Andrew Taggart

Archive for 2012|Yearly archive page

, ,

A pastoral dirge

In meditation, philosophical counseling on May 22, 2012 at 3:41 am

Dearest A,

My god what a beautiful day. On leaves with filtered light, goddess spiders, succulent wine and caressed notes. Words just don’t suffice.

Merci mon beau ami for being in my life.

Love,

C

*

Unspeakably beautiful our day together. Thank you, dearest C. And how lovely your new picture.

More tomorrow once my internet returns to life.

Love,

A

*

Dear C,

Well, I’m sitting here in that wickery corner chair you know. The bamboo one crisscrossed with blond bone and red berries. On my left are your photos; on my right the outdoors, I suppose. I’ve perched my computer on my thighs flattened by my tippy toes. In this spot, I can get good–OK, fairly good–internet reception. Good, good, blah blah vibrations.

I’m reminded of young boys holding up those tinfoil bunny ears. The TV antenna might work all right until you took your hand off and tiptoed back to your carpety seat. With the crash came the fuzz. So there you were again, gentler or less patient or both.

It’s just after 2 p.m. and I’m still waiting for my new modem to arrive. Hence my tippy toe window seat. (My ass is starting to hurt something fierce.) Earlier, I sat in the dark of the dining room and spoke with P by phone. I’m sure I sounded the fool. Before that, I’d moved the last plant out into the courtyard. That bugger was SO heavy and large, those fat billowy leaves reminiscent of Arabian Nights. I thought I’d break something: the wall, an antique painting, my back.

Today is nothing like yesterday, is it? Then the pastoral, today the Gothic. Then the bucolic, now the sultry. Now I feel itchy. I ate the rest of the chocolate. I want to go for a run in the rain. Or maybe I want to cry a little.

Last night I slept fitfully. Half-awake, I’m brushing my hair. Who does that? I do I guess, and I’ve no idea why. I’m half-awake and detangling, my head a quarter off the pillow. What’s that all about? Is this my sign that says I’m concerned about others?

Good Lord do the leafy trees sway! I’m sure I had something important to tell you but, while scribbling away, I must have forgotten it. Oh yes, this simple truth: I’m thinking of you…

A

*

Dear Andrew,

Fell asleep last night around 9:30, my head reeling from the day, the wine still coursing in my blood and the sun’s heat radiating from my skin. I slept strangely, awaking with a start at 12:50 a.m. thinking of P. I opened my laptop and she was there. Now I know the full story and hope to be of some comfort.

When I woke up this morning I was almost thankful for the rain. Washing, cooling the intensity of yesterday. I’m still marveling how time was suspended, 15 minutes felt like a lifetime. My head on your lap, your hand on my shoulder: I don’t remember the last time I felt life coursing so loudly. Yes I think I could cry a little too.

Imagining you on your wicker chair, the one I remember dragging out on your roof, with glass in hand, hoping not to tip over your plants in the doorway. This Baudelaire quote came to mind when reading your post from this morning: “One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.” There are not many people I feel Iike I could get drunk with. But with you yes.

C.

*

Dearest C,

How did you guess? Yes, I am still sitting in my wicker chair and feeling just as out of sorts now as I was when I first wrote you. The contrast between yesterday and today is still jarring: the beauty of mere being, of being in friendly, fecund fields (where was the shepherd? where the traveling goats? where the midsummer night?), of loving lightly skin and sun, of– juxtaposed with the infinite sorrow of world-sundering change.

(O brave woman…)

I think often (and just as often misquote) Frost’s poem about the country boy who lost his hand and died. My version of the final line reads, “And they, since they were not the ones dead, returned to their affairs.”

And how do we return to our affairs, how after the fields and the forests, the hay and the lake? And how do we return when another–our mutual beloved–is reminding herself to breathe? What do we owe her–what words, what thoughts, what caresses?

