a scene from Blake's series on Dante's Divine Comedy

In the meantime, I have not been dormant.  I have taken on a bit of work researching Emmanuel Lévinas.  This work has thus far largely been one of data-mining, if you will; little actual reading and interpretation has yet been done, but I have learned or reacquainted myself with the task of journal-finding and sorting.  My skills had perhaps become somewhat rusty over the past year, but I also suspect that I had come to expect that my web-searching techniques would work just as well for sorting through piles of academic works.  Soon enough, I hope to actually be reading some of these journal articles and books, a task which is understandably more exciting than merely fishing for sources.  Since my first experience with Lévinas, I have found some of his ideas to have profoundly altered my perspective, others to seem prima facie contrary to reason, and a number more to simply baffle me.  I hope to find more clarity and insight, more explanation for the ostensibly nonsensical, and of course a little footing for the confusing material; of course, I suspect I will just find more material that fits into all three categories.

A number of issues probably made my earlier attempts at following Lévinas’ thought quite difficult, and I suspect that the most salient of these obstacles was my total inexperience with Husserl and Heidegger.  I have, since the time of my last writing (over a month ago, it seems) had my first tiny morsels of both of these philosopher’s works.  No doubt these little bits are markedly inadequate representations of these two philosophers’ complex perspectives, but I suspect that having a start will help me re-read Lévinas.

In the meantime since my last post, I have also experienced a few more tiny nuggets from philosophers like Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Roland Barthes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Benedetto Croce, Daniel C. Dennett, Francis Bacon, and perhaps a few others whom I cannot now recall.  I suspect, though, that the thinker with the most substantial influence on my thought patterns over the past month has been none other than William Blake.  Therefore, I mean to take a moment to relax here at home, treating my Black Friday outside as if it were the terror its name implies, while I discuss a bit of the influence of Blake’s ideas.

My standard disclaimer applies; I am interpreting, but as an interested party with limited experience, rather than as an authoritative scholar.  I know little about Blake’s life, and have scanned only a few small works of his, so forgive (and correct, point out, or argue against!) my errors and missteps.

I first became interested in William Blake when studying art history.  I was struck instantly by Blake’s unusual forms, style, and color in Elohim Creating Adam.  This, as so many of his creations, depicted deeply religious images with aesthetic beauty and a seemingly converse, irrepressibly sheol-ic gloom.  I saw in Blake’s approach a sort of algedonic theology, maybe even an aesthetic retort to theodicy.  The creation of mankind, as an example, is an admixture of good and evil–at least from the standpoint of mankind today.  The work is a manner of showing mankind’s ability to get beyond good and evil (see also), without resorting the irreverent self-righteousness of proverbial Tower of Babel architects.

Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake

Recently I rediscovered William Blake, this time in the genre of poetry.  I am not much of a poetry critic, and quite honestly I have not experienced the same degree of aesthetic ekstasis from his writing as from his art.  My approach and my interest is in philosophical ideas, a category of thoughts which exist aplenty in these poems.

One thing that struck me immediately when reading Blake was his similarity to Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Both poets have an ostensibly devout affiliation with some form of Christianity, yet each has a fascination with other world religions.  Both adopt a pretty revolutionary form of universalism for their time.  Blake’s All Religions are One poem/print/argument indicates his position in the least-obscured manner:

The Argument    As the true method of knowledge is experiment
the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.
This faculty I treat of.
  PRINCIPLE 1st  That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that
the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.
Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius.
which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
  PRINCIPLE 2d  As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with
the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius
  PRINCIPLE 3d  No man can think write or speak from his heart, but
he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic
Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual
  PRINCIPLE 4.  As none by traveling over known lands can find out
the unknown.  So from already acquired knowledge Man could not ac-
quire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists
  PRINCIPLE. 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each
Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where
call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
  PRINCIPLE 6   The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original
derivation from the Poetic Genius. this is necessary from the
confined nature of bodily sensation
  PRINCIPLE 7th  As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So
all Religions & as all similars have one source
  The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius

(Be sure to see some original prints of this here.)

It looks like we get to do a little metaphysics before we get the theory of religious/spiritual universalism!  Blake is pretty clearly setting up a definition of the self/mind, but it is not clear at first whether this coincides with Cartesian mind/body dualism or not.  Most readers would agree that, at the very least, Blake’s “poetic genius” plays a similar role to that of the mind in traditional Cartesian dualist models, because it is both the source of basic inner consciousness and the originator of thoughts.  I think that the work also implies that the “poetic genius” is also the recipient of experience (or at the very least, revelation); this “poetic genius” can also be said to be a consciousness of as opposed to simple consciousness, and perhaps a force of reasoning, memory, and other trope mental functions.

Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan

However, I think that it is quite unfair say that Blake’s “poetic genius” is simply synonymous with the Cartesian mind; a few important considerations illustrate that this would be an oversimplification.  First, even if it is only a matter of emphasis, Blake uses the term “poetic genius” place weight on the role of creativity being at the heart of the human being, rather than our gamut of cognitive functions and perceptions.  Blake’s education would have ensured that he knew of the term poet in its original Greek sense; the poet (ποιητής) is not simply “creative” (a term by which we typically indicate “original” thought) but an actual force of creating, a maker.  Likewise, the term genius, which to us now implies only high-level cognition, would have been known to Blake also with its Latin connotations; in this case, not simply excellent mental performance, but a sort of spiritual auspice for the individual.  Thus the poetic genius is not just a source of unique thought, but an active participating spirit in the world  A second consideration to note is the mind/body interaction model supplied by Blake.  While it is unclear in this work¹ whether the “poetic genius” and our physical bodies are made up of the same metaphysical stuff, Blake is unequivocal in declaring that the outward body is derived from the core, the poetic genius.  By then associating the poetic genius with that which “by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon”, Blake could be saying that the poetic genius is the incorporeal “mental” “spirit”, but he could also just mean that people formerly described features of the poetic genius in erroneous ways.  The middle-way interpretation which I think yields the most interesting results is that Blake is attempting to get beyond the corporeal/incorporeal distinction at this point.  By providing a metaphysical structure which allows not only simple mind/body-like interaction but also posits the excressence of the traditionally material from the stereotypically nonmaterial, Blake critiques this metaphysical distinction.

It is important to observe, though, that Blake still appeals to a metaphysical ideal–that the poetic genius is the “true” man; additionally, he offers another grand metaphysical ideal in the form of the universal poetic genius, which of course has implications for a possible hierarchy of metaphysical relationships between the self-ideal of the poetic genius and inter-poetic genius relationships.  Unfortunately, I never managed to get beyond the metaphysics to my main point about correlations between Emerson and Blake on topics like universalism, human creativity, and freedom (and, on reflection I think there’s an interesting correlation to flesh out between Blake and symbolists like Stéphane Mallarmé).  Perhaps the point is already becoming clear, but if I get the chance I might make another quick post about this topic.  I’ll make no promises this time, though, as that seems a sure-fire way to keep me from completing any post.

By the way, in the last month I have also had the unfortunate experience of rediscovering Librarything.com, a place for bibliophiles such as myself to waste their time online.  If you are likewise afflicted, I invite you to look me up there by my username “jxn”.

image courtesy of princeton press; apparently only aesthetic philosophers get pretty covers

In my attempt to learn a bit more from some “post”-analyitic philosophers, I’ve decided to begin by revisiting Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (sold here).  I rather regret going back to this text before having had direct experience with the work of Heidegger in particular, but I am also displeased that I have yet to read any substantial works from Wilfrid Sellars, David Donaldson, Rudolph Carnap and W.V.O. Quine.  However, I suspect that I will be aided by the fact that I have ventured at least gotten my feet wet in exploring John Dewey, Hans Gadamer, Richard J. Bernstein, Quine, and Wittgenstein since i first rushed through parts of Rorty’s work two years ago.

I have chosen to start with Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for a number of reasons.  First, it seems to me something of a seminal work–for Rorty, for philosophy internally, and about philosophy from an external perspective.  Rorty’s criticisms are, if I remember well and if my sources are accurate, poignant, reflective, but not pleasing to the ears of most philosophers.  As such, he cannot be ignored.  Either Rorty’s harsh words are valid and philosophy must reform itself in some dramatic ways or philosophers must make a cogent rejoinder.  Since the writing of Rorty’s book, I suspect both have been done with countless subtle incarnations of each, and perhaps some not so subtle.

I have also selected this work for pragmatic reasons, because I think it represents a noteworthy pastiche of early Neopragmatist/postanalytic philosophers’ works (namely Quine, Sellars, and Davidson), as well as those of some of their influences (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and to some extent Dewey).  Furthermore, there is a marked lack of analytic tradition philosopherss in my formal education in philosophy–a deficiency which I hope to allay at least to some degree by reading this work.  Finally, I have selected Rorty’s text over those of his peers because the philosophical exploration that I have just begun was encouraged by epistemological criticisms of Rorty’s later work–work which is foreshadowed very strongly in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

No doubt that one of the most salient sources of the flak that philosophers receive from others is that they are willing to engage in serious discussion about otherwise seemingly worthless minutiae–apparently that includes pragmatists, too.  However, when I happened again upon this piece by William James, I simply could not keep myself from asking a few hair-splitting questions.

