For all y’all who have asked how it can be possible that my students are as bad as they are, I guess the only real answer is that Zembla U is a public school. The minimum GPA for admission here is frighteningly low, and I have the sneaking suspicion that high school English teachers just sort of sweep the masses through with a friendly pat on the back. Thanks, guys. No really. It’s not that I in any way disdain public education or high-school English teachers. If it weren’t for my 12th grade English teacher, I probably would have stuck with my plan to major in art, and I’d still be working at that coffee shop. (Actual, earnest, non-sarcastic thanks to Mrs. B, wherever you are.) It’s just that, if I were stuck teaching high school English, you can bet I would be packing a flask and whisking them out of there as quickly as possible.
The best thing about grading papers is how fucking wonderful everything else seems after. My own academic writing flows more easily; food tastes better and wine sweeter; the words of whatever book I am reading seem to sparkle a little brighter on the page (unless that’s just the booze; who can really say).
At the moment, I am enjoying the sparkle of Sharon Olds, thanks to the always-reliable recommendation of Clarabella. Other sparkle on my bedside table includes David Foster Wallace and the not-for-leisure but still-always-seismic Vladimir. Here is a thing he wrote one time:
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, self-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
I suspect Vlad’s distaste for jazz arose from his proximity to the venues of the Montreux jazz festivals. All those blowing horns, late into the nightwould get to me too after a while. Fortunately, during my tenure there, I was able to scope out all the decent watering holes. And the Montreux Palace (where Vlad lived) was not one of them. It was there I derived my most important equation:
booze = good^2
i always found the wine to taste sweetest *while* grading papers.
‘wine sweeter’? u bean hagnin out in germeny?
A-B–It’s sad, but I think V was generally just uninterested in music; at least he has disparaged it on a number of occasions. (And he wrote that a few years before me moved to Montreux anyway).
KWH–wine is good for grading, you’re right, but it is more a wine of bitterness than a wine of happiness, I find. (At least it is still wine, which is something!)
HA–well, sweeter metaphorically, I mean. I don’t actually like those sweet German wines. Or German wines at all, although I like German wine country…eh.
word !
You know what? I am going to rescind my comment about VN having written that verse before Montreux. I thought that he had, but publication dates alone do not in any way confirm this. So, A-B, I will say you are probably right.
Let’s give grading a chance, though, even if it’s like thalidomide for the brain. Why don’t you try doing some homework in axiomatic set theory AFTER grading a bunch of undergrad papers. THEN you’ll come to appreciate the secret delights of such an activity.
Your sample of Vladimir sounds like a verse version (wow, is that a nice alliteration, or what?) of his “Strong Opinions.”
If you don’t mind my asking, what school of literary theory and/or hermeneutics do you subscribe to? It seems to me a lot of the mumble-jumble passed these days as post-structuralist “theory” is actually just shameless regurgitations of themes and motifs in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (of course, via those two hacks Foucault and Derrida, who stole most of their ideas from Heidegger). So, you can’t honestly subscribe to the versed credo above and do contemporary “critical studies” without engaging in, as the phrase goes, cognitive dissonance.
Or, to use another phrase from a real critical master (Habermas), a “performative contradiction.”
I like the post and the Vlad bit, but you are making me really, really uneasy about the prospect of teaching freshman comp. 50 papers at a time from students less accomplished than yours, at a similarly unselective public university–yikes.
of course, via those two hacks Foucault and Derrida, who stole most of their ideas from Heidegger).
To the extent that Heidegger’s ideas were worth stealing. Dasein my ass, thanks.
Stories like this remind me of why I loved, LOVED WR 122: After I turned in my first paper the GTF teaching it told me that my writing was as good as his, that there was nothing he could do for me, and all I had to do was show up and turn in my work on time. Easiest A I ever earned, with the added benefit of chuckling at the absolutely horrible prose submitted by my classmates.
I did, also, avoid taking creative writing because I know I suck at fiction. I did not think my terrible fiction writing, or mediocre poetry, were worth the pain through which I would have to put some unsuspecting professor.
And, yes, that last paragraph changed tenses. Feel free to send some wolves after me.
What’s wrong with Dasein? At least the Dasein prior to the early 30s? It’s one of the most important attempts to solve questions of metaphysics in the first half of the 20th century–the other two being Carnap’s ‘Logische Aufbau der Welt’ (a complete botch, to be sure), and Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ (on which the jury is still out).
