‘waking life’

the idea is to remain in a constant state of departure while always arriving: it saves on introductions and goodbyes.

the ‘bottomless freedom of disappointment’

on the occasion of talking with him again — of forcing the months-long moment of silence to its crisis — i had, besides the ecstasy of anxiety, nothing but the disappointment of not knowing something beautiful to say, despite all those months i’d thought about what i might.

the story had ended exactly as it should have, with no defect or protuberance in form: with the unexpected and arbitrary departure, and then the intensely self-conscious struggle of figuring out what to make of it and how to move on. but the freedom of stories lies in their ability to end; their forms must somehow close back in on themselves, even if here and there they seem to dash off to infinity or ripple in a seeming singularity. no matter how well the story aestheticizes the psychology of its characters, it never gets at the real trouble (and pleasure) of keeping going, after it ends –

it’s like putting down one volume of proust and starting the next, not the same person you were as when you started; it’s the muted majesty of change, of inventing new ways for dramatizing the old chaos, the bottomless freedom of disappointment –

But Chekhov’s idea of ‘life’ is a bashful, milky complication, not a solving of things [...] he had a character in ‘Concerning Love’ complain that ‘decent Russians like ourselves have a passion for problems that have never been solved.’ Chekhov had such a passion for problems, but only if solution might stay unrequited [...] to be disappointed by one’s own story is an extraordinarily subtle freedom in literature, for it implies a character’s freedom to be disappointed not only by his own story but, by extension, by the story Chekhov has given him. Thus he wriggles out of Chekhov’s story into the bottomless freedom of disappointment.

– James Wood, “What Chekhov Meant by Life”

i share chekhov’s (and derrida’s, i should point out) distaste for closure; i wrote to christina a few days ago that “i’m always secretly afraid of discovering an author who totally ‘explains away’ the world in a perfect reconception of it, one that encompasses everything — but coming home helps me deconstruct the stupidity of that fear, when i realize that no matter how much i love my family, we always end up fighting at some point (that no matter what ideas or beliefs one has, there’s a huge distance between them and acting on them). if anyone has saved the world from ever being ‘explained away’ and thus made boring, it’s freud.”

i fly back to boston in three days, now with a refreshed sense of optimism in the possibilities of keeping going –

reflections on reading rorty at home

though i’m always on guard against making these kinds of claims, i can say without guilt that contingency, irony, and solidarity is probably the most beautiful book of discursive (rather than intentionally literary, which is an ironic distinction to be making here) thinking i’ve ever read. reading it has brought me the greatest delight bound up with the disappointment that these ideas and intuitions i have come to privately and independently have, in fact, already been codified and laid down with such profundity of sustained insight and clarity — which is essentially the reaction any real work of art should produce. what makes me conspicuously ironist, in rorty’s terms, is the character of this disappointment, which represents not so much jealousy as it does a presentiment of exhaustion: at the recognition that i still have to find and flesh out a final vocabulary that is entirely my own —

all of rorty’s thinking goes back to my idea of the “abstractness” of all thinking, or in other words all inference-making within a particular language. the question i posed recently when i was thinking about the supreme court’s ruling on desegregation policies in seattle — “how is that logic pulled down into the world?” — is the essential question, since it points out that fact that there is no such process that could “pull down” some train of thought to its implications in “the real world” for “the way things really are,” except in terms of its psychological powers of persuasion. the objection that this is naively another form of dogmatism describing an innate, ahistorical fact of “human nature” is written off in the recognition that this is not a claim about the way the world really is but rather a claim about the way the world really is for me.

out of this perspesctive, the desire to always “go meta” in language seems to me to suggest to nearly everyone that this is some sort of innate “capacity” (to echo kant) or acontingent “fact” of “reality” — but it is precisely the fact that we can always “go meta”, independent of our “first” principles, that renders that (socratic) process defunct, even in enlightment terms: for in those terms there ought to be some vocabulary with privileged and unique access to the “truth” about “the way things are.” the fact that we can always make this posturing toward a metavocabulary that seeks to identify “first” principles, however, makes it useless. this distills, in particular, the self-undermining or self-destructive capabilities of any final vocabulary, of any language — an idea that begs dangerous but intriguing comparison to godel’s ideas about incompleteness. a philosophical vocabulary cannot escape its implications of certain dogmatic platitudes that “lay the foundations” for its own epistemology or metaphysics. only we can escape the seduction of these kinds of inquiry by refusing to draw out these implications and attempt to act on them.