From William James What Pragmatism Means: Lecture II [1909]

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel – a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: “Which party is right,” I said, “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb ‘to go round’ in one practical fashion or the other.”

While I appreciate James’ attempt to illustrate pragmatism by example in this case, I think this is a great opportunity to nitpick a bit, hopefully to better elucidate the meaning and uses of pragmatism.

I have a few outstanding criticisms of James’ use of this story above.  First, I am not confident that when James says “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel” [emphasis mine], that the word practically brings any additional meaning its sentence, given the assumption that the rest of James’ paragraph is the explanation of what might be meant practically.  In other words, James might just as well have said that it “depends on what you mean by ‘going round’ the squirrel”, because there is no difference in meaning between the two sentences.  When William James goes on to describe the two potential definitions for “going round”, he supplies definitions which do not really touch on the pragmatic nature of the situation.  Each definition is, it seems to me*, metaphysical–as is the question of going round the squirrel (*for the sake of simplicity, I’m proposing a metaphysical v. pragmatic dichotomy here, let’s not bring language/psychology/etc. into the equation).

This is not to say, however, that a pragmatic distinction cannot be made for this metaphysical squirrel question.  Indeed, it seems to me that a clarification drawn between what our squirrel-watching friends “mean” and what they “practically mean” might help us get a better grasp on pragmatism, if we can simply get away from the positions James offers us.

I will begin by examining James’ two potential definitions for “going round” the squirrel.

“Going Round”

First, James says one approach is to claim that going round said squirrel means “being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again”.  My complaint with this description is that it does not satisfy what we expect when we say “going round”; to illustrate this, I’ve composed a little animation (go easy on me, it’s my first attempt ever) which shows a man–William James himself, actually– “going round a squirrel” by this definition:

apposite version of James going round a squirrel

I suspect most people will agree that this does not really illustrate what we mean when we say “going round”; therefore, James’ apposite approach to defining the motion is unsuccessful.  I should say that there are other options for satisfying the conditions of this apposite definition, but they are more difficult to animate.

Now on to the directional approach to defining “going round”.  I have made another animation in a like manner to illustrate a scenario that falls within the bounds of James description “passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again”:

directional version of James going round a squirrel

Again, I think most of us will agree that this is not what is meant by going round, and, again, this is only one animation of a number of possible configurations.

So…what’s the point?

My intent, here, was not merely to disapprove of William James’ options for defining a man going round a squirrel.  Rather, it is to question whether merely defining things in simple relations to each other–and abstracted from the reality of motives and consequences–presents us with metaphysical answers, not pragmatic answers (pragmatic in both the sense of philosophy and of practical use).

My alternative approach, and one which seems to me more indicative of the goals of pragmatism (please correct me if I am wrong), is that the definition of “going round” can be precise, but it must be fluid depending on our ends, our experiences and knowledge, and the prospective consequences of the ends and knowledge which we bring to the table.  I’ll attempt to make this clearer with a quick and dirty example.

A truly pragmatic distinction in meaning requires application.  In this sense, we might need not only to “go round the squirrel”, but to “go round the squirrel for [some reason] “.  For example, if I ask you to go round the squirrel to get a full-view 3D picture for mapping into a computer, and you keep chasing the squirrel around with the camera, but can only ever get the little beast to show its belly to you, then you might rightly tell me “I simply could not get round the squirrel to get those pictures”.  Yet if your task was merely to go round the squirrel to set up pylon cameras to get those same images, you might rightly explain to me that you were able to go round the squirrel in order to complete this task, though in this case you never beheld the rodent’s dorsal side.  In these cases, the definition is formed through the situation and its consequences; there appears to be a real cash value (on the converse, what does James’ situational and definitional distinction get for us?  Perhaps we receive nothing, if we have no interest vested in either consequence).

Perhaps, then, the difference between what we mean and practically mean might not be a difference in denotation.  What I mean by going round the squirrel might be confined to a simple definition, but what I practically mean in the given example is that the act of “going round the squirrel” is an act the whose completion belongs to the category of things required in order for me to accomplish my end goal, one of the things which would get me closer to obtaining the cash-value of the 3D computer image of said squirrel.