I think you pose an interesting question Ruthie (in your response to my 'Thucydotus' post). Does the fact of these works' composition indicate a major shift in the subjectivity of humankind? Are people with oral history so different than people with written history? I agree that Havelock's work -and Parry's, and Ong's, and especially McLuhan's, etc.- is/are brilliant; this is a very interesting object of study. I guess we'll get even deeper into this when we look at the printing press stuff, with Eisenstein... I wonder though, if we aren't making a kind of error here; what I've been trying to argue for is that while the means, the mechanisms, whereby culture is transmitted might change, and while we might identify a series of major epochal shifts in our historiography of these changes, this doesn't necessarily mean that what is being transmitted has changed as much as it might appear. In other words, while the means and modes of transmission have indeed undergone a series of stochastic mutations, and while this series of formal ruptures has undoubtedly had profound effects on human history, I still think that it is quite possible -and indeed, I think it is probable- that the meanings of these messages, the substance of human culture itself, its semantic content, has not in fact undergone a similar series of discontinuities, but has actually evolved much more continuously than our research would lead us to believe. I think that Latour's work supports this view, for example; I guess we're getting there...
To take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion... More on this perhaps, a bit later... I'm currently reading Ilya Prigogine's "The End of Certainty", which I highly recommend for a beautiful exposition of the contemporary scientific status of these questions about time and occurrence; he points to deeply-set, persistent habits of thought within which we cannot possibly handle these matters effectively, and suggests a fascinating solution...
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Historicism
It seems to me that we have really cracked this can of worms open in the past couple of weeks, with regard to the questions of history and time, power and justice... And academic scholarship, of course (we can't forget ourselves ; )...
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
herodides/thucydotus
We could, perhaps, draw a contrast between the approaches of Thucydides and Herodotus with a statement like; if Thucydides was our first historian, Herodotus was our last mythographer. Along the lines of such a statement, we could tabulate and emphasize the differences between Thucididean and Herodotean techniques and/or styles, compiling these differences as a proxy for our notion of a discontinuity, or rupture, in the evolution of rational thought. This would perhaps accord with Thucydides' own presentation of his work as a factual account: "Anyone . . . will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events" (27 / p.12); his complex, analytic style (very difficult to translate, we heard from Mary Beard in her review of Kagan and Hornblower) furnishes a project which, in many ways, seems to take its stance in direct opposition to the work of Herodotus.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Anti-Aristotelianisms
I'm sorry to stir up so much trouble, but I'm seeing a basic philosophical problem in the foundation of this line of thinking: when we study history, when we objectify it, and we thereby necessarily affirm a kind of Platonism. We implicitly affirm our own position at some ideal point; a place from which our gaze originates, and at which our soul resides. The present. This location must always lies beyond, outside of the surrounding pattern of worldly events. This point allows us to frame what we observe; to measure 'outer' ('other') events from a fixed perspective, and thus identify definite patterns of interrelationship between and among them. These are the patterns that Plato identifies as the Forms. They are the definite, mathematical functions describing patterns of interrelationship we see manifested in the goings-on of the world around us. These patterns are the only true object of knowledge; at least any knowledge conceived as transcendental familiarity.
The simplest Form as such is the dialectic: binary code! It can compile iteratively and collapse back upon itself to produce all manner of forms. In fact, due to the ordered infinity recognized by Cantor as the Form of the set of all integers, we can literally model any mathematical pattern in binary code. This magical mathematical reducibility underlies the early development and conception of the computer -i.e. by Turing- as a universal instrument; a metamachine. The computer, because its hardware instantiates a dialectical language, can simulate -or model, we could say; mimic- the functional apparatus of any other machine. Including other computer programs, which are really just more limited, more functionally heterogeneous instantiations of mathematical thought, thought of as the continuity of functional syntax...
