Some responses

So, here’s my first post. You seem to lament that yours wasn’t as good as you’d hoped. I think that’s a good thing. If you’d set the bar too high, both of us would have been afraid to jump in. Without trying to, I expect my first contribution might also have that dubious virtue.

I should hasten to add that I found both your posts quite stimulating, as you’ll infer from the fact that I find a lot in them to respond to. What I’ll do is write two separate posts, one responding to the two you’ve put up so far, and a second one reflecting on a couple of readings I’ve done recently. I figure it makes for more interesting blogging not to use the comments to respond to a post unless the response really is just a few sentences. Anything longer, I think, belongs on the main page.

I share your sentiment about lectures, conferences, and even seminars. I try to attend these things occasionally, because I do find that I’ll get things out of them that I wouldn’t get otherwise, but little enough that I try to minimize the time I spend on them. What I find I get that’s of most benefit is the provocation of something that comes from something entirely external to me: I’ll encounter ideas and forms of reasoning that never would have come to me on my own because I didn’t start or frame the conversation even to the extent that I do when I’m selecting what books to read. It’s a good learning experience to watch intelligent people thinking, especially if they’re quite unlike me.

On the flip side, I have great trouble participating. I think I go slower than most people. In conversation, I can slow things down and get my interlocutor to go at the pace that I need to follow him or her. But even in seminars, I usually timidly assume that the whole seminar shouldn’t slow down for my sake, so I just follow along, pick up as much as I can, and rarely feel on the ball enough to make a contribution of my own.

So one thing I do like about conversation with intimates is that I cease to be a spectator and can actually be carried along in someone’s train of thought. It’s like the difference between watching a car race and sitting in the passenger seat, perhaps even making suggestions and giving directions, and steering every once in a while.

On the topic of lectures, I’m reminded of a remark by Popper, explaining why he chose to use his invitation to speak at the Wittgenstein-dominated Moral Science Club to launch an attack on the Club’s chairman. The one thing, he said, that a lecture can do that a written article can’t, is spark debate, and so he aims to choose the most provocative topics when he gives talks.

I was interested to read about Proust’s disdain for conversation (something you’ve mentioned before), because it seems like conversation is so universally praised by thinkers of all stripes. I’m attracted to people who develop and defend the thought that goes against conventional wisdom, but I’m at least a bit sceptical of Proust’s claim. The scepticism comes from the fact that all language, and not just conversation, is a public phenomenon: we learn language from others, we use language to speak to others, and our words have meanings only to the extent that we can use them to make sense to others. Maybe that puts it a bit too strongly, but only a bit too strongly, I think. When Proust writes, who’s he writing for? The same people he can’t share his private self with in conversation? If anything, the public that buys his books is more of a stranger, less intimate, than those he speaks with. The self that writes has less of a sense of its audience, and so presumably has to find a language that’s less intimate than the language that friends share. Maybe the distance of not having to face your interlocutors allows for greater honesty? At any rate, Proust was clearly influenced by reading books, and wrote them himself, so perhaps the most he should say is that the conversations he prefers are the ones where he gets to control the pace of the conversation, where he never gets interrupted, and where his interlocutor will continue speaking until he chooses to intervene.

On a related note, one of my pet peeves is where thinkers (and this is true of the cleverest) generalize about human experience when really they’re just speaking of their own experience. At least the way you transcribed him, Proust says not just that he becomes more superficial, lazy, etc., in conversation, but that people in general do. How should he know? Maybe he feels that way. What if someone else says that all his best thoughts come from dialogue with others: does Proust really have any basis to claim that this person is lying, or deceived, or simply shallow?

All that said, I think I’m probably assuming too much about Proust, especially since I’m not reading him at first hand. I thought what you said about Socrates was really interesting, that though we often take the dialogues as the prime example of how thought evolves through conversations, Socrates’ thought doesn’t seem to be particularly shaped or shifted by his interlocutors. The one counter-example you gave, that of Diotima, comes as a story Socrates tells of his youth. We don’t see the Socrates of the dialogues being shaken in his views at all.

I was also charmed by the polar bear story. It raises some interesting questions about what we take for granted and what we deem to require evidence. It reminds me of a passage in the Philosophical Investigations, section 52: “If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous. But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy.”

Gosh, and those are just responses to your first post. Regarding the second, I imagine there’s a fascinating history to be written (or perhaps it’s already been written?) on the ways in which different people at different times have conceived of childhood. Bataille’s association of childhood with evil seems to me to be one side of a dichotomy, the other of which associates childhood with innocence. I think what both of these views pick up on is the sense that children haven’t fully been initiated into our moral world, they don’t yet have a sense of responsibility, which makes them chaotic and unpredictable, but also not subject to the same sanctions as adults.

I was also interested in your suggestion that evil is something transgressive but necessary, like the spooks at Hallowe’en (I know Bakhtin has things to say about this that I haven’t read). Hopefully by summer I’ll be working out in more detail what I want to say about play in my thesis, but I think it has a lot to do with just this: play seems to require a space in which the ordinary rules of conduct are suspended, and this space is both necessary for those ordinary rules to exist, but also has to be bounded in space and time.