What I need is someone who will disagree with me if compelled, not the agreement conceeded for the sake of appearing polite.
posted by Jordaan Allison | 4:39 PM
Streams of Conscious Reflection
A digital diary archiving conceptual developments.
- Anxiety and Documentation
- The Other
- Idle minded
- Turning from contentment
- Automatic Reason
- The scourge and promise of creativity is the etern...
- Subtle Speech
- Work is an arduous task that I must make haste to ...
7 Comments:
Good Morning Jordaan, I do have quite a bit to say about your writing, but where to begin? The beginning won't do because there isn't any. You are always mid-stream. I think I want to talk about, and disagree with, your idea of documentation. I think I see a piece of guilt there about not being a better objective scholar, a better journalist reporting on and keeping track of the comings and goings in the minds of the big philosophers. Maybe not. It seems to me that you are neither an objective scholar nor a true-to-the-facts journalist – but who am I to judge? Your writing is much too musical for that. You have a great sense of movement, almost elegant movement, in writing a sentence. The reader flows on to the end of the paragraph with ease. All the while you are lyrically sighing and the stream moves on.
A word about one philosopher writing about another: the best writing is always an act of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and perverse, willful misprision. That's Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (it's difficult, but read it). "Good (philosophy) is a dialectic of revisionary movement (contraction) and freshening outward-going-ness." You are a creative writer, the opposite of a "good" scholar and far from "serious" journalism. The best philosophy is creative and mostly wrong. It moves the reader to the Heights of contemplation.
You wrote:
Although I don't intend to shrink away from your comment, nor will I make the lazy claim of subjective autonomy, I do respectfully offer that what I am writing has no satisfactory point of reference. What I am interested in doing is pointing out peculiarities, the moments when the influence of structure is unstable.
I am not simply reserved for a fate but am invested in it.
Those are not scholarly statements, but they are statements of true philosophical contemplation. They have a certain spiritual lusciousness to them, but they are almost meaningless. Strength vs. meaning – that has always been the good writers concern. Poets and philosophers. A powerful word or sentence stands alone in a Husserlean epochè, isolated, still. A meaningful word or sentence lends itself out to be manhandled by the crowd. The solitary mind vs. the prattler.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/index.shtml
Here is Milton's Satan falling through vast space and landing on the floor of Chaos. This is a perfect "philosophical" description of Man falling into Des Cartes Extendedness out of the Intendedness that Husserl tried to regain.
Write On! We are watching and thinking.
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What an extraordinary event this is to have laid bare a foggy vision of consciousness that has, by virtue of the existence of an Other, become more than simply itself. Your comments are certainly welcome and reveal what I might have otherwise selfishly called my own state of being.
In the article "Anxiety of Documentation", I would agree that there is no doubt a judgment or sense of regret being conveyed – it admits the failure of producing a thing called "writing" that carries with it the baggage of expectations. The article is a description of what occurs in act of judging, how it constrains and what sense of authority has placed my free self in a state of conflicted responsibility. There is no satisfactory answer that could encapsulate the entirety of this experience. It is countlessly irreducible and yet at the same time it is quite specific to a being.
The good and bad scholars’ alike share the tendency towards error, not based on a common failure but rather in a deficiency inherent in speech as a tool and the fiction of objective neutrality. This point reminds me of something that Hans-Georg Gadamer considered about prejudice and how hermeneutically all writing must endure the birthing pains of history that is a perpetually changing present. Our own understanding is not at any point historically isolated but is shaped from the content of the past. The inheritance of the enlightenment's "prejudice again prejudice" that remains with us today is a blind faith in objectivity that fails to embrace our various presuppositions as meaningful. If I understand you correctly, you were proposing in your comments about Bloom that it is through the working over an idea that, placed aside from any valuation, is a form of creative production not determined by its end. This is quite a similar to what Jean-François Lyotard proposed was the driving thesis of post-modernism (countering so called “meta-narratives” with unstructured experimentation akin to avant-garde movements) though this is not at all characteristic of the many different approaches and interests of thinkers that form the corpus of what has been labeled post-modernism.
You had also mentioned that there is a sense of the "meaningless" in my approach, and to this I would agree. It is not meaning in agreement with the way that it has been traditionally formulated according to the implements that shape discourse. Rather I am seeking to identify something that is characteristic of discourse itself - namely the act where signification imposes upon the plurality of nature… a negational dialectic if you will. What I am describing is indeed a form of non-meaning in this sense, if one could so brutishly imply what meaning is in such a limited manner, but it is also not entirely divorced from what operates behind the “as such” classification of any being. Meaning and non-meaning are not mutually exclusive things but are coextensively the same.
Thanks again for the comment, it’s been a joy!
Jordaan
My Goodness Jordaan, you do have a quick way with words. You were able to compose such an intellectually complex analysis in no time. Is that talent or is a sprite whispering in your ear? Once again, I did enjoy reading it. I imagine, though, that some of your friends who don't have as much practice as I at reading such arcana would be thrown off the side of the truck as it careened around an idea. I'm not going to argue with your understanding of any of this, simply because you know so much more than I about it. I read and learn. I do, however, want to say something about your style of writing. Maybe here I am regretting that I was never able to wield the sword of phenomenological Lingo. I have only a pocket-knife and I have tried to drive my little literary car down a much different road. Let me explain.
