fragments of Nietzsche and Freud and Marx lurk in my mind, capsules of hard-won lessons. Occasionally I quote these lines. More often they are the clues to how to play a situation. Words to stay loose by.
It’s a small thing. It’s taken a long time. But it’s a start.
enlightenment
wonder
teacher
student
At least for me. It may be that someone with a generous spirit and a disciplined mind could do it, but I discovered early that while Aristotle claimed that “philosophy begins in wonder,” the reality is that it begins in wonderfulness. It’s not enough to pass the courses and get the licence. There are some things that can’t be taught. Humanity, for example.
Still, there’s something to be said for street smarts.
It goes like this: I have a friend, a former student. He drops me an email, suggests we meet for coffee. We’ve done this before. I suspect we’ll talk about his grief at the murder of one of his daughters and his fears for the sanity of another daughter.
He’s a middle-aged guy with a string of failed marriages. The last divorce is still fresh. He isn’t ready to think about another relationship, fears there won’t be one.
The one bright spot--his new career as a nurse--remains more stress than satisfaction. It is only with regard to nursing, since I helped him prepare for it, that I am qualified to speak. I do not let this stop me from posing as an expert on everything. from madness to love.
He’s already drinking iced tea and trying to log on the wireless hub when I get to the coffee house. Our stated purpose is to swap information about the medical databases we have on our PDAs. But in no time we’re talking about his living but very depressed daughter (also one of my former students).
He’s worried her medications are impairing her ability learn in her new job as a nurse. “She’s afraid of failing,” he says. “It’s making her more depressed.” I agree. It worries me too. She’s a wonderful person. I’m very fond of her.
What do I have to offer him? Nothing, but perhaps the chance to talk freely. I sense that he’s down on himself. He has high standards, blames himself for the misfortunes of his daughters. I meet this by playing the fool, a bigger fool than he. I tell the truth about my marriages and affairs, the damage I did to my children.
This is a kind of treachery. He’s a smart guy has a lot of insight after years of therapy. I really have nothing to tell him that he doesn’t know. But he respects me as teacher. He hasn’t been a nurse long enough to know he’s already better at it than I am. My aim is to subvert that, to laugh in the face of my crimes. I have no point, no advice. It is not therapy, though it may be friendship.
He thinks so, suggests we go fishing.
Oddly, though, it is my failed quest that makes this possible. Fragments of Nietzsche and Freud and Marx lurk in my mind, capsules of hard-won lessons. Occasionally I quote these lines. More often they are the clues to how to play a situation. Words to stay loose by.
It’s a small thing. It’s taken a long time. But it’s a start.
enlightenment
wonder
teacher
student
What bugs me is lack of theory.
I was raised on theory. Good theory, I was taught, trumps messy imperfect practice.
Well, maybe I wasn’t taught this (who would do that to a child?). Maybe I invented the world of theory. A safer, more satisfying world than the one I lived in. Even so, I had help.
It is said (by Boethius who knew these things) that on Dame Philosophy’s cloak an embroidered ladder symbolizes the climb we must make from Practice at the bottom to Theory at the top. As a lad I loved this image, took it to my heart. This primed me for a college steeped in Aristotle and Aquinas. After that a career in science disappointed me (too dreary and mundane). I fell instead for the demiurgical twins Hegel and Marx who made sense of history as I lived in it.
That didn't last long. History may not have ended, but the rules that govern it are on extended leave, waiting like the rest of us to see how it comes out.
Which leaves me with....what? I’m no fan of postmodern untheory, but I do believe the world is woven from...nay, is narrative. (Does this make me a latter-day Nominalist? A long journey from the Realism of the Platonists.)
Still, something is lost here. Without theory we flail about blindly. There’s a good bit of blind flailing lately. Most of it done by those of us who don’t recognize which theories animate our actions.
I’ve come around a good bit on both sides of the question. I no longer see theory as an alternate universe of perfect forms. Neither is it the ad hoc byproduct of our schemes and projects. Theory is about action. Done right it is action.
In that sense, theory abounds. Just as action abounds. But that alone should tell us we’re in trouble. The same ideas send us racing in different directions only to butt heads because we didn’t see each other coming. We have no idea, for example, whether our best efforts will save civilization or push it over the edge.