I guess, far off in New York, I do my part by running around in search of modems. Do not fret: I have my case number, my little billete, my confirmations. (Did I mention that the old modem worked just fine? Oh, but upgrades! We must have upgrades!) Or by not taking showers for 2 (or is it 3?) days straight and feeling as gross, as encrusted, as greasy as can be. Or by eating cocoa and frozen blueberries and agave nectar together for most every meal. (I think I am getting sick and jittery from the chocolate. My tendons are all quivery and my eyelids refuse to close. Is this a problem?)

Goddamn it: it’s just so still out there right now. I ask only that you leafy trees breathe.

O let’s go back to the fields. Let’s write in praise of lassitude. Let’s sing a song to drunken love. Or will it be enough if we listen to the 6 o’clock church bells and cry a little or a lot–as much in joy as in sorrow?

With love,

A

, ,

New York is not New York

In meditation, philosophical counseling on May 21, 2012 at 4:42 am

When people ask me whether I like living in New York City, I can only answer in the day by day, the block by block. The city writ large is not a home. My treetop dwelling is my home and so is the northern half of Central Park and so is being with Joan. So.

To live well in New York is to find one’s rare and excellent spots: the little gardens no one knows of, the hideaways and stowaways, the stretches lying far from tourist stops and hipster startups. The landmarks most people associate with New York are not mine or my friends’; the reasons most come to New York have never been mine; the desires that most indulge do not attract or tempt me. My New York is a secret.

My New York is the day by day, the block by block, the glimpse by glimpse. Do I like Chelsea? Well, which street, which set of houses, which adjoining tree? The Upper East Side? Not around 2nd Avenue, that’s for sure. Did I see this exhibit? I saw the hydrangeas start to bloom in a garden I fear to publish. I saw my ailanthus tree in winter when the doves came and in spring as the rains began.

I suppose I am a New Yorker if by this one means that I love of my neighborhood, my sanctuary home, my retreat, my cloister, my garden. I do not know how one can flourish here unless this is also the case for you. Would I defend my city? I do not know, but I do know that I wouldn’t want to escape from my New York.

In New York, one’s home must be a secluded sanctuary, an enchanted world. Then also, as I say, the places you frequent must be nooks and enclaves where few others roam.

Last, you must get out of New York as often as possible. You must go into the woods and walk through bucolic fields, smell hay alluding to cow and summer, take forest paths opening onto dragon fly lakes. You must sit in the pasture, beneath an overhanging tree branch, and get drunk on the slowness of life: on the moments as they come to pass and pass away.

,

O brave woman

In meditation, philosophical counseling on May 19, 2012 at 3:55 am

At 5:47 a.m., the rim of the sky wore a pinkish hue. It was fuchsia. At 7:46 p.m. last night, the stain glass of the bell tower was lit all in fuchsia. I awoke early, recalling the cool steps of the courtyard, awoke, curled up like a fetus, and thought of you.

O brave woman, know that pain has an element of blank.

And now the trees in the courtyard and all the trees of the world jostle lightly with the wind. Will you look with me? And now the light is picked up by my eastern wall. Look, look here with me, but look. It alights on a photo of the lake. In the foreground, the water is so dark blue as to be black, black, and black while in the background the light is sublime, the aura of moving dust, the intimation of radiant being.

O my brave woman, know that we are here.

, ,

‘Come here love…’

In meditation, philosophical counseling on May 18, 2012 at 3:56 am
Come here love:
the evening itches on,
like limbs inching unseen,
each stretch kept under quiet wraps,
his purr lending peonies, their
wings rinsing the other’s dark silence.
 

*   *   *

Now, the window thyme
in morning sun. Now,
the long trunk but an X-axis. Yet:
a single sprig is yenning Up.
 

*   *   *

I dropped the breakfast bowl.
It broke,
I didn’t notice.
 
My heart,
long-lingering, undropped:
rest here and notice.
 
