The idea that seems to have emanated from the sun

I’ve never had a good feel for philosophical discussions of perception. Since I don’t work on perception that’s not that much of a problem, but there are times when reading the moderns that it becomes an issue just because they’re so exercised by perception.

One passage in particular that’s always bothered me comes during Descartes’ critical examination, in the Meditations, of his (pre-meditation) tendency to judge that certain of his ideas resemble things outside him:

And finally, even if these ideas did proceed from things other than myself, it does not therefore follow that they must resemble those things. Indeed, it seems I have frequently noticed a vast difference in many respects. For example, I find within myself two distinct ideas of the sun. One idea is drawn, as it were, from the senses. Now it is this idea which, of all those that I take to be derived from outside me, is most in need of examination. By means of this idea the sun appears to me to be quite small. But there is another idea, one derived from astronomical reasoning, that is, it is elicited from certain notions that are innate in me, or else fashioned by me in some other way. Through this idea the sun is shown to be several times larger than the earth. Both ideas surely cannot resemble the same sun existing outside me; and reason convinces me that the idea that seems to have emanated from the sun itself from so close is the very one that least resembles the sun (AT 39).

I realize that there is a certain bracketing of the role of distance here, but I don’t understand why. I take it that somewhere in the background is an argumentative trope about the disc of the sun, as I see it, appearing to be exactly the same size as, for example, a small disc I hold up ‘next to it’ at arm’s length. Or, for example, exactly the same size as the fingers with which I encircle it. But observations of that sort also make it clear that the sun of which I have this perception is different from the disc I hold up or the circle I make myself. I can move the disc closer to my eyes to ‘make it appear bigger’ as it gets closer. I can’t really do that with the sun as I see it, without the aid of technology: I can’t walk toward the sun to make it appear bigger as I get closer to it. This doesn’t seem to be a judgment I make because, in the background, I have it in mind that the sun is very far away, as I was told in school. It just seems like a natural feature of our perception of the sun, that it is something far away. (Compare to clouds or mountains: surely the ancients or early moderns didn’t need meteorologists or geographers to tell them that these things were much farther away than appreciated, in order to impress upon people the fact of their distance?) Or, likewise, I can touch and manipulate the disc I hold up; try as I might my encircling fingers touch only air, never the sun.

As for ‘emanation’, I suppose I sort of understand the principle behind this talk but I’ve never felt it to be very phenomenologically accurate. I’ve never felt my visual perceptions of things to ‘come from’ their objects. I do feel light sources to be different, which might be why Descartes chooses the sun as an example, but even then I don’t feel what I see to emanate from what I see, exactly, even though it emits light, light is coming from it, or ‘there’s a light shining in my eyes’; there seems to be a difference between light and, for example, ‘what the (thing causing the / thing which is a) light looks like’. What I see is over there (and sometimes, ‘right here’ or ‘right in front of me’, or in even closer places like my my nose). So there is a distance to be spanned. But I don’t see it as a distance which has been spanned by my perception, one which what I see has traveled over, from the object, so that I might see it.

It’s this sort of thing that made Heidegger’s talk about ‘existential spatiality’ in Being and Time sound exciting to me.

(I have also always found it silly to choose this example as one with which to discuss the possibility of ‘resemblance’ between ideas and things. Surely all circles resemble all other circles, and all circles resemble all spheres? But I suppose Descartes would like as identical a resemblance as possible.)

The meditator in plural voice

Descartes’ Meditations are written primarily in the first-person singular, for whatever reason (perhaps one of the familiar ones). But there are points at which he switches into the first-person plural. Why?

One such point is the full paragraph in Meditation One (AT 19–20) in which he sifts out a class of things not to be rejected via the dream doubt, which are then listed in the subsequent shorter paragraph:

Let us assume, then, for the sake of argument, that we are dreaming and that such particulars as these are not true: that we are opening our eyes, moving our head, and extending our hands. Perhaps we do not even have such hands, or any such body at all. Nevertheless, it surely must be admitted that the things seen during slumber are, as it were, like painted images which could only have been produced in the likeness of true things, and that therefore at least these general things—eyes, head, hands, and the whole body—are not imaginary things, but are true and exist. For indeed when painters themselves wish to represent sirens and satyrs by means of especially bizarre forms, they surely cannot assign to them utterly new natures. Rather, they simply fuse together the members of various animals. Or if perhaps they concoct something so utterly novel that nothing like it has ever been seen before (and thus is something utterly fictitious and false), yet certainly at the very least the colors from which they fashion it ought to be true. And by the same token, although even these general things—eyes, head, hands and the like—could be imaginary, still one has to admit that at least certain other things that are even more simple and universal are true. It is from these components, as if from true colors, that all those images of things that are in our thought are fashioned, be they true or false.

