Reflection A
Category I: Vocabularies
Category II: Contemplating history
Reflection B
Category III: Salvation
Category IV: Self-consciousness
Reflection C
Category V: Anti-dogmatism
Category VI: Aesthetics
Reflection D
Category VII: Education
Category VIII: Virtue
Reflection E
Reflection A
In a way, a commonplace book collection of idea-scraps is similar to collecting Hopi Katsina dolls, Zuni fetishes, Hallmark-ornaments, stamps, keeping an aquarium, tending your garden or a thousand other things: we extrapolate ourselves into space, to gain some control, or foothold, as we construct a narrative. It may hang on walls, be neatly tucked inside plastic pockets in albums, be an underwater, moving vision of color and form behind glass, have the smell of freshly cut grass – or, as in the commonplace case, impose some control on our thought-processes as entries somehow mirror or condense an attitude we have - or have had - towards some idea, expression, topic or thing. Rorty talks of our self being ‘centreless’ (IV, 4) and I think this is precisely what he means: we switch between narratives, not least in a practical sense as we focus our attention in one direction or another. How do we otherwise explain forgetting, apart from it being the result of some dreary biological process? The commonplace thought-scraps can be extrapolated into hour-long contemplations of the deepest existential concerns. They signal what it is we entertain intellectually and are as such of course in need of interpretation. They may be black and white on paper but do not hold the same concrete satisfaction as the Katsina-doll on my wall no matter how elusive its meaning.
My 8 categories (an inconclusive number) for the 79 entries (nice, uneven number): VOCABULARIES, CONTEMPLATING HISTORY, SALVATION, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, ANTI-DOGMATISM, AESTHETICS, EDUCATION, VIRTUE merely reflect some of the things that are important to me; probably the ones I spend and have spent a good deal of time being preoccupied with, whether in an organized format: reading, teaching, preparing a paper or a presentation, or that I have been contemplating while biking, walking, cooking, staring into a wall, or trying to fish a dead fish out of the aquarium. That’s my least favorite task when it comes to aquarium keeping: stiff, its dead, empty eyes staring at me straight through the glass to its underworld; its unnatural movements: bobbing in the water as I try to guide it into the net and flush it down the toilet if it's small enough. Some are too big. What the hell are the other fish thinking? ‘Thank you, thank you, oh Lord, for extrapolating the rottening carcass from our habitat!’ - ‘Old Joe was a good fish!’ -‘The net! The net! Not me! Not me!’ or simply ‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi!’ One day, perhaps, we will know.
Category I: Vocabularies
1. So too in our vulgar tongue there are some excellent expressions whose beauty is fading with age and metaphors whose colour is tarnished by too frequent handling.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 301
2. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts.
-Montaigne, On idleness, Screech 9
3. But no matter what we may say, the customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 275
4. It pains me that my Essays merely serve ladies a routine piece of furniture – something to put into their salon. This chapter will get me into their private drawing-rooms; and I prefer my dealings with women to be somewhat private: the public ones lack intimacy and savour.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 269
5. In marriage, alliances and money rightly weigh at least as much as attractiveness and beauty.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 272
6. Who with her witchcraft and misseeming sweete,
Inveigled him to follow her desires unmeete.
-Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (p. 797)
7. I cannot recognize most of my ordinary emotions in Aristotle: they have been covered over and clad in a different gown for use by the schoolmen. Please God they know what they are doing! If I were in that trade, just as they make nature artificial, I would make art natural.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 301
8. We happen to have been born in a country where it [religion] was in practice; or we regard its antiquity or the authority of the men who have maintained it; or we fear the threats it fastens upon unbelievers, or pursue its promises. Those considerations should be employed in our belief, but as subsidiaries; they are human ties. Another religion, other witnesses, similar promises and threats, might imprint upon us in the same way a contrary belief.
-Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, Frame 325
9. The one crucial feature of human nature that underwrites this adaptability [to new and different environments] is domain-general intelligence, and that intelligence, along with all the distinctive features of human temperament and personal character, varies from person to person and group to group.
-Joseph Carroll, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Theoretical Model Illustrated with a Critique of Pride and Prejudice.” (p. 81)
10. What enriches a language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds – not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 300
Category II: Contemplating history
1. It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.
-Will Durant (http://www.willdurant.com/home.html)
2. And what if (as some say) the heavens as they grow old are contracting downwards towards us, thereby casting our very hours and days into confusion? And what of our months too, since Plutarch says that even in his period the science of the heavens had yet to fix the motions of the moon? A fine position we are in to keep chronicles of past events!
