Category: ancient

High school wisdom

I have never studied philosophy institutionally.  This is, almost, a fact.  When I was in high school a few students were selected (how I don’t know) to participate in the University of Winnipeg’s Mini-U program which was a week’s worth of classes on a topic of the student’s choosing.  I chose philosophy (why I don’t know).  I remember the basic outlines of certain sessions.  We looked at theories of essence in which a knife was evaluated by its knifiness.  I remember making a comment and the professor saying I was a closet Nietzschian (I remember neither the comment nor do I know why it would have been associated with Nietzsche).  I remember being told that a dog does not think.  I remember some high school bantering about how truth can be known.

What I remember most, though, was coming across Zeno’s paradox.  I will go from memory so I don’t need to worry about accuracy.  Zeno’s paradox explores the nature of two simultaneous and seemingly conflicting processes.  As I remember it the paradox was described (either in the original context or taught as an example) as a race in which the runner has a clear start and finish.  However, during that run a mathematical process also occurs or can at least describe the runner.  Mathematically the space can be divided into halves.  Halving a finite space, however, is an infinite process.  A half can always be mathematically halved.  How can an infinite mathematic process be completed within a finite progression?  I am probably stating this horrendously.  However, Zeno’s paradox came back to mind as I am reading Husserl in which he attempts to outline the faulty thinking of science in assuming that objective and abstract processes can be the basis for all knowledge, when in reality “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself.” So Husserl attempts to move back into understanding what a science of the subjective could be.

And more than this Zeno’s paradox came to mind with this image from a newly added blog to my feed, Fuck Theory.

I do not dance

I just finished Philosophical Fragments (PF).  I wanted to get a few observations down while they are fresh in my mind.

First, while I get Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship this is the first one where it makes real sense to me.  Either/Or is also blatantly clear but it strikes me as too much of an abstract experiment.   PF still comes as an experiment.  The experiment being whether it is possible to go beyond Socrates and what that might look like in philosophical discourse.  However, Kierkegaard comes off as more invested in this venture, more curious about how this will actually play out.

Second, it is important to note that these are fragments.  In his original manuscripts they were actually called ‘pamphlets’ which he also refers to them as within the book.  The significance of this is brought fully to bear in the final section.  Here he talks about the possibility of a ‘second pamphlet’.  He writes,

If I ever do write a second section – because a pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me – why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend to seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise?  In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. (109)

The ‘system’ of course is Hegelianism.  What I find intriguing about this passage is  the notion that perhaps the more ‘serious’, thoroughgoing, complete even social and political approach can actually end up being the most individualistic and self-serving.  This is partially a critique of academia as well as what could now be termed an ideological centralizing of power by ‘men who talk about important stuff’ as I have heard it put.  This final section really bookends well the intro to PF, which did not make a great deal of sense to me originally.  The preface begins,

What is offered here is only a pamphlet, by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense, without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy. (5).

Kierkegaard goes on in the Preface to consider what it might mean to have social (world-historical as he puts it) significance.  No one would consider a pamphlet to have such significance.  So what is Kierkegaard’s opinion on the matter?

Do not ask me about that.  Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is.  To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. (7)

There is a certain tone of liberation thought in the Preface and conclusion to PF (which hardly alludes to the book’s actual content in many ways!).  The critique is of those wielding socially constructed and maintained forms of power who believe that they can function as the benefactors of truth.  The framing of this book, which has just dawned on me, is making me rethink how I interpreted the bulk of the work.  Hopefully I can post a reading of PF that reflects its preface and conclusion.  Here are the final words of the preface.  I thought they were pretty.

I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life – not with another’s.  I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, ‘scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course’ (Cratylus).  All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears.  Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.  Every human being is too heavy for me, and there I plead per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance. (9).

Controlled Irony

I finished Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony yesterday.  While the majority of the text worked through Socrates thoroughgoing negativity the final section looked at “Irony After Fichte.”  This was essentially a commentary on Romanticism.  I think I missed something in this section.  While Kierkegaard was not entirely critical of this expression he also did not view this movement as either reflecting or going beyond Socrates.  In browsing over what I underlined I saw what might be a paradigmatic statement at the start of the section;

It was in Kant, to call to mind only what is generally known, that modern speculative thought, feeling itself mature and come of age, became tired of the guardianship in which it had lived hitherto under dogmatism and, like the prodigal son, went to its father and demanded that he divide and share the inheritance with it.  The outcome of this division of the inheritance is well known, and also that speculation did not have to go abroad in order to squander its resources, because there was no wealth to be found.  The more the I in criticism became absorbed in contemplation of the I, the leaner and leaner the I became, until it ended with becoming a ghost. (272)

Turning then to Fichte he talks about how he “infinitized the I in I-I. . . . But this infinity of thought in Fichte is, like all Fichte’s infinity, negative infinity, an infinity in there is no finitude, an infinity without any content” (273).  I don’t entirely understand why K. becomes more critical of this ongoing need of irony to ‘free itself’ (he was hardly critical of Socrates in this regard).  The criticism comes, it seems, on the shift towards making everything myth as a disingenuous mode of irony (contra Socrates); a sort of unfair play by irony to keep its thinking free.  This [Romantic] ironist ‘poetically composes’ but is not ‘poetically composed’.  This would require a limiting within actuality.  There is no content for the Romantic and transitions are nothing.  “At times he is a god, at times a grain of sand” (284).  So while Romanticism offered a cool breeze its tragedy is that “what it seizes upon is not actuality” (304).