Not to say that any of this can be resolved at the level of theory. Nor should we want it to be. The past and the present are littered with examples of (disastrous) societies dominated by one “correct” idea. Still we should be quick to falsify whatever is wrong-headed. It is just that little can be reduced to that. Besides we’ve often made huge strides under the guidance of erroneous ideas. Even if we managed to prove one theory better than others we’d have a devil of a time getting everyone to line up under its banner.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Magister Ludi an elaborate proto-computer allows players to manipulate facts, symbols and ideas so as to generate new knowledge in the course of scoring points in a game. Leibnitz (the inventor of binary) tried to build a machine that would make discoveries. Can you say internet?
No, the internet will not yield an ultimate answer like 42. It’s strength is precisely that it is not totalizing or reductive. It is inclusive and self-correcting. It is a tool that mirrors and magnifies the light of consciousness. In this sense it is the physical body for that noosphere that Teilhard de Chardin saw mankind evolving toward. How nice that the methods and models of narratology have been lying in wait for this marvelous convergence of technology and society.
The Japanese thinker Miki Kiyoshi came in time to favor the notion that we are our tools. The medium is the message. What we create creates us. Seen in this way the internet is a form of practice that makes its own theory.
But what kind of theory? I cannot say. Only that it does not speak with an imperious or prophetic voice. It listens. It laughs. It insults and rants and offends. It excludes nothing, gives no aspect of life purchase over another. In this sense Georges Bataille would have loved it.
The boundaries between topics and idioms disappear. People tell their true stories and post them next to their attempts at literary fiction. Sometimes their personal accounts turn out to be invented and their fictions stolen. (This while educators and publishers debate the ground rules for memoirs and novels.) Intimate truths coexist with erotic fantasies. Pornographers apply the latest methods of textual criticism to discuss each other’s work.
This last may provide the most useful and portable model. Sex has moved off the axis of pleasure and reproduction to become a mode of inquiry. Not in the abstract. But not in the mere doing either. Rather, the exploration generates a reflective and analytic narrative. This happens within a virtual community and its real-world counterpart that would not otherwise exist. It may be that this aspect of on-line sexuality--instead of its conventional naughtiness and exploitation--is what really rankles pastors and politicians.
If this can happen in the bedrock of taboo, why not along the fault lines of race, class, religion, politics and ideology? This is not really a question; it is already a reality. This is quite different from being able to predict (or control) where any of this is headed. We’re already in the middle of this wild ride. All we can do is hang on tight and lean in the same direction when we have to.
But I (seem to) digress. I was talking about theory. And what I’ve come around to is a cascading chain reaction of cyber practice. Can that suffice for the ground of Being that has all but washed out from under our feet? Heraclitus would say yes. What’s more, this is a structured, constrained flux. It has rules rooted in its tools. It represents the world as number, generates endless forms out of a dialectic of ones and zeros. Yin and yang. Is and is-not. At the very heart of its operation is narrative, code.
Are were there yet? No. Except to say that we have always lived in a world of our own making. Before there were machines there were dreams. Vico said it best: We only understand what we have made.
That’s a theory I can live with.
boethius
hegel
marx
hesse
teilhard
leibnitz
miki
heraclitus
bataille
vico
I was raised on theory. Good theory, I was taught, trumps messy imperfect practice.
Well, maybe I wasn’t taught this (who would do that to a child?). Maybe I invented the world of theory. A safer, more satisfying world than the one I lived in. Even so, I had help.
It is said (by Boethius who knew these things) that on Dame Philosophy’s cloak an embroidered ladder symbolizes the climb we must make from Practice at the bottom to Theory at the top. As a lad I loved this image, took it to my heart. This primed me for a college steeped in Aristotle and Aquinas. After that a career in science disappointed me (too dreary and mundane). I fell instead for the demiurgical twins Hegel and Marx who made sense of history as I lived in it.
That didn't last long. History may not have ended, but the rules that govern it are on extended leave, waiting like the rest of us to see how it comes out.
Which leaves me with....what? I’m no fan of postmodern untheory, but I do believe the world is woven from...nay, is narrative. (Does this make me a latter-day Nominalist? A long journey from the Realism of the Platonists.)
