how many times do i repeat these complaints, spared from them anymore only by the joy i find in losing myself in reading:

Alas! Am I cut out for all this? You know me for a man of passionate enthusiasms and sudden depressions. If only you knew all the invisible nets of inaction that surround my body and all the mists that float in my brain! I often feel the most overwhelming fatigue at the idea of performing the smallest action, and it is only through great effort that I succeed in grasping the simplest idea. My youth steeped me in I know not what drug of apathy for the rest of my days. [...] I have dragged this with me, through everything I have done — at school, in Paris, in Rouen, on the Nile, on our trip. You, with your clear and precise nature, have often rebelled against these vague normandismes which I apologized for so clumsily and you have not spared me your criticism!

– Flaubert, in a letter to Maxime Du Camp, October 1851

flaubert and the language problem

helen vendler gave a talk tonight at the harvard humanities center on her new book on yeats’s lyric form. i admire her self-deprecation as much as rorty’s; she unabashedly admitted her own inability to “understand” yeats as a graduate student and her continued, frustrating ignorance throughout many years of her teaching career. it is moving to hear america’s best close-reader of poetry admit major lacunae in understanding, even if she was slightly hyperbolic.

tonight i find myself writing yet another paper, and wondering yet again, in fits of ammons-like anxiety, what it means for me to feel so overmastered merely by the idea of the project of writing five fantastic pages of glittering prose — a feeling that makes it so hard to get started in the first place, and one i wasn’t so strongly immobilized by until this year. barzun’s keen critique of contemporary self-consciousness becomes more relevant by the week (which is to say, by each new writing deadline).

but to get at the title of this post (and back to my writing), here’s the concluding paragraph from leo bersani’s introduction to my edition of madame bovary, in which he brilliantly summarizes an entire school of literary-artistic thought about the epistemological status of language and the imagination (one which uncannily echoes innumerable strains of rorty’s thought), that age-old central interest of mine:

But the fictions of language may in fact be reality, or at least the only reality we can know. And what we like to think of as living in harmony with reality may be simply a knack for multiplying fictions, for accommodating new versions of experience to older ones so that we may impose a personal if always tentative unity on the inexplicable richness of our imagination. That unity is our personal style, which, as Maupassant rightly suggests, is not at all what Flaubert meant in his ascetic devotion to an idea of style which necessarily crippled his own inventiveness. What we miss in Flaubert is some trust in those fictions which tempted but frightened him; for, as his work and his career movingly illustrate, the alternative to that trust is a panic at the mind’s inventions and the impressive but perhaps unnecessary torture of trying to be “realistic.”

barzun, culture, and the “prolonged incitement to finesse”

(photo borrowed from here)

i stumbled onto arthur krystal’s fantastic new yorker article on jacques barzun today, after reading through the one book i have of barzun’s (the culture we deserve) completely fortuitously on saturday. my favorite essay in the collection was the first — called “culture high and dry” — in which barzun provocatively pits academic scholarship against “culture,” which he defines early on in his essay as “the traditional things of the mind and spirit, the interests and abilities acquired by taking thought; in short, the effort that used to be called cultivation — cultivation of the self.” here’s a longer excerpt:

But the same human mind that has created science by the analytical method can work in an entirely different way. The mathematician-philosopher Pascal pointed this out 350 years ago. He called the way of analysis the “geometrical bent.” [...] The other use, direction, or bent, Pascal called the espirit de finesse — we might call it “intuitive understanding.” It goes about its business just the other way. It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. [...]

Now, the things that make up culture are understood and remembered and enjoyed by mental finesse; they are for inspection as wholes, not for analysis and measurement; they lack definable, unchangeable parts.

[...]

It is not surprising that the flowering of methods has taken place in the university, for that institution has the duty to teach. And any subject, to be teachable, must be presented in systematic form. There must be definitions, principles, methods for covering and mastering the ground. I have used literature as illustrative, because its academic treatment is the most familiar, but there are corresponding methods in other departments. Art history devotes itself to iconography — translating symbols in a painting or finding sources and parallels in other paintings or in literature. Musicology analyzes styles, classifies technical devices, or tests accomplishment by one or another method, such as Schenker analysis. [...]

