Weekly Synthesis

Kant and McDowell and issues of where experience stands in relation to concepts. Long ago the conflict I felt was betwen the "realm of perception" and the "realm of communication"; between the silent experience of nature, with nothing communicable in it, and the whole web of the human things. The assumption was that the conceptual was not capable of the completeness of the natural. Placing oneself within human concepts would invariably fragment you, parcel you out into concepts and categories, open the door for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In it one could not be preserved whole. The picture was of a world "where human eyes fragment the self, and nature cannot see." But when the human descended on me, all at once, it felt not constricting but liberating. The human concepts were universals, that made one important--that made one exist--through one's instantiation of them. Of course, the decisive event was feeling sympathy. (Not that I had never felt sympathy before; but the things one feels as a child have not acquired adult importance yet; and in adolescence one is unsure that one feels anything describable at all.) And sympathy can hardly be considered divisive. But the feeling was one of discovering a positive realm, full of connections and commitments and possibilities; not one that primarily misrepresents. It was positive--it was "somethingness"--primarily, I think, because I needed it to be. The truth is of course that the web of human concepts and relationships can be both--heaven and hell. My wish, my ideal for states of affairs within this web, is that one be preserved whole. Yet what that whole is must be transformed as it is conceptualized; and there will invariably be conflicts in the process of converting oneself over to something that has a place in this web; it's like translation.

The kind of relationship one has to the silent, nonconceptual world is (disturbingly) like the sense of combined (but unspecifiable) meaningfulness and meaninglessness described in the Sass essays on schizophrenia that Professor White puts in all his course packets.

The question, for me, is: what is the status of "nonconceptual" experience? Do human practices we perform unreflectively (Wittgenstein) count? Or is that another level? (Can human practices ground language? What would that mean?) Are these levels of experience, in one of which langauge is grounded? Does the unspecifiability of the unreflective-nature experience allow us to reconceptualize things in new ways by providing a blank slate?

And what is the proper level of passivity or activity? I do not like to think of conceptualization as passive. If we make judgments passively we most likely don't know (mean) what we're saying; we're babbling, and should be more reflective. Plus, if it's passive I think that puts us back in the position we're in with regard to the nonconceptualized world: it could mean everything and nothing. We might as well be mad. This may be the problem with Hume: if we regard the mind as passive with respect to the world, or to "experience," from which all knowledge comes, we end up uncertain about the connections between things. Our concepts arise out of habit alone, and are unsecured. But the mind is not passive with respect to the world. The human being is not passive with respect to the world. Our concepts are grounded in our use of them. (To obscure Kant's explanation completely.) Another question then would be: how is grounding our concepts in whatever way Kant says is the case different from the grounding in our activity that Wittgenstein and Cavell say is the case? The great revelation for me is still the descent of the human, which was the most grounding experience I could imagine: I was given a place. This is why I like Wittgenstein so much.

Addendum

The possibility of skepticism & the fragility of the human. If we forget what we're doing, what we really mean, if we lose the transparency of our activity, we are open to self-doubt. We lose our sense of activity in relation to the world and the grounding of our concepts can be thrown into doubt. This is also exactly when we're open to seeing things in new ways. But it's in the normal course of things that things become hidden from us. PI 129: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something--because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. --And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful."

But if inquiry happens in the normal course of things, what is the failure here? What does it mean that "we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful"? It makes sense if the striking thing is what we're looking for. Not all inquiry is successful. Sometimes we cannot see what we need to see and are stuck. That things are hidden means both that we have a perspective (a paradigm, if you will) from which to conduct inquiry and a possible blind spot. Possibly a blind spot to the way we need to see things to solve a problem. (Need whatever is hidden from one's perspective and one's blind spots be the same? Probably, to some degree, yes. But I need examples.)

Compare Polyani: "For the Meno shows conclusively that if all knowledge is explicit, i.e. capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution. And the Meno also shows, therefore, that if problems nevertheless exist, and discoveries can be made by solving them, we can know things, and important things, that we cannot tell" (The Tacit Dimension 22).

Skepticism about seeking knowledge comes from thinking knowledge must all stand on the same level: either you know it, or you don't; you don't partly know anything; you can't identify something that's hidden; there's no point in calling the thing-in-itself an x. This is clearly an extreme view of knowledge, like the skeptic's view of justification. Does it mean that, to be a skeptic about inquiry, one must doubt that we have contexts (etc.) backing us up, with respect to which things are hidden for us because we're not fully aware of them? But I don't want to make contexts do the work: we have to. (...)