-Montaigne, On the lame, Screech 352
3. Every portrayal affects the identity of what is portrayed, as much as the subject conditions its portrayals.
-George Kubler, “Style and representation of historical time”
4. … history teaches me that the world is more abundant and diverse than either the ancients or we ever realized…
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 372
5. We should stop trying to put our discursive practices within a larger context, one which forms the background of all possible social practices and which contains a list of “neutral” canonical designators that delimit the range of the existent once and for all.
-Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. (p. 24)
6. Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ (…) We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.’
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (p. 1)
7. Only poets (…) can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist that there is only one true lading-list, one true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives. We are doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (p. 28).
8. …my interest in science and indeed the arts and anything else is simply that they provide a series of ingredients which can be combined – with luck – by means of pattern-building intuitions, to provide some kind of particular counter-intuitive or apparently counter-intuitive solution to some kind of problem which can be stated in a fairly restricted sort of way. Other anthropologists think of themselves as contributing to some ongoing march of science. That’s maybe why other anthropologists are greater scientists than I am, because they actually believe in science and progress and cumulativeness. Whereas I am actually one of nature’s genuine postmodernists, always was, from the very beginning. I mean, I was a postmodernist before postmodernism had ever been invented, in the sense that I wasn’t really interested in actually, as it were, ‘advancing the subject’ in any particular way. All that I was interested in doing was producing a certain frisson, a certain artistic effect, which could be achieved by taking a random collection of objects which would be made to fit together in an interesting way. You know, like a bird decorating its nest with an arrangement of little pieces of tissue paper, a leaf, a flower.
-Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology; Essays and Diagrams (1999) (p. 24)
9. The years can drag me along if they will, but they will have to drag me along facing backwards.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 262
10. It is quite true, what philosophy says, that life is to be understood backwards. Yet, then we overlook the other statement, that it is lived forwards. A statement, the more you think about it, whose consequence is that life can never be quite understood since at no point in time do I achieve complete immobility to assume the position: backwards. (my translation)
-S. Kierkegaard, Journals
”Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds. Hvilken Sætning, jo meer den gjennemtænkes, netop ender med, at Livet i Timeligheden aldrig ret bliver forstaaeligt, netop fordi jeg intet Øieblik kan faae fuldelig Ro til at indtage Stillingen: baglænds.” Journalen JJ:167 (1843), SKS bd. 18, s. 306 / SKS-E.
Reflection B
There’s no doubt in my mind that we are the victims of vocabularies. There are the obvious ones: ‘languages’ as in foreign languages which it requires significant time and energy-consuming effort to decode and command. There are cultural vocabularies no less mired in such communicative complexity. Even within ‘a culture’ you’ll find a plethora of communities each with their specific, often unwritten barriers of linguistic and cultural vocabularies (i.e. expectations) impossible to transcend without significant existential dedication, the result of which is that we typically prefer not to engage them as the costs to our everyday psyche simply would be too high. It is for example perfectly legitimate and possible to live a full and satisfying life without the slightest concern for English literature. You may have other literatures, just as good or even better. This again would depend on the circumstances of your path through life, which culture, language, sets of expectations to meaning, aesthetics etc. you had been trained in - irrespective of whether or not you had perfect competence in the languages involved. These problems no less arise when we think about history and try to make sense of it.
My selections in categories I and II all speak to these difficulties. Montaigne’s contributions address different dimensions of the defining condition: ‘vocabulary.’ Spenser’s two poetic lines posit a specific human craft: seduction. They demonstrate how a vocabulary in a sense is like ‘witchcraft,’ sweeping us along, in Montaigne’s words, into its customs, her desires. Carroll’s piece states the same while holding out the thought that the myriad of representations converge on a simpler form. Likewise, Durant’s popular emphasis of ‘accumulated memories’ for both individual and group reaches into notions of both commonality and idiosyncrasy. Rorty is more ruthless with his ‘discursive practices’ which I take not to exclude a sense of familiarity with that which went before; i.e. it is impossible not to view Montaigne as a contemporary human being. Evolution is a radical mode of understanding what the human being is; I don’t think mankind in general, and in particular humanists, have even begun to assess its consequences. Gell delivers, in my eyes, the most sympathetic and most relevant depiction possible of a post-modernist. Finally, it is interesting how Kierkegaard and Montaigne appears to be precisely on the same page – at least in these two entries (II, 9 & 10). (Their notion of ‘God’ (elsewhere) also seems to converge in essence.)