—

Thanks to three conversation partners who inspired me to write these three poetic replies. The first poem is a collage made up of her prose. The other two were written yesterday morning in response to certain inquiries. There is thyme on my window sill and I did drop my breakfast bowl onto the floor. My thoughts had long been elsewhere.

, ,

Tree cutting

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 17, 2012 at 4:16 am

Socrates’ greatness was to be able to play with children, and to consider that his time was thus well spent…. Socrates lives a human life simply and humbly.

–Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone

*

Yesterday I bought bananas for Joan. She said she had plenty. Now I have four bananas to eat.

The rain from the past three days carried silt and stone from the neighbor’s yard into the back courtyard. At first, I thought the stones and such might have fallen from the sky since the fence separating the houses seemed well intact. As I cleaned up the mess, however, I saw how the rock could have passed beneath the wooden posts and settled like a temporary installation next to the august compost bin. The faux art would have to go into the rubbish bin, which is where it went, and now the courtyard is clean again.

On Sunday, Joan asked whether I could cut down an overgrown branch that might pose a hazard this winter. Calling this long arced being a branch is rather like calling a redwood a happy little tree. A branch it is not; half the tree it was, half a wishbone, half a life. I said I could come Monday and on Monday morning I put on the garden gloves, pulled out the hand saw, slipped on my sunglasses, and looked up at the branch (read: tree) like a manly man.

Let me tell you about this manly man. First he says Hmm… and then proceeds to ponder things mathematically. Should this branch fall that way, he reasons, it could very easily take out the tree beside it; and should it fall too far other way, it could smash in the other neighbor’s window. He calculates probabilities, devises a plan, and starts to cut.

I simply prayed.

I was relieved when the falling branch–20 feet long? 80 feet wide?–didn’t break the window of the brownstone next door. It fell cleanly into the middle of the courtyard. Then I cut the long branch into small logs, stacked them in a neat pile; broke the twigs, piled them neatly; swept the ground and left the patio newborn as the rain came and washed it.

Andy told Joan that he was impressed by my three stacks: leaves, small branches, logs for firewood. Joan tells me again that I am her best tenant ever. She is 89 years old. I am storing up her praise.

, ,

Fan of an altostratus, pastel and askew

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on May 16, 2012 at 3:59 am

Her

An hour ago, our skin, akin to clawed clay, came and combed in teeth of amethyst and bone–oh, you know, just a precipitous cappuccino.

Me

“Clawed clay” is so well described.

I’d only add:

the molten lava, like Jupiter’s eye and
the top-hatted man holding up his rather sad umbrella.

Her

A chimney sweep’s propeller in tow: fan of an altostratus, pastel and askew.

Me

A boy kneels down, unseen, giggles to himself. He holds a tie, a cord that’s wrapped around his big boy propeller. Oh but when he pulls… When he pulls!

He giggles to himself, kicks his feet the way he would if he were to throw a tantrum. But he’s not throwing a tantrum; he’s splitting himself with laughter.

He pauses, breathes, then pulls. The propeller unwinds and unwinds, first slowly, then rapidly, more rapidly, more rapidly like a top. It wobbles and rattles some, speeding up all the while. The three lines blur and blur, becoming a circle, a disc, a spinning planar world.

When the contraption finally lifts off into a sky clawed by clay, he is elated by the sense of deliverance. Yet as it rambles forth into the altostratus–pastel, molten, askew–he too feels pastel, molten, askew. He never knew, till now, what sadness really was. He stands wordless, his awe the awe of adults for whom release is always complex…

, ,

Ethical life restored (VII)

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on May 15, 2012 at 4:21 am

VII

Silent of speech is nature’s course.

Laozi, Daodejing, 23

Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech.

In early May, a friend and I spent a week at a cabin on the outskirts of Woodstock. We dwelled in seamless being, a time scarcely open for recollection because only one seamless fabric, the whole all seeming a single day that was filled with textures and rhythms and shades. The whole was enfolded in quiet calm, a mood of flowing sober joy.

