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.

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*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.