Or maybe you reject metaphysics altogether, which would be a quite different matter. But then I’d like to know how you could do philosophy without engaging in that kind of problems.
I must admit it’s been a long time since I read any of this stuff, and I will not hide my own ignorance of large parts of philosophy. That said, upon refresher of definitions (ahh internet), Dasein strikes me as a particularly pretentious way of saying “we exist and think about existing”. Nice to have a noun for it and all, but it sort of just makes me yawn.
Maybe I need to revisit the subject, I could find it more interesting now, once I get through reading some archaic anti-Marginalist econ (a buddy found a first edition of Taussig’s Wages and Capital for me), I might dive back into philosophy.
Largely, however, I do reject metaphysics. I’m also not sure it’s possible to do philosophy, at least in the sense that I’ve encountered it, without metaphysical questions. I think Ethics are entirely different, so that’s one area that I suspect doesn’t require metaphysics.
I’m interested in the development of philosophical thought, to a certain point, and like I said I’m largely ignorant past a certain point so my opinon of Dasein could be based on misperception, but I mostly find metaphysical questions annoying. And I’m not much in the habit of “doing” philosophy because I don’t think the answer is all that important.
Look, you can always say you don’t care about philosophy (which, by the way, we know since Aristotle that it’s a philosophical position, anyway–call it philosophical quietism, if you want. The ancient stoics and perhaps David Hume, on a certain reading, best embody this stance). At any rate, getting your ideas about anyone’s positions from the Internets is always a losing bet.
But if you do care, then Heidegger is inexorable in a way in which the French pygmies that came after him are not. Dasein is not just fancy codeword shorthand for a trite realization. It’s a sort of Kantian insight–while attempting to do justice to Hegel, Nietzsche, and German philosophical hermeneutics e.g., Dilthey), without falling in any of their conceptual traps. Shortly put, just like Kant, Heidegger asserts that a meaningful investigation into the nature of being (or Being, if you don’t mind a certain jargon), is only legitimately pursued as an examination of certain structures of the thinking subject (if you remember the central claim of Kant’s First Critique). In that subject, always situated in a historical world (hence the ‘Da’ in Dasein), the meaning of being (the ’sein’) comes to light. Unlike Kant, for Heidegger these invariable structures are not the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of intuition, rather the three registers of experienced temporality. This allows him to take onboard certain insights of Hegel regarding the historicity of the epistemic subject and its knowledge, and also give an approving nod to Dilthey, by claiming that the understanding of being–something that colors our entire outlook on the world–is always historically constituted.
What I mean is that the early Heidegger achieved a synthesis of European thought that’s hard to even begin to comprehend. In contrast, that sociologist of knowledge whom some people want to take for a philosopher (Michel Foucault, are your ears red?) started by stealing some ideas of Mauss, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, realized their combination was unworkable, discovered Nietzsche, could not philosophically grapple with the full implications of that position, then moved on to… God knows what, for I can’t make any good sense of his third period, the so-called ethics of the self. Maybe by then he had realized that his entire philosophical past only served to undermine all normativity, only to realize, at long last, that you actually need that normative fundament, at least with regard to ethics.
Happy now?
By the way, it sort of puzzles me how one could discern which are the truly interesting philosophical claims if you don’t have a good grip on the history of philosophy, one that enables you to know which claims are truly new and whether they haven’t perhaps been treated better by some author in the past. Contemporary hardcore analytic philosophers often make that mistake, only to find that their supposedly clever arguments are often variants of insights thhat were common knowledge to 18th century philosophical thought. See, for instance, latter-day epistemologists fumbling about in the dark only to bump against transcendental arguments. Had they carefully read Kant (or Wilfrid Sellars, if they can’t handle German), they’d have been spared many a misguided attempts.
Note to Alfina the Vague: please don’t come down too hard on my English. It’s not my first idiom.
A correction: with regard to philosophical “quietism,” I mean to say the ancient skeptics e.g., Sextus Empiricus), rather than the stoics. The latter were quite engaged, philosophically speaking.
Well, Chochachos, I have said earlier all I had ever planned on saying to the subject of philosophy. (I wrote that while reading What is a Thing, which, incidentally, was not worth the snark bestowed thereupon.)
So you’ll have to make do with this: Hedegger makes his way, wormily, into my project, as does Nietzsche.
