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It's not surprising that I would unintentionally end up reading two books with dovetailing themes. Really it is more than two. This set includes essays in moral psychology and Buddhist meditation. The themes (even more unsurprising than the fact that I have ended up reading about them) are freedom and dialogue. "Dialogue," of course, means more than multiple speakers. It means, if it is within oneself, allowing multiple perspectives to exist and to confront or harmonize or whatever they wish to do without forcing them in one way or another. It means equanimity towards their appearance--and therefore, that one take a slightly different perspective on the contents of one's mind than one may ordinarily take. There is no good characterization of this position that I know of; perhaps the "transcendental ego" comes close. Whether there is or is not a "self" present in such a perspective seems to me like it could go either way. This perspective has no content; it's just a position of equanimity.
Charles Guignon ends his book, Being Authentic, with an attempt to moderate between the idea that we seek our authentic selves within us and the idea that there is no authenticity to us, but merely a collection of roles we learn to adopt. The mediation is authenticity as a "social virtue." That is, some degree of taking things seriously, of willingness to deliberate about them, stand up for some and attack others, is necessary for us to be socially, politically, respectable. Inauthentic people are "letting us down" because they are not taking their civic responsibilities seriously enough. Being authentic in this sense involves expression: "insofar as each person must start out from his or her own best judgment about how we should undertake common projects and conduct our lives together, there is a need tor people to get clear about their own deliberations and fully express what they conclude in public space" (160). It also involves "attentiveness and activism": "being authentic involves more than just the awareness that a particular sort of society is needed. To be fully authentic is to recognize the need to be constantly vigilant in one's society, to be engaged in political action aimed at preserving and reinforcing a way of life that allows for such worthy personal life projects as that of authenticity. If this is the case, however, the authentic individual cannot be thought of as someone hwo is simply reflective and candid in acting in the world" (162). And finally, it involves dialogue: "The center and focus of an intense conversation is defined by the ongoing play of ideas as they carry the matter at hand forward. The locus of activity as we experience it is not my mind and yours, but rather the 'between' made concrete in the issue of the truth of the matter we are discussion" (165, about Gadamer). (My favorite example of this is from The Waves, when Bernard says to Susan: "When we sit together, close, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstatial territory.")
I am also reading Robert Grudin's On Dialogue, in which "dialogic interactions" both within oneself and without, are clearly linked to the idea of freedom. (He mentions the trivium and the quadrivium on the third page, and no, he is not a Johnnie.) In the first chapter--which is all I've read so far--he analyses literary devices used in Hamlet as ways of learning to hold multiple ideas, or ideas possessed of some dissonance, in one's head at the same time. The discovery that words can have different senses, and that there can be ambiguity as to which is meant, is, for him, literally mind-expanding.
A concept, too, is something that for him is fuzzy, has many sides. He gives both his own and Martin Buber's analysis of "tree" to show this. I like Buber's better, but Grudin's is shorter. He sees trees as "primary engines of renewal of the biosphere, as tangible images of beauty, as symbols of stability and fertility, as sources of delicious and sometimes forbidden fruit, as natural birdhouses, as fountains of nature refreshing towns and cities, as singers and dancers in the wind, as brooding congresses in the wilderness, as messengers of symmetry, as natural tranquilizers, as shelters from the rain, as ominous, unforgiving barriers to young sledders, as sun-drenched temples condoning hiliarities of children, as rooms whose green ceilings shade the liberties of lovers, as untranslatable presences in dreams" (34-35).
There is no list of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a tree. And much of what is a tree for us is shown not by listing attributes of the tree on its own, but by the ways we relate to it (climbing it, lying under it, recognizing one as a source of shade, etc.).
Wittgenstein is sometimes called schizophrenic (e.g. by Sass) for having many voices. But what I most admire in the character of his writing is its integrity. If to be fully authentic one must let the matter at hand eclipse oneself, then sometimes one will have many voices. And if the matter at hand is the best description of certain aspects of human experience on which philosophers like to focus, then the voices will question these. Such a task is normative because it involves a continuous dialogue between one's picture of the way things are to the way things are, because "the way things are" is capable of continuous refinement, and because this dialogue rarely starts from the same place, or has the same interlocutors. But the point is to avoid taking one's experience as simpler than it is because our language, or our categories, lead us to. The point is not to insist that certain elements of experience are "uncategorizable" or "irrational" or "irreducible." Rather, it is to be true to the facts, as best as possible, and to see more clearly; to be best informed.
