papers up

I've posted a long paper of mine at Scribd. It's in two parts, a main paper on Platonism as read by two very different contemporary interpreters (Alain Badiou and Ernest McClain) with some meandering about with Kojeve and Rosen and others; and a technical/speculative appendix that gets way beyond my competence, and admits it. The paper (with or without appendix) is actually meant to be more than just a presentation of Badiou or McClain; it argues pretty frankly for my own idiosyncratic take on what I think is at stake in philosophy whether in Plato's day or our own (I don't think the situation has changed much).

Badiou is too huge a presence to need introduction, but or those of you who don't know, McClain is an emeritus professor of music at Brooklyn College, who argues that many of the more difficult passages in ancient texts--passages that almost always involve numbers--become readable if we interpret these numbers in terms of ancient musical theory. The texts McClain looks at this way are not just Plato, but also the Vedas, Homer, the Bible, and the Quran, among others. Though he might not endorse the juxtaposition, I'd compare McClain's work to Giorgio de Santillana's and Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill; but in place of archeo-astronomy, McClain gives pride of place to music--the other most universal experience, besides sex, death, and the sky. My paper argues that the spirit of McClain's exegesis has philosophical consequences, and suggests that among these are revisions of many of Badiou's arguments. Since Badiou is among the most rigorous and broad thinkers today (and the course-corrections I suggest would arise are not trivial), this is actually a less niggling argument than it might seem.

I'll be getting some other papers up eventually, as I work out formatting issues. I'll keep a permanent link up under my "About Me" to the right, where I've also put a link there to my LibraryThing page where I have a number of book reviews up of various lengths.

All the papers on Scribd, either now or eventually, are drafts and subject to revision, but I welcome comments. The two up now have circulated before, privately, so some of you will have seen them already.

cats & dogs

As always, in medias res; anyone claiming there’s another way is either a prophet or a con artist. This is a long-ish post (one of many, eventually, but the longest so far) on what the work-in-progress I’m trying to work out on this site is supposed to be progressing towards. It’ll also give a fair example of the way I think-by-composition, should anyone be remotely interested.

This blog is made up of working notes towards a book (or possibly a “blook,” if it stays online); but in a sense there are two books I’m trying to sort out here, and I am not sure they will not be fighting like cats and dogs all the way through. The “cat” is easy to write, for by definition, it is what gets written easily. It’s the stuff that comes out in white heat, though often half-baked (or less), as an idea grows and transforms and draws other ideas into its sphere. The cat is easily distracted, with a short attention-span and a tendency to pounce. It plays with ideas and loses them under the couch, and almost doesn’t care if I’m there or not. The “dog,” on the other hand, is loyal and steady, but requires much more attention. Whereas the cat will bring me, day after day, little trinkets, the dog wants to herd a whole flock of ideas in a single direction—but that takes work. This second book is like unfinished business that has sat for years in the attic or the hall closet, needing to be seen to and always taking more time than I thought once I get around to it. It’s a whole series of parts without any obvious instruction list for putting them together.

One could plausibly describe these two books as a young man’s book and an old man’s: a book being thought out only in the writing, not knowing where it is going; and a book written to set in order things in memory, conclusions—not dogmas but habits, more or less conscious—already reached. In other words, it’s a book written In the Middle of Life’s Journey.

It occurs to me that my clever dichotomy may give the false impression of a nice order. Actually, both the cat book and the dog book are disheveled things, scattered and cluttered. For in “white heat” it is possible to write in any number of styles (admittedly, not always well) according to the subject; if the cat has pounced on a scholar, it makes little scholarly pawprints everywhere; if it has pounced on poetry, its pawprints might scan or at the very least look a little lyrical. But the cat is by definition interested in what it has right now. The dog, for its part, has its work cut out for it precisely because what it has to order and shepherd is, well, what the cat dragged in, once, long ago, and forgot about. This has been very different over the years, and not infrequently from day to day.

