Author: david cl driedger

Du Côté de Chez Swann – Day 16 – A Damn Good Sentence So Far as Sentences Go

Je me rendormais, et parfois je n’avais plus que de courts réveils d’un instant, le temps d’entendre les craquements organiques des boiseries, d’ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité, de goûter grâce à une lueur momentanée de conscience le sommeil où étaient plongés les meubles, la chambre, le tout dont je n’étais qu’une petite partie et à l’insensibilité duquel je retournais vite m’unir.

I went back to sleep, and sometimes I was only awake for a short moments, time enough to hear the natural creaking of the woodwork, eyes open to steady the kaleidoscope of darkness, to taste with the light of a momentary awareness the sleep that lay heavy in the furniture, the room, all of which I was a small part and to its insensitivity I will again be quickly united.

The Potency of Life

What, then, is the potency of life?  A life, a singular life, a life that dies in the event, a fragile life that does not live in time and cannot be evaluated in terms of money – a life that necessarily dies in its incarnations. . . . Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have elevated bizarre idols to obscure this transcendental field. . . . the situation is hardly improved when one throws out the transcendent, allowing capital and time to become impersonal grounds of evaluation and thought.  Life is controlled by that which does not live.  All manner of tyrants and idols have been worshipped as supreme values, as dogmatic images of thought, or as transcendentals – philosophy is superstitious, all too superstitious.

All it requires is for thought to consider a transcendental persona, to show a little care for a dying rogue, to try resuscitation once more, to breathe a little life into ‘this dank carcass,’ ‘this flabby lump of mortality’, for thought to lend ‘a hand, a heart, and a soul’.  For, in modern life, this dying rogue is no one but ourselves, and the transcendental persona of thought is our doctor.  Life is immanence, ‘the most intimate within thought’, yet it is also transcendence, ‘an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.’ So often the concepts of immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other, as if one could be thought without the other.  Nevertheless, the criteria for absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are the same: they consist in removing all pretenders from the role of the absolute.  Transcendence only has a relation to this world in immanence; immanence only constitutes this world in transcendence. [emphasis mine]

– Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 166.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Some Quick Thoughts on Method

The Concept of Irony is not recognized by Kierkegaard in his later work The Point of View on My Work as an Author.  Noteworthy, I think, is the fact that The Concept of Irony represents his first and last direct engagement with the academia.  Subsequent works were all published independently or jounralistically.  His writings had no backing or initiative from the academic institution.

While Kierkegaard received unanimous approval for his thesis it was not without qualification.  Nearly all critical comments were directed towards style and method. Kierkegaard himself notes this at several points and explicitly states in the conclusion of the first section how the whole treatise “departs somewhat from the now widespread and in so many ways meritorious scholarly method” (156).  What I take K to be referring to here is the subjective dialectic (or ironic method?) being employed.  K is trying to outline the Socratic as ironic but to do that he must wade through the mediated sources of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.  This is no ‘Quest for the Historical Socrates’ (those scholars would have done well to read this).  Rather, Socrates is in some sense intuited by the misunderstandings of these three writers.  In a footnote K clarifies this mode,

Wherever, it is a matter of reconstructing a phenomenon by means of what could be a view in the stricter sense of the word, there is a double task: one must indeed explain the phenomenon and in so doing explain the misunderstanding, and through the misunderstanding one must attain the phenomenon and through the phenomenon break the spell of the misunderstanding (155).

This seems to me to be a healthy pre-Gadamer understanding of the situatedness of both the reader and the text.  And K presses forward pushing all scholarly boundaries by conceding that in all this he already had an ‘end’ in mind.

During this investigation, I have continually had something in mente [in mind], namely, the final view, without thereby laying myself open to the charge of a kind of intellectual Jesuitism or of having hidden, sought, and then found what I myself had found long ago.  The final view has hovered over each exploration simply as a possibility.  Every conclusion has been the unity of a reciprocity: it has felt itself drawn to what was supposed to explain and what it is supposed to explain drawn to it.  In a certain sense it has come into existence by means of reflecting, although in another sense it existed prior to it.  But this can scarcely be otherwise, since the whole is prior to its parts. . . . If I had posed the final view first of all and in each particular portion had assigned each of these three considerations its place, then I would easily have lost the element of contemplation, which is always important but here doubly so, because by no other way, not be immediate observation, can I gain the phenomenon (156). [emphasis mine]

This is not a simple admission that K found what he was looking for . . . eisegesis as the biblical scholars like to accuse.  Rather this seems at first to be a negative dialectic.  Perhaps it is already K’s attempt at Socratic irony.  However in the next part K says that he will shift methodology now incorporating ‘historical facts’ which he will treat in their ‘inviolate innocence.’  We’ll see where that goes . . .

Der Prozeß – Day 13

Obwohl der fremde Mann dadurch nichts erfahren haben konnte, was er nicht schon früher gewußt hätte, sagte er nun doch zu K. im Tone einer Meldung: »Es ist unmöglich.«

Although the strange man could have found out nothing by this, which he had not known before hand, however he now said to in a tone of a report, “It is impossible.”

Der Prozeß – Day 11

Aber dieser setzte sich nicht allzulange seinen Blicken aus, sondern wandte sich zur Tür, die er ein wenig öffnete, um jemandem, der offenbar knapp hinter der Tür stand, zu sagen: »Er will, daß Anna ihm das Frühstück bringt.

But he was not still long to look at him, but turned to the door, which he opened slightly, to someone, apparently just behind the door, to say, “He wants Anna to bring him breakfast.”