This class of things appears to include corporeal nature in general, together with its extension; the shape of extended things; their quantity, that is, their size and number; as well as the place where they exist; the time through which they endure, and the like.

It’s unusual, I think, for Descartes to switch suddenly into the plural, given the apparently important connection between the singular ‘I’ and so much of what precedes these paragraphs. It’s just as unusual to suddenly switch back—by the end of the following paragraph (not quoted), he’s back on ‘I’: ‘For whether I am awake or asleep, 2 plus 3 make 5…’. And I don’t think it can easily be explained as a mere rhetorical modulation, for example one of the conventional sort in which an author encourages the reader’s agreement by speaking as if both are doing the same thing (assuming, reasoning about their joint assumptions, etc.).

One possibility is that Descartes suddenly wishes to highlight the general scope of the doubt he has thus far established, i.e., about all human beings, none of whom can escape dream doubt. This would comport with something he says in introducing the dream doubt: ‘This would all be well and good, were I not a man who is accustomed to sleeping at night…’. My old advisor L., the modern scholar, recently shared a helpful interpretation of this with me when I asked him to help me puzzle over the preceding paragraph, in which Descartes seems to reject madman-doubt for reasons that sound arbitrary, relative to the most explicit agenda of the Meditations. I framed the tendency of Meditation One as one from conditional doubts (small objects, faraway objects) to doubt which is as unconditional as possible, and L. pointed out that in contrast to the madman doubt, which would only hold were Descartes in a special condition of sorts, the dream doubt is introduced as one in which any person could reasonably expect to find him- or herself: thus, Descartes’ stress on his being a man, i.e., a human being, subject to the condition of all human beings, of waking and sleeping and dreaming.

That seems apt, but nevertheless, a sudden activation of the plural in the paragraph after dream-doubt is considered seems conspicuous. So I think it’s noteworthy what Descartes establishes while his voice has shifted into a more inclusive register. Essentially, it’s a partial table of categories: body and its extension, and the place, time, shape, size, and number of extended things. Loosely, and contra Berkeley, we could imagine it to be a table of categories which one might think don’t pertain to the ‘subjective’ ways in which objects appear. (Qualities like color are conspicuously absent, given that the list is introduced as the metaphorical equivalent to the colors out of which painters’ images are made, and intended to enumerate certain basic elements of our experience.)

I’ve never been very clear on even the rough outline of the picture of the world which is meant to be re-constituted upon completion of the Meditations. I expect that it would include a provision for individual knowledge of a shared world, and intuitively, I would guess this must include some kind of acknowledgment that the framework within which this knowledge would be had, would contain a number of common elements which it could be asserted to be available to any other individual knowers. Or, in other words, that an adequate-enough conceptual basis (in the set-theoretic or algebraic sense of the word, I guess: a basis from which the more complex things could be built) for such knowledge could be shown to (already) be in the possession of an individual meditator.

In a way, I find this reassuring, because it suggests that one might find other ways in which the meditator’s relations to others—expressed in his common humanity or human capacities—reappear in the Meditations. In particular, that Descartes may have felt himself compelled to use the natural forms of expression in such cases, ‘we say…’, or to frame his expressions similarly while suppressing the preamble.

(Perhaps I should say that when I say ‘categories’, I have in mind Aristotle’s Categories in particular, because of the clarity with which it introduces its constituents-of-reality by way of very ordinary-language-sounding claims about what we do and don’t say. So ‘what we say’ is standing immediately behind category-talk in later eras.)