About the only thing these two books have in common, one might say, is their starting point.

My starting-place is the same as that of all philosophy: astonishment. Wonder. Yes, this; but also an incorrigible itch to make this wonder articulate. Wonder is named as the beginning of philosophy by Aristotle, who adds in the Metaphysics [1.2 982b] that “the lover of myths is also in a way a philosopher, since myths are made up of wonders.” Aristotle is a man not in most respects much like my cat—neither my cat-book, nor my actual cat, which freezes or leaps in unfeigned astonishment at every twitching leaf. But then, Aristotle calls wonder the beginning of philosophy, not the whole thing. Articulation—that’s the dog-book—is also essential. Astonishment by itself is, I am tempted to say, a noble response, even a grace; no genuine philosophizing is possible without it. But not every moment of wonder turns into the thoughtful perplexity that is philosophy. Feeling bafflement is perfectly compatible with being satisfied with it, or merely stumped; but if either of these are one’s first response, no articulation occurs.

And one can see why. This articulation is a struggle. Take the old question: Why is there something rather than nothing? If you have never felt the radical, dumbfounding wonder behind this question, it is unlikely that having someone describe it to you will make it seem like a diverting topic for an afternoon reverie. If you have felt it, you will understand how maddeningly difficult it is even to put it into words. To me it feels like trying to find a good fingerhold on the Great Wall of China in order to lift it up and look underneath, while standing on top of the wall. To ask “why is there anything?” is in a way to be asking for a spot outside of everything to be the explanation. And yet, the question will not go away, no matter how often one hears explained, patiently, that it arises because of a kind of grammatical mistake. Indeed, Wittgenstein says of this wonder that anything at all exists, that it cannot be coherently phrased in the form of a question, “nor is there any answer to it;” indeed, “all we can say about it can a priori be only nonsense.” But Wittgenstein, who may plausibly be held to have started the “it's a grammatical mistake” sort of approach with these kinds of remarks, also called the urge to formulate these questions, to “run up against the limits of language” as he called it, “a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply,” and added that “I would not for my life ridicule it.”

Every effort to ask “The Question of Being” is a rushing or an infiltration of these borders. (T.S. Eliot called this sort of thing “raids on the inarticulate;” but I think “raids” is a bit strong for the style of my own attempts, which are more like reconnaissance missions). Ken Wilber boils down all such attempts to two kinds. Wilber opens Sex, Ecology, Spirituality with the disarming sentence, “It is flat-out strange that something—that anything—is happening at all.” There are, he suggests, two responses to this realization: either one can believe it is purely fortuitous—a response Wilber calls the philosophy of Oops—or one can hazard something other, as has always been asserted by the great spiritual traditions. One might contend that even this hazarding is bound to either include this “something else” in the everything that is “happening” (and so risk an infinite regression), or not (and so beg the question). Why not just stay with Oops? And yet there is a good deal of difference between arriving at Oops at the end, as Quentin Meillassoux does in After Finitude, and starting out with it, remaining with it and being satisfied with it.

You see what has been going on here, as the dog and the cat stalk each other warily. Names or issues or phrases are getting dropped in here as if they are part of some assumed common knowledge and not what they are, the flotsam of my own idiosyncratic itinerary through the library and life. This is going to happen all the time, so we’d better figure out what to do. My own preference is not to be talked down to, even at the risk of being presented with information I might not immediately understand. Do you really want the explanatory clause, “Quentin Meillassoux is a contemporary French philosopher,” here? Yes, it’s a blog, for the time being, so I can include links, which are less obtrusive (though potentially more distracting); but are they any less condescending? If you knew Meillassoux’s name already, you are or yawning or rolling your eyes. If you didn’t—well, did I think you didn’t know how to find out?

