Dreaming the Future Closer

In Straw Dogs, Gray quotes Schopenhauer from On the Basis of Morality:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (37)

It’s a good quote, I would say a ‘true’ fable.  But both Schopenhauer and Gray seem unable to crack open its hard outer shell to enjoy the meaty nut contained within.  They think Kant laughable, worthy of derision, for being so foolish as to spend so much time chasing after what was already his.

But imagine that this story is not in the mouth, the pen of bitter Schopenhauer, sitting, lonely, in his study with his dog Atman at his feet.  Strip away the cynical laugh he is having at the ‘old fool.’  Instead, imagine Kant telling this story, his wife at his side, in a warm drawing room, with an old friend fresh from the dusty road to Konigsberg. 

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This is from a notebook I used to carry around with me to write about what I was thinking about. The entry is dated November 30, 2004. There are good ideas here, ideas I would still endorse in some form or another. But it’s been a while since I really cared so much about these sorts of things as I do in this entry, and that makes me a little sad. I have left the inconsistencies of the original (typos and all) since they, too, seem part and parcel of that enthusiasm. Here it is:

A Brief Note on Sense & Reference: Too many put too much weight on the divergence of the two. At base, sense guarantees reference—a sensible phrase always has a referent, even if that referent is a fictional being (“fictional” opposing “real” only in common parlance, not in the metaphysical/ontological sense established in the “sense/reference paradox”). “The present king of France is bald” makes perfect sense and refers to an ontologically real entity (i.e. the fictional character “the present King of France”).

Consider Jed, “a poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed.” The story about Jed both makes sense and refers!

This goes some way to laying the framework for a public philosophy of exemplarity.

Notes toward teaching—Make clear the technical & general uses of a term so that students are prepped for vocabulary pluralism.

Emphasize the distinction between “brilliance” (rapid deployment of intellectual schema) and “wisdom” (slow, comparative work that ferrets out “deep” similarities without collapsing the compared into a single category)—especially in a 101-style course, grade according to the student’s effort toward engaging in such comparisons, even if it results in less clearly “brilliant” pieces.

Back to Sense & Reference: where reference becomes less clear, so does sense & vice versa. Sense “secures” the space for referred entities, so that the weakening of their clarity cannot but entail a corresponding loss of sense, just as a blurring of “sensible” categories makes reference more difficult. Sometimes, this blur grows into a full extension of sense, sometimes it collapses into babble, sometimes it remains unstable. (Todorov’s fantastic read back into discourse as a whole—consider “alternative logics” as attempts to claim (stretch) sense).

This is not new—it distills much of what I consider best in Deleuze—The Logic of Sense & What is Philosophy? with Guattari. The introduction of fictional entities opens the door to deeper appreciation of related (but not identical cases) to aesthetic entities, theoretical entities…and philosophic entities. But, unlike D&G, the concept need not be the primary vehicle—ethical vignettes, thought experiments, etc. are not necessarily “concepts” but nonetheless are philosophical entities. If anything, the traditional division of art, science, and philosophy may be too big, still too analogical and not comparative enough. We must move lower to appreciate the entities like Jed, Present King of France, Quarks, Superstrings, thought experiments, casuistry-crafted analogues, etc.

In this lies a criticism of so-called “interdisciplinary” work—the notion of inter-disciplinary does not go quite where we need to be—it sustains the disciplines when it should generate a space where disciplinary boundaries blur. These occur mostly at “sub-disciplinary” levels, where the topic should not “x object” from several perspectives but ”x entity” as of families of entities whose similarities and (more importantly) differences form a field that exists in no discipline but enriches many. These entities may frequently demarcate disciplines, the differences between related entities an important factor in a particular disciplinary boundary. Such entities may also, though, move between disciplines, be shared by them. In such cases, a study of their different uses may be an important aspect of cataloguing them.

Such a study should be loath to quickly categorize certain things as lacking sense and reference. Musico-poetic uses of words as well as instrumental music do not have the sorts of s&r we readers are used to, but this does not have to equate to an absence. A piece of music deploys sense (chords, notes, etc) that establish and condition reference, just as certain kinds of experimental music stretch and distort those establishes patterns of s&r.

Sense and reference here become a certain kind of entity, a conceptual relative of Jed and present king of France, that makes such sub-disciplinary fields possible—establishing conditions that make comparative endeavors possible.

It may be possible to talk about “properly” philosophical applications of terms like these, of claiming philosophical privilege to these sub-disciplinary spaces. But this misses the point: philosophy has no special access qua discipline, although it might have an accidental local privilege based on historical circumstance. Philosophy may enter into such sub-disciplinary spaces & return to its “proper” bounds with new entities or a deepened sense of its own entities (“philosophy” too vague—not philosophy as some vaguely defined aggregate, but philosophy & historical points of interacting).

This model borrows some material from philosophic talk about “conditions of possibility,” but is clearly more historical and materialistic: not absolute conditions of possibility but very local examinations of family relations that illuminate regions of thought they make possible. They give weight to what Foucault wanted his genealogies & archaeologies to be (his claim you can do many archaeologies on the “same” material)—not final descriptions (ascriptions/inscriptions) of how things are, but discussions about the sorts of things we are interested in and how they enable us to talk to each other without simply asserting discursive primacy of our bailywick (hence why questions of what “our” archive is are nonsensical (pardon the pun)—an “archive” is simply a local, practical means of facilitating a discussion, not a “real” thing we unearth).

Note the way this makes standard exegesis of my “favorite” figures problematic—I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them in any easy manner, but using their work as inspiration, as partial steps toward my project. The “towards” is complicated, because I give their work an aim it may or may not have internally and use that to drive a series of conclusions, that are only partially theirs. I use the concepts of public philosophy, communication, and sense/reference issues to develop inconsistencies from their work, these inconsistencies providing the basis for an alternative formulation (mine) that solves them.

This is “unfair” in terms of adhering to their work, but essential for making use of a thinker. And it is only in use that we begin to really talk.

The work of “use” highlights the problems with any historical discourse that assigns figures to movements and schools. Those movements and schools can too easily elide the diversity of its members, of the uses to which they are put. They become dead litanies of dogma instead of occasions for communication & use.

I spend a fair amount of time musing over how the education system in the United States could be better, less didactic, more dynamic and creative.  I’m hardly alone in that—I think a lot of people are becoming more and more aware of how inflexible the system has become and how poorly it helps those who are not bound for a ‘traditional’ college experience.

But one thing that I realized recently is how rarely I keep in mind the role of the education system as a form of discipline, as a means of regulating this potentially disruptive body of young people who might otherwise have a lot more free time on their hands.  It’s not a big step, really, from a clear-eyed reading of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to this.

This is something that any good educational reform will have to address—in what way will it provide an order, a discipline, to those under its purview.  What we don’t need is some Marcuse-inspired, Pink Floyd-driven romanticism that yells about how all discipline is bad, that we need to free ourselves from constraints…piffle.  Those responses are symptomatic of the failure of the current system, not genuine answers to the problems that create them.

Discipline ought not be a bad word.  That it has become so has a lot to do with poor exercise of it.  Good discipline guides and structures, leaving room for organic developments within its objects.  Bad discipline stamps out such organic dimensions and leaves those is exercised upon worn out.

Looking at the current model of education, it isn’t just failing in terms of how it prepares students for the world, but in the disciplinary structures it employs.  Some of this may be a matter of scale—the educational and disciplinary methods used in most schools date back more than a century and were most effective with a smaller population.