A quick glance at Meditation Two, the next place where Descartes switches voice, suggests that a wider scope (than just pronoun usage) would help a bit: He denies that he is ‘that concatenation of members we call the human body’ (AT 27), later takes care to adjust his conception of what ‘properly speaking…’ in him ‘is called “sensing”‘ (AT 29), and famously is ‘nearly deceived by the ways in which people commonly speak’ (AT 32, preceding the discussion of knowledge of men passing in the street). The major parallel to the painting-argument from Meditation One comes in the introduction to the discussion of the wax, though, where again Descartes switches into plural voice. But it’s sustained less clearly there, and if the results of the painting-argument tend toward the impersonal, the shared, in a way that invites use of a ‘we’, the discussion of the wax results in a denial of readily shared access to objects themselves (as opposed to their manifest qualities).

I assume that the general tendency of the work will be toward isolating the ‘I’ from the ‘we’, for sort of Cartesian/Augustinian reasons. I also assume that this will be borne out in the ways in which Descartes is forced to make adjustments to the common ways of speaking, and that this should be in tension to the disposition of the common ways of speaking in producing the table of categories.

I also wonder about the tendency of the denials of human or animal being to dissociate the meditator from much of the basis for what we would think of as ‘common humanity’.

Essences are common but hidden or obscured; people who prepare themselves to know essences distinctly must separate themselves from common life, but the meditator banks on only needing to distort his participation in common life, via its common language, so much in order to accomplish this.

Rigor

In those few free moments I’ve had lately, I’ve been working on an essay on Nietzsche’s ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’. The writing has a distinctly Cavellian pitch to it, one that would not be surprising to readers of my last several months of posts.

But reading an article in Nietzsche-Studien recently, I felt my style to be a little exposed by comparison. It was an utterly routine article, routine in its style of producing claims, of paraphrasing and selecting from the text, of assigning thoughts to Nietzsche. To a Cavellian, it would have seemed that the author of this article left himself out: did not let the text address him, nor try to put himself in the exposed position of ‘being read by’ Nietzsche’s text as a part of the process of performing the reading of Nietzsche to the author’s own readers.

I’ve worked enough on ‘Utility’ that I figured it was time to start digging around in Nietzsche’s notebooks from the period, and see what I could see. I am pleased to find, early on, this remark:

Everything must be said as precisely as possible, and every technical term, including “will,” must be set aside (19 [46], Summer 1872-Early 1873).

That idea of the (hoped-for) quality of writing will be familiar to readers of Wittgenstein or Cavell, I think, just as it probably seems to be confused to philosophers who think technical terms are a necessity. (How could philosophy be written as precisely as possible without technical terms?)

Brandom on non-inferential perception

My colleague wants to argue that Brandom has inconsistent views about the immediacy of perception.

1. Brandom claims (so my colleague claims) that we have perceptual knowledge non-inferentially. We know what we perceive without appeal to further reasons.

2. But: Brandom claims (so my colleague claims) that our perceptions can be wrong. They may individuate the objects of reality incorrectly. Only if we have been well trained will our perceptions give us accurate knowledge of the world. So, my colleague claims, we know what we perceive only if we know we have been correctly trained. So we do in fact have to appeal to further reasons. And so we have perceptual knowledge only inferentially.

How could one save Brandom here?

Can’t get no

My teaching duties, not quite a full load (even by the standards of an idyllic R1 institution), nevertheless seem to have come to demand all my time, leaving me little for the writing and reading I wish I could do. In part this is because I am still changing what I teach in demanding ways. My course is somewhat familiar to me now, having been repeated in more or less the same format several times. Only one item in it right now is really anything like a ‘new preparation’, just because this is the first time I have really put in the work on that item. The rest, I have read, thought about, conceived, lectured, presented, discussed, assigned, and graded things for, repeatedly. But for the current iteration I have a new attitude toward my materials, so I am reading anew (I almost always reread before teaching) and trying to get my new work down in permanent form (markup, notes, new outlines and other paraphernalia) so I can build on that work in the future. I also find myself writing completely new study questions to accompany all the reading assignments, primarily because the sensibility of the old questions is often just out of joint with this iteration of the course, and I keep having to update the material to keep the course (what I imagine to be—folly!) consistent in, let’s say, intellectual tone, in the sorts of questions and remarks and details on offer.