My criteria for the good reader are those enumerated by Nabokov: “The reader should have an imagination. The reader should have a memory. The reader should have a dictionary. The reader should have some artistic sense.” A pencil and paper might also help. I am going to assume, too, that my reader can use a library, or at least an internet search engine. The reader I hope for is curious enough to look into whatever isn’t immediately made clear—and suspicious enough to look closer at what seems made a little too clear. The reader I hope for will be patient with what might seem like the boring parts, or will give herself permission to skip about and come back, and won’t take umbrage at the author’s apparent assumption that it’s worth hanging in there. For my part, I will attempt to fill in what I think will be helpful, and yes, I put in the links, as I attempt to learn how to ride this curious new media. This inevitably involves treading on some toes, because I will be moving about from discipline to discipline, in what I hope is a responsible way, and this means that one audience might be all too familiar with what is brand-spankin’-new to others.

Brand-spankin’-new, and familiar: this is what everything is all the time. Look at these words.

L o o k a t t h e s e w o r d s.

What is involved when you read this sentence is so astoundingly complex and so familiar that a full account is probably impossible. Perfectly arbitrary (by some criteria) arrangements of dark against a lighter background are scanned by the eye. How much does “scanned by the eye” already presuppose? The mechanism of the eye, the manner in which the photons of light trigger neuroelectric signals in the brain, the translation of these into (sub-aural) sounds, all of this is a synaesthetic miracle. These sounds, these inky squiggles, these arrangements of pixels on a back-lit screen, mean something. The ramifications of this one act are enough to fill a book, an encyclopedia, a library. It took millions of years of evolution, and a relatively brief but quite complex coda of human history, to attain the well-formed eye, the capacious brain, and the language-system that enable this reading. We so take this for granted that “take for granted” is too weak or loaded a phrase. It is not possible for us not to take it for granted. To not take it for granted would actually be to change who we are.

Now my point here is not to swerve off (yet!) into a tour of the history of language, writing, and culture, or the evolution, biology, and physics of perception, cognition, and reading. (Patience, gentle reader). My point is that every moment of our experience involves these unexamined ramifications before and behind. The dance (the clumsy dance) I make between expertise and bluff here is the dance we make all the time. The artist who presents what we “already know” in a new way, who estranges the familiar, and the scientist who attempts to explain something puzzling in terms of what we can regard as established, are both engaged in this dialectic, and each presupposes something of the other. Everything we think we already know is charged through and through with the unacknowledged, the unplumbed, the unguessable; under our feet, the soles of our shoes; under the shoes, the pavement; under the pavement, the ants. The ants on the surface of the earth, the earth hanging in the void of the heavens, the heavens nowhere-because-everywhere. Where do these things come from? And how is it that any of them are at all? This strange question—“why is there anything at all?”—or rather, the wonder motivating this inadequate formulation of a question, turns out to be simply the continuous perplexity behind all the others, the always-present strangeness of the taken-for-granted. Every time an apparent digression sideswipes us here, it is always a sign that the strangeness of things is clearing its throat, asking politely (or perhaps not) for our kind attention.

This is the family quarrel of my cat- and dog-books. What is diverting and new squares off with what is assumed and established. The boringly familiar is re-lit with wonder; the astonishing and unforeseen comes forward to greet us and make acquaintance, speaking a language we can understand. Every moment of our lives is “the middle of life’s journey.” Every instance opens onto an infinite number of possible paths, and this infinitude of questions that can be asked is itself always a signal of the even more mysterious unaskable question, fumblingly expressed as Why is there anything at all?

The discipline of philosophy is to keep this question open, to never get bored with it. The technique of philosophy is to ask as many of the other questions as possible in concert with each other, always opening them back upon this fundamental question. The aim of philosophy is to cultivate the understanding of the answer; an answer which, note, is just as nonsensical as the question, and can only transpire in one as an experience and not a sentence, but which, I want to say, casts a sort of image in language which, as close as I can come, is something like this:

I don’t know, but it is good that there is.

First post; Nth sailing

"Do you wish me, Cebes," said he, "to give you an account of the way in which I have conducted my second voyage...?"

