josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
newest | archives | search | about | wishlist | flickr | email | rss
Most philosophical writing produced by academics is like business-to-business communication. Yet the customers of these philosophers are never served; they are always wrong.
I’ve learned some language at distinct points in my life. I never took a foreign language earlier on, so had to take some in college to satisfy a language requirement that most people got covered with credit for their high school Spanish. I opted for Russian and met the challenge erratically, with a couple few years of courses spread over my whole undergraduate career and extending into grad school, since I audited a bit when I had moved on to a math master’s. I never got to be particularly fluent at what I could manage, and I stalled at right about when my vocabulary was supposed to be expanding a lot to enable me to deal with written Russian. But one of my teachers, a native speaker, took an interest in me, and gave me a job assisting her with some translation of literary scholarship. We would sound out the nuances of meaning for what she had already worked up. In those years I was quite interested in the margins of the language-learning experience, acquiring books and records and consulting dictionaries and all that—I remember hunting down some Chekhov plays in original text, listening to Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (what all I remember at the moment: gribki, gribki!)—but I suppose it was more like a preparation for me, instilling interest in language and culture, than it was actually serving to establish an ability to speak and read.
The passion that took me into and carried me through graduate school, once I switched to philosophy, was Wittgenstein. The nature of my project, which focused on his writing as writing, required that I at least be aware of what that writing actually was in its original German, although due to quirks of its entry into the world it was extensively available in dual-language facing-page translations and the translations (of the later work I was interested in—there is persistent ambivalence over how to render the terse German of the earlier Tractatus into English) were deemed perfectly adequate by most philosophers. At some point, whether before or after my dissertation proposal I can’t recall, a friend observed that he always saw me carrying some book around but not Wittgenstein, which seemed to indicate a reluctance to write. I had read the Philosophical Investigations so many times, certain portions over and over endlessly, that I found it hard to see the text with unfamiliar eyes, to leave behind the scripts for what it was supposed to mean that I was acquainted with from the scholarship and from the general culture of reading Wittgenstein that existed among the philosophers I knew. I thought to get past this by looking at the German, but I found the constant availability of the English on a facing page too easy to fall back on. So I responded by getting hold of a purely German-language text and forcing myself to read it cold, with of course the memory of the translation always in the background. I think this proved to be a wonderful way to acquire a strong enough language skill to read with and grow from—for variety I moved on to Schopenhauer, which I used to reread a bit of every morning at the Hard Times over breakfast—and I still enthusiastically cite the experience when I want to encourage people to improve a language. Sometimes when I look back—heavy with regrets—at graduate school having basically taught myself to read German seems like the most valuable part of it.
It’s not exactly true that I taught myself (or that I ‘read German’ now—I can read plenty of it, for many purposes, highly sensitive to what it is I’m trying to read), since there were instructional books, some recorded lessons I never much took to, a German-for-grad-students short course I audited at some point, the kind designed to hustle people through the language requirements for Ph.D. programs that were by then nearly obsolete—but it’s true enough to my experience of learning. My knowledge of the text was crucial because it gave me a different level of comfort, of confidence about what didn’t make sense at the moment, so that I could go on with a good enough understanding. More than that, though, it gave me different grounds for caring about what the words said, about connecting them to my felt sense of meaning. I recognize that this is somewhat backwards as far as language learning usually goes, since the whole point of learning to speak first, or with priority at least over reading and writing, is that this grounds meaning in what the personal grounds of sense are in one’s first language (W.: ‘meaning something is like going up to someone’), in the gestural, relational, situational matrix of its use, in wanting to speak (French translation for ‘to mean’: ‘vouloir dire’), but all the same the felt sense of meaning I was most interested in was not so much the ‘five red apples’ part of it (as in the opening section of the Investigations) as it was the philosophical part, the part that was the first section of the Investigations. So it would be more to the point to say Wittgenstein’s writing, and caring about it, taught me how to read in German.
