A wind comes off a frozen peak
Apr. 25th, 2006 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
High today, here: 7. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: 0.
High today in TO: 8. Dewpoint then: -7. High dewpoint: -1.
Low today on the balcony: 9.7. Low: 1.8. Currently: 2.3.
I thought tonight's House was the first one I'd seen that didn't involve a misdiagnosis, or rather several misdiagnoses, but then it did, sort of. It did also, however, feature what I suspect is the first faith-healer character in the history of television who really believes he heals people. Though they couldn't resist the Catholic references; they never resist the Catholic references. I don't know what's with that: TV writers seem amazingly often not clear on the concept that Christianity and Roman Catholicism are not identical.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: in my halting attempts to get back in business, I read a bit of Ronald Santoni's Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity the other day, and today I read Joseph Catalano's "Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective", though actually my eyes glazed over through a lot of the latter. Santoni's book, through the first chapter, is at least more engagingly annoying, but both of these guys, who seem to be the two leading anglophone commentators on Sartre and bad faith, are annoying in the same way, and in the same way as so much Heidegger commentary: it seems like there's nothing much going on but word-shuffling. The strange thing is, Santoni says he was an analytic philosopher who got into Sartre because the experience of bad faith was an interesting problem for him, yet the experience doesn't seem to come into his commentary at all; the whole first chapter is concerned with a supposed equivocation, which is supposed to demonstrate the fallaciousness of Sartre's argument that bad faith is not "cynical" (i.e., that you don't have the truth before you when you're in bad faith in the same way you do when you straightforwardly lie). But the thing is, Sartre isn't, or isn't importantly, making an argument; he's describing an experience, and the only way to demonstrate that bad faith isn't cynical is to examine the experience and see! And then you can say whether he's described the experience in a way that misleads, or misses important aspects, or whatever.
There's another article I've read by Catalano--actually, I see I've mentioned it before (where, I see, I also unsuccessfully predicted that it would turn out that Palmeiro didn't take stanazolol)--where he argues that bad faith shouldn't be interpreted as the inescapable product of our dual, free and factical, nature, but as consisting in our self-deceptive failure to take responsibility for our freedom. That was actually how I'd first taken the idea of bad faith when I first read and wrote about it, but when I first presented my Eyes Wide Shut paper (at least, I think it was then; it was some comment on that paper, anyway) someone suggested that I was missing half the story on bad faith: it's not just self-deceptively failing to take responsibility for our freedom, but also self-deceptively failing to take responsibility for our facticity. E.g., if I were to say now--affirming my freedom--that I will never again look at the internet (because, after all, life might well be better off that way), that would be a bad-faith self-deceptive denial of the factical weight of my past which will be brought to bear against me tomorrow morning when I wake up and am faced with going on with my day as usual or not.
Obviously, I now think that that interpretation of bad faith is exactly right; it happens to be much more philosophically interesting, since it's more intimately tied to Sartre's picture of human being, but more importantly it describes our actual experience: as a matter of fact, we do deceive ourselves if we deny that we are free to choose otherwise than we have chosen hitherto (in some sense absolutely free: I can just never look at the internet again; it's not impossible, and all that has to happen is that I choose for it to happen!), and we also deceive ourselves--it's just hubris--if we affirm our absolute freedom to choose otherwise than we have always chosen. (Hence the "duck-rabbit" of my CPA paper's title.) You look at the experience, and that's the way it is; you can't make it go away with word games (that might, for instance, try to come up with a conception of bad faith that's more convenient for the project of constructing an ethics that cobbles together this and that that Sartre says elsewhere, which seems to be Santoni's main concern).
Anyway, all this got me to wondering again just how to say what the difference is between the way I read philosophical texts and the way all these commentators seem to. I've long thought that, when I read philosophy, I'm reading for what the author should have said--more charitable than charitable, so to speak. The errors and mis-steps are unimportant; what's important is what the text points toward. (Like I've been saying for a number of years, one good idea is all I hope to get out of a talk. If I get that, then it's a good talk and I'm glad I went, even if 4900 of the 5000 words were more or less beside that one good point, as is very often, if not usually, the case. Which is why I go to all the talks I can: it's much easier to drift through, waiting for the 100 words that matter, or mulling them over after they've come, when you're listening to a talk than it is when you're reading an article.) Now, with these commentaries on basically phenomenological writers, Sartre and Heidegger, it strikes me that what they're missing is the phenomenon; they're all legein and no phainomena. All writers like Sartre and Heidegger are trying to do, when you boil it right down, is to say what's right there in our experience, though we don't typically have the words to describe it, or though, in the grip of an ideology, we're prone to denying it's there. Hence, in a way, it's not possible for them to be wrong, though it's possible for what they say to be more and less true, more or less in error, more or less misleading, better or worse at bringing us face-to-face with the phenomenon, to recognize what's important in it. And so the usual critical approach of examining arguments, sorting out the logic, looking for fallacies and so on, just completely misses the point.
The problem is whether it's just presumptuous on my part to think that that's all the bulk of the commentaries are doing. Maybe I'm just missing the phenomenon in what they're saying. I dunno. But I think this is what makes me so slow, often so painfully slow, to be able to say what a philosophical text is saying: until I feel like I've got the phenomenon in view, I just don't feel like I've got anything. And I get the sense that commentators, and students of philosophy generally, by and large don't operate under that constraint.
High today in TO: 8. Dewpoint then: -7. High dewpoint: -1.
Low today on the balcony: 9.7. Low: 1.8. Currently: 2.3.