As you know, English is divided into two parts: the Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate through French. The former, the little words in English, has usually conveyed the feeding of the immediate and the concrete, strong emotive words about that thing right in front of you. The Latinate has been reserved for high intellectual global ideas. They are distant and disinterested. They are also rather vague. Depending on the spirit playing within us we use one part of the language or the other. Shakespeare, uses mainly the former with a lively sprinkling of the latter. Much of philosophy, especially continental European philosophy, has used the latter, fearing that the former may not express the sense of Otherness and encompassing consciousness that they so want to … to what? Capture?
In English we are also able to construct grand complex sentences with deferred and deferring subordinate clauses. Why do we do that? Are we holding something in suspense? Are we unable to come to the point or maybe we don't want anything so definite as that? Why not a simple, to-the-point definite declarative sentence with strong Anglo-Saxon words? The occasion demands what it demands. We use the style, it seems to me, that captures either our this-right-here-ness or our far flung visions on the rolling ocean of intellectual dreams. Did that make any sense? Was it meaningful? Do I really want it to be meaningful? Or do I merely want you to smile at my stumbling ineptness?
Yes, style vs. content. The Aesthetics a hundred years ago played that game. One thing you do, in spite of the great weight of Latinate words you use, is move the sentence right along at a good clip. Some might say you are not serious enough to be properly unable to dance.
Here is a something on style and writing and mathematics that may be relevant.
www.theontologicalboy.com/3100.doc
Splendid commentary my friend! You've judged this smile correctly as it has now taken a permanent residence across my face. What an arresting observation that you have now fixed me upon. I feel held captive to those idea, understanding it will now consume the better part of my time.... eros truly is bittersweet.
I should first preface my remarks here by stating that I may have learned to grasp in the dark using phenomenological language but I feel that I have never truly held on to something of substance, though I still keep the faith of a work in progress.
Your heurminutical perspective is both sobering and original. Thank you for sharing. Regarding what you took from the text I had composed, in spite of being remarkably flawed, was nothing short of an inspiring act of charity. But perhaps you may be reading too much into my jarring interjections? Could these gestures be the product of intention or the graceful stumbling upon something resembling a point?
I suppose that is a possibility that yet has still to rear its head out of the opening made in the womb of conception. But it isn't anything that I could evoke much less the being-in-the-world that I find myself "thrown" into (using a Heideggerian term). Nonetheless, it is evident that I am here despite my willing it. I wonder if Descartes, in his radical doubt, ever got bored of his own company?
After reviewing your article “3100” I can see a parallel between phenomenology and Wittgenstein's “picturingness of a picture”. This resembles one of the most challenging criticisms put forward against the phenomenological method as a discipline. How can we have a description of the “thing in itself” if it relies on the same language employed by the being it refers to? Surely if we use language we cannot remove ourselves from the contingencies of this being much less possess a clarity about its presuppositions. When you emphasized “feel” and “style” it suggested to me that what we have been discussing is the possibility of speaking about this transcendental narrative the forms the relation between objects and subjects. In plainer terms (because we are now striving for clarity) do we need to externalize ourselves from both the subject and object in order to speak of their ties to each other? In asking this question we might begin to recognize how close we are to the content of our study. Language does tell us what it is but only through the subtext of what it is doing. For this reason Gadamer famously said that language is condemned to always offer an account of more than itself.
I will not attest to possessing the knowledge that you have so crafty articulated here concerning language, but I was fond of your commentary on the distinction between mathematics and “style” or “feeling”. The de-materialization of the world into formula through mathematical language seems to suggest a form of progress that alienates nature but still resembles being – the “ode to man” in Antigone acknowledges the frailty of man despite his use of techne. You might find Hannah Arendt satisfying because the mathematical, or what she calls the vita-conceptual, is precisely where her phenomenological focus lies. In her most notable work The Human Condition she provides a historical account of the turning away from “action” (and she identifies many) as an essential mode of being since the Greeks. Action is often dismissed as a proper intellectual pursuit because it is either deemed as self evident or too ambitious an undertaking, but for Arendt action is a necessary precondition of any conscious experience. Although I won't bore you with too many extraneous details, it is suffice to say that your interests are more aligned with phenomenology than you might admit to yourself.
While attempting to avoid the crutch of my phenomenological lingo, I feel there is little substance that I can offer you apart from gratitude. I digress. Perhaps a bloated ego is not healthy for either of us for it not only would require the resignation of my own but would surely be accompanied by the fatigue that often follows a hearty meal.
Take care my friend and thank you again for your comments.
Jordaan
Jordaan, you wrote:
"Perhaps a bloated ego is not healthy for either of us for it not only would require the resignation of my own but would surely be accompanied by the fatigue that often follows a hearty meal."
My Friend, in these conversations let your ego soar without fear. Let yourself go near the sun. When you do fall, it will be only into a late afternoon nap and you will wake up as you were. This is philosophy, a super-human thing that none of us can do as humans; nevertheless, we must not let ourselves by overcome by a view of man that is altogether too anthropomorphic. We are also other. Be the strangely Other for a while. The truth is that at this meal, this picnic on the Heights, I am far from having had enough. More! Write more! I want to read. In particular I want you to reveal even more daringly up in this intellectual ether the secret of the following statement that you so casually offered in a plain wrapper.
"In plainer terms (because we are now striving for clarity) do we need to externalize ourselves from both the subject and object in order to speak of their ties to each other?"
Resign yourself to accepting whatever seeps out of your typing fingers. It might be ambrosia. Picnics do need nectar with inhuman clarity. Your magical way with words will suffice as a still. I will happily let it make me stumble over your hidden point.
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