French has been a different experience for coming after all this, and for being easier, so much closer to English. But I also went at it differently. There were books I wanted to be able to read, some French I had already looked at, but basically I started with a very different register or level, at a different speed, by doing Duolingo’s French course on my phone during the pandemic. I was sick and laid up very early on, and for a while I was spending hours a day, literally hours, completing lessons. Duolingo is notoriously lopsided—it’s not ideal for training to speak—but it also enables all sorts of idiosyncratic unevenness in practice, or at least did before their recent revisions to corral people into narrower paths. Since I was practicing intensively the speed I was moving at mattered less to me, so also the repetitiveness, and for a while rather than moving on to new material at lower levels I was sticking it out with every single topic until it was exhausted, something I’ve gathered they don’t exactly advise as a best practice. Eventually, when lots of speech exercises were available to me, or the speed-conditioned drills, I was certainly flogging them far in excess of the normal expectation.
But it did its thing. It brought me to a point where I could read a lot of written French with pleasure and curiosity—importantly, even when I don’t follow everything exactly. I’m much more interested in my own experience with this language because my history with the previous ones makes the qualities of the experience of learning stand out more, be more available for reflection than frustration. Russian I associate with, among other things, the stultifying experience of sitting in the library media center, playing the audiotapes that accompanied the textbook for the first semester (which I got partway through before dropping, for the time being). Learning German, I read philosophy more than anything, and what I recall is more the frequency with which I would infer meaning thanks to the assurance provided by the predictably restricted vocabulary of philosophy and the logical patterning that lends supportive structure to its prose. In French it is much more often that I go by feeling, guess, tolerate vagueness (in what I comprehend, not in what’s there). Not knowing a language makes it hard to exercise patience, because without sufficient reward of sense, without ways to orient yourself and feel like you know where you are and where you’re going, you can easily resent every new absence or disappearance of sense, and this inhibits your generosity of mind and your willingness to prove to have been wrong (even to yourself, when reading—always conscious, no doubt, of possible situations of speech where one stands to lose face when incompetence is revealed). But with more experience and with a stronger stage of development it seems patience comes more readily; what I miss this time around I’ll get better at eventually.
One of the things I’ve been reading is Maigret novels. A while back I noticed my reading, on the level of sentence to sentence and word to word activity, going through a transition of phases, as it were. I care about getting the sound right and I do a lot of reading aloud. This seemed to correlate with a certain limitation of my pace at reading, as if I couldn’t read silently any faster than I could read aloud (which meant, roughly, speak or listen, too: my limit was tied to that index of my ability). One day, however, I felt as if my mind had relaxed; I could move along the text more easily, ‘hearing’ it without having to put as much distinct effort into subvocalizing or speaking it inwardly. And obviously this helped me with sense-making: the parts and wholes that I could take in with some sort of immediacy seemed to grow a bit.
I thought of this the other day when listening to Vieux frères, an album by the group (they say ‘collective’) Fauve, which is basically high-speed spoken word (bordering on slam poetry or rap at points) set to moody beat-curious contemporary indie. I like this and I’ve played it off and on, about 30 times (decent for me) in the four years I’ve had it, but I haven’t listened so closely that I can unlock the lyrics. Sung French is hard enough for the obvious reasons, but the velocity and volume of words here would be overwhelming enough in English. Anyway, as my ability has grown the record has grown in accessibility. I’ve been trying to listen to more spoken French, YouTube and podcasts and whatnot, to improve my listening, and I’ve found that like my reading, but in a way more irresistibly, it prompts me to speak in turn. I’ve read that the neural or brain subsystems for speech repetition, like speech shadowing or echolalia, operate more rapidly than recognition or comprehension of what’s heard even does, which is apparently explained in terms of what gives us our capacity for first language acquisition. What I noticed distinctly the other day was that I caught a lot more of what the Fauve vocalists were speak-singing than before, while at the same time the pace of the lyrics was overpowering my modest little ability for speech repetition. Yet it wanted to come out.
