Core

[Flowerville]

What is the value of a philosophy which has no power over life?

And so I return to Virginia.

I have been thinking much about the value of philosophy -- going again through the morass of difficulties I have with doing this study and this work in an academic setting. I have also been reading Bernard Williams' brilliant and infuriatingly tortuous book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I have been thinking about how I want, above all, to live and to live well, and how I have learned that this living well is not done by holding firm to some project or pinning down some fact or isolating some discovered relation. This living well is an immersion and it is difficult and nuanced and elusive -- but it can be done, and I have had glorious stretches of time where that is exactly what I have (miraculously) managed to do.

I have also been thinking about how rare it is to read a philosophy -- or, to keep it simple, a work of philosophical interest and intention -- which has power over life. It happens of course. There is something in Spinoza which does this and I love him for it. There is something ascetic and yet amiable about Spinoza -- the amiability of the misfit perhaps, but the asceticism of the genius who saw too far and was not able to communicate what he saw. There is something about Williams which has this power -- or at least promises it. He has to first cut through the weeds -- has to show which philosophies have no power over life -- which assumptions confuse us -- which theories turn us away from living in the first place, or set up life as some path toward immunity or slow refinement of the personal into the ideal.

And so I have been thinking about philosophy and life and about how I have a sense of what I want to do -- how I have a sense of what philosophy would have to be for me -- and then I found a paper by Martha Nussbaum on To the Lighthouse and felt that familiar frisson of connection and assent and the joy of discovering something in a text -- something which is important and hard and far more nuanced and complex than others have taken it to be. The problem of how we come to have knowledge of other minds and how this problem is epistemological when philosophers approach it and can be ethical when people approach it -- people who are immersed in life -- in the interests of individuals in a nexus of relations.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey know one another. They seem closed in and off like everyone else -- they seem sealed, like the buzzing hives that Lily Briscoe think of when she imagines what it must be like to be Mrs. Ramsey -- and to be Lily Briscoe wanting desperately to know exactly what it would be like to be the beautiful, powerful, mysteriously private Mrs. Ramsey. They seem sealed, but they are not, and they are not because of the love that they share, the love which is different from one to the other, but is the same in accomplishing the same intention -- to know the other, and to respect the other. As Nussbaum says, they have each learned the other. They have each learned the mannerisms, the idiosyncrasies, the wishes and the unspoken desires, the little frustrations, the deeper, hidden sadnesses -- they have each read the other, each thought of the other, in times of togetherness and in times of solitude. It is their love which motivates this great work of learning to peer in to another, and it is their love which respects the boundedness and privacy of the other. Their relations are not symmetrical in content and yet they are in intention, and in their utter importance.

Nussbaum says in concluding her paper,

It is the distinguished contribution of this novel to show how a problem that philosophy frequently cordons off from the messy stuff of human motivation and social interaction is actually a series of human problems of great complexity, many of them ethical and social, which can't really be adequately described, much less resolved (where resolution is possible) without reflecting about emotions and desires, without describing a variety of possible human loves and friendships in their historical and social setting, without asking, among other things, how love, politics, power, shame, desire, and generosity are all intertwined in the attempt of a single woman and man to live together with understanding.

It is an incredible paper and reminded me of my own nascent ideas about the incredible philosophical work that a novel like Orlando can do -- and the even more staggering philosophical work that a masterpiece like The Waves can do. There is so much to be said and read and written about these books -- and about others as well, about Robert Musil and Pessoa and so on. This is the work that gets to the heart of living and its the work that takes the reflective stance and does not destroy the wealth of emotion and imagination and mental activity that buzzes beneath the surface.

Completely different

A little bit of silliness, but its dear to my heart ... some of my favorite cats-and-their-people portraits:

[via The Selby]

[source unknown]


[via The Selby]


[via The Selby]


[via Apartment Therapy (I think)]


[via The Selby]



[via The Selby]

Quoted

[emmanuel polanco]

Some gems from Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy:

On consequentialist moral theories:

G.E. Moore also thought that the forward-looking type of consideration was fundamental, but he allowed things other than satisfaction -- such as friendship and the awareness of beauty -- to count among the good consequences. It was because of this that his theory was so attractive to the Bloomsbury group: it managed to reject at once the stuffiness of duty and the vulgarity of utilitarianism.

On what to do about religious ethics:

In fact, the logical or structural questions about religious ethics, like many questions about God, are interesting only if you believe in God. If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything. In that case, the important questions must be about human beings, and why, for instance, they ever believed that God existed. The issues about religious ethics are issues about the human impulses that expressed themselves in it, and they should be faced in those terms. For those who do not believe in a religious ethics, there is some evasion in continuing to argue about its structure: it distracts attention from the significant question of what such outlooks tell us about humanity. Nietzsche's saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him.

Such strength

[Flowerville]

I'm reading Bleak House at the moment and it is a true joy. Today, as I read Esther's narrative with tears in my eyes (always, always Esther makes me weep), I realized something. When Bleak House begins and Esther begins it all seems so quaint and lovely and rosy and overdone that it is easy to dismiss her goodness and amiability and general effect on everyone as so exaggerated that it must be comical.

But there is something so sincere and endearing and absolutely noble and joyful about her that her narrative becomes something that I grip on to and cherish. When she tells of her illness and does not tell of her love -- when she communicates her worries and her joys -- when she iterates and reiterates the importance of duty, duty known intuitively and steadfastly -- when she worries about the ravages the fever has taken on her looks and admits to herself some small scrap of vanity (but always for the sake of someone else) -- it is all so touching, so heart-wrenching. She is never saccharine, never insipid, never a caricature of the virtuous little woman. She is a beautiful person -- she gives hope and joy to everyone around her, and Dickens is so, so careful to communicate this.

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night, and I had again been dejected and unhappy there, did I begin to know how wrong and thankless this state was. But from my joyful darling who was coming on the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving anticipation that I must have been made of marble if it had not moved me; from my guardian too, I found another letter, asking me to tell Dame Durden, if I should see that little woman anywhere, that they had moped about most pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was going to rack and ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and that everybody in and about the house declared it was not the same house, and was becoming rebellious for her return. Two such letters together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved, and how happy I ought to be. That made me think of all my past life; and that brought me, as t ought to have done before, into a better condition.

Busy

[Christine de Pizan]

I'm in New York this weekend, having the most incredible time at a conference I feel incredibly fortunate to have been indirectly invited to. I have so much to think through and write about-- the women philosophers of the early modern period who I have just now started discovering -- and the re-invigoration of my sense of purpose in doing philosophy, and in returning to issues that used to be at the front of my mind, but which have somehow been swept into corners and forgotten. Exciting times!