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MELANCOLIA
I had finished two-thirds of the book before
I originally stopped several years ago, which,
considering its depth and difficulty is actually
a pretty good review. I do not know why I
stopped, but I shall start, first, with the
dedicatory quotes just before the *CONTENTS*
and then go to my last serious underlings
on page 245.
F. H. BRADLEY: Metaphysics is the finding
of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct,
but to find these reasons is
no less an instinct.
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DAVID HUME:
"To consider the matter aright, reason
is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible
instinct in our souls, which carries us along
a certain train of ideas, and endows them
with particular qualities, according to their
particular situations and relations."
*LIVINGSTON:
*The wisdom of common life is thoroughly
social and can be known only through CONVERSATION
. . . Here again we have the central truth
of the dialectic that the source of belief
and conduct is not reflection but custom.
Critical reflection may be carried out within
the domain of custom but cannot go beyond
it.
"The Materials of this Commerce must
chiefly be furnished by Conversation and
common Life: The manufacturing of them alone
belongs to learning*"
DAVID HUME: ESSAYS page 535, ed. Miller, Liberty Classics
. . . |
Here the barbarism of refinement appears
as a failure to consult experience as the
source of critical thought. But by experience?
Hume does not mean the sense-data epistemology
of modern empiricism with which he is unhappily
still identified. That abstract notion of
experience is itself a barbarism of refinement.
Experience for Hume is the enjoyment through
conversation of the deeply established customs
and conventions of a way of life.
DAVID HUME:
And indeed, what could be expected from Men
who never consulted Experience in any of
their Reasonings, or who never searched for
that Experience, where alone it is to be
found, in Common Life and Conversation**
ESSAYS, ibid.*
Page xi
*This is a study both in the history of ideas
and in philosophy. It is, of course, difficult
to combine the two. The former demands the
Collingwoodian ideal of rethinking past thoughts
as the agent understood them. The later demands
speculative judgment about reality independent
of what past thinkers have thought. But in
the end, both things must be done, if there
is to be such a thing as a tradition of philosophical
inquiry.* |
ON THE STRANGE
DISJUNCTEDNESS OF MODERN POETRY
Maybe this theme is called forth by the many
deep distractions in my life whereby I cannot
concentrate on a strict rational development
of a philosophical theme. And yet one such
theme I would like to discuss yet have great
difficulty expressing is Hume?s Skepticism,
the meaning of the ancient Skepticism, the
actual general agreement in fundamental motive
of all the ancient philosophies in the theme
*How to Live*. 888.
One could say Hume's
main disagreement with all other modern philosophy,
a disagreement which is startlingly fundamental
when one sees it, is that the only true purpose
of philosophy is how to live, not how to
understand. He would say that when one starts
examination of one?s thought processes, one
is already fully understanding according
to one context or another. But when modern
philosophy tries to deal with *How to Live*
either it distances itself terribly from
the question in its everyday practicality
or tends to follow lines of thought - usually
unknowingly - of ancient Skepticism which
is fundamentally the same as Hume?s Skepticism
which is never the questioning of other beliefs
from the standpoint one knows one certain
truth like Descartes *Cogito ergo sum* because
Hume, like Sextus Empiricus, would question
the validity that one thinks, that one *is*
and that there even is an *I*.
The ancient Skeptic,
Livingston would say, is not able to find
any certain truth to start from whatsoever,
though the drive to find *truth* nonetheless,
in whatever form - and no form whatsoever
seems indicated or privileged, is a powerful
one, even a survival factor, and yet even
*survival* as a known value is highly questionable,
something Skepticism can not only share with
Stoicism - which considers self-love concomitant
with self-survival as its primary premise,
something many may not realize - but also
with Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and all
other ancient philosophers, that is, though
self-survival with its rational implications
[which tend to be seen as altruism when it
certainly is not in any way, since *altruism*
tends to be a *self-sufficient principle*
standing above the value of the self which
none of the ancient philosophers would agree
to] advocates getting along with one?s fellow
man in the sense of *Love thy neighbor as
thyself* but in a drastic sense incomprehensible
today because self-sacrifice as if the neighbor
were somehow more valuable than one?s self
would be seen as a logical absurdity because
if one does not value oneself, one cannot
possibly value one?s neighbor in any rational
sense.
