Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Saturday, February 6, 2010

In the rubble of best-laid plans


In my comment to Joe, I mentioned his excellent review on Marx & Engels on religion, up at his LibraryThing page. This is worth reading (as are in fact all of Joe's reviews).

It came up in my mind in connection with the "Program for a System of German Idealism," variously attributed to Schelling, Hegel, or even Holderlin, which calls for, among other things, a unification of philosophy and mythology.

I was responding to a comment of Joe's on the Hayek/Keynes EconoRap video. Joe writes, "The philosophers have only blessed what was happening (or emerging) around them. So Plato did not 'make' the various Platonic Worlds (Christianity, Islam, Secular Modernity) based on Being and Knowing - he merely discovered that tendency in his times and furthered it along. Ditto Nietzsche and his World(s) of Becoming and Creating."

There's more here than just the owl of Minerva lifting off at dusk. I heartily agree that Plato and Nietzsche both (and all real philosophers in between) are responding to the pressing needs of their age and bringing to light the latent directions of their culture. But these directions are always both 'creative' and 'destructive', to use some ham-fisted terms. The most precious heritage of a culture is its means of processing the raw chaos of existence into meaning, by orienting itself to the source of order. (I might need to think through this language a bit more, but this is pretty much my position). This is more or less what Kierkegaard says in The Sickness Unto Death: in relating itself to the power that grounds it, the self relates to, and wills to be, itself.

Problem is, the cultural mediation for this relation is constantly decaying (and as you will have noticed, the question of mediation looms large for me). Quite possibly any language that is right for the job, is right only once. Eventually the wrong language needs to be swept out, precisely in order to keep access open. But those who wield the broom too often also want to upgrade to a bulldozer. Often those whose job it was to keep the language clean and to note what was ready to be thrown out have done such poor work that they would secretly be relieved if the bulldozer came through. And of course sometimes an earthquake levels the house.

Scholarship can do some of the task of pre-sorting the rubble; but we need philosophy to make a living question of what is involved, and at stake, in seeking to understand the great traditions. Of course, to really see what they saw, to make them alive again--that takes us beyond philosophy, and as Rosenzweig says, "into Life."

Incidentally, the remark by Hayek that concludes the video, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design," comes from his final book, The Fatal Conceit, which as The American Mind notes, was published "decades after the Keynes-Hayek debates," a summing-up of Hayek's long career of exploring the philosophy of society, science, and psychology. This sentence is a striking nutshell-sized take on why the "Program" that Hegel or Schelling or whoever it was envisioned, will never be completed.

But then, as Rabbi Tarfon said: "It is not required of you to complete the work. Nor is it permitted you to neglect it."

2 comments:

  1. All philosophical alliances are temporary affairs. Whether we are speaking of Averroes and the Jurists ("Decisive Treatise"), Spinoza and Securalism ("The Theologico-Political Treatise"), or, just yesterday, Nietzsche and 'Religion' (see, most especially, the third chapter of BGE) we are only speaking of a temporary state of affairs. Philosophers have been, with Reason, - Pagans, Monotheists, Secularists, and even (God help us!) postmoderns.

    And, with Reason, they will turn on their 'allies' when circumstances require it. The alliance with 'Mythology' is but another example of this. Now, I think on this we are agreed.

    "The most precious heritage of a culture is its means of processing the raw chaos of existence into meaning, by orienting itself to the source of order."

    After saying this you mention Kierkegaard and his 'Sickness unto Death'. And then you add, "in relating itself to the power that grounds it, the self relates to, & wills to be, itself." Well, yes, - but how again is this not turning the Ground of the things that are into a mirror?

    Nietzsche, in the first chapter of BGE (the only chapter on Philosophy!), has two major turning points. The first turning point occurs in section 8:

    Adventavit asinus
    Pulcher et fortissimus.
    (Along came the Ass
    Beautiful and Strong)

    Before this Nietzsche is concentrating on the Truth of Perspectivism; that is, the onrush of experience that Philosophy (and indeed all of us) encounter when experiencing the world. (Yes, I understand, btw, that the immediately preceding sections are preparing us for section 8.) One should note that it is only after the arrival of the Ass that Nietzsche can (I really should type dares!) speak of the Will to Power. After the appearance of the Ass we are now discussing Philosophical Understandings of the World (i.e., their convictions). In other words, we have stepped away from the phenomena...

    (To be continued)

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  2. The other major turning point in BGE occurs at the very end of the chapter in section 23. 'Psychology is the Queen of the Sciences'. After this point (I mean after the first chapter) Nietzsche is speaking to (and of) the exceptions (chapter 2) and the herd (chapter 3). "Psychology is once more the route to fundamental problems", the fundamental problem, for philosophical psychology, is (and can only be) Man. If this were not so Psychology would not (and could not) be Queen; Cosmogenesis (the study of the Whole) would instead rule.

    You know that Psychology is Queen of the Sciences but you want Cosmogenesis to be Queen of all. Technically, this is correct; but actually, in speech and in deed, it is wrong.

    "Problem is, the cultural mediation for this relation is constantly decaying (and as you will have noticed, the question of mediation looms large for me). Quite possibly any language that is right for the job, is right only once."

    Yes, you are quite correct to say 'only once'. And I agree that only Philosophy can decide when broom or bulldozer are needed. (That is, whether the house needs to be cleaned or leveled for a new building to be built.) Now, you also quite rightly leave leveling to natural calamity (an earthquake) because at no time does philosophy want to start all over again. But there are times when it will speak as if it were starting out entirely new in order to excite people who are excited by that sort of thing. But we are only speaking of a 'home' here, a place fit for human habitation; that is, we are speaking of habit and fashion...

    "It is not required of you to complete the work. Nor is it permitted you to neglect it."

    Ouch. That was meant for me... I do not mind wielding a broom at all. However, what you think of as 'sweeping' I see as only adding to the mess. At this moment, new positions do not sublate old positions, they merely add to the clutter of positions. This is because, unfortunately, the greatest lesson that people have in fact learned from philosophy is how to never change their minds.

    New philosophical mediations, in order to, properly speaking, be mediations must absorb (in fact, not merely in theory), while adding to, older positions. This 'absorbtion', in fact, no longer happens...

    Thus there are today no mediations, only a further accumulation of positions.

    Agreed?

    Joe

    PS. In a sense, we really do agree, btw. I think that once the 'new world' rises what you say about mediation will again be possible, but just not now.

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