Our familiar circle at St John's is various enough, I suppose, students coming and going from year to year--but among the tutors, now, how long can they really go back and forth amongst themselves and feel like that is sufficient--Touchstones, executive seminars, etc, because these ideas need to be heard, these stories told. When the teller is a book, it matters how we read it--and the Book, or the Qu'ran, how much more! Finally, that lingering question about Jonah's experience in the deep, and under the gourd--what about that righteous person, a kind of Meno, in whom no amount of talking and questioning and signs avails to give the understanding, the humor? the Pharisees, the Furies, like the poor, will be with us always?
For almost as long as I've been looking for jobs, the jobs have been getting more elusive, giving some kind of semblance anyway to the fact of the ever-existing and -growing difference between haves and have-nots. Yet that a place like this persists, small as it is and apparently purposefully so, has to mean something, too. Does it have to be so grand and expensive, relying on the rich, who have not only money but taste and a certain philosophic bent? Could it not be adapted to the needs of others starting at a much more basic level of reading and means both? Or is a certain amount of economic well-being prerequisite for the interest in so many unsettling questions?--unsettling up to a point, but your house and bank accounts are still safe from them. Or is the current and recurrent crisis the voice crying out in the wilderness for just these questions to be asked, and that the answers have some real bearing on lived experience its demand? We are so detached here from the world, the protests, repressions, board rooms, wars, and the necessity of working within that whole complex of forces; but we are so nourished here with ideas that when we do become aware of it waiting for us out there, we can't help imagining all the impact our ideas will have, leaping over by thought the rift, the disconnect, of privilege and circumstances. What is the project but to bring these two, ideas and the world, more into harmony? But can it be done unless somewhere each of the extremities is practically unmitigated?
The real questions about economics are all yet unasked--what our needs are and where they shade into wants, as if it were not a need in us to want and desire; how these require our living together, and only up to a certain point can we live together before we no longer feel connected with each other, or positively hostile to the people around us; and why there should be some analogy between the individual and the collective of which the household is primary and gives its name to the dismal science? What conditions we live in now, what these impose on us as far as our ability to think about the origins of our socialization and exchange--for at this point we are so abstracted from the grounds of need and nature, and full of history of things and thought, and so dependent on machinery for our lives' running smoothly which we never installed for ourselves but were more installed into. Even the household is not its owners', even the state is not its citizens', but the weighted time of money in electronic channels flows between and links all these, as if for its own purposes and not ours. What if this is not just rhetoric now but a real impasse--and the analogy of individual to state is rather an opposition and a conflict? How do we work, not from origins to it, but from it and where we are now back to where we can be?
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Whether I might not be a monster "more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon"
Having to ask whether there is any such thing as a natural scholar, or whether it would be desirable for there to be, even; or anyhow what it is, then, that does lead us to read rather than to the various other ways of spending the time--in some people, it begins to look like a kind of pride and pedantry, but this can't be the only thing, because in others it is nowhere near strong enough to have overcome those other claims on our attention, other pastimes or vocations. And sure enough, some of us like to believe we, at least, read in meekness, for the sake of that wonder, and to become better--not better than others, not so as to lord it over them and berate them for shiftless dolts, but better than ourselves, a better being ourselves.
Something halfway between self-knowledge and self-creation, yet not in service of the self meanly, but surely drawn on by that love of the good; it's just that here we have no other vehicle, so to speak, than the body and the self, to go after it. So that we have to say what we mean by those, and in what sense they are ours: the body, the body politic; the self, and its varieties of metamorphosis--moods, as simple as that; feelings, memories, reveries, those voices in books and conversations and conversions. What is meant by those enthusiasts who could so lightly outright reject the self as an efficacy, with all its categories, and call it merely a construct?--because this movement, too, it seems, is still part of what the self is, and among its capabilities, perhaps one of the most devious. And devious for what--or whom is the self helping? Is it out for itself, or does it proceed with irony or with calculation, or are more of its motives buried in its own unconscious, or in the labyrinthine structures of the race, what is past gripping and shaping what is to come, or else in airy concatenations down and up from the divine, a Jacob's ladder, and we participants in those ineffable purposes?