The magic spell of science is evident in these various procedures: scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometrical mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not “discourse about,” nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.

“american philosophy”

i just stumbled onto some fantastic clips from a film called american philosophy:

in another clip on “the putnam-rorty debate and the pragmatist revival,” rorty says, in typical deflationary style:

When people ask what philosophy is good for, I don’t think one can do anything except say philosophy is the following series of books, starting with Plato and coming on down — all those things that Whitehead called footnotes to Plato. These books have influenced the way human beings have thought of themselves, the way they’ve organized themselves into social groups in various ways. The people who are writing footnotes to footnotes to footnotes to Plato are making suggestions about how we might think of ourselves, how we might organize society — but of course, so are all the other intellectuals; they’re making the same sorts of suggestions. Philosophy is just suggestions of this sort made by people who have read certain books as opposed to suggestions made by people who have read other sorts of books.

watch the whole thing here:

rorty, quine, and the privileged status of science

it is a common — and often scathing — rebuke of postmodern critiques of reason (especially of the anti-correspondence arguments rorty advances in his seminal work, philosophy and the mirror of nature), that such theories divest science of its privileged status and unique ability to describe the world, or to discover truths about an objective reality independent of the human mind — thereby placing it on the same footing alongside other forms of discourse in what one could imagine, i suppose, as a completely egalitarian landscape of equally legitimate vocabularies one might use to describe, make sense of, and function within the world.

nyu philosopher paul boghossian rehearses this standard criticism in the first few pages of his book fear of knowledge: against relativism and constructivism, a book i’m hoping soon to read in full:

Arresting as these remarks are, they would only be of passing interest were it not for the enormous influence of the general philosophical perspective they represent. Especially within the academy, but also and inevitably to some extend outside of it, the idea that there are “many equally valid ways of knowing the world,” with science being just one of them, has taken very deep root. In vast stretches of the humanities and social sciences, this sort of “postmodernist relativism” about knowledge has achieved the status of orthodoxy. [...] We are not necessarily fact-objectivists about all domains of judgment [...] But on a factual question such as the one about the origin of the first Americans, we are inclined to think, surely, there is just some objective fact of the matter. [...] Because we believe all this, we defer to the deliverances of science: we assign it a privileged role in determining what to teach our children at school, what to accept as probative in our courts of law and what to base our social policies on. We take there to be a fact of the matter as to what is true.

but d. wade hands makes a keen distinction between rorty’s and quine’s philosophical skepticisms in a footnote to an essay in his collection, testing, rationality, and progress: essays on the popperian tradition in economic methodology — an important, obvious, though often overlooked distinction, to my mind, that shows epistemological skepticism doesn’t necessarily entail a demotion of science:

Now, Rorty also argues that there is no first philosophy; but his view — and that of antimodernism more generally — is often taken to undermine science. The difference is that, if science receives its primary support from the epistemological stories about its access to privileged representations, then undermining that epistemology as Rorty does also undermines the privileged position of science and brings it down to the level of any other (all other) discourse. On the other hand, if science is self-supporting (either prima facie or because of its instrumental success) as I would characterize the Quinean view, then the destruction of the narrative about its epistemic privilege is only a problem for philosophy; it leaves science unscathed.

hume on eloquence, rorty on language

Nothing is more capable of infusing any passion into the mind, than eloquence, by which objects are represented in their strongest and most lively colours. We may of ourselves acknowledge, that such an object is valuable, and such another odious; but till an orator excites the imagination, and gives force to these ideas, they may have but a feeble influence either on the will or the affections.

