Socrates and Frost

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder," said Socrates in Plato's Theaetetus, albeit in Jowett's translation not Levett's, who renders it "[wondering] is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher ... this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else."

I like the idea of a "feeling" characteristic of philosophers, an emotional impulse to a conceptual notation. Likewise, we should have a conceptual occasion (a "thought") for an emotional notation, or poem. If wonder is what a philosopher "feels" before beginning to "think" then lust is what the poet "thinks" before beginning to "feel". In both cases, it is the beginning, not the end.

Robert Frost said that "poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom", which is as wrong as saying that philosophy ends in love (see this post for Derrida's views on love and philosophy). He was probably just being polite. Poetry begins in lust and ends in love.

Philosophy begins in wonder and ends in wisdom. Except, of course, that the poet and philosopher so often fail. We might say that the poet is trying to extract a love from a lustful overwhelming of desire. The philosopher is trying to derive wisdom from a wondrous overwhelming of belief.

Tractations VI

Philosophy begins in wonder,

when the flesh senses

the limit of belief

and finds the wisdom

of a mind bound to

a body

with a heart, longing

to take love through

that freedom of desire

where the flesh moves.

Poetry begins in lust.

Lust & Wonder

It's like this, it seems to me. Wonder is a state of mind. Lust is a longing of the heart. Wisdom and love result from our ability to temper these experiences, to absorb them, if you will, in our temperament. Both lust and wonder, are moments during which we experience the rootedness of experience in the body, but in equal and opposite ways.

Lust is the heart longing to be free of its flesh. It is the heart reaching out beyond its body. It is always an example of overreaching. There is no such thing as well-tempered, or measured, or even appropriate lust. If it is lust, it is going too far. Sometimes, one goes too far. It is not that the heart desires too much, it is that it does not master its desire.

Wonder is the mind bound to its limit in the flesh. If lust is movement, motion, outward beyond the limit of the skin, wonder is sensation turned back at the limit of the senses, the skin. It is the mind becoming aware of its own limits. It is not that it can't believe what it sees, it's that it does not know what a belief would here involve.

The skin is the limit, and it is interesting to note that the difference between lust and wonder may lie in the particular asymmetries of a given situation. A man meets a woman. Her beauty may cast him into a state of wonder, or spark his lust. This will depend on his body as much as hers.

Wonder

That's the answer.

Lust is to love as wonder is to wisdom.

Wisdom is success in the way of dealing with wonder. It is not wise to remain merely in "a state of wonder".

Likewise, in love we must deal with lust, but not be enslaved by it.

We might say, in both cases, that we need to liberate ourselves from the "base" experience. But really it is only our lust we need to be liberated from (it is the paradoxical impulse that seeks to enslave us through our desire to be free). Wonder needs to be reigned in, disciplined.

As I've said before wisdom determines a limit, a limit to belief, which is essentially the same thing as checking our capacity for limitless wonder. Love frees desire from our receptivity to slavish lust.

But I don't want to put either wonder or lust down. There is an aesthetic component to this liberation and de-liberation. Lust and wonder indicate a particular kind of pleasure, which the base experience challenges us to pursue. In satisfying it, we may simply addict ourselves to pleasure, or we may find a way to transcend the basic impulse.

Of course, we may also simply repress lust and wonder. Not recommended.

Lust?

Love is to wisdom as power is to knowledge, as poetry is to philosophy.

Okay.

Love is to lust as wisdom is to _______.

Hint: ________ is to knowledge as lust is to power.

Poets and Lovers

Wisdom is the master concept just as a love is the master emotion. A concept is a particular clarity that is available to us, an emotion, a particular intensity. All thought seeks wisdom, we might say, just as all feeling seeks love. Whenever we think something, no matter how stupidly or obscurely, we are trying to be wise. Whenever we feel something, no matter how cruelly or violently, we are trying to love. Philosophy helps us to think. Poetry helps us to feel. Beauty is difficult. That's the basic setup.

Philosophers, accordingly, are to sages as poets are to lovers. A sage is not trying to be wise, he just is wise. A sage does not need a philosopher to help him to think. But a philosopher, also, does not need to become a sage. In fact, philosophers have a profound distrust of sages. They seem to be cheating, making it too easy. Simply to "be" wise, is not the same thing as thinking wisely, making the effort.

Poets, perhaps, feel the same distrust of lovers. To just indulge in "the obvious remedy"! That's too easy for the poet. The poet wants the emotion to be a much more delicate instrument, a more sublime difficulty, never accomplished. An art. But one can make an art, too, of the act of love. The art of motor-kineasthetic maintenance?

Does the perfect sage make a fool of the philosopher? Does the perfect lover make a fool of the poet? Is the philosopher always a failed sage? Is the poet always a failed lover? We'll leave these as questions for now.

