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The rites of spring go on and on
Apr. 3rd, 2014 02:57 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. Today is the first day of no ice on the pond. The spring bulbs have burst out of the ground all over in the last few days.
I was going to live-blog the Jays opener the other day, like I did in 2012, but got side-tracked. Just as well, it kinda sucked. I was a bit taken aback to re-read my first "Rites of spring" post, from 2008. I had just taught the human nature course for the second time. I have just finished teaching it for the third time, and I have just turned down an offer to teach it again for the first time. Those first two times I taught it were the first two times I taught any course at all, and it had been a bit better the second time than the first time, and I was hopeful. It was one of the few times that I've ever seemed, well, not at least tinged-with-melancholy around here. Within a year after that, life had started to go haywire.
If all goes according to "plan", I'll have given my last lecture today. Last class altogether will be Monday, a 4th-year seminar on Heidegger, a make-up meeting for a snow day. And then, I have been telling people, I plan to retire to the pub I live-blogged the 2012 Jays opener from, for my retirement party.
But there isn't really a plan, there never really has been a plan. (I am always on my way north; maybe eventually I will have gotten there. It's the closest thing to a plan I've got right now.) A couple of months ago someone said, "Tell me a story," and I said I don't have any stories, I only have fragments. I have some senses of things, that glow and fade and hum and buzz and sputter and spark and explode and go dark ... one of Heidegger's phrases comes to mind: they're always "underway toward language" but they've never gotten there. You say things and they're not right and you get the idea that whatever you say is never right; you get to be like Zarathustra saying to his animals that words are cheerful lies that dance over things ... and they say to him, but to us all things are dancing, too, and he tells them, yes, I know, I know, but how easily you make a hurdy-gurdy song of it.
Plato has Socrates say that what marks dialectical people is that they draw parts together into wholes, that they make one out of many. But what you see in Plato is that the whole is always contingent, never stable. The dialectician also makes many out of one, separates the whole out into parts, reassembles them ... collection and division, collection and division, endlessly. The number of forms is equal to the number of possible collections; the number of logoi is equal to the number of possible sets of all collections. Theoretically there must be a logos of all possible sets of collections, but--it must be only a theoretical logos?
Socrates says in the Phaedo that when you get into the argument game you run the risk of becoming a misologist: every particular logos ends up betraying your trust if you push it far enough, and eventually you mistrust logoi altogether. You end up like Socrates in the Apology, knowing nothing except that you know nothing, and so unable to live in the world: the craftsmen, he concedes in the Apology, know something that he doesn't know--they must, because they can do things that he can't do--but they can't tell the difference between what they do know and what they don't know; they think they know things that they don't. Better, Socrates says, to have the wisdom to know what you know and what you don't know, even if that means disavowing all knowledge of anything. Socrates in the Phaedo has given up philosophy for mythologizing, calling into question (but this question is at the heart of every dialogue) the distinction between the two. It's in the Phaedo that Plato has Socrates invent the forms. Beware I don't mislead you here, he tells the others; I'm in no position to care about whether what I say is true or not. Now, at last, I just need a story I can believe in--sometimes, he says, when you have no idea what the truth is, you just have to put your faith in the most vigorous story available--that will get me through the day, this day of all days.
I was going to live-blog the Jays opener the other day, like I did in 2012, but got side-tracked. Just as well, it kinda sucked. I was a bit taken aback to re-read my first "Rites of spring" post, from 2008. I had just taught the human nature course for the second time. I have just finished teaching it for the third time, and I have just turned down an offer to teach it again for the first time. Those first two times I taught it were the first two times I taught any course at all, and it had been a bit better the second time than the first time, and I was hopeful. It was one of the few times that I've ever seemed, well, not at least tinged-with-melancholy around here. Within a year after that, life had started to go haywire.
If all goes according to "plan", I'll have given my last lecture today. Last class altogether will be Monday, a 4th-year seminar on Heidegger, a make-up meeting for a snow day. And then, I have been telling people, I plan to retire to the pub I live-blogged the 2012 Jays opener from, for my retirement party.
But there isn't really a plan, there never really has been a plan. (I am always on my way north; maybe eventually I will have gotten there. It's the closest thing to a plan I've got right now.) A couple of months ago someone said, "Tell me a story," and I said I don't have any stories, I only have fragments. I have some senses of things, that glow and fade and hum and buzz and sputter and spark and explode and go dark ... one of Heidegger's phrases comes to mind: they're always "underway toward language" but they've never gotten there. You say things and they're not right and you get the idea that whatever you say is never right; you get to be like Zarathustra saying to his animals that words are cheerful lies that dance over things ... and they say to him, but to us all things are dancing, too, and he tells them, yes, I know, I know, but how easily you make a hurdy-gurdy song of it.
Plato has Socrates say that what marks dialectical people is that they draw parts together into wholes, that they make one out of many. But what you see in Plato is that the whole is always contingent, never stable. The dialectician also makes many out of one, separates the whole out into parts, reassembles them ... collection and division, collection and division, endlessly. The number of forms is equal to the number of possible collections; the number of logoi is equal to the number of possible sets of all collections. Theoretically there must be a logos of all possible sets of collections, but--it must be only a theoretical logos?
Socrates says in the Phaedo that when you get into the argument game you run the risk of becoming a misologist: every particular logos ends up betraying your trust if you push it far enough, and eventually you mistrust logoi altogether. You end up like Socrates in the Apology, knowing nothing except that you know nothing, and so unable to live in the world: the craftsmen, he concedes in the Apology, know something that he doesn't know--they must, because they can do things that he can't do--but they can't tell the difference between what they do know and what they don't know; they think they know things that they don't. Better, Socrates says, to have the wisdom to know what you know and what you don't know, even if that means disavowing all knowledge of anything. Socrates in the Phaedo has given up philosophy for mythologizing, calling into question (but this question is at the heart of every dialogue) the distinction between the two. It's in the Phaedo that Plato has Socrates invent the forms. Beware I don't mislead you here, he tells the others; I'm in no position to care about whether what I say is true or not. Now, at last, I just need a story I can believe in--sometimes, he says, when you have no idea what the truth is, you just have to put your faith in the most vigorous story available--that will get me through the day, this day of all days.