Something halfway between self-knowledge and self-creation, yet not in service of the self meanly, but surely drawn on by that love of the good; it's just that here we have no other vehicle, so to speak, than the body and the self, to go after it. So that we have to say what we mean by those, and in what sense they are ours: the body, the body politic; the self, and its varieties of metamorphosis--moods, as simple as that; feelings, memories, reveries, those voices in books and conversations and conversions. What is meant by those enthusiasts who could so lightly outright reject the self as an efficacy, with all its categories, and call it merely a construct?--because this movement, too, it seems, is still part of what the self is, and among its capabilities, perhaps one of the most devious. And devious for what--or whom is the self helping? Is it out for itself, or does it proceed with irony or with calculation, or are more of its motives buried in its own unconscious, or in the labyrinthine structures of the race, what is past gripping and shaping what is to come, or else in airy concatenations down and up from the divine, a Jacob's ladder, and we participants in those ineffable purposes?
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Barr and Klein and Harrell and us
A question I'd wanted to ask, if I hadn't been so engrossed in observing what was going on there between the tutors and the few bold students, bringing in their Socrates and their Strauss, went to that experience of wonder, but not as a philosophical concatenation, but as the older intimations of self and world, the careening learning of childhood--to what stage in life should we assign such an education as this? and then, prior to that, in what sense can we educate in wonder? Is the child's wonderment at all comparable to the adult's? to the philosopher's? or is each, while unmixed, somehow apt to its place? On the face of it, you might say the wonder of childhood is prerequisite for the free play of intellect, for it to develop later in life at all, rather than becoming ossified and scared into confines. Then the sort of education that would allow for that free play of intellect (proto-intellect if you prefer) in a child really looks nothing like a curriculum of great books, but something close to what someone tried to sketch out from the hispter's phone's lines of Shakespeare's Arden, a learning how to read, and to read between, so as to create meaning. The work of refining that, vis-a-vis sedimentary assumptions, if we permit it at all, comes later, once some basis is esablished--a tree after all is rooted in a soil--and prehaps unconsciously at first, while the wonder is all-embraing, and self-consciousness nil. Questions of confidence hardly arise, only avoiding fear and seeking delight. Personally, my great books as a child were legos, swing sets, and videogames. Books at school were preferable to the waste of time of most of the lessons, then a good in themselves later.
At stake in the life of the mind lecture and question period was the freedom of the intellect, the capacity of ordinary non-great writers to have insights, but also the girl sitting up close who goes out for drinks with the tutors every week, and the option of sitting outside watching the same sunset as glows there in the great hall, but with the rabbits and birds. All told, the discussion of the questions lasted much longer than the representation of the two ideas--both the question why is it so? why is there something? and the audience questions around the table, where there were attempts to muddy the distinction or cast it as a tension, or ask what the outcome should be, or how palpable assumptions and this sediment are--even tentative revisions for the college involving Lady Gaga or film, which sound excellent even if they were made in jest--but for all the disagreements and quibbles, to me it looked like a lot of the same assumptions were still at work, and wonderment at original creative insight balked at, and too many old white men sitting around, whose institution pays them to do so, and if it is at controversy over its idea of itself, it will be from that homogeneity rather than from the fruitful diversity of thinking.
At stake in the life of the mind lecture and question period was the freedom of the intellect, the capacity of ordinary non-great writers to have insights, but also the girl sitting up close who goes out for drinks with the tutors every week, and the option of sitting outside watching the same sunset as glows there in the great hall, but with the rabbits and birds. All told, the discussion of the questions lasted much longer than the representation of the two ideas--both the question why is it so? why is there something? and the audience questions around the table, where there were attempts to muddy the distinction or cast it as a tension, or ask what the outcome should be, or how palpable assumptions and this sediment are--even tentative revisions for the college involving Lady Gaga or film, which sound excellent even if they were made in jest--but for all the disagreements and quibbles, to me it looked like a lot of the same assumptions were still at work, and wonderment at original creative insight balked at, and too many old white men sitting around, whose institution pays them to do so, and if it is at controversy over its idea of itself, it will be from that homogeneity rather than from the fruitful diversity of thinking.