On Beauty

The thing is to knowing as the person is to mastery. The object is to the thing as the subject is to the person. Beauty is a coordination of our knowledge and our power; it positions the subject in relation to the object. It establishes a proportion.

The experience of beauty is a species of apperception. The exposure to beauty is a posture of the self, the thing knowing itself and the person mastering himself. When we experience beauty we experience ourselves. And the beautiful thing, when experienced, experiences itself. We are but occasions for its apperception.

In his experience of a beautiful woman the lover seeks always his own self. This is easier to accomplish before a work of art. Here the self is brought out and laid bare, but in the comfort of an institution (and an intuition) that has been specially designed to support the experience. A work of art, its beauty, presents a finite sequence of poses, available to the self before it.

With women, beauty is altogether more difficult, the sequence of poses is complete, infinite. A woman's body, its beauty, issues a command. The lover contorts himself to obey it, and in his obedience finds himself, alone. All the more alone as he is successful.

It is forever unclear whether a beautiful woman, like a beautiful thing, when experienced, also experiences herself. It seems unlikely. The lover's art is to show the woman her own beauty, which will reveal her to her own self.

It is easy to exaggerate a woman's beauty. Women themselves do this, as do their lovers. Much pleasure and much heartache results. The trick, as ever, is to keep things in proportion. One does not hold one's breath.

Tractations V

Consider the thing,

present, immediately, in intuition,

as an object to be known

here, some clarity

now, an intensity

as a subject to be mastered

present, immediately, in institution,

the person, considered.

Tractations IV

Things are what they are.
They appear to be what they are.
It is thought that makes them possible, i.e., objective.
As objects, things present us with chances.
The object occupies a space of possibilities.
The image is what can be seen without strain.

The image is easy.

The image is what can be done without effort.
The subject occupies a time of necessities.
As subjects, people present us with needs.
It is feeling that makes them necessary, i.e., subjective.
They surface to become who they will.
People become who they are.

Best Answer, Chosen by Asker

If I want to be a lion, I asked, can I be a lion?
You can be, someone said, anything you want.
And I thought that was the best answer.
(Yay, I said, I am a lion!) But there were others.
One said, No, you cannot be a lion. Another said,
You can join a Lions Club. And one said,
Sure, why not? Be a lion. And then there was
this one girl, Regina. She said, Yes you can.
Go to a costume store and buy a lion costume.
Everyone will laugh at you but that's okay
because you are now a lion and you can eat them.
Three people, seriously, rated that answer as good.

(Source: Yahoo! Answers.)

Tractations III: Ostension

This is the World.

That's how it is.

This is the case.

These are my views.

These are my eyes.

[This is my body.]

This is my mind.

This is the image.

This is my heart.

[This is my body.]

These are my hands.

These are my deeds.

This is the story.

That's what happened.

This is History.

Tractations II

Everything is the case.

The world is the totality of facts, not things.

Science represents the facts (not things).

Philosophy presents concepts, not thoughts.

Art renders the image.*

Poetry presents emotions, not feelings.

Politics represents the acts (not people).

History is the totality of acts, not people.

Everyone is on my case.

_______
*Added March 24, 2012.

Tractations I

The world is everything that is the case, the totality of facts.

Science is the attempt to construct true propositions about the facts (assertions).

Politics is the attempt to construct just propositions about the acts (injunctions).

History is everyone that is on my case, the totality of acts.

Political Actvities

Over at my other blog, I've been discussing Heidegger's interpretation of modern science as "ongoing activity" (Betrieb) and the danger of letting it degenerate into "mere busyness" (des blossen Betriebs). I think it is the task of the philosopher precisely to keep science "open" in the sense Heidegger suggests: "Ongoing activity becomes mere busyness whenever, in the pursuing of its methodology, it no longer keeps itself open on the basis of an ever-new accomplishing of its projection plan..."

Well, the same can be said of poetry and politics. The poet works to keep politics open in the pursuit of its mandate. Obviously, the philosopher has to keep the scientist thinking. The poet, likewise, has to keep the politician feeling. Without this, politics degenerates into mere busyness (and becomes a business) and, just as science can succumb to it and "never again confirms and verifies its own self-accumulating results and the calculation of them, but simply chases after such results and calculations", so too can politics fail to ratify and justify its results and simply chase after ballots and opinion polls.

Ontics Optics Haptics Ethics

Maybe McGinn, an onticist, a proper philosopher, looks very carefully at things to inquire into their being. The ethicist, properly speaking a poet, should touch people very daringly to govern their becoming.