Category III: Salvation
1. We, who are never-endingly confused by our own internal delusions, should not go looking for unknown external ones.
-Montaigne, On the lame, Screech 359
2. ... let boys be fashioned by fortune to the natural laws of the common people; let them become accustomed to frugal and severely simple fare…
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 406
3. Everywhere death intermingles and merges with our life: our decline anticipates its hour and even forces itself upon our very progress. (…) I am not over-fond of salads nor of any fruit except melons.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 408
4. The Absurd is precisely by its objective Repulsion the Measure of the Intensity of Faith in Inwardness.
- S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (p. 189)
5. Just because I loathe superstition I do not go straightway mocking religion.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 275
6. I may begin with any subject I please, since all subjects are linked to each other.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 303
7. The Greeks acknowledged another species of fear over and above that fear caused when our reason is distraught; it comes, they say, from some celestial impulsion, without any apparent cause.
-Montaigne, On fear, Screech 15
8. Poetry can show us love with an air more loving than Love itself.
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 271
9. The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation?
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 269
10. ... so skillfully do the Fates spin the thread of our lives.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 411
Category IV: Self-consciousness
1. A loud and lively gab, such as mine habitually is, soon flies off into hyberbole.
-Montaigne, On the lame, Screech 354
2. There is nothing so supple and eccentric as our understanding.
-Montaigne, On the lame, Screech 362
3. I so hunger after freedom that if anyone were to forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I would to some extend live less at ease.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 373
4. We are free to see the self as centreless, as an historical contingency all the way through.
Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.”
5. A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material which potently lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection (31). Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes (63).
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
6. I should prize just as highly graces that were all mine and inborn as those I had gone begging and seeking from education. It is not in our power to acquire a fairer recommendation than to be favored by God and nature.
-Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, Frame 337
7. When someone said to Plato: ‘They are all gossiping about you,’ he said, ‘Let them. I will so live that I will compel them to change their style.’
-Montaigne, On some lines of Virgil, Screech 287
8. In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities.
-S. Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony (p. 262)
9. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquility for the conduct of our life.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 415
10. I, unconcerned and ignorant within this universe, allow myself to be governed by this world’s general law, which I shall know sufficiently when I feel it.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 374
Reflection C
I chose SALVATION and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS for their philosophical radicalism and Montaigne’s earthly approach to them both. He has a complex sense of the relationship between the great mystery and our rational abilities to verbalize answers. From ‘internal delusions’ to ‘genital activities’ ‘all subjects are linked to each other.’ And for Montaigne keeping both legs on the ground acknowledging our limitations brings us as far as we can go on our own engine.
Kierkegaard’s: “The Absurd is precisely by its objective Repulsion the Measure of the Intensity of Faith in Inwardness” is probably my longest held saying and deserves an explanation. The absolute (God) appeared before human beings (at a specific historical point in time) in the most ordinary and recognizable of forms. The paradoxical nature of this encounter was an objective ‘repulsion, an absurdity,’ as the witnesses tried to overcome the paradox (God = 'carpenter'-look-alike-me!?) which, were they to entertain the notion that indeed something divine was going on, could only be a matter of intense, private ‘faith.’ Says Kierkegaard.
A serious contestant to the position of ‘favorite quote’ for me sits in IV, 7: live and make them ashamed of themselves… the clowns!
Category V: Anti-dogmatism
1. How many improbable things there are which have been testified to by people worthy of our trust: if we cannot be convinced we should at least remain in suspense.
-Montaigne, That it is madness to judge the true and the false, Screech 76
2. But what I have definitely not done is to delve deeply into them [the sciences], biting my nails over the study of Aristotle, that monarch of the doctrine of the Modernists…
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 38
3. When collating objects no quality is so universal as diversity and variety.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 364
4. He was quite unaware that there is as much scope and freedom in interpreting laws as in making them.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 365
5. It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the texts, and there are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 369
6. And that is how laws serve us: they can be adapted to each one of our concerns by means of some twisted, forced or oblique interpretation.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 370
7. … human justice is formed on the analogy of medicine, by which anything which is effective is just and honourable…
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 372
8. And all her filthy feature open showne,
They let her goe at will, and wander ways unknowne.
-Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (p. 797)
9. A doctrine seriously digested is one thing; another thing is these superficial impressions, which, born of the disorder of an unhinged mind, swim about heedlessly and uncertain in the imagination.
-Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, Frame 325
10. “[…] Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressivity; the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositionalities of racist discourses.” ~not!
-Homi K. Bhabha, Visual culture: the reader (p. 377)
Category VI: Aesthetics
1. Make use of time, let not advantage slip (129)
Beauty within itself should not be wasted. (130)
2. My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning; (142)
Love is a spirit all compact of fire, (149)
3. Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, (233)
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. (234)
4. Who is so faint that dares not be so bold (401)
To touch the fire, the weather being cold? (402)
5. Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace (539)
With blindfold fury she begins to forage; (554)
6. Now is she in the very lists of love, (595)
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter. (596)
7. Planting oblivion, beating reason back, (557)
She sinketh down still hanging by his neck; (593)
8. Like a divedapper peering through a wave, (86)
Panting he lies and breatheth in her face. (62)
Oh, how quick is love! (38)
-W. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593)
9.
Make use of time
Make use of time, let not advantage slip
Beauty within itself should not be wasted.
My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning,
Love is a spirit all compact of fire.
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Who is so faint that dares not be so bold,
To touch the fire, the weather being cold?
Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace
With blindfold fury she begins to forage;
Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.
Planting oblivion, beating reason back,
She sinketh down still hanging by his neck;
Like a divedapper peering through a wave,
Panting he lies and breatheth in her face.
Oh, how quick is love!
My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning,
Love is a spirit all compact of fire.
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Who is so faint that dares not be so bold,
To touch the fire, the weather being cold?
Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace
With blindfold fury she begins to forage;
Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.
Planting oblivion, beating reason back,
She sinketh down still hanging by his neck;
Like a divedapper peering through a wave,
Panting he lies and breatheth in her face.
Oh, how quick is love!
~Shaksper
10. My armpits had precocious hairs and stank like a goat: Mother was astonished by my early beard.
-Montaigne, On experience, Screech 391
Reflection D
I decided to include Bhabha as a good example of the epitome of phantasmatic, dogmatic, post-modern, needlessly overcooked nonsense. The keyword here being ‘needlessly.’ Precisely in that sense, so much over-wrought post-modern rhetoric is mere snobbism and nothing else unfortunately. Not that I mind the ‘post-modern’ at all as a cognitive disposition: see Rorty, Montaigne, Kierkegaard. The problem has been that in too many epigones the philosophical potential was reduced to dogmatic cliquishness prone to linguistic hyperbole, analytical-idiosyncratic buzzing, and unwillingness to incorporate, preferring to ignore, perspectives not fitting the proto-theoretical fashion-canon. Nature was viewed as a hostile term, not even to be uttered. Prefixed, exposed, neutered in cliquish jubilation. Every entry speaks to the necessity of anti-dogmatic approaches to solving problems. Spenser’s lines even let hypocrisy go be hypocritical another day. Montaigne puts it succinctly: “remain in suspense.” Relating to nature, the physical universe, biological necessity and potential does not do anything to undo such suspense.
Shakespearean aesthetics is the essence of un-dogmatism. His extraordinary poetic vitality and force breaks down preconceived notions (of any kind) as his imagery in smooth metaphors and syntactic play expand our listening vocabularies. Lines can be taken out of context to function perfectly well on their own, at the same time as they all are integrated in and drive towards a common goal: the overarching meaning-structure of his play: here, Venus and Adonis. I hope he won’t mind my enthusiasm having distilled from his work a briefer sentiment of love and joy.
Category VII: Education
1. If we get that proportion [ability] wrong we spoil everything: knowing how to find it and remain well-balanced within it is one of the most arduous tasks there is.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 43
2. Yet it is hard to force a child’s natural bent.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 41
3. Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 73
4. When eloquence draws attention to itself it does wrong by the substance of things.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 68
5. It is just as in farming: the ploughing which precedes the planting is easy and sure; so is the planting itself: but as soon as what is planted springs to life, the raising of it is marked by a great variety of methods and by difficulty.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 41
6. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 43
7. Let the tutor pass everything through a filter and never lodge anything simply by authority, at second-hand. Let the principles of Aristotle not be principles for him any more than those of the Stoics or the Epicureans. Let this diversity of judgements be set before him; if he can he will make a choice: if he cannot then he will remain in doubt.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 44
8. Let him camp in the open, amidst war’s alarms.
-Horace, Odes, III, ii, 5; -Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 46
9. Never underestimate the educational value of eccentricity.
-K. Andersen, reformulation of line from Biloxi Blues (motion picture, 1988)
10. Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me.
