minotaurs

LEVI ADDS MINOTAURS to K-Punk’s bestiary of trolls, grey vampires, fans, and masters:

“To K-Punks bestiary, I wonder if we shouldn’t add Minotaurs and their Labyrinths. One of the most frustrating things about the trollish figure of the scholar is the manner in which they proceed as minotaurs presiding over labyrinths. For the Minotaur it is never possible for there to be a genuine philosophical difference or a genuine difference in positions among philosophers. Rather, the Minotaur converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape. The Minotaur is even willing to go so far as deny explicit textual evidence to the contrary, speculating about the motives animating the Minos-Master they defend, suggesting that the thinker was either being humble or didn’t really mean such and such or that it is just a manner of speaking.”

And I love this part, especially about Kant/Hume:

“The goal of the Minotaur, of course, is to insure that there is never any subsequent philosophy, but rather that the practice of philosophy consist in endlessly combing over the bones of the past. Philosophy as archeology, and not in Foucault’s sense either. Any living culture for these archeologists is an affront. The Minotaur is, above all, Janus-Faced, allowing one set of principles for the Minos-Master he defends and demanding another for all those that refuse homage to Minos. Thus, for example, the Minotaur that defends Kant’s Labyrinth sees no contradiction in the fact that Kant reduces Hume’s position to a brief few sentences without a detailed engagement with the Treatise and the Enquiry, while demanding a nuanced and careful analysis of Kant’s entire body of work from anyone who protests.”

*lol*

They also neglect Kant’s own scathing remarks about the minotaur type in the opening pages of the Prolegomena, just as Heidegger scholars neglect Heidegger’s openly expressed frustrations with the very personality type some of them perfectly represent.

Iran

Things getting very intense in Iran. Check the news if you haven’t.

that’s all for tonight

That’s enough blogging for me today, so I’m signing off. But if you’re interested in these sorts of issues, then Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” should be considered a kind of homework assignment. It’s a hoot, but also an accurate description of how the process works, and Poe is surely right that authorial vanity is one of the ingredients in the mystification of writing and thinking.

However, I still hold that the majority of mystification is done not by those who are succeeding, but by those who are having problems doing so. Most of my mystification of the writing process was done before age 30, and it was just the typical sort of self-destructiveness that is often found in the graduate students I am trying to advise as one of this blog’s tasks. (It’s not a mission I began with in January, but has evolved over time to become perhaps my most compelling mission on this page.)

If there is one thing I’m proud of about my 20’s, however, it’s that I always viewed productive people as heroes and as models. I never told myself that they were cutting corners. I just sought proximity to them whenever possible, because somehow I sensed that they had a healthier relationship to their own work than I had to mine. I’ve recommended that one extremely good model may be all you need, and in those days I could have listened to Alphonso Lingis talk for hours about his daily writing mechanics. People like this, who exert a fortunate influence at an opportune moment, can’t ever really be repaid, because you’re only young once, and over time you become naturally less pliant and receptive to the routines of others. It’s a long road between age 20 and age 40, but you’re not equally influenceable along the entire course of that road. William James even says that you have to break all your bad habits by age 25, and while that may be too harsh and perhaps too tied to a specific era of history, the relevant age isn’t too much later than that even now.

an early start on The Composition of Philosophy

But in fact, there is no fear of a jinx in describing things that are already known. This series of posts will discuss how I go about writing a philosophy book. Other methods than mine will obviously be possible. My goal here is simply to do as Poe did, and demystify the process (and in his case, I find myself admiring “The Raven” much more after reading the essay than I did beforehand).

As stated several times over the past week, my view is that intellectual work should not be viewed as a pristine internal process that later must come into contact with regrettably corrupt material limitations of the world in which we live. For while many thoughts do exist in advance in our minds, they are nowhere near as articulate or rigorous as we imagine them to be. They are somewhat vague pre-thoughts, at least when they are new.