As for me, I am content to be at best a good reader.
Heh. The duel of the discontented philosophs. Is it any wonder I prefer the cold, harsh world of mathematics? There’s nothing quite like the stark reality of numbers and testable objectivism to spin one’s proverbial crank!
Beer o’clock!
Anti-brain, I’m veering in that direction too, man. But don’t kid yourself about the reality of numbers and the objectivity of math. Things are more complicated than we were taught to believe. Have a look at, e.g., Lakatos’ “Proofs and Refutations.”
It’s a work on the philosophy of mathematics that does much to undermine the received wisdom about the reality of mathematical objects and the progress of mathematics as the inevitable march of reason.
Not to ruin your morning, but, if math is so crystal clear, how come Cantor got into such a deep depression when Russell informed him of a paradox in his set theory? Or why is it that huge geniuses like Felix Klein, of Klein disc fame, got so depressed with mathematics that he nearly committed suicide?
Moreover, you guys in mathematics have the luxury of defining and constructing your own objects. We don’t have that privilege in philosophy. But we do secretly envy mathematicians.
Here’s a task for you: give us a procedure for the well-ordering of the real numbers. :-)
Yes, clearly my bluff on “testable objectivism” has been called. You literary types sometimes surprise me. While you touch upon the implications of Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis, you have, however, failed to mention Godel’s Incompleteness theorem - which I think is more profound and to the point. In fact, Cohen has showed that the Continuum hypothesis can be neither proved nor disproved. So enter Kurt Godel. From the other results you mention, I will assume that you are familiar with Kurt and his pesky little theorems.
Clearly there is some deeply rooted trouble at the heart of mathematics. However, without necessitating that Kurt bring down the entire logical structure around us, one can reasonably claim that mathematics is able to provide us with a logical and rule-based system by which to test, quantify and judge experiments and, to some extent, reality (Einstein’s general relativity would be one excellent example of this).
Indeed while the countability, or rather uncountability of the real numbers is a bit of an aesthetic “hiccup”, it rarely intrudes upon the daily travails of mathematics. But that is not to say we still do not have our problems.
While the human mind is good at constructing mathematical objects, the point of constructing these “models” is to, well, model reality; and this is where we get into trouble. Take the photon, for example. Simple little point-like particle, but also a wave. Particle. Wave. Particle-wave duality. All three are separate and distinct manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. One phenomenon, three separate mathematical treatments. I will leave it at that as I believe you smart enough to draw your own conclusions. :)
Hey, Anti-Brain! Ah ain’t no lit’rary type! Don’t be daft, man! I love good literature 9which is more than can be said about SOME literary theorists these days), but I’m not into social constructivism or mindless deconstructionism. I’m an intellectually serious fella. How many literary types do you think bother with axiomatic set theory.
And, yeas, the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved, but you can posit it (as the Axiom of Choice), and yes, the Minkowski differentiable manifold does a swell job telling us about the structure of space-time, and yes, you can get along fine in math without bothering about such niceties, but I thought you guys (just like us in the philosophy business) were worried about completeness, consistency, provability, and other such quaint things.
Jus’ sayin.’
Aha! A philosopher it is! I was curious as to how you knew so much about mathematics.
Yes, completeness, consistency, provability…the triad of terror. What I think is the real problem with Mr. Godels’ troubling little theories is that they seem to imply there exists no universal mathematical framework. But then, what should we expect? Unless we are looking towards a “universal explanation of everything” (TM) that unifies biology, chemistry, physics and all the knowledge of mankind, why should we expect harmony in the mathematical world?
Do we even require it? I mean, for chissakes, mathematics was developed to facilitate fair-trade!
So while Godel, Cantor and Gentzen cause us a lot of consternation, I (as a physicist/mathmatician) can go to sleep at night not fearing that tomorrow Pythagoras’ little ditty about triangles is going to fail me. Proof in this sense is in the pudding.
What, I think, these theorems do underscore is the limited human capacity to assign something other than primitive language constructs to our subjective reality. We are bound to 3 dimensions. Clearly the universe seems to conform well to mathematical laws and differentiable manifolds, but is that the whole story? Is space-time just a differentiable manifold? It’s really difficult to say but with enough beer in me I will say no, that’s just our notion of what is going on. It’s an approximation. An educated guess, at best. How do we know this? We know this because we have problems with completeness, consistency and provability. This triad show us that our understanding is limited. They are screaming something out to us. This is perceived as ugliness by the aesthetic crowd, but to others, they speak volumes about our (current)ability to understand reality.