And this is--potentially--also a political virtue.
Charles Guignon ends his book, Being Authentic, with an attempt to moderate between the idea that we seek our authentic selves within us and the idea that there is no authenticity to us, but merely a collection of roles we learn to adopt. The mediation is authenticity as a "social virtue." That is, some degree of taking things seriously, of willingness to deliberate about them, stand up for some and attack others, is necessary for us to be socially, politically, respectable. Inauthentic people are "letting us down" because they are not taking their civic responsibilities seriously enough. Being authentic in this sense involves expression: "insofar as each person must start out from his or her own best judgment about how we should undertake common projects and conduct our lives together, there is a need tor people to get clear about their own deliberations and fully express what they conclude in public space" (160). It also involves "attentiveness and activism": "being authentic involves more than just the awareness that a particular sort of society is needed. To be fully authentic is to recognize the need to be constantly vigilant in one's society, to be engaged in political action aimed at preserving and reinforcing a way of life that allows for such worthy personal life projects as that of authenticity. If this is the case, however, the authentic individual cannot be thought of as someone hwo is simply reflective and candid in acting in the world" (162). And finally, it involves dialogue: "The center and focus of an intense conversation is defined by the ongoing play of ideas as they carry the matter at hand forward. The locus of activity as we experience it is not my mind and yours, but rather the 'between' made concrete in the issue of the truth of the matter we are discussion" (165, about Gadamer). (My favorite example of this is from The Waves, when Bernard says to Susan: "When we sit together, close, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstatial territory.")
I am also reading Robert Grudin's On Dialogue, in which "dialogic interactions" both within oneself and without, are clearly linked to the idea of freedom. (He mentions the trivium and the quadrivium on the third page, and no, he is not a Johnnie.) In the first chapter--which is all I've read so far--he analyses literary devices used in Hamlet as ways of learning to hold multiple ideas, or ideas possessed of some dissonance, in one's head at the same time. The discovery that words can have different senses, and that there can be ambiguity as to which is meant, is, for him, literally mind-expanding.
A concept, too, is something that for him is fuzzy, has many sides. He gives both his own and Martin Buber's analysis of "tree" to show this. I like Buber's better, but Grudin's is shorter. He sees trees as "primary engines of renewal of the biosphere, as tangible images of beauty, as symbols of stability and fertility, as sources of delicious and sometimes forbidden fruit, as natural birdhouses, as fountains of nature refreshing towns and cities, as singers and dancers in the wind, as brooding congresses in the wilderness, as messengers of symmetry, as natural tranquilizers, as shelters from the rain, as ominous, unforgiving barriers to young sledders, as sun-drenched temples condoning hiliarities of children, as rooms whose green ceilings shade the liberties of lovers, as untranslatable presences in dreams" (34-35).
There is no list of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a tree. And much of what is a tree for us is shown not by listing attributes of the tree on its own, but by the ways we relate to it (climbing it, lying under it, recognizing one as a source of shade, etc.).
Wittgenstein is sometimes called schizophrenic (e.g. by Sass) for having many voices. But what I most admire in the character of his writing is its integrity. If to be fully authentic one must let the matter at hand eclipse oneself, then sometimes one will have many voices. And if the matter at hand is the best description of certain aspects of human experience on which philosophers like to focus, then the voices will question these. Such a task is normative because it involves a continuous dialogue between one's picture of the way things are to the way things are, because "the way things are" is capable of continuous refinement, and because this dialogue rarely starts from the same place, or has the same interlocutors. But the point is to avoid taking one's experience as simpler than it is because our language, or our categories, lead us to. The point is not to insist that certain elements of experience are "uncategorizable" or "irrational" or "irreducible." Rather, it is to be true to the facts, as best as possible, and to see more clearly; to be best informed.
And this is--potentially--also a political virtue.