This subterranean but
violent conflict between ancient philosophy,
inclusive of Hume as possibly the only modern
philosopher that truly understands them,
versus the primally self-centeredness of
modern philosophy - primal in the sense of
*How else can one think?* - actually may
be seen far better in modern poetry which,
in those poets we still listen to - even
if reluctantly - in this other side of the
twentieth century, because, on the one hand,
they are in all practicality existentially
self-centered to an extreme degree and yet
on the other hand quite explicit in their
need of a social life which is in no way
the *social life* of fundamentally agreeing
with everyone else as it has become but the
conversationalist life of Hume where many
fundamentally different points of view can
be put in polite dialogue with others in
a mannerly fashion without forcing oneself
to find artificial agreement as if it were
some kind of ethical principle.
This is what Cicero largely
does in his philosophical dialogues to the
point one cannot clearly discern the differences
between philosophical positions. This is
because, from his point of view, all philosophy
is in agreement in its primal motive, to
find out how to live whereas the differences
in ancient philosophy modern scholars search
out is their differences - which are many
- on how to understand as the pre-eminent
point to be made altogether whereas for Cicero
or Hume - whom Livingston calls a Ciceronian
humanist - the only point of philosophy is
learning how to live wherein understanding
per se is merely a tool.
The purportedly great
differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism,
when closely examined, resolve not into differences
of fundamental principles of knowledge but
how this knowledge is to be applied in learning
how to live, where the actual practice of
living is very similar between them, whereas
their approaches of understanding to achieve
that end can, seemingly, vastly differ on
the surface - Epicurean atheism and scientism
versus Stoic acknowledgement of a *higher
power* which actually resolves down to the
difference between having to accept fatalistically
the power of chance in life versus whatever
happens is rational, must happen that way,
and therefore, since rationality is the supreme
value, must somehow be good, a difference
most people would simply shrug off as of
no importance, as merely a difference as
to how one approaches life. But *approaching
life* is what they are all about, not the
other way around - not learn how to understand
- and then approach life. One, to the ancients,
is always already on the way to approaching
life and wants to learn how to understand
that process. If *knowing* does not work,
then try something else. That could never
be *faith* which assumes an absolute knowledge
of some sort [and makes it much more like
modern philosophy which Hume describes as
*melancholic* for that reason] but rather
more like Hume?s *Try this until something
better comes along*.
The poetry of Robert
Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop among many others,
and the short stories, letters, and essays
of Flannery O?Connor, show the off-centered
self-centeredness of the modern mind in a
living way modern philosophy, at best, can
only do in obscure principles and generalities
made self-consistent in themselves but completely
contradicting practical living experience.
While in practice accepting, *Nothing is
certain, everything must be doubted*, they
in no way accept the solid rock grounding
of the cogito but rather question the mode
of existence of their own identity and acknowledge
the fragmented and multi, contradictorily
motivated starting points of their thinking.
To them this is not a deficit but is the
modern stuff of poetry which is not well
seen in the poetry of the nineteenth century,
and hardly at all in the poetry of the eighteenth
century and can really only be found in the
plays of Shakespeare fully and explicitly.
This was brought home
to me with a shock when, starting a biography
of Lincoln, I read his favorite Shakespearean
characters were Macbeth, Richard III, and
Claudius. Lincoln in many ways is a powerful
exemplification of how a truly thoughtful
and individual human being must in fact develop
in the modern world. His Shakespeare - and
to many others of his generation - was his
*ancient philosophy* of thinking about how
to live which makes Lincoln an enigma to
modern scholars who seem to be thinking more
and more in stereotypes of what a person
*should* be and then are pleasantly surprised
with their lack of understanding of a titanic
figure like Lincoln. He was *All things to
all men* which should give us second thoughts
about another truly enigmatic and contradictory
figure, Paul.
Modern poetry does not
proceed in supplying normal expectations
of what one *should* think, but piles up,
sometimes, things that seem disjointed until,
coming to the last line, the whole actually
somehow seems to be summed up.. But it is
not easily said at all *How?*
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