Ontics

In his piece in the New York Times, Colin McGinn is probably not being entirely serious. Nor am I being entirely serious in responding to it. I do so mainly because I agree with the underlying idea that there is a sense in which philosophy is "ontics".

What I want to stress is that his proposal is as odd as one in which, say, Jerome Rothenberg might propose to stop calling it "poetry" and call it "ethnics" instead. Here, too, I'd sort of agree. All poetry is about "the people", the broader culture of "the subject", just as philosophy is about the underlying nature of "the thing" and "the object". We can approach any poem in terms of its ethnography, implicit or explicit, just as we can approach any philosophy in terms of its ontology.

Strangely, I'm even with him on an implication of his argument that he might not endorse, namely, that "ethics" isn't really a philosophical activity (it is, properly speaking, a poetic one). Let alone political philosophy! I'd banish both. But not by changing the name.

What I object to is the idea that philosophy is more like a science than an art.

I'm curious to know what McGinn does to study "being" that gets him completely around the need to engage with culture.

Also, in the book which is perhaps most clearly “about reality”, i.e., the Tractatus, which begins with the famous sentence, “The world is everything that is the case,” Wittgenstein says (at 4.111) “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences … Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.” (I.e., it is not a “body of knowledge” but a style of analysis.)

In my view philosophy is more like poetry than science. That’s also just one view, of course. And perhaps I’d be a happier philosopher if people like McGinn stopped calling what he does by the same name. But when I undertake to “write concepts down” (just like a poet undertakes to write emotions down), when I strive for the (non-)authority of the “perfect immanence of the presentation” (as Kierkegaard put it) of my philosophical remarks, whose only aim is to present (and not represent) a concept or set of concepts, I am not doing anything that anyone would or should call science. I am practicing an art. But this does not* make me one of "those practical sages ... that tell people how best to live". I help people think.

Perhaps better than the Rothenberg analogy: McGinn’s proposal is a bit like a proposal to rename poetry in the early 20th Century “imagics” or (!) “imagery”, just because the members of a particular movement, Imagism, at a particular time focused on a particular virtue of their particular style.

_________
*The "not" was added on March 15, 2012, at 8:25.

Stare, Breath

"Remark and Strophe" is not so much a poem as a poem "schema". I'm going to try to write some poems using it as a form or grid. I'll also, of course, try to write some philosophical remarks.

I'm guite happy with this particular homology, these supplements: staring is to knowledge, and therefore philosophy, as breathing is to power, and therefore poetry. Much of the "profundity" of philosophy and poetry derives, I think, from this centering of the body.

I'm still committed to the idea that a poem can be traced back to the intensity implicit in the tension of a string (lyre, lyric, etc.). And that the clarity of philosophy is the clarity of a lamp. Thus, lamp/stare on the one hand, lyre/breath on the other.

I sometimes worry I am making too much of language, and especially of writing. Why should there be anything profound about marking up a page? "In what sense is a white page with black marks on it like a human body?" asks Wittgenstein. (I'm not sure he meant that to sound as profound as it does to me.) Kant said that thought may either directly, in experience, or indirectly, "by way of certain marks", relate to intuition. I've suggested a supplement from "The Critique of Pure Passion": "All feeling must, either directly, or indirectly by way of certain marks, relate ultimately to institutions, and therefore, as far as stuff is concerned, to motility, because in no other way can a subject be taken with stuff."

Intuition (Anschauung) is to reason as institution (Anstalt) is to passion. Staring is to intuition as breathing is to institution.

Remark and Strophe

She passes and
turns.

Outstanding!
(Breathtaking.
&
Breathless,)
they stare.

She just stands there
and breathes.

"Remarkable," says the philosopher.
"Catastrophic," says the poet.

As they open their notebooks.

Existence and other Problems

Some thoughts lately akin to these...

Philosophy really does attempt to understand existence. Poetry really does try to obey (!) inspiration. Hence Dasein is to existence as duende is to inspiration.

Why do we exist? asks the philosopher. Or why, more simply, does it exist? Here I had a moment of lucidity.

Why do I breathe?
asks the poet.

Why does "it" breathe? he might have asked.

Exist, ex-stare, "stand out".

Inspire, in-spire, "breathe into".

(Can't teach inspiration? You can teach breathing. Said Allen Ginsberg.)

Why does it stand out?
Why does it breathe?

Why does it stand there and breathe?

Well, it does.

What Remains

After a poem has caused its "stir" and has become "a depleted fashion", said Ezra Pound, "only emotion remains." He means that quite abstractly. The emotions of the poem itself, he says, "are those of a maître-de-café."

A work of philosophy will stand in the same (questionable) relation to its concepts. There will be much excitement about the "recent development" in philosophy and the "progress" that the work in question signals. Only concepts will remain. Concepts that no longer belong to the work.