[lit-ideas] Re: Notting or not
- From: cblists@xxxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2013 10:01:29 +0100
On 4-Dec-13, at 6:38 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
Unless, of course, this is just a game that I don't know how to
play, don't know the rules or how it ever ends.
Cf.:
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden;
he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree',
pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else
arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow
isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.'
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty
The fear of science, of "scientism", of "naturalism",
of self-objectivation, of being turned by too much
knowledge into a thing rather than a person, is the fear
that all discourse will become normal discourse. That
is, it is the fear that there will be objectively true or
false answers to every question we ask, so that human
worth will consist in knowing truths, and human virtue
will be merely justified true belief. This is frightening
because it cuts off the possibility of something new
under the sun, of human life as poetic rather than merely
contemplative.
But the dangers to abnormal discourse do not come
from science or naturalistic philosophy. They come
from the scarcity of food and the secret police. Given
leisure and libraries, the conversation which Plato began
will not end in self-objectivation - not because aspects
of the world, or of human beings, escape being objects of
scientific inquiry, but simply because free and leisured
conversation generates abnormal discourse as the sparks
fly upward.
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors,
neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world,
nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a
conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended
and made more articulate in the course of centuries.
It is a conversation which goes on both in public and
within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument
and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable
they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation,
and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the
passages ...
Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an
extrinsic
profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an
activity
of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure ...
Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill
and
partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize
the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance,
and
in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits
appropriate
to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end,
gives place and character to every human activity and
utterance.
- Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the
Conversation of Mankind
Connecting the dots between these four quotations is left as an
exercise for the reader.
Chris Bruce,
remembering what else is born
as the sparks fly upward, in
Kiel, Germany
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