This is obviously not the case for finely polished and developed thoughts that we have had years to whip into shape. For instance, my thoughts on Heidegger’s tool-analysis are now as clear as they could possibly be; I have counter-arguments prepared for virtually every challenge that could be posed to my reading, and could easily write a convincing essay on the topic with only 10 minutes’ notice, or hold my own in a debate carried in real time on radio. But that was not the case during the early years in which my reading of Heidegger was in genesis.

In the early 1990’s, for instance (the core of my reading of Heidegger dates to 1991-92) I more or less “knew” what I know now about the tool-analysis, but would have done a rather poor job of articulating and defending it. That’s what needs practice. And this is just one of many reasons that the supposed priority of “argument” in philosophy is a very bad idea. Arguments are the final stage of philosophy, not its first stage.

Important note: I am not claiming that “we arbitrarily decide what we want to believe on the basis of feeling and emotion, and then develop elaborate sophistry for defending it.” This is one of those absurd dichotomies that anyone who has lived 30 or 40 years on this planet should realize bear no relation to the actual way in which thought occurs.

No, I am saying that philosophy is perfectly rational, but that argument is most often just a johnny-come-lately, superficial form of rationality– just as the contours of a suit of armor give us only a rough idea of the shape of the human body that it protects. It has been said countless times (first by Goethe and Nietzsche, I believe) that once we are able to express a thought in words, we are no longer in love with that thought anymore. I’d probably put a bit differently, but this idea is on the right track.

Many of the most interesting thinkers I know have quite a struggle putting things into words. In fact, this is why they tend to become writers— precisely because they do not find it easy to find the right words quickly and in speech. The frustration of this missing ability is often the major ingredient that produces a writer.

Back to the topic at hand…

An intellectual product of any sort ought to “breathe.” That is to say, it ought to be in genuine contact with its environment. This is why the best way to overcome the horror of infinity/nothingness that enshrouds an empty piece of paper, is to turn the constraints of any project into positive features. Or the old familiar maxim: “make a virtue of necessity.”

So, when beginning any piece of intellectual work, I ask myself “what are the most inviolable constraints on this project?” And these are often crudely practical.

What are my constraints in the present case?

A French publisher wanted to publish a translation of Tool-Being. Naturally, I was quite excited by this. Disappointment soon followed when exact calculations were done as to how much this would cost. No philosophy publisher would take the risk of recouping those investment costs for anyone short of a full-blown international celebrity, and I do not meet that description.

This left the option of writing an original work for the French market. The publisher was amenable to this. But the need for a translator was still a basic constraint on the project. In January, I determined that I am able to write and deliver a pretty good lecture in French, but in no way is it my strongest foreign language, and I have neither the time nor the ability to compose a stylistically competent monograph in French.

This put me in the truly amusing predicament of having a financial constraint on the project. How much money could I obtain for a translator? Having determined this, we calculated the affordable length of the book by the preferred French method of the number of characters. Converting this into words, I came up with the approximate total of 43,000 words.

A matching grant is possible, from a French cultural agency. This would be desirable, because 43,000 words is a bit short for my tastes for a book of systematic philosophy.

However, here comes another constraint… We can only apply for the matching grant once 20% of the translation is complete. This puts me in an interesting situation. Namely, I need to conceive the book in two parts, such that the first part is capable of standing alone, but also such that I can quickly double the length of the book if the grant is received. I believe I have figured out a way to do this.

The next constraints come from the conditions of the French market. In the first place, none of my writings currently exist in French translation, and hence my ideas are not generally well known in France. This means that at least the first few chapters of the book must aim at getting the French readership up to speed on my readings of Husserl, Heidegger, and some of the basic concepts that I draw on in everything I write– withdrawal of objects, fissure of two layers of objects into two parts apiece with a resulting fourfold structure, the impossibility of direct causation, and so forth. All of these topics will need to be handled in expository textbook fashion, and in a manner compatible with the conventions of French intellectual style, which differs from the norms utilized in English.

