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