It was then that we laughed lightly at the sparrows and the dandelions; then that we hiked uphill and rested on overlooks; that we ate food made with chafed fingers and sewn into our souls; that we drank wine and were charmed with our giddiness and our ruddy cheeks; that we sat in silence, dangling our feet over large opal rocks and bony froth; that we held each other closely and cried in joy, occasionally in longing; that we listened to loving words, ours so soft and caring, as steady as rubbing palms; that we slept when our bodies were aching for rest and could do no more for us; it was then again, a pail filling and refilling, that we awoke to morning mists and falling rains and birdsong calling from the hillside.

There was, we knew, nothing extraordinary in this, nothing save the constant humming, the thrumming of life amid life, the sense of being our best and our most spontaneous, of living according to our heart songs and day chants and night hymns. We were falling in love, this is true, but we were in love most especially with this way of living, with this way of being in touch with nature. For our natures were again following nature’s silent course and then love was all we knew.

, ,

Life is not like water (VI)

In philosophical counseling, ethics, education, politics on May 14, 2012 at 4:19 am

VI

We have been following nature’s course through modernity with a view to solving an enigma. How could it be so self-evident during earlier epochs that the virtuous person would, without question, live according to nature when it became just as self-evident in our time that the morally upright person would have to act contrary to nature? The answer is to be discovered, in key part, in the disappearance of what the young Hegel once called the “friendliness of life.”

The leitmotiv of human life as one that flowed like water was well-known in the ancient world. The Daodejing says that “The highest goodness is like water,” Xenophanes says that ”All things that come into being and grow are earth and water,” and in one of the extant fragments from Thales we read, simply, that “Life is water.” Among Daoists in particular, it would have been counterintuitive to speak of fighting against water or of striving to swim upstream, perhaps as absurd as Don Quixote fighting windmills or Sisyphus trying to push a boulder uphill. Yet this does not mean that water was always an easy friend.

The paradigmatic example of water’s ferocious power is, of course, the story of the flood. In the Early Theological Writings, Hegel writes that where once there existed unspoken amity, friendliness, and love, the flood sundered man from nature, evoking a “disbelief in nature” and, in turn, giving rise to man’s desire for mastery. Coming to consciousness of his world, man would build a tower impregnable to sea fury and though his wounds would never heal, at least he could console himself with the thought that he would never be harmed again.

Examined closely, the myth of the flood is a story of the emergence of higher order abstract reasoning on the heels of the destruction of a natural amity between friend and friend, human beings and the natural world. And where one might just as well imagine human beings weathering the storm and, once the flood had subsided, giving thanks to the earth and the sun, making love to each other and kissing their children and their gods all in the hope of restoring the general friendliness of life, one observes instead the construction of semi-permanent structures, forms of protection, bulwarks against harm and wounds and possible injuries.

One could do worse than to read this myth as an allegory for modernity. The breakdown of a previous social order led, out of fear and hope and, yes, also hubris, to the supervenience of principle upon lost love. If you do not love me anymore, then let us settle up, call in the law, summon forth the lawyers, draw up our contracts. Let us legislate and codify, regulate and systematize, making ourselves into good Confucians, middle managers, and dutiful bureaucrats. Above all, let everyone follow the rules (and, in the boudoir, eroticize transgressing them).

Given this disenchanted nature, morality must be a struggle against life, a set of duties trumping our inclinations, a list of obligations that at times terminate in tragic conflict. For us, morality must be deliberative and obligatory while nature remains mechanistic, undirected, following its own separate course. Now morality must be universalizable–stern and rigorous stuff–applicable mainly to the good will or good outcomes, or else it succumbs to mere cant, empty relativism, or the shameless will to power.