– A Treatise on Human Nature (II.iii.6.7)

although i haven’t, of course, read his entire oeuvre (in fact, i bought volumes 1 and 3 of his collected philosophical papers from amazon just yesterday) — and though i don’t consider contingency, irony, and solidarity a failure or disappointment in any sense — i wonder how much more convincing rorty might have been in that book had he drawn support explicitly from a humean philosophy of mind, using exactly this sort of argument about eloquence (or rhetoric in general) to ground his beliefs that

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. The realization that the world does not tell us what language games to play should not, however, lead us to say that a decision about which to play is arbitrary, nor to say that it is the expression of something deep within us. [...] Europe did not decide to accept that idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others. (p. 6, CIS)

though he confesses in the introduction to occasionally “skating on pretty thin ice” in this book, this debt to hume (of which this particular observation is only a small instance) seems to me so great that i’m a bit astonished he didn’t treat him more prominently in his writing.

completely unrelated: most people can’t distinguish my hyperlinks from regular text because the font colors are too similar, but i’m too lazy to select a new color and update the CSS. so from now on — if you care, dear reader — i’ll bold all my links, perhaps to give more force to the ideas they display.

rorty on verse

i was once very hostile to the idea that all great literature, at bottom, is consolation (especially when those words came out of the mouth of the peevish dakin in the film version of the history boys), but it’s on days like this, when i find myself once again in the doldrums, that i not only don’t mind such a thought, but believe there’s nothing at all embarrassing about it potentially being the truth.

shortly before his death this summer, rorty wrote a short essay called “the fire of life,” which has been published in this month’s issue of poetry magazine. he writes:

Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.”

[...]

Though various bits of verse have meant a great deal to me at particular moments in my life, I have never been able to write any myself (except for scribbling sonnets during dull faculty meetings — a form of  doodling). Nor do I keep up with the work of contemporary poets. When I do read verse, it is mostly favorites from adolescence. I suspect that my ambivalent relation to poetry, in this narrower sense, is a result of Oedipal complications produced by having had a poet for a father. (See James Rorty, Children of the Sun (Macmillan, 1926).)

However that may be, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

stanley cavell on emerson & tragedy

(photo borrowed from here)

i bought two of cavell’s books today, philosophy the day after tomorrow and cities of words. the former is lucid and enjoyable, but the latter is a real gem.

It is a characteristic criticism of Emerson to say that he lacks a sense of tragedy; for otherwise how can he seem so persistently to preach cheerfulness? But suppose that what Emerson perceives, when he speaks of his fellow citizens as existing in a state of secret melancholy, is that in a democracy, which depends upon a state of willingness to act for the common good, despair is a political emotion, discouraging both participation and patience. So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he and she raise and cheer us, he is asking for a step of political encouragement, one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of compromise with justice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is rather an index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the one we sustain, one we know there is no good reason we perpetually fail to attain.

some reaffirming words, after reading (and deeply connecting with) john gravois’s article on impostor syndrome in the chronicle this week. i couldn’t count the number of times each week i come to the conclusion that i’m a fraud and genuinely don’t know anything. in retrospect, i wonder how much such worries may have to do with a kind of rortyan ironism. (i’m thinking in particular of the first condition rorty gives of the ironist, as someone who “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered.”)

anyway — cavell is giving a talk on musical epic this friday at the harvard film archive; i couldn’t be more excited. i’ll get around to the second part of my post on naive falsifications of rorty sometime or another —

The poem
                if it reflects the sea
                                reflects only
its dance
                upon that profound depth
                                where
it seems to triumph.
                The bomb put an end
                                to all that.
I am reminded
                that the bomb
                                also
is a flower
                dedicated
                                howbeit
to our destruction.
                The mere picture
                                of the exploding bomb
fascinates us
                so that we cannot wait
                                to prostrate ourselves
before it. We do not believe
                that love
                                can so wreck our lives.

     – Williams, from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

by mid-morning thrushes go quiet
in fingerling birches the hay field
exhales two tons of water
and someone who leaped into your life
like a crown fire blows out

     – forrest gander, from “present tense”