Anyway. That’s all somewhat generic, as far as efforts toward good pedagogy go. Lately I’ve also found myself reflecting on the specific, long-term tendency of my teaching as it’s developed over the brief period since I first began delivering this course. I suspect it has a lot to do with why I (seemingly) have been a bit slow to acclimate to my material and move on to that stage at which it becomes relatively unburdensome to discharge my teaching responsibilities. I find it really satisfying to teach the introduction to philosophy—and more so each time. I’m led, though, to believe that some of my colleagues don’t derive all that much satisfaction from teaching introductory courses. My sense is that this is because, aside from whatever satisfaction one might derive from the ‘pure’ pleasures of teaching, guiding the educations of young people, and so on (against the pure pains of grading, managing, scheduling, administrating), philosophers who teach often wish for ‘philosophically satisfying’ teaching work, and set the standard for satisfaction closer to the kind of thing they do with their peers. Material at the lower levels, or pitched to newcomers, offers diminished charms to people who think that it’s old hat.

The reason the material in my introductory course has grown in interest for me is, I think, the same as the reason it remains so much work to teach the same course every time. I’ve been trying very hard to make it all ordinary. I can’t say fully what I mean by that. But one thing it involves is trying to persist in treating the texts in terms of questions like, ‘what would make someone say that?’, which I imagine to be different from the standard philosophers’ (philosophy teachers’) questions like ‘what are the reasons for thinking this is true?’, though the former does include the latter. Often this focus has the effect of diverting some of my attention to the background from within which—against which?—the activity of the philosopher or the writing of the philosopher takes its start. This, the background—’ordinary life’, maybe—is something that can be conveyed, placed, but even texts relatively well-adapted to such use (Plato, Descartes) make it a challenge to do. Ordinary life is in the background; why should people engaged in something far more estimable trouble themselves to fully manifest the background against which they work?

Making things as ordinary as possible (with some material, perhaps this can only be taken so far) is also hard because it complicates the dynamics of the relation between me and my students. Ordinary life is the one we all live, both me and them; the texts I teach often seem extremely out of the ordinary to students, and this accurately registers something about the texts which shouldn’t be lost; my mere presence in the front of the room and my occupation of my position of authority also qualifies my ability to solicit students’ acceptance that ‘we’ share in ordinary life in certain relevant ways, because a great deal of the shared involvement in ordinary life is precisely not colored by such a formal asymmetry in power and authority; my need to sometimes code-switch, or speak ironically, or conspicuously, performatively self-consciously, to call attention to such issues itself introduces subtleties that increase the obstacles to understanding me.

My. That sounds terribly overthought; but it’s at best a reconstruction of what is coming to be a more and more natural attitude, assumed in performance, to me. When I put on the performances, I think of them, at the front of my mind, more like: now I get up and talk. And then it just goes from there.

Spleen

I haven’t read Thompson Clarke—’The Legacy of Skepticism’—in forever, though it was recommended to me off and on by people who knew I was reading a lot of Cavell, when I was in grad school. The distance, and especially Cavell’s own acknowledgment of debts to Clarke, made me forget a lot, it seems.

For the paper is so gnarled (‘mazeways‘ seems charitable) and seemingly needlessly alienating in its language that I have a hard time even beginning to believe that Clarke understood the first thing about ‘the plain’ (which is what he calls ordinary language, or better, the everyday life in which ordinary language is spoken, and other things are done, the place, or ‘circle’, within which we live not subject to the skeptical doubts pursued deliberately by the philosopher). There’s the usual postwar gloss of subscripts and ‘efficient’ abbreviations, there are ‘humanoids’, there is a scientist dosing himself and writing up his experiences in his lab notebook, there are individuals notating every item of human knowledge in preparation for the abandonment of the earth—if reading made me angry, this might be the kind of thing I would ‘throw across the room’, as people are said to do with books that frustrate them.

Apparently the paper was read at the Eastern APA in 1972, with comments by Keith Lehrer and Barry Stroud. Reading, I can do as I like; trapped in that audience, I would have wanted to bolt for the streets.

What drives a person cognizant of plain ways of making sense, appreciative of the constraints they appear to impose, to willfully, drastically estrange himself from plain sense in order to understand plain sense?

Professional identity

I imagine myself asked to identify myself to a fellow professional philosopher (‘what do you do?’): I can think of no better (meaning: safer, more defensible) answer than, ‘I’m a historian of philosophy’.