In Patterns of Moral Complexity, the contemporary moral philosopher Charles Larmore writes candidly about what he deems the “heterogeneity of morals.” He concludes, “We have to live with the fact that we have obligations we cannot honor.” All right, but what obligations are these and why can’t they always be honored? Larmore claims that the principles of partiality, deontology, and consequentialism are the three principles that constitute modern morality. We are partial, he believes, in that we have particular projects that we deem good and that we seek to realize. In the pursuit of final aims that are ours, we do not expect others to value or pursue the same. Additionally, we have incontrovertible duties, as Kant held, duties that admit of no exceptions and that enjoin us always to act, or to abstain from acting, in a certain way (telling the truth, keeping our promises, never using another as a means, and so forth). Finally, we have an obligation to bring into being the most good or least evil overall. To say, therefore, that modern life is “morally complex” is just to say that there will be scenarios in which one principle may come into conflict with another and this with tragic implications. Larmore once again: “I do not think there is any systematic principle [that is, any higher order principle transcending these three] that will decide these conflicts.” Larmore’s honesty is telling, and I think he is right about the inevitability of tragic conflict in modernity, provided we accept the assumption that morality consists solely of incommensurable obligations.

For Larmore takes for granted what we moderns also take for granted–that we act on principles and that these principles “lie,” in his words, “at a high level of generality.” But this is only true once we take on board the assumption that nature is ‘other’ and that our fellows are not our friends but strangers, mere acquaintances, and potential foes. Our distrust runs deep. Yet when life is going well, there is no principle that we apply with rigor and constancy but, more simply, the face to face, the touch, the besito; no abstractions but your words; no Confucianism but, says the Daodejing, “filial piety and fraternal affection” arising and holding us close to one another.

An order collapses, “The state is in chaos,” and “there arises the loyal minister.” These are Laozi’s words of caution. Indeed, once nature flees from us and we, in our turn, seek to bring it back to us by taming it, then we and nature go our separate ways. Truly, modern life may be like H20, but it is not like water. Recognizing as much, we poets of life long for ethical life to be restored.

Part VII (final) tomorrow: Ethical Life Restored…

, ,

Kant’s tribunal (V)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 12, 2012 at 4:21 am

V

One of Hegel’s enigmatic theses from the Preface to The Philosophy of Right is that the actual is rational. The contemporary scholar Robert Pippin glosses this proposition–rightly, in my view–as a demand that being be intelligible. As human beings, we long for order in reality so much so that is scarcely conceivable that we could live at all were we utterly incapable of seeing how we fit into the general schema of things.

Philosophy may very well be the way we go about bringing order to lived reality. In a recent interview, the professional philosopher Raymond Geuss stated quite elegantly that philosophy is thinking in a systematic spirit without recourse to a system. Kant, a systematic philosopher from the first, did not pay heed to Geuss’s delicate distinction between being systematic and building systems. Instead, he developed a grand system in order to hold at bay the powerful forces, the plentiful incoherencies, the fragmented traditions running through the Western tradition and spilling into the modern world. In so doing, he took on board his contemporaries’ disenchanted conception of nature while also seeking to find a place for human beings in this newly emerging age.

The pressures thrust upon this backwaters man from Konigsberg were immense and, depending on your standpoint, Kant could either be charged with hubris or timidity. It is worth recalling that, by the end of the medieval period, the nominalists had already unwittingly and, contrary to their intentions, assigned God a minor role in what was to be a modern drama. If, as nominalists insisted, God acted from a distance from his creation, then it was only a matter of time before deists would see him as bringing the world into being and then removing himself utterly from the order of creation. The Creator and creation were no longer analogous but heterogenous. For their part, materialists would call the deists’ bluff, seeing no reason why efficient causality and the laws of nature could not, on their own, be sufficient to supply explanations for the mechanics and development of nature. Once a deist, Voltaire would later on throw his lot behind atheist materialists; to him, it seemed a logical progression. Applying Ockam’s Razor, materialists would do their part to cut God out of the drama entirely. He was, after all, an unnecessary and unwarranted otherworldly hypothesis. Given world enough and time, this-worldliness would win out and Nietzsche’s madman declaring God’s death would come as no surprise to us.