So does privileging the mathematical necessarily mean that we should devalue more naive kinds of experience? This is an important point to clarify, and Whitehead is one of the best when it comes to this point. In his later work, particularly Modes of Thought, he insisted that Form should not be exclusively identified with thought. Rather, he insists on the relative superficiality of conceptual thought to the totality of our conscious experience:
“The pitfall of philosophy is exclusive concentration on these manageable relationships, to the neglect of the underlying necessities of nature. Thus thinkers repudiate our intimate vague experiences in favor of a mere play of distinct sensations, coupled with a fable about underlying reality.”
And I'm not trying to start a quarrel with Whitehead. On the contrary, I think he raises precisely the point that we need to realize: outmoded linguistic forms can't be dispatched with weapons that they themselves have supplied. The clear conceptual divisions of Aristotelian logic have fascinated our epoch as surely as the songs of the Homeric poets fascinated the public of Plato's and Socrates' time. This is emphatically not to say that it should be abolished, or replaced by a superior form. Just as the transition from oral to literate forms of thought and social organization are and were much more subtle and complex than mere replacement, so does the transition heralded by digital and electronic media today need to learn to include and incorporate the advances made by its predecessor.
When we attempt to negate Aristotelian logic, or to categorize definitively Platonic Idealism, we are actually engaging in nonsensical linguistic operations, we are building programs with recursive loops in them, that will not be able to ever stop, to ever arrive at a solution, but will instead spin around in circles forever. Not that this is necessarily always a bad thing! A trans-Aristotelian-and-Platonic logic would have to learn to perform its data-processing operations without relying on negation, and to think the Forms of things without relying on outmoded categories.
Perhaps to sum this up: in our critique of idealism we are forced to rely on idealism, i.e. in our assumption of categorical formations -idealist/pragmatic, visual/acoustic, spatial/temporal, etc. Derrida, working a little after Havelock, and in a much different milieu, identified a set of similar formations as essential metaphysical binaries of Western Philosophy. Perhaps it is, after all, only through something like the Derridean method of Deconstruction that we could truly achieve the return of a Protagorean, or even a Socratic Pragmatism...?
The simplest Form as such is the dialectic: binary code! It can compile iteratively and collapse back upon itself to produce all manner of forms. In fact, due to the ordered infinity recognized by Cantor as the Form of the set of all integers, we can literally model any mathematical pattern in binary code. This magical mathematical reducibility underlies the early development and conception of the computer -i.e. by Turing- as a universal instrument; a metamachine. The computer, because its hardware instantiates a dialectical language, can simulate -or model, we could say; mimic- the functional apparatus of any other machine. Including other computer programs, which are really just more limited, more functionally heterogeneous instantiations of mathematical thought, thought of as the continuity of functional syntax...
So does privileging the mathematical necessarily mean that we should devalue more naive kinds of experience? This is an important point to clarify, and Whitehead is one of the best when it comes to this point. In his later work, particularly Modes of Thought, he insisted that Form should not be exclusively identified with thought. Rather, he insists on the relative superficiality of conceptual thought to the totality of our conscious experience:
“The pitfall of philosophy is exclusive concentration on these manageable relationships, to the neglect of the underlying necessities of nature. Thus thinkers repudiate our intimate vague experiences in favor of a mere play of distinct sensations, coupled with a fable about underlying reality.”
And I'm not trying to start a quarrel with Whitehead. On the contrary, I think he raises precisely the point that we need to realize: outmoded linguistic forms can't be dispatched with weapons that they themselves have supplied. The clear conceptual divisions of Aristotelian logic have fascinated our epoch as surely as the songs of the Homeric poets fascinated the public of Plato's and Socrates' time. This is emphatically not to say that it should be abolished, or replaced by a superior form. Just as the transition from oral to literate forms of thought and social organization are and were much more subtle and complex than mere replacement, so does the transition heralded by digital and electronic media today need to learn to include and incorporate the advances made by its predecessor.