Still, something is lost here. Without theory we flail about blindly. There’s a good bit of blind flailing lately. Most of it done by those of us who don’t recognize which theories animate our actions.
I’ve come around a good bit on both sides of the question. I no longer see theory as an alternate universe of perfect forms. Neither is it the ad hoc byproduct of our schemes and projects. Theory is about action. Done right it is action.
In that sense, theory abounds. Just as action abounds. But that alone should tell us we’re in trouble. The same ideas send us racing in different directions only to butt heads because we didn’t see each other coming. We have no idea, for example, whether our best efforts will save civilization or push it over the edge.
Not to say that any of this can be resolved at the level of theory. Nor should we want it to be. The past and the present are littered with examples of (disastrous) societies dominated by one “correct” idea. Still we should be quick to falsify whatever is wrong-headed. It is just that little can be reduced to that. Besides we’ve often made huge strides under the guidance of erroneous ideas. Even if we managed to prove one theory better than others we’d have a devil of a time getting everyone to line up under its banner.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Magister Ludi an elaborate proto-computer allows players to manipulate facts, symbols and ideas so as to generate new knowledge in the course of scoring points in a game. Leibnitz (the inventor of binary) tried to build a machine that would make discoveries. Can you say internet?
No, the internet will not yield an ultimate answer like 42. It’s strength is precisely that it is not totalizing or reductive. It is inclusive and self-correcting. It is a tool that mirrors and magnifies the light of consciousness. In this sense it is the physical body for that noosphere that Teilhard de Chardin saw mankind evolving toward. How nice that the methods and models of narratology have been lying in wait for this marvelous convergence of technology and society.
The Japanese thinker Miki Kiyoshi came in time to favor the notion that we are our tools. The medium is the message. What we create creates us. Seen in this way the internet is a form of practice that makes its own theory.
But what kind of theory? I cannot say. Only that it does not speak with an imperious or prophetic voice. It listens. It laughs. It insults and rants and offends. It excludes nothing, gives no aspect of life purchase over another. In this sense Georges Bataille would have loved it.
The boundaries between topics and idioms disappear. People tell their true stories and post them next to their attempts at literary fiction. Sometimes their personal accounts turn out to be invented and their fictions stolen. (This while educators and publishers debate the ground rules for memoirs and novels.) Intimate truths coexist with erotic fantasies. Pornographers apply the latest methods of textual criticism to discuss each other’s work.
This last may provide the most useful and portable model. Sex has moved off the axis of pleasure and reproduction to become a mode of inquiry. Not in the abstract. But not in the mere doing either. Rather, the exploration generates a reflective and analytic narrative. This happens within a virtual community and its real-world counterpart that would not otherwise exist. It may be that this aspect of on-line sexuality--instead of its conventional naughtiness and exploitation--is what really rankles pastors and politicians.
If this can happen in the bedrock of taboo, why not along the fault lines of race, class, religion, politics and ideology? This is not really a question; it is already a reality. This is quite different from being able to predict (or control) where any of this is headed. We’re already in the middle of this wild ride. All we can do is hang on tight and lean in the same direction when we have to.
But I (seem to) digress. I was talking about theory. And what I’ve come around to is a cascading chain reaction of cyber practice. Can that suffice for the ground of Being that has all but washed out from under our feet? Heraclitus would say yes. What’s more, this is a structured, constrained flux. It has rules rooted in its tools. It represents the world as number, generates endless forms out of a dialectic of ones and zeros. Yin and yang. Is and is-not. At the very heart of its operation is narrative, code.
Are were there yet? No. Except to say that we have always lived in a world of our own making. Before there were machines there were dreams. Vico said it best: We only understand what we have made.
That’s a theory I can live with.
boethius
hegel
marx
hesse
teilhard
leibnitz
miki
heraclitus
bataille
vico
"There's no success like failure," says Bob Dylan.
Without ignoring Dylan's next line--"and failure's no success at all"--I want to take failure as my starting point.
A particular failure. I have plenty of successes. I'm relatively well off in a world where many people are not. I get a reasonable amount of satisfaction in life. I'm not complaining.
