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Existentialism and Ordinary Language
Jul. 10th, 2005 04:31 pmThe "Explanations" thread, continued.
Objection: I am only interested in the philosophy I'm interested in as a means of addressing my own problems.
Response: Me and everyone else.
I'm not sure how much weight an objection like this carries; Nietzsche made lots of them, but the general point I draw from those is not that everyone's philosophy is therefore bunk, but that everyone's philosophy is invariably tinged by personal concerns--and so much the better, since objectivity is an illusion anyway.
Objection: The fact that your own problems are not necessarily everyone else's problems means that no one has an obligation to take anyone else's philosophy seriously. (I generalize.)
Response: This appears to be your main concern with these issues; you want to know how different groups (or people) can talk to one another (at all), whereas I wanted to compare different types of explanations. I guess I don't see relativism as quite so threatening. First, I think there will always be philosophical problems; as long as there are humans, a certain proportion of them will probably take philosophical problems seriously. Their doing so requires no justification. The fact that philosophical problems go away after a little while is no objection; impermanence, one might argue, is what gets us into philosophical problems in the first place. We forget things, we're not sure the future will resemble the past, and so on. I think this generalizes across communities. Is thinking like a philosopher all that important? Well, it addresses certain aspects of human existence. In any case, it happens.
I do think that philosophy done from ordinary language is meant to address everyone. Underlying this claim is a view of language not as a bunch of splintered communities but as a whole entity, in which any one of us can access the remoter parts via the parts nearer to home. Why we should want to do this has to do, I think, with something not unlike Nietzsche's or Heidegger's or even Emerson's fear of the meaninglessness brought on by failing to own some aspect of one's world. The idea is that there's something inherently bad about failing to own one's language. I don't know what to say in defense of this view. One could say what Sartre says of bad faith and dishonesty towards oneself: that the "strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty." It isn't clear to me what this means; in any case, you will probably ask what the good is of having the "coherent" attitude. Sartre might also say that we cannot will that everyone be dishonest with themselves, which might be true. Whatever their defense is, I think motivations like these lie behind at least Cavellian ordinary language philosophy: even the corners of our language or our words that we neglect are our responsibility.
That they can be our responsibility is made possible by (1) the wholeness of a language, and (2) the fact that language is something all speakers own equally. And if language is an extension of oneself, neglect of part of it amounts to neglect of part of oneself. I am generally of the opinion that such ignorance is a bad thing.
This does not mean that theoretical explanations are all bad. It does mean that many 'reducing' explanation are. There may be little at stake in reducing phenomena like light and water to accounts of their physical causes or compositions; reducing one physical phenomenon to another isn't such a big deal. But 'consciousness,' say, is a word with many different uses, one of which refers to an experience or group of experiences. The cause of an experience is not the experience itself. If we begin to think that it is, however, we might experience a disconnect between what our theory says our experience is and what it seems to us to be; we might begin to lose the words for our inner life. We could forget that we can also control our experience and behavior from within, and not just via changing situations or therapists or drugs. We could forget that we are also responsible for what we are.
This is political; I never pretended it wasn't. But I think both the tendencies of philosophers to, say, want to reduce everything to a certain sort of explanation, as well as the urge to resist that reduction, say a lot about humans in general--about our intellectual ideals, and about what we think is important to capture in our theories.
Objection: I am only interested in the philosophy I'm interested in as a means of addressing my own problems.
Response: Me and everyone else.
I'm not sure how much weight an objection like this carries; Nietzsche made lots of them, but the general point I draw from those is not that everyone's philosophy is therefore bunk, but that everyone's philosophy is invariably tinged by personal concerns--and so much the better, since objectivity is an illusion anyway.
Objection: The fact that your own problems are not necessarily everyone else's problems means that no one has an obligation to take anyone else's philosophy seriously. (I generalize.)
Response: This appears to be your main concern with these issues; you want to know how different groups (or people) can talk to one another (at all), whereas I wanted to compare different types of explanations. I guess I don't see relativism as quite so threatening. First, I think there will always be philosophical problems; as long as there are humans, a certain proportion of them will probably take philosophical problems seriously. Their doing so requires no justification. The fact that philosophical problems go away after a little while is no objection; impermanence, one might argue, is what gets us into philosophical problems in the first place. We forget things, we're not sure the future will resemble the past, and so on. I think this generalizes across communities. Is thinking like a philosopher all that important? Well, it addresses certain aspects of human existence. In any case, it happens.
I do think that philosophy done from ordinary language is meant to address everyone. Underlying this claim is a view of language not as a bunch of splintered communities but as a whole entity, in which any one of us can access the remoter parts via the parts nearer to home. Why we should want to do this has to do, I think, with something not unlike Nietzsche's or Heidegger's or even Emerson's fear of the meaninglessness brought on by failing to own some aspect of one's world. The idea is that there's something inherently bad about failing to own one's language. I don't know what to say in defense of this view. One could say what Sartre says of bad faith and dishonesty towards oneself: that the "strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty." It isn't clear to me what this means; in any case, you will probably ask what the good is of having the "coherent" attitude. Sartre might also say that we cannot will that everyone be dishonest with themselves, which might be true. Whatever their defense is, I think motivations like these lie behind at least Cavellian ordinary language philosophy: even the corners of our language or our words that we neglect are our responsibility.
That they can be our responsibility is made possible by (1) the wholeness of a language, and (2) the fact that language is something all speakers own equally. And if language is an extension of oneself, neglect of part of it amounts to neglect of part of oneself. I am generally of the opinion that such ignorance is a bad thing.
This does not mean that theoretical explanations are all bad. It does mean that many 'reducing' explanation are. There may be little at stake in reducing phenomena like light and water to accounts of their physical causes or compositions; reducing one physical phenomenon to another isn't such a big deal. But 'consciousness,' say, is a word with many different uses, one of which refers to an experience or group of experiences. The cause of an experience is not the experience itself. If we begin to think that it is, however, we might experience a disconnect between what our theory says our experience is and what it seems to us to be; we might begin to lose the words for our inner life. We could forget that we can also control our experience and behavior from within, and not just via changing situations or therapists or drugs. We could forget that we are also responsible for what we are.
This is political; I never pretended it wasn't. But I think both the tendencies of philosophers to, say, want to reduce everything to a certain sort of explanation, as well as the urge to resist that reduction, say a lot about humans in general--about our intellectual ideals, and about what we think is important to capture in our theories.