When we attempt to negate Aristotelian logic, or to categorize definitively Platonic Idealism, we are actually engaging in nonsensical linguistic operations, we are building programs with recursive loops in them, that will not be able to ever stop, to ever arrive at a solution, but will instead spin around in circles forever. Not that this is necessarily always a bad thing! A trans-Aristotelian-and-Platonic logic would have to learn to perform its data-processing operations without relying on negation, and to think the Forms of things without relying on outmoded categories.
Perhaps to sum this up: in our critique of idealism we are forced to rely on idealism, i.e. in our assumption of categorical formations -idealist/pragmatic, visual/acoustic, spatial/temporal, etc. Derrida, working a little after Havelock, and in a much different milieu, identified a set of similar formations as essential metaphysical binaries of Western Philosophy. Perhaps it is, after all, only through something like the Derridean method of Deconstruction that we could truly achieve the return of a Protagorean, or even a Socratic Pragmatism...?
afterthoughts
"The difference that shows itself as creative is the passage that leads the nightmare back to the dream, and the dream to a project (which is fully aware of the difficult and limitation) of life. If difference is resistance, the dream can live its historical projection in a fully aware and conscious manner. If difference is a mode of life, it identifies the mode of life as productive. No one here is putting critical and transcendental action into question: but we should pity it, comprehend it in the radical aporia that gives rise to it, and which does not allow it to take root in the only natural and temporal difference that counts: that of power. As a matter of fact, in the theory of creative difference there is something like an extremely strong return to an origin that is not burdened with nightmares and repressive violences. This is not an illusion but the very thing which is here at stake. Difference does not become creative when it identifies itself with an origin (burdened by the past), but when it confounds itself with a power that is always new open onto what is to-come. Difference destroys every determinate ontological foundation because it is the creative determination of an ontology of freedom."
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.
"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Antonio Negri, The Italian Difference. P.22.
"In some sense the eidos, which is the cause of the being of entities, is made of the substance of the ideal, or at least exists in a medium homogeneous with soul or mind. Aristotle himself suggests as much in De Anima 3.8, where he writes that 'in a way the soul [psyche] is all existing things' because the faculties of the soul must be 'identical' with the forms of things. The intellect (nous) is the form of forms (eidos eidon). The homogeneity of intellect and being is also suggested by the way in which Aristotle sometimes uses logos interchangeably with eidos (Metaphysics 1039b20 ff; De Anima 412b10-413a3), so that entity seems to be not just correlative with logos but in some way the same as logos.
The intraphilosophical question of being with respect to Plato and Aristotle addresses the relations between the intelligible form and the sensible thing; what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a 'realist' like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence, the crucial boundary for Aristotle and for philosophy in general does not pass between thought and thing, or between word and thing, but, within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.
All of philosophy works on the other side of the line that separates being according to the logos from the indeterminate, and for Derrida the full weight of this separation comes to rest on the role within philosophy of the third-person present infinitive of the verb 'to be'. The word 'is' speaks the being of the thing, and so marks the relation of language to what is outside language (Margins p.183); it is on the linguistic passageway between form as what is knowable and speakable and form as the presence of the entity. Though it is still a word, the 'is' seems to be the thinnest membrane, offering almost no distortion or deformation of the being it brings to expression, so that thought by its means could come into the closest relation with being. But thought and being have already been teleologically predestined to meet, since they are part of the same mutually determined circle of concepts: 'One might think then that the sense of being has been limited by the imposition of the form which, . . . since since the origin of philosophy, seems to have been assigned to Being, along with the authority of the is, the closure of presence, the form-of-presence, presence-in-form, form-presence. . . . on the other hand, that formality . . . is limited by the sense of Being which . . . has never been separated from its determination as presence' (Margins, p.172)."
-p.7-8 in Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
temperments
In his introduction to The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, Havelock again draws our attention to what I referred to in an earlier post as the epochal structure of history:
"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)
Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:
"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)
This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.
"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)
Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:
"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)
This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.
anxieties and their discontents
In response to Ruthie's perceptive comment on my last post:
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B
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