I thought tonight's House was the first one I'd seen that didn't involve a misdiagnosis, or rather several misdiagnoses, but then it did, sort of. It did also, however, feature what I suspect is the first faith-healer character in the history of television who really believes he heals people. Though they couldn't resist the Catholic references; they never resist the Catholic references. I don't know what's with that: TV writers seem amazingly often not clear on the concept that Christianity and Roman Catholicism are not identical.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: in my halting attempts to get back in business, I read a bit of Ronald Santoni's Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity the other day, and today I read Joseph Catalano's "Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective", though actually my eyes glazed over through a lot of the latter. Santoni's book, through the first chapter, is at least more engagingly annoying, but both of these guys, who seem to be the two leading anglophone commentators on Sartre and bad faith, are annoying in the same way, and in the same way as so much Heidegger commentary: it seems like there's nothing much going on but word-shuffling. The strange thing is, Santoni says he was an analytic philosopher who got into Sartre because the experience of bad faith was an interesting problem for him, yet the experience doesn't seem to come into his commentary at all; the whole first chapter is concerned with a supposed equivocation, which is supposed to demonstrate the fallaciousness of Sartre's argument that bad faith is not "cynical" (i.e., that you don't have the truth before you when you're in bad faith in the same way you do when you straightforwardly lie). But the thing is, Sartre isn't, or isn't importantly, making an argument; he's describing an experience, and the only way to demonstrate that bad faith isn't cynical is to examine the experience and see! And then you can say whether he's described the experience in a way that misleads, or misses important aspects, or whatever.
There's another article I've read by Catalano--actually, I see I've mentioned it before (where, I see, I also unsuccessfully predicted that it would turn out that Palmeiro didn't take stanazolol)--where he argues that bad faith shouldn't be interpreted as the inescapable product of our dual, free and factical, nature, but as consisting in our self-deceptive failure to take responsibility for our freedom. That was actually how I'd first taken the idea of bad faith when I first read and wrote about it, but when I first presented my Eyes Wide Shut paper (at least, I think it was then; it was some comment on that paper, anyway) someone suggested that I was missing half the story on bad faith: it's not just self-deceptively failing to take responsibility for our freedom, but also self-deceptively failing to take responsibility for our facticity. E.g., if I were to say now--affirming my freedom--that I will never again look at the internet (because, after all, life might well be better off that way), that would be a bad-faith self-deceptive denial of the factical weight of my past which will be brought to bear against me tomorrow morning when I wake up and am faced with going on with my day as usual or not.
Obviously, I now think that that interpretation of bad faith is exactly right; it happens to be much more philosophically interesting, since it's more intimately tied to Sartre's picture of human being, but more importantly it describes our actual experience: as a matter of fact, we do deceive ourselves if we deny that we are free to choose otherwise than we have chosen hitherto (in some sense absolutely free: I can just never look at the internet again; it's not impossible, and all that has to happen is that I choose for it to happen!), and we also deceive ourselves--it's just hubris--if we affirm our absolute freedom to choose otherwise than we have always chosen. (Hence the "duck-rabbit" of my CPA paper's title.) You look at the experience, and that's the way it is; you can't make it go away with word games (that might, for instance, try to come up with a conception of bad faith that's more convenient for the project of constructing an ethics that cobbles together this and that that Sartre says elsewhere, which seems to be Santoni's main concern).
Anyway, all this got me to wondering again just how to say what the difference is between the way I read philosophical texts and the way all these commentators seem to. I've long thought that, when I read philosophy, I'm reading for what the author should have said--more charitable than charitable, so to speak. The errors and mis-steps are unimportant; what's important is what the text points toward. (Like I've been saying for a number of years, one good idea is all I hope to get out of a talk. If I get that, then it's a good talk and I'm glad I went, even if 4900 of the 5000 words were more or less beside that one good point, as is very often, if not usually, the case. Which is why I go to all the talks I can: it's much easier to drift through, waiting for the 100 words that matter, or mulling them over after they've come, when you're listening to a talk than it is when you're reading an article.) Now, with these commentaries on basically phenomenological writers, Sartre and Heidegger, it strikes me that what they're missing is the phenomenon; they're all legein and no phainomena. All writers like Sartre and Heidegger are trying to do, when you boil it right down, is to say what's right there in our experience, though we don't typically have the words to describe it, or though, in the grip of an ideology, we're prone to denying it's there. Hence, in a way, it's not possible for them to be wrong, though it's possible for what they say to be more and less true, more or less in error, more or less misleading, better or worse at bringing us face-to-face with the phenomenon, to recognize what's important in it. And so the usual critical approach of examining arguments, sorting out the logic, looking for fallacies and so on, just completely misses the point.
The problem is whether it's just presumptuous on my part to think that that's all the bulk of the commentaries are doing. Maybe I'm just missing the phenomenon in what they're saying. I dunno. But I think this is what makes me so slow, often so painfully slow, to be able to say what a philosophical text is saying: until I feel like I've got the phenomenon in view, I just don't feel like I've got anything. And I get the sense that commentators, and students of philosophy generally, by and large don't operate under that constraint.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-05 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 05:34 am (UTC)Generally, I doubt there's a commentator I'd recommend on anything, mostly because I generally avoid them myself unless I'm forced into them. I just can't believe that it's more worthwhile to read a commentary (unless it's the kind of commentary that's actually doing philosophy itself, in which case it's probably not a good source as a commentary on ... ) than to re-read the thing itself. And in Sartre's case, I haven't read nearly enough of the thing itself even once.