Gadzooks! Look at the length of this baby. See what you philosophy types do me?!? I said it, I said it. Math is not perfect. Happy now? Christ, I need a beer and some counselling.
And thus, with a thundering roar, comes down man’s last bastion of certainty–mathematics, whom we thought to be a faithful lover, only to be revealed as jest another shifty mistress. However, don’t imagine that we philosophers revel in the imperfection of mathematics. Quite the poosite, I should say.
But don’t rush to get depressed, Anti-Brain. Some of us in the philosophy cottage industry knew about man’s limited abilities to deal with reality. That is one of the main lessons of Kant’s First Critique. Let’s just make the best of this limitation, then, and soldier on. Otherwise, the crackpots out there might just take it our limitations as a proof that there’s gotta be some other, unlimited being who runs the show. These days, they call it Intelligent Design. And surely we don’t want that.
Note, however, that Godel’s results on PROVABILITY fail to undermine the quest for universal principles of EXPLANATION. In fact, we keep waiting for you guys to unify gravitation theory and quantum mechanics (whether you do it with rope, string, or superstrings is up to you, just patch up the goddamn machinery), and then we’ll have those ultimate explanantia we’ve been looking for. Or something.
Depressed? No, far from it - it is important to be aware of the shortcomings of any discipline. Like I said about the Pythagorean theorem; tomorrow, I will wake up and mathematics will still be there. The earth will spin, and calendars will still have 365 as a measure of a year. So I wasn’t so much touting the destruction of logical-formalism as I was highlighting some of the important difficulties that we now face…
Clearly math is one of the most important frameworks for explanation that man has ever devised. Quite simply, we really have nothing else - well, except for ID *shudder*, or something…Maybe super-soap-on-a-rope-strings? Heh.
Sorry, wrong blog. I’ll get my coat…
So, mathematics explains?
How odd! I thought it describes and quantifies. I was brought up to believe that laws explain facts, and theoretical laws explain empirical laws. But math is an uninterpreted formal framework–how could it even explain anything at all?
Or maybe you’re talking about mathematical PHYSICS? But that, my dear fellow, is interpreted mathematics, formal models into which empirical meaning has been injected, to make them applicable to the phenomenal world.
If mathematics explains, then logic explains, too. “If p, then q. Non-q. Therefore, non-p.”
How could that ever explain anything?
Or maybe you have in mind elementary mathematics, like arithmetics that helps us count apples, and synthetic Euclidian geometry that helps us build bedframes and windows. But surely, counting apples is not explaining them, and we have no conclusive reason to think that the structure of physical space (or space-time, if you will) is just as a Greek fella DESCRIBED it in the third century before the man from Nazareth.
But I fear we may have hijacked nice missus Alfina’s forum for our abstruse sparing practice. Apologies to the rightful owner of this blog.
Indeed, we need seek out another venue for this.
Apologies.
Let me state that I love this comment thread precisely because everyone on it is smarter than me. That’s it, I’m going to graduate school, so maybe I’ll learn something besides all this economics. Or at least more of this blasted economics. Don’t even get my started on its shortcomings (mathematical bias, confusing statistics for proof, ignorance of its own history, often unrealistic assumptions, etc), I could go on for days and I love the stuff.
That said, thanks for the crash-course in the significance of Heidegger. Piqued the whithered husk of my intellectual interest again. I’ll go ahead and blame college for killing it, college and the one awful course in Philosophy of Science that I took. Just the mention of Lakatos or Khun makes my eyes roll up in my head.
Hey, no big deal. The more people I can convert to the bankrupt business of philosophy, the merrier, as the saying goes. :-)
Anti-Brain, I don’t have my own blog. I don’t have things to say that are interesting enough to start a blog, and I’m not into Fuzzy Critters Friday Blogging, or something. So I don’t know which forum we could find to carry on the friendly punching.
That being said, I gotta run to a conference on–what else–epistemology.
I will never convert to your ontology, sir! NEVER!
I prefer the banrupt business of economics, and there’s more money in it.
Good Glaven! Most comments ever–on philosophy, no less. Well, feel free to natter on about whatever. Then no one can complain if I do a gabillion more Nabokov posts this week.