But this leads to an additional constraint issuing from my own personality… Namely, I have no interest in writing a book that merely summarizes what I’ve already done. I try to structure books in such a way that I inevitably have to confront problems that I have not fully confronted before. This is the only way you learn. No book can solve every problem, and every philosophical standpoint has dozens of unresolved problems. But I try to choose at least 3 or 4 problems in each book whose solution has previously eluded me. (This is why the beginnings of my books are generally smoother than the conclusions… At the outset I am always giving increasingly polished and rapid compressed versions of things I already know quite well. Tool-Being was hundreds of pages on Heidegger’s tool-analysis, but I can now dispose of the topic perfectly adequately in just a few paragraphs. But by the end of a book you ought to be struggling with things that are closer to the edge of your knowledge. Only in this way can you develop intellectually over time.)

So, I have to plan for around 43,000 words by the end of the summer for sure, and around another 43,000 words quickly and on demand in case the matching grant comes through. But the first 43,000 have to be completely self-contained, in case the matching grant is never obtained.

Incidentally, there was the further side-drama that someone tried to torpedo my initial grant for the first 43,000 words. But that’s just typical bad academic politics, and you have to try to get to the point where it doesn’t eat at you too much, because it never really stops; over time, you hopefully establish a stronger position that means people have to pay a higher price to mess with you than previously, and for that reason it happens less often than before. The grant was ultimately obtained, though I also had to enter into “practical” countermeasures to neutralize the attempted torpedoing of it. This required subtle political skill (which I have less of than many others, being a bit on the frank side by nature), including knowledge of the exact motivations of the person trying to stop the grant. In short, this project like every other had to “breathe” in a specific political atmosphere– in this case, the atmosphere of a grant process. There’s no point becoming too angry about it. Humans are not angels, and to expect them to be so is to court a lifetime of disappointment. It’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, and in fact I still haven’t mastered it: for several weeks I was pretty furious about this. But all’s well that ends well, or at least we have no choice but to tell ourselves that.

Now, how should the 43,000 words be organized? That is the next question.

To answer this question, I used a somewhat arbitrary method. 43,000 words is almost exactly the length of the first third of Tool-Being. That third of Tool-Being is made up of nine sections. For this reason, I decided to enter into the comfort of familiarity and do what worked before.

43,000 words organized into 9 sections means approximately 4,800 words per section. That’s maybe around 15 double-spaced pages per section. This was a comforting thought, because at this point 15 pages is an extremely manageable size for me. If necessary, I could wake up at 6 AM and have 15 extremely polished and well-argued pages by bedtime, and still have time for a nice lunch and a couple of relaxing walks. Normally, however, I might give it 2 or 3 days to go from zero to finished-and-polished.

However, because of the structure of my summer activities, I will only have about 6 weeks to write this book. Is 6 weeks for 43,000 words too ambitious? Not at this point. That’s only around 3 good pages per day, and if necessary I could always cut way back on blogging if time is running short.

However, no matter how short the sections, the number of 9 sections in comparison with 6 weeks could be inherently panic-inducing on a bad day. (And we all have bad days.)

So, I have decided to mentally arrange the 9 sections in groups of three. The way I psychologically conceive of this project, then, is that I need to write three 45-page articles in a six-week period, and that doesn’t sound intimidating anymore. (Until two years ago, it would have, but spring 2008 during sabbatical revealed previously unsuspected powers of rapid preparation and composition. One of the key moments for me was reviewing Braver’s book, which I read and marked up exhaustively in two or three days and then reviewed completely in one or two. It was quite gratifying… On one Wednesday I had never read a single word by Lee Braver, and by the following Wednesday had what I think is a balanced and capable article on his extremely long book. It’s important to have “breakthrough” moments like this every couple of years, I’ve found, and these breakthroughs can pertain to work habits no less than to ideas.)

