Niether Duck Nor Rabbit

As a follow-up to my last post and the comments: as I was reviewing my discussion with Reshef, it occurred to me that my not knowing what the "right" response is on some nights when I stare into the vast sky and can, on the one hand, be filled with thoughts of our smallness and the seeming groundlessness of things, and then, on the other hand, with thoughts about how wondrous the whole world is--perhaps this state of not knowing, of not moving decidedly into either aspect (or way of viewing the world), is itself a "position" rather than a failure to know what the "right" position is? Perhaps this is obvious to those who have considered the issue of aspect-seeing, that the real temptation is to think that the tension between seeing things one way or another must ultimately, in all cases, be resolved. That the true "resolution" is to resolve to learn to accept certain fundamental ambiguities, to accept the tension between apparently contradictory aspects. Perhaps this is why Simone Weil says, in Gravity and Grace:

The contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

This might shed a different light on Wittgenstein's distinction in the Tractatus between the worlds of the happy man and the sad man, or show that there are different ways of being the happy or the sad. On the one hand, the happy man might be the one who sees the world as a wondrous miracle, and the sad man the one who sees everything as awful and pointless. But on the other hand, the happy man might be the one who has accepted the tension between the two aspects (and yet sees and feels the weight of both aspects, at different times, forcefully), and the sad man the one who cannot accept this ambiguity.

Weil on Attention

I'm grinding it out right now in my classes, and struggling to find time to write, let alone write here. (Family life is busy, too!) I've recently finished a few papers, and am getting back to work on patience. (I'm not sure I ever quite stopped that work, but it feels like it.) In the mean time, for the teacher-readers especially, here's something from Simone Weil:

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do--that is enough, the rest follows of itself.
     The authentic and pure values--truth, beauty and goodness--in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.
     Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act.
     All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

-- Gravity and Grace, p. 119-120.

(See also Weil's "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God")

Stranger than Fiction

My thinking has been shifting lately in ways that are important, but hard to articulate, most likely in part because I'm still shifting. Let me start with some relevant quotes:

"My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul." -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"A method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist.
      "Piety with regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist." -Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

"But when God has become as full of significance as the treasure is for the miser, we have to tell ourselves insistently that he does not exist. We must experience the fact that we love him, even if he does not exist." -Weil, Gravity and Grace

"The only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption....beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters." -Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Sec. 153 (Finale)

"Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God." -Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism" (last paragraph)

The middle three (Weil and Adorno) have most recently been on my mind; I then recognized a connection with Wittgenstein's remark about soul, and that Sartre's last paragraph of his famous essay (which has come to be my favorite paragraph from it) is also part of the story.

My ethical sympathies--e.g. my recent interest in virtues such as humility and patience--are certainly "religious," and I have a great respect for serious religious thought, and perhaps tend toward a kind of mysticism--but nothing in any way specific or theistic (in metaphysical terms). I'm coming to find at times that terms like "soul" and "God" are exactly the right terms to invoke--that God knows if anyone does, and that, as Socrates put it, one should care foremost about the state of one's soul. But my finding them this way is about using the right language to express a point; it is not a "metaphysical" discovery but rather, as it were, an ethical one.

Weil's remarks are particularly striking since she did believe in God (I assume). But she clearly thinks that a certain kind of "believing in" is a distraction and a false consolation. I just recently decided to start reading Adorno, and lucked into the line above by flipping randomly to the last page. At any rate, I think what all these passages are driving at is the idea that there are ways of orienting ourselves with regard to, and situating our lives and thoughts within, certain religious concepts, for which the significance is not a matter of taking on the metaphysical commitments normally associated with invoking those concepts.

Perhaps that's what people mean by "fictionalism." (I read Kalderon's book on moral fictionalism, or meant to read it, back when I was working on my dissertation, but it didn't leave any mark on me. I found, at that time, Blackburn's "quasi-realism" unsatisfying.) But, as in the title of this post, my sense is that what's going on isn't captured by the notion of a fiction. But I haven't figured out what does capture it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that these concepts capture, or appeal to, the mysteries of life, to what is hidden or ineffable (or just very hard to eff, or what can only be effed at the cost of feeling that our expressions remain tentative, incomplete, and unsatisfactory)--to the depth behind the actionable surface of moral discourse, the thought and inner struggles that go on "behind the scenes" but which are ethical in character (even if of little interest to consequentialists, for example). These things are not fictions and they are not myths. But the concepts which seem to touch on them are those which are themselves mysterious. As a result, the way I would use the terms I mentioned above will not be satisfying to skeptics (who will think that such language is dispensable) or to "believers" (who will think that I have no right to this language unless I "believe in"). The trick, then, is to get away with it, which means making clear that the use of such language need not be "metaphysical." (Does that make any sense?)

Good Advice from Simone Weil

"Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true." (From Gravity and Grace, which I consumed over the holiday.)

The problem with following this advice is that it becomes very hard to get anywhere, but that, I suspect, is the point. Where is it that we are going?

Lock the doors and turn it way up:



A Happy New Year to All.