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Philosophy
Jan. 9th, 2005 11:06 pmThe flowers have made it mostly intact and are hanging (like bats) from my fighting-tiger scroll painting.
Tall cities seem landlocked even when they aren't. This is the trouble with Boston; it also explains my inexplicable preference for Washington over all other cities. I need to live someplace short, with vistas; preferably grey and full of fish.
_______
"[W]herever there is really a love of wisdom--or call it the passion for truth--it is inherently, if usually ineffectively, revolutionary; because it is the same as a hatred of the falseness in one's character and of the needless and unnatural compromises in one's institutions." Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
Ineffective because passion is often ineffective? It's revolutionary with relation to some origin, or source; it's reactionary. Why is reactionariness ineffective? Is the way things are simply too expansive?
"I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one's present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one's mind, such as it is." Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
"It was now possible to investigate philosophically the very topic of irrelevance, and therewith philosophy itself: it is characteristic of philosophy that from time to time it appear--that from time to time it be--irrelevant to one's concerns; just as it is characteristic that from time to time it be inescapable." Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
Philosophy is expansive. Sometimes necessary, and sometimes superfluous. (Sometimes we need to make sure we are doing things for the right reasons, sometimes not. Philosophy is aligning what we're doing, or thinking, with reasons. The reasons themselves are nonphilosophical.)
"To see that ordinary language is natural is to see that (perhaps even see why) it is normative for what can be said. And also to see how it is by searching definitions that Socrates can coax the mind down from self-assertion--subjective assertion and private definition--and lead it back, through the community, home." Cavell, "Must We Mean What We Say?"
I shouldn't be allowed to think by myself anymore; I won't know where to stop, or what the terms are.
"The art is to be utterly personal without getting personal" Eva Brann, Open Secrets, Inward Prospects, 183.
The terms of good conversations are personally felt and impersonally huge. (This is one motivation for a heaven of forms.)
_______
I wish I could preserve the feeling of spaciousness from being in a half-empty room, without a lot of stuff; compelled to be in public most of the time. I have this fear (that only needs confirming) that we think best when not too comfortable, not too moored; when we write less and talk more. When there is too much there already there's less need to create the world for oneself. "Inelastic" is a good criticism. Things go from the mind too quickly when I write them. But they go too quickly anyway. I'd rather keep them jumbled there and keep adding things. But there is a fear of forgetting (I sympathize with the Egyptians. I'm good at memorizing, at practicing the things I can remember; but they seem unsteady all the same). I need to rehearse (but perhaps not write, not more than once) what I want to keep in mind (or in soul) before bed. Or all the time. "Maintain."
_______
Ends: we don't want our maxims tainted by ends. We don't want our conversations, our philosophy, tainted by ends. Is this because philosophy is descriptive? It refigures the world in different ways; it doesn't--shouldn't--aim at anything. --But doesn't ethics aim at something?
Tall cities seem landlocked even when they aren't. This is the trouble with Boston; it also explains my inexplicable preference for Washington over all other cities. I need to live someplace short, with vistas; preferably grey and full of fish.
_______
"[W]herever there is really a love of wisdom--or call it the passion for truth--it is inherently, if usually ineffectively, revolutionary; because it is the same as a hatred of the falseness in one's character and of the needless and unnatural compromises in one's institutions." Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
Ineffective because passion is often ineffective? It's revolutionary with relation to some origin, or source; it's reactionary. Why is reactionariness ineffective? Is the way things are simply too expansive?
"I believe that philosophy shares the modernist difficulty now everywhere evident in the major arts, the difficulty of making one's present effort become a part of the present history of the enterprise to which one has committed one's mind, such as it is." Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
"It was now possible to investigate philosophically the very topic of irrelevance, and therewith philosophy itself: it is characteristic of philosophy that from time to time it appear--that from time to time it be--irrelevant to one's concerns; just as it is characteristic that from time to time it be inescapable." Must We Mean What We Say?, Foreward
Philosophy is expansive. Sometimes necessary, and sometimes superfluous. (Sometimes we need to make sure we are doing things for the right reasons, sometimes not. Philosophy is aligning what we're doing, or thinking, with reasons. The reasons themselves are nonphilosophical.)
"To see that ordinary language is natural is to see that (perhaps even see why) it is normative for what can be said. And also to see how it is by searching definitions that Socrates can coax the mind down from self-assertion--subjective assertion and private definition--and lead it back, through the community, home." Cavell, "Must We Mean What We Say?"
I shouldn't be allowed to think by myself anymore; I won't know where to stop, or what the terms are.
"The art is to be utterly personal without getting personal" Eva Brann, Open Secrets, Inward Prospects, 183.
The terms of good conversations are personally felt and impersonally huge. (This is one motivation for a heaven of forms.)
_______
I wish I could preserve the feeling of spaciousness from being in a half-empty room, without a lot of stuff; compelled to be in public most of the time. I have this fear (that only needs confirming) that we think best when not too comfortable, not too moored; when we write less and talk more. When there is too much there already there's less need to create the world for oneself. "Inelastic" is a good criticism. Things go from the mind too quickly when I write them. But they go too quickly anyway. I'd rather keep them jumbled there and keep adding things. But there is a fear of forgetting (I sympathize with the Egyptians. I'm good at memorizing, at practicing the things I can remember; but they seem unsteady all the same). I need to rehearse (but perhaps not write, not more than once) what I want to keep in mind (or in soul) before bed. Or all the time. "Maintain."
_______
Ends: we don't want our maxims tainted by ends. We don't want our conversations, our philosophy, tainted by ends. Is this because philosophy is descriptive? It refigures the world in different ways; it doesn't--shouldn't--aim at anything. --But doesn't ethics aim at something?
