tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30379986.post8590618042927932406..comments2023-12-10T07:55:27.177+00:00Comments on kenodoxia: Is a philosophical life pleasant?James Warrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262258553733864003noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30379986.post-34979234370964692672007-03-02T20:29:00.000+00:002007-03-02T20:29:00.000+00:00Forgive me for being very brief.I don't see a prob...Forgive me for being very brief.<BR/>I don't see a problem with focusing on acquring knowledge as the pleasure of the philosophical life. For Plato the knowledge the philosopher pursues is not limited. It includes all of the math and the sciences, for example. The philosopher will never run out of new things to pursue and learn. <BR/>Other views of the philosophical enterprise ( Austin, Wittgenstein) may have this problem. Plato doesn't. <BR/>Scholarship may have this problem. 25-30 years of doing Aristotelian ethics may exhaust that topic. Ne plus ultra, and so the end of the pleasures of Aristotelian scholarship.<BR/>I don't know what the pleasures of possessing knowledge are. I understand the pleasures of learning to apply your knowledge in new ways. Surely this is the inducement offered to the Guardians for their civic labors. But I dont understand the pleasures of merely possessing knowledge.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17561016814825836844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30379986.post-9743618165975959352007-02-21T11:21:00.000+00:002007-02-21T11:21:00.000+00:00I've got a suspicion that this business of philoso...I've got a suspicion that this business of philosophical pleasure has a lot to do with the process of fetishization so central to Marx's thinking. Non-living things take on properties of living things (capital grows, money generates profit, commodities beckon and wink and generally behave most whorishly ;-)) and living things are emptied of these properties that are transferred to lifeless things/idols (the productive power of human labour is transferred to capital, and the bare, forked labour power of an individual is regarded as an expensive and irksome cost of production).<BR/><BR/>The things/idols being invested with living properties in Plato’s (the philosophical?) case here are the Forms, the Ideality of the Substance, and the beings losing these properties are us, the enlightened philosophers :-)<BR/><BR/>Leaving the Cave is the solemn procession from our joy and light at living and understanding to the darkness and misery of death and obscurantism (give me Homer's vision any day!). A very sophistical and plausible turning of black into white and vice versa, one of the great Inversions. <BR/><BR/>Now, I have a personal story to tell about this. One spring, as a reluctantly conforming adolescent, just having been confirmed, I experienced the most amazing joy/pleasure/euphoria seeing the copper beeches burst into leaf in our local park. "Nature can do this itself", was the message that rang in my head.<BR/><BR/>More or less simultaneously I had some intense dreams involving the edge of the universe as bricks/breeze blocks of light. I was Lucretius's javelin thrower without the javelin. But the message, crude as it was, hit home — "boundless".<BR/><BR/>So, I think something of this kind, and like the joys of advanced meditation I've heard of, and like the thrill of cracking a problem great or small, and of a victory no one can ever take from you — all this rolled into one and always there must be the sublime pleasure enticing our philosophers and poets (biggest highs there possibly Lucretius and Dante).<BR/><BR/>Only Lucretius was here and now, while Dante was clearly high on his vision here and now (e quindi uscimmo a rivider le stelle!!) but also fetishizing like billy-o in Paradise:<BR/><BR/>"ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:<BR/>se non che la mia mente fu percossa<BR/>da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.<BR/><BR/>A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;<BR/>ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,<BR/>sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,<BR/><BR/>l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."<BR/><BR/>"But my own wings were not enough for this,<BR/> Had it not been that then my mind there smote<BR/> A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish. <BR/><BR/>Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:<BR/> But now was turning my desire and will,<BR/> Even as a wheel that equally is moved, <BR/><BR/>The Love which moves the sun and the other stars." <BR/><BR/>(Quotes from WikiSource)<BR/><BR/>"Substance and accident, and their operations, all interfused together... one simple light" — the geometrician squaring the circle — all this tremendous intellectual joy and pleasure is located about as far from normal human experience as could be imagined. Not only that, but even there it needs a thunderbolt (like Dr Frankenstein) to get things moving.<BR/><BR/>So maybe God-drunk Spinoza was on to something with his Deus sive Natura, a great vision of unity, which Hegel later articulated but at the same time bureaucratized as the self-realization of the Spirit in the World. Cosmic ecstasy forcing itself on our minds and into our bodies — and then out into action changing the world in Marx. <BR/><BR/>And the same cosmic ecstasy punishes us if we meet it on anything less than the highest level of our species-being — or perhaps not so much punishes, as threatens to tear us to pieces, shred us in the grinding social-historical millwheels of contradiction — Orpheus ripped apart by Maenads, The Who dissolving their minds as they rattle through Clapham Junction:<BR/><BR/>"Inside outside. leave me alone.<BR/>Inside outside. leave me alone.<BR/>Inside outside. nowhere is home.<BR/>Inside outside. nowhere is home.<BR/>Inside outside, where have I been?<BR/>Inside outside, where have I been?<BR/>Out of my brain on the five fifteen.<BR/>Out of my brain on the five fifteen."<BR/><BR/>Hm. Again — not particularly thin conclusions ;-)<BR/><BR/>But perhaps the highest joy we are capable of deserves a broad approach?Choppahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04980510007443012482noreply@blogger.com