So at the end of his 35o page dissertation he offers a brief 5 page conclusion, “Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony.”  Here he treads carefully along the contentious line relating the life of the poet to the poetic work.  K. agrees that the poet’s life is no concern of ours.  “But in the present undertaking it should not be out of place to point out the misrelation that can often exist in this respect” (325).  I am still not quite sure what that sentence means.  As an example he points to Goethe.  “The reason Goethe’s poet-existence was so great was that he was able to make his poet-life congruous with actuality.  But that in turn takes irony, but, please note, controlled irony” (325).  K. accuses the Romantic of being incongruous with his work.  The point here seems to be that poetry is nothing if it does affect lives . . . and should it not affect the poet above all!  K. continues making the intriguing statement “what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life” (326).

As I am re-reading this short conclusion I am realizing that it is much more suggestive than I first realized.  I think I will end it here for now and spend a little more time working directly through his conclusion.

I am also almost finished the 100 pages of notes Kierkegaard took on the lecture series he attended by Schelling.  It is a supplement added to the Princeton series . . . I kinda of wish it wasn’t.  I doubt I will post anything on it.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Mid-Point Reflections

I have to say that The Concept of Irony has been a pleasant surprise.  It has provided a sorely needed introduction to Socrates.  Kierkegaard’s continual engagement with Hegel has also been helpful.  Surprisingly this engagement is primarily positive.  Hegel is an authoritative source to which Kierkegaard consistently appeals.

The method of Socrates is a thorough-going negativity.  All is clearing away, nothing is planted or established.  Kierkegaard reflects on the role of Socrates’ daimon as enabling a shift away from both state and religious control.  The daimon is not to be equated with consciousness but is a sort of necessary shift for the possibility of individuality.  Instead of state law or religious oracle there is now an internal / external authority.

Instead of the oracle, Socrates now has his daimon.  The daimonian in this case now lies in the transition from the oracle’s external relation to the individual to the complete inwardness of freedom and, as still being in this transition, is a subject for representation.  [citing Hegel] . . . “The daimon is not Socrates himself, nor his opinion, nor his conviction, but it is something unconscious; Socrates is impelled.” (163-164)

What is important for Kierkegaard is that the daimon only warns.  It, again, offers no positive content.  It remains negative.  Socrates brings nothing but silence and space, the vanishing point.  This is irony.

[Socrates’] whole position, therefore, rounds itself off in the infinite negativity that turns out to be negative in relations to both a previous and a subsequent development, although in another sense it is positive in both relations – that is, infinitely ambiguous.  Against the established order of things, substantial life of the state, his whole life was a protest. (218)

With regard to morality the good then becomes the process of becoming and not arriving.

There are clear and strong seeds and outlines here of what Kierkegaard will take up in later writings.  What interests me will be how and if he explicitly addresses his move away from Hegel and beyond Socrates (in Christ).  He seems to maintain the role of negativity.  There is high view of clearing away and creating space and yet joined to that is the possibility of the ‘leap’ which seems to allow for positivity that is not trapped in a Platonic or Hegelian idealism.  This text is far more invigorating than I expected.

I have an unusually high amount of free time this weekend so hopefully I can finish off this volume shortly.

The Concept of Irony – A Constructive Position?

I am still trying to outline the contours of SK’s initial approach to the Socratic method.  In relation to Christianity SK views Platonism as a negative to Christianity’s positive.

On the one hand, in Christianity that which is to be died to is understood in its positivity as sin, as  a realm that all too convincingly proclaims its validity to everyone who languishes under its laws; on the other hand, that which is to be born and is to arise is understood just as positively.  In the intellectual dying to [Platonism], that which is to be died to is something indifferent; that which is to grow during this dying to is something abstract. . . . The one says that we should refrain from unwholesome food, control desire, and then good health will come; the other says that we are to stop eating and drinking, and then one can have the hope of gradually becoming nothing.  Thus we see that the Greek is more of a rigorist than the Christian, but therefore this view is also untrue. (76-77)

I have mixed feelings about this basic distinction.  On the one hand it lends itself towards instrumentalizing Christianity.  But on the other hand it demands that Christianity remain articulated and engaged in the level of materiality.  I cannot imagine this will be SK’s unqualified word on the matter but I thought I would throw it up to keep a point of orientation.

As I read along a little further I wonder if irony in the Platonic (or Socratic) context informs that space in which the necessity and the nothingness of death are affirmed.  Kierkegaard writes,

In my view, that well-known epitaph by Wessel, “At last he could not be bothered to live,” contains irony’s perception of death.

And then he continues,

But he who dies because he cannot be bothered to live certainly would not wish for a new life either, since that would indeed be a contradiction.  Obviously the languor that desires death in this sense is a snobbish sickness found only in the highest social circles and in its perfectly unalloyed state is just as great as the enthusiasm that sees in death the transfiguration of life.  Ordinary human life moves drowsily and vaguely between these two poles.  Irony is healthiness insofar as it rescues the soul from the snares of relativity; it is a sickness insofar as it cannot bear the absolute except in the form of nothing, but this sickness is an endemic disease that only a few individuals catch and from which fewer recover (77-78). [emphasis mine]