Knowing that I will break the book into three chunks, I asked myself: “can the argument of this book somehow be grouped into three logical stages?” This established a further arbitrary but useful constraint… How can I split the whole of my philosophical ideas as of 2009 into three plausibly articulated chunks? I’ll address this issue in later posts.

the obvious title, then…

Since Poe used “The Philosophy of Composition” as his title, I will plan to use “The Composition of Philosophy” as the name for my posts on the writing of L’objet quadruple (once the contract arrives, my fear of jinx will end; expect mid-July as the starting date for these posts).

*laughing out loud*

Not to beat this essay to death, but while rereading it now I am amazed by this wonderful summation partway through:

“I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word ‘Nevermore’ at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines.”

[ADDENDUM: There is one incorrect claim in the essay. Poe makes the useful but exaggerated point that concerning the line near the end “Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”, “It will be observed that the words, “from out my heart,” involve the first metaphorical expression in the poem.”

This is technically untrue, since he had already written “and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,” obviously a metaphor. Nonetheless, it easily could have been the case that the entire poem employed no metaphors until the very end.]

this was the inspiration

It is the following paragraphs from Poe’s essay that gave me the idea to write, later this summer, a series of “how I wrote this philosophy book” posts:

“I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would- that is to say, who could- detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say- but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers- poets in especial- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy- an ecstatic intuition- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought- at the true purposes seized only at the last moment- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view- at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable- at the cautious selections and rejections- at the painful erasures and interpolations- in a word, at the wheels and pinions- the tackle for scene-shifting- the step-ladders, and demon-traps- the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio…

For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions, and, since the interest of an analysis or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select ‘The Raven’ as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition- that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”

The difference, of course, is that Poe did not have the blogosphere at his disposal, and hence he was unable to do this in real time for his reading audience.

best ending in literature

And if Poe is merely a candidate for the funniest opening with that “Charles Dickens” entrée, he is the hands-down winner of the “most hilarious conclusion” contest.

I refer to the final sentences of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Never has there been a more comical exploitation of the deliberate deus ex machina. Could Poe possibly have kept a straight face while writing this?

The narrator is about to be pushed into the terrifying pit by the fiery walls closing in on him. But then, sudden deliverance!

“There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

Perhaps I should add that the advance or even existence of the French army had never been foreshadowed even the least bit anywhere earlier in the story. (If memory serves, we had never even been told that the narrator’s tortures were at the hands of the Inquisition, and certainly the events in the story had never been situated openly in Toledo before the end.)

“It was that of General Lasalle.” No funnier sentence has ever been written in Anglophone literature. It deserves to become a catchphrase.

speaking of Poe

Speaking of Poe, he’s one of those people that many of us read at a very young age, then forget about, and then vaguely remember as a “horror” writer.

Well, “horror” isn’t exactly false, but it does miss the point a bit.

I rediscovered Poe on a rainy November evening at the age of 23, and immediately realized that I had been no position at 13 or 14 to have appreciated his brilliance. Poe does it all… Original tales, poems that are underrated only because poetry these days has drifted so far afield from classical meter and rhyme, handwriting analysis, cryptography, a bit of phrenology, literary criticism, and in “Eureka” even a plausible philosophy of nature.

Poe: The Philosophy of Composition

For those who haven’t read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition,” it’s well worth a look. He goes through the whole of “The Raven” and comments on the method he used to write the poem. It’s a rather irreverent treatment of the usual theme of poetic inspiration, and even if at times it sounds like he’s having a bit too much fun debunking his own inspiration, it rings true on the whole as a description of how one goes about creating a piece of writing from nothing.

This essay is also a candidate for one of the funniest opening half-lines in literature:

“CHARLES DICKENS, in a note now lying before me…”

It reminds me of one of my favorites, the opening half-line of the English translation of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom:

“The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign…”

(Not what you would expect as the opening words of a graphic novel of kidnapping and sex crimes.)