i think i described the situation rather concisely in a critique of james cook’s conception of mathematics as “precise philosophy”

If there’s something that distinguishes mathematics from philosophy (besides this difference in the types of problems confronted), it isn’t the rigor or precision by which it logically proceeds: it’s the ability to work purely abstractly without the messier human details. Axioms in philosophy so often carry the burden of compatibility (or incompatibility) with someone’s fundamental beliefs. An entire philosophy can change if one applies a different vocabulary or takes a different perspective, and it’s hardly ever possible to agree on first principles. Mathematics on the other hand clearly lays out its first principles, so that whereas changes in point of view often undermine philosophical inquiry (say the belief that god is or is not omniscient), they are precisely what strengthen mathematics (Poincare’s idea of giving different names to the same thing, e.g. functors).

it is this process of changing perspective — of redescription — that underlies all of rorty’s thinking. it’s no secret, then, why i’ve found this book so beautiful.

i’ll wrap up this sketchy post with a bit of a letter i just sent rob, motivated mainly by the fun i’ve had finishing this book while here at home:

there is a peculiar pleasure about coming home, though — and that is the pleasure of having ideas in a place that seems so far from them. it is like privately discovering the ecstasy of a life of the mind all over again, a secret and almost selfish pleasure made ecstatic precisely because of the contrast, because i am here in this place that seems so aloof to the existence of that world. in a crude metaphor, thinking in a place like mit — or practically anywhere in cambridge — becomes bound up in life like a routine, something everyone does and (usually) knows how to do; thinking here, however, is so far removed from the way people live, so devested of its power to affect life, that it takes on a world of its own, a secret and faraway world, and so literally puts me out of place, in the original greek meaning of “ecstatic” —

departing as air

[the disrupted] self sees its self-certainty as such to be completely
devoid of essence, sees that its pure personality is absolutely not a
personality. the spirit of its gratitude is, therefore, the feeling of the
most profound dejection as well as of extreme rebellion.

– hegel, die phenomenologie des geistes

what has caught me offguard is the realization that both outwardly and inwardly the whole ordeal of coming home (the lonely last few hours in the empty manhattan apartment, the hauling of the bags to the curb, the anxious taxi ride to la guardia, the disappointingly boring routine of figuring out how to get around a new airport on my own) has occured neither with a bang nor with a whimper — neither with excitement nor with sadness — but without notice at all, as if i’d never left —

another part of my life has officially drawn to a close.

there was the anticlimactic poster session this morning, preceded by a farewell barbecue yesterday at my pi’s apartment, which overlooks the rooftops of the east midtown skyline; there was the cathartic french movie, la faute a fidel, christina and i saw monday night in the village, preceded (and made cathartic) by two weeks of tiresome and focused twelve-hour days in the lab; there was the mad rush toward presenting at lab meeting last friday and submitting posters this monday; and of course, tonight, there was the farewell reception, the distribution of certificates and acknowledgments of a job well done, the exchanging of goodbyes with graduate students and postdocs, the sight of the east river from the fifteenth floor of sloan-kettering’s research institute for the last time. and somewhere behind the blankness i feel, having been overcome by the momentum of time’s passage the last month, there is the solemnity at leaving behind two months of work, passing it on to someone else, relinquishing the challenges and the privilege of being given the opportunity and independence to take them on. i have nevertheless been offered the possibility of returning to continue my work next summer.

tomorrow christina and i are taking a bus to princeton as our final adventure — i’m especially excited about visiting the institute for advanced study. i fly home sunday for two weeks before returning to mit on the first of september, when i look forward to re-immersing myself in the literature department, with classes on literature and ethics and british romantic poetry. i’m also taking a course on the classic phase of the novel at harvard (the two classes i wanted to take on metaphor and lyric aren’t being offered) with professor philip fisher.

in the meantime i have to figure out how to say goodbye to a city i’ve fallen in love with –

let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

in the meantime, i finally found a philosopher who came out and just explicitly said it in such a quoteable form:

“what if, after all, philosophy were nothing but literature?”

– philippe lacoue-labarthe, the subject of philosophy

the existential realm is, from the standpoint of propositional structure, a raging chaos.

– murray krieger, the play and place of criticism

a post will be coming soon when i recover from the delirium induced from spending, on average, more than twelve hours a day in the lab this past week.