My failure is the failure to do this...this thing here, this saying of what it is I really want to say that I am initiating right now. In terms of my earliest idea of myself, it is the failure to write the articles and treatises and novels that are clamoring to get out of my brain.
No big deal. A common enough affliction. Every reporter and every cop, never mind every doctor and every cabbie, has a manuscript in their desk drawer. "If only people could read my story..." I publish, therefore I am.
For me the peculiar twist is that from my earliest awarenss I have craved (!) clarity of mind and calmness of spirit. This was precisely because I was a confused, anxious child. Only occasionaly did I have fleeting moments of understanding and peace. As I grew these moments were increasingly bound up in the act of reading. I felt that what I sought must be somewhere on some page. Even more that it was the possession and domain of those who wrote these pages. I wanted to be them.
Strangely, the effect of my quest to find the right words poisoned my capacity to find satisfaction in relationships and jobs. These always disappointed. They also managed to distract me from what I saw as my true work, making the statement that subsumes all previous statements. In my eagerness to own the whole farm I neglected the necessary step of tending my own plot of land and ended up a hired hand.
All has not been lost though. Lately I notice that I am occasionally sought out by students and friends as if I am a source of those qualities I have yet to acquire. It's almost as though, having beaten my head for so long against the walls of that cave in which Plato placed those who see only the illusory shadows of reality, I am able to tell them, "I've been down that path; there's nothing there."
While I credit this to my habits of reading and scribbling, I notice that I am less inclined to want to read every word of every thinker, let alone resolve ever discrepancy within and between them. This is not to make a virtue of ignorance or to disparage those who till the long stony furrows of philosophy (a term I dislike and seldom use). Rather it is that, having approriated a few insights, I now have some of my own.
I still play at the big themes a little: Opinion versus truth. The one and the many. Permanence and change. But I no longer see these as battles to be won. Much better to use them as tools to open minds. For we need nothing so much in these desperate times as to be able to hear each other.
wisdom
folly
success
failure
opinion
truth
inquiry
plato
dylan
philosophy
Without ignoring Dylan's next line--"and failure's no success at all"--I want to take failure as my starting point.
A particular failure. I have plenty of successes. I'm relatively well off in a world where many people are not. I get a reasonable amount of satisfaction in life. I'm not complaining.
My failure is the failure to do this...this thing here, this saying of what it is I really want to say that I am initiating right now. In terms of my earliest idea of myself, it is the failure to write the articles and treatises and novels that are clamoring to get out of my brain.
No big deal. A common enough affliction. Every reporter and every cop, never mind every doctor and every cabbie, has a manuscript in their desk drawer. "If only people could read my story..." I publish, therefore I am.
For me the peculiar twist is that from my earliest awarenss I have craved (!) clarity of mind and calmness of spirit. This was precisely because I was a confused, anxious child. Only occasionaly did I have fleeting moments of understanding and peace. As I grew these moments were increasingly bound up in the act of reading. I felt that what I sought must be somewhere on some page. Even more that it was the possession and domain of those who wrote these pages. I wanted to be them.
Strangely, the effect of my quest to find the right words poisoned my capacity to find satisfaction in relationships and jobs. These always disappointed. They also managed to distract me from what I saw as my true work, making the statement that subsumes all previous statements. In my eagerness to own the whole farm I neglected the necessary step of tending my own plot of land and ended up a hired hand.
All has not been lost though. Lately I notice that I am occasionally sought out by students and friends as if I am a source of those qualities I have yet to acquire. It's almost as though, having beaten my head for so long against the walls of that cave in which Plato placed those who see only the illusory shadows of reality, I am able to tell them, "I've been down that path; there's nothing there."
While I credit this to my habits of reading and scribbling, I notice that I am less inclined to want to read every word of every thinker, let alone resolve ever discrepancy within and between them. This is not to make a virtue of ignorance or to disparage those who till the long stony furrows of philosophy (a term I dislike and seldom use). Rather it is that, having approriated a few insights, I now have some of my own.
I still play at the big themes a little: Opinion versus truth. The one and the many. Permanence and change. But I no longer see these as battles to be won. Much better to use them as tools to open minds. For we need nothing so much in these desperate times as to be able to hear each other.
wisdom
folly
success
failure
opinion
truth
inquiry
plato
dylan
philosophy