The new reading group began with a recent book on Bergson by a political theorist, Alexandre Lefebvre. The group wasn't too fussed with the author's main scholarly business of supplying some Hadot/Foucault 'way of life' slogans to frame a reading of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (pretty clunky execution, we all agreed), but they were intrigued enough to want to go on to read Bergson himself. I did learn something, though, from the author's use of Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, of all things.
In that preface, after locating the book's era of publication a bit—the May '68 protests, e.g., as a return of utopian projects of the 30s—Foucault resists classifying it as a totalizing theory, in favor of characterizing it as an art of anti-fascist living. He sums up his little account with a comparison: in tribute to Saint Francis de Sales' Introduction to the Devout Life, one might call Anti-Oedipus an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life. Something about the context of this citation in Lefebvre made me, where Foucault himself had not previously, take a look at the text. I suppose that since I'd read some of Foucault's writings using spiritual exercise manuals and Hellenistic sources as his archive, so I assumed that the de Sales was more of the same. It is; but de Sales emphasizes, and I suppose Foucault meant to highlight, that the Introduction is intended for the use of readers in a particular sort of political, or world-historical (the Counter-Reformation, I gather), situation:
'Almost all those who have written concerning the devout life have had chiefly in view persons who have altogether left the world; or at any rate they have taught a manner of devotion that would lead to such total retirement. But my object is to teach those who are living in towns, at court, in their own households, and whose calling obliges them to a social life, so far as externals are concerned. Such persons are apt to reject all attempt to lead a devout life under the plea of impossibility; imagining that like as no animal presumes to eat of the plant commonly called palma Christi, so no one who is immersed in the tide of temporal affairs ought to presume to seek the palm of Christian piety.' (de Sales, Preface)
De Sales goes on to recount the manual's origins in his effort to lead the spiritual direction of a woman with 'a great desire, through God's grace, to aspire more earnestly after a devout life', and thus his reason for constructing, as his book's addressee, 'Philothea' (officially universal, though from the looks of it, parts of the text are basically sermonistic, pastoral, and address others more specifically as required, sometimes men, sometimes women, for instance). The parts I've glanced at that are not focused specifically on spiritual guidance (that's earlier, the sort of stuff I associate with Ignatius of Loyola or Thomas à Kempis as schematizing a journey or retreat or course of progress, I guess) are more practically moral, addressing circumstances that would be everyday for de Sales' readers. Chapter 33 in the third part, for example, concerns dances, balls, 'and other lawful but dangerous amusements', the danger being a 'temptation' in favor of the general evil tendency of it all. It is helpful to have read a lot of Stoic philosophy for this, because it dissipates the churchy atmosphere that attaches to words like 'temptation': the core advice is still essentially to treat indifferent things indifferently and act so as to choose and strengthen, rather than weakening, personal virtue. Elsewhere, the topics are likewise adapted to a reader with a worldly rather than a religious vocation. For instance, the entirety of chapter 39, 'The Sanctity of the Marriage Bed':
'The marriage bed should be undefiled, as the Apostle tells us, i.e., pure, as it was when it was first instituted in the earthly paradise, in which no unruly desires or impure thought might enter. All that is merely earthly must be treated as means to fulfill the end God sets before his creatures. Thus we eat in order to preserve life, moderately, voluntarily, and without seeking an undue, unworthy satisfaction therefrom. "The appointed time has grown very short," says Saint Paul; "from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none… and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it" (1 Cor 7:29, 31).
Let everyone, then, use this world according to his vocation, but so as not to entangle himself with its love, that he may be as free and ready to serve God as though he used it not. Saint Augustine says that it is the great fault of men to want to enjoy things that they are only meant to use, and to use those that they are only meant to enjoy. We ought to enjoy spiritual things, and only use those that are material; but when we turn the use of these latter into enjoyment, the reasonable soul becomes degraded to a mere brutish level.'