Nature, accordingly, was governed by mechanism, not directed by teleology. Nature did not flow like water; it consisted of analyzable properties and was governed by physical law. But could this be all for surely it felt as if we humans could act for reasons and with ends in mind. Or were we deluded in regarding ourselves as purposive beings? In addition, since nature was nothing but spatial extension–this, remember, the truth about which Pascal was absolutely horrified–what were we human beings to make of the richly hued, fine-grained objects we perceived and tasted, never mind the blushes and loves we shared? What on earth did we know and where on earth were we anyway?

Kant may have been an awkward Pietist and a tedious man, but he was, in all things, an exceptionally elegant thinker. In his day, he aroused everyone’s interests, was admired by most, was imitated by many, and yet managed to satisfy almost no one completely with his philosophical solutions. For Kant was, by turns, a man of measure, probity, and boldness who cautioned his contemporaries against flying too far beyond from realm of sense experience but who urged them nonetheless–dared them even?–to explore the limits of human comprehension.

His conclusions dazzle and puzzle at one and the same time. Here are a few: God’s existence can neither be proven nor disproven, neither affirmed nor denied by rational means; the world may be finite or infinite, a totality or not; we may have free will, we certainly must regard ourselves as acting under the idea of freedom, but human understanding cannot show this to be the case; we are a part of mechanized nature insofar as we have bodies and yet we are a part from nature insofar as we are rational persons; objects do indeed have secondary qualities yet these qualities are the results of our conceptual contributions and yet reality could not possibly appear to us the way it does unless we brought to bear such conceptual deliverances upon that which we receive; and–to round out this very partial list–we are warranted in regarding nature in teleological terms, provided we treat natural beings not as really striving toward final aims but as if they could. Kant’s conclusions, as I say, are breathless, tending toward the beautiful or the sublime depending on one’s mood.

The challenge presented to Kant–as momentous as it was impossibly demanding–was to reconstruct a modern moral order on the ruins of a medieval cosmos. Kant’s critical project is perhaps most succinctly characterized as the attempt to return us to ourselves but on a higher plane of abstraction. One or two levels up (or out), Kant’s is doubtless a fitting project for an increasingly abstract world of law and calculation, of modern states and international trade, a world, above all, that was beholden to a Theoretical Vision. Fitting, yes, but wrongheaded from the first.

This Theoretical Vision first becomes apparent in the question of what we can know and believe. In epistemology, Kant’s question-changing approach is to not to listen to nature as a lover listens to the wind chimes but to issue it a summons to appear in a certain light. And this is precisely what occurs as nature is brought to higher order conceptuality. When we ask, “What can we know?,” we are, Kant thinks following Locke’s lead, inquiring first about what contributions we are making to our comprehension of reality and second about the manner of reality’s appearing to us. We are not asking about nature as it is in itself, such a question being either poorly formulated, unintelligible, or, in any case, beyond the bounds of human understanding. We are asking about ourselves as subjects who come to represent reality. Given this orientation, reality is, as it were, ‘forced’ to appear in the terms we give it, the highly abstract terms of space and time, of efficient causality, of substance, and so forth.

In some respects, Kant’s elucidation of our claims to knowing is little more than a preparatory exercise for an elaboration on our moral lives. By the eighteenth century, it had already become common sense, one baldly stated by Hobbes and held by more cynical types like Bernard Mandeville, that human beings were thoroughgoingly self-interested agents who acted solely for the sake of realizing their own happiness. In time, the marketplace would come to be the sphere in which rational actors would seek to maximize their self-interest and satisfy their preferences. Still, although Kant granted that as natural beings we wanted to be happy where being happy just was identical with satisfying our inclinations regardless of the content of these inclinations, he could not stomach the thought that egoism could hold sway throughout the entirety of social life. But then where would some universally binding claims be discoverable, the herculean task of which would be to hold you fast to me and me tightly to my highest obligations? Where could we find the secular form of morality that would replace God’s edicts? Where indeed.