A while ago I undertook to put together perhaps the only book I have it in me to write. This is an effort to demonstrate why and how I read philosophy vis-a-vis myth, poetry vis-a-vis religion, politics vis-a-vis scholarship, science vis-a-vis history, and all of the above via love. I expect it will be perhaps equal parts exegesis, thought-experiment, lyric, reconstruction, proposal, and jeremiad.

Some of my friends have seen a few of my efforts before now, and if the responses I've received are any indication, readers are likely to consider the work dense, meandering, a trifle obscure, and looooonnnnnng. I am not sure how much of this can be helped. I doubt I can honestly rein in my digressive nature without doing real violence to the shape of the thought; and if that sounds like special pleading, well, so be it. Tracing the “hidden roads that go from poem to poem” is how Harold Bloom described the object of literary criticism. My conviction—which may merely make a virtue of a disposition—is that philosophy takes the secret paths that go from world to world (in the sense in which Wittgenstein wrote, “the world of the happy is quite another from that of the unhappy”). Philosophy maps ways among the worlds of the Dadaist ensemble, the biochemist’s Petri dish, the psychoanalyst’s couch, and the stock exchange trading floor. It finds a wormhole between the silence of an undiscovered vein of silver ore, and the unheard roar and crackle of a solar flare; a route between the chemical panic in a fish caught by a sea anemone, and the exhausted hope of a death camp inmate at the approach of the liberating army. Thought is the medium in which philosophy charts these passages, which means it maps them by traversing them; and this can mean a mélange of styles, a shuttling betwixt rigor and risk, and some hairpin apparent changes of subject.

This is not always easy to follow, and I can tell you it isn’t always easy to write. But a few generous people, resisting the temptation to throw up their hands, have graciously asked me (admittedly, less eagerly than Cebes) to explain my explanation. For myself, I know that my worst excesses always arise when I write in the “abstract,” to no one in particular, or to some “general reader.” I have always found my best results, in terms of accessibility, manageable length, and readable style, when writing to a specific person in the context of living inquiry.

Hence this series of Open Letters on Philosophical Praxis. While I propose to work through some established points in a more-or-less established order, my hope is to preserve something of the real-time circumstance of actual encounter by genuinely responding to comments (assuming there are any). This is not a conceit on my part; I am convinced that the best, perhaps the only, philosophy happens when there is a real dialogue between engaged persons. I trust that in this conviction I remain a faithful Platonist. This means that intelligent inquiry and critique in good faith is both welcome and solicited. As is always the case, challenge helps me better than does mere acquiescence; though I aim to persuade, my writing is a form of spiritual discipline, an ongoing cultivation of the Socratic spirit of the examined life, above all in myself. I hope to make plausible the claim that philosophy remains viable as such a spiritual discipline (not an academic “subject,” though it is not cut off from scholarship), in open—speculative and critical—dialogue with the spiritual traditions of the world. Moreover, I hold that this encounter can be seen in the history of these traditions; it needs to be nurtured in our current cultural moment, and offers us real promises in the trajectories we can glimpse ahead of us.

Point of clarification: I'm not posing as an online instructor, and have no pretensions of being a great thinker. I am “only a scholar,” as Leo Strauss (a much greater scholar) wrote, and an “independent” one at that; a generalist who is not ashamed to trespass, with no credentials other than twenty-five years of reading philosophy (literature, history, science, religion...), thinking hard, seeking out good fellow-students, trying to be honest, and praying (all this in between musical gigs, phases of political activism and quietism, travels, love affairs, and playing with children). To lead the examined life, one must live. That’s about all I can offer if asked for my certifications, except that I was once a licensed Emergency Medical Tech.

I hope that out of this experiment will emerge a series of posts that can serve as an exposition, however wayward, of what I think is at stake in philosophy today as always. I anticipate that the result will be idiosyncratic, uneven, and difficult. My hope is it will be worth the difficulty. If I did not fear being misunderstood, I would say, worth the danger.