Evidently in a manual of spiritual direction with a worldly intention, you can't not talk about fucking at some point, but prevailing standards of propriety and the devotional purpose at the heart of the book mean that you're bound do to so in this abstracted way, tantamount to cancelling each utterance, each act: live with your wife as if you had none, use the world as if you used it not, otherwise you'll entangle yourself with its love. In Lefebvre's reading (standard, for all I know), Bergson remains interested in a form of love that is as it were incapable of this sort of entanglement (compare to Epictetus on friendship, for instance: only the philosopher, the sage, can love).
It is interesting to me, in light of my route to this through a reading of Bergson, how de Sales refers only judiciously to love, for instance the love of God (e.g. in the book's final chapter, advising that readers make open profession of their desire to be devout, on the model of ancient philosophers who present as such socially 'in order to be left unmolested in their philosophic life'). I suppose both that it might be pedagogically useful to put a lot of practically intended advice in terms of love, and that it is deemed intellectually (and therefore somehow spiritually) unhelpful to resort too heavily to this tactic, say because it would be to debase the system of doctrine the book represents, I mean both theologically and ethically (the adaptation of ancient Greek virtue thinking, for one, involves transposing a structure that owes its robustness not to scriptural or theological or ecclesiastical supports, but to ways of thinking about actions, ends, everyday character traits, desires, and so on). There's some consideration of economy involved. In Epictetus' Enchiridion, for instance, the level of condensation can make certain principles or core concepts of the Stoic practice take on a hectoring aspect, reappearing with comic regularity as universal solutions your overly attached ass is too blundersome to apply correctly. In the Discourses, this impression subsides somewhat (not a lot).
I've only made some headway in Two Sources so far. I'm acquainted with Bergson's style of argumentation from reading his first two books over the past couple of years. Perhaps, though, I give too much credit to his knack for precisely refusing the conventional terms in which certain problems have been framed. Late in the first chapter, 'Moral Obligation', after distinguishing the pure obligation due to social pressure from the part of morality expressive of a creative emotional state exemplified for us in heroic figures like Socrates or Jesus, after whose models we aspire, Bergson clearly intends to identify universal equality and properly human rights with the latter, but not the former (war attesting—this is Lefebvre's argument—to the reason that the morality of the closed society, owing to social pressure, is incapable of recognizing human rights). Yet Bergson's characteristic reversals, associating intelligence with the mechanical and the superficial, social self and opposing these to emotion and life and the deep, individual self, set him up to walk right into this howler while fending off an objection about his apparent (moral) sentimentalism:
'Suffice it to say that woman is as intelligent as man, but that she is less capable of emotion, and that if there is any faculty or power of the soul which seems to attain less development in woman than in man, it is not intelligence, but sensibility. I mean of course sensibility in the depths, not agitation at the surface.'
'We need hardly say that there are many exceptions. Religious fervour, for example, can attain, in women, to undreamt-of depths. But nature has probably ordained, as a general rule, that woman should concentrate on her child and confine within somewhat narrow bounds the best of her sensibility. In this department she is indeed incomparable; here the emotion is supra-intellectual in that it becomes divination. How many things rise up in the vision of a mother as she gazes in wonder upon her little one? Illusion perhaps! This is not certain. Let us rather say that reality is big with possibilities, and that the mother sees in the child not only what he will become, but also what he would become, if he were not obliged, at every step in his life, to choose and therefore to exclude.' (Two Sources, pp. 44–5)
Lefebvre identifies Durkheim as a tacit interlocutor. I suppose this—the editions I'm reading right now have no editorial apparatus to speak of—has something to do with the capsule analysis he gives of the origins of justice, in which an idea of equality of value of objects in exchange or barter is extended gradually to a form of reciprocity in punishment, whose compatibility with a society having class subordination he is careful to note. This sets him the problem of how a justice 'which implies neither exchange made nor service rendered, being the assertion pure and simple of the inviolability of right and the incommensurability of the person with any value whatever' (p. 71). His answer appeals to 'one or several privileged beings' who break through society's closure, drawing it after them, due to 'having expanded the social ego within themselves' exactly as creative geniuses in the arts transform the public taste through their works:
… it is one thing for an idea to be merely propounded by sages worthy of admiration, it is very different when the idea is broadcast to the ends of the earth in a message overflowing with love, invoking love in return. Indeed there was no question here of clear-cut wisdom, reducible, from beginning to end, into maxims. There was rather a pointing of the way, a suggestion of the means; at most an indication of the goal, which would only be temporary, demanding a constant renewal of effort. Such effort was bound to be, in certain individuals at least, an effort of creation. The method consisted in supposing possible what is actually impossible in a given society, in imagining what would be its effect on the soul of society, and then inducing some such psychic condition by propaganda and example: the effect, once obtained, would retrospectively complete its cause; new feelings, evanescent indeed, would call forth the new legislation seemingly indispensable to their appearance, and which would then serve to consolidate them. The modern idea of justice has progressed in this way by a series of individual creations which have succeeded through multifarious efforts animated by one and the same impulse.' (p. 78)
(I've read that Beauvoir, Mary Daly, and Michèle Le Dœuff take some lesser or greater inspiration from Bergson, which makes me wonder what scope the historical feminist movements provide for contesting the heroic individualism behind this picture precisely where Bergson would evidently have been most blind to the possibility. My youngest acquaintance with feminism always involved the school-lesson type examples of famous names, which the history itself made challenging to assemble.)
As it should happen, opening Anti-Oedipus at random I find Deleuze and Guattari wading into social theory on comparable terms:
'Meyer Fortes makes a passing remark that is joyous and refreshingly sound: "The circulation of women is not the problem. …A woman circulates of herself. She is not at one's disposal, but the juridical rights governing progeniture are determined for the profit of a specific person." We see no reason in fact for accepting the postulate that underlies exchangist notions of society; society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked. There is circulation only if inscription requires or permits it. The method of the primitive territorial machine is in this sense the collective investment of the organs; for flows are coded only to the extent that organs capable respectively of producing and breaking them are themselves encircled, instituted as partial objects, distributed on the socius and attached to it. A mask is such an institution of organs. Initiation societies compose the pieces of a body, which are at the same time sensory organs, anatomical parts, and joints. Prohibitions (see not, speak not) apply to those who, in a given state or on a given occasion, are deprived of the right to enjoy a collectively invested organ. The mythologies sing of organs–partial objects and their relations with a full body that repels or attracts them: vaginas riveted on the woman's body, an immense penis shared by the men, an independent anus that assigns itself a body without anus. A Gourma story begins: "When the mouth was dead, the other parts of the body were consulted to see which of them would take charge of the burial.…" The unities in question are never found in persons, but rather in series which determine the connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of organs. That is why fantasies are group fantasies. It is the collective investment of the organs that plugs desire into the socius and assembles social production and desiring–production into a whole on the earth.' (pp. 156–7)
In Foucault's Anti-Oedipus preface, he also calls that handbook for an art of anti-fascist living, equivalently, a handbook for an art of love (what's more, an art of theory, an art of politics). And he identifies its three main 'adversaries' (a term I would not formerly have read with an echo of the devotional manual about it, with its wariness of tempters, of Satan) in appropriate terms: 'the political ascetics, the sad militants, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse', 'poor technicians of desire… who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack', and fascism, not just historical fascism but 'the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates us and exploits us' (pp. xiv–xv). What these adversaries are adversaries to is the pragmatics of revolutionary change, but a change that Foucault conceives in problematic, experimental form: 'How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order?'. Read 'desire' here as an echo of de Sales' spiritual aspirants who ought to make a profession of their desire to be devout: despite the Stoic asceticism absorbed into his guidance, and the technical spiritual and moral knowhow most of the text embodies, toward the end of helping readers subjugate their own more multifarious desires to a rule of discipline, this is an enterprise that fundamentally plays with desire, puts desire's fruits at stake. I think the description of the third adversary is usually read with its emphasis on the internality of fascism, its unwitting absorption into each of a society's persons' structures of feeling and action. But in this other context of spiritual exercise and of arts of living, the caution that stands out to me is: be careful with your love.