It is here that Kant draws on the analogy of natural law and moral law, the first applying to empirical beings, the second to rational persons. It is also here in the moral realm where he wishes to show that humans are capable of giving themselves law and of binding themselves to it, thereby transcending the siren calls of their lower natures as appetitive beings even as they achieve their higher ends as rational persons.

Less important for our purposes is getting straight the particulars of Kant’s supreme moral principle, the Categorical Imperative; far more important for us to grasp the Theoretical Vision Kant espouses and bequeaths us. The Theoretical Vision works by ripping humans out of nature, only to reintroduce nature to us in the guise of theoretical entities for use, consumption, analysis, and circumspection. One sees in Kant’s critical philosophy the apotheosis of human beings’ standing over and against nature and coming to confront an estranged reality as a set of theoretical entities revealing themselves to scientific investigations into their truth. Kant’s world, which is very much our own, presents us with over-there objects that are seemingly readymade for theoretical investigation. From a distance, we inspect objects, breaking them up into analyzable parts; we speak of objects as having discernible properties (recall Locke’s primary qualities); we regard morality as being law-like and as applying without exception; we think of humans as deliberative beings from the first, always on the verge of acting rightly or wrongly; we apply principles and laws to cases (e.g., bioethics, foreign policy); we accuse each other of hypocrisy (that is, of acting contrary to stated principle); we think of God, if we do at all, as an abstract entity; we speak to each other in terms of valid and sound arguments; we offer defenses of our firm positions; we conceive of material reality in terms of its abstract uses, its resources, its utility, its market value. In the end, we touch money, eat calories, act based on permissions and forbidden fruits, visit museums filled with mounted butterflies, and have nearly forgotten how to listen to or see each other.

In place of a way of being with nature, we have put Theory. By submitting nature to our questions, we can no longer let be. By submitting human nature to law, we can do no otherwise than act contrary to the natural world, restraining ourselves to act in accordance with duty, not in keeping with the rhythms of love. Whither has fled human beings who were once so fully immersed in a way of being that all these theoretical questions would never have emerged in the first place? Where is the full fecundity of sensuous experience? Where is still that elemental love of living flowingly according nature’s course?

Part VI: Life is not like Water…

Part VII (final): Ethical Life Restored…

, ,

Locke’s qualities (IV)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on May 11, 2012 at 4:53 am

IV

The sober minded Englishman John Locke read the Frenchman Descartes’ work approvingly, finding the “way of ideas” especially edifying for his empirical pursuits into the question of what we can know. Just as we must first examine our instruments before we can attend to what the instruments are measuring, so, Locke insisted, we must analyze our perceptual apparatus before we can hope to grasp with any certainty the contents of our perceptual experiences. Despite Locke’s being an empiricist and Descartes a rationalist, it is of far greater importance that they shared the same point of departure. For them as for their contemporaries, nature was already disenchanted, and our mental lives were presumed to be distinct from physical reality. But if this is the case, how can mind and world become reacquainted with each other?

This disenchanted picture is most clearly on view in Locke’s crucial distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was written in 1690, presents us with an epistemic puzzle. On the one hand, Locke wants to save our common sense intuitions about perceptual experience. He wants to say that there are objects with sense properties; that we do indeed see the redness of balls, surely do touch velvety fabrics, do smell fragrant roses, can taste the oakiness of wine, and so on. On the other hand, he turns our intuitions on their heads by seeking to show how the qualities that we think are in the objects themselves are really not in them at all. Where, then, is this redness in the red balls we claim to perceive there? More generally, if not of redness and rounds, of what do material objects like red balls actually consist?

