1. Make a list of ten key points from this chapter.
-when
a metaphor is created it does not express something which previously existed
-we
call something fantasy rather than poetry or philosophy when it revolves around
metaphors which do not catch on with other people
-Freud
helps break down the distinction between moral guilt and practical
inadvisability thereby blurring the prudence-morality distinction.
-the
tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of
contingency
-an
effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency
-Kant
found that the point of contact in our moral consciousness is to turn inward
and search for righteousness rather than our search for truth.
-Aristotle
believe philosophy to begin was wonder at finding oneself in a world larger,
stronger, and nobler than oneself.
-Wittgenstein’s
point that there are no private languages, you cannot give meaning to a word or
a poem by confronting it with a nonlinguistic meaning.
-Nietschean
view is the impulse to think, inquire, reweave oneself more thoroughly
-Freud
makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis and
most importantly, morality and prudence not as products of distinct faculties
but as alternative modes of adaptation.
2. Make a
list of twenty or so terms that you are unfamiliar with from this chapter.
(Every time you see a word you don't know, write it down.)
Lading-list
(pg 23) Denudation
(pg 38)
telic
(pg 26) Bien-pensant
(pg 35)
epoch
(pg 28) Idiosyncratic
(pg 23)
spatiotemporal
(pg 30) mythopoeic (pg
30)
pious
(pg 31) Ragioni
(pg 31)
spermatozoon
(pg 31) finitude (pg
42)
vicissitudes
(pg 32) Thrasymachus
(pg 31)
abjure
(pg 35) Pathos
(pg 40)
citadel
(pg 35) Hybridized
(pg 38)
cathexis
(pg 36) Ovum
(pg 31)
3. Write a
rough draft summary of the chapter.
An ironist, according to Rorty is
someone who has three traits:
First, they have doubts about their "final
vocabulary" - the ability of the words they use is true in describing
their unique existence.
Second, they know that the expression of
these doubts do not nullify their problem.
Third, they realize that their choice of
vocabulary is shedding light on something profound by bouncing a new language
off of an old. This does not mean their choice of language can penetrate
appearances to a privileged "truth."
So, when thinkers admit that there is a
contingency to the language they use, and yet, write a serious work about
anything they are "meta-stable" as Sartre terms it- for their
self-credibility hangs by a thread.
In more dramatic terms; we want to the best of our
ability understand that when we are dying and describing our life, that our
beliefs were ours and not parroted- we chose our words and fully own their
potential and limitations.
Contingency
and irony are always trying to remind common sense that its vocabulary is
simply a reliable but fallible placeholder for an inaccessible reality.
Ironists point to the past where what seemed to be very good and widely
accepted common sense was shown to be glaringly wrong. They may elaborate in
detail on how our different and current vocabulary may or may not be better or
worse; and perhaps why; and perhaps, what we may, or may not, conclude.
The
contingency of selfhood discusses the quarrel between poetry and philosophy,
the tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of
contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of
contingency. Traditionally philosophers have tried to achieve
self-consciousness of our own essence by transcending the contingencies of our
existence (and mortality) through identification with imperishable truths. Or,
with Kant's treatment of morality, there is the quest for achievement of a
moral self whose rationality transcends the contingencies of life.
Proust-
he wrote his characters from every angle he could, build them up and breaking
them down so that they are seen as just actors in contingency despite their
authority or lack thereof. He accomplished this without being an authority
figure on science, metaphysics, politics etc... He just brought the accidental
events of the lives of his characters to the surface. He picked chance
characters and events to write about.
Rorty
credits Nietzsche with providing an alternate, more useful description, namely,
the self-creating self trying to overcome what is merely inherited from others.
His definition of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” amounted to saying that
the whole idea of “representing reality” by means of language, and thus the
idea of finding a single context for all human lives, should be abandoned.
Rorty
credits Freud with establishing the contingent nature of the moral self (in
contrast with Kant) by showing how our moral sense develops through
internalization of contingent conditions of our social existence rather than
through rational thought. Freud de-universalizes the moral sense making it as
idiosyncratic as the poet’s inventions. He allows us to see the moral
consciousness as historically conditioned, a product as much of time and chance
as a political or aesthetic consciousness.
Rorty thinks of Derrida as
the ideal ironist because he doesn't philosophize... he simply talks about
philosophers. By revealing the contingency in language and philosophy through
offering different colored lenses for us to view philosophy he accomplishes the
task of the ironist without contradicting himself.
Rorty
finds that Proust and Derrida- by bouncing characters/philosophers against each
other rise above them in creating new possibilities rather than finding a place
or argument within the order from which to write.
The metaphors of geniuses
(the works of major thinkers, artists, etc.) result from "the accidental
coincidence of a private [idiosyncratic] obsession with a public need"
rather than from the discovery of some grander truth. The self should be seen
as "a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and
forward through past and future time" rather than "a unified,
present, self-contained substance.
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