-Montaigne, On educating children, Screech 41
Category VIII: Virtue
1. A man’s worth and reputation lie in the mind and in the will: his true honour is found there. Bravery does not consist in firm arms and legs but in firm minds and souls.
-Montaigne, On the Cannibals, Screech 89
2. He says it [punishment] is born at the same instant, with the sin itself; to expect punishment is to suffer it: to merit it is to expect it.
-Montaigne, On conscience, Screech 144
3. A lack of intelligence or even animal-stupidity can counterfeit virtuous deeds: I have often seen men praised for deeds which deserved blame.
-Montaigne, On cruelty, Screech 174
4. Can it possibly be true that to be good in practice we must needs be so from some inborn, all-pervading property hidden within us, without law, without reason and without example?
-Montaigne, On cruelty, Screech 176
5. But we must vigilantly ensure that our soul is taut and erect.
-Montaigne, On cruelty, Screech 178
6. I hardly ever catch a beast alive without restoring it to its fields.
-Montaigne, On cruelty, Screech 182
7. We owe justice to men: and to the other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.
-Montaigne, On cruelty, Screech 185
8. Resurgent Marxism was in the air; but I had no left-wing leanings and I never believed that anthropology was a force to set the world to rights or undo the effects of colonialism. I never had the slightest feeling that I could be “engaged” or “committed” or identify with the subjects of anthropology, if only because my middle-class income – even an academic salary – was so much greater, and cost me so much less sweat to obtain, than the incomes of Umedas or, later, Muria Gonds. I have never understood how bourgeois like myself can consider themselves the class allies of third world peasants, since it seems to me that we are all just walking, breathing examples of the results of their exploitation. All that people like me can do in the third world is watch and listen sympathetically, and maybe form a few personal relationships which, in the nature of things, are without significance so far as the wider historical relationships between nations are concerned. The business of bourgeois anthropologists like me is only to produce texts – or give seminars – directed towards a reception of other anthropologists and interested (metropolitan) parties.
-Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology; Essays and Diagrams (1999) (p. 7)
9. Does knowing mean nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it?
-Persius, Satires, I, xxiii; Montaigne, On solitude, Screech 104
Reflection E
EDUCATION is all Montaigne. As far as I am concerned we could dismantle all colleges of education and pedagogy courses and just require future teachers (and general adults with regular intervals) to read and discuss his essay: On educating children. This is a highly irreverent thought and probably not at all practical wherefore I shall keep it to myself and only encourage everybody to do so at their earliest leisure. His sense of communicative economy and substance (e.g. VII, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8) is unparalleled. A sensitive discussion of his essay would ‘translate’ it into contemporary problems and obliterate the fact that the man who speaks to us does so from the 16th century.
VIRTUE is a slippery concept which has an awful anachronistic ring to it. We have been hardened by time and matter. It seems to me to be a social category no matter how we twist and turn it. Were I alone, I wouldn’t need to be virtuous; I probably wouldn’t have even a sense of what could be meant by it. Whatever I was were. The moment I relate to someone else, however, VIRTUE becomes the measure of our relationship. It comes into being as we relate to others as a category that attempts to establish a parameter for the catalogue of possible coexistence-expressions. A parameter, which as it ripples outwards in communicative expectations, also bends inwards in self-consciousness as duty.
For instance, whether left-leaning or not: Gell’s humble attitude as an observer (VIII, 8) towards his fellow-man is virtuous, as much as Persius (VIII, 9) suggests the concept’s social, epistemological core: what do you know?
______________________
References:
Joseph Carroll, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Theoretical Model Illustrated with a Critique of Pride and Prejudice.” In The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Gottschall, Jonathan and Wilson, David Sloan. eds. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Donald M. Frame, trans.(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958).
Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. Hirsch, Eric ed. (London & New Brunswick: Athlone Press, 1999).
George Kubler, “Style and representation of historical time.” Aspen no. 5+6, Fall-Winter. New York: Roaring Fork Press, 1967. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html
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