Locke’s reply is that material objects consist entirely of particles whose intrinsic properties are mass, extension, shape, and velocity. According to Locke, primary qualities are those properties that are intrinsic to as well as indispensable for the object. They are (1) those properties that are in the objects themselves (intrinsic properties), (2) those without which the object would not be what is (necessary conditions), and (3) those that in fact make it what it is (constitutive conditions). To say that an object has a certain mass is just to say that it has that mass in itself and hence independent of whatever observations we make or could make about it.

By contrast, secondary qualities are secondary or “derivative” by dint of their not being in the objects themselves; they are instead relational properties that arise in our apprehension of whatever objects happen to appear to our senses. Whereas mass is something that is universal and essential to material bodies, the sensation of warmth is neither essential nor universal. But why is so? Locke reasons that warmth is correlative with my proximity to an object—the closer I get to a fire, the warmer I feel—as well as with the sensitivity of my sense organs—at some distance D1 from the fire, I would likely report feeling hotter than you would were you stationed at D2. As a result, due to the impact of our presence on the object in view and due also to the particular sensitivity of our perceptual apparatus, we have good reason to believe that such a quality as being warm can only be felt relative to the way we happen to be.

To a large degree, Locke is saying that the property of warmth comes and goes while that of mass stays the same with the metaphysical implication that permanence is to be privileged over variability. He is saying this, but he is also saying considerably more.

The epistemic puzzle is not alleviated, however, by this distinction, since Locke leaves us to wonder how we are to understand how particles that do not appear to our sense organs nevertheless produce in us the form of red balls, bluish nights, and swaying ailanthus trees. Here, Locke appeals to the “powers” or “dispositions” of the object to produce in us the ideas of being red, being loud, and so on. Secondary qualities are, in his words, “nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; and depend on those primary qualities.” Recall that Locke’s first blow to common sense involved smuggling colors and suchlike in through the back door by means of denying that colors exist in the things themselves. Now, color returns, albeit in neutered form, redness now a “power” or “disposition” within the object, a power to work on our sense organs. This line of argument rules out the thought that our idea of redness could correspond to the stretch of reality presently before us. But what in the objects produces these ideas in us, ideas that seem to bear no resemblance to mass or velocity? And by what mechanism? Locke’s answer: the particles themselves bring out these secondary qualities in us by means of a causal mechanism—or, more precisely, by means of efficient causality.

For those of us with a poetic spirit, the results of Locke’s empiricism are nothing if not unsettling. Nature, here bleached of attributes, awash only in particles, capable of strange “powers,” returns to us but only at a once remove. Worst still, our ordinary reality–those rocks and stones and trees of which Wordsworth writes so movingly–is either derivative or unreal but in either case much less interesting. For not only is the life of the natural world far less vitalistic inasmuch as seeds no longer ‘express’ themselves as trees, birds no longer greet their mates with song, and rivers no longer flow toward the sea; not only do our senses become passive and receptive, dull feelers of sensuous life; but–as we shall find in what follows–our aesthetic sense becomes attenuated, our sense of the face to face more opaque, the feel of experience less intense, less vibrant, more epistemically impoverished. In Locke’s picture of disenchanted nature, the distance between mind and world grows as vast as the distance between your face and mine, my touch and yours, our mouths and tongues and teeth. No longer do we know the world or each other by kissing; we know all, if we know at all, by analyzing mechanized bodies occupying space and time.

Kant, the greatest modern philosopher, has his work cut out for him, for he has inherited the disenchanted picture of nature from Descartes, Locke and others. Kant’s solution is to domesticate all his progeny: God will neither be proven nor disproven; man will be both apart of and a part of nature; teleology will return to nature in the form of the as if; and morality will be contrary to nature, raised to law, upheld by reason. Especially important to giving shape to modernity in general and to Kant’s system in particular was the emergence of a novel background assumption: the world functioned in accordance with an analogous set of laws. Just as nature followed physical law, so man followed moral law in ethics, general principles in psychology, the law of the marketplace in civil society, and positive law in politics. So we will see, particularly in the case of morality running contrary to nature.

Part V tomorrow: Kant’s tribunal…

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 196 other followers