To some, this sounds like ‘I study old philosophy instead of doing philosophy’.

To me, it means that I think past examples of what it means to do philosophy, or what it means to be a philosopher, serve me better than what I might find if confined to the present for my examples.

No conclusions drawn where none intended

I begin my intro course with Plato’s Euthyphro because it’s short and gives a good example of Socrates practicing the elenchus, which I like to have prior to doing the Apology so that his self-characterization in that dialogue has some content to it. Though I do attend somewhat to its specific content – and have done so more this semester – there’s a sense in which I’m not that interested in the fact that the Euthyphro is about piety. As with many things I’m more interested in methods.

But I also have a tendency to quietly steer my courses away from questions about any conflicts between religion and philosophy or religion and ‘reason’. I realize that emphasizing such conflicts is a useful way to introduce philosophy to young people who may not have thought much about, for example, the justification for religious belief. But I don’t want to send the wrong message. I don’t have the view, which I think many philosophers find it practically incumbent upon them to have, that doing philosophy means rooting out illegitimately or insufficiently warranted religious belief wherever it exists; or requiring thought about ethics and politics to be completely independent from religious thought. It’s possible to do philosophy that way – to make it a point to make philosophy one thing, and religion another. It’s also possible, obviously, to try understand religion in doing philosophy, however that turns out. But it’s also possible simply to do philosophy without any particular interest in religion. I feel like this last option is intelligible enough in practice without having to be explained or justified: we just talk about some things and not others.

But, of course, students have different concerns. With the Euthyphro in particular, even if they haven’t been given a certain line on it (‘divine command theory proved wrong! religious ethics trounced!’), they often take its apparent criticism, in some way, of something having to do with religion, as a broader critique or rejection of religion entirely. And often one which pretty quickly turns back on contemporary society, rather than on ancient Greek religion, or polytheistic religion, or what have you.

So I find myself, as I have just this semester in particular (with a few students very keen on reading Euthyphro as being anti-religious), trying to specify very carefully what one could see the conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro as showing about piety, while trying not to seem as if my care in doing so is intended as a defense of religion against its critics, and not to seem as if my care in doing so is occasioned by the extreme caution one imagines is called for by talking seriously about religion, rather than being called for by doing philosophy at all.

I imagine both religious students, and anti-religious students, wondering at such care being taken: why be so careful, so mindful of what is and isn’t being said, if you’re not trying to show why religion is right after all? or if you’re not trying to show that it’s just plain wrong?

…so that no word of yours may fall to the ground.

I’ve never been comfortable with the Euthyphro. I believe I first encountered it in its standard form—tendentiously trotted out as an argument against divine command theory in an ethical theory course. Maybe even in excerpt (what an insult! to me, the student, and to Plato, the author). Since then I’ve read it and taught it a number of times, with varying success. Often my discomfort doesn’t matter since it’s not really operative at the level at which I need to teach the material.

I’ve wondered, lately, doing my new semester’s rereading, whether my discomfort might not just have something to do with never having felt permitted to actually read the dialogue. Through graduate school, I worked closely with some ancient philosophers who helped make extra appealing to me the view that perhaps one ought to pay attention to the dialogues as dialogues. But the Euthyphro never really gave way to that point of view for me. Too short, maybe, too fixed in my mind as ‘the one where they define piety and Socrates does that thing’.

I’ve noticed other things this time through, but one thing in particular stood out because I’ve started to read it with more of an ordinary-language ear.

Euthyphro’s fifth attempt at a definition of the pious—which begins with ‘the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods’ at 12e, and is clarified further from there on at Socrates’ insistence—doesn’t exactly fail. Meaning, the definition he gives is not examined to the point that it gives way. Rather, Euthyphro fails; pressed to ‘sum up the many fine things that the gods achieve’, he falters:

‘I told you a short while ago, Socrates, that it is a considerable task to acquire any precise knowledge of these things, but, to put it simply, I say that if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, those are pious actions such as preserve both private houses and public affairs of state. The opposite of those pleasing actions are impious and overturn and destroy everything’ (14b).

He begs off examination of the earlier definition and switches terms, focusing now on the conventional, ritually obligatory acts of piety (in which I guess he is supposed to be an expert, in the least controversial sense?). Socrates quickly shapes this new answer into canonical form: ‘piety would be a knowledge of how to give to, and beg from, the gods’ (14d). (Later he even slips in that this is a specification of that ‘service’ about which he was earlier disappointed by Euthyphro.) What interests me is the exchange immediately following:

E: You understood what I said very well, Socrates.

S: That is because I am so desirous of your wisdom, and I concentrate my mind on it, so that no word of yours may fall to the ground.

It takes less than a page for Socrates to press Euthyphro back into admitting that the pious is what is dear to the gods.

This final examination has never seemed that interesting to me—maybe because it seemed inexplicable, arbitrary, that Euthyphro should just oscillate back to his starting-point so easily. But I suspect that the passage from this last examination’s (regularized) definition to the reprise of the very first one to appear in the dialogue also struck me as traversed in no particularly sophisticated way. No one trots out this examination to talk about ‘its argument’; it doesn’t seem like it has one. It seems like Euthyphro just gives too much away, doesn’t stand his ground.

But now I find it striking that Socrates makes this remark immediately before commencing to examine—’…I concentrate my mind on [your wisdom], so that no word of yours may fall to the ground’. That phrase seems like a sharp way of characterizing what does go on to happen.

S: … But tell me, what is this service to the gods? You say it is to beg from them and to give to them?

E: I do.

S: And to beg correctly would be to ask from them things that we need?

E: What else?

S: And to give correctly is to give them what they need from us, for it would not be skillful to bring gifts to anyone that are in no way needed.

E: True, Socrates.

S: Piety would then be a sort of trading skill between gods and men?

E: Trading yes, if you prefer to call it that.

S: I prefer nothing, unless it is true. But tell me, what benefit do the gods derive from the gifts they receive from us? What they give us is obvious to all. There is for us no good that we do not receive from them, but how are they benefited by what they receive from us? Or do we have such an advantage over them in the trade that we receive all our blessings from them and they receive nothing from us?

E: Do you suppose, Socrates, that the gods are benefited by what they receive from us?

S: What could those gifts from us to the gods be, Euthyphro?

E: What else, do you think, than honor, reverence, and what I mentioned just now, to please them?

S: The pious is then, Euthyphro, pleasing to the gods, but not beneficial or dear to them?

E: I think it is of all things most dear to them.

The margins of my copy here are just a chain of words: begging – needing – giving (gifts) – trading – benefit – advantage. Literally, the words are Socrates’, but Euthyphro approves them. (Earlier, they had traded mythological comparisons in a process of trying to shift the responsibility for having ‘moved’ Euthyphro’s statements, so the dialogue is, like many, sensitive to the fact that ownership of words is one of the contentious things for the characters.)

What does Socrates mean when he says ‘… so that no word of yours may fall to the ground’? Are the words I’ve chained together here ones that do fall to the ground? Or does each one appear as Socrates is attempting not to let it—or previous words?—fall to the ground? Is Euthyphro the one who keeps making them fall, by granting so much? He shows some resistance, discomfort: unsure about ‘trading’ (perhaps it sounds impious just to say that, of our relationship with the gods), openly challenging Socrates at the idea that the gods could so much as benefit from anything we do for them.

‘Need’ makes some gifts better, more treasured. But in many isn’t it precisely their total needlessness, gratuity, superfluity, that makes them gifts?

The first day

I hate the first day.

Well, that’s not quite right. Too dramatic. There’s nothing wrong with the first day of class. It’s a day. But I have to admit that I have not yet mastered, not yet come close to mastering, the rousing first-day protreptic, which is always what I secretly wish I might deliver—hopefully, thinking I might be literally inspired. I seem to recall a particularly good first day, once, somewhere in the past. It seems that I didn’t write down what I said.

I do teach set-pieces once I get into my proper material, but I feel averse to developing one merely for purposes of showmanship, to trot out on day one.

Usually, since I want to do something I’m not really up for, and then try it anyway, my first day of class seems half-done. I imagine students going home, saying, ‘what did you do in class today?’ ‘Well—sort of nothing. But he talked. But we didn’t really do anything yet.’

Most of my difficulties stem from thinking, perversely perhaps, that I should talk about philosophy on the first day. Probably only the orthodox can